Not Really Sure What's Going on.
Frankly this is like Riding a Bull as far as getting the most current info posted.
Here's what we have so far:
Asteroid nearly misses Earth soon to be followed by at least One More Today.
Yes, TODAY!
The new unmanned Spaceplane Boeing X-37 has made a Flight on a possible mission to do something or not. No News on Mission Parameters yet, 17 minutes of Flight Blacked Out from Media Tuesday.
Another flight is planned for Today if it has not launched already.
The new unmanned Spaceplane Boeing X-37 Orbital Test Vehicle - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37Bushnell 788840 Northstar 100mm Maksutove Telescope (Google Affiliate Ad)
Check It:
Asteroid passes inside moon's orbit, buzzes Earth - Secret spaceplane blasts off for mystery mission - Madtown Preppers - http://madtownpreppers.blogspot.com/2012/12/asteroid-passes-inside-moons-orbit.html
Illustration of asteroid Toutatis nearing Earth.
Toutatis is expected to pass within 4 million miles of Earth tomorrow (12/12/12). But another smaller asteroid passed much closer today. (E. De Jong and S. Suzuki, JPL, NASA) As if 12/12/12 wasn’t curious enough of a date already with the whole Mayan-doomsday-but-not-really thing, there’s also the dicey issue of tomorrow’s relatively close encounter with the huge (nearly three miles long) 4179 Toutatis asteroid, expected to pass within 4 million miles of Earth. As the author of this story puts it, “On the scale of the cosmos, that is a very close shave.”
But if you think that’s too close for comfort, how about an asteroid passing within just 140,000 miles (only 60% of the distance between the Earth and moon) of our planet? Guess what?... already happened earlier this morning.
Discovered only two days ago, XE54 came about as close to crashing into Earth as an asteroid can without actually doing so - close enough to be “eclipsed by Earth’s shadow, causing its shadow to ‘wink out’ for a short time,” according to Universe Today.
With a diameter of just 72-160 feet, XE54 is a far cry from the over six-mile wide asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs (and about 50% of all life’s species) 65 million years ago. But, while it’s possible an asteroid of this size would produce nothing more than a brilliant fireball as it disintegrated after entering the atmosphere, a direct hit by remaining rock chunks on a populated region could be disastrous.
Believe it or not, a surprise near miss of this sort is not especially unusual. In June 2011, an steroid estimated about 30 feet in size (“2011 MD”) passed by Earth and missed a direct hit by only 7,500 miles. An even closer encounter occurred earlier in 2011 when another small asteroid missed Earth by just 3,400 miles.
Asteroids coming this close cross through the zone of geosynchronous satellites (such as the GOES series). The chances of an asteroid-satellite collision are extremely small, though not zero.
Small asteroids such as these are difficult to discover, usually detected within a week of their closest encounter, and that’s much too little time to do anything but issue a warning about the likely locations of impact. In most, but not all cases, impacts would focus on oceans or relatively unpopulated regions.
Fortunately, asteroid strikes by ones of the size that wiped out dinosaurs are few and far between. An impact with more common intermediate-sized asteroids - dimensions larger than about 500 feet – would explode with the power of a large atomic bomb. However, large and intermediate-sized asteroids can be detected and tracked years before any close encounter with Earth.
At this time, there are no sure collisions on the horizon even over the next few hundred years. That said, much of the sky, especially that viewed from the southern hemisphere, is not being monitored!
Related: Close asteroid encounter - September 2012
What could be done if a large- or intermediate-sized asteroid strike on Earth were deemed likely? Although no U.S. or international government agency has assumed responsibility for stopping a potential collision, there have been a number of academic and some technical studies, not to mention numerous movies, on how a devastating asteroid impact might be avoided. Among the solutions are deflecting the asteroid trajectory by nudging it with robot space vehicles, or destroying the asteroid with a nuclear-armed rocket.
One of the most intriguing ideas is to deflect an approaching asteroid with paintballs. While this sounds pretty far out there at first, the approach formulated by an MIT graduate student won the top spot of a competition sponsored by the United Nations Space Generation Advisory Council (2012 Move an Asteroid Technical Paper Competition).
Video: Deflecting an asteroid, with paintballs
Essentially, the strategy would be to blast the asteroid with paint pellets launched from a spacecraft and filled with white powder. The initial force of the pellets would deflect the asteroid, and the albedo of the white painting would reflect the sun’s rays, thereby exerting a force that would deflect even more.
The caveat to this strategy, like most others, is that it requires about 20 years of advanced warning.
By
|
11:30 AM ET, 12/11/2012
Categories: Astronomy, Latest, Space, Tracton
PUT THIS SITE ON YOUR FAVORITES:
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs)
are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that
can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the
known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet,
although astronomers are finding new
ones all the time.
Notes: LD means
"Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance
between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256
AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on
the date of closest approach.
The United States Air Force's secretive X-37B space plane has been
circling Earth for more than 10 months, and there's no telling when it
might come down.
As of Friday (Jan. 20), the mysterious robotic X-37B spacecraft has been aloft for 321 days, significantly outlasting its stated mission design lifetime of 270 days. But it may stay up for even longer yet, experts say, particularly if the military views this space mission — the second ever for the hush-hush vehicle — as something of an endurance test.
"Because it is an experimental vehicle, they kind of want to see what its limits are," said Brian Weeden, a technical adviser with the Secure World Foundation and a former orbital analyst with the Air Force.
A long mystery mission
The Air Force launched the X-37B in March 2011, sending the reusable space plane design on its second space mission. The X-37B now zipping around our planet is known as Orbital Test Vehicle-2, or OTV-2.
Another X-37B vehicle, the OTV-1, launched in April 2010 and landed in December of that year, staying on orbit for 225 days — well under the unmanned spacecraft's supposed 270-day limit. But OTV-2 has already exceeded that limit by more than seven weeks, and the calendar keeps turning over. [Photos of the 2nd Secret X-37B Mission]
Racking up a lot of time in space might be a key part of the current mission, according to Weeden.
"I think they didn't want to push it, just because it was the first of its kind," he told SPACE.com, referring to OTV-1's flight. "But I think that they are looking to push the second one."
Statements from Air Force officials appear to support Weeden's supposition.
"This successful flight is important in the progression of the X-37B program, moving us forward in our effort to prove the utility and cost-effectiveness of an unmanned, long-duration, reusable spacecraft," Air Force Lt. Col. Tom McIntyre, the X-37 systems program director, told SPACE.com in late November, when OTV-2 hit the 270-day milestone.
"We look forward to trying to expand the platform's envelope by extending the mission further," McIntyre added.
Testing new technologies?
The X-37B looks a lot like NASA's now-retired space shuttle, only much smaller. The unmanned vehicle is about 29 feet long by 15 feet wide (8.8 by 4.5 meters), with a payload bay the size of a pickup truck bed. For comparison, two entire X-37Bs could fit inside the payload bay of a space shuttle.
Just what the X-37B does for so long while circling our planet remains a mystery, because the space plane's payloads and missions are classified.
Partly as a result of the secrecy, some concern has been raised — particularly by Russia and China — that the X-37B might be a space weapon of some sort. But the Air Force has repeatedly denied that charge, claiming that the vehicle's chief task is testing out new technologies for future satellites.
That's likely to be the case, said Weeden, who published a report in 2010 that investigated the X-37B and its likely missions.
The Air Force doesn’t disclose the X-37B's orbital parameters, but amateur observers have tracked the movements of both OTV-1 and OTV-2. They've found that OTV-2 is not looping around Earth in a polar orbit, which enables a good look at every spot on the globe.
Rather, the spacecraft is flying repeatedly over the stretch of Earth from 43 degrees north latitude to 43 degrees south latitude. Weeden thinks the space plane may be observing the Middle East and Afghanistan with some brand-new spy gear, perhaps instruments optimized to observe in wavelengths beyond the visible-light spectrum.
Earlier this month, an article in Spaceflight Magazine, a British publication, speculated that OTV-2 might be spying on Tiangong 1, China's recently launched prototype space module. But the orbits of the two robotic vehicles are quite different, making this scenario highly unlikely, Weeden and other experts have stressed.
You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
Frankly this is like Riding a Bull as far as getting the most current info posted.
Here's what we have so far:
Asteroid nearly misses Earth soon to be followed by at least One More Today.
Yes, TODAY!
The new unmanned Spaceplane Boeing X-37 has made a Flight on a possible mission to do something or not. No News on Mission Parameters yet, 17 minutes of Flight Blacked Out from Media Tuesday.
Another flight is planned for Today if it has not launched already.
 |
| The Boeing X-37 (also known as the X-37 Orbital Test Vehicle) is an American reusable unmanned spacecraft. It is boosted into space by a rocket, then re-enters Earth's atmosphere and lands as a spaceplane. The X-37 is operated by the United States Air Force for orbital spaceflight missions intended to demonstrate reusable space technologies.[3] It is a 120%-scaled derivative of the earlier Boeing X-40.[4] The X-37 began as a NASA project in 1999, before being transferred to the U.S. Department of Defense in 2004. It conducted its first flight as a drop test on 7 April 2006, at Edwards Air Force Base, California. The spaceplane's first orbital mission, USA-212, was launched on 22 April 2010 using an Atlas V rocket. Its successful return to Earth on 3 December 2010 was the first test of the vehicle's heat shield and hypersonic aerodynamic handling. A second X-37 was launched on 5 March 2011, with the mission designation USA-226; it returned to Earth on 16 June 2012.[1] A third X-37 mission launched successfully on 11 December 2012.[5] |
The new unmanned Spaceplane Boeing X-37 Orbital Test Vehicle - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37Bushnell 788840 Northstar 100mm Maksutove Telescope (Google Affiliate Ad)
Check It:
Illustration of asteroid Toutatis nearing Earth.
Toutatis is expected to pass within 4 million miles of Earth tomorrow (12/12/12). But another smaller asteroid passed much closer today. (E. De Jong and S. Suzuki, JPL, NASA) As if 12/12/12 wasn’t curious enough of a date already with the whole Mayan-doomsday-but-not-really thing, there’s also the dicey issue of tomorrow’s relatively close encounter with the huge (nearly three miles long) 4179 Toutatis asteroid, expected to pass within 4 million miles of Earth. As the author of this story puts it, “On the scale of the cosmos, that is a very close shave.”
But if you think that’s too close for comfort, how about an asteroid passing within just 140,000 miles (only 60% of the distance between the Earth and moon) of our planet? Guess what?... already happened earlier this morning.
Discovered only two days ago, XE54 came about as close to crashing into Earth as an asteroid can without actually doing so - close enough to be “eclipsed by Earth’s shadow, causing its shadow to ‘wink out’ for a short time,” according to Universe Today.
With a diameter of just 72-160 feet, XE54 is a far cry from the over six-mile wide asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs (and about 50% of all life’s species) 65 million years ago. But, while it’s possible an asteroid of this size would produce nothing more than a brilliant fireball as it disintegrated after entering the atmosphere, a direct hit by remaining rock chunks on a populated region could be disastrous.
Believe it or not, a surprise near miss of this sort is not especially unusual. In June 2011, an steroid estimated about 30 feet in size (“2011 MD”) passed by Earth and missed a direct hit by only 7,500 miles. An even closer encounter occurred earlier in 2011 when another small asteroid missed Earth by just 3,400 miles.
Asteroids coming this close cross through the zone of geosynchronous satellites (such as the GOES series). The chances of an asteroid-satellite collision are extremely small, though not zero.
Small asteroids such as these are difficult to discover, usually detected within a week of their closest encounter, and that’s much too little time to do anything but issue a warning about the likely locations of impact. In most, but not all cases, impacts would focus on oceans or relatively unpopulated regions.
Fortunately, asteroid strikes by ones of the size that wiped out dinosaurs are few and far between. An impact with more common intermediate-sized asteroids - dimensions larger than about 500 feet – would explode with the power of a large atomic bomb. However, large and intermediate-sized asteroids can be detected and tracked years before any close encounter with Earth.
At this time, there are no sure collisions on the horizon even over the next few hundred years. That said, much of the sky, especially that viewed from the southern hemisphere, is not being monitored!
Related: Close asteroid encounter - September 2012
What could be done if a large- or intermediate-sized asteroid strike on Earth were deemed likely? Although no U.S. or international government agency has assumed responsibility for stopping a potential collision, there have been a number of academic and some technical studies, not to mention numerous movies, on how a devastating asteroid impact might be avoided. Among the solutions are deflecting the asteroid trajectory by nudging it with robot space vehicles, or destroying the asteroid with a nuclear-armed rocket.
One of the most intriguing ideas is to deflect an approaching asteroid with paintballs. While this sounds pretty far out there at first, the approach formulated by an MIT graduate student won the top spot of a competition sponsored by the United Nations Space Generation Advisory Council (2012 Move an Asteroid Technical Paper Competition).
Video: Deflecting an asteroid, with paintballs
Essentially, the strategy would be to blast the asteroid with paint pellets launched from a spacecraft and filled with white powder. The initial force of the pellets would deflect the asteroid, and the albedo of the white painting would reflect the sun’s rays, thereby exerting a force that would deflect even more.
The caveat to this strategy, like most others, is that it requires about 20 years of advanced warning.
Categories: Astronomy, Latest, Space, Tracton
PUT THIS SITE ON YOUR FAVORITES:
spaceweather.com
 |
|
 |
|||||
 |
 |
 | |||||
|
| Listen to radar echoes from satellites and meteors, live on listener-supported Space Weather Radio. |  |
|
ASTEROID
FLYBY: Potentially hazardous asteroid
4179 Toutatis is sailing past Earth today. There's
no danger of a collision, say astronomers, but the
asteroid is close enough for unusually clear radar
images of the tumbling space rock. [full
story]
GEMINID
METEOR SHOWER--THIS WEEK! Earth
is entering a stream of debris from rock
comet 3200 Phaethon, source of the annual Geminid
meteor shower. Forecasters expect as many as 120
Geminids per hour to appear when the shower peaks
on Dec. 13th and 14th. The best time to look is
during the dark hours before dawn this Thursday
and Friday. [sky
map] [meteor
radar] [video]
"I photographed my first spectacular
Geminid this morning, Dec. 12th," reports Antonio
Finazzi of Chiuduno (BG), Italy. The fireball was
visible even through the trees:
According to the International Meteor
Organization, Geminid rates are now at 20 per hour
and climbing. Monitor the Spaceweather.com's realtime
photo gallery for more images as the shower
intensifies.
Extra
meteors? NASA says that another
meteor shower, appearing for the first time
this year, could add to the count of Geminids on
Dec. 13th. Veteran sky watcher Doug Zubenel of Kansas
sends this report of a possible sighting:
"I believe this shower is real, because at
~ 19:30 hrs, CST on Dec. 10th, I saw a very slow-moving
meteor nearly as bright as Jupiter enter the frame
of my windshield as I was driving east, and it was
in Taurus moving toward the Orion/Gemini border.
It's path led back through the radiant in Pisces.
While this obviously does not prove it was from
Wirtanen, it certainly seems likely."
ARCTIC
LIGHTS: There was no geomagnetic
storm last night, but around the Arctic Circle a
geomagnetic storm is not required to produce auroras.
Last night, photographer Mike Theiss was traveling
along the Dempster Highway just north of Eagle Plains,
Canada, when the sky erupted in color. The
sign in the foreground marks the latitude of
the Arctic Circle:
"It was insane," he says.
"Lights danced all over the sky for 3 hours!
I've never seen anything like it."
Theiss was located beneath Earth's
auroral
oval, a doughnut of light circling the North
Pole where auroras sputter on and off even when
geomagnetic storms are at low ebb. Displays like
this could occur on any night of northern winter.
Such auroras are all we can expect for the next
few days as NOAA forecasters estimate a mere 5%
chance of geomagnetic storms. Aurora
alerts: text,
voice.
|
| Near Earth Asteroids |
|
|
On
December 12, 2012 there were 1356
potentially hazardous asteroids.
|
Recent
& Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters:
| Asteroid |
Date(UT)
|
Miss
Distance
|
Size
|
| 2012 XE54 |
Dec 11
|
0.6 LD
|
32 m
|
| 2012 XL55 |
Dec 11
|
4.2 LD
|
17 m
|
| 2009 BS5 |
Dec 11
|
8.4 LD
|
15 m
|
| 4179 Toutatis |
Dec 12
|
18 LD
|
2.7 km
|
| 2012 XM16 |
Dec 16
|
3.1 LD
|
31 m
|
| 2003 SD220 |
Dec 23
|
59.8 LD
|
1.8 km
|
| 1998 WT24 |
Dec 23
|
69.2 LD
|
1.1 km
|
| 2012 XM55 |
Dec 23
|
3.1 LD
|
12 m
|
| 2012 XP55 |
Dec 27
|
9.1 LD
|
67 m
|
| 1999 HA2 |
Feb 5
|
58 LD
|
1.3 km
|
| 3752 Camillo |
Feb 12
|
57.5 LD
|
3.4 km
|
| 1999 YK5 |
Feb 15
|
49.1 LD
|
2.1 km
|
| 2012 DA14 |
Feb 15
|
0.09 LD
|
57 m
|
| 2009 AV |
Feb 25
|
59.7 LD
|
1.0 km
|
|
 |
| This
infrared view of the U.S.'s Air Force secret X-37B space plane was taken
shortly after it landed at Vandenberg Air Force base on June 16, 2012. CREDIT: 30 Space Wing USAF |
| News | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Madtown Preppers eStore: http://astore.amazon.com/madtoprepp-20 | ||||||||
Mystery Surrounds Air Force's Secretive X-37B Space Plane Landing Plan - Space.com
by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer
Date: 20 January 2012 Time: 04:00 PM ET http://www.space.com/14305-secret-x37b-space-plane-landing-mystery.html
|
| An Air Force photographer snapped this profile view of the
X-37B shortly after its landing on Dec. 3, 2010, which marked the end of
the secret vehicle's maiden space mission. CREDIT: USAF/Vandenberg Air Force Base |
As of Friday (Jan. 20), the mysterious robotic X-37B spacecraft has been aloft for 321 days, significantly outlasting its stated mission design lifetime of 270 days. But it may stay up for even longer yet, experts say, particularly if the military views this space mission — the second ever for the hush-hush vehicle — as something of an endurance test.
"Because it is an experimental vehicle, they kind of want to see what its limits are," said Brian Weeden, a technical adviser with the Secure World Foundation and a former orbital analyst with the Air Force.
A long mystery mission
The Air Force launched the X-37B in March 2011, sending the reusable space plane design on its second space mission. The X-37B now zipping around our planet is known as Orbital Test Vehicle-2, or OTV-2.
Another X-37B vehicle, the OTV-1, launched in April 2010 and landed in December of that year, staying on orbit for 225 days — well under the unmanned spacecraft's supposed 270-day limit. But OTV-2 has already exceeded that limit by more than seven weeks, and the calendar keeps turning over. [Photos of the 2nd Secret X-37B Mission]
Racking up a lot of time in space might be a key part of the current mission, according to Weeden.
"I think they didn't want to push it, just because it was the first of its kind," he told SPACE.com, referring to OTV-1's flight. "But I think that they are looking to push the second one."
Statements from Air Force officials appear to support Weeden's supposition.
"This successful flight is important in the progression of the X-37B program, moving us forward in our effort to prove the utility and cost-effectiveness of an unmanned, long-duration, reusable spacecraft," Air Force Lt. Col. Tom McIntyre, the X-37 systems program director, told SPACE.com in late November, when OTV-2 hit the 270-day milestone.
"We look forward to trying to expand the platform's envelope by extending the mission further," McIntyre added.
The SPACE.com infographic depicts the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle is an unmanned space test vehicle for the USAF.
CREDIT: Karl Tate, SPACE.com
CREDIT: Karl Tate, SPACE.com
The X-37B looks a lot like NASA's now-retired space shuttle, only much smaller. The unmanned vehicle is about 29 feet long by 15 feet wide (8.8 by 4.5 meters), with a payload bay the size of a pickup truck bed. For comparison, two entire X-37Bs could fit inside the payload bay of a space shuttle.
Just what the X-37B does for so long while circling our planet remains a mystery, because the space plane's payloads and missions are classified.
Partly as a result of the secrecy, some concern has been raised — particularly by Russia and China — that the X-37B might be a space weapon of some sort. But the Air Force has repeatedly denied that charge, claiming that the vehicle's chief task is testing out new technologies for future satellites.
That's likely to be the case, said Weeden, who published a report in 2010 that investigated the X-37B and its likely missions.
The Air Force doesn’t disclose the X-37B's orbital parameters, but amateur observers have tracked the movements of both OTV-1 and OTV-2. They've found that OTV-2 is not looping around Earth in a polar orbit, which enables a good look at every spot on the globe.
Rather, the spacecraft is flying repeatedly over the stretch of Earth from 43 degrees north latitude to 43 degrees south latitude. Weeden thinks the space plane may be observing the Middle East and Afghanistan with some brand-new spy gear, perhaps instruments optimized to observe in wavelengths beyond the visible-light spectrum.
Earlier this month, an article in Spaceflight Magazine, a British publication, speculated that OTV-2 might be spying on Tiangong 1, China's recently launched prototype space module. But the orbits of the two robotic vehicles are quite different, making this scenario highly unlikely, Weeden and other experts have stressed.
You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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Product Description
DETER . DELAY. DEFEND!
Does your disaster preparation plan include security measures? When civilization fails and the desperate masses begin looting, they will come for your food, water and life-sustaining supplies. This book shows you how to implement a complete plan for operational security and physical defense, including:
• Perimeter Security Systems and Traps
• House Fortifications and Safe Rooms
• Secured and Hidden Storage
• Firearms and Defensive Combat Techniques
• Gathering Intelligence and Forming Alliances
Does your disaster preparation plan include security measures? When civilization fails and the desperate masses begin looting, they will come for your food, water and life-sustaining supplies. This book shows you how to implement a complete plan for operational security and physical defense, including:
• Perimeter Security Systems and Traps
• House Fortifications and Safe Rooms
• Secured and Hidden Storage
• Firearms and Defensive Combat Techniques
• Gathering Intelligence and Forming Alliances
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