Today's Cool News

Watch Out for that Tree

If the only way to do it was via Soyuz and I had the gazillion dollars to do it, I would still go into space on one of the Russian spacecraft.  Still, the whole concept of re-entry in something that resembles a bullet more than an airplane and that smashes into the ground is somewhat sobering.

Now we learn they can't even exactly figure out where the darned thing is coming down.  Pardon me Boris, but watch out for that falling spacecraft.

From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

Three space travellers, including South Korea's first astronaut, returned to Earth on Saturday aboard a Russian space capsule that landed about 420 kilometres off target in northern Kazakhstan.

The Soyuz craft likely missed its planned landing point because it followed a "ballistic" or very steep trajectory upon re-entry, said NASA commentator John Ira Petty, monitoring the descent from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Tex.

Besides being far off course, the landing, on a return from the International Space Station, was about 20 minutes later than planned.

South Korean bioengineer Yi So-yeon, American astronaut Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko were reported to be in satisfactory condition, Russian mission control spokesman Valery Lyndin said.

Once a recovery helicopter arrived, the crew were examined by medical officials.

It doesn't say how long that wait was for the recovery helicopter.  Perhaps there was time for a bowl of borscht?

A Glimmer of Hope for Space Migration Enthusiasts

Most people who know me have heard my rant about the only long-term solution to Global Warming and the other problems facing our resource-limited planet is for a substantial number of us to get the hell away from here and migrate into space.  I assumed we would be doing it by now when at the age of seven I watched Neil Armstrong flub the first words on the Moon.

Instead we're stuck on this primitive planet with some urging a return to the horse and buggy days.

Well, here's a story that gives me just a little bit of hope.  It seems NASA is ready to test an inflatable environment for the lunar surface.

From The Future of Things:

NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are about to test an inflatable habitat in Antarctica starting January 2008. Its new architecture is supposedly strong enough to withstand the conditions on the moon; to test that, Antarctica's frigid, harsh, isolated landscape was chosen to simulate the lunar environment and test the prototype’s capabilities.

(snip)

As NASA's Constellation Program is working to send humans back to the moon by 2020, they'll need a place to live. The agency is developing concepts for habitation modules that not only provide protection for the astronauts, but are easy to get to the Moon's surface.

Read the official press release here

No Wonder the Universe is on a Diet

A couple of space related items:

From Space.com:

The universe just got a little bit slimmer.

Revised calculations indicate the universe contains less normal and dark matter than previously thought, resulting in a "weight loss" of 10 to 20 percent.

  Dark matter is a mysterious substance that is invisible to current technologies and which scientists think outnumbers normal "baryonic" matter by about 5-to-1. 

The new weight estimate, detailed in   the Oct. 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal, comes from new observations   of the galaxy cluster Abell 3112. In 2002, astronomers announced they had traced X-rays in the cluster to clouds of dust and gas between the galaxies. But new observations by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory failed to detect the light signature, or "spectral emission lines," that should be given off by atoms in the clouds.

Or can you blame that weight loss on all of those super-high-energy particles?

From Sci-Tech Today:

Nearly 70 years ago, French scientist Pierre Victor Auger (1899-1993) was the first to observe a phenomenon known as an "air shower," a broad cascade of particles occurring in the Earth's upper atmosphere.

Auger speculated that the air showers, which can cover 15 square miles, were caused by particularly powerful cosmic rays. But at the time, he had no mechanism for studying the phenomenon in more detail.

On Thursday, an international team of 370 scientists announced that they have identified the most likely source of the rare particles.

Most Energetic Particles in Nature

On the basis of data collected by the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, scientists now believe that they originate in galaxies containing Active Galactic Nuclei -- particularly massive black holes that are actively converting stellar material into powerful bursts of energy, including high-energy cosmic rays.