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SpaceX and Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk said recently that the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon-landing mission was an “anomalous situation.” What Happened: “The fact that we were able to go to the Moon in '69 was such an anomalous situation, it was like reaching into the future and bringing the technology forward,” said Musk on the "Full Send" podcast. The landings, which saw Neil Armstrong become the first human to step on the lunar surface, were “not the natural pace of technology development,” according to the SpaceX founder. “It’s just that the United States just collectively decided that this...

Open records requests reveal 64 of 66 Georgia counties have the same unsolved 'Tennessee Error' that caused seven scanners to miscount hundreds of ballots in Williamson County. In a podcast episode released last week Thursday, David Cross and Kevin Moncla of the Election Oversight Group reveal that open records request from 64 of 66 Georgia counties show the same security error “QR code signature mismatch” and warning message “Ballot format or id is unrecognizable” that caused seven scanners to miscount hundreds of ballots in Williamson County, Tennessee. The "Tennessee Error" is an “anomaly” discovered on Dominion’s Image Cast Precinct (ICP)...

The South Atlantic Anomaly is a vast expanse of reduced magnetic intensity in Earth's magnetic field, extending all the way from South America to southwest Africa. Since our planet's magnetic field acts as a kind of shield – protecting Earth from solar winds and cosmic radiation, in addition to determining the location of the magnetic poles – any reduction in its strength is an important event we need to monitor closely, as these changes could ultimately have significant implications for our planet. ...[T]here's nothing to be alarmed about. The ESA notes that the most significant effects right now are largely...

Boeing's Starliner astronaut taxi suffered an anomaly today (Dec. 20) during its flight to the International Space Station during the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) mission. About 90 minutes after blastoff, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said on Twitter that the capsule will not be able to reach the space station because it burned too much fuel during the anomaly. The Atlas V rocket from United Launch Alliance successfully launched from Space Launch Complex 41 here at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 6:36 a.m. EST (1136 GMT) as planned. But, as of about an hour after launch, the mission...

Luxembourg-based Intelsat reports that its Intelsat 29E satellite (IS-29E) is now a total loss, after having reported earlier that the spacecraft suffered an anomaly. Late on April 7, the Intelsat 29e propulsion system experienced damage that caused a leak of the propellant on board the satellite, resulting in a service disruption to customers.. That event caused a service outage on the Intelsat 29e satellite that affected maritime, aeronautical and wireless-operator customers in the Latin America, Caribbean and North Atlantic regions. While working to recover the satellite, a second anomaly occurred, after which all efforts to recover the satellite were unsuccessful,...

According to Florida Today, large plumes of smoke were seen emanating from the area, indicating something had gone wrong. There were no injuries caused by the anomaly, which is now under control, according to officials with the 45th Space Wing based at the Air Force station. SpaceX plans to use its Crew Dragon capsule to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The capsule successfully flew for the first time in March. During the uncrewed mission, the spacecraft docked itself with the space station and then returned to Earth, splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean. That first...

Only a week before its expected meeting with Kuiper Belt object (KBO) Ultima Thule on New Year's Day, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has not been able to detect the predictable and consistent variations in reflectivity — or ‘light curve' in the jargon of astronomers — that accompany all celestial objects in orbit near a bright star. "It's really a puzzle," agreed Alan Stern, NASA's New Horizons principal investigator, cited by Gizmodo. Southwest Research Institute mission scientist Marc Buie suggested that the rotational point of Ultima Thule could currently be aligned directly toward the NASA spacecraft as it approaches. From that...

Rep. Louis Gohmert, a member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, said during a hearing Thursday that a government watchdog found that nearly all of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails were sent to a foreign entity. The FBI, specifically Strzok, did not follow-up. And, the foreign entity wasn’t Russia. The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) in 2016 Charles McCullough III found an “anomaly on Hillary Clinton’s emails going through their private server, and when they had done the forensic analysis, they found that her emails, every single one except four, over 30,000, were going to an address...

A member of the House Committee on the Judiciary said during a hearing Thursday that a government watchdog found that nearly all of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails were sent to a foreign entity and that the FBI didn’t follow-up on that finding.The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) found an “anomaly on Hillary Clinton’s emails going through their private server, and when they had done the forensic analysis, they found that her emails, every single one except four, over 30,000, were going to an address that was not on the distribution list,” Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas...

Did a Planetary Society citizen scientist help find one of Earth’s biggest impact craters? About 66 million years ago, a 10-kilometer-wide hunk of rock smashed into Earth near what is now Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.The impact created a global dust cloud that snuffed out the sunlight, leading to the demise of 80 percent of Earth's plants and animals—including most of the dinosaurs. A 200-kilometer-wide crater buried near the city of Chicxulub is all that's left. It's ground zero for one of the world's most notable extinction events.But throughout Earth's history, there have actually been five major extinction events. The largest of...

Scientists believe a massive object that could change our understanding of history is hidden beneath the Antarctic ice. The huge and mysterious “anomaly” is thought to be lurking beneath the frozen wastes of an area called Wilkes Land. The area is 151 miles across and has a minimum depth of about 2,700 feet. Some researchers believe it is the remains of a truly massive asteroid more than twice the size of the Chicxulub space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs. If this explanation is true, it could mean this killer asteroid caused the Permian-Triassic extinction event, which killed 96 percent...

Attacked?

Mother's Day is Sunday. Traditionally, it is a day to honor and respect all that mothers do and sacrifice for the sake of their children. And while this day is important, special, and necessary, we can't help but wonder what our country would be like if we celebrated mothers every day. If mothers and babies were held in the highest regard, as they should be, each and every day of the year, think about the lives that could be spared. Think about the heartache that would not come about because a mother chose to abort her child. That would truly...

In this era of tight airport security, the Transportation Safety Administration typically will not allow a passenger to board an airplane if the name printed on the ticket differs from the way it appears on government-issued identification. Now that the White House has released President Obama's purported long-form birth certificate, a question arises as to why the name on that document does not match the name on his State Department passport. This matched how his name was listed on the short-form Certification of Live Birth released during the 2008 presidential campaign, as first presented by DailyKos.com June 12, 2008: Below...

Ten years ago, NASA researchers discovered that the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft had fallen slightly behind course during their 35-year journeys to the outer reaches of the solar system. In what has become known as the Pioneer anomaly, which was the subject of one of the talks this weekend at the American Physical Society here in St. Louis, nobody knows for sure why it happened. It probably stemmed from leaking gas or heat. But there's also the possibility, however remote, that gravity doesn't behave the way we expect. Until recently, researchers haven't had the data to distinguish the different...

When scientists send their spacecraft across the universe, they save fuel by performing “slingshot fly-bys”. This is where, rather than firing up the thrusters, the craft changes its trajectory by harnessing the enormous gravitational pull of a planet. However, this trick has had an unexpected side-effect: it seems to produce a change in speed that no one, since it was first discovered in the early 1990's, can account for. Experts are intrigued by the fact that while the acceleration is tiny and has no significant effect on NASA missions, it holds great interest because no explanation based on conventional physics...

UAH Global Temperature Anomaly for June 09 ~ ZERO There was a lot of speculation last year that our global temperature would recover (increase) from the huge drops last spring. While there has been some recovery, the overall global temperature trend since 1999 has been the subject of much debate. What is not debatable is that the current global temperature anomaly, as determined by a leading authority on global satellite temperature measurements, says we have no departure from “normal” this month. Given the U.S. Senate is about to vote upon the most complex and costly plan to regulate greenhouse gases,...

Some interesting observation from the county votes in North Carolina.

Pioneer spacecraft mystery may be laid to rest 14:30 15 April 2008 NewScientist.com news service Valerie Jamieson, St Louis What is making NASA's twin Pioneer spacecraft mysteriously drift off course, apparently defying the laws of physics? A rigorous new analysis suggests ordinary heat emission can at least partly explain the wayward probes' strange trajectories.Pioneer 10 and 11 were launched in the early 1970s and explored the outer solar system. But in 1980, mission scientists noticed that the spacecraft have unexpectedly drifted off course.Both spacecraft have been pulled a little harder than expected towards the sun, and since their launch, they...

Computer sleuths try to crack Pioneer anomaly 19:24 02 March 2007 NewScientist.com news service Stuart Clark Because the tracking system for the Pioneer probes changed so much since their launches in the early 1970s, researchers have to look at each data file individually to put them in the same format (Image: NASA/ARC) Scientists and engineers remain on course in their efforts to determine what caused the twin Pioneer spacecraft to apparently drift off course by hundreds of thousands of kilometres during their three-decade missions. Within a year, they expect to be able to decide whether this drift was caused by...