Tag Archives: nasa

Business/Economics, International, Technology, U.S.

Who Owns the Moon? United States declares no fly zone over the Moon, The New Space Race is On! Space War next?

There’s a new space race, thanks in part to Google’s Lunar X Prize, but also because the Moon is indeed full of mineral wealth.

But the new race is not for exploration, it’s for exploitation. The Moon has titanium, trace amounts of water, and rare minerals used in high tech electronics: “In our case it’d be people prospecting for the best places to mine the water, or mine the metals…”-David Gump, Astrobotic Technology

China has a lunar satellite in orbit, and hopes to put an unmanned explorer on the Moon by 2013.  India also has a satellite orbiting the Moon.

You might think Republican Newt Gingrich is crazy with his plans for U.S. domination of the Moon, but he’s not too far off from official policy!

NASA (National Aeronautics & Space Administration) issued a report (dated July 20, 2011) titled How to Protect and Preserve the Historic and Scientific Value of U.S. Government Lunar Artifacts.

It’s not just about artifacts brought back from the Moon, but it recommends that the Apollo sites on the Moon should be declared “no fly zones”, and that the U.S. must make every effort to get back to the Moon: “…we’re coming into an age of exploitation…because of the changing environment, and much more use of space by other groups…we’re beginning to think about it.”– Robert Kelso, author of NASA report

The U.S. government has also declared that the United States is the only country that should have exclusive access to the Moon, simply because it was the first to put people on the Moon!

 

 

International, Technology

Asteroid 2005 YU 55 will come close to Earth, closer than the Moon

NASA says on November 8, asteroid 2005 YU 55 will come very close to the Earth.

The asteroid is 400 meters (1,312 feet) in diameter, and at the closest point will be only 320,000 kilometers (198,000 miles) from Earth, that’s within the orbit of the Moon.

This isn’t a rare occasion; the last time such a close encounter happened was 35 years ago.

International, Technology, U.S.

Polar Ice Caps Paradox: Ice Caps melting, should raise ocean levels, NASA says the opposite is happening, launched Aquarius satellite to find out why

In June 2011, NASA and the Space Agency of Argentina (CONAE) launched a new Earth observatory, called Aquarius.  The mission: Find out why ocean levels are seemingly dropping, despite glacial melting and heavy rain.

Scientist think the ocean water levels are going down because the ocean salt levels are going up, a sign that the ocean water is evaporating faster than it can be replenished: “Based on decades of historical data gathered from ocean areas by ships and buoys, we know the salinity has changed over the last 40 years. This tells us there’s something fundamental going on in the water cycle.”-Gary Lagerloef, Aquarius Mission

Up ’till now scientists have made some assumptions about how the ocean will react to the so called “global warming”, but, they now admit they missed an important ingredient: “We’ve been missing a key element, salinity. A better understanding of ocean salinity will give us a clearer picture of how the sea is tied to the water cycle and help us improve the accuracy of models predicting future climate.”-Gary Lagerloef, Aquarius Mission

What’s amazing is that the United States and Argentina built a satellite that could measure sea salt levels from space: “One of our Argentine instruments is another microwave radiometer in a different frequency band that will measure sea surface winds, rainfall, sea ice, and any other ‘noise’ that could distort the Aquarius salinity measurement. We’ll subtract all of that out and retrieve the target signal.”-Sandra Torrusio, CONAE

On September 1, 2011, Aquarius finished successful tests of its equipment, and has started checking the Earth’s oceans for salt.  Canada, France and Italy also contributed to this global climate change mission.

 

International, Technology, U.S.

Antartic Ice Shelf, the size of Manhattan, ripped off by March 11 Tsunami

The Journal of Glaciology, and NASA, says that 18 hours after the massive March 11 tsuanami hit Japan, it torn off huge chucks of ice at the South Pole.

Large pieces of the Sulzberger ice shelf, one the size of Manhattan, broke off between March 12 and 16.  NASA scientists watched and took pictures of the event using a satellite.

NASA said they immediately turned there eyes towards the South Pole when the March 11 tsunami hit Japan.  They wanted to test a long time hypothesis, that large numbers of ice bergs appearing in the ocean coincide with large earthquakes and tsunamis.  They got their proof.

Amazingly the tsunami was only one foot high when it hit the Sulzberger ice shelf.