The 40-kg meteorite measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide traveling 56,000 mph slammed through the Moon’s surface on March 17, 2013.The explosion from the impact, glowing like a 4th magnitude star, was so bright that it could have been seen from Earth with the naked eye. However the flash of light lasted only for a second and was rather difficult to detect.Ron Suggs an analyst at the Marshall space flight center was the first to notice the explosion on a digital video recorded by one of the monitoring programs.“It jumped right out at me. It was so bright” he acknowledged.”On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office.”It exploded in a flash nearly ten times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”Unlike Earth, the Moon has no atmosphere to protect it. As there is no oxygen, it poses the question of how they explode.“Lunar meteors don’t require oxygen or combustion to make themselves visible. They hit the ground with so much kinetic energy that even a pebble can make a crater several feet wide. The flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site,” NASA explains.As the crater from the impact could be as wide as 20 meters, comparing it to the brightness of the explosion might give certain explanations to scientists about “lunar meteor showers”.For the past eight years NASA scientists have been observing the Moon as part of a lunar monitoring program to identify new kinds of space debris that can threaten our planet. The US space agency says that this is a ‘good candidate’ for research.The lunar impact might have been part of a much larger event, Cooke noted. NASA and the University of Western Ontario’s sky cameras detected an unusual number of deep-penetrating meteors on Earth. These speeding fireballs rushed along nearly identical orbits between Earth and the asteroid belt. He notes that the Earth and the Moon were pelted by meteoroids at about the same time and supposes that these two events were connected.The NASA lunar monitoring program began in 2005. “Lunar meteor showers” are quite common, since the beginning of the program scientists have detected more than 300 impacts. According to NASA’s observations, half of all lunar meteors come from known meteoroid streams such as the Perseids and Leonids. The rest are from sporadic space debris.Russia plans to launch its next unmanned mission to the Moon in 2015. It will mark the country’s return to the Earth’s natural satellite after a 40-year hiatus. The Russian space agency has said that three lunar exploration missions will be launched from Cosmodrome Vostochny under construction in the country’s Far East region. The first mission is to be dubbed the ‘Luna-Glob-1’. … Read More
Many Air Passengers Never Turn Off Electronics, Survey Finds
As many as one third of all airline passengers say they have accidentally failed to turn off an electronic device during takeoff and landing, despite the admonition to do so, according to a study released on Thursday by two industry groups. … Read More
Blizzards in May. Wild fires. Is this global warming?
Since We Don’t Know Whether and How Much People Might Cut Greenhouse-Gas Emissions, It’s Hard to Know Exactly How High the Temperature Will Go by 2100.Yogi Berra is credited with having said that “predictions are hard to make, especially about the future.” It’s true, but climate scientists do their best anyway. Computer models can do a pretty good job of simulating real-world events, but they can’t ever replicate them exactly (you’ve probably noticed this firsthand if you’ve ever seen a computer-animated human in motion). Even well-understood phenomena, like the physics of flight, can’t be simulated perfectly, but aeronautical engineers know they can rely on flight simulations because they know how closely their models represent the real world.Similarly, models of the planet’s climate can’t simulate today’s climate precisely, but they do a good job of approximating it (and they’re getting better, as the models are continually improved and tested). The places where models and reality disagree help point out the areas of uncertainty.Continue Reading… … Read More
Shots fired at Houston airport
HOUSTON (AP) — Shots were fired near a ticket counter at Houston’s largest airport on Thursday, critically injuring at least one armed man and sending people in the terminal scrambling and screaming, a Houston police spokesman and witnesses said.A call that there had been a “discharge of firearms” came into police at 1:35 p.m., John Cannon, the spokesman said. The shots were fired near the ticket counter in Terminal B at Bush Intercontinental Airport, he said. One person has been taken to an area hospital with life threatening injuries.Dale Howard, of Tomball, was at the baggage handling area of the airport waiting for his sister to arrive on an incoming flight when he heard two shots fired from the floor above. A few seconds later, he said he heard three more shots.”People were screaming. I knew exactly what it was – gunfire,” Howard said.Police from an adjacent station rushed in, and Howard said he directed them to the floor above.Parts of the terminal remained blocked off as police investigated the shooting. The airport announced on its Twitter feed that the terminal had been closed and passengers would be redirected to other terminals.Continue Reading… … Read More
A Night Flight Powered by the Sun
The Solar Impulse, a plane with the wingspan of a 747, is the creation of a Swiss team working on fuel-free flight. … Read More
House GOPer: My constituents love the sequester
Rep. Billy Long, a Republican from Missouri, boasted on Monday that his constituents can’t get enough of the sequester, and tell him that they want more of it. ”The people that I’ve talked to seem to be doing well,” he told KOLR10 News. “In fact, when I got out in restaurants here in town, people come up to me. They want to see more sequestration, not less.”"So I think that’s different than it could be in some parts of the country, but we haven’t seen any measurable affect here at all,” he added.A new poll from CBS News shows that 69 percent of Americans don’t believe the sequester has impacted them. That may be because the cuts have been very specific and localized, and particularly affected low income communities.On the other hand, Congress did take urgent steps to rectify the part of sequestration that was being felt by wealthier people – FAA furloughs, which were causing flight delays. Continue Reading… … Read More
