Posts Tagged ‘NASA’
It’s later than you think…
The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.
Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.
“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”
…
“It’s what we call the ice-skater effect,” David Kerridge, head of Earth hazards and systems at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, said today in a telephone interview. “As the ice skater puts when she’s going around in a circle, and she pulls her arms in, she gets faster and faster. It’s the same idea with the Earth going around if you change the distribution of mass, the rotation rate changes.”
Read the whole story in this Bloomberg filing reprinted on BusinessWeek.com.
As we re-synchronize our watches, we might recall that it was on this date in 1977 that the rings around Uranus were discovered. In fact, in 1789 William Herschel had discussed possible rings around the seventh planet. But it was only 23 years ago that, using the Kuiper Airbourne Observatory, the rings– 13 bands of extremely dark particles, varying in size from micrometers to a fraction of a meter– were definitively observed.
Hubble Space Telescope photo of Uranus, its rings, and its moons
It’s true of desk tops and bedrooms too…
Chaos drives the brain…
Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?
Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.
<snip… read the rest of the New Scientist article here>
As we feel an odd but satisfying rush of reassurance, we might recall that it was exactly 40 years ago– at 2:56 UTC July 21, 1969– that Neil Armstrong uttered the famous words “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” as he planted his foot on the surface of the moon for the first time.
The statement prepared for Armstrong was “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”… but the astronaut accidentally dropped the “a,” from his remark, rendering the phrase a contradiction (as “man” in such use is of course synonymous with “mankind”). Armstrong later said that he “would hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended, even if it was not said – although it might actually have been.” (And to his latter point, disputed audio analyses of the tapes of the radio message suggest that Armstrong did include the “a,” but that the limitations of the broadcast masked it…)
Armstrong, about to step onto the moon
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How quickly we forget…
First, KFC misplaces the specs for its 11 secret herbs and spices… Now, it’s the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration.
The U.S. NNSA needs to refurbish the aging warheads on Trident missiles to assure their safety and reliability, but the program has been set back a year, at an additional cost of $69 million, because the agency has lost track of the recipe for a key ingredient, a mysterious but very hazardous material code-named “Fogbank.” The secret sauce is thought to be a foamy, explosive solvent cleaning agent (and who couldn’t use one some of that at times) that plays a key role between the fission and fusion stages of a thermonuclear bomb.
Unfortunately, the last batch was made some 20 years ago, and in the meantime, not only was the sole production facility torn down, but, according to a GAO report, “NNSA lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production retired or left the agency.”
A new production facility has been built, work on recreating the recipe continues… and Homer Simpson is saying “Doh.”
(Thanks, GMSV)
As we resolve to back-up our files, we might we recall that on this date in 1912, immortal pitcher Cy Young retired from baseball, having scored 511 wins in his 21 year career– 815 starts, another ecord. (The next highest total belongs to Walter Johnson, who won 417 games for the Washington, D.C. team variously known as the Nationals and the Senators. And to put this in a more modern perspective, the “winningest” active pitcher, Greg Maddux, has 355 wins on 740 starts.)
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