Yeah,
Pretty neat stuff.

Though, for those that prefer to use Google Earth (the .exe)

http://www.googleearthhacks.com/dlcat34/Craters.htm

There is better coverage...

Hum,
Here is a strewnfield of craters around Lake Chiemsee, in south-east Bavaria, that may have been caused by fragments of a huge comet that broke up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Evidence from ancient tree rings and Roman reports of “stones falling from the sky”, has led researchers to conclude that the impact happened in about 200BC.

IMAGE (117kb, 798 x 572)
47.8° to 48.4° N and 12.3° to 13.0° E

The crater field was uncovered after amateur archaeologists working in the area found pieces of metal containing unusual minerals.
More than 80 craters were found in an elliptical area 36 miles long and 17 wide, ranging in size from 10 to 1,215 feet across. The largest, filled with water, now formed Lake Tuttensee.

Around the site the team found clues that suggested an impact from space, including rock heated into glass and minerals associated with meteorites.
The most likely cause was a low-density comet, 1.1 kilometres wide, that broke up at an altitude of 43 miles and fell in pieces to Earth.

"[i]The main mass of the projectile struck the ground at 2,200 miles per hour, releasing an amount of energy equivalent to 106 million tons of TNT/i]"

Er, or not.


Hum,
i cant seem to attach my Lake_Chiemsee_strewnfield.kmz file...

Indeed,
but I wonder how stable those very distant orbits would be, (in the long term), given that passing stars come quite close by every few million years.

I imagine that in a time scale of a few hundred million years, most would be flung out of our system
(er, on the other hand, the sun may acquires new ones)...

Hum,
Cool,
yesterday’s news, brought to you today.
No Nemesis no planet X

http://au.arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0506/0506548.pdf

The word on the street says that:
The theory fails when modelling the galactic rotation speeds of dwarf galaxies.
The theory fails to agree with observations near the galactic centre.
The theory derives the galactic density from the rotation curves- they should be doing it the other way around.
The small number of bright galaxies they chose have high inclination angles.
The theory fails to address why galaxy clusters are held together.

Singular disk of matter in the Cooperstock and Tieu galaxy model
Authors: Mikolaj Korzynski

Recently a new model of galactic gravitational field, based on ordinary General Relativity, has been proposed by Cooperstock and Tieu in which no exotic dark matter is needed to fit the observed rotation curve to a reasonable ordinary matter distribution. We argue that in this model the gravitational field is generated not only by the galaxy matter, but by a thin, singular disk as well.
The model should therefore be considered unphysical.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0508/0508377.pdf (PDF)

An agency official said experts could not establish communication with the vehicle because it might have landed in an area with heavy radio interference or its transmitter had been damaged during the landing. A search would continue for three days as a matter of routine; but it is too early to declare the craft lost.

The Demonstrator launched successfully.

R-29R Volna (Wave) rocket which is based on an RSM-50 ICBM (SS-N-18, 'Stingray'), a design that is very old by todays standards.

For the Cryosat launch, the Rockot's Breeze-KM upper stage is fairly new. The SS-19 ballistic missile to which the second stage was added, is however very dated.

Seemingly the booster unit did not switch on; the flight computer had a missing command.
Doh!

"We believe the satellite ... fell where the second rocket stage is supposed to fall, that is in the Lincoln Sea, near the North Pole" - Oleg Gromov, Russian Space Troops.

"The remnants of the satellite have fallen into the northern Arctic Sea. The booster unit did not switch on and it resulted in the failure of the satellite to reach orbit" - Vyacheslav Davydenko, spokesman for the Russian Federal Space Agency.

A commission to investigate the incident has already been appointed.

I managed to grab a webcam photo from Aberdeen, Scotland at 10:00

IMAGE
IMAGE2

i was quite pleased since i hadn`t set anything up, and was just a quick snap.

It had been suggested that a faraway dwarf star, named "Nemesis", was orbiting the sun, or an unknown "Planet X" somewhere far out beyond the solar system that's disturbing the comets in the distant region called the Oort Cloud and might be possible causes for the 62-million-year extinction cycles that were found in geological formations.

However, it has been shown long ago, that the solar barycentre is not being dragged around with respect to the rest of the cosmos by Planet X.

By means of high-precision pulsar timings, astronomers using the Australia Telescope National Facility pulsar database found no evidence for non-zero acceleration.

The sensitivity achieved by their method is comparable to the acceleration due to a Jupiter-mass planet at 200 AU.
The acceleration method rules out the presence of a distant companion (closer than 300-400 AU).

Yes,
It was an impressive launch, (viewed through Nasa TV).
i even managed to grab a few fuzzy shots of the lift-off as well…

Any one got a better link/photo of that pipe sticking out?


Seemingly the spacecraft is currently located near Mu Andromeda about 3 degrees from M31 so it might be worth someone snapping that...

Hum,
The word on the street says that there is already an asteroid called (10386) Romulus....

List of Asteroids (180Kb)

Better image than the link given

Hum,
There is also the complication of `coincidence`; with trying to tie in impacts with volcanism.
For example, the chances that asteroid impacts and huge bouts of volcanism coincide randomly to cause mass extinctions, is greater than previously imagined.

I believe that UK researchers conducted statistical tests to determine the probability of such catastrophic events happening at the same time in Earth history.
And they found massive releases of lava and space collisions should have overlapped three times in the last 300 million years. They found the probability of this happening at least once over a period of 300 million years was 57%.
Once the researchers reduced the size of the impact slightly, the probabilities increased sharply.
For craters exceeding 100km, the probability of at least three co-occurrences between flood basalts and impacts was 46%. For craters exceeding 60km, the probability of three or more was 97%!

Although the dates of the proposed impacts are ten times older, the probability that the Pilbara impacts and the volcanic eruptions were coincidences are probably equally high.

But having said that, it would be fair to say that any impact will transfer a tremendous amount of energy to the Earth, which if it were still in the process of `forming` would lead to increased volcanism.

For me, the jury is still out on this one….

The launch window is between 11:54 to 13:39 GMT, Wednesday.
If the launch is postponed, additional launch windows open daily at different times each morning through August.

The Asteroid 99942 Aphophis (2004 MN4) makes it closest approach to Earth (0.268 AU) on 8th August.

Those in the know will understand that it is worth observing.

"The Pilbara Craton

in Western Australia has a domainal architecture, which has been interpreted to reflect a history of accretion. The Tabba Tabba Shear Zone is the major division between the East and West Pilbara blocks: this is based on significant differences in the tectono-thermal histories of the bordering terranes.

New laser ablation U-Pb zircon geochronological data, coupled with trace element data for the same core parts of the sampled mineral grains indicate a range of magmatic crystallization ages for representative igneous rocks emplaced before, during or after shearing.

The Tabba Tabba Shear Zone currently forms the eastern bounding fault of the Mallina Basin. The last major activity in the structure occurred during a major phase of oblique sinistral movement, corresponding to closure of the Mallina Basin. Ages of late syn-kinematic granitic intrusions indicate that this occurred at about 2940 Ma.

These unique locations have kept the formations from experiencing the depths that metamorphose rocks, obscuring their original sedimentary and volcanic features. "

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