NASA scientists at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., effectively have ruled out the possibility the asteroid Apophis will impact Earth during a close flyby in 2036. The scientists used updated information obtained by NASA-supported telescopes in 2011 and 2012, as well as new data from the time leading up to Apophis’ distant Earth flyby yesterday (Jan. 9).
It’s a little old, but I just now found this. And it’s awesome. Click the link/picture; the real Table is interactive.
A Dutch non-profit wants to colonize Mars… not with Right-Stuffy-Supermen, but with more or less normal Just Schmoes. How to fund the exercise? In part… by making it a reality TV show. The colonists would be sent on a one-way mission to the red planet… no return vehicle, and no plan on *ever* coming back to Earth. While some will inevitably label this a “suicide mission,” it is in fact colonization, no more a “suicide mission” than people who pulled up stakes from the Old World and moved to the New World. I expect that if they make a real go of it (let’s face it… doubtful), they’ll have a lot of volunteers. The hardware shown includes SpaceX Dragon capsules for the Mars landings and as small habitats.
A few months ago some news sites went buggo with the declassification of several reports on the Avro-Canada Project 1794, a late 1950’s effort to develop a VTOL supersonic “flying saucer.” See, for example, Wired wildly inaccurately titled: “Declassified at Last: Air Force’s Supersonic Flying Saucer Schematics,” which ignores the fact that this design had been declassified fifteen or more years ago… I got a report from the NASM in the mid/late 1990’s, and have seen it online for *years.* Heck, a year or two back I made available some Avro documents on the topic (to thunderous silence, I’ll add).
While a technical masterpiece, it suffered from one minor flaw… it didn’t work. The “Avrocar” test vehicle proved wholly incapable of flight… it could hover in ground effect, and slowly wobble about, but could not generate enough vertical thrust to lurch clear of the ground.
Anyway, a few months back the National Archives declassified a box of reports, the tech blogosphere went nuts, and very little actually got posted online, just retreads of what the National Archives put in a single blog post. So, here’s some more Project 1794 stuff.
It doesn’t really seem like it’d work, but at least sometimes it did. And when it did, it’s pretty funny.
[youtube xVrJ8DxECbg]
An interesting study written for the Keck Institute of Space Studies (at JPL) has been published describing how to go about grabbing a near-Earth asteroid of about 7 meters diameter (250 to 1000 metric tons mass), and drag it into Lunar orbit.
The spacecraft is proposed to be an unmanned vehicle with Hall effect thrusters (a type of ion engine), using large solar panels to generate the electricity needed. The writers of the study suggest that a 500-ton asteroid could be transported to high lunar orbit by 2025. The small asteroid could then be used as a base of operations/source of raw materials for manned missions to the Moon and beyond.
The capture mechanism would be fairly simple: a large inflatable bag. The spacecraft would simply envelope the asteroid (after matching rotation), cinch in the bag, and slowly shove the rock to the Moon. Due to the exceedingly low thrust/weight that the loaded spacecraft would have, lunar orbit capture would be a complex dance.
The spacecraft would have an initial mass of 18,000 kilograms and would be launched by an Atlas V or similar booster. The 40 kilowatt solar-electric propulsion system would have an impressive Isp of 3,000 seconds, but a vanishingly low thrust (which does not seem to have been given in the study). 12 metric tons of the 18 would be xenon propellant for the thrusters.
The mission would be a very long duration one. After being delivered to low Earth orbit, 2.2 years would be required to spiral out to the moon. A gravity assist would be used to boost the craft towards the target asteroid; 1.7 years would be needed for the cruise. After rendezvous, 90 days would be needed to precisely match orbits, precisely match rotation, capture the asteroid and de-tumble. Another 2 to 6 years would be needed to transit to lunar orbit. Total: 6 to 10 years. One example mission involves launch on 4/28/2018 and return with asteroid 2008 HU4 (assumed to be 7 m diameter, 1300 tons mass) on 4/26/2026.
So Piers Morgan had a whole show about guns Monday night. He brought on a bunch of people to agree with him that “Guns ur bad, m’kay,” and a very few to argue the other side. One that he interviewed was world-class conspiracy whackjob Alex Jones, who thinks that the Bush administration was behind 911. I saw part of that… it was painful. Jones went full-bore bugnuts, ranting and raving. You can probably find the video on Youtube (it’s late and I’m tired).
I wouldn’t have brought it up except that someone on Fark *nailed* the situation:
Alex Jones is a nut and a kook, and I can only think of a few reasons for Piers Morgan to give him airtime, none of which reflect well on Morgan:
1) Morgan believes that Jones is representative of the political right, in which case Morgan is an ignorant fool.
2) Morgan wants to falsely portray Jones as representative of the political right, in which case Morgan is a disingenuous partisan hack.
3) This was a ratings stunt, in which case Morgan is sleazeball who will put anything on the air if it grabs a few extra eyeballs.
I personally expect that #2 is the real story here. Morgan is hardly an idiot; you don’t sleaze your way to wealth and fame as he’s done while being an ignorant fool. But he has shown himself to be of low character and desperately opposed to the right to keep and bear arms. What better way to tar the opposition than to find and promote the most unhinged kook who just happens to share *one* belief with the opposition?
As mentioned HERE, I’m going to do a run of 1/72 Saturn V blueprints. And what would go better with a 1/72 Saturn V blueprint than a 1/72 Saturn V model (well, apart from all the other blueprints I’ll be offering…)?
George Takei reads from “50 Shades of Grey.” Yeah, it’s NSFW. And it’s high-larious.
[youtube 7WahBH9sANg]
Still, not quite as funny as Gilbert Gottfried reading from “50 Shades,” but still…
