Sunday, March 4, 2012
Scotland & North England: 'Meteor' sight swamps switchboards
Police forces across the UK have received numerous calls after a large fireball, thought to be a meteor, was spotted in the sky.
Reports of a "bright light" and an "orange glow" were received by police across Scotland and the north of England around 9.40pm on Saturday. The Met Office tweeted: "Hi All, for anyone seeing something in the night sky, we believe it was a meteorite."
The Kielder Observatory also reported the sighting of a "huge fireball" travelling from north to south over Northumberland at 9.41pm. The Observatory posted on Twitter: "Of 30 years observing the sky #fireball best thing I have ever seen period."
Meteors are particles from space that burn up in a streak of light as they enter the Earth's atmosphere, whereas meteorites are larger objects that survive the trip and reach the surface of the Earth.
Dr David Whitehouse, an author and astronomer, said: "Judging by its brightness, it may have have been large enough to survive and hit the ground but until people work out its trajectory we won't have any idea where it might have come down."
Dr Whitehouse said the object was about the size of a fist and was probably the debris of a planet that never properly formed. He said: "It's a chunk of rock that's probably come from somewhere between Mars and Jupiter and has been in space for thousands of millions of years. There are tens of thousands of bits of rock and grains of sand orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Some of it comes out of that orbit and some of it hits the Earth."
A spokesman for Strathclyde Police said the force had been "inundated" with calls about a bright object in the sky across the west of Scotland.
A Durham Police spokeswoman said a number of calls came in around 9.45pm from concerned members of public who had seen a "bright light or a fire in the sky" and believed it may have been incidents involving an aircraft.
"It has been confirmed with air traffic control that there are no incidents of aircraft in difficulty and nothing registered on radar," she said. "The sightings are believed to be either an asteroid burning out or similar which has been restricted to the upper atmosphere only."
Grampian Police said reports of people seeing a "flare or a bright object with a tail" were received from across the region. And Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary said numerous calls were made about a "large ball of fire in the sky" across Annandale and Eskdale. One user wrote on the force's Facebook page: "It was awesome to see! Really big and bright!"
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Dragon Runner 10 | QinetiQ North America - YouTube
The Dragon Runner 10 (DR-10) Micro Unmanned Ground Vehicle (MUGV) is a lightweight, compact, multi-mission remote platform developed for supporting small unit, dismounted operations.
Using a wearable controller, the warfighter sends DR-10 in first to gain situational awareness and take action. DR-10's day and night sensors enable it to serve as the team's forward eyes and ears while also delivering remote sensors, setting counter-IED charges and more.
QinetiQ North America today announced that its Dragon Runner 10 (DR10) has been selected by the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) in response to a Joint Urgent Operations Needs Statement (JUONS) for lightweight, throwable robots.
This order for more than 100 DR10 robots represents the first significant US military procurement of this new class of robot.
With multiple cameras and payload options, DR10 is ideal for reconnaissance and surveillance missions to support small military units, patrols and first responder teams.
At just over ten pounds, DR10 is small enough to carry in an assault pack and rugged enough to throw into buildings and hostile environments.
DR10 can climb stairs, carry significant payloads and maintain effective wireless communication over long distances.
To protect warfighter lives, DR10 is thrown or driven into potentially hostile environments to assess situations remotely, before committing personnel.
DR10 provides rapid situational awareness with visual reports back to its operator using day and night sensors.
With optional accessories, this modular robot can also carry out other critical missions such as delivering counter-IED charges and remote sensors.
The JIEDDO order includes DR10 robots and spare parts at a contract value of $5.3 million. Initial deliveries were made within four weeks of contract award, and follow-on deliveries will continue into early spring 2012.
Multiple payloads are available, including a variety of sensors, radios, cameras and robotic arms. DR10 can be equipped with either tracked or wheeled mobility options to negotiate various types of terrain.
When thrown, DR10 has the ability to automatically flip video images, antennae and controls upon landing. DR10 is 15” long, 13.5” wide and 5.8” tall. For product photos, videos and fact sheets, visit our Facebook page (link below).
QinetiQ North America is a world leader in robotic technology solutions that save lives in defense, security and first responder environments.
For more information, please see our website www.qinetiq-na.com or follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/qinetiqnarobots or Twitter at www.twitter.com/qinetiqnarobots.
NASA successfully hacked 13 times last year
National Aeronautics and Space Administration Inspector General Paul Martin testified before Congress this week on the breaches, which appear to be among the more significant in a string of security problems for federal agencies.
The space agency discovered in November that hackers working through an Internet Protocol address in China broke into the -network of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Martin said in testimony released on Wednesday.
One of NASA's key labs, JPL manages 23 spacecraft conducting active space missions, including missions to Jupiter, Mars and Saturn.
The hackers gained full system access, which allowed them to modify, copy, or delete sensitive files, create new user accounts and upload hacking tools to steal user credentials and compromise other NASA systems. They were also able to modify system logs to conceal their actions.
"Our review disclosed that the intruders had compromised the accounts of the most privileged JPL users, giving the intruders access to most of JPL's networks," he said.
In another attack last year, intruders stole credentials for accessing NASA systems from more than 150 employees. Martin said the his office identified thousands of computer security lapses at the agency in 2010 and 2011.
He also said NASA has moved too slowly to encrypt or scramble the data on its laptop computers to protect information from falling into the wrong hands.
Unencrypted notebook computers that have been lost or stolen include ones containing codes for controlling the International Space Station, as well as sensitive data on NASA's Constellation and Orion programs, Martin said.
A NASA spokesman told Reuters on Friday the agency was implementing recommendations made by the Inspector General's Office.
"NASA takes the issue of IT security very seriously, and at no point in time have operations of the International Space Station been in jeopardy due to a data breach," said NASA spokesman Michael Cabbagehe.
NASA Hubble Image: Merging Galaxy Cluster Abell 520
The natural-colour image of the galaxies was taken with NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope and with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii.
Superimposed on the image are "false-coloured" maps showing the concentration of starlight, hot gas, and dark matter in the cluster.
Starlight from galaxies, derived from observations by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, is coloured orange.
The green-tinted regions show hot gas, as detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The gas is evidence that a collision took place.
The blue-coloured areas pinpoint the location of most of the mass in the cluster, which is dominated by dark matter.
Dark matter is an invisible substance that makes up most of the universe's mass. The dark-matter map was derived from the Hubble Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 observations by detecting how light from distant objects is distorted by the cluster of galaxies, an effect called gravitational lensing.
The blend of blue and green in the centre of the image reveals that a clump of dark matter resides near most of the hot gas, where very few galaxies are found.
This finding confirms previous observations of a dark-matter core in the cluster. The result could present a challenge to basic theories of dark matter, which predict that galaxies should be anchored to dark matter, even during the shock of a collision.
Abell 520 resides 2.4 billion light-years away.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CFHT, CXO, M.J. Jee (University of California, Davis), and A. Mahdavi (San Francisco State University)
SETI Live: Online Project Lets ‘Citizen Scientists’ Help Search for Aliens
SETI Live provides data gathered by the Institute's Allen Telescope Array, which scans sections of space for radio frequency signals.
Web users can log on to the site and help analyze the data, sifting through signals for evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization.
"There are parts of the spectrum where our sophisticated signal processing system is overwhelmed because there are so many signals," said astronomer Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research, in an interview. "I'm hoping to put together this army of citizen scientists to help figure out which signals to follow up on."
Essentially, human eyes are needed to pick up on subtle patterns that might be overlooked by SETI computer algorithms.
"The people that will do the best at this are going to be people whose pattern skills are such that they can ignore the bright pattern that's so easy to detect and look to see that there's something else there, something fainter, and see if they can in fact discover this needle that's buried under the hay," Jill Tarter stated.
SETI Live came out of the TED Prize program, which awards $100,000 every year to an "exceptional individual" with "One Wish to Change the World."
Jill Tarter won the prize in 2009, revealing her wish to "to empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company." Her wish developed into SETI Live.
SETI Institute scientists have been searching for signs of intelligent alien life since the 1960s, but have yet to find anything. With the discovery of 700 extra-solar planets, the search for extraterrestrial life has become much more targeted in these regions of space.
NASA Cassini Saturn's Moon Dione: Oxygen Detected
Nasa's Cassini spacecraft has detected the presence of oxygen ions around Saturn's icy moon Dione for the first time.
Nasa has reported that the oxygen ions present on Dione moon are quite sparse and showed that Dione has an extremely thin neutral atmosphere, while Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has a much denser atmosphere.
The study done by an international team led by Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Saturn
Saturn's moon Dione was discovered in 1684 by astronomer Giovanni Cassini. It orbits Saturn at roughly the same distance as our own moon orbits Earth."The concentration of oxygen in Dione's atmosphere is roughly similar to what you would find in Earth's atmosphere at an altitude of about 300 miles," stated Robert Tokar, a Cassini team member based at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
He added that the presence of oxygen ions in Dione is not enough to sustain life, but said that with similar observations of other Saturn and Jupiter's moons could divulge more details about their habitability.
Nasa launched Cassini spacecraft, named after Giovanni Cassini, in 1997 and sent it on the first leg of its journey to Saturn. Cassini detected the oxygen ions in Dione's when it flew by the moon two years back in 2010.
NASA Orion Crew Vehicle Mockup
A mockup of the Orion crew vehicle is prepared in Yuma, Ariz., for another in a series of parachute drop tests.
This particular test model will be used to study Orion’s wake, a disturbance of air flow behind the vehicle.
This test will be the first conducted with the representative Orion wake that mimics the full size vehicle and complete system.
This particular test model will be used to study Orion’s wake, a disturbance of air flow behind the vehicle.
This test will be the first conducted with the representative Orion wake that mimics the full size vehicle and complete system.
Photo credit: NASA
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