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SEOUL, South Korea  - South Korea’s space program suffered a blow Tuesday after a satellite launched from its first space rocket failed to reach proper orbit, a science official said.

“All aspects of the launch were normal, but the satellite exceeded its planned orbit and reached an altitude of 360 kilometers,” said Ahn Byung-man, the minister of science and technology. The satellite should have separated at about 302 kilometers, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

The cause of the failure was not immediately known. Korean experts were working with Russian scientists, who provided the technology for launch, to determine the reason, Ahn said.

The Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1 lifted off from the Naro Space Center on the southern coast about 5 p.m. (4 a.m. ET) Tuesday.

A series of delays had kept the rocket and its satellite payload earthbound for nearly four years, including a technical glitch that halted last week’s countdown less than eight minutes before blastoff.

South Korea spent 502 billion won (US $402 million) on the rocket, which is part of an ambitious plan to jump-start the country’s space program, Yonhap reported.
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Officials plan another rocket launch in April. The long-term goal is to create an unmanned space probe that can reach the moon by 2025, the agency reported.

The rocket was originally scheduled to be launched in late 2005, before being pushed back to October 2007 and then 2008 due to “administrative and diplomatic reasons,” Yonhap reported.

Russia had sent 245 rockets with payloads into orbit successfully since 1999, compared with America’s 218, according to data from Futron, a technology consultancy. China now surpasses Europe as a base for spacecraft launches, while India and Japan send up a few every year. Israel has also put two rockets into space.

ufo bbc

A former head of the armed forces told the defence secretary a UFO claim known as Britain’s Roswell could be a “banana skin”, newly released files show.

In 1985 Lord Hill-Norton wrote to Michael Heseltine about the “Rendlesham incident” in 1980, when US airmen in Suffolk said they saw strange lights.

He said an authorised aircraft may have entered and left UK airspace.

In 2003, an ex-US security policeman said he and another airman had shone patrol car lights as a prank.

The case is among the latest MoD files on UFOs released by the National Archives.

BBC news

NASA plans to bomb the moon’s south pole with an unmanned spacecraft launched in October 2008, tossing up a cloud of lunar debris that will be visible to Earth-based observatories, the space agency announced Monday.

A satellite will fly through the 30-to-40-mile-high dust plume to search for evidence of water ice left by comets that slammed into the moon billions of years ago.

The crash vehicle, called an impactor, and observational instruments will be added to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Already slated for launch, the orbiter will map the moon’s surface in unprecedented detail, taking a fresh look at the rugged south and north pole terrain to assist with the selection of landing sites for human expeditions.

The $600 million plan outlined on Monday represents an early milestone in the strategy outlined by President Bush two years ago to send astronauts back to the moon to prepare for the eventual human exploration of Mars.

How does a liquid mirror telescope work?

Response #: 1 of 1
Author: samuel p bowen
The simplest idea is to rotate a liquid about the central axis and let its
shape change under the rotation. This can give you a shape that could focus
a light ray. The surface would be clean and have no impurities.

What do astronomers use to figure out if an object is a star, planet,
asteroid or comet?

Response #: 1 of 1
Author: asmith
If you just look at an object in the sky once, it could be hard to tell
anything much about them (although astronomers do have techniques called
“spectroscopy” that tell something about what an object is made of). But if
you watch the object for a while, you can see where it is going, trace out
its orbit, see what influence it has on its neighbors, etc., which tells you
much about it: stars hardly move at all; planets move in pretty ordinary
close-to-circular orbits about the sun, while other things can be seen to
orbit around them (which then tells us how massive those planets are) and
asteroids tend to be clustered in the asteroid belt or else to have kind of
elongated orbits, and comets have really wild orbits, and in particular tend
to get close to the sun where they flare up and get bright every once in a while.

What is the distance between the center of the Milky Way and our Sun?

Response #: 1 of 1
Author: hawley
The Milky Way has a radius of about 15 kpc, and the Sun is about 10 kpc from
the center. A “kpc” is a kilo-parsec. One parsec is 3.26 light years or
3.086 x 10^18 cm. I leave the awesome mathematical challenge of converting
to miles (or kilometers) as an exercise for the reader.

Does the Sun have any motion in respect to our solar system, or is it
completely stationary (no spin, etc.) with all of the other planets orbiting
around it?

Response #: 1 of 2
Author: hawley
The Sun not only spins on its axis but also travels around the center of our
galaxy in a big orbit. And our galaxy is moving relative to other galaxies.
Basically, everything is moving.

Response #: 2 of 2
Author: rcwinther
If we neglect the motion of our solar system as a whole, then all of the
bodies in the solar system revolve around the center of mass of the solar
system. The center of mass is an imaginary point that is determined by a
sort of averaging over the whole. The solar system’s center of mass lies
deep within the Sun (because the Sun contains the vast majority of the solar
system’s mass) but not at its center. Hence, the Sun also revolves about
this point; we say that it wobbles (in our case, almost entirely due to
Jupiter’s pull on the Sun). At the moment, looking for this sort of wobble
in other stars is our best bet for inferring the existence of planetary
systems around those stars.

More here : http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/astron98.htm