HouseofMike

NASA plans to send a two-tonne probe crashing into a crater on the moon in hopes of discovering if it harbours water that could be used for manned missions, the US space agency said on Monday.

The $US73 million ($NZ120 million) probe, to be built by Northrop Grumman Corporation, is set to be launched in 2008 aboard a rocket also carrying a sophisticated lunar mapper.

“We’re going to learn a lot from this,” said program manager Dan Andrews of NASA’s Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California. “It’s going to give us a real definitive understanding of what we have up there.”

NASA astronauts visited the moon during the late 1960s and early 1970s under the Apollo program but have not returned.

In the aftermath of the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster, US President George W Bush instructed NASA to retire the shuttle fleet in 2010 and return humans to the moon by 2020 and then aim for Mars.

First, though, NASA plans a series of robotic precursor missions including the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, which will plough into the crater, and the mapper, called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

When LCROSS strikes the crater, it is expected to create a hole 5 metres (16 feet) deep and send up a 998,000 kilogram (2.2 million-pound) plume of debris for sensors and cameras stationed on a second spacecraft to monitor.

Dozens of ground-based telescopes, as well as possibly space observatories, such as the Hubble telescope, will be trained on the plume as well.

A monitoring satellite that is part of LCROSS, but separate from the reconnaissance orbiter, will then fly through the plume to collect and relay data back to Earth. It will have just 15 minutes before it too crashes into the moon, sending up a second, smaller plume for additional studies.

Two previous missions, the military’s Clementine spacecraft and NASA’s Lunar Prospector, determined the moon’s south pole is particularly rich in hydrogen, which scientists suspect is bound with oxygen to form water.

But there are other theories to explain the hydrogen readings as well.

“What this mission buys us is an early attempt to get to know what the resources are,” said Scott Horowitz, head of NASA’s lunar exploration program. “We know for sure that for human exploration to succeed we’re going to have to eventually live off the land.”

Water ice could be used to make oxygen for astronauts to breathe, as well as an oxidiser for rocket fuel.

The new guy made me post this.

A member of the Russian State Duma has blamed computer games and the Internet for the rise in violent crime in Russia, especially for the sharp surge in racist attacks and killings.

The Rosbalt news agency quoted Alexander Gurov, a member of the parliamentary security commission as saying that the Russian crime rate has risen to become the highest in the world, with 21 murders per 100 thousand population committed in 2005.

“The spread of violence into all the pores of social life is evident,” Gurov said. “The Internet is awash with violence and computer games have gangsters and killers, Nazis and Japanese militarists as main characters,” he said.

The MP said that the spread of such information technologies was one of the causes of the rise of nationalist and extremist tendencies in Russian society.

“In Russia, only games where the Nazis always lose should be available, but so far the opposite is happening,” Gurov said.

Yes, if only the games had Nazis losing all the time then the murder rate would be lower. Could it possibly be that people playing these video games are well, too busy playing games to kill anyone? Especially if they are playing a game like Civilization 4. Russia’s social problems run much deeper than video games.

Season 5 Episode 4

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - A controversial Texas program to send undercover agents into bars to arrest drunks has been halted after a firestorm of protest from the public.

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission has “temporarily suspended” what it called “Operation Last Call” even though it still believes it was worthwhile, commission spokeswoman Carolyn Beck said on Thursday.

“We understand that everything has room for improvement, this included,” she said.

She said most of those arrested in the sting operations had been “dangerously drunk” and might have tried to drive if TABC agents had not busted them.

The TABC has launched an internal investigation of Operation Last Call and a Texas Legislature committee will hold hearings on the program on Monday.

The TABC announced the program in late August but it received little attention at the time.

But recent media reports that drunks were being arrested in bars provoked both ridicule and anger around the world and, perhaps more importantly, complaints from hotels, restaurants and bars in Texas who said it could hurt business.

The program drew support from groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

The Houston Chronicle found that 1,740 people across the state had been arrested for public intoxication in Operation Last Call.

It seems the media has brought some common sense to the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.

“most of those arrested in the sting operations had been “dangerously drunk” and might have tried to drive if TABC agents had not busted them.”

Most? Might? So arrest all the legally drunk people because some might want to drive? How insane is that? What if they have a designated driver, was going to walk, or catch a cab?
Why not just hang out in the parking lot and test individuals that get in the drivers seat of a vehicle? Doesn’t that make more sense then lurking about in the bar?