Perhaps I spoke too soon with our "simulated" footage of the satellite strike. The Pentagon has released video of the successful missile strike:
Click through to see a vid of the satellite-busting missile taking off.
Continue reading 'UPDATE: Satellite destruction mission video footage' >
Woo-hoo! I don't know if I'm more excited about the success of our military's efforts to destroy a wayward satellite because 1) it's a bold tactical, interstellar move, or 2) now we'll get to stop writing about it. Either way, the Navy is "80-90 percent confident" that a missile aboard the U.S.S. Lake Erie took out most of the spy satellite, including that tank of poisonous hydrazine that caused such a hubbub. There's no official video of the takedown, but you can imagine that it went a little something like this:
War is bad and all, but recent news of an errant satellite and our military's plans to blow it out of the sky has stoked the fires of our Millennium Falcon-loving youth. Luckily, our thoughtful, do-gooder big brother spent less time breaking out the action figures and actually investigated the possibility of the U.S. and China engaging in a protracted arms race in outer space. Basically, the Pentagon is already thinking about it seriously, but astronomical (heh) costs and mitigating factors (debris in orbit from space battles could interfere with essential communications satellites) might hold us or the Chinese back from building a Death Star anytime soon.
Even cooler than the article, though, is the space weapons slideshow our sibling provided at no extra charge. It covers possible space weapons, connected technology, and the feasibility and costs of getting said super-weapons off the ground. Badass entries include: a ground-based antisatellite laser, kinetic-energy interceptors, offensive satellites, and space-based hypersonic bombers (pictured left). Yes! Way to go, bro!
Continue reading 'Pew! Pew! Is an arms race in space on the horizon?' >
After all the hand-wringing about what's going to happen to the U.S.'s broken, poisonous satellite on track to crash into earth, it looks the military is going to go ahead and do the Hollywood thing after all and blow it out of the sky. Or at least, they're going to try.
Right now, the military has a two-week window in which to shoot down the school bus-sized satellite; after that point, it would begin to break apart and tumble down into the earth's atmosphere, depositing its half-ton of frozen, hazardous hydrazene rocket fuel in an unknown place. Because the satellite circles the earth 16 times a day, we'll have a second and maybe even a third chance to hit it if we miss on the first blast.
The plan is to use ship-based anti-ballistic missile weaponry to take out the busted satellite, which, um, hasn't exactly been done before. If it works, it stands to serve not only as a way to take out a potentially dangerous piece of space junk, but also a powerful proof-of-concept for the U.S.'s antisatellite capability.
Continue reading 'Asteroid practice: U.S. plans to shoot down errant spy satellite' >
We told you we'd post up pics when they came back from Messenger, and here they are — just click for hi-res: 
Sure it looks kind of like the moon, but already a few unique things are coming out from this picture. The topography of the Caloris Basin, one of the largest impact areas in the solar system, is revealed in full. We can also see bands or cliffs called "rupes" that score some of the craters. These are places where tectonic uplift occurred after crater impact, showing that Mercury still may have geological compression going on.
We'll keep you posted on any other Mercurial developments.
I just finished watching Danny Boyle's sci-fi opus Sunshine last night, and it was pretty incredible as a purely visual, visceral experience. Even though the film loses a bit of face with a credibility-stretching horror twist near the end, it was one of my better sci-fi experiences in recent memory. (Heavy emphasis on the fi: The loopy science only gets loopier, but they certainly make it look believable. And who doesn't want to believe we could fire a nuke the size of Manhattan into the core of the sun to reignite it?)
One of the most memorable scenes is a close flyby of Mercury — the supposed iron core content helps amplify a distress signal. In an example of life imitating art, NASA's Messenger satellite — if all goes well — will have flown within 124 miles of Mercury's surface around noon EST today. It's our first visit in 33 years, and it's freaking cool. But, sadly, I'm pretty sure we're not launching a nuke into the sun.
Continue reading 'Messenger satellite flies by Mercury today — sweet pictures TK' >
More news from the American Geophysical Union Meeting:
Last February, NASA launched the Themis mission, five satellites that loiter in the upper reaches of our atmosphere. The satellites take measurements that will help scientists figure out how space storms energize those dazzling light shows known as auroras. The first results are in.
From the AP story:
New data from NASA's Themis mission, a quintet of satellites launched this winter, found the energy comes from a stream of charged particles from the sun flowing like a current through twisted bundles of magnetic fields connecting Earth's upper atmosphere to the sun.
The energy is then abruptly released in the form of a shimmering display of lights, said principal investigator Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California at Los Angeles.
It's time to grab some Schlitz, St. Ides or Olde English and pour a forty: Voyager 2 has left our solar system for good. Voyager 2 first hit space in '77 and crossed the 'termination shock' -- the transition region between the bubble dominated by the sun's solar wind and interstellar space -- on August 30 of this year. To put it in perspective, Voyager 2 left Earth when swinging was cool and Star Wars movies ruled, whereas by the time Voyager 2 left the solar system, swinging got relegated to old folks in the 'burbs and Star Wars movies sucked.
But Voyager 2 ain't going out without giving us some sweet information. Voyager 1 crossed this same boundary in 2004, but Voyager 2 did it almost 1 billion miles closer to the sun, suggesting that something is compressing the bubble that contains the outermost reaches of solar wind -- which is generally considered the edge of the solar system.
Continue reading 'Voyager 2 leaves solar system, looking forward to 'new projects with Diddy'' >
