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‘Houston, we have a problem’: $500,000 of high-tech equipment goes missing at NASA in a year
They might be able to send men into outer space – but it seems NASA can’t stop losing cameras, televisions and computers at its offices on the ground.
The U.S. space agency lost almost $500,000 of high-tech equipment at Kennedy Space Center in Florida last year, including a Vidge digital recorder worth $100,391.
Other items lost since 2008 include 11 Motorola handheld radios worth $35,582, a $18,000 wave reflectometer that checks for breaks in wiring and a $3,379 golf cart.
Lost property: Read more…NASA admits all previous warming trends caused by sun
I wonder what Al Gore’s rebuttal is going to sound like…
Under mounting pressure from scientists that reject the politically popularized man-made global warming and climate models—the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory—the American space agency NASA has admitted that all past warming trends were driven by solar activity.
A victory for the man-made ‘global warming deniers’
As more scientists have joined the outcry over the politicization of Earth’s climate cycles—the current number exceeds 20,000—promoters of the AGW model have denounced the “global warming deniers” countering that little evidence supports the view that the sun is driving the observed warming trend.
Now, however, new study released from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland measuring the global temperature variance during the past 100 years has found the sun’s heat and variable cycles have indeed made a significant, measurable impact and greatly influenced Earth’s climate.
In fact, the influence extends as far back as the Read more…
NASA’s buzz about comet Elenin
IMAGE: NASA JPL
NASA posted a video on their website Buzzroom last week, bringing attention to a recently discovered comet in our solar system. The comet was discovered by Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin in December last year. Comet Elenin, as it is called, is of particular interest to NASA because of the close proximity to Earth that its orbit will reach during its turn around the sun on its way back out through the solar system later this year.
Most orbits of planets are not circles; they are ellipses. The elongated ends of elliptical orbits are called aphelions and perihelions; the aphelion being the end farthest away from the stationary object being orbited, and perihelion being the end closest to the stationary object. In Elenin’s case, its trip around our sun represents the comet’s perihelion.
So little is known about this comet because of its relatively recent-discovery status, therefore, Read more…
Secretive X-37B Space Plane Launches on New Mystery Mission
| space.com
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| The Air Force’s second X-37B robot space plane blasts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on March 5, 2011 to begin its secret Orbital Test Vehicle 2 mission. CREDIT: United Launch Alliance |
After being delayed a day by bad weather, the U.S. Air Force’s second X-37B robotic space plane blasted off from Florida this afternoon (March 5) on a mystery mission shrouded in secrecy.
The unmanned X-37B mini-shuttle — known as Orbital Test Vehicle 2 (OTV-2) — took to the skies from Cape Canaveral at 5:46 p.m. EST (2246 GMT) today, tucked away in the nose cone atop a huge Atlas 5 rocket.
“Liftoff of the Atlas 5 rocket and the second experimental X-37B, America’s miniature military space shuttle,” the Air Force Space Command wrote in a Twitter post as the Atlas 5 streaked into the Florida skies.
The space plane was originally scheduled to launch yesterday, but cloudy, windy conditions scrubbed two attempts. And a technical glitch caused the X-37B to miss a launch window earlier this afternoon; a faulty valve had to be replaced in a last-minute repair.
The X-37B’s mission is classified, but Air Force officials have said the vehicle will be used to test out new spacecraft technologies. Shortly after launch, the mission went into a scheduled media blackout, with no further public updates.
Today’s launch marks the start of the X-37B program’s second space mission. The Air Force’s other X-37B plane, known as OTV-1, returned to Earth in December 2010 after a similarly mysterious seven-month maiden mission. [Photos: First Flight of the X-37B Space Plane]
CREDIT: USAF
Mysterious mini-shuttle
The X-37B spacecraft looks a bit like NASA’s space shuttles, only much smaller. The vehicle is about 29 feet long by 15 feet wide (8.8 by 4.5 meters), with a payload bay about the size of a pickup truck bed. By comparison, two entire X-37Bs could fit inside the payload bay of a space shuttle.
The space plane, built by Boeing for the U.S. military, can fly long, extended missions because of its solar array power system, which allows it to stay in orbit for up to nine months, Air Force officials have said. [Infographic: The X-37B Space Plane]
What exactly the vehicle does while circling the Earth for so long is a mystery, since the craft’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 is a space weapon of some sort.
But the Air Force has repeatedly denied that charge, claiming that the X-37B’s chief task is testing out new hardware for future satellites — instruments like sensors and guidance, control and navigation systems. And that’s likely to be the case, experts say.
“It gives the Air Force the ability to test-fly some of this hardware,” said Brian Weeden, a former Air Force orbital analyst who works as a technical adviser for the nonprofit Secure World Foundation.
Weeden suspects the X-37B is testing gear for the National Reconnaissance Office, the intelligence agency that builds and operates the U.S.’s spy satellites. That would explain all the secrecy, he said.
Second mission for the X-37B
The Air Force’s other X-37B, known as OTV-1, launched last April and returned in December after spending 224 days in space. While its mission was also classified, technology-testing was OTV-1’s primary job, too, Air Force officials have said.
CREDIT: United Launch Alliance
And things presumably went well, experts say, or the Air Force wouldn’t be launching the craft’s twin a few short months later.
While the X-37B is likely trying out new hardware, the vehicle itself is experimental — hence the “X” designation — so these flights should also help the Air Force assess the space plane as well as its payload.
“Part of its mission is to test out reusable technologies and to see how quickly they can turn around these vehicles and launch them again,” Weeden said.
Boeing’s Space and Intelligence Systems division builds the X-37B for the Air Force. Originally, NASA used the space plane as an experimental test bed until funding for the project ran out in 2004.
The vehicle then passed to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and was ultimately turned over to the Air Force in 2006.
NASA scientist finds evidence of alien life
Aliens exist, and we have proof.
That astonishingly awesome claim comes from Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, who says he has found conclusive evidence of alien life — fossils of bacteria found in an extremely rare class of meteorite called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites. (There are only nine such meteorites on planet Earth.) Hoover’s findings were published late Friday night in the Journal of Cosmology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover, who has spent more than 10 years studying meteorites around the world, told FoxNews.com in an interview. “This field of study has just barely been touched — because quite frankly, a great many scientist [sic] would say that this is impossible.”
Hoover discovered the fossils by breaking apart the CI1 meteorite, and analyzing the exposed rock with a Read more…
NASA Shuts Down Prolific Sky-Mapping Space Telescope
A prolific sky-mapping telescope that has spent more than a year scanning the heavens for asteroids, comets and other cosmic objects received its last command today (Feb. 17).
NASA shut down its WISE spacecraft – short for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer – at 3:00 p.m. EST (2000 UTC) today. The mission’s principal investigator, Ned Wright of the University of California in Los Angeles, sent the final command to the now-hibernating spacecraft, according to an update from the WISE mission’s official Twitter account.
“The WISE spacecraft will remain in hibernation without ground contacts awaiting possible future use,” NASA officials said via Twitter.
WISE launched on Dec. 14, 2009 to begin a 10-month mission to collect Read more…
Nibiru, What NASA Knows & You Don’t
Ancient Folklore most of the time can be traced back to some actual event. The folklore around Nibiru and planet X goes back thousands of years, and can even be seen in the symbolism of every day architecture provided to us via secret societies, mysticism and most religions around the world.
Commonly referred to as the Crossing Planet, Planet X, Nibiru, Winged Orb, Nemesis, Wormwood, The Death Star and the Destroyer. This mystical heavenly body very well may exist. Given the misinterpretation of planet X actually being a planet, is the first mistake, which has likely led to the lack of supporting scientific evidence of its existence. Only the misnomer of Planet X would allude to this planet actually being a planet. According to mystical and esoteric history, Planet X is not a planet at all but a Brown Dwarf star, that may have its own orbiting planets.
Infrared anomalies were found in the Sagittarius constellation, and Lloyd believes the ‘dark star’ lies in this direction. Irregularities in the Kuiper Belt (a region beyond Neptune), such as objects with odd inclined orbits, indicate that science is catching up with the idea of a Planet X, he pointed out. It’s possible, he added, that NASA already discovered such a celestial body years ago, and has deliberately kept its presence a secret.
When NASA tells you that there are no large planets in our solar system that have gone undetected, they are Read more…
NASA Sold Computer Hard Drives Containing Sensitive Government Info
Julian Assange may have needed a mole inside the Army to get sensitive government documents for WikiLeaks, but thanks to the lax IT procedures at NASA, it looks like he may have only needed an eBay account.
Due to weak security measures and an agency culture that struggles with properly handling property transfer, NASA sold hard drives to the general public that contained information that could help hackers penetrate the space agency’s computers, according to a new report from the NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG).
The computers were left over from the shuttle program, which NASA sold off publicly after they had been properly sanitized of any sensitive information. However, it seems that a combination of poorly designed procedures and individual failures led NASA personnel to skip that sanitation step. Overall, 10 entires PCs that might have contained IP information and other sensitive data are known to have ended up sold to private citizens.
“During our audit, we discovered significant weaknesses in the sanitization and disposal processes for IT equipment at four NASA Centers – Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers and Ames and Langley Research Centers,” the report reads.
This is not the first time that NASA has come under fire for poor information technology and equipment management. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), NASA misplaced $94 million in equipment between 1997 and 2007, and failed to meet their goals of stopping such losses in six of those ten years.
A 2007 GAO report portrayed a NASA culture where property mismanagement and loss rarely results in punishment. In one instance, a NASA employee escaped punishment despite providing an explanation for losing a laptop consisting of the excuse “this computer, although assigned to me, was being used on board the International Space Station. I was informed that it was tossed overboard to be burned up in the atmosphere when it failed,” the 2007 GAO report said.
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