The accident details of which has just been released goes back to April 2012, when NASA realized that the Fermi Telescope was set to brush past the Soviet Cosmos 1805 satellite. This satellite is a 1.5-ton piece of junk circling the orbit.Had the two objects collided, the US$690 million US spacecraft would have been destroyed, as the clash would have released energy equivalent to two tons of explosives.“These are objects of several tons each, as wide as a small airplane, traveling 20 times faster than a bullet. The Fermi mission would be over,” the statement on NASA’s official website quotes engineer Eric Stoneking, who controls Fermi’s orientation in the sky.The Fermi mission first learned of the potential space collision threat on March 29, 2012. Primary calculations showed that the two space objects would miss each other by just more than 200 meters. But later it became clear that their orbits would cross through the same point in space within 30 milliseconds of one another. Since the Russian space junk was travelling at a speed of 43,000kph, the Fermi mission engineers decided not to run a risk and corrected the orbit of the US spacecraft. The scientists fired Fermi’s thrusters, which were specifically designed to move the satellite out of the way in such situations.The two spacecraft successfully missed each other by almost 10km when they passed one another on April 3, 2012.”The maneuver, which was performed by the spacecraft itself based on procedures we developed a long time ago, was very simple, just firing all thrusters for one second,” Stoneking said, adding that “there was a lot of suspense and tension leading up to it, but once it was over, we just sighed with relief that it all went well.”Due to that maneuver, Fermi is still looking for dark matter and black holes. Launched in 2008, the spacecraft is expected to remain in orbit until 2018. While the 26-year-old Cosmos 1805 satellite is just another dead spacecraft still floating around in space.Since the launch of the first satellite in 1957, space junk has been a growing threat to all spacecraft, as occasional collisions occur. NASA tracks 17,000 objects larger than 10cm across in orbit above the Earth daily. Only 10 per cent of those tracked objects are actually active satellites. … Read More
Hacker steals sensitive infrastructure data from U.S. military
The US military has revealed that a hacker infiltrated a government database for a period of several months, gaining access to detailed US Army Corps of Engineers information regarding possible vulnerabilities in US infrastructure.According to a report published by nonprofit online newspaper the Washington Free Beacon, the hacker, possibly using stolen username and password credentials, accessed the National Inventory of Dams (NID) and siezed information not normally available to the public.The NID database contains comprehensive information about 79,000 dams throughout the US, including the estimated number of deaths there would be if a given dam failed.“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is aware that access to the National Inventory of Dams (NID), to include sensitive fields of information not generally available to the public, was given to an unauthorized individual in January 2013 who was subsequently determined to not to have proper level of access for the information,” Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson Pete Pierce told the Washington Free Beacon.Continue Reading… … Read More
Harpoons and suicide robots: Scientists pitch new solutions to ‘space junk’ problem
Even lasers that act like “Star Trek” tractor beams are among the suggestions put forth by scientists to protect some $100 billion worth of satellites from man-made cosmic trash.Ion-firing satellites are also being considered as a solution to the space junk problem, according to astronomer Thomas Schildknect. The satellites would shoot ions at the target, potentially slowing down orbiting space debris and dragging it back to Earth.Ground based lasers could be used in the same way, although only for very small objects, Schildknect told AP.Meanwhile, British engineers at the satellite company Astrium have developed a harpoon that could be launched from a chase satellite to catch junk. It would then reel it in and hurl it through the atmosphere where it would safely burn up.The harpoon’s inventor, Dr. Jaime Reed, said the company could begin space trials in just four years.”There’s a lot of stuff up there already that can – and will – come back to Earth,” he told Sky News. “New satellites pose a threat to future satellites, so it’s something we need to look at and address.”Extra-large space junk could be combated with a dedicated robot, which would be sent on a suicide mission to bring the debris down safely. But the complex mission comes at a cost. In fact, such a quest would cost up to $200 million.However, the hefty price tag hasn’t stopped Schildknect from expecting such attempts to take place very soon.”I’m confident that we will see demonstration missions in the near future,” he said.And it seems the sooner, the better. The European Space Agency (ESA) says testing of new technologies for cleaning up space needs to happen rapidly, because the amount of junk spinning uncontrollably through orbit is growing.Experts estimate that around 27,000 objects measuring ten centimeters or more are flying through orbit at 80 times the speed of a passenger jet, said Heiner Klinkrad, a space debris expert at ESA. And each one could destroy a satellite.Even a piece of debris measuring just 1 millimeter – of which there are around 160 million – can destroy sensitive space instruments. Scientists say that smaller debris may pose the biggest danger because it is harder to track.“Whatever we do is going to be an expensive solution. But one has to compare the costs of what we are investing to solve the problem as compared to losing the infrastructure that we have in orbit,” Klinkrad said.He said that five to ten large objects need to be collected each year to prevent what is known as Kessler Syndrome – when a few major collisions trigger a cascade effect in which each crash increases the amount of dangerous debris in orbit.Although such major collisions are rare, they do happen. In 2009, a private communications satellite called Iridium 33 smashed into the Russian military satellite Kosmos-2251, destroying both in the process.Scientists say it’s only a matter of time before the next major space collision occurs. … Read More
Fukushima Nuclear Crisis Far From Over: Continuous Leaking of Radioactive Water, Dangers of Spent Fuel Pools
After visiting Fukushima a year ago, Senator Ron Wyden warned that the situation was worse than reported … and urged Japan to accept international help to stabilize dangerous spent fuel pools. … Read More
The Infrastructure Crisis That Isn’t
Listen to President Obama, and
you’d think the United States has a serious infrastructure funding
problem. In his State of the Union address this year, for example,
Obama
proposed a jobs program that would put people to work building
and rebuilding national infrastructure in need of “urgent” repair,
like “the nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across the
country.”
But as Bloomberg’s Evan Soltas
argues ;today, ;the idea that the U.S. is in desperate
need of higher spending is something of a myth: ;
Believe it or not, infrastructure has improved significantly
over the last two decades. In its ;report ;for
2010, the Federal Highway Administration said that 57 percent of
all vehicle-miles were traveled on federal highways with ratings of
“good” or higher — according to a measure of road quality
pleasingly known as the International Roughness Index. That was up
from 48 percent in 2000. The percentage of roads in bad condition
has also declined: In 1989 ;6.6
percent ;of rural and urban interstates were rated “poor”;
now only 1.9 percent of rural interstates and 5.4 percent of urban
ones earn that grade.
Despite ;warnings ;from
President Barack Obama, America’s bridges have never been safer.
The highway administration rated ;21.9
percent ;of its bridges “deficient” in 2009, as compared
to ;37.8
percent ;in 1989. And contrary to Obama’s implication, the
word “deficient” ;does
not mean unsafe, at least as the highway administration uses
it. A bridge is “deficient” when it would benefit from expansion
and renovation in line with usage.
Soltas also notes that U.S. infrastructure spending as a
percentage of the economy has held fairly steady over the years,
and that America’s infrastructure budget puts it basically in line
with global peers like Germany, Canada, and Australia. ;
Much of the concern over the sturdiness of U.S. infrastructure
is driven by the regularly released American Society of Civil
Engineers report card, which invariably gives the nation’s
infrastructure a poor grade. But what most reports fail to note is
that the ASCE isn’t exactly a disinterested party; on the question
of whether or not we should spend more money on civil engineering,
it is not entirely shocking to discover that a group of civil
engineers thinks we ought to spend a whole lot more. ;
The other point to make here is that a clear-eyed look at the
nation’s infrastructure spending undermines the case for spending
lots more money building roads and such as a way to create jobs. It
would be one thing if those projects were desperately necessary,
but in many cases they’re not. ; … Read More
Hard to swallow: Supermarkets ‘trash planet’ with half UK food thrown away
Supermarkets and restaurants add fuel to fire embracing a throw-away culture and binning tonnes of perfectly good products each year.“At the moment we pay supermarkets and other food businesses to trash the planet, to grow food, and then waste a third of it. We need to make a demand as consumers that they change their behavior as well,” Tristram Stuart, author of ‘Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal’ told RT.“When we go to a supermarket and see that all the carrots are straight and all the apples look the same we need to say, ‘Hold on a sec, why do all these fruits and vegetables look the same? What did that supermarket do with all the wonky ones?’ and demand that actually they stock all the vegetables as they’re grown,” Stuart added. Oxfam warns that over 13 million people in the UK do not have enough to live on. The rest spend an average of 11 per cent of their budgets on food. The head of energy and environment at the UK’s Institute of Mechanical Engineers, Dr. Tim Fox, was quoted as saying that, “In developed countries like the UK, food waste is largely the result of commercial practices, such as the demand for aesthetically pleasing food products, and wasteful behavior in the home.”As a matter of fact, according to a survey by the institute, more than 80 per cent of British shoppers would be willing to buy fruit and vegetables which are not perfect in shape or color. “This survey clearly indicates that, despite perceptions held by commercial buyers, UK consumers are willing to purchase imperfect-looking fruit and vegetables. This food, which is perfectly good to eat, is often rejected by buyers before it leaves the farm as it does not meet cosmetic requirements,” Fox said. While landfill sites become the final destination for much of the UK’s ugly fruit and vegetables, volunteers at the so-called People’s Kitchen in East London have found their way to solve the problem. The challenge for the eco-conscious group of people is to save food that would have been otherwise thrown away by shops and markets at the end of a day’s trading. They are treating local residents to free meals.“As a chef I’ve seen food being wasted at every restaurant and every event I’ve ever done, and on a bigger scale at the supermarkets and an even larger scale at these big markets,” Tom Fletcher from Beggar’s Banquet told RT. Beggar’s Banquet has been salvaging surplus food from London’s restaurants and markets to “funnel the waste product of a destructive economy into one of abundance.” “The food that we are taking is not good enough to sell, but too good to throw away…It’s just kind of OK to get someone to throw it in the bin when there’s people starving. Not just in other countries where the food came from, but in this country,” Fletcher explained. While every link in the supply chain continues to throw away perfectly good produce, up to 50 per cent of food bought from supermarkets is thrown away. Fiercely competitive stores attract customers with ‘buy-one-get-one-free’ deals. Consumers are lured into buying excessive quantities of food half of which ends up in the bin. “I spent many years visiting the skips of supermarkets and literally, you open up a skip and what you see is an array of perfectly good vegetables and fruit that have been thrown away. And most people think, ‘Gosh, how disgusting to get food out of a bin.’ It’s true, it is disgusting. But what’s disgusting is that we’re throwing away fit-for-consumption food,” Stuart told RT. … Read More
False Flags, Fake Media Reporting, Deceiving the Public: Social Engineering and the 21st Century “Truth Emergency”
Several years ago Project Censored directors Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff identified and explained the “truth emergency” that is among the greatest threats to civil society and human existence. … Read More
