Higgs Boson for Linebacker

"We observe an excess of events around mass of about 126 GeV."






















Starts alongside Jarvis Jones. Wears No. 124~126.
Gives things mass/destroys. Causes "an excess of events."

Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket for Defense

Sent in by chief analyst Joe Petersen, from breitbart.com:

A journey from Earth to Mars could soon take just 39 days, cutting current travel time nearly six times, a rocket scientist who has the ear of the US space agency NASA has said.

Former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says reaching the Red Planet could be dramatically quicker using his high-tech VASIMR rocket -- now on track for lift-off after decades of development.

The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket -- to give its full name -- is quick becoming a centerpiece of NASA's future strategy as it looks to private firms to help meet the astronomical costs of space exploration.

God's blue Earth

My parents gave me a book for Christmas called Instant Genius. And it's this compendium of random interesting knowledge.

And it says that, though Earth's actual atmosphere fluctuates, "space" begins 62 miles above the planet surface. This is called the Karman Line, after a Hungarian-American physicist.

It is the approximate altitude at which you no longer need thrust to move away from the planet surface. Your momentum carries you, because there is no friction in space.

If a person travels above this imaginary line, they are considered an astronaut. Below it, they're a pilot.

And it occurred to me: Sixty-two miles is less than the distance from my house to my parent's.


The moon is considerably further away. Image from NASA's image of the day gallery.

Blackout over China

I was not aware that Georgia's linebacking corps was in China today.


Image: Associated Press

Lots of information about today's solar eclipse, viewable only in certain parts of the world, from NASA. That includes this map, which shows the timetable for future non-Richt related blottings out of the sun.


2017 is looking good.

The year is 1987

Why isn't Buck Rogers in syndication?

But is it Chilly Water?

The Science Times (The New York Times' science section) is usually worth reading.

For example: There is water on Mercury, according to the Messenger spacecraft NASA has flying past the planet. Who knew?

An instrument aboard Messenger sampled Mercury’s surface composition by catching some of the charged atoms that have been knocked into space. Silicon, sodium and sulfur were detected. So was water.

“Which is a real surprise,” said Thomas H. Zurbuchen, an associate professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences at the University of Michigan and lead author of another paper in Science. “The first time we took a whiff of the planet, it’s right there.”

One possibility is that the water exists as ice in the shaded parts of craters in the polar regions.

Space station, shuttle visible tonight

They'll just be two bright blips across the sky shortly after 9 p.m. here in Macon, but it's still kind of cool.

From The Telegraph:

Barring a cloud cover, the International Space Station will be visible to the naked eye tonight between 9:01 and 9:07 p.m.

The space station should be directly overhead and be one of the brightest things in the sky, said Jim Greenhouse, director of marketing at the Museum of Arts and Sciences.

Everest and Mercury

United by a sense of exploration...

This is Sir Edmund Hillary's obituary, which is bound to be better than mine. Particularly since his made The New York Times.

“The whole world around us lay spread out like a giant relief map,” he told one interviewer. “I am a lucky man. I have had a dream and it has come true, and that is not a thing that happens often to men.”

According to the obituary, Hillary preferred to be called Ed. His father was journalist and beekeeper. He was 88.

Meanwhile, NASA is sending a probe closer to the planet Mercury than any man-made thing has ever been:

NASA's MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) probe will make a close approach to Mercury on Monday, one of three scheduled passes before slipping into a stable orbit around the hot planet in 2011.

The probe will be the first to enter orbit there, although the Mariner 10 previously visited the planet in the mid-1970s. But with an approach as close as 124 miles this time, MESSENGER will be able to send back more data, and images of higher resolution, than were achieved by the earlier craft.

Planet Earth is blue

If they've stuck to NASA's timetable, American astronauts are walking in space right now, installing trusses for some kind of a solar array on the International Space Station.

They are in a state of constant free fall around the Earth. If they look over one shoulder, they see the planet they live on. Over the other, it's infiniti.

And this is happening right now.

So much of life is geography.