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SpaceX Releases Explosive Video of Failed Rocket Landing

Under the heading of “Close, but no cigar,” SpaceX released video of its Falcon 9 booster’s failed explosive landing

Today, under the heading of “Close, but no cigar,” SpaceX released video of its Falcon 9 booster’s failed landing following last weekend’s successful launch. This was the company’s first attempt at retrieving one of its boosters for reuse, and it publicly stated that it wasn’t expecting success on the first try. But the video will clearly provide some information on what went wrong with the landing.

It shows the booster drifting above the barge that was its intended landing site; the lighting makes it a bit difficult to tell whether the rocket was oriented vertically at that point. Then, as it was clearly off target and headed past the far end of the barge, the booster tilted heavily in order to re-center itself on the landing site. Unfortunately, it was quite low by that point, and it ended up striking the barge while leaning heavily to one side. That set off the explosion of its remaining fuel, scattering rocket parts out into the ocean.

Initial suggestions from CEO Elon Musk were that the landing problems were the result of failure of the rocket’s stabilizing fins, which could have run out of hydraulic fluid part way through the descent. But the new video appears to suggest that the problems occurred after those fins were mostly superseded by the action of the main rocket engines, which steer and stabilize the craft on its final approach. It is possible, however, that the failure of the fins left the Falcon 9 in a state that the engines couldn’t correct for.

Details of the company’s investigation into the crash landing are still ongoing.

5 Most Terrifying Serial Killers Still At Large

Can anyone solve these cases before they murder again?

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Warning, text spoilers below…

Presenting the 5 most terrifying serial killer mysteries that no true detective could solve… including the dangerous and psychopathic Beer Man of India, the poisonous “yukaihan” Vending Machine Killer of Japan, the disturbingly punctual February 9th Killer, the gruesome Long Island (Craigslist) Serial Killer, and the Zodiac — the most famous serial killer never caught.

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Music: “The Bucket of Blood” by Pravdamusic

Intro: “The Machine Thinks”
Background audio copyright Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

Oklo, the Two Billion Year Old Nuclear Reactor

A unique set of conditions came together eons ago to form the world’s only known natural nuclear reactor, the Oklo uranium deposit in Africa.

Gabon was a French colony when prospectors from the French nuclear energy commissariat (the industrial parts, which later became the COGEMA and later Areva NC) discovered uranium in the remote region in 1956. France immediately opened mines operated by Comuf (Compagnie des Mines d’Uranium de Franceville) nearMounana village in order to exploit the vast mineral resources and the State of Gabon was given a minority share in the company.

For forty years, France mined for uranium in Gabon. Once extracted, the uranium was used for electricity production in France and much of Europe. Today, however, the uranium deposits are exhausted, and the mine is no longer worked. Currently, mine reclamation work is ongoing in the region affected by the mine operations.

There is strong geochemical evidence that the Oklo uranium deposit behaved as a natural nuclear fission reactor in Precambrian times: some of the mined uranium was found to have a lower concentration ofuranium-235 than expected, as if it had already been in a reactor. Geologists found that it had been in a reactor before—two billion years ago. At that time the natural uranium had a concentration of about 3% ²³⁵U, and could have gone critical with natural water as neutron moderator.

Mysterious Ice Ring Could Be Meteorite Crater

During a routine flight over the Antarctic ice shelf, geophysicist Christian Müller spotted something strange: a huge, 2-kilometre-wide crater in the ice.

During a routine flight over the Antarctic ice shelf on 20 December last year, geophysicist Christian Müller spotted something strange: a huge, 2-kilometre-wide circle on the ice.

Müller, a contractor with research consultants Fielax from Bremerhaven, Germany, was in Antarctica as part of a polar survey conducted by the German Alfred Wegener Institute. Six days after spotting the weird ice-ring, he and his colleagues returned and flew over the site at two different altitudes, to photograph and scan it. Their working theory is that the ring marks an ice crater left by a large meteorite that slammed into Antarctica in 2004.

Two previous studies seem to back up this theory. First, a trail of dust was seen 30 kilometres above Antarctica on 3 September 2004. An Australian team speculated at the time that this was the remnants of one of the largest meteoroids to have entered Earth’s atmosphere during the decade (Nature, 10.1038/nature03881).

Second, in 2007, another team used global infrasound (low-frequency sound) data to triangulate the location of a big bang that was picked up by remote sensors on that same date (Earth, Moon and Planets, 10.1007/s11038-007-9205-z. They pinpointed the Antarctic ice shelf, very close to where Müller spotted his ice crater and speculated the bang had been made by a meteoroid the size of a house.

Müller and his colleagues say their theory still needs to be carefully checked out, and will be conducting further studies.

SpaceX Rocket Crashes in First Attempted Boat Landing

‘Close, But No Cigar’: SpaceX had positioned an autonomous barge off the coast of Florida to attempt the first ever Falcon 9 landing on a solid surface.

Private spaceflight firm SpaceX launched its fifth cargo mission to the International Space Station today – but its planned test landing of the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a boat was unsuccessful.

Most rockets are built for a single use only, falling into the sea once their fuel is spent. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has likened this to throwing away your aircraft every time you fly and identified it as a key reason for the high cost of spaceflight.

That’s why SpaceX has attempted to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket,with an eye to reusing it. After previous launches the company has fired up its rockets as they return to Earth, deploying a set of landing legs and reducing their speed but ultimately still landing in the ocean. It has also conducted small-scale land-based tests with its Grasshopper rocket.

For this latest flight, SpaceX positioned an autonomous barge off the coast of Florida to attempt the first ever Falcon 9 landing on a solid surface, following the launch at 947 GMT from Cape Canaveral, Florida, sending an unmanned Dragon capsule on its way to the ISS.

On its way down, the rocket successfully hit the barge, but came in too fast and was destroyed. “Close, but no cigar this time,” tweeted Musk shortly after the attempted landing, which took place around ten minutes after take-off. Musk also said it was too dark and foggy to get video of the landing, but SpaceX now plans to analyse data from the flight and try again with a future launch.

A successful landing will place SpaceX in a league of its own, as the ability to reuse rockets could drastically lower the cost of getting to orbit, though there are many more tests required before we see a second-hand rocket fly into space.

Competitors are already starting to take notice – earlier this week the French space agency, CNES, announced plans to develop its own reusable rocket tech. And in the long term, the ability to land a rocket on solid ground will assist in Musk’s ultimate goal: colonising Mars.

NASA Reveals Incredible View Inside Superstar Eta Carinae

New findings include Hubble Space Telescope images that show decade-old shells of ionized gas racing away from the largest star at a million miles an hour, and new 3-D models that reveal never-before-seen features of the stars’ interactions.

Eta Carinae is a binary system containing the most luminous and massive star within 10,000 light-years. A long-term study led by astronomers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, combined data from NASA satellites, ground-based observing campaigns and theoretical modeling to produce the most comprehensive picture of Eta Carinae to date. New findings include Hubble Space Telescope images that show decade-old shells of ionized gas racing away from the largest star at a million miles an hour, and new 3-D models that reveal never-before-seen features of the stars’ interactions.

Located about 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina, Eta Carinae comprises two massive stars whose eccentric orbits bring them unusually close every 5.5 years. Both produce powerful gaseous outflows called stellar winds, which enshroud the stars and stymy efforts to directly measure their properties. Astronomers have established that the brighter, cooler primary star has about 90 times the mass of the sun and outshines it by 5 million times. While the properties of its smaller, hotter companion are more contested, Goddard’s Ted Gull and his colleagues think the star has about 30 solar masses and emits a million times the sun’s light.

At closest approach, or periastron, the stars are 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) apart, or about the average distance between Mars and the sun. Astronomers observe dramatic changes in the system during the months before and after periastron. These include X-ray flares, followed by a sudden decline and eventual recovery of X-ray emission; the disappearance and re-emergence of structures near the stars detected at specific wavelengths of visible light; and even a play of light and shadow as the smaller star swings around the primary.

During the past 11 years, spanning three periastron passages, the Goddard group has developed a model based on routine observations of the stars using ground-based telescopes and multiple NASA satellites. According to this model, the interaction of the two stellar winds accounts for many of the periodic changes observed in the system. The winds from each star have markedly different properties: thick and slow for the primary, lean and fast for the hotter companion. The primary’s wind blows at nearly 1 million mph and is especially dense, carrying away the equivalent mass of our sun every thousand years. By contrast, the companion’s wind carries off about 100 times less material than the primary’s, but it races outward as much as six times faster.

The images and video on this page include periastron observations from NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, the X-Ray Telescope aboard NASA’s Swift, the Hubble Space Telescope’s STIS instrument, and computer simulations.

Tesla’s “Solid Metal Snake” Is Alive and Will Find You

Tesla Motors is developing a creepy automated metal ‘snake’ that would emerge from the wall and connect itself to the battery port on Tesla cars.

Tesla Motors is developing an automated metal ‘snake’ that would emerge from the wall and connect itself to the battery port on Tesla cars. Such an advancement would essentially create a hands-free car charging system for owners of the sleek electric vehicles.

CEO and chief product architect Elon Musk tweeted the announcement, promising a “solid metal snake” that automatically moves from the wall and connects to the car.

He followed up with a second tweet to elaborate that the technology would be backwards compatible to work with existing models as well as those released in the future. It’s uncertain whether this automatic robot snake charger would be available only for supercharging stations or at home as well.

If it’s available for residential installation, the robotic charging snake would be a great benefit for Tesla owners. It eliminates the need to remember to plug your car’s battery in for charging, so electric car owners would never wake up to a dead battery. In the long line of technological advancements in motoring, this is just one more step toward a world where cars do everything for themselves.

Engineers have had their sights on robotic snakes for some time. OC Robotics has already developed a prototype robotic snake arm. Carnegie Mellon University’s Biorobotics Lab has been working on a modular robotic snake as well. Neither of those teams has electric vehicle charging specifically on their agendas, and there is no indication at this time whether Tesla’s hands-free charging snake will rely on any of these previously developed technologies.

5 Darkest Facebook Secrets

Facebook fails to keep your secrets safe? Login at your own risk…

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Presenting the 5 darkest Facebook secrets including the stolen idea Mark Zuckerberg used to create thefacebook.com, a secret scientific test to hack the feelings of users and cause emotional contagion, the mysterious all access pass that Facebook Messenger has to spy on your phone, the ability for moderators to stalk users, and the tricks and marketing strategies used to sell your info on the black market.

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Music: “Ferrum” by MuzRussia

Intro: “The Machine Thinks”
Background audio copyright Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

Sharks Are Eating Asia’s Internet

Shark species in the region may be drawn to chow down on undersea cables, which send off electromagnetic waves that can act as shark bait.

If you live in Southeast Asia and can’t stream YouTube videos or access Facebook, sharks may be to blame.

The underwater trans-Pacific cable that provides Internet to most of Southeast Asia broke again yesterday, leaving millions with slow or spotty connectivity. The region faces an estimated repair time of up to a month.

The Asia-America Gateway (AAG), launched in 2009, is an enormous underwater cable line stretching 12,000 miles across the Pacific. It connects 10 points throughout the Pacific islands and Southeast Asia and provides vital connectivity to several countries between Malaysia and California.

But one branch of the $500 million AAG has been continually beset with problems. The segment of the cable that runs between Vietnam and Hong Kong has ruptured four times within the last six months—twice near Hong Kong and twice near Vietnam. The latest incident occurred yesterday, when the cable broke near the Vietnamese city of Ba Ria.

In addition to Vietnam, the outage effects the cable’s offshoot points further west, which means Internet users in Brunei, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia are also feeling the slow-down. Although these other countries rely on the cable, it is managed by one Vietnamese telecommunications company.

Investigators have not confirmed a reason for the latest rupture. One common explanation in these cases is that anchors from passing fishing trawlers snagged the cable and caused damage. Increasingly, however, cable watchers believe that the problem may be sharks.

Shark species in the region, these experts say, may be drawn to chow down on the cables, which send off electromagnetic waves that can act as sharkbait. One theory holds that sharks mistake the cables for the bioelectric fields surrounding schools of fish. Others suggest that perhaps sharks are merely overly curious.

To prevent sharks from chomping through fragile and expensive fiber-optic wires, Google, which has pledged to collaborate on a similar $300 million undersea cable to Japan, has started wrapping its cables in kevlar.

Strange UFO Ejects Orb Over California

This unidentified flying object was captured on video over Southern California. The UFO—which is producing a corkscrew tail that seems to indicate rotational movement—ejects some round thing that flies into another direction at a faster speed than the object itself. What can it all be?

A meteor

Today is the peak night of the Quadantrid Meteor Shower, which happens as the Earth crosses the remains of a comet or planetoid observed half century ago. It’s logical to think this is may be one of these meteors, but it seems way too slow to be a meteor, which enter the atmosphere at a much faster speed than the UFO recorded in California.

A satellite or spacecraft on re-entry

Judging by its speed, this can also be an unknown satellite or a spacecraft entering the atmosphere. There have been no official reports at this time and there may never be one because it could be a military satellite or some secret experimental spacecraft. The ball may be a piece of the object ejected in a violent explosion.

An experimental anti-intercontinental ballistic missile defense system or some other weapons test

This is may be a possibility, as the US announced last month that they were going to start testing anti-ICBM system. It’s definitely not an ICBM, however, as the warheads wouldn’t be ejected in that way, as shown in this video of a recent Russian test.

An alien spaceship crashing with an alien escaping in a pod

Why not, right?

A very good CGI prank

This is the most obvious explanation—it could all be a prank carefully crafted in a computer.

Any other theories?