North Korea At It Again
In what has been interpreted as a thinly veiled threat, the North Korean government in Pyongyang has issued a statement saying that it could not guarantee the safety of airliners transiting its airspace.
The warning has led to Korean Air, Asiana Airlines and international carriers Air Canada and Singapore Airlines to reroute services that normally pass through North Korean airspace.
The statement has been widely condemned, with South Korean spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon saying "Threatening civilian airliners' normal operations under international aviation regulations is not only against the international rules but is an act against humanity..."
The latest interchange of words comes on the eve of two events. The first a launch of a North Korean satellite seen by the United States, Japan and South Korea as a test launch of North Korea's Taepodong-2 ballistic missile.
This satellite launch coincides with an annual joint United States, South Korean military exercise, which the North has condemned in the past as a dress rehearsal for an invasion. An expansion of this year's exercises in length and scale is being seen by Pyongyang as cover for preparations to shoot down its launch vehicle.
Pyongyang has threatened both Japan and the United States, the two nations in the region capable of shooting down its satellite with "...merciless retaliatory blows" and has placed its 1.2 million strong army on alert.
Kepler Goes to Space
The Kepler telescope
NASA's Kepler Telescope, which will search for planets orbiting other stars, was successfully launched by a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at approximately 10:51 p.m. (EST).
NASA regained the rocket's signal at 12:11 a.m. EDT Saturday, shortly after confirming the satellite's separation from the rocket.
According to the Kepler Mission page on NASA's website, the telescope "is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets." The telescope is named after Johannes Kepler, an astronomer, astrologist and mathematician from Germany in the late 1500 and early 1600s.
The Kepler Telescope will use the 'Transit Method' of detecting planets. When planets pass in front of their parent star, a small black dot is cast over the star, called a transit. Transits by terrestrial planets produce a small change in a star's brightness of about one part in ten thousand (.01%), lasting for 2 to 16 hours.
Kepler's view is 105 square degrees and will be focused on one area all the time. It will orbit around our Sun, maintaining a constant distance from Earth of 950 miles. It will continuously and simultaneously monitor the brightnesses of more than 100,000 stars for the life of the mission, which is expected to be three and a half years.
The Milky Way Galaxy, showing Kepler's range of view.
Image: NASA.
"Even if we find no planets like Earth, that by itself would be profound. It would indicate that we are probably alone in the galaxy," said William Borucki, the mission's science principal investigator.
Although planets orbiting stars other than the Sun had been theorized for centuries, it was only in 1988 that a team of Canadian astronomers made the first detection of extrasolar planets orbiting the star Gamma Cephei. Now over 300 extrasolar planets are said to have been discovered.
The launch comes just weeks after NASA's failed launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which crashed into the ocean off Antarctica's coast. It would have been the first spacecraft dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide, the most significant human-produced greenhouse gas and the principal human-produced driver of climate change. The cost of the project was US$273 million.
Discovery Ceases to Discover
NASA announced during a press conference on Friday night that that agency has decided to delay the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery, which was scheduled for takeoff on February 27. NASA cited the need for additional time to evaluate the shuttle's hydrogen fuel flow control valves. A new launch date has yet to be scheduled, though NASA is considering mid-March as an option. Another review of Discovery's flight readiness is scheduled for February 25.
Discovery had originally been scheduled for liftoff on February 12, but NASA wanted to perform additional tests on the valves which control the amount of hydrogen fuel pumped into the external tank when the shuttle is taking off. When Space Shuttle Endeavour went into space in November 2008, one of the valves broke. NASA fears that if one breaks off on this mission, then it could damage the outside of the shuttle.
"We need to complete more work to have a better understanding before flying," said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. who chaired Friday's Flight Readiness Review. "We were not driven by schedule pressure and did the right thing. When we fly, we want to do so with full confidence."
The current scheduled mission, STS-119, is set to fly the Integrated Truss Structure segment ("S" for starboard, the right side of the station, and "6" for its place at the very end of the starboard truss) and install the final set of power-generating solar arrays to the International Space Station. The arrays consist of two 115-foot-long arrays, for a total wing span of 240 feet, including the equipment that connects the two halves and allows them to twist as they track the sun. Altogether, the four sets of arrays can generate 84 to 120 kilowatts of electricity – enough to provide power for more than 40 average homes.
Commander Lee Archambault will lead Discovery's crew of seven, along with Pilot Tony Antonelli, and Mission Specialists Joseph Acaba, John Phillips, Steve Swanson, Richard Arnold, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata.
