ISS Sharack NX-15

Very Interesting..Unica..

Interesting ... Unica

Oh, My! When Worlds Really Collide

Around a distant star, two planets similar to Earth collided and were destroyed, astronomers said today.

The somewhat speculative scenario is based on the leftovers: a ring of debris around the star that includes a million times more dust than now circles our sun.

"It's as if Earth and Venus collided," said researcher Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. "Astronomers have never seen anything like this before. Apparently, major catastrophic collisions can take place in a fully mature planetary system."

The researchers used X-ray data and other observations of a star called BD+20 307. They had assumed it was a young star, just a few hundred million years old, and the debris was leftovers from planet formation. But earlier this year, another study showed the star was actually a binary pair, and that the stars were billions of years old.

So why all the debris? The dust is about the same distance from the stellar pair as Earth is from the sun, and given current theories of planet formation, that debris should have been swept up into planets by now or pushed away by stellar radiation. It simply shouldn't be there.

A colossal collision must have created all that dust sometime in the past few hundred thousand years and perhaps much more recently, the astronomers figure.

It would have been a whopper.

"If any life was present on either planet, the massive collision would have wiped out everything in a matter of minutes â€" the ultimate extinction event," said Gregory Henry, an astronomer at Tennessee State University (TSU) who worked with Zuckerman on the research. "A massive disk of infrared-emitting dust circling the star provides silent testimony to this sad fate."

To put the collision into context, Zuckerman said: "By contrast with the massive crash in the BD+20 307 system, the collision of an asteroid with Earth 65 million years ago, the most favored explanation for the final demise of the dinosaurs, was a mere pipsqueak."

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA, and also by TSU and the State of Tennessee. It will be detailed in the December issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

The conclusion has the astronomers thinking about home.

"This poses two very interesting questions," said TSU astronomer Francis Fekel. "How do planetary orbits become destabilized in such an old, mature system, and could such a collision happen in our own solar system?"

It has already happened here, in fact. Our moon is thought to have been created when a Mars-sized object slammed into Earth. Henry points out that computer models done by other researchers suggest that as planets in our solar system migrate over time, there is a "small probability for collisions of Mercury with Earth or Venus sometime in the next billion years or more."

Of course by then the sun will have expanded and we might be toast anyway.

The Mysterious Zodiacal Light

During the next few weeks on some clear moonless early morning, if you are fortunate to be far from any haze and bright lights, keep a close watch on the eastern horizon about two hours before sunrise. If you're lucky you might catch a glimpse of a ghostly column of light extending upward into the sky.

Many have been fooled into thinking that it's beginning of morning twilight and indeed the Persian astronomer, mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam (1050? -1123?) referred to this ghostly glow as the "false dawn" in his poem, The Rubaiyat.

That faint ghostly glow was once thought to be solely an atmospheric phenomenon: perhaps reflected sunlight shining on the highest layers of Earth's atmosphere. We know now that while it is indeed reflected sunlight, it is being reflected not off our atmosphere, but rather off of a non-uniform distribution of interplanetary material; debris left over from the formation of our solar system.

These countless millions, if not billions of particles – ranging in size from meter-sized mini-asteroids to micron-sized dust grains -- seem densest around the immediate vicinity of the sun, but extend outward, beyond the orbit of Mars and are spread out along the plane of the ecliptic (the path the sun follows throughout the year). Hence the reason for the name Zodiacal Light is because it is seen projected against the zodiacal constellations.

Before the break of dawn

The best time to see the Zodiacal Light is when the ecliptic appears most nearly vertical to the horizon. For those in the Northern Hemisphere, the best morning views in the eastern sky will come during the next few weeks without the interference of bright moonlight. Conversely, for those who live in the Southern Hemisphere, the best views now are in the western evening sky right after sunset.

Those who live in the tropics or at the equator are luckiest of all since the Zodiacal Light is always very conspicuous from these regions. This is probably because from these locations the ecliptic is always favorably oriented allowing views of the Zodiacal Light both in the western evening sky and eastern morning sky all year long.

For northerners at this particular time of the year, it is just before morning twilight begins (about 90 minutes before sunrise), that the Zodiacal Light should appear at its brightest and most conspicuous.

A ghostly slanted pyramid

The Zodiacal Light is something you have to see to believe.

My best views of it came from southeast Arizona back in 2001. I had chosen that part of the country for a view of a pristinely dark and starry sky to serve as the backdrop for an upcoming display of Leonid meteors. Imagine my surprise when I stepped outside on my first early morning watch, and was surprised to see what looked like the glow of a town or small city just beyond the horizon to my east. It took a while for me to realize that what I was seeing was not urban light pollution, but the Zodiacal Light!

To a discerning eye, its diffuse shape somewhat resembles a tilted cone, wedge or slanted pyramid. At the base of the cone, the light may extend some 20 to 30-degrees along the horizon. At its best, it can approach or even equal the Milky Way in brightness, but more often than not it is so faint that even a small amount of atmospheric haze can obscure it. On exceptionally clear nights, the tapering cone might be seen to stretch more than halfway to the zenith.

In fact, should you be blessed with such conditions – absolutely no artificial lighting, smoke or haze – you should also try to see the Zodiacal Band, which runs along the entire ecliptic and usually averages about 5 to 10-degrees in apparent width.

Counterglow

There is yet another ghostly glow in the sky which few have seen or heard about.

This is the Gegenschein, derived from a German word meaning "counterglow," since it is always opposite or "counter" in position to the sun in the sky. The Gegenschein is visible only with the unaided eye, as it is far too large and diffuse to be viewed with a telescope or even binoculars.

The exact nature of the Gegenschein is still somewhat of a mystery, though most think that – like the Zodiacal Light – it might be some sort of tail formed by minute particles from our atmosphere that are streaming out into space away from the Earth in the opposite direction from the sun.

Explosion That Injured 7 Spurs NASA Probe

NASA investigators are studying a tank explosion that caused minor injuries at Kennedy Space Center during a contractor's independent equipment test just before Christmas.

"They're looking at what happened and how to prevent it from happening again," KSC spokesman Allard Beutel said.

Seven people were treated and released from KSC's medical clinic after the incident, which occurred around 9 a.m. Dec. 23 outside a cryogenic testing lab on space center property.

Beutel said Lockheed Martin Corp. and ASRC Aerospace Corp. conducted the pressurization test on a composite tank, and that the work was not related to NASA programs.

The vessel, enclosed by a metal cage with a plywood box around it, was intended to leak but not rupture, Beutel said.

Marion LaNasa, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, said the test involved an unlined, liquid oxygen compatible tank measuring 54 inches in diameter that is being designed to support future launch vehicles.

"We had successfully completed some testing cycles and determined we were going to go forward and test the limits of the hardware," he said. "We were expecting a leak rather than the tank to burst, but certainly everyone understood that there was a potential for the tank to burst."

He said the contractors and NASA agreed on the testing procedures in advance, and that it would be up to investigators to determine if the procedures were adequate.

In addition to the minor injuries, the blast's force and impact from splintered plywood caused thousands of dollars of damage to the lab facility, Beutel said. The damaged area is taped off but the building remains open.

A NASA "mishap investigation team" is expected to produce a report by late February.

I agree I am glad no one was seriously hurt or killed.

and awate the reports in the future on this.

Easy Skywatching: See the Shuttle and Space Station

With the Space Shuttle Discovery scheduled to undock from the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, skywatchers across much of the United States and southern Canada are in for a real treat on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evenings.

Should clear skies prevail, there will be opportunities to see both Discovery and the orbiting station flying across the sky from many locations.

The sight should easily be visible to anyone, even from brightly-lit cities. Already last week, skywatchers were spotting the station easily after it spread its newly deployed solar panels. Mike Tyrrell of England shot videos of the station, on multiple passes, from his garage observatory.

Other satellites too

The appearance of either the shuttle or the space station moving across the sky is not in itself unusual. On any clear evening within a couple of hours of local sunset and with no optical aid, you can usually spot several orbiting Earth satellites creeping across the sky like moving stars. Satellites become visible only when they are in sunlight and the observer is in deep twilight or darkness. This usually means shortly after dusk or before dawn.

What makes the prospective upcoming passages so interesting is that you'll be able to see the two largest orbiting space vehicles in the sky at the same time.

Shuttle Discovery is expected to undock from the ISS at 3:53 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Wednesday. Discovery will fly around the ISS before finally pulling away from the Station at 5:37 p.m. EDT, although it should still remain at a relatively close distance to it until its scheduled return to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday, March 28.

What to expect

Both vehicles will be traveling across North America near the most northerly part of their respective orbital trajectories that is taking them directly over latitude 51.6-degrees N.

Appearing as a pair of very bright stars, the ISS should appear as the noticeably brighter object and will be leading Shuttle Discovery as they move across the sky.

While the ISS looks like a moving star to the unaided eye, those who have been able to train a telescope on it have actually been able to detect its T-shape as it whizzed across their field of view. Some have actually been able to track the ISS with their scope by moving it along the projected path. Those who have gotten a good glimpse describe the body of the space station as a brilliant white, while the solar panels appear a coppery red.

Traveling in their respective orbits at approximately 18,000 mph (29,000 kilometers per hour), both should be visible from about one to four minutes (depending on the particular viewing pass) as they glide with a steady speed across the sky.

Because of its size and configuration of highly reflective solar panels, the space station is now, by far, the brightest man-made object currently in orbit around the Earth. On favorable passes, it can appear as bright as the planet Venus at magnitude -4.5 and some 16 times brighter than Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

During this current mission, astronauts have deployed the space station's final set of solar arrays and based on recent observations they have made the ISS appear even brighter; some have made estimates as bright as magnitude -5 or -6 (one and a half to 4 times brighter than Venus!). And as a bonus, sunlight glinting directly off the solar panels can sometimes make the ISS appear to briefly "flare" in brilliance.

Local sighting shedules

So what is the viewing schedule for your particular hometown? You can easily find out by visiting one of these three popular web sites:

NASA's SkyWatch
Science@NASA's J-Pass
Chris Peat's Heavens Above
Each will ask for your Country, City or a zip code, and respond with a list of suggested spotting times. Predictions computed a few days ahead of time are usually accurate within a few minutes. However, they can change due to the slow decay of the space station's orbit and periodic reboosts to higher altitudes. Check frequently for updates.

Regions of visibility

Generally speaking, the shuttle-ISS tandem will be visible across southern Canada and the northern and central United States.

Locations that are situated above latitude 40-degrees north, will be able to partake in at least a few of the Wednesday/Thursday/Friday evening viewing opportunities. New York and Salt Lake City, for instance, will have three opportunities with the duo getting as high as roughly one-quarter of the way up from the horizon to the overhead point (called the zenith).

As one heads farther north, the number of sighting opportunities increase and viewing circumstances improve. Across southern Canada, at least four and in some cases as many as five opportunities to see the shuttle and space station will occur for most cities. Indeed, for cities such as Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, the two space vehicles will be available twice on consecutive nights (either Wednesday-Thursday or Thursday-Friday). And their tracks across the sky in most cases will be much higher: as high as 72-degrees from Montreal, 77-degrees for Vancouver and 84-degrees (practically overhead) for Winnipeg.

Between roughly 35 and 40-degrees north latitude, however, the viewing options become much fewer, perhaps only one or two chances at best, with sky tracks no better than 10 or 15-degrees above the horizon. Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and St. Louis have two chances; San Francisco, Oklahoma City and Virginia Beach get only one chance. Meanwhile, localities below roughly latitude 35-degrees north are out of luck, with the shuttle/ISS tandem not rising higher than 10-degrees above the horizon; too low to be considered favorable for viewing.

Other locations

For Europe, viewing circumstances will mirror the conditions for Canada and the northern United States, although Discovery and the ISS will still be docked on Wednesday evening (Greenwich Time) and will thus appear as a singular moving star, but they'll be two separate objects on Thursday and Friday.

In the Southern Hemisphere, Australia's New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania are favored with a few passes on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, but in the early morning hours before sunrise. The same holds true for New Zealand. For much of South America the shuttle/ISS tracks are unfortunately too far to the south for good visibility, but for southernmost Chile and Argentina (Patagonia) as well as the Falkland Islands, Discovery and the ISS should be readily visible before sunrise on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Again, keep in mind again that once undocked, Discovery should appear to trail the space station as they track across your sky. On Wednesday evening, they will be separated by only about a half-degree (the apparent width of the moon). By Friday evening, the distance between them will have widened to nearly 10-degrees; the ISS will be leading Discovery across the sky by almost a half-minute.

BERLIN – Researchers in Germany have used a modern medical procedure to uncover a secret within one of ancient Egypt's most treasured artworks — the bust of Nefertiti has two faces. A team led by Dr. Alexander Huppertz, director of the Imaging Science Institute at Berlin's Charite hospital and medical school, discovered a detailed stone carving that differs from the external stucco face when they performed a computed tomography, or CT, scan on the bust.

The findings, published Tuesday in the monthly journal Radiology, are the first to show that the stone core of the statue is a highly detailed sculpture of the queen, Huppertz said.

"Until we did this scan, how deep the stucco was and whether a second face was underneath it was unknown," he said. "The hypothesis was that the stone underneath was just a support."

The differences between the faces, though slight — creases at the corners of the mouth, a bump on the nose of the stone version — suggest to Huppertz that someone expressly ordered the adjustments between stone and stucco when royal sculptors immortalized the wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten 3,300 years ago.

"Changes were made, but some of them are positive, others are negative," Huppertz said.

John H. Taylor, a curator for Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum in London, said the scan raises interesting questions about why the features were adjusted — but that answers will probably remain elusive.

"One could deduce that the final version was considered in some way more acceptable than the 'hidden' one, though caution is needed in attempting to explain the significance of these changes," Taylor wrote in an e-mail.

The bust underwent a similar CT scan in 1992. But the more primitive scanner used then only generated cross sections of the statue every 5 millimeters — not enough detail, Huppertz said, to reveal the subtlety of the carving hidden just 1-2 millimeters under the stucco.

Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt discovered the bust in 1912 and added it to Berlin's Egyptian collection on Museum Island, a cluster of five neoclassical art halls that make up one of the city's most familiar landmarks.

Currently on display at the Altes Museum, the bust will move next door when the Neues Museum reopens in October after a lengthy restoration by British architect David Chipperfield.

In 2007, Wildung denied a request from Egypt's antiquities chief to borrow the bust for an exhibition, saying it was too fragile to transport. Huppertz said the results of his scan added credence to that claim.

Taylor, the British Museum curator, said the better understanding of the bust's structure will also help preserve it.

"The findings are particularly significant for the information they shed on the constructional process and the subsurface condition of the bust, which will be of value in ensuring its long-term survival in good condition" Taylor said.

HM that sounds interesting be neet to see how its all don..

HIMKO

Astronomers on Wednesday announced the discovery of a massive and mysterious gas blob of the type that can be precursors to galaxies, which they dubbed Himiko.

The data used in identifying the megablob came from a suite of telescopes. Scientists said the object, which they named Himiko for the legendary Japanese queen, existed when our universe was only about 800 million years old.

Our universe, borne of the Big Bang as the theory goes, is an estimated 13.7 billion years old.

Himiko, a ball of gas, stretches for 55,000 light years, a record for that early era. The enormous length is comparable to the radius of our Milky Way's disk.

Still, astronomers remain uncertain about Himiko's nature. Even with a blizzard of data from the best telescopes in the world, they are not entirely certain about what the blob is.

The image of Himiko, one of the remotest heavenly bodies ever found by scientists, is blurry, so astronomers have not been able to get a handle on its physical makeup.

Among the many possibilities, astronomers believe it could be ionized gas powered by a tremendous black hole; or it could be a pre-galaxy with a great gas buildup.

Himiko could have been borne of the dramatic collision of two young galaxies, by a mega-wind resultingg from an intensive star formation, or may be one giant galaxy, with the mass of some 40 billion suns.

"The farther out we look into space, the farther we go back in time," said author Masami Ouchi of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a private research center, who led a team of researchers from Japan, Britain and the United States.

"I am very surprised by this discovery," Ouchi said.

"I have never imagined that such a large object could exist at this early stage of the universe's history," he added.

Astronomers previously had identified extended gas blobs of a similar type seen at a distance when our universe was two to three billion years old.

Great Info Unica how you do it amazes me.

wow cool

Flying on fruit juice: Jumbo Jet powered by 'plum' biofuel takes to the skiesBy Mail Foreign Service

A passenger jet partially fuelled by fruit juice oil has taken to the skies.
The Air New Zealand Boeing 747-400 was powered by a 50-50 blend of oil from a plum-sized fruit known as jatropha and traditional jet fuel.

The two-hour flight demonstrated that greenhouse gas emissions from long-haul flights could be cut by 65 per cent by using the biofuel.

Air New Zealand's chief pilot Dave Morgan said that up to 1.5 tons of fuel could be saved in a 12-hour flight, and cut carbon dioxide emmissions by about five tons - around 60 per cent

He called the fuel savings 'significant,' though the monetary gain will depend on the price of oil.
Andrew Herdman, director general of the Asia Pacific Airlines Association said: 'At the moment these feed stocks are still facing the challenge of reaching cost competitiveness with conventional jet fuel, particularly when the price of oil is around $60 a barrel.'
Biofuels would become competitive sooner if an emission trading system raised the price of carbon-based fuels, he added.

Air New Zealand obtained the jatropha oil for its test flight from Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and India. Seeds from the jatropha - a bush with round, plum-like fruit - are crushed to produce a yellowish oil that is refined and mixed with diesel.
Some environmental groups have questioned whether jatropha and other plants used as biofuels are sustainable.

They have expressed concerns about the plants' impact if more land and resources are devoted to growing them on a commercial scale.
Mr Herdman warned that while several airlines testing biofuels have shown promising results, the 'drop-ins' as the plant oils are called, still face 'another couple of years' work to demonstrate that it can be certified' as a suitable addition to jet fuel.
'It's got to perform exactly the same or better, and it's got to be a competitive price,' he said.
Mr Morgan also cautioned that 'many more steps' were needed before biofuel could become 'a commercial aviation fuel source.'

Cool