Each year, millions of eyes from all over the world are focused on the sparkling Waterford Crystal Times Square New Year's Eve Ball. At 11:59 p.m., the Ball begins its descent as millions of voices unite to count down the final seconds of the year, and celebrate the beginning of a new year full of hopes, challenges, changes and dreams.

On November 11th, 2008, The co-organizers of New Year’s Eve in Times Square (Times Square Alliance, Countdown Entertainment) unveiled a new Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball at a press conference at Hudson Scenic Studio in Yonkers, New York.

The new Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball is a 12 foot geodesic sphere, double the size of previous Balls, and weighs 11,875 pounds. Covered in 2,668 Waterford Crystals and powered by 32,256 Philips Luxeon Rebel LEDS, the new Ball is capable of creating a palette of more than 16 million vibrant colors and billions of patterns producing a spectacular kaleidoscope effect atop One Times Square.

The organizers also announced that the new Ball will become a year-round attraction above Times Square in full public view January through December.

“For one hundred years, the Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball has attracted millions of revelers to Times Square on December 31st to celebrate the beginning of the New Year” said Jeff Straus, president of Countdown Entertainment and co-organizer of Times Square New Year’s Eve. “The new Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball will be a bright sparkling jewel atop One Times Square entertaining New Yorkers and tourists from around the world not only on December 31, but throughout the year.”

“The New Year’s Eve ball is bigger, better and brighter than ever, just like Times Square itself,” said Times Square Alliance President Tim Tompkins. “And like Times Square, it’s not afraid to show off. That’s why we’re proudly putting it on display year-round so visitors to the neighborhood can enjoy a true Crossroads of the World icon.”

Check out article at Time Square Alliance.

I wish everyone a safe, happy and prosperous 2009!

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AT THE GREENWICH PRIME MERIDIAN, England (AP) -- Just a second, 2009. It's going to take a little longer to say goodbye to the worst economic year since the Great Depression, but all for good cause. The custodians of time will ring in the New Year by tacking a "leap second" onto the clock Wednesday to account for the minute slowing of the Earth's rotation. The leap second has been used sporadically at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich since 1972, an adjustment that has kept Greenwich Mean Time the internationally agreed time standard.

Some scientists now say GMT should be replaced by International Atomic Time - computed outside Paris - because new technologies have allowed atomic time to tick away with down-to-the-nanosecond accuracy.

But opponents say atomic time's very precision poses a problem.

A strict measurement, they say, would change our very notion of time forever, as atomic clocks would one day outpace the familiar cycle of sunrise and sunset.

The time warp wouldn't be noticeable for generations, but within a millennium, noon - the hour associated with the sun's highest point in the sky - would occur around 1 o'clock. In tens of thousands of years, the sun would be days behind the human calendar.

That bothers people like Steve Allen, an analyst at the University of California at Santa Cruz's Lick Observatory.

"I think (our descendants) will curse us less if we choose to keep the clock reading near 12:00 when the sun is highest in the sky," Allen said.

Atomic time advocates argue that leap seconds are onerous because they're unpredictable.

Since the exact speed of the Earth's rotation can't be plotted out in advance, they're added as needed. Sometimes, like this year, they're added on Dec. 31, sometimes they're inserted at the end of June 30.

Those willy-nilly fixes can trip up time-sensitive software, particularly in Asia, where the extra second is added in the middle of the day.

Critics say everything from satellite navigation to power transmission and cellular communication is vulnerable to problems stemming from programs ignoring the extra second or adding it at different times.

Although the time will pass in the blink of an eye, Judah Levine, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., predicts the change will make him a very busy man starting about 5 p.m. Mountain Time. As part of the institute's Time and Frequency Division, he'll be helping to work out the bugs that follow.

"There's always somebody who doesn't get it right," Levine said. "It never fails."

Britons seemed less concerned about the remote prospect of having tea at 3 a.m. than the notion of leaving a France-based body in control of the world's time.

"I think there's some kind of historical pride we might feel in Britain about Greenwich being the point around which time is measured," 50-year-old telecoms executive Stephen Mallinson said as he waited to board a Eurostar train for Paris at London's St. Pancras Station.

"But in practice, does it make a difference? No."

At the Royal Observatory, 53-year-old homemaker Susie Holt was adjusting her wristwatch to match the digital display above the meridian. She said it would be a pity if GMT were made obsolete. Her daughter, 15-year-old Kirsty, was more forthright.

"We don't want the French to control time," she said. "They might get it wrong or something."

Meanwhile, Elisa Felicitas Arias, a scientist at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, which computes atomic time at a facility outside Paris, has been busy lobbying to scrap the leap seconds that have given the 17th century Royal Observatory pride of place.

"GMT is out of date," she sniffed.

She said she has been garnering considerable support, with the International Telecommunications Union - the arbiter of international time standards - considering a vote on a switch as early as next year, with a 2018 target to implement it.

The U.S., France, Germany, Italy, and Japan were all on board, she said.

But David Rooney, the Royal Observatory's curator of time, defended leap seconds, saying they give everyone "the best of both worlds."

The arrangement, he said, allows satellites, physicists, and high-frequency traders to benefit from the accuracy of atomic time while keeping our clocks consistent with the position of the sun in the sky - and with GMT.

The American Astronomical Society is officially neutral on the proposal to switch to atomic time, which is calculated based on readings from more than 200 atomic clocks maintained across the world.

Perhaps predictably, Britain's Royal Astronomical Society has come out in favor of conserving leap seconds. While spokesman Robert Massey said star-watchers could cope no matter what happened, he urged caution on such an important change.

"It's not just a matter for the telecommunications industry to tell everybody to get rid of the leap second," Massey said. "It would be a big cultural change at the very least. Abandoning the connection between time and solar time is really a big shift."

Check out article at The Advocate.

I'm on the fence on this one... scientific accuracy is important, but I kinda like that time matches solar time. Guess we'll have to see how this argument plays out over the next few years.

Anyway... Please everyone remember to be safe and responsible tonight... and enjoy the celebrations!

Labels: Entertainment, History, Images, Technology

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Need that perfect gift for the space buff in your life?
Got 129 million cu ft of spare hangar space?
Then has NASA got a deal for you: Once the space shuttle fleet retires,
probably by 2010, the shuttles will be ready for purchase.
But even for the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum,
the shuttles come at a hefty price—about $42 million each!

Earlier this week the space agency issued a Request for Information (RFI) to educational institutions, museums, and "other organizations" in an attempt to sell off the remaining space shuttles in 2010. The estimated total for tax, tags and freight is $42 million. According to NASA, the RFI will "gauge the level and scope of interest of U.S. organizations in acquiring … orbiters and other major flight hardware."

The agency hopes to find homes for two of the three orbiters; Discovery is already earmarked for the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. By law, the institution has something akin to a rights-of-first-refusal agreement with NASA that allows it first crack at space memorabilia once the government is done with it.

Discovery's long, active history makes it a logical choice for the Smithsonian. The third of NASA's winged spaceships and the oldest working orbiter, Discovery was deployed for the Hubble Space Telescope on mission STS-31 in April 1990, carried the 77-year-old John Glenn back into space in 1998, and was twice NASA's return-to-flight spacecraft—after the Challenger disaster in 1986 and the Columbia explosion five years ago. While Enterprise, the shuttle built for test flights, anchors the Smithsonian's space collection at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles airport in Virginia, the museum has long wanted to replace it with an operational orbiter. "To have any flown orbiter would be wonderful," says Valerie Neal, the Smithsonian's curator of the human spaceflight collection. "The Smithsonian tries to acquire the oldest or first-flown aircraft—so up until 2003, we'd hoped it would be Columbia. Now, of course, Discovery would be a perfect fit."

But that history comes with a hefty price tag—even for the internationally renowned Smithsonian. "We were in a different era then, where we had no eBay and people who were looking to make money off of artifacts," NASA spokesman Michael Curie told CollectSpace, a Web site devoted to space memorabilia. "So it was to everyone's advantage to try to provide them to those who might display them." NASA makes an important distinction: The $42 million isn't to buy an orbiter, but to prepare it for public presentation—nearly $30 million goes to "safeing" the craft (removing the fuel systems and other environmental hazards), approximately $8 million goes to display preparation and the final $6 million or so is spent on transportation and installation. Technically, the agency says, the cost is compensation for shipping and handling.

Industry observers also suggest that the cash-strapped space agency is grabbing every dollar it can find for the over-budget Constellation Program. In August, budget constraints forced NASA to scrap plans to have the shuttle's replacement, Orion, ready by 2013. The orbiters should be available Sept. 30, 2011, according to the RFI, and they should be ferried to their final destinations by May 31, 2012—where they will likely remain for a long time, since the agency is also decommissioning the 747 that is used to haul the spacecraft. "In the past, sometimes we have paid for this sort of 'shipping and handling,'" Neal says, "but this is unprecedented in terms of the cost involved. We're thrilled to have an orbiter designated for us, but we'll have to resolve the cost matter. Luckily, it's not like we have to come up with the money in 90 days."

Check out the article at Popular Mechanics.

Sweet... I want one!!! =)

Labels: History, Images, Space, Technology

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CAMBRIDGE, England — Most clocks just tell time. Not the newly unveiled clock at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, which aims to disorient and dazzle, to remind people of their own mortality and to pay tribute to one of the most famous watchmakers of all time.

No wonder it cost more than 1 million pounds (US$1.8 million) to build and drew the attention of famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who formally unveiled the masterwork Friday.

This clock blasts away all preconceptions about timepieces. For one thing, it has no hands. And it is specially designed to run in erratic fashion, slowing down and speeding up from time to time.

The "Corpus clock" is the brainchild of inventor John Taylor, who used his own money to build it, in part to pay homage to the genius of John Harrison, the Englishman who in 1725 invented the "grasshopper" escapement — a mechanical device that helps regulate a clock's movement.

Making a visual pun on the grasshopper image, Taylor has designed a fantasy version of a grasshopper at the top of the clock face, and uses this beast — with its long needle teeth and barbed tail — as an integral part of the clockworks.

Its jaws begin to open halfway through a minute, then snap shut at 59 seconds. The creature's eyes, usually a dull green, occasionally flash bright yellow.

The oversize grasshopper is called a chronophage, or "time eater."

"Time is gone, he's eaten it," Taylor said. "My object was simply to turn a clock inside out so that the grasshopper became a reality."

At the unveiling, Hawking predicted the creature atop the clock would become "a much-loved, and possibly feared, addition to Cambridge's cityscape."

The chronophage stands atop the clock face, which is four feet in diameter. It displays time with light — a light races around the outer ring once every second, pausing briefly at the actual second. The next ring inside indicates the minute, and the inner ring shows the hour.

The lights are light-emitting diodes, or LEDS, which are constantly on. The apparent motion is regulated mechanically through slots in moving discs.

Weirdly, the pendulum slows down or speeds up. Sometimes it stops, the chronophage shakes a foot, and the pendulum moves again. Because of that, the time display may be as much as a minute off, although it swings back to the correct time every five minutes.

"There are so many expressions in everyday life about time going fast, time going slow and time standing still. Your life is not regular, it's relative to what's going on," Taylor said.

"This is the first clock in the world that does not set out to show accurate time," Taylor said.

He noted Albert Einstein's observation: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."

On Taylor's clock, the hour is tolled not by a bell or a cuckoo, but by the clanking of a chain that falls into a coffin, which then loudly bangs closed.

"I'm in my early 70s," Taylor told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "When you're a young person you think there is plenty of time. The sound was to remind me of my mortality."

The clock is the showpiece of Corpus Christi's new library, also a gift from Taylor. His wealth comes from inventing controls for electric tea kettles, inventions which he estimates are used 1 billion times a day around the globe.

Taylor is intrigued by making the ordinary interesting.

"Clocks are boring. They just tell the time, and people treat them as boring objects," he added. "This clock actually interacts with you."

Check out the article at Fox News.

Awesome concept! That is one cool clock!

For more info, check out the Corpus Clock Wiki Entry

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Large Hadron Collider Successfully Completes First Test








The sky is falling! Quick, get under a blanket!

The world's largest particle collider successfully completed its first major test by firing a beam of protons all the way around a 17-mile tunnel Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.

After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of the $3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider.

The startup was eagerly awaited by 9,000 physicists around the world who now have much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to see how they are made.

The organization, known by its French acronym CERN, fired the protons — a type of subatomic particle — around the tunnel in stages, several miles at a time.

Now that the beam has been successfully tested in clockwise direction, CERN plans to send it counterclockwise. Eventually the two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of smashing together protons to see how they are made.

"The beam is the size of a human hair," Paola Catapano, a spokeswoman for the host European Organization for Nuclear Research said after the protons were fired into the accelerator below the Swiss-French border at 9:32 a.m. (3:32 a.m. EDT).

It'll be months before any usable data comes out from the experiments, but the so-called "Big Bang machine" already has physicists salivating at the prospect of unlocking the mysteries of the universe — and many other people worried it'll create a black hole or strange self-replicating particle that will gobble up the Earth.

Professor Stephen Hawking, easily the world's most renowned living physicist, came down squarely in the "it's a good thing" camp Tuesday in a interview with BBC Radio: "Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe."

The researchers' top aim is to find the Higgs boson, a sub-subatomic particle that's essential to the so-called Standard Model of nuclear physics, but which has never been seen.

Previously unknown particles are also expected to pop up, if only for a millionth of a second, from the high-energy collisions of protons and antiprotons.

A pair of Russian scientists even think the LHC would be the world's first time machine, and that we should expect visitors from the future to arrive soon after it goes into operation.

For that, $10 billion dollars has been spent to build the machine, the largest supercollider on Earth ever since the project to build an even larger ring in Texas was canceled in 1993.

But the very fact that it would create unknown particles, as well as incredibly dense microscopic black holes that would almost instantly evaporate, has raised many fears.

"It's nonsense," CERN chief spokesman James Gillies told the Associated Press.

A columnist on Wired magazine's Web site said that "the likelihood of these black holes becoming the more well-known kind of black hole is nearly nonexistent."

Brian Cox, a glamorous particle physicist who literally was once a rock star, told London's Daily Telegraph that he and his colleagues had been receiving death threats.

He then bluntly characterized anyone who feared the LHC would destroy the world with an unprintable term for a female body part.

That hasn't stopped several people, including a former nuclear engineer from Hawaii and a German biochemist, from speaking out against the project.

"Someone will spot a light ray coming out of the Indian Ocean during the night and no one will be able to explain it, retired Professor Otto Roessler told London's Mail on Sunday. "Very soon the whole planet will be eaten in a magnificent scenario — if you could watch it from the moon. A Biblical Armageddon. Even cloud and fire will form, as it says in the Bible."

"The compression of the two atoms colliding together at nearly light speed will cause an irreversible implosion, forming a miniature version of a giant black hole," reads a lawsuit filed in March in U.S. District Court in Honolulu by Walter L. Wagner and a Spanish colleague, Luis Sancho.

The case, in which Wagner and Sancho demand that the LHC stop operations until an independent safety review is conducted, is still pending.

Wagner first became famous a decade ago when he filed suit against the opening of the smaller Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island, claiming it too would destroy the world when it started up in 2000.

Public reaction, true to form, has been mixed.

"This reminds me of the Millennium Bug! I love hysteria — it makes me laugh and I need a good laugh," said "Johan of Brisbane" in the comments to an Australian News Corp story.

Best of all was the posting on the same page by "KnowerOfAll": "Chuck Norris doesn't look for God Particles — he creates them."

Gillies told The Associated Press that the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam of protons at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the collider itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel.

Full power is probably a year away.

"On Wednesday, we start small," Gillies said. "What we're putting in to start with is one single low-intensity bunch at low energy and we thread that around. We get experience with low-energy things and then we ramp up as we get to know the machine better."

Huge amounts of data will pour in — so big that the lab's computers can't sift through it all. So scientists, who will monitor the experiment at above-ground control centers, have devised a way to share the load among dozens of leading computing centers worldwide.

The result is the "LHC Grid," a network of 60,000 computers to analyze what happens when protons are hurled at each other. That computing power is needed if scientists are to find what they are looking for among the mountains of data.

"You can think of each experiment as a giant digital camera with around 150 million pixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second," said CERN's Ian Bird, who leads the grid project.

Sophisticated filters discard all but the most interesting data, still leaving some 15 petabytes to be analyzed. That's enough to fill 2 million DVDs.

The data will be sent to 11 top research institutions in Europe, North America and Asia, and from there to a wider network of 150 research facilities around the world for scrutiny by thousands of researchers.

Collaborating on such a large project has proved invaluable, said Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid at Fermilab in Chicago. The U.S.-government funded project is among the major contributors to the grid.

"We are doing things that are at the boundaries of science," Pordes said. "But the technologies, the methods and the results will be picked up by industry."

Even if the LHC experiment doesn't yield answers to the cosmic questions, historians may one day see it as a key step in developing networked computing.

It wouldn't be the first time that has happened at CERN. In 1990, young British researcher Tim Berners-Lee created a computer-based system for sharing information with colleagues around the world.

He called it the World Wide Web.

Check out the article at Fox News.

Now, that's some exciting science! So exciting that it has captured the imaginations of people around the world!

Even Google got in on the act!

Coincidentally, this was the subject matter at the center of the plot in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, which will be made into a 2009 movie of the same title! The story is the prequel to The Da Vinci Code, and is very well written... Check it out!

Labels: History, Images, Technology

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Electronic Arts Inc. eventually to hire 220 people at facility

Rarely has recruiting a new company with a $6 million yearly payroll created such a buzz in Baton Rouge, but it’s the kind of jobs and the potential for keeping young people excited about staying in Louisiana that animated Wednesday’s announcement of a video game testing center coming to LSU.

Electronic Arts Inc.’s center at LSU’s South Campus on GSRI Avenue eventually will hire 220 people, 200 of whom will form a part-time platoon of students doing the heavy lifting on games like EA’s 20-year-old Madden NFL franchise, its Tiger Woods PGA Tour game and its NCAA Football series to make sure they’re consumer-ready.

Over the next decade, Gov. Bobby Jindal and economic development Secretary Stephen Moret envision EA’s Baton Rouge presence growing to higher-paying jobs for professionals who actually develop the video games, something that now takes place for EA largely in Orlando, Fla., and Vancouver, British Columbia.

If Baton Rouge reaches that zenith, construction of a digital research complex for kindred companies could result on LSU’s 200-acre South Campus area, Moret said.

“Ladies and gentlemen, with EA Sports this place definitely is more cool today than it was yesterday,” Adam Knapp, the Baton Rouge Area Chamber’s Generation X chief executive, told a Capitol audience at Wednesday’s announcement. “We have some investors (at the chamber) who believe and dream that the Baton Rouge area can be cool — and it is.”

Among the noteworthy Baton Rouge credentials cited by EA leaders in their location decision is this stunner: Not only is Louisiana’s obsession with LSU football and other sports not a negative as is often assumed by critics of the state’s higher education priorities, but the sports obsession is a huge plus, because the testers need to be savvy about the games they play for a living at EA.

“Is it fun? Does it have the right feel? Is it too hard? Is it too easy” are among the questions EA employees will answer at LSU, where Southern University and Baton Rouge Community College students are expected to fill the testing ranks as well, said Dave Steele, EA’s senior director of quality assurance.

“Because of the sports knowledge here, people can look at a football game and have the skills needed to test functions,” he said. “They still have to have a feel for the game. You’re down by less than a touchdown with less than two minutes to go on fourth down — what do you do? That’s really one of the reasons we wanted to come to Baton Rouge.”

The company also benefits from Louisiana’s offer of a 20 percent tax credit against state income tax liability, credits that can be claimed by the company or sold to a third-party for a cash advance.

All told, EA’s incentives for bringing the testing center to Baton Rouge will be worth about $14 million in the next decade, including payroll tax credits through the state’s Quality Jobs program.

Jindal said EA’s recruitment is invaluable for what it will mean to building the digital industry in the state, but it’s a good deal on the bottom line alone for this project.

“The state Department of Economic Development really looks at a 10-year return on investment as a good deal,” the governor said. “Within five years, we will get our return on investment. We look at this as the first step toward a much larger and bigger relationship with EA Sports.”

Simon Carless, publisher of Game Developer magazine, agreed that EA’s site selection represents a coup for Louisiana that could generate many more digital media gains.

It’s unusual for a global video game software company to open a testing-only center, which leads to the conclusion that actual video-game development business from EA could be within Baton Rouge’s reach, he said.

“I think what states struggle to do is get large-name publishers to set up offices in their area,” Carless said. “Electronic Arts is the world’s largest publisher, so I think it’s important if you can get someone like that. I think it’s definitely a positive introductory step, but it’s also important for individual area to reach a critical mass of game production or development before you can really get an ecosystem there, if you will.”

So far, three significant game developers have emerged in Baton Rouge: Founded by Southern University engineering graduate and former Motorola executive Jacqueline Beauchamp, Nerjyzed Entertainment LLC has published “Black College Football: The Experience”; Yatec LLC will publish its third major game, “Say N Play,” with voice recognition software late this year; and a Resurgent Entertainment LLC unit publishes the “Enigma: Rising Tide” war game.

“The industry will not develop overnight in Louisiana,” Redman said by e-mail Wednesday. “We said that back in 2005, but a couple of small companies every few months add up, and the synergy with Louisiana’s film industry will only become more apparent. … With EA, Louisiana has an enormous win to hold up and show to the world.”

Check out the article at LSU Sports.

Excellent news coming out of LSU! That's exactly the kind of thing we needed here! Not to mention... What a kick-ass job that would be!!!

Labels: Entertainment, Sports, Technology

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The Space Race

After the Soviet space program's launch of the world's first human-made satellite (Sputnik 1) on 4 October 1957, the attention of the United States turned toward its own fledgling space efforts. The U.S. Congress, alarmed by the perceived threat to U.S. security and technological leadership (known as the "Sputnik crisis"), urged immediate and swift action; President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his advisors counseled more deliberate measures. Several months of debate produced an agreement that a new federal agency was needed to conduct all non-military activity in space.

Explorer 1, officially Satellite 1958 Alpha, was the first Earth artificial satellite of the United States, having been launched at 10:48pm EST on 31 January 1958.

On 29 July 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). When it began operations on 1 October 1958, NASA consisted mainly of the four laboratories and some 80 employees of the government's 46-year-old research agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). A significant contributor to NASA's entry into the Space race was the technology from the German rocket program, led by Wernher von Braun, who became a naturalized citizen of the United States after World War II. He is today regarded as the father of the United States space program. Elements of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (of which von Braun's team was a part) and the Naval Research Laboratory were incorporated into NASA.

NASA's earliest programs involved research into human spaceflight and were conducted under the pressure of the competition between the U.S. and the USSR (the Space Race) that existed during the Cold War. Project Mercury, initiated in 1958, started NASA down the path of human space exploration with missions designed to discover simply if man could survive in space.

On May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard—one of the seven Project Mercury astronauts selected as pilot for this mission—became the first American in space when he piloted Freedom 7 on a 15-minute suborbital flight. John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth on 20 February 1962 during the 5 and a quarter-hour flight of Friendship 7.

Once the Mercury project proved that human spaceflight was possible, Project Gemini was launched to conduct experiments and work out issues relating to a moon mission. The first Gemini flight with astronauts on board, Gemini 3, was flown by Gus Grissom and John Young on 23 March 1965. Nine other missions followed, showing that long-duration human space flight was possible, proving that rendezvous and docking with another vehicle in space was possible, and gathering medical data on the effects of weightlessness on human beings.

Apollo program

The Apollo program was designed to land humans on the Moon and bring them safely back to Earth. Apollo 1 ended tragically when all the astronauts inside died due to fire in command module during an experimental simulation. Because of this incident, there were a few unmanned tests before men boarded the spacecraft. Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 tested various components while orbiting the Moon, and returned photography. On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11, landed the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. Apollo 13 did not land on the Moon due to a malfunction, but did return photographs. The six missions that landed on the Moon returned a wealth of scientific data and almost 400 kilograms of lunar samples. Experiments included soil mechanics, meteoroids, seismic, heat flow, lunar ranging, magnetic fields, and solar wind experiments.

Skylab

Skylab was the first space station the United States launched into orbit. The 75 tonne station was in Earth orbit from 1973 to 1979, and was visited by crews three times, in 1973 and 1974. Skylab was originally intended to study gravitational anomalies in other solar systems, but the assignment was curtailed due to lack of funding and interest. It included a laboratory for studying the effects of microgravity, and a solar observatory. A Space Shuttle was planned to dock with and elevate Skylab to a higher safe altitude, but Skylab reentered the atmosphere and was destroyed in 1979, before the first shuttle could be launched, landing over parts of Western Australia and the Indian Ocean, with some fragments being recovered.

Apollo-Soyuz

The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (or ASTP) was the first joint flight of the U.S. and Soviet space programs. The mission took place in July 1975. For the United States of America, it was the last Apollo flight, as well as the last manned space launch until the flight of the first Space Shuttle in April 1981.

Shuttle era

The Space Shuttle became the major focus of NASA in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Planned to be a frequently launchable and mostly reusable vehicle, four space shuttles were built by 1985. The first to launch, Columbia, did so on April 12, 1981.

The shuttle was not all good news for NASA — flights were much more expensive than initially projected, and the public again lost interest as missions appeared to become mundane until the 1986 Challenger disaster again highlighted the risks of space flight. Work began on Space Station Freedom as a focus for the manned space program, but within NASA there was argument that these projects came at the expense of more inspiring unmanned missions such as the Voyager probes.

Nonetheless, the shuttle launched milestone projects like the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The HST is a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), and its success has paved the way for greater collaboration between the agencies. The HST was created with a relatively small budget of $2 billion but has continued operation since 1990, delighting both scientists and the public. Some of its images, such as the groundbreaking Hubble Deep Field, have become famous.

In 1995 Russian-American interaction resumed with the Shuttle-Mir missions. Once more an American vehicle docked with a Russian craft, this time a full-fledged space station. This cooperation continues to today, with Russia and America the two biggest partners in the largest space station ever built – the International Space Station (ISS). The strength of their cooperation on this project was even more evident when NASA began relying on Russian launch vehicles to service the ISS during the two year grounding of the shuttle fleet following the 2003 Columbia disaster.

Costing over one hundred billion dollars, it has been difficult at times for NASA to justify the ISS. The population at large has historically been hard to impress with details of scientific experiments in space, preferring news of grand projects to exotic locations. Even now, the ISS cannot accommodate as many scientists as planned.

During much of the 1990s, NASA was faced with shrinking annual budgets due to Congressional belt-tightening in Washington, D.C. In response, NASA's ninth administrator, Daniel Goldin, pioneered the "faster, better, cheaper" approach that enabled NASA to cut costs while still delivering a wide variety of aerospace programs (Discovery Program). That method was criticized and re-evaluated following the twin losses of Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander in 1999. Yet, NASA's shuttle program had made 116 successful launches as of December 2006.

The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, which killed the crew of six Americans and one Israeli, caused a 29-month hiatus in space shuttle flights and triggered a serious re-examination of NASA's priorities. The U.S. government, various scientists, and the public all reconsidered the future of the space program.

NASA's future

NASA's ongoing investigations include in-depth surveys of Mars and Saturn and studies of the Earth and the Sun. Other NASA spacecraft are presently en route to Mercury and Pluto. With missions to Jupiter in planning stages, NASA's itinerary covers over half the solar system.

Managed by the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, the Phoenix mission was launched on August 4, 2007. It will search for possible underground water courses in the northern Martian pole. This lander revives much of its experiments and instrumentation from the failed 1999 Mars Polar Lander, hence its name. An improved and larger rover, Mars Science Laboratory, is under construction and slated to launch in 2009. On the horizon of NASA's plans are two possibilities under consideration for the Mars Scout 2013 mission.

The New Horizons mission to Pluto was launched in 2006 and will fly by Pluto in 2015. The probe received a gravity assist from Jupiter in February 2007, examining some of Jupiter's inner moons and testing on-board instruments during the fly-by.

Vision for space exploration

On January 14, 2004, ten days after the landing of the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, US President George W. Bush announced a new plan for NASA's future, dubbed the Vision for Space Exploration. According to this plan, mankind will return to the Moon by 2018, and set up outposts as a testbed and potential resource for future missions. The Space Shuttle will be retired in 2010 and Orion will replace it by 2014, capable of both docking with the ISS and leaving the Earth's orbit. The future of the ISS is somewhat uncertain — construction will be completed, but beyond that is less clear. Although the plan initially met with skepticism from Congress, in late 2004 Congress agreed to provide start-up funds for the first year's worth of the new space vision.

Hoping to spur innovation from the private sector, NASA established a series of Centennial Challenges, technology prizes for non-government teams, in 2004. The Challenges include tasks that will be useful for implementing the Vision for Space Exploration, such as building more efficient astronaut gloves.

Moon base

On December 4, 2006, NASA announced it was planning to build a permanent moon base. NASA Associate Administrator Scott Horowitz said the goal was to start building the moonbase by 2020, and by 2024, have a fully functional base, that would allow for crew rotations like the International Space Station. Additionally, NASA plans to collaborate and partner with other nations for this project.

Man on Mars

On September 28, 2007, NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin stated that NASA aims to put a man on Mars by 2037, and in 2057, "We should be celebrating 20 years of man on Mars."

Check out the article at Wikipedia.

When you look at how much NASA has brought us in the past 50 years, one cannot even begin to imagine what the next 50 will bring! Exciting stuff!!!

Be sure to check out the image gallery at the NASA 50th Anniversary website!

For more information, check out the following interesting links:

• Space Shuttle
• Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicle
• International Space Station
• Colonization of the Moon
• Colonization of Mars

Labels: History, Images, Space, Technology

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The United States Navy's Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, popularly known as the Blue Angels, was formed in 1946 and is the world's first officially sanctioned military aerial demonstration team, as well as the oldest currently flying aerobatics team.

The Blue Angels’ mission is to enhance Navy and Marine Corps recruiting efforts and to represent the naval service to the United States, its elected leadership and foreign nations. The Blue Angels serve as positive role models and goodwill ambassadors for the U. S. Navy and Marine Corps.

A Blue Angels flight demonstration exhibits choreographed refinements of skills possessed by all naval aviators. It includes the graceful aerobatic maneuvers of the four-plane Diamond Formation, in concert with the fast-paced, high-performance maneuvers of its two Solo Pilots. Finally, the team illustrates the pinnacle of precision flying, performing maneuvers locked as a unit in the renowned, six-jet Delta Formation.

The team is stationed at Forrest Sherman Field, Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, during the show season. However, the squadron spends January through March training pilots and new team members at Naval Air Facility El Centro, California.

The Blue Angels are scheduled to fly 66 air shows at 35 air show sites in the United States during the 2007-2008 season, as the team celebrates 20 years of flying the F/A-18 Hornet. Last season, more than 15 million spectators watched the Blue Angels perform. Since its inception in 1946, the Blue Angels have performed for more than 427 million fans.

Check out the Official Blue Angels website.

We headed back to Pensacola to catch the annual Blue Angels Airshow. Saturday rained out, so it was rescheduled for Sunday, July 13... but they didn't disappoint! If you've never seen the Blue Angels perform live, you don't know what you're missing! They're awesome every time you see them!

Labels: Entertainment, Images, Military, Technology

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It sounds crazy, and it probably is: Skydive from 15,000 feet (4,600 meters) and land safely—without a parachute—wearing a getup that resembles a flying squirrel costume.

"It's pretty much considered impossible," said Maria von Egidy, a designer with Jii-Wings in Cape Town, South Africa.

Von Egidy isn't interested in trying the stunt herself. But she aims to design the first wingsuit that will help pull it off.

Wingsuits are jumpsuits with fabric panels between the arms and legs that enable skydivers to zoom around in freefall.

By angling the self-inflating, rigid "wings," pilots can turn, dive, or rocket forward.

What wearers can't do—at least not yet—is land safely without the aid of a parachute.

"In terms of downward speed, we're actually within the margin of safety there for landing," von Egidy said. "But of course the forward speeds are tremendous."

And therein lies the catch.

Terminal Velocity

If pushed from a high-flying plane, a naked human would fall to Earth at a terminal velocity—or maximum speed—of about 120 miles (190 kilometers) an hour.

A wingsuit doubles a person's surface area, slowing the descent rate to about 30 miles (50 kilometers) an hour, about the same as with a small parachute, von Egidy said.

The main problem with making a safe landing is that wingsuit pilots descend not only downward but also forward, propelled by the gliding action of their wings.

Forward speeds can top 75 to 90 miles (120 to 150 kilometers) an hour.

For now wingsuit pilots deploy a parachute at the end of their jumps to slow their descent for touchdown.

But a few pilots and designers have been exploring ways to set down on solid ground without the aid of a chute.

Some, like BASE (building, antennae, spans, and Earth) jumper Jeb Corliss of Malibu, California, are reportedly experimenting with landing gear or special surfaces.

Von Egidy has a different idea.

"We're trying to flare the suit without using landing gear [but] with aerodynamics," she said. "It's really a very simple solution in the end."

The designer won't discuss her plans in more detail, lest she divulge trade secrets. But she does say that the key to her concept is to create a forward brake at the right moment.

"Our design efforts are centered around solving that problem," she said.

Von Egidy's passion for the wingsuit might seem ironic, as she has never skydived at all, let alone jumped wearing one of her prototypes.

Instead she relies on a clutch of experienced skydivers around the world to test the suits and report on their performance.

"I don't have the luxury of actually experiencing it myself," von Egidy said. "So I have to rely on really good descriptions from [the testers]."

Danger Dives

Jean Potvin, a physics professor at St. Louis University in Missouri, analyzes parachute safety for the Parks College Parachute Research Group.

Potvin, a veteran skydiver who's logged more than 2,400 jumps, believes it's possible to land the right wingsuit without a parachute.

But, he says, the very high speeds involved and the potential for pilot error pose huge risks.

"It's something that's doable, but it's … fraught with danger," Potvin said.

Whether von Egidy's strategy will work remains to be seen. She says it will be another few months before a prototype can be safely tested in the air.

In the meantime, she and business partner Cate Turner will continue to subsidize their wingsuit work with income from their main business: Tailors of Tinseltown, which supplies costumes to South Africa's television and film industry.

As for her quest to design the first wingsuit to safely deliver a person to Earth, the South African says she harbors few doubts she will succeed.

"The preliminary ground tests are very positive," she said. "Everybody who knows what I'm doing believes in it. It's just a damn good idea that no one spotted."

Check out the article at National Geographic News.

Sounds like an awesome ride... I wanna try!!!

Labels: Entertainment, Images, Sports, Technology

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Shuttle Endeavour and a crew of seven blasted into orbit Tuesday on what was to be the longest space station mission ever, a 16-day voyage to build a gangly robot and add a new room that will serve as a closet for a future lab.

The space shuttle roared from its seaside pad at 2:28 a.m., lighting up the sky for miles around as it took off on a multinational flight involving Canada and Japan.

It was a rare treat: The last time NASA launched a shuttle at nighttime was in 2006. Only about a quarter of shuttle flights have begun in darkness.

"Good luck and Godspeed, and we'll see you back here in 16 days," launch director Mike Leinbach radioed to the astronauts right before liftoff.

"Banzai," replied Endeavour's commander, Dominic Gorie, using a Japanese exclamation of joy. "God truly has blessed us with a beautiful night here, Mike, to launch, so let's light them up and give Him a show."

They did. The shuttle took flight with a flash of light, giving a peach-yellow glow to the low clouds just offshore before disappearing into the darkness.

Shortly after liftoff, the astronauts had to deal with alert messages regarding their ship's steering thrusters. Then for unknown reasons, the cooling system had to be switched from the primary to backup line. NASA said it was looking into the problems.

Gorie and his crew face a daunting job once they reach the international space station late Wednesday night. The astronauts will perform five spacewalks, the most ever planned during a shuttle visit.

The launching site was jammed with Canadians and Japanese representing two of the major partners in the international space station.

The Canadian Space Agency supplied Dextre, the two-armed robot that was hitching a ride aboard Endeavour, while the Japanese Space Agency sent up the first part of its massive Kibo lab, a storage compartment for experiments, tools and spare parts.

Also on hand for the liftoff was a 19-member congressional delegation led by Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Texas, whose district includes Johnson Space Center in Houston. He is pushing for increased NASA funding.

For the first time since space station construction began nearly 10 years ago, all five major partners were about to own a piece of the orbiting real estate. The launch of the first section of Kibo, or Hope, finally propelled Japan into the space station action.

"Our Japanese people have been waiting for a very long, long time," said Yoshiyuki Hasegawa, the Japanese Space Agency's station program manager.

"With this flight I believe that we finally became a real partner of the (space station) project, not just one of the members on the list, after 20 some years of effort in the project," said Keiji Tachikawa, head of the Japanese Space Agency.

Work on the space station project began in the mid-1980s, with preliminary design work for Kibo (pronounced KEE'-boh) starting in 1990. Space station construction, however, was stalled over the years for various reasons, most recently the 2003 Columbia tragedy.

The main part of the Kibo lab will fly on the next shuttle mission in May, with the final installment, a porch for outdoor experiments, going up next year.

Altogether, the Japanese Space Agency has invested about $6.7 billion in the space station program, including a Kibo control center near Tokyo.

Canada's $200 million-plus Dextre, meanwhile, is designed to eventually take over some of the more routine outdoor maintenance chores from spacewalking astronauts.

Dextre, short for dexterous and pronounced like Dexter, will join the space station's Canadian-built robot arm, already in orbit for seven years.

In addition to working with their international payloads, Endeavour's astronauts will try out a caulking gun and high-tech goo on deliberately damaged shuttle thermal tile samples.

The test — part of NASA's ongoing post-Columbia safety effort — should have been performed last year, but was put off because of emergency space station repairs.

Astronaut Garrett Reisman will stay behind on the space station until June, swapping places with a Frenchman who accompanied Europe's Columbus lab into orbit in February.

A Japanese astronaut is also part of Endeavour's all-male crew.

Endeavour's countdown was the smoothest in years, officials said. Shortly after liftoff, however, the astronauts had to deal with a couple of problems that ended up being minor. They got alert messages for some of their ship's steering thrusters, but it turned out to be a bad electronics card. Then the primary cooling system failed, and they had to switch to the backup.

A cursory look at the initial launch images — fewer than usual because of the nighttime launch — showed only one significant loss of debris from the external fuel tank 83 seconds into the flight. But it appeared to miss the right wing.

In any event, Endeavour will be checked thoroughly in orbit for any potential damage, standard procedure ever since the loss of Columbia because of a foam strike.

"This is just a wonderful beginning to what's going to be a long and challenging mission for us," said LeRoy Cain, a shuttle manager who gave the final "go" for launch. "But we're really looking forward to it and we're ready to go, ready to get to work on orbit."

It is the second of six planned shuttle missions this year, all but one to the space station. NASA faces a 2010 deadline for finishing the station and retiring its shuttles.

Check out the article at Fox News.

Cool stuff! Man, do I need a Dextre at home!

Labels: Images, Space, Technology

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Scientist have nailed down how and when the Earth will cease to exist.

The sun will slowly expand into a red giant, pushing the Earth further out into space, but not far enough.

Our home planet will be snagged by the sun's outer atmosphere, gradually plunging to its doom inside the fiery stellar furnace.

"The drag caused by this low-density gas is enough to cause the Earth to drift inwards, and finally to be captured and vaporized by the sun," explains astronomer Robert Smith of the University of Sussex in southern England.

Previous projections had all figured that the Earth would avoid falling into the sun, even during our star's red-giant phase.

The good news: This won't happen for another 7.6 billion years.

The bad news: Life on Earth will end long before then.

In fact, we've only got a billion years left before the slowly expanding sun boils off the oceans and reduces our planet to an uninhabitable cinder, says Smith.

That may sound like a long time, but in fact life on Earth's been around a lot longer than that — a total of 3.7 billion years, according to the latest estimates.

For those first three billion years, true, we were nothing but pond scum. Still, the new figures indicate the long story of life on our fair blue-green planet may be entering its last act.

Is there any way our future descendants can save themselves? Why, yes, explains Smith.

He cites a recent study emanating from the University of California, Santa Cruz. It proposes taming an asteroid to swing by the Earth every few thousand years, slowly nudging the Earth into higher solar orbit, enough to outpace the sun's own outward growth.

"This sounds like science fiction," says Smith. "But it seems that the energy requirements are just about possible and the technology could be developed over the next few centuries."

Check out the article at Fox News.

Holy crap does that sound like a bad day!

Labels: Space, Technology

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U.S. Officials Plan to Shoot Down Satellite

WASHINGTON — Taking a page from Hollywood science fiction, the Pentagon said Thursday it will try to shoot down a dying, bus-size U.S. spy satellite loaded with toxic fuel on a collision course with the Earth.

The military hopes to smash the satellite as soon as next week — just before it enters Earth's atmosphere — with a single missile fired from a Navy cruiser in the northern Pacific Ocean.

One of the main goals of the satellite's destruction is to prevent any sensitive equipment from falling into the wrong hands.

"We are worried about something showing up on e-Bay," defense and intelligence expert John Pike said, adding that breaking up the satellite's pieces lessens the chance that sensitive U.S. technology could wind up in Chinese hands.

"What they have to be worried about is that a souvenir collector is going to find some piece, put it on e-Bay, and the Chinese buy it," said Pike, who is director of the defense research group GlobalSecurity.org.

The dramatic maneuver may well trigger international concerns, and U.S. officials have begun notifying other countries of the plan — stressing that it does not signal the start of a new American anti-satellite weapons program.

Military and administration officials said the satellite is carrying fuel called hydrazine that could injure or even kill people who are near it when it hits the ground.

That reason alone, they said, persuaded President Bush to order the shoot-down.

"That is the only thing that breaks it out, that is worthy of taking extraordinary measures," said Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a Pentagon briefing.

He predicted a fairly high chance — as much as 80 percent — of hitting the satellite, which will be about 150 miles up when the shot is fired.

The window of opportunity for taking the satellite down, Cartwright said, opens in three or four days and lasts for about seven or eight days.

"We'll take one shot and assess," he said. "This is the first time we've used a tactical missile to engage a spacecraft."

Deputy National Security Adviser James Jeffrey discounted comparisons to an anti-satellite test conducted by the Chinese last year that triggered criticism from the U.S. and other countries.

"This is all about trying to reduce the danger to human beings," Jeffrey said. "Specifically, there was enough of a risk for the president to be quite concerned about human life."

There might also be unstated military aims, some outside the administration suggested.

Similar spacecraft re-enter the atmosphere regularly and break up into pieces, said Ivan Oelrich, vice president for strategic security programs at the Federation of American Scientists.

He said, "One could be forgiven for asking if this is just an excuse to test an anti-satellite weapon."

A key issue when China shot down its defunct weather satellite was that it created an enormous amount of space debris.

"All of the debris from this encounter, as carefully designed as it is, will be down at most within weeks, and most of it will be down within the first couple of orbits afterward," said Jeffrey. "There's an enormous difference to spacefaring nations in ... those two things."

He and others dismissed suggestions that this was simply an attempt by the U.S. to flex its muscles, and that officials were overstating the toxic fuel threat.

Left alone, the satellite would be expected to hit Earth during the first week of March. About half of the 5,000-pound spacecraft would be expected to survive its blazing descent through the atmosphere and would scatter debris over several hundred miles.

If the missile shot is successful, officials said, much of the debris would burn up as it fell. They said they could not estimate how much would make it through the atmosphere.

They said the largest piece that would survive re-entry would be the spherical fuel tank, which is about 40 inches wide — assuming it is not hit directly by the missile.

The goal, however, is to hit the fuel tank in order to minimize the amount of fuel that returns to Earth, Cartwright said.

A Navy missile known as Standard Missile 3 would be fired at the spy satellite in an attempt to intercept it just before it re-enters Earth's atmosphere.

It would be "next to impossible" to hit the satellite after that because of atmospheric disturbances, he said.

Known by its military designation US 193, the satellite was launched in December 2006. It lost power and its central computer failed almost immediately afterward, leaving it uncontrollable. It carried a sophisticated and secret imaging sensor.

Software associated with the Standard Missile 3 has been modified to enhance the chances of the missile's sensors recognizing that the satellite is its target. The missile's designed mission is to shoot down ballistic missiles, not satellites.

Other officials said the missile's maximum range, while a classified figure, is not great enough to hit a satellite operating in normal orbits.

"It's a one-time deal," Cartwright said when asked whether the modified Standard Missile 3 should be considered a new U.S. anti-satellite technology.

He said that if an initial shoot-down attempt fails, the military would have about two days to reassess and decide whether to take a second shot.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin told reporters that analysis shows the hydrazine tank would survive a fall to Earth under normal circumstances, much as one did when the space shuttle Columbia crashed.

"The hydrazine which is in it is frozen solid, as it is now. Not all of it will melt," he said.

If the tank hits the ground it will have been breached because the fuel lines will have broken off and hydrazine will vent out, he said.

Jeffrey said members of Congress were briefed on the plan earlier Thursday and that diplomatic notifications to other countries were being made by the end of the day.

"It should be understood by all, at home and abroad, that this is an exceptional circumstance and should not be perceived as the standard U.S. policy for dealing with errant satellites," said House Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton.

Check out the article at Fox News.

If you're interested in getting a look at this satellite before we blow it out of the sky, it will be easy to see with the unaided eye. Just go check out the Satellite US 192 page at Heavens-Above.com for more info. I'm kinda hoping I can catch a glimpse of the explosion... provided I don't get a close-up view of any falling debris!

Labels: Military, Space, Technology

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January 16, 2008—The first of many planned images from NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft is showing astronomers a side of Mercury no one's ever seen before.

Mercury is tough to view from Earth, since it's so close to the sun. And when the Mariner 10 probe flew past the innermost planet in 1974 and 1975, only one side of the body was facing sunlight.

That's because Mercury rotates three times during every two orbits, so the same side of the planet is lit up every other time it is nearest to the sun—including during all of Mariner's flybys.

Added up, these factors have meant that although Mercury sits only about 57 million miles (92 million kilometers) away from Earth, for more than 30 years scientists have had almost no details about its other face.

But on Monday MESSENGER, the first mission to Mercury since the 1970s, snapped the first image of the "missing" half of the rocky world.

Among many new sights, the picture features the full Caloris Basin, a huge impact basin more than 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) across that sits on the border between the known and previously unknown regions of the planet.

More unprecedented images of the tiny planet are expected as the MESSENGER craft completes three flybys of Mercury before settling into orbit in March 2011.

From that point on, writes astronomer Phil Plait on the Bad Astronomy blog, "we'll get as many images of this tiny, hot, battered, dense and neglected planet as we can handle."

Check out the article at National Geographic News.

Awesome new photos! I can't wait to see the map of Mercury once Messenger gets settled into orbit!

Labels: Images, Space, Technology

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Here we are, nearly eight years into the 21st century, and the most spectacular manned mission NASA can pull off is a trip to the International Space Station, a mere 210 miles above the Earth. Even the most ambitious part of NASA's current plans for human spaceflight involves visiting a celestial body we've already been to: the moon. Astronauts, space buffs and an unimpressed public hunger for space exploration that's more dramatic, more heroic, more new. Something like, say, landing astronauts on a distant rock hurtling through space at 15 miles per second.

That's exactly the kind of trip NASA has been studying. In fact, scientists at the space agency recently determined that a manned mission to a near-Earth asteroid would be possible using technology being developed today. The mission wouldn't be easy. A crew of two or three would spend months riding in a cramped spacecraft before reaching their barren, nearly gravity-free target. That such a mission is even being considered, though, says a lot about the versatility of NASA's next fleet of spacecraft and the ambitions the agency has for them. If nothing else, it's a signal that space exploration could soon get much more exciting.

The Allure of an Asteroid

This wouldn't be our first trip to an asteroid. We've been visiting them by proxy for years now, using unmanned space probes. In 2000 NASA's NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft arrived at 433 Eros, which a century earlier became the first near-Earth asteroid known to man; five years later, the Japanese Hayabusa probe touched down on asteroid 25143 Itokawa.

Yet unmanned probes have their limitations. NEAR Shoemaker and Hayabusa gathered a good deal of data, but we still don't know the exact composition and internal structure of the asteroids they visited. And although Hayabusa was designed to collect two small samples from Itokawa, it's doubtful the probe will actually have anything onboard when it returns in 2010.

Humans, however, could be much more effective. Unlike robots, we adapt to our environment in real time. "We spend weeks at a rock with a Mars rover, trying to determine what it is," says Rob Landis, an engineer at NASA's Johnson Space Center and one of the co-leaders of the mission feasibility study. "An astronaut could make that determination in a matter of seconds."

A human crew could travel across an asteroid more intelligently than a robot, making it easier to deploy scientific instruments, collect samples, and zero in on the areas of greatest interest. "No doubt, on a human mission we would characterize an asteroid better than we ever have," says Bruce Betts, director of projects for the Planetary Society.

Plenty of characterization needs to be done. While most asteroids are a safe distance from Earth (in an approximately 190-million-mile-wide expanse between Mars and Jupiter), Jupiter's gravitational tug and, less often, collisions between asteroids can kick these objects into orbits that pass uncomfortably close to Earth. The 270-meter-wide asteroid 99942 Apophis, for example, will pass within roughly 24,000 miles of Earth in 2029, and could come back for a direct hit in 2036.

And if we're to have any hope of deflecting asteroids, we need to know a lot more about them than we do now. First off: What, exactly, are they made of? Measurements taken by Hayabusa indicate that 40 percent of Itokawa's volume is empty space. If some asteroids are truly this porous, that's helpful information for any plan to destroy or deflect an Earth-bound object.

Averting the apocalypse isn't the only reason to study near-Earth asteroids, though. They could be floating gold mines for future deep-space expeditions. Preliminary observations suggest that some asteroids are rich in useful minerals and, better yet, frozen water—the most valuable resource a space traveler could hope to find. If water could be extracted from asteroids, it could not only be used for drinking, but also broken down into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for rocket fuel. "It might be an ultimate way to get to Mars," Landis says.

Check out the article and the slideshow at Popular Science.

Just image the resources that could be discovered and the knowledge that would be gained by this venture. Truly exciting stuff!

Labels: Images, Space, Technology

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The original Earth-rise - taken by William Anders
during the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon on December 24, 1968.

A Japanese moon probe has replicated the famous Apollo-era "Earth-rise" photograph with modern high-definition imaging.

The Kaguya spacecraft, also called Selene, has been orbiting 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the moon since Oct. 18.

The new Earth-rise image shows our blue world floating in the blackness of space. It is a still shot taken from video made by the craft's high-definition television (HDTV) for space.

A second image, taken from a different location in the lunar orbit, has been dubbed Earth-set. A related series of still images shows our planet setting beyond the lunar horizon.

In the Earth-set image, Earth appears upside-down; visible are Australia and Asia. A region near the moon's south pole is seen in the foreground.

The footage was taken Nov. 7 using equipment provided by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK).

The orbiter mission is run by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Its first high-definition videos of Earth were sent back last month. The mission objectives are to obtain scientific data on the origin and evolution of the moon and to develop the technology for future lunar exploration.

Check out the article at Space.com.

Awesome images... I want to get my hands on that video! Congrats to JAXA on a successful mission, and thanks for sharing!

Labels: History, Images, Space, Technology

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Ever wish you could be a "fly on the wall" at a closed-door meeting or to hear a foe’s secrets?

Enter the robobug.

Witnesses are buzzing about recent sightings of robotic-looking dragonflies seen at Washington and New York political events. And U.S. government and private agencies have admitted to striving for the spy technology, The Washington Post reports, though no one has confessed to deploying the bugged bugs.

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Others think they are, well, dragonflies -- an ancient order of insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

The technical challenges of creating robotic insects are daunting, and most experts doubt that fully working models exist yet.

"If you find something, let me know," said Gary Anderson of the Defense Department's Rapid Reaction Technology Office.

But the CIA secretly developed a simple dragonfly snooper as long ago as the 1970s. And given recent advances, even skeptics say there is always a chance that some agency has quietly managed to make something operational.

"America can be pretty sneaky," said Tom Ehrhard, a retired Air Force colonel and expert in unmanned aerial vehicles who is now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonprofit Washington-based research institute.

Robotic fliers have been used by the military since World War II, but in the past decade their numbers and level of sophistication have increased enormously. Defense Department documents describe nearly 100 different models in use today, some as tiny as birds, and some the size of small planes.

All told, the nation's fleet of flying robots logged more than 160,000 flight hours last year -- a more than fourfold increase since 2003. A recent report by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College warned that if traffic rules are not clarified soon, the glut of unmanned vehicles "could render military airspace chaotic and potentially dangerous."

But getting from bird size to bug size is not a simple matter of making everything smaller.

Check out the article at