‘Mark your calendar for Sunday, April 13, 2036. That’s when a 1,000-foot-wide asteroid named Apophis could hit the Earth with enough force to obliterate a small state.
The odds of a collision are 1-in-6,250. But while that’s a long shot at the racetrack, the stakes are too high for astronomers to ignore.
For now, Apophis represents the most imminent threat from the worst type of natural disaster known, one reason NASA is spending millions to detect the threat from this and other asteroids.’
Followup to It’s called Apophis. It’s 390m wide..
`This movie, built with data collected during the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe on Jan. 14, 2005, shows the operation of the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer camera during its descent and after touchdown. The camera was funded by NASA.
The almost four-hour-long operation of the camera is shown in less than five minutes. That’s 40 times the actual speed up to landing and 100 times the actual speed thereafter.
The first part of the movie shows how Titan looked to the camera as it acquired more and more images during the probe’s descent. Each image has a small field of view, and dozens of images were made into mosaics of the whole scene.’
(11meg Quicktime)
`A bouncing universe that expands and then shrinks every trillion years or so could explain one of the most puzzling problems in cosmology: how we can exist at all.
If this explanation, proposed in Science1 by Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University, New Jersey, and Neil Turok at the University of Cambridge, UK, seems slightly preposterous, that can’t really be held against it. Astronomical observations over the past decade have shown that “we live in a preposterous universe”, says cosmologist Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago. “It’s our job to make sense of it,” he says.
In Steinhardt and Turok’s cyclic model of the Universe, it expands and contracts repeatedly over timescales that make the 13.7 billion years that have passed since the Big Bang seem a mere blink. This makes the Universe vastly old. And that in turn means that the mysterious ‘cosmological constant’, which describes how empty space appears to repel itself, has had time to shrink into the strangely small number that we observe today.’
`At the height of the Cold War in the late 1950s, all international communications were either sent through undersea cables or bounced off of the natural ionosphere. The United States military was concerned that the Soviets (or other “Hostile Actors”) might cut those cables, forcing the unpredictable ionosphere to be the only means of communication with overseas forces. The Space Age had just begun, and the communications satellites we rely on today existed only in the sketches of futurists.
Nevertheless, the US Military looked to space to help solve their communications weakness. Their solution was to create an artificial ionosphere. In May 1963, the US Air Force launched 480 million tiny copper needles that briefly created a ring encircling the entire globe. They called it Project West Ford. The engineers behind the project hoped that it would serve as a prototype for two more permanent rings that would forever guarantee their ability to communicate across the globe.’
`Most self-respecting starships in science fiction stories use antimatter as fuel for a good reason – it’s the most potent fuel known. While tons of chemical fuel are needed to propel a human mission to Mars, just tens of milligrams of antimatter will do (a milligram is about one-thousandth the weight of a piece of the original M&M candy).
However, in reality this power comes with a price. Some antimatter reactions produce blasts of high energy gamma rays. Gamma rays are like X-rays on steroids. They penetrate matter and break apart molecules in cells, so they are not healthy to be around. High-energy gamma rays can also make the engines radioactive by fragmenting atoms of the engine material.
The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is funding a team of researchers working on a new design for an antimatter-powered spaceship that avoids this nasty side effect by producing gamma rays with much lower energy.’
`Japan’s space agency reports that the sleepy Tokyo suburb of Kogane has been hit by a laser from an orbiting spacecraft. Click below for the full details of this first-ever extraterrestrial event.
Another first for Japan’s future military space-communications apparatus: the Optical Inter-orbit Communications Engineering Test Satellite, also known, fortunately, as Kirari, zapped the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in the Tokyo suburb of Kogane with a laser. Not to worry, though, the beam was fired for communication purposes, not destructive ones.’
`Scientists think they have solved the mystery of how planets form around a star born in a violent supernova explosion, saying they have detected for the first time a swirling disk of debris from which planets can rise.
The discovery is surprising because the dusty disk orbiting the pulsar, or dead star, resembles the cloud of gas and dust from which Earth emerged. Scientists say the latest finding should shed light on how planetary systems form.
“It shows that planet formation is really ubiquitous in the universe. It’s a very robust process and can happen in all sorts of unexpected environments,” said lead researcher Deepto Chakrabarty, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.’
Fucken cool eclipse image.
`An international collaboration of scientists at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today (March 30, 2006) the first results of a new neutrino experiment. Sending a high-intensity beam of muon neutrinos from the lab’s site in Batavia, Illinois, to a particle detector in Soudan, Minnesota, scientists observed the disappearance of a significant fraction of these neutrinos. The observation is consistent with an effect known as neutrino oscillation, in which neutrinos change from one kind to another. The Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment found a value of delta m2 = 0.0031 eV2, a quantity that plays a crucial role in neutrino oscillations and hence the role of neutrinos in the evolution of the universe.’
`Thirty years ago the clearest views of the planet Jupiter could only be obtained from multi-million dollar robotic space probes, like the twin Voyager missions sent to survey the outer planets. As recently as five years ago, the atmosphere still hopelessly blurred views of Jupiter, or any other planet, seen from the surface of the Earth through telescopes. All of that has changed thanks to the digital revolution in photography. Now, people with the interest, a modest telescope and a common web camera can learn to take planetary portraits that rival some the best from NASA.’
`There’s no place for the Sun to hide its face anymore.
The rotating star’s far side, out of view to astronomers, has now been fully seen for the first time using data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).
A new technique allows scientists to detect potentially damaging solar storms that may be brewing on the far side of the Sun and, weeks later, will be rotated into view and aimed our way.’
`NASA, the American space agency, has unveiled plans for one of the largest rockets ever built to take a manned mission to the far side of the moon.
It will ferry a mother ship and lunar lander into Earth orbit to link up with a smaller rocket carrying the crew. Once united they will head for the moon where the larger ship will remain in orbit after launching the lunar lander and crew.’
`MIT researchers have developed a tiny light detector that may allow for super-fast broadband communications over interplanetary distances. Currently, even still images from other planets are difficult to retrieve. [..]
The new detector improves the detection efficiency to 57 percent at a wavelength of 1,550 nanometers (billionths of a meter), the same wavelength used by optical fibers that carry broadband signals to offices and homes today. That’s nearly three times the current detector efficiency of 20 percent.’
`Physicists announced Thursday that they now have the smoking gun that shows the universe went through extremely rapid expansion in the moments after the big bang, growing from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second.
The discovery — which involves an analysis of variations in the brightness of microwave radiation — is the first direct evidence to support the two-decade-old theory that the universe went through what is called inflation.
It also helps explain how matter eventually clumped together into planets, stars and galaxies in a universe that began as a remarkably smooth, super-hot soup.’
`NASA astronauts are going back to the moon and when they get there they may need quake-proof housing.
That’s the surprising conclusion of Clive R. Neal, associate professor of civil engineering and geological sciences at the University of Notre Dame after he and a team of 15 other planetary scientists reexamined Apollo data from the 1970s. “The moon is seismically active,” he told a gathering of scientists at NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) meeting in League City, Texas, last October.’
`I am pretty convinced now that life exists outside the Earth. At the very least, there is an exotic type of life on earth of which we have been totally unware until now. The pictures of the “red rain” particles have convinced me. Scroll down to ogle them.
The best article so far on the the “red rain” phenomenon is in New Scientist. The Observer had a decent article too. An Indian scientist, Dr. Godfrey Louis, thinks the red particles found in the rain are the remnants of a meteorite that exploded. He further thinks that they might be extraterrestrial life forms.
The New Scientist article linked to his full-length paper that is to appear in the peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science. Intrigued, I took a look at his paper. It is surprisingly readable considering it’s meant for a journal.
The paper has lots of very interesting photos (New Scientist published one — the only pic in the paper that was in color). I have cut-n-pasted the photos from the paper below. They are pretty amazing and deserve wide exposure.’
followup to Red rain could prove that aliens have landed.
`It’s official: Solar minimum has arrived. Sunspots have all but vanished. Solar flares are nonexistent. The sun is utterly quiet.
Like the quiet before a storm.
This week researchers announced that a storm is coming–the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.’
`Tonight I noticed that mars.google.com now has a CNAME record that points to www.google.com. This usually means that something is about to happen with that subdomain — with the exception of calendar.google.com of course. So I started digging and you will never guess what I found — a Google Maps type application that lets you view Mars. This service is called “Google Mars”.’
`The Nigerian Government has warned citizens they may suffer “psychological discomfort” during a new eclipse this month but urged them not to panic.
Information Minister Frank Nweke says an eclipse in 2001 caused riots in northern Borno state because people did not know why it happened.
“Some people even felt some evil people in their communities were responsible for the eclipse,” he said in a statement aimed at reassuring Nigerians the eclipse is expected to darken parts of the country on March 29.’
`A large “mothership,” closely resembling the U.S. Air Force’s historic XB-70 supersonic bomber, carries the orbital component conformally under its fuselage, accelerating to supersonic speeds at high altitude before dropping the spaceplane. The orbiter’s engines fire and boost the vehicle into space. If mission requirements dictate, the spaceplane can either reach low Earth orbit or remain suborbital. [..]
Exactly what missions the Blackstar system may have been designed for and built to accomplish are as yet unconfirmed, but U.S. Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) officers and contractors have been toying with similar spaceplane-operational concepts for years. Besides reconnaissance, they call for inserting small satellites into orbit, and either retrieving or servicing other spacecraft. Conceivably, such a vehicle could serve as an anti-satellite or space-to-ground weapons-delivery platform, as well.’
‘Why is there a sawed-off shotgun on the International Space Station? To fight Alien invaders? In case of war on Earth so the Cosmonauts can kill the US Astronauts? NO.
Read the following paragraph and you will see that Russians take the Wolf problem very seriously:
“In 1965, two cosmonauts overshot their touchdown site by 1,200 miles and found themselves deep in a forest with hungry wolves. That’s when Russian space officials decided to pack a sawed-off shotgun aboard every spacecraft. It took Russian search crews more than two hours to locate the spacecraft and another two hours for helicopters to get support crews to the landing site.”‘
`Take one part high-frequency gravitational wave generation, then add in a quantum vacuum field.
Now whip wildly via a gravitomagnetic force in a rotating superconductor while standing by for Alcubierre warp drive in higher dimensional space-time.
So you’re looking for the latest in faster-than-light interstellar travel via traversable wormholes? That’s one theme among many discussed at Space Technology & Applications International Forum (STAIF), a meeting held here Feb. 12-16 that brought together more than 600 experts to thrash out a range of space exploration issues.’
`Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people’s clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points.
Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. ‘If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.’ Instead Louis decided that the rain was made up of bacteria-like material that had been swept to Earth from a passing comet. In short, it rained aliens over India during the summer of 2001.’
`Backyard astronomers, grab your telescopes. Jupiter is growing a new red spot.
Christopher Go of the Philippines photographed it on February 27th using an 11-inch telescope and a CCD camera [..]
At first, Oval BA remained white—the same color as the storms that combined to create it. But in recent months, things began to change:
“The oval was white in November 2005, it slowly turned brown in December 2005, and red a few weeks ago,” reports Go. “Now it is the same color as the Great Red Spot!”‘
`Scientists have discovered a huge crater in the Saharan desert, the largest one ever found there.
The crater is about 19 miles (31 kilometers) wide, more than twice as big as the next largest Saharan crater known. It utterly dwarfs Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is about three-fourths of a mile (1.2 kilometers) in diameter.
In fact, the newfound crater, in Egypt, was likely carved by a space rock that was itself roughly 0.75 miles wide in an event that would have been quite a shock, destroying everything for hundreds of miles. For comparison, the Chicxulub crater left by a dinosaur-killing asteroid 65 million years ago is estimated to be 100 to 150 miles (160 to 240 kilometers) wide.’
`Scientists who study the sun, moon, planets and stars on Thursday protested the Bush administration’s plan to send humans back to the moon and on to Mars.
They say the president’s two-year-old Vision for Space Exploration program is gobbling up billions of dollars that they think could be better used for less expensive projects, including new telescopes and unmanned robots such as the twin rovers on Mars.
NASA has cut more than $3 billion from what it had promised for Earth and space science programs to make room for the moon-Mars exploration missions and 16 more shuttle flights to the half-finished International Space Station.
Partly as a result, the launch of the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope has been delayed until 2013, the search for Earthlike planets around other stars has been deferred indefinitely and the budget for the “astrobiology” program – the quest for life on other worlds – has been slashed by 50 percent.’
`Russia plans to hit a golf ball into Earth orbit from the International Space Station. If NASA approves the plan, the ball would set records for the longest drive ever made – but some experts warn that a mishap could cause “catastrophic” damage to the station.
The plan is part of a commercial deal between the Russian space agency and Element 21 Golf Company, based in Toronto, Canada. In the plan, the station’s next crew members, due to launch to the station on 29 March, will try for the record-breaking swing during one of three planned spacewalks by September 2006. [..]
In a worst-case scenario, the ball would remain at the same altitude long enough that its orbital plane shifted until it could hit the station side-on, says J C Liou, an orbital debris expert at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, US. “Then you could potentially have something similar to a head-on collision with an impact speed of about 9.4 kilometres per second,” Liou told New Scientist.
The force of such a collision would be equivalent to that of a 6.5-tonne truck moving at nearly 100 kilometres per hour. “So the outcome of the worst-case scenario could be quite catastrophic,” he says. But he adds that such a dire scenario is “highly unlikely” to occur.’
`It’s a serious problem. Countless bovines have disappeared from dairy farms everywhere. And the numbers of missing cows are on the rise.
A rapidly growing collection of alien cow abduction evidence and documentation has been posted below.’
`Ground-based astronomy could be impossible in 40 years because of pollution from aircraft exhaust trails and climate change, an expert says.
Aircraft condensation trails – known as contrails – can dissipate, becoming indistinguishable from other clouds.
If trends in cheap air travel continue, says Professor Gerry Gilmore, the era of ground astronomy may come to an end much earlier than most had predicted.’
`Observations by astronomers tracking near-Earth asteroids have raised a new object to the top of the Earth-threat list.
The asteroid could strike the Earth in 2102. However, Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US, told New Scientist: “The most likely situation, by far, is that additional observations will bring it back down to a zero.”
He adds: “We’re more likely to be hit between now and then by an object that we don’t know about.” ‘
