Casis manages the U.S. national laboratory portion of the ISS

HOUSTON — Ellen Ochoa, a former astronaut who has been deputy director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center since late 2007, will become director of the 14,100-person field center as of Jan. 1, the agency’s administrator, Charles Bolden, announced Nov. 16. She succeeds Mike Coats, 66, as the 51-year-old installation’s 11th director and the first Hispanic to serve in the post.

Program allows government to share cost with industry against injuries or property damage

Additional $1.5 billion in cuts from annual budget threaten

The House this week approved a bill to extend for two years an indemnification program allowing the government to share the cost with industry against injuries or property damage suffered by the public in a commercial space launch.

NASA’s Kepler planet-finder has started an extended mission that could last as long as four more years, after finding more than 2,300 candidate extra-solar planets in its 3.5-year primary mission by measuring the faint flickers of distant stars. The candidate list, which must be confirmed by Earth-based observations, includes “hundreds” of planets that are roughly the same size as Earth. A prime objective of the extended mission will be to find a true Earth analog in terms of size, star type and orbit.

The U.S. and Australian militaries have agreed to place two key U.S. space systems in Australia. A U.S. Air Force C-band space-surveillance radar – which can track up to 200 objects a day and can help identify satellites, their orbits and potential anomalies – will move from Antigua to Western Australia in 2014 and will increase coverage of space objects in the Southern Hemisphere, the Pentagon says. It will be the first low Earth orbit space surveillance network sensor in that hemisphere and will help track “high-interest” launches from Asia.

Test flights of the Lynx Mark I are scheduled to begin in early 2013