New Mars Forums

For those places developing space ports its about local goverment getting tax dollars and job creation once flights begin.

Rumored for a while now...

State asks counties to launch spaceport

Taxpayers Foot Spaceport Bill

New jobs and an economy boost; the new Southern New Mexico spaceport seems to be moving forward, but it lacks one important thing, and that's money -- Money that taxpayers are being asked to give.
The project lacks $60 million and nearly $58 million of that money will come from only three of the 33 New Mexico counties. Those counties are Sierra, Otero and Dona Ana.

CIRCUMPOLAR COMET: Comet McNaught is now a circumpolar object over New Zealand--"we can see the comet all night long," says Minoru Yoneto of Queenstown, NZ, who took advantage of the extra observing time to make a spectacular 5-minute exposure of the comet, the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds.

experienced astronomers have never seen anything like it--a sweeping fan of comet dust visible to the unaided eye despite city lights and twilight.

The tail curves so much and stretches so far that it actually leads all the way back to the northern hemisphere where streamers can be seen glowing faintly in the western sky after sundown.  On Jan. 18th, Mila Zinkova took this picture from a beach near San Francisco:

This marks the third night in a row that observers have spotted the comet's tail in northern skies. Dan Laszlo of the Northern Colorado Astronomical Society saw it on Jan. 17th and offers this advice: "Find the darkest sky you can and look west between one and two hours after sunset. A site where you can see zodiacal light would be best."

The hunt for elusive gravitational waves has a new target: singing cosmic superstrings that theoretically emit the long-sought waves as they vibrate.

The superstrings are “so light that they can’t have any effect on cosmic structure, but they create this bath of gravitational waves just by decaying,”

These theoretical cosmic superstrings, which researchers described as ultra-thin tubes filled with ancient vacuum created in the early universe, can coil into galactic-sized, vibrating loops that emit gravitational waves as they decay into oblivion

“Sensing these vibrations would add the soundtrack to the beautiful imagery of astronomy that we are used to seeing,” Hogan said. “All this time, we have been watching a silent movie.”

Robert wrote:  Today's Winnipeg newspaper had pictures of the new Prowler UAV based out of Grand Forks, North Dakota. They're proceeding with arming the Canada-US border. (Shudder)

Jupiter Encounter Begins - 9 Jan 2007

The New Horizons Jupiter encounter is under way! The spacecraft began collecting data on the Jovian system this week, starting with black-and-white images of the giant planet and an infrared look at the icy moon Callisto on Jan. 8.

These were the first of about 700 observations of Jupiter and its four largest moons planned from now until June. They include detailed scans of Jupiter's turbulent, stormy atmosphere and dynamic magnetic field, a peek into its faint ring system, maps of the composition and topography of the moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, and a look at Io's volcanic activity. Also in the flight plan: the first-ever trip down the long "tail" of Jupiter's magnetic field, which extends tens of millions of miles beyond the planet.

The New Horizons mission operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., works closely with science operations team, based at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colo., and mission scientists to plan, test and eventually send the observation commands to the spacecraft, which runs the sequences from memory in its onboard computers.

Data are stored on the spacecraft's recorders and sent back to Earth through NASA's Deep Space Network antennas. The newest images will be available on the New Horizons Web site next week.

"Our ground team has worked very hard to get to this point," says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of SwRI. "Now the curtain is rising on the next stage of Jupiter-system exploration. It's exciting!"

Closest approach to Jupiter comes Feb. 28, when the spacecraft zooms within 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles). New Horizons uses Jupiter's gravity to speed toward its ultimate destination, Pluto.

Jupiter approach already and New Horizons is about to accelerate to ridiculous speed