Showing posts with label fireballs. Show all posts

Monday, 17 August 2009

Astronomers lose access to military data

Satellite information on incoming meteors is blocked

By Geoff Brumfiel

Military satellites that constitute a missile early-warning system also pick up inbound meteors.

The US military has abruptly ended an informal arrangement that allowed scientists access to data on incoming meteors from classified surveillance satellites.

The change is a blow to the astronomers and planetary scientists who used the information to track space rocks, especially those that burn up over the oceans or in other remote locations. "These systems are extremely useful," says Peter Brown, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. "I think the scientific community benefited enormously."

When the policy changed is unclear. The website Space.com reported the end of the relationship on 10 June, but Brown says that he was told at the beginning of this year that there would be no further data releases. Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, says he was told this spring that he could no longer publicly discuss the classified data to which he had some access. Neither scientist could give a reason for the end of the

arrangement, and the United States Air Force, which operates the satellites, did not respond in time for Nature's deadline. The Air Force did issue a 16 March memo on the military classification of fireball data, but Nature could not confirm its contents.

The Defense Support Program satellite network is part of the Pentagon's early-warning system. Since 1970, 23 infrared satellites in the series have been launched into geosynchronous orbit to monitor the globe for missile launches or atmospheric nuclear blasts.

But the same infrared sensors were perfect for spotting fireballs as they streaked across the atmosphere, according to Brian Weeden, a former Air Force captain who now works at the Secure World Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Superior, Colorado. The satellites could precisely detect the time, position, altitude and brightness of meteors as they entered Earth's atmosphere. Weeden, who left the Air Force in 2007, says that the military didn't consider that information particularly useful, or classified. "It was being dropped on the floor," he says.

Under an informal arrangement, at least some of the data seem to have been provided on an ad-hoc basis to scientists studying meteorites. Often it came in the form of an anonymous, tersely worded e-mail describing the coordinates, altitude and size of a fireball. Brown, who has collected the data since 1994, declined to specify who sent the reports.

Even the short descriptions of events were enormously helpful. In 2002, Brown and his colleagues used a larger data set from the satellites to quantify the number of objects striking Earth each year (P. Brown et al. Nature 420, 294–296; 2002). Last year, they were used to narrow the search for remnants of the asteroid 2008 TC₃ in the Sahara Desert in North Africa, and they were also crucial in recovering a meteorite fragment in 2000 from Tagish Lake in northern Canada. "In both of those cases it's hard to say whether this would have been picked up without the satellite data," Boslough says.

The data also provide a useful check against ground-based instruments monitoring low-frequency sound waves and dust from the fireball explosions, says Brown.

Although the reason for ending the arrangement remains unclear, Weeden notes that it coincides with the launch of a new generation of surveillance satellites. The US$10-billion-plus Space-Based Infrared System will provide a more detailed infrared picture of Earth for battlefield surveillance, early-warning alerts and the US missile defence programme.

The first of these satellites was launched in 2006 in a highly elliptical orbit and entered operational service in November 2008, a month after Brown received his last report. In its final configuration, the system will include at least two satellites in highly elliptical orbit and three or more geosynchronous satellites for a whole-Earth view.

Weeden speculates that the Pentagon may not want details of the new satellites' capabilities to be made public, or it may simply lack the expensive software needed to handle classified and declassified data simultaneously. "The decision may have been made that it was perhaps too difficult to disclose just these data," he says.

Brown says that whatever the reason, the end of the relationship has left the tight-knit meteorite community smarting. The global reach of the satellites and the data they supplied were unparalleled, he says. "There's nothing else that even comes close," he says.

via http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_56071.shtml

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Saturday, 3 September 2005

Global Heating Strikes Home

Your Planet Needs You

Wet Sack Cloth, Burning Ashes

Flaming ashes raining from the sky, tanned inside and out with smoke, wet sack cloth, animals racing from the bush, gliders, koalas and owls calling by night, blackened forests, burned five hundred year old trees - and, of course, no accident; it almost never is. Some cattle 'farmer' - who actually grows nothing but harvests self-replicationg meat - wants more grass than forest on everyone else's land and lit it all up. That way they can graze it illegally. A match in the hand of a halfwit is a dangerous thing. It's the usual method of destruction used by the ignorant redneck rabble we're meant to trust as 'experienced custodians of the land'. In fact, they destroy the home of all for unholy dollars.

With the canny and timely help of neighbours Moon and Bearbeard, frantically yet methodically working away, the site of the unfinished mansionette was cleared just before it was engulfed. Lack of sleep right now, but one image stands out beyond the random stupidity and Armageddon-like destruction; in the midst of the fire, with choking clouds filling the air and large trees smashing to the griound, the new next door neighbour turned up - to log the land. They wanted me to walk the boundaries with them, dropping everything in the middle of saving as much as possible and with the forest a very dangerous place to be.

'Sorry, I'm a little busy right now."

"How about tomorrow morning then?" with dollar signs for eyes.

They began logging while it was all ablaze - and it turns out the laws have changed. To clear 45 degree slopes full of endangered species in upper water catchment next to a National Park on 'private land' you don't even need a permit - as long as you call it 'native forest logging' and not 'land clearing'.

Yes, Australia is part of the Third World, where slash and burn agriculture is the norm and anyone with an indecent level of greed can make a motza if they can't see the forest for the trees. Any ecologists out there interested in free land? The only way to save nature is to have someone decent, thoughtful and compassionate living there. There's some here waiting for you.

Otherwise the so-called 'farmers' will steal everyone's birthright before walking away and 'leaving the land' - what's left of it after they've finished with it.

O wise children of the revolution - Come out of Babylon - your planet needs you!

Global Heating Strikes Home

Global heating strikes wherever you may be. Here in paradise the fires are out - stopped at the borders of the rainforest and five to twenty metres from the dwellings and other buildings. Animals pour from the forest, but koalas continue to call from the trees; week-old dingoes shrink from me as eye walk right by them, a metre away; as they're seeking refuge eye let them be. Despite the likelihood of their killing hundreds or thousands of other animals in their lifetimes, today's not the day to cut their time short.

The fire chief, who has been 'fighting' fires for sixty years, is nonplussed. "I've never seen the fire continue on into the damp gullies this way at this time of year," he says. "It's unheard of."

"The tortoises didn't hibernate at all this year," eye reply.

"Just as well I'm retiring," says he.

The fire and logging have left us peculiarly undepressed. Everything seems to be all right even as catastrophe strikes and our personal economies deplete to danger point. It's partly because the loggers have given up; instead of four months' work, they have only a week. The trees have been destroyed in a commercial sense, but are still there as habitat - and without the logging the soil on the mountainsides will survive in place, making regeneration likely in a way that wouldn't be possible if the logging had gone on. Yet a walk through the drier hills is still a walk through the Black Forest, apocalyptic black on white ash with a fringe of red leaves.

A fire like this once in a generation can be survived and the land can recover, even thrive from a little 'thinning'. But more often than that and everything disappears in a succession of depletion; water, soil, plant and animal diversity, until what's left is like the rest of the world that humans have 'touched' (in the sense of molested).

This land is very forgiving - moreso than most places. But, like the rest of the planet, it can only tolerate fools for so long...

Right now the kids are playing amid the devastation; they're quite happy. To them, life still shines brightly. After all, you actually can't know what you've lost when it's gone. The curse and blessing of a very long memory is that today's world pales before the remembered glories of an Earth that humankind had not yet damaged so severely - by extending our egos as far as our reach.

The only way to survive and thrive, according to the Aborigines and the Dalai Lama, is by caring and sharing. Nuclear families end in nuclear decay; we can only thrive and survive by actually dropping the bullshit and LIVING TOGETHER, abandoning the septic illusion of separation for something far more challenging, dangerous and pleasant - tribal life. Start now - there's no time BUT the present!

- R. Ayana

Images – author’s @ http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2341/1582801059_00fc7f60c5_b.jpg
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