Archives News: novembre 2005

Such a title would have been immediately considered as science-fiction some years ago, but knowledge and technology rapidly evolve. Edward T. Lu & Stanley G. Love have written a paper where they expose a method to get rid of nasty asteroids:

We present a concept for a spacecraft that can controllably alter the trajectory of an Earth threatening asteroid using gravity as a towline. The spacecraft hovers near the asteroid with thrusters angled outward so the exhaust does not impinge on the surface. This deflection method is insensitive to the structure, surface properties, and rotation state of the asteroid.

Read this paper (pdf - to be published in Nature).

Oh and the asteroid shown in the image below is 25143 Itokawa as seen from Hayabusa, a japanese spacecraft launched in may of 2003 that is supposed to collect a sample of material from this asteroid and bring it back to Earth for analysis. On november 7, Hayabusa was 7.5 km from Itokawa. You can follow almost in real time the state of the mission on this page.

25143 Itokawa on wikipedia
Hayabusa on wikipedia
Hayabusa arrived at Itokawa - sept. 14th, 2005 (pdf)
Proximity operations + beautiful pictures of the asteroid

pifpafteam is the name of a ski / snowboard team I am part of, and is the extreme sports division of Blumaise.org
After one year and a half of existence, pifpafteam website has now its own domain name : www.pifpafteam.org

The website was created on the 29th of march, 2004.
31 GigaBytes of data have been transfered since the very beginning, the site got 88805 hits, and 105 people added it to their favorites. It is not enormous but since there are something like 10 members, I think it's pretty reasonable.

Oh, and by the way, a new teaser of the upcoming movie pifpafteam in Slovenia is available on the homepage. Movie is scheduled to hit theatres at the end of the month.

And I thought it was the perfect moment to link the source of the name of this team, a text to speech wav file sent by Pistols to me some years ago... Listen to it!

As seen on slashdot, an article talking about singing mice. This post can be related to previous one, but is not directly linked. It seems that male mice really sing in the presence of females. The sounds it produces almost look like some birds' songs, but are in the ultrasonic range. This article is quite long and full of information.

Read the full article
Listen to those recorded sounds!