Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Chicken Little was wrong again! The scattered remains of Comet Elenin will pass the Earth, on Sunday, 22 million miles away.
Lacking sufficient funds, Europe has invited Russia to join the US/ESA ExoMars program as full partner.
Twenty-three Indian Ocean nations successful tested their own tsumani warning system on Wednesday.
Robot gas attendants could keep old satellites chugging.
MDA has a contract, and a good design. If they succeed in refueling an old communications satellite with a robot, it will be fundamentally change the launch industry. If satellites don’t have to be replaced as often, there will less need for launches, reducing the demand for rockets.
An archeology discovery in Africa suggests that Stone Age humans had an understanding of some basic but complicated chemistry.
Archaeologists have found evidence that, as long ago as 100,000 years, people used a specific recipe to create a mixture based on the iron-rich ochre pigment. The findings, published in the journal Science, “push back by 20,000 or 30,000 years” the evidence for when Homo sapiens evolved complex cognition, says Christopher Henshilwood of the universities of Bergen in Norway and Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, who led the work. “This isn’t just a chance mixture, it is early chemistry. It suggests conceptual and probably cognitive abilities which are the equivalent of modern humans,” he says.
Amateur astronomers discover near Earth asteroid.
In an editorial yesterday Space News suggested that Congress use the billions it is allocating for NASA’s heavy-lift rocket to fund the James Webb Space Telescope instead.
This is not surprising. Webb already has a strong constiuency (astronomers, the public) while the Space Launch System has little support outside of Congress and the specific aerospace contractors who want the work. With tight budgets as far as the eye can see into the future, and the likelihood that Congress is going to become more fiscal conservative after the next election, it would not shock me in the slightest if SLS gets eliminated and the money is given to Webb. And if the SpaceX and Orbital Sciences cargo missions to ISS go well then cutting SLS would almost be a certainty, as this success would demonstrate that these private companies should be able to replace SLS for a tenth of the cost.
And I also think this would be a much wiser use of the taxpayers money.
Success for India: Its PSLV rocket yesterday lifted four satellites into orbit.
The defunct 2.4 ton ROSAT space telescope is now predicted to crash to Earth sometime between October 20 and October 25.
The uncertainty of science: Hesperia Planum, a giant basin on Mars, assumed for decades to have been formed by volcanic activity, now appears to have instead been formed by water.
Dream Chaser, Sierra Nevada’s space plane, is to get its first test flight this coming summer.
For the unmanned test flight, it will be carried into the skies by WhiteKnightTwo, the carrier aircraft for the commercial suborbital passenger ship SpaceShipTwo, backed by Virgin Galactic, a U.S. company owned by Richard Branson’s London-based Virgin Group.
A UN report this week says that nearly one billion people are hungry, partly because of biofuels such as ethanol from corn.
The findings are echoed in a report published today by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), based in Washington DC. Maximo Torero, one of the report’s authors, says policymakers must “curtail biofuels subsidies” and “discourage the use of food crops in biofuel production” to limit food price volatility.
Just another indication of how politically weak Obama is: The Democratic Senate has rejected Obama’s jobs plan.
Gilad Shalit freed: Israel agrees to swap a thousand Palestinian prisoners for him.
I wonder how many of those Palestinian prisoners, many imprisoned for terrorist acts, will come back to do more harm.
An update, with pictures, from Orbital Sciences on the launchpad and assembly work leading to the first test flight of the Taurus 2 rocket.
The tolerance of Islam: Jews banned at Jewish holy site in Egypt.
London to Tokyo in ninety minutes, via space.
As much as I want every space tourism company to succeed, I’ll believe this story only when I see it.
I find this quote interesting:
When the status of the city was designated [after the fall of the Soviet Union], the leased Baikonur was monitored by two Interior Ministries, two prosecutors’ offices and two state security organs. But social problems have not disappeared. Engineers and astronauts are not the only ones who live in the city. Baikonur hosts a great deal of people who have local residence papers, including the indigenous Kazakhs. They cannot work on Baikonur objects because mostly Russians are hired to work there. If the Kazakhs are lucky enough to be hired, they are paid far less than the Russians.
In June of this year mass uprisings occurred in Baikonur. A crowd of youths pelted a police patrol car with stones and bottles.
Want to ask climategate scientist Michael Mann some questions? He will be presenting a paper today during a session on extreme weather and how it links to climate change at a geology conference in Minnesota.
The strange rubbing boulders of Chile.
Then, on another trip to the Atacama, Quade was standing on one of these boulders, pondering their histories when a 5.3 magnitude earthquake struck. The whole landscape started moving and the sound of the grinding of rocks was loud and clear.
“It was this tremendous sound, like the chattering of thousands of little hammers,” Quade said. He’d probably have made a lot more observations about the minute-long event, except he was a bit preoccupied by the boulder he was standing on, which he had to ride like a surfboard. “The one I was on rolled like a top and bounced off another boulder. I was afraid I would fall off and get crushed.”
The abstract is here.
Got $50,000 for the good faith deposit? Then you can bid on remaining assets of Rocketplane Kistler, to be auctioned off on November 11.
The abuse of power: A Louisiana man has won a $1.7 million lawsuit from the EPA for malicious prosecution.
The judge wrote that [government prosecutor Keith] Phillips, “set out with intent and reckless and callous disregard for anyone’s rights other than his own, and reckless disregard for the processes and power which had been bestowed on him, to effectively destroy another man’s life.” Furthermore, Judge Doherty railed against the complete absence of evidence against Mr. Vidrine and ordered the U.S. government to pay Mr. Vidrine $127,000 in defense fees, $50,000 in lost income, and $900,000 in loss of earning capacity.
The uncertainty of science: Great Britain faces a “mini-ice age.”
Getting to the right orbit, the hard way.
A new report has found that Big Ben in London is leaning, just under a half a meter off the perpendicular.
Video: How to build a Soyuz rocket.
Eco-friendly festival closes down due to lack of attendance.
Reminds me of a local news piece here in Maryland last week, where a team from the University of Maryland in College Park won a Department of Energy competition for the best built solar powered house. The problem is that the house cost $330,000 to build, is only 920 square feet in size, and the best price they hope to get for it is $250,000, if that.
In other words, it appears that these ecological projects have little to do with the real world, where creating something that customers will want to buy is the only way to succeed. All else is fantasy.
For the third year in a row — all Obama years — the federal government ran a deficit exceeding $1.3 trillion.
