Slashdot is reporting that Satellite junk (from the recent collision) is falling on Texas, but he very latest (as of moments ago) from Bad Astronomy is that it is not.

UPDATE:

But then, there’s this.

PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE JACKSON KY
1145 PM EST FRI FEB 13 2009

…POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION…

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN JACKSON HAS RECEIVED CALLS THIS EVENING FROM THE PUBLIC CONCERNING POSSIBLE EXPLOSIONS AND…OR EARTHQUAKES ACROSS THE AREA. THE FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION HAS REPORTED TO LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT THAT THESE EVENTS ARE BEING CAUSED BY FALLING SATELLITE DEBRIS. THESE PIECES OF DEBRIS HAVE BEEN CAUSING SONIC BOOMS…RESULTING IN THE VIBRATIONS BEING FELT BY SOME
RESIDENTS…AS WELL AS FLASHES OF LIGHT ACROSS THE SKY. THE CLOUD OF DEBRIS IS LIKELY THE RESULT OF THE RECENT IN ORBIT COLLISION OF TWO SATELLITES ON TUESDAY…FEBRUARY 10TH WHEN KOSMOS 2251 CRASHED INTO IRIDIUM 33.

$$

RAY/WJM

Apparently there is an argument among spaceologists as to how long satellite debris floating around the earth will stay “up there.” The difference in opinion ranges from decades or a century or so on one hand to ten thousand years on the other hand . Details here.

Imagine if two people got in their cars and drove to work. They both live in different places and work in different places. They live miles from where they work. Their driving paths cross at one point.

There are no other cars in the universe, just these two (remember, I’m asking you to use your imagination). And from the first time they make the commute to work and back thereafter, the cars make the same trip every day on autopilot.

Eventually, this might happen:

According to Sorting Out Science (whence I totally stole this video) this is a reconstruction of a collision between two communicatoins satellites over Siberia. Think of all those people at that very moment looking at their cell phones and going “Hmmmm… must be in a dead spot…..”

Meteors are falling on your head all the time, or so it is said. I’ve heard that you can collect meteorites by sifting through the stuff that accumulates in your gutters with a magnet. The magnet ignores the silica rock and tarry stuff that your roof is made of, but picks up the iron bits which tend to be meteoric dust. I’m not sure if I believe that, but this is what is said.

One of the best places to get meteorites is in Antarctica, because they land on ice instead of land, and are thus not mixed up with non meteoric rocky stuff, they stand out on the background, and there are certain glacial forces that concentrate them (and bring them to the surface) so they can be easily found.

Why do I even mention this? Well, for reasons that are NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS (yet) I’ve been reading about meteors on the Antarctic ice, and I came across this web site:

Ansmet The Antarctic Search for Meteorites

and thought you might like to see it.

I should mention that I discovered this site via Bad Astronomy, so Hat Tip to Phil.

Does Spirit have a Boyfriend? Or may be a little drug habit? NASA is perplexed:

PASADENA, Calif. – The team operating NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit plans diagnostic tests this week after Spirit did not report some of its weekend activities, including a request to determine its orientation after an incomplete drive.

Very suspicious. I’d start keeping track of the odometer if I was NASA.

On Sunday, during the 1,800th Martian day, or sol, of what was initially planned as a 90-sol mission on Mars, information radioed from Spirit indicated the rover had received its driving commands for the day but had not moved. That can happen for many reasons, including the rover properly sensing that it is not ready to drive. However, other behavior on Sol 1800 was even more unusual: Spirit apparently did not record the day’s main activities into the non-volatile memory, the part of its memory that persists even when power is off.

“I don’t remember.” Right. So totally teen-ager.

On Monday, Spirit’s controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., chose to command the rover on Tuesday, Sol 1802, to find the sun with its camera in order to precisely determine its orientation. Not knowing its orientation could have been one possible explanation for Spirit not doing its weekend drive. Early Tuesday, Spirit reported that it had followed the commands, and in fact had located the sun, but not in its expected location.

I think I’d want to check the pupils to see if they are dilated.

“We don’t have a good explanation yet for the way Spirit has been acting for the past few days,” said JPL’s Sharon Laubach, chief of the team that writes and checks commands for the rovers. “Our next steps will be diagnostic activities.”

.. yeah, don’t count on getting an explanation any time soon. Maybe you can read her memoirs in a few years …

Among other possible causes, the team is considering a hypothesis of transitory effects from cosmic rays hitting electronics. On Tuesday, Spirit apparently used its non-volatile memory properly.

…. ffffffffffsssst. (holding holding holding) cough cough cough! ….. Oh man, those cosmic rays are gooooood……

Despite the rover’s unexplained behavior, Mars Exploration Rovers’ Project Manager John Callas of JPL said Wednesday, “Right now, Spirit is under normal sequence control, reporting good health and responsive to commands from the ground.”

… the parents are always the last to know.

Because the black holes that the big machine will probably create will decay too quickly to start an irreversible sucking-into-the-black-hole kind of effect.

But wait, there is a glitch in that theory. As being reported by the Physics arXiv blog, Black holes from the LHC could survive for minutes.

In 2002, Roberto Casadio at the Universita di Bologna in Italy and a few pals reassured the world that this was not possible because the black holes would decay before they got the chance to do any damage.

Now they’re not so sure. The question is not simply how quickly a mini-black hole decays but whether this decay always outpaces any growth.

Recalculations seem to indicate that the black holes can last for seconds, maybe longer. This raises two questions:

1) How does that part about how the LHC can’t destroy Switzerland (or more) go again, only this time do it with the black holes lasting, oh, say, 30 seconds?

and

2) What is the change in the basis of confidence for these predictions that would be mandated if in fact the previous assertions are incorrect? In other words, what is the new meaning of “oh really, we’re quite certain, that think you are saying is totally impossible how could you even think it” in the post “impossible” version of this conversation?

I’m not making any assertions here. I’m just asking.

When Woody Allen was little, and his mother told him to clean his room, he countered that he had no room to put his stuff. So he was waiting for the universe to expand for a while, then it would be possible to clean his room.

Since then, cosmologists have admonished that expansion of the universe does not really work that way. Of course, it DOES work that way, and Woody Allen was partly correct. But other factors we need not discuss here would come into play and ruin his plans.

Anyway, I’ve been going to the gym a lot lately, and I noticed yesterday that my weight had gone UP instead of DOWN. To cheer my self up, I simply attributed the increase to the huge muscles I’m building. (De nile is not just a river in Africa any more.) But then I found out that there might be another explanation for the scale giving obviously erroneous results:

The Milky Way… has 50 per cent more mass than previously believed, increasing the chance of a collision with another galaxy, say astronomers.

That would explain a lot of things. If the entire Milky Way has gotten heavier, then everything IN the Milky way has gotten heavier.

They are also saying that the Milky way is spinning faster. I wonder if that means I don’t have to spend as much time on the treadmill….???

OK, but seriously…
Continue reading Milky Way = Faster, Heavier. Like me. →

Given the limited and limiting nature of the discussion of the Large Hadron Collider firing up in a very short time, which could then destroy this corner of the solar system according to some, I have been hoping that blogger Jennifer Ouellette would chime in and make sense of it all.And she certainly has taken a stab at it.Go read this now!!! Before it is too late!!!!!

An utterly incomprehensible paper has been produced by a team of physicists, designed to make everyone feel better about the possibility that the Large Hadron Collider will produce black holes that will suck the Earth into themselves.There is no effort whatsoever in this paper to speak to normal people. The most I can get out of it is that yes, black holes can form, and possibly very many of them, but it will take them longer to destroy the planet than it will take the sun to destroy the planet by exploding on its present schedule (of some billions of years from now). Which makes no sense to me at all until I saw this in the paper:Ah, that makes me feel so much better….

Remember a while ago, I joked that NASA is twittering Phoenix? Well, either they were listening to me, I’m psychic, or …. or maybe it is just a totally obvious thing to do. Point is … THEY ARE! Here.

To stop this obnoxious flashing, just hit the ESC key! It’s like gold, but better. It’s ice! On Mars!If there’s ice, there is water. If there is water, there cold be life. Maybe.I’m pretty sure the presence of H2O on Mars is not that surprising. But what are the chances of scooping up a robot-fist full of dirt and having visible chunks of ice right there, unless this stuff is actually very common?NASA is reporting “Bright Chunks at Phoenix Lander’s Mars Site Must Have Been Ice”Bits, or more accurately, crumbs, of some whitish stuff was visible in the Martian soil, and then it disappeared over time … almost like it had evaporated.This animated GIF shows the ‘before’ and ‘after’ views of possible ice, which showed up in the ground then went away. Continue reading Ice! Ice I say! IIICCCEEEEE!!! →

Jason-1 Will Make its 30,000th Orbit

The Jason-1 spacecraft will make its 30,000th science orbit this week. Revolution number 30,000 will begin at 10:27 UTC (3:27 a.m. PDT) on June 14th, 2008 and will be completed at 12:19 UTC (5:19 a.m. PDT). From its vantage point 1,336 kilometers (830 miles) above Earth, Jason-1 uses its radar altimeter to precisely measure the topography of the ocean surface.Jason-1 was launched December 7, 2001, as the follow-on to Topex/Poseidon, which successfully collected science data from 1992 to 2005. Both missions are a partnership between NASA and the French space agency, CNES. Covering 95% of Earth’s ice-free ocean every 10 days, Jason-1 continues the critical data record of ocean surface topography, increasing our understanding of ocean circulation and the oceans’ role in climate. ….

Read the rest here. International Mission Studying Sun to Conclude

After more than 17 years of pioneering solar science, a joint NASA and European Space Agency mission to study the sun will end on or about July 1.The Ulysses spacecraft has endured for almost four times its expected lifespan. However, the spacecraft will cease operations because of a decline in power produced by its onboard generators. Ulysses has forever changed the way scientists view the sun and its effect on the surrounding space. Mission results and the science legacy it leaves behind were reviewed today at a media briefing at European Space Agency Headquarters in Paris.

More here.