the-shrike.net

Here you’ll find an interesting covering about the actual status of studies on the Pioneer 10 & 11 slowing down anomaly.
Apparently without any understandable reason these two probes launched in 1972 and 1973 (and now at the outer border of our Solar System) are, year by year since the early ‘80, losing substantial ammount of their velocity. Unfortunately NASA is not going to allocate resource to investigate what is happening (due to a very low budget, I suspect…) and noone since then has been able to think about an answer. Some of the scientists actually studying the problem are even thinking that:

…something may be wrong with our understanding of the laws of physics.

Of course, even without going so far, the anomaly Pioneer 10 & 11 are experiencing is really a huge mistery by now, even if the investigation continues to go on, mainly thank to the support from The Planetary Society and all its members (look here for an exhaustive report on the 2005 Pioneer Anomaly Conference).

Today was the first time I get in touch with such a detailed analysis of what is happening, and I think I will follow any news about this in the future, it’s something very interesting and charming… mysteries always are! :)

Today 27th of January is, at least in Europe, a very important and particular day. Since last year has been decided that this day (the day of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945) would have been, for all Europe the “Memory Day“, remembering the Holocaust, the victims, and all the tragedy that it led.
Indeed, maybe for the first time in its history, Italy came first, having taken this day as a national day of memory since 2000. Many other European countries had done this too, but was only since 2005 that European Union declared it officially.
I’ve been unable to find a european wide office home page of the event (let me tell you the EU web portal is quite a mess…) so I’ll link you to the UK official page.

Changing subject completly, the last Thursday in January (yesterday), NASA stopped to commemorate all of his victims from Apollo 1 (27th of January 1967), Challenger (28th of January 1986) and Columbia (1st February 2003). I wasn’t there to witness the first two of these tragedy (I was only 6 years old in ‘86) but I lived in first person the loss of Columbia, and that signed me deeply.

So, while the sky keeps snowing like in a desperate effort to cover this piece of the world, I’ll let my thoughts to go away for a while, mourning for all the victims this world have ever seen and will ever see.

Take care.

Today, a team of scientists has reported the discovery of the lowest mass planet yet. The planet, called OGLE-2005-BGL-390Lb, is about 5 times the mass of the Earth, orbiting a star about 25,000 light years away.

Today another planet discovery has been announced.
This time, as stated above, we’re dealing with a planet definitely smaller than the other ones discovered in the past, leading us closer and closer to the moment when our telescopes will find an Earth-like planet somewhere up there.

OGLE-2005-BGL-390Lb is somewhere near the center of the Milky Way, very far away from us, and it’s orbiting around a star very different from our Sun (it’s just 1/5 of the Sun in mass) and it’s probably to far away from its (weak) star to be something less than a ball of ice or even not solid at all (it may be a Jupiter-like body), but finding out that the resolution of our instruments makes us able to see such a small and far object is encouraging on the way to find a planet just like our.

Take a look here for more detailed informations on the discovery announcement and for a quick (and exhaustive) explanation about the technique usually used to search for extraterrestrial planets.

You may, or may not, have noticed I’ve changed layout.
It’s part of my geeky nature to get easily tired of layouts and stuff like that, so here the new look. EquiX theme modified by me in some aspects, and here we come. Hope it’s readable also on IExplorer, I have tested it on Firefox, Konqueror and Opera only. But to be true, I don’t mind if it’s broken or not in IExplorer, as the footer suggests: pick up a real browser! :)

And here we are again, after the Divisional Championship games of Sunday.
I’ve seen them both (though I didn’t see Panthers-Seahawks until the end), so let’s write down the usual recap.

• AFC: Steelers - Broncos (34 - 17)
  An amazing match, let me tell you. I’ve seen the Steelers through all the post season games, and I’ve never seen them playing in such a perfect way. They simply didn’t do anything they shouldn’t do. The game was straight to perfection, starting from the usual Bus no.36 Bettis, to QB Roethlisberger, Polamalu, Ward or Porter. Name one, and you’ll find out they have played a fantastic match.
  Denver tried to stay in the game, but you can’t let this Steelers to take such an advantage in the first half, and thinking you can recover it later. They started to play good football too late. Steelers were in complete control of the game from the first to the last minute, and this’s the mind you should have if you want to go to the SuperBowl. Again… Go Steelers Go!
• NFC: Carolina - Seattle (14 - 34)
  I’m not new to saying such a thing, but damn, you can’t win a football match (even more if it is a divisional championship) when your QB lanches 3 intercepts and complete less than half of his total launching score. Maybe I’m not an expert, but this’s what I think. Then, taken a Jake Delhomme in one of his worts game ever, put it side-by-side with the injury of N. Goings and there you see the Panthers are going to have a bad day. On the other side, Hasselback did a great job keeping is mind focused on the game: offence did a great job (come on, Shaun Alexander is a beast… 132yd and 2 TD after only 1 week from the injury against Washington, incredible!) while defence was perfect blocking S. Smith. And when even the great Smith is able to score only by returning a punt, you’re in big trouble Panthers. It’s going to be nice to see Alexander agains the Steelers‘ defence.

This playoff games didn’t start so well, I mean, the first matches wasn’t much of an excitment, but after the wild card everything changes, and that’s good for us supporter and football lovers. I think we’re going to see a great match in Detroit on the 5th of February, my heart will be supporting the Steelers with all its strenght, but I also feel some sympathy for Seattle, so just let it be a great match, and I won’t be too much disappointed ;)

“Detroit claims back its BUS no.36″

Update (11:46 Pacific time): Spacecraft separation! New Horizons is on its way! It’ll pass the Moon’s distance in about 9 hours (it took Apollo 3 days), and then it’s next stop: Jupiter. Well, not stop actually, it’ll pass Jupiter pretty quickly, and gain a huge amount of velocity from the giant planet, speeding it up more and shortening the trip to Pluto by several years.

Update (11:42 Pacific time): MECO! Main Engine CutOff. New Horizons is over the Indian Ocean, and everything looks great.

Update (11:34 Pacific time): the Centaur upper stage is firing now, and everything looks good.

I come a little late with this news, but only because I wasn’t here yesterday night :)
Indeed everything appears to have gone fine with the launch (finally) and New Horizon is now on its journey to Pluto. Now sit down, and have your 10 years wait! ;)

(source: BadAstronomy Blog | more: NASA Mission Page)

Today’s planned launch of an Atlas V carrying NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has been scrubbed due to excessive ground winds at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Launch managers extended the countdown several times, hoping the upper level and ground winds would die down, but the winds surpassed limits during the final minutes prior to liftoff. NASA will try again tomorrow, Jan. 18, during a launch window extending from 1:16 p.m. - 3:15 p.m. EST.

Mother nature wasn’t with NASA today.
Oh, not a big problem, indeed, it will have to travel for 10 years, I think New Horizon can wait one more day. Let’s hope tomorrow is going to be better, speaking about weather and that everything will go just fine.

(source: NASA.gov)

Playoffs matches came to an end this week-end with the last four games.
I’ve been unable to see live all the four matches, but I’ve seen all the recap of the saturday’s ones. What to say…

• Washington - Seattle (10-20): defence is something very important in football, but you can’t win without a serious attack team. And let me tell you, for what I saw (even against Tampa Bay) the Redskins right don’t have one right now. Let’s hope Seattle didn’t lost Alexander for more than a week… I think we’re going to see a great NFC Championship against the Panthers.
• New England - Denver (13-27): the second game I haven’t seen live on TV. From what my friends said to me, New Englad played a great match, even losing it mostly because of two major referee’s errors. Indeed, I can’t say I’m unhappy about the Patriots going home, and I think everyone able to beat them (even when they’re in one bad day) is worth a lot of respect: fear theBroncos!
• Pittsburgh - Indianapolis (21-18): OH MY GOD! This was the craziest match I’ve ever seen in NFL! Incredible. I think the Steelers went really “so” close to trash this match by themselves after ending the first half on 14-3, but please tell me I’m not the only one thinking that that Polamalu dive was a clean intercept. I still can’t understand why on earth the referee called an incomplete… crazy crazy crazy, the last 2 minutes were incredible. GO STEELERS GO!!!
• Carolina - Chicago (29-21): playing a post-season game like that one, with a QB that played only 1 game as a starter in the season, is not a safe good starting point. I think Grossman did his best, but was rarely into the game. The Panthers controlled the game from the beginning to the end, and I really think that Smith is going to be a realy pain also for the Seahawks‘ defence next week. A shame for the Bears, but I’m really happy for Carolina!

Was a positive week-end after all, 4 on 4 teams of my favourites went ahead to the Championships, and I’m very pleased with that. But to all the Steelers fan out there, let’s hope there will be less to suffer next sunday than there was this one! :)

The Stardust capsule is on the ground, they don’t know quite where yet, but a helicopter is up and searching. The capsule is quite small, about the size of a tire and the area they are searching is large so it may take a little bit.

6:08 am: Well that didn’t take long. The helicopter “Oscar” is reporting the capsule is intact.

GREAT!
The capsule landed safely and intact, that’s amazing.
If you want to follow a “minute-by-minute” report of what happened, check this (as usual) great post from Tom’s Astronomy Blog.

The final maneuver to put the spacecraft on the proper trajectory to put it on the path to reach its landing target was completed yesterday. It was a burn that took 58.5 seconds that changed the spacecraft’s velocity by just 2.9 mph.

At 15:30 UT today the Stardust spacecraft passed the moon on its way home. This marks the final 290,000 miles (400,000 km) on the trip home.

By now, everything seems to go smooth as Stardust reentry date is approaching.
Since the failure of the last attempt to land safely a “sample return” probe (the Genesis) I bet almost everyone at NASA is quite nervous about the landing of Stardust.
I’m quite sure that little comet-dust collector baby will performe just fine, and all we can do is to cross our fingers that the samples returned could give substantial scientific results after examination.

Go Startdust, go! :)

(more on badastronomy.com, tomastroblog.com and planetary.org)

Watch this.
Watch it once.
Watch it twice!

No matter what, watch it over and over again!
It’s outstanding… the more I see it, the more I love it!

I don’t know how many of you out there share with me the need to have an easy to use English-Russian/Russian-English dictionary, but I’ll share with you my little Opera customization anyway.

This is the dictionary page

What I wanted to do was to add a custom search key (and indeed also a menu) in Opera in order to use that easier. This is how my search.ini (usually located in ~/.opera and/or in /usr/share/opera/) came out:

[Search Engine 7]
Name=Rambler-RUEN
URL=http://www.rambler.ru/dict/scripts/…
Query=
Key=ruen
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Encoding=Windows-1251
Search Type=11
Verbtext=17063
Position=-1
Nameid=0

[Search Engine 8]
Name=Rambler-ENRU
URL=http://www.rambler.ru/dict/scripts/…
Query=
Key=enru
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Encoding=iso-8859-1
Search Type=11
Verbtext=17063
Position=-1
Nameid=0
Has endseparator=-1

The only thing you just have to be sure of, is the encoding for the Russian-English part, and that’s something easy once you found out what Rambler.ru is using.
The adress was too long to be shown correctly on the page, so I’ll link here to my full search.ini file.
Feel free to download it and to use it if you need :)