The Asteriod Threat
Dave Dearborn’s mission is to keep us safe from incoming asteroids.
Dearborn, a physicist in DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, serves on a research panel, spearheaded by the National Academy of Sciences, tasked with evaluating methods to divert potentially hazardous objects—those that could hit Earth in the next 100 years.
“An object of this size would have [...]
Russian Rocket To Knock Away Asteroid
Russian is trying to determine if they should send a rocket to the asteroid Apophis. The 885 foot asteroid was discovered in 2004.
Anatoly Perminov said the space agency is meeting to assess the situation. “I don’t remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032. People’s [...]
New Found Planet Going the Wrong Way?
A newly found “ultra-low density planet is in a probable retrograde orbit”. All known planets rotate in the same direction as the stars. All known planets except for one — WASP-17. The knewly found planet was discovered by a graduate student under the direction of Coel Hellier of Keele University.
“This planet is [...]
Long, Long, Long Walk In Space
Outer Space — Astronauts completed one of NASA’s top six longest spacewalks over the weekend. The Atlantis’ Mission to Hubble was not suppose to have a spacewalk of this length; however, a problem arose while working on a bolt interface. Astronaut, Mike Massimino, had to remove over 100 screws by hand.
NASA reported:
In [...]
NASA: Launch Mishap Ends OCO Mission
from NASA
Several minutes into the flight of the Taurus rocket carrying NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory spacecraft, launch managers declared a contingency after the payload fairing failed to separate.
NASA Spots Huge Gamma-ray Blast
from NASA
Astronomers using NASA’s Swift satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope are seeing frequent blasts from a stellar remnant 30,000 light-years away. The high-energy fireworks arise from a rare type of neutron star known as a soft-gamma-ray repeater. Such objects unpredictably send out a series of X-ray and gamma-ray flares.
“At times, this remarkable object has [...]