Russia may send spacecraft to knock away asteroid
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Dec 30, 8:47 AM (ET)

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia is considering sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent a possible collision with Earth, the head of the country's space agency said Wednesday.

Anatoly Perminov said the space agency will hold a meeting soon to assess a mission to Apophis, telling Golos Rossii radio that it would invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project once it is finalized.

When the 270-meter (885-foot) asteroid was first discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated the chances of it smashing into Earth in its first flyby in 2029 were as high as 1-in-37, but have since lowered their estimate.

Further studies ruled out the possibility of an impact in 2029, when the asteroid is expected to come no closer than 18,300 miles (29,450 kilometers) above Earth's surface, but they indicated a small possibility of a hit on subsequent encounters.

In October, NASA lowered the odds that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 from a 1-in-45,000 as earlier thought to a 1-in-250,000 chance after researchers recalculated the asteroid's path. It said another close encounter in 2068 will involve a 1-in-330,000 chance of impact.

Without mentioning NASA findings, Perminov said that he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet. "I don't remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032," Perminov said.

"People's lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people," Perminov said.

Scientists have long theorized about asteroid deflection strategies. Some have proposed sending a probe to circle around a dangerous asteroid to gradually change its trajectory. Others suggested sending a spacecraft to collide with the asteroid and alter its momentum, or using nuclear weapons to hit it.

Perminov wouldn't disclose any details of the project, saying they still need to be worked out. But he said the mission wouldn't require any nuclear explosions.

Hollywood action films "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon," have featured space missions scrambling to avoid catastrophic collisions. In both movies space crews use nuclear bombs in an attempt to prevent collisions.

"Calculations show that it's possible to create a special purpose spacecraft within the time we have, which would help avoid the collision without destroying it (the asteroid) and without detonating any nuclear charges," Perminov said. "The threat of collision can be averted."

Boris Shustov, the director of the Institute of Astronomy under the Russian Academy of Sciences, hailed Perminov's statement as a signal that officials had come to recognize the danger posed by asteroids.

"Apophis is just a symbolic example, there are many other dangerous objects we know little about," he said, according to RIA Novosti news agency.

Thanks Dreemz, I have added it on the timeline


Dreamtime Meteor Impact Found with Google Earth

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December 30th, 2009

Duane Hamacher a PhD student from Australia’s Macquarie University found an ancient meteor impact crater in a remote location of the Northern Territory by searching Google Earth and following clues from an ancient dreamtime legend told by the indigenous Arrernte people.
Mr Hamacher reported to the Sydney Morning Herald and other Australian newspapers that the Arrernte people’s legend about a star that fell into a waterhole called Puka in the valley where Kulaia, the serpent, lived – has led to the discovery of the ancient crater, which the research team he is part of propose to name Puka.

Guided by details of the story, Mr Hamacher searched an area about 130 km southwest of Alice Springs, in the Finke National Park on Google Earth. He found what appeared to be a bowl-shaped depression. His suspicions were confirmed when he visited the site with a team of geophysicists and astrophysicists, who found evidence that a popular tourist location in the national park called Palm Valley contains the remains of an ancient impact crater.

"We found shocked quartz, which is only produced by a substantial impact and its presence in the rock samples and the morphology of the structure are the major indicators that Palm Valley is a crater,” Mr Hamacher said.

The ancient landscape around Alice Springs has preserved several impact craters, notably Gosses Bluff Meteorite Impact Crater, which can be seen from the ISS and is thought to be the result of a bolide impact 145 million years ago. Much more recent is the Henbury Meteorites field, a collection of over 13 small craters formed by a meteor breaking up before impact just over 4,000 years ago. Several tonnes of iron-nickel meteorite have been recovered from this site. And if you are wondering – Wolfe Creek crater, central to the plot of a misspelled Australian horror movie, is in Western Australia

A date for the impact that caused the newly found Palm Valley crater has not been reported, but is certainly millions of years in the past. Although the local people could not have observed the impact directly, Mr Hamacher proposes that their intimate knowledge of the land may have led them to surmise such a cause and to integrate this knowledge within their local dreamtime legends.

Mr Hamacher expects more impact craters may be found in this way. "We found stories with descriptions of cosmic impacts and meteorite falls related to places in Arnhem Land – we assume there are more meteorite craters out there and science doesn't even know about their existence yet," he said. Mr Humacher is reported to be expecting to publish more details of this find in a future edition of Meteoritics and Planetary Science

an interesting read:

A "Nobel Torsion Message" Over Norway?

Part II

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Strikes against Al-Qaeda in Yemen were US led: report

(AFP) – 15 hours ago

WASHINGTON — Recent attacks on Al-Qaeda positions in Yemen, including cruise missile strikes, were led by the United States according to a CBS television report Saturday.

The channel quoted Sebastian Gorka, a "US special operations expert who trains Yemeni officers," as saying the United States had led the recent ground and air assaults.

"That was very much something executed by the United States, but with heavy support by the Yemeni government," Gorka said.

"It was cruise missile strikes in combination with military units on the ground."

The report comes after President Barack Obama earlier blamed Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula for arming and training a young Nigerian man who tried to blow up a US airliner on Christmas Day.

The US leader also vowed to hit back at those behind the attack, as his administration faces criticism for failing to prevent the December 25 attack.

"Training camps have been struck; leaders eliminated; plots disrupted," he said in a weekly radio address. "And all those involved in the attempted act of terrorism on Christmas must know: you too will be held to account."

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edit January 9, 2010, published on December 21, 2009 Earths orbital position End of Mayan Long Count:

Mystery of Golden Ratio Explained

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ScienceDaily (Dec. 21, 2009) — The Egyptians supposedly used it to guide the construction the Pyramids. The architecture of ancient Athens is thought to have been based on it. Fictional Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon tried to unravel its mysteries in the novel The Da Vinci Code.

"It" is the golden ratio, a geometric proportion that has been theorized to be the most aesthetically pleasing to the eye and has been the root of countless mysteries over the centuries. Now, a Duke University engineer has found it to be a compelling springboard to unify vision, thought and movement under a single law of nature's design.

Also know the divine proportion, the golden ratio describes a rectangle with a length roughly one and a half times its width. Many artists and architects have fashioned their works around this proportion. For example, the Parthenon in Athens and Leonardo da Vinci's painting Mona Lisa are commonly cited examples of the ratio.

Adrian Bejan, professor of mechanical engineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, thinks he knows why the golden ratio pops up everywhere: the eyes scan an image the fastest when it is shaped as a golden-ratio rectangle.

The natural design that connects vision and cognition is a theory that flowing systems -- from airways in the lungs to the formation of river deltas -- evolve in time so that they flow more and more easily. Bejan termed this the constructal law in 1996, and its latest application appears early online in the International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics.

"When you look atwhat so many people have been drawing and building, you see these proportions everywhere," Bejan said. "It is well known that the eyes take in information more efficiently when they scan side-to-side, as opposed to up and down."

Bejan argues that the world -- whether it is a human looking at a painting or a gazelle on the open plain scanning the horizon -- is basically oriented on the horizontal. For the gazelle, danger primarily comes from the sides or from behind, not from above or below, so their scope of vision evolved to go side-to-side. As vision developed, he argues, the animals got "smarter" by seeing better and moving faster and more safely.

"As animals developed organs for vision, they minimized the danger from ahead and the sides," Bejan said. "This has made the overall flow of animals on earth safer and more efficient. The flow of animal mass develops for itself flow channels that are efficient and conducive to survival -- straighter, with fewer obstacles and predators."

For Bejan, vision and cognition evolved together and are one and the same design as locomotion.The increased efficiency of information flowing from the world through the eyes to the brain corresponds with the transmission of this information through the branching architecture of nerves and the brain.

"Cognition is the name of the constructal evolution of the brain's architecture, every minute and every moment," Bejan said. "This is the phenomenon of thinking, knowing, and then thinking again more efficiently. Getting smarter is the constructal law in action."

While the golden ratio provided a conceptual entryway into this view of nature's design, Bejan sees something even broader.

"It is the oneness of vision, cognition and locomotion as the design of the movement of all animals on earth," he said. "The phenomenon of the golden ratio contributes to this understanding the idea that pattern and diversity coexist as integral and necessary features of the evolutionary design of nature."

In numerous papers and books over past decade, Bejan has demonstrated that the constructal law (www.constructal.org) predicts a wide range of flow system designs seen in nature, from biology and geophysics to social dynamics and technology evolution.

Bejan's research is supported by the National Science Foundation.

updated:

read part I, II and III


A "Nobel Torsion Message" Over Norway?

Part III

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