NEOShield project

NEOShield is a new project to defend Earth from Near Earth Objects (NEO). This project has been set up to assess the best way to remove any threats by any interplanetary objects such as asteroids. This project is being lead by the Institute of Planetary Research in Germany.

Approximately once a year an asteroid the size of a car enters our atmosphere, but this burns up as it falls through our atmosphere, causing stunning fireballs in the sky. Every 2000 years an asteroid the size of a football field, this asteroid is wouldn't completely burn up in our atmosphere and it will cause a lot of damage to the local area.

They are going to consider several techniques to lessen the effects of an asteroid impact. A few of them are:

KINETIC IMPACTOR:
This involves a spacecraft that would, not exactly collide with it but change the velocity of the asteroid, such that the asteroid would "arrive early" or "arrive late" therefore causing it to miss the earth.

GRAVITY TRACTOR:
This proposition includes positioning a craft close to the asteroid and then using ion thrusters to keep them from colliding because of the gravitational pull between them. And then, scientists are predicting that because of the gravitational attraction between them the spacecraft will be able to "tow" the asteroid out of its trajectory with Earth.

BLAST DEFLECTION:
This is the classic suggestion for stopping an asteroid collision, this consists of placing an explosive of sorts, usually nuclear, close to or on the surface of an asteroid, the hope is that the explosion would cause it to be deflected away from earth or to be broken in to smaller pieces that burn up in our atmosphere.

This project, in the long term, will be helpful to the existence of humans and will save millions of pounds in damages.

SOPA Issue

Recently there is a big issue to do with SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). Several companies are supporting this act, such as Nike, Viacom and Pfizer. However there are several opposing it too, such as Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia.... and the list goes on.

As you can tell, some of the biggest online companies are opposing this act. You may have noticed that most of the supporting companies are product based, this is probably to stop people selling counterfeit goods over the internet.

Companies like Google, Yahoo! and Wikipedia are opposing it because they deal with information which will be restricted if SOPA is inforced. Wikipedia will lose thousands of pages, Google will have to restrict searches, and so will Yahoo! Google, the largest search engine in the world, will be restricted and will only show us certain results instead of all the possiblities.

Another issue with SOPA is that if they closed down one illegal site another 5 will be opened and so it will be pointless to close them down in the first place, that just how the internet works. However because of the restrictions on search engines, they will be harder to find but they will still exist.

In conclusion, I think that SOPA will not make much of a difference except for make these illegal file sharing websites less obvious however they will still be working just as well and still selling and sharing products and files illegally.

Pictures of Our Universe

Mystic Mountain
























 Supernova Remnant (N 63A)

Light Echo from the star V 838


























 Spiral galaxy M74

 Star Cluster NGC 602

The Ant Nebula (MZ 3)





















 
 The Trifid Nebula

Glowing Gases in the Swan Nebula






















Filaments in the Crab Nebula

Bug Nebula (NGC 6302)

Photos thanks to NASA and the Hubble Telescope Project

Introduction

Hey!! this is my blog, as you can see on my profile, I am 17 and have a keen interest in Entertainment media, Science and Photography + Technology ( E.S.P ) once i have completed my A-levels I am hoping to go into Astrophysics or Pharmacy. Here is a quick introduction to the topics that I am going to cover in this blog:

Entertainment media: I will be posting latest music and classic songs, and some covers and so on .... Also i will be posting about movies, recent releases, or that i have recently watched and amazing classics. I will also be talking fictional novels and maybe some science papers.

Science: I will be commenting about scientific theories, my opinion and thoughts on several topics ranging from the images from the Planck space telescope to the hunt for the Higgs Boson particle and many other topics.

Photography + Technology: Photography is one of my favourite hobbies and I will be posting about new cameras their pros and cons and also new lenses and what they are good for and not good for, just to let you know I'm a Canon person and so will probably not be commenting about any other make of SLR :-) Sorry to disappoint Nikon people

Also i will be talking about the latest gadgets gizmos, games and  and whether or not that they are worthwhile or just another gimmick.


This is my very first blog post if you have any comments or recommendations then please comment. Thanks for reading guys!