The Luna-Glob in an undated illustration.

MOSCOW | Tue Jan 15, 2013 2:56pm EST

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will resume a long-dormant quest to explore the moon by sending an unmanned probe there in 2015, the head of the space agency was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

The craft, called Luna-Glob, or Moon-Globe, will be carried by the first rocket to blast off from a new facility that Russia is building in its far eastern Amur region, Roskosmos director Vladimir Popovkin said, according to the Interfax news agency.

"We will begin our exploration of the moon from there," he said of the new space centre that will decrease Russia's reliance of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the ex-Soviet nation Kazakhstan, which it leases.

Russian space officials have said Luna-Glob would consist of an orbital module and a probe that would land on the moon and beam back information about samples it takes from the surface.

The Soviet Union got a jump on the United States in the Cold War space race, sending a probe to the moon in 1959 and putting the first person into space in 1961. But the United States first put a man on the moon in 1969 and Russia has not done so.

The last successful Soviet launch of a unmanned probe to the moon was in the 1970s, and Russia has suffered setbacks in its space program in recent years, including bungled satellite launches and the failure of a Mars probe in 2011.

A successful rocket launch on Tuesday put three military satellites in orbit, the Defense Ministry said.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved a plan last month to spend 2.1 trillion roubles ($70 billion) on space industry development in 2013-2020, to pursue projects to explore the moon and Mars, among other things.

(Writing by Steve Gutterman; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

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Mike Lynch, Founder and Chairman of Autonomy Corporation, poses for photographers at an awards ceremony in central London March 13, 2008.

LONDON | Fri Dec 28, 2012 8:32am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - Mike Lynch, the founder of the software firm sold to Hewlett-Packard last year in a deal tainted by accusations of accounting fraud, said he would defend the company's accounts to U.S. Federal investigators.

HP confirmed in a filing late on Thursday that the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating Autonomy's books.

The PC and printer maker bought the British company for $11 billion last year to lead its push into the more profitable software sector.

Autonomy did not deliver the growth expected, resulting in Lynch's departure earlier this year.

But worse was to come last month when HP wrote off some $5 billion of the company's value and accused its former management of accounting improprieties that inflated its value.

The Silicon Valley company said it had passed information from a whistleblower to the U.S. Department of Justice, the SEC and Britain's Serious Fraud Office.

"On November 21, 2012, representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice advised HP that they had opened an investigation relating to Autonomy," it said in the filing.

"HP is cooperating with the three investigating agencies."

Lynch launched a robust defense of his track record almost immediately after HP made the accusations.

He said on Friday that he was still waiting for a detailed calculation of HP's $5 billion writedown of Autonomy's value and a published explanation of the allegations.

"Simply put these allegations are false, and in the absence of further detail we cannot understand what HP believes to be the basis for them," he said in a statement.

"We continue to reject these allegations in the strongest possible terms. Autonomy's financial accounts were properly maintained in accordance with applicable regulations, fully audited by Deloitte and available to HP during the due diligence process."

Lynch said he had not been approached by any regulatory authority, but he would co-operate with any investigation and looked forward to the opportunity to explain his position.

HP has refused to concede to Lynch's demands for more information about the allegations.

"While Dr. Lynch is eager for a debate, we believe the legal process is the correct method in which to bring out the facts and take action on behalf of our shareholders," it said in response to an open letter from Lynch last month

"In that setting, we look forward to hearing Dr. Lynch and other former Autonomy employees answer questions under penalty of perjury."

(Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Helen Massy-Beresford)

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People enter the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. global headquarters, also known by its address as 200 West Street, in New York's lower Manhattan, April 19, 2010.

WASHINGTON | Thu Aug 9, 2012 9:45pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department said it will not pursue criminal charges against Goldman Sachs Group Inc or its employees related to accusations that the firm bet against the same subprime mortgage securities it was selling to clients.

The decision not to prosecute Goldman, a firm held up by critics as a symbol of Wall Street greed during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, highlights the difficulty in prosecuting crisis-related cases.

Few expected the bank to face criminal charges, but in April 2011, U.S. Senator Carl Levin asked for a criminal investigation after the subcommittee he leads spent more than a year looking into Goldman.

The accusations were aired in a heated 2010 Congressional hearing in which Levin grilled Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein for hours about whether it was morally correct for the firm to sell its clients products described internally as "crap".

"The department and investigative agencies ultimately concluded that the burden of proof to bring a criminal case could not be met based on the law and facts as they exist at this time," the Justice Department said in a statement late on Thursday.

The DOJ does not typically make public statements when it concludes an investigation.

Neil Barofsky, a former watchdog for the U.S. government's financial system bailout in 2008, said the announcement was a stark reminder that no individual or institution had been held meaningfully accountable for their role in the financial crisis.

"Without such accountability, the unending parade of megabanks scandals will inevitably continue," said Barofsky, who has been an outspoken critic of the government's response to the financial crisis.

In a brief statement emailed to Reuters, a Goldman Sachs spokesman said: "We are pleased that this matter is behind us."

A Levin aide had no immediate comment.

In a related civil case, Goldman settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for $550 million in July 2010, without admitting wrongdoing.

The SEC, in one of its premier financial crisis cases, said Goldman failed to tell investors the Paulson & Co hedge fund helped choose and bet against the subprime mortgage-backed securities underlying an investment product named Abacus.

The SEC is still pursuing a civil complaint against Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman vice president involved in the Abacus deal.

Separately on Thursday, Goldman said the SEC had dropped an investigation into the firm's role in selling a different $1.3 billion subprime mortgage-related deal arranged in 2006.

TARNISHED REPUTATION

The Abacus deal was a major focus of the televised hearings held by Levin's subcommittee in 2010. The hearings and a following report from Levin's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations weighed on Goldman's shares as the firm suffered a reputational hit from the unwelcome spotlight.

Goldman -- dubbed a "great vampire squid" in a 2009 article in Rolling Stone magazine -- has continued to be dogged by criticism, including from its own ranks.

A Goldman Sachs banker in March published a withering resignation letter in the New York Times, calling the Wall Street titan a "toxic" place.

In its release on Thursday, the Justice Department said there was "not a viable basis to bring a criminal prosecution" against Goldman. If new or additional evidence emerged, it could make a different determination, it said.

Prosecuting financial fraud would continue to be a top priority and it highlighted other investigations, including its probe into banks' alleged manipulation of Libor, a widely used benchmark for interest rates.

The SEC has brought a handful of high-profile cases related to the financial crisis, including against former Countrywide Financial Chief Executive Angelo Mozilo and its case against Goldman. But the Justice Department has struggled to bring criminal charges.

The frustration, in part, has been because such charges involve securing evidence that shows beyond a reasonable doubt a defendant intended to break the law.

For example, a federal jury in 2009 acquitted two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers accused of continuing to push souring investments as sound.

Jurors said prosecutors did not prove the case, which relied on e-mail evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt. Since then, the Justice Department has brought few major prosecutions tied to the subprime crisis.

In January, President Barack Obama announced a new task force to investigate misconduct that fueled the financial crisis, and the Justice Department has said it has issued more than a dozen civil subpoenas and has multiple inquiries underway.

So far, no cases have come out of that effort, and some critics have dismissed the task force as an election-year stunt.

(Reporting by David Ingram and Aruna Viswanatha, Writing by Karey Wutkowski; Editing by Gary Hill and Richard Pullin)

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BEIJING | Mon Jul 30, 2012 7:54am EDT

BEIJING (Reuters) - China aims to land its first probe on the moon in the second half of next year, state media reported on Monday, the next step in an ambitious space progam which includes building a space station.

In 2007, China launched its first moon orbiter, the Chang'e One orbiter, named after a lunar goddess, which took images of the surface and analyzed the distribution of elements.

That launch marked the first step in China's three-stage moon mission, to be followed by an unmanned moon mission and then the retrieval of lunar soil and stone samples around 2017.

The official China News Service said that the Chang'e Three would carry out surveys on the surface of the moon when it is launched in 2013.

It provided no further details.

Chinese scientists have talked of the possibility of sending a man to the moon after 2020.

China's Shenzhou 9 spacecraft returned to Earth last month, ending a mission that put the country's first woman in space and completed a manned docking test critical to its goal of building a space station by 2020.

China is far from catching up with the established space superpowers, the United States and Russia. But the Shenzhou 9 marked China's fourth manned space mission since its first in 2003, and came as budget restraints and shifting priorities have held back U.S. manned space launches.

The United States will not test a new rocket to take people into space until 2017 and Russia has said manned missions are no longer a priority.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard and Sabrina Mao; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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This artist's concept depicts the rover Curiosity, of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, as it uses its Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument to investigate the composition of a rock surface.

PASADENA, California | Sun Aug 5, 2012 4:28pm EDT

PASADENA, California (Reuters) - NASA plans to follow up a decade-long search for Mars' lost water with a mission to learn whether the Red Planet once harbored other ingredients necessary for life.

The astrobiological hunt begins once the $2.5 billion Mars Science Lab rover Curiosity lands itself beside a towering mountain that rises from the floor of a vast, ancient impact basin called Gale Crater.

Touchdown, monitored from mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is scheduled for 10:31 p.m. Sunday Pacific time (1:31 a.m. EDT on Monday).

"It's a big science goal. We're not just looking for water anymore," said California Institute of Technology geologist John Grotzinger, the lead mission scientist.

"The expectations go up. The scientific challenge is much greater. It's just going to be harder to address this question of habitability," he told Reuters.

Scientists considered hundreds of landing sites before choosing Gale Crater, which probably formed when an asteroid or comet crashed into the planet some 3.5 billion to 4 billion years ago.

From high-resolution images taken by orbiting satellites, Gale Crater's central mound, known as Mount Sharp, appears to consist of layers of sediment rising like a stack of cards 3 miles into the sky, taller than the crater's rim.

The most likely origin of the mountain is that it formed from the remains of whatever material filled up the basin long ago. How it was left standing in the middle of Gale Crater, a 96-mile-(154-km)wide bowl located near the planet's equator, is a mystery, one of many scientists hope to answer during Curiosity's two-year science mission.

Regardless of how it formed, scientists consider Mount Sharp a gift of time.

Nothing like it exists on Earth, where plate tectonics, erosion and other natural phenomena constantly reshape the planet's surface.

"We have the opportunity to start in the past, rove up the surface of Mount Sharp and come through time to see how the environments have changed," said Michael Meyer, NASA's Mars exploration program scientist.

WARMER, WETTER MARTIAN PAST

A succession of previous rovers, landers and orbiting spacecraft have gathered compelling evidence that Mars, which is about half the size of Earth and 50 percent farther away from the sun, was not always the dry, acidic, cold desert that appears today.

NASA's strategy since resuming Mars exploration following the 1970s-era Viking missions there has been to look for the chemical and physical fingerprints of water, which is necessary for life - at least as it has evolved on Earth.

The second ingredient in the recipe for life is carbon, which provides organic structure. Carbon will be far more difficult to detect on Mars, if it exists, because the same processes that produce rock tend to destroy organics.

The planet's harsh radiation environment doesn't help either.

"We have a radiation-rich environment on Mars that can destroy organics, so even if it was there, it may be hard to find a place where it's been preserved," Meyer said.

On Earth, the oldest evidence for life dates back about 3.5 billion years. Fossilized remains of single-celled microorganisms were found in 1958 inside a type of rock known as chert. This glass-like rock may exist on Mars as well, and it is not the only material that can preserve organics like a time capsule.

"The challenge for Mars exploration is to first try to identify environments that might have been habitable and then ask, 'Is this the kind of place where organic carbon could have been preserved?'" Grotzinger said.

"With Curiosity, we don't have the ability to look for life, or even fossil life, but we do have the ability to look for organic carbon, so we try to find those environments conducive for preservation. That's the hard part," he said.

The oldest sections of Mount Sharp may overlap the window when life emerged on Earth, a time when Mars is believed to have been warm and wet.

Curiosity's landing site inside Gale Crater is one of the lowest regions on Mars, stacking the odds that water, if it existed there, flowed down to the basin's floor. Mount Sharp may be the remains of this ancient lake bed and perhaps a place that life once called home.

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Steve Gorman and Jackie Frank)

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