Space News, Above and Beyond

Spacey

Oops No Longer Topical
I kind of overslept, but hey. NASA decided to beam a Beatles song into deep space today at 7 PM EST. Namely, Across the Universe.

NASA will on 4 February beam Beatles' ditty Across the Universe into deep space to mark the 40th anniversary of the day the Fab Four recorded the song, as well as the launch 50 years ago this week of Explorer 1 and the 45th birthday of its Deep Space Network (DSN).

According to the press release, the transmission is being directed towards the North Star, Polaris, and will travel at 186,000 miles per second towards its 431 light year-distant target.

Dr Barry Geldzahler, the DSN's program executive at NASA's Washington headquarters, said of "Across The Universe Day": "I've been a Beatles fan for 45 years - as long as the Deep Space Network has been around. What a joy, especially considering that Across the Universe is my personal favorite Beatles song."

Paul McCartney enthused to the agency: "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul."

Now, Polaris, the star system they aimed it at, is 431 light-years away. It will take over four centuries for those radio waves to reach Polaris, where they will be impossibly attenuated.

But hey. Still sort of neat.

Me, I think they could have gone with other choices. I would have been in favor of Shatner doing 'Rocket Man', or that Leonard Nimoy rendition of 'Good Morning Starshine', just so the aliens know what they're dealing with.

Source: The Register

Telescope Arms Race
For once, huge amounts of money are going to something useful.

A telescope arms race is taking shape around the world. Astronomers are drawing up plans for the biggest, most powerful instruments ever constructed, capable of peering far deeper into the universe — and further back in time — than ever before.


The building boom, which is expected to play out over the next decade and cost billions of dollars, is being driven by technological advances that afford unprecedented clarity and magnification. Some scientists say it will be much like switching from regular TV to high-definition.

...

Just the names of many of the proposed observatories suggest an arms race: the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope, which was downsized from the OverWhelmingly Large Telescope. Add to those three big ground observatories a new super eye in the sky, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013.

Giant telescopes... aghghghg.

This will keep me in a supply of desktop wallpaper for years!

More seriously, the article concerns four giant ground based telescopes and NASA's Super-Hubble, the James Webb thingummy. Yes, thingummy. Basically, adaptive optics, the technology of rapidly adjusting the telescope's vision to compensate for atmospheric distortion, is making big ground telescopes competitive with space ones like Hubble or Webb again. There's also mention of a huge radio telescope, the fourth of the ground-based supereyes they're making, so it's not all visible light astronomy here.

Nice to see money being spent on something other than pouring blood into the Iraqi desert, for a change.

Source: Raw Story

Iran, Iran So Far Away
So Iran has a space center, and they've launched a rocket from it. They're planning to put a lousy little satellite in Low Earth Orbit eventually. Whoopity-do!

Get the spin on this one though:

Amid fears in the West that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, some experts believe Iran's space program is possibly a cover to improve its military ballistic missiles

Yeah... you mean, like OURS WAS?

Pot, kettle. Kettle, Pot.

Source: CNN.com

Tanguska Boomy Boomy
So it looks like the rock that turned a chunk of Siberia into a pancake may have been smaller than originally thought... and thus, that smaller rocks from space pose a bigger threat than previously imagined.

Alan Harris, a planetary scientist at Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said he's been following Boslough's work on Tunguska for several years "and I think the idea that he has there seemed very sound."

"A meteorite or asteroid coming into Earth's atmosphere has a lot of momentum," he said. "The idea that it would push down into the atmosphere seems very plausible."

"The bottom line is it takes a lot less energy, a small explosion, to create ground damage" such as that at Tunguska, said Harris, who studies the frequency of such impacts to assess hazards.

In the future, he said, he'll take Boslough's work into account and revise estimates of damage from impacts by smaller objects.

Oh yeah. That's what I'm talking about. Cold indifferent universe, baby.

Source: CNN.com

Baghdad from Spaaaaaaaace
Baghdad has three sewer treatment plants. One is busted, one barely works, one is backed up and creating a huge lake of... sewage.. that you can apparently see... from Google Earth.

Baghdad is drowning in sewage, thirsty for water and largely powerless, an Iraqi official said in a grim assessment of services in the capital five years after the US-led invasion.

One of three sewage treatment plants is out of commission, one is working at stuttering capacity while a pipe blockage in the third means sewage is forming a foul lake so large it can be seen "as a big black spot on Google Earth," said Tahseen Sheikhly, civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan.

I tried, I really did, to find the lake in question. I think it's in the northeast of the city, in a long line of obviously, horribly contaminated spill ponds. But it's hard to say. There are so many algae bloom covered lakes, so many toxic-red bodies of water, the Tigris looks like a bright green snake, which has got to be all the sewer runoff... wow.

Source: MSN
Also, Google Earth