China's first man in space completes 14 orbits in 21 hours on October 16, 2003. Photograph Xinhua/AP.
December 12, 2003 Alexandria, Virginia - American science might soon be challenged by the President of the United States with a request to get back to the moon. According to Washington insiders, Vice President Dick Cheney has been having a series of confidential meetings for some time to discuss with agencies and congressmen how to reinvigorate the depressed NASA space program. One idea that has caught a lot of attention and speculation is going back to the moon with astronauts - and maybe even building a permanent lunar base.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
"The distributary fan's discovery provides clear, unequivocal evidence that some valleys on Mars experienced the same type of on-going, or persistent, flow over long periods of time as rivers do on Earth. ... and might be the strongest indicator yet that some craters and other depressions on Mars once held lakes."
Mike Malin, Ph.D., Planetary Geologist, Malin Space Science Systems
Hubble Telescope image of Mars and the largest canyon in the solar system, Valles Marineris, that stretches for 2,500 miles (4,000 km). Image courtesy Space Telescope Science Institute.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
Updated - December 5, 2003 - Two influenza vaccine manufacturers announced today that they have shipped all their vaccines and will not have any more until the spring of 2004. So, if one doctor's office is out of flu shots, try another. Some offices and clinics have more flu vaccines than others.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
October 29, 2003 Grenbelt, Maryland - Today at 20:48 UT (4:58 p.m. ET), the fifth intense solar X-Flare (10) in a week erupted on the sun. The massive Jupiter-sized sunspot known as 486 has been the source of two of the most powerful solar flares ever recorded in the X category that indicates most intense sunspot eruptions. The unprecedented series of five X-flares within a week began last Thursday, October 23, 2003, when there was a powerful X-sized solar flare, followed by two weaker X-flares. Then on Tuesday, October 28th, came the third largest solar flare ever recorded - an X 17.2. The strongest known is an X 20. That was followed on Wednesday, October 29th, with an X 10.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe's first detailed map of the oldest light in the universe. Cosmologists call it a "baby picture" of the universe. Colors indicate "warmer" (red) and "cooler" (blue) spots. The oval shape is a projection to display the whole sky; similar to the way the globe of the earth can be projected as an oval. The microwave light captured in this picture is from 379,000 years after the Big Bang, over 13 billion years ago. Source: WMAP NASA.
October 24, 2003 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - 2003 is turning out to be a pivotal year for cosmologists. In February, NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy (an-EYE-stro-pea) Probe - known as WMAP - made precise measurements of the oldest light in the universe, the microwave background radiation from the Big Bang. The map produced from the microwave data breaks our universe down this way:
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
"An analysis of astronomical data suggests not onlythat the universe is finite, but also that it has a specific, rather rigid topology (dodecahedral sphere). If confirmed, this is a major discovery about the nature of the universe."
George F. R. Ellis, "The Shape of the Universe," Nature,
Vol. 425, October 9, 2003, www.nature.com/nature
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
October 5, 2003 Havana, Cuba - Three years ago when Paulina Zelitsky and Paul Weinzweig, co-owners of Advanced Digital Communications, saw the first side scan sonar images of the deep water structures off the western tip of Cuba, some underwater objects were dark as metals sometimes show up on magnetometers. I asked Paul if any more data supported the initial cesium magnetometer data which implied there might be metal coatings on some of the megalithic structures.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
October 5, 2003 Bainbridge, Ohio - The following photographs were taken by Jeffrey Wilson during his field investigation of the Paint Creek Island, Ross County, Ohio, formation in soybeans on September 28, 2003. The formation is four miles west of the ancient Seip Mound and about thirty miles from the Serpent Mound. This is the third formation at the mounds in 2003.
September 24, 2003 Havana, Cuba - It was a summer day in 2000 that the first surprising side scan sonar images of what looked like architecture were seen a half mile down off the western tip of Cuba. The ocean floor there is very flat and covered with white sand. The camera was run by the Remote Operated Video control room on the "BIC Ulises" ship owned and operated by engineer and oceanographer, Paulina Zelitsky, and her husband and business partner, Paul Weinzweig co-owners of Advanced Digital Communications International, Inc. or ADC International, Inc. Paulina was born and educated in the Soviet Union and was assigned to work in Cuba. Later, after she married Paul, a Canadian citizen, ADC was based in Canada. More recently, ADC International has become an international business company incorporated in the Commonwealth of the Bahamas to conduct deep ocean bottom survey in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
"Scientists already know of 113 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) tumbling on paths that will eventually lead them to within an astronomical hair's width of Earth. The total number of such asteroids could be well over a thousand."
- EarthSky.com
Top: The 1994 XM asteroid appeared as a trail in images taken on December 9, 1994. Bottom: Compare to image on right which shows the asteroid some 4.5 hours later. The asteroid was about 550,000 kilometers away from Earth at the time, on its way to a record close approach of some 105,000 kilometers (65,258 miles) only 12 hours later.
Updated - The Jet Propulsion Lab's Paul Chodas, a research scientist who specializes in calculating the orbits of asteroids and other near-Earth objects, announced today that asteroid 2003 QQ47 is not on a collision course with Earth in March 2014. Chodas said, "This particular one was of interest because it is fairly large, 1.3 kilometers [0.8 mile], and the predicted impact was only ten years away. Combining those two factors, we raised it to some level of concern."
September 2, 2003 Cloudcroft, New Mexico - The first eyes to see the new asteroid threat called "2003 QQ47" are at the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research Program at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. LINEAR, as it's known to astronomers, was an outgrowth of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) that took over the Reagan Administration's Star Wars program. LINEAR rose from the development of very high tech surveillance equipment that was originally designed to look for orbiting space junk high above our planet. Scientists already know of 113 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) tumbling on paths that will eventually lead them to within an astronomical hair's width of Earth. The total number of such asteroids could be well over a thousand. And this newly discovered one is about two kilometers in diameter - big enough to do serious damage on Earth if it hit us.
Click here to subscribe and get instant access to read this report.
Click here to check your existing subscription status.
