Author: John

Initial Scientific Results of Hayabusa’s Investigation on Itokawa

 

It’s quite amazing that even after many problems the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s space probe Hayabusa has brought back some great science on the asteroid Itokawa.

Asteroid explorer Hayabusa observed asteroid Itokawa from the middle of September to the end of November last year. Hayabusa observed Itokawa form the altitude of 20 km to 3 km by using four observational instruments, and a lot of new results were obtained for the asteroid’s shape, geographical features, surface altitude variation, albedo, spectrum, mineral composition, gravity, and the main chemical composition, etc. These results are totally new information to understand the formation process of asteroid. It will be the important standard for all the future mission to asteroids to have revealed the detail features of the asteroid, which is a most common type in the asteroid belt. We introduce here the summaries of papers, which obtained excellent results of science.

Initial Scientific Results of Hayabusa’s Investigation on Itokawa

Reptoid Research Center!?!

lizard-01

Ok, I’ll buy the underground cities but lizards? Oh come on…

Since the early 1990’s, John Rhodes has provided television and radio interviews, lectures, workshops, and media presentations to national and international audiences regarding his Terrestrial Reptoid Hypothesis. This hypothesis claims that the beings that humanity has been calling ‘E.T.’s’ or ‘Aliens’ are sightings of sentient Reptilian-Humanoid ‘Reptoid’ beings that are native to Earth.

The Terrestrial Reptoid Hypothesis further contends that the ancestors of the reptoids retreated into underground caverns during environmental cataclysms long ago, and that their descendant, now sentient, reptoid cultures are currently living in deep, remote cavern-cities undetected by mainstream humanity.

[via presurfer] 

Reptoid Research Center

Record Meteorite Hit Norway

Impact

 

A chunk of rock from space hit Norway a few days ago and it could be a record setter. Many people reported seeing the fireball and the smoke trail and then the sound of the impact:

Farmer Peter Bruvold was out on his farm in Lyngseidet with a camera because his mare Virika was about to foal for the first time.

"I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke," Bruvold told Aftenposten.no. He photographed the object and then continued to tend to his animals when he heard an enormous crash.

"I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away," Bruvold said.

Astronomers were excited by the news.

 I’ll bet. With some luck the meteorite can be recovered and studied. For more information on meteorites, check out Wikipedia.

Record meteorite hit Norway

PXL2000 – Alive and Well

PXL2000PXL2000

Any one remember the Fisher-Price PLX2000 video camera? Yeah, it’s the one that recorded a smaller than normal sized video image (gutter boxed) onto regular audio cassette tape. It was meant for kids but it soon found a following with video artists all over the place. I used to have a few of them, one I even modded to have a direct video out so the picture quality would be better because it could feed into a regular VTR directly. Anyway, I was tooling around the backwaters of YouTube yesterday and discovered that some people have uploaded and tagged footage from these cameras. I have a link here so you can see the classic camera in action. If you have any footage, and you can still play the tapes back on your camera, you should upload them and join in the fun.

YouTube – tag ‘pxl’