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Not a lot. However, they've been in free fall around the Sun for as much as 4.5B years. The pile of rubble will pick up the odd grain of sand, chunk of ice or small piece of gravel every now and then as it orbits; and, it will stick together and grow. Or it will fly apart as was evidenced by Hubble sees asteroid breakup

They will shortly, there was a planned launch last month but it has been pushed back for various reasons. http://www.space.com/25822-spa...

The fact they have this thing vertical at well below terminal velocity and apparently not spinning means the rest is just details. Controlling it down from supersonic is the hard part. They have made many successful landings with grasshopper from a vertical, low speed non spinning state.

Yeah, at this point, we'll NEVER learn ANYTHING about Mars!

http://www.space.com/12404-mar...

Thanks, Obama!

This is 100% irrelevant to the point that was being made: long ago Obama publicly directed NASA to cease any significant efforts toward manned missions to Mars. (Which was the subject under discussion here: human exploration.)

Yes, thanks, Obama! Indeed. /sarcasm

Yeah, at this point, we'll NEVER learn ANYTHING about Mars!

http://www.space.com/12404-mar...

Thanks, Obama!

The US system is known as Navstar GPS. See http://www.space.com/19794-nav...

"GPS" _is_ generic

Anyone who has ever looked at the night sky might goto H-A and create an account.The site has much info. I saw the Shuttle chasing the ISS in orbit over my home, many satts like TRMM and China's Tiangong !, spy satts like the Lacrosse series passing by. Most of what can be seen is space junk, rocket bodies and such, some have been in orbit for twenty years. The X37B, seen that too. I was at work and saw Shuttle Columbia on it's fateful re-entry.... RIP brave souls. http://www.heavens-above.com/m... http://www.space.com/25275-x37...

In other news:

NASA May Put Greenhouse on Mars in 2021
http://www.space.com/25767-nas...

Aw, man, STFU, and knock it off with the partisanship.

You want to play that way? OK, fine.

How about your illustrious leader, installing a black guy in as NASA chief, and telling him that the "foremost" goal of NASA is NOT science, is NOT space flight, but is, literally, to make Muslims feel better.

"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering,

http://www.space.com/8725-nasa...

Seems to me your boy Obama is doing more damage today to NASA than any Republican.

So, in conclusion, STFU.

I bet the energy companies could make tons of money from the large methane lakes on Saturn's moon, Titan.

http://www.space.com/8556-larg...

So what?

Hosting the Olympics is estimated to have cost Russia $51 billion.
Building a Moon Colony is estimated to cost $35 billion with an extra cost of $7.35 billion/year to keep it running.
The cost of annexing Crimea have been estimated to be in the ballpark of $5 billion, and as the statement from Alfa Bank goes “For Russia’s budget this is not a big deal, Even if you spend $5 billion or $10 billion, this is not money that dramatically changes things.”

Russia has already shown that it is willing to spend the money needed to build a permanent Moon Base on other prestige projects.
Sure, a moon base is a costly project without clear ROI, but it won't be the worst offender in the Russian economy.

Erm no, what you are seeing is solar weather http://www.space.com/23934-wea..., which drives el ninos and la ninas. Currently we are at a solar low, which is really rather worrying, because we are still not dropping below averages hence we are riding a stretching climate rubber band and the swing back as we enter solar highs could be quite extreme (which is why the more wide spread government concern). Years of hidden still above average increases, to rudely and suddenly appear in a single weather cycle as we hit solar activity highs. Of course the polluters will try to blame everything on the sun and still do nothing, at which point people will consider public trials for those spreading disinformation to prop up fossil fuel resource values.

We will see a decade's worth of rises hidden by low solar activity all appear in the one year and we shift to solar highs, well above the ability of the oceans to absorb and mitigate at depth. So a real threat of the big methane burp (melting permafrost and flood debris), sudden major ice melt and significant drop in planetary albedo, a real big short term change which will result in short term catastrophic climate conditions, until it is absorbed in the oceans and the excess methane breaks down. How bad? Well it is short term stuff, so it depends upon how rapid the solar activity increase is, current volcanic conditions and actual weather cycles at the time, which are all different to long term climate averages. Likely outlook, pretty bloody grim but it will stabilise out given time and return to global warming change averages.

And NASA is too busy with "Muslim Outreach" to bother with actual space missions.

That is so old of a comment that it isn't relevant anyway. Can you name any current "Muslim outreach" efforts?

Other than some space tourism stuff from Dubai trying to buy American launch services and perhaps some countries in the Middle East trying to put up some communications satellites, I can't think of anything that might even remotely qualify for what you are talking about here. I certainly don't see any specific policy initiatives or anything with a congressional line item that targets Muslim countries.

Senators are too busy designing pork barrels to design rockets.

And NASA is too busy with "Muslim Outreach" to bother with actual space missions.

Click through some of the articles above and you'll discover that for the one emergency EVA they've done since this incident they installed snorkels, although they actually go down towards the midriff. They also installed an absorbent pad in the back of the helmet. Notably this was all MacGyvered up from equipment they had on-board.

Linky: http://www.space.com/24027-nas...

I don't think two orders of magnitude is possible

If you want to see what the actual guy who designed the Falcon 9 thinks of the reduction of launch costs, I'd suggest at least reading some of his thoughts before pulling up random numbers of your own.

The long term goal of SpaceX is to start selling Falcon 9 flights for about $20-$30 million with a reusable 1st stage and if they can get the 2nd stage to become reusable they want to get it down to about $5 million per flight... with a hoped-for goal to drop that down to perhaps as low as $1 million. In other conversations, Elon Musk has suggested he might even get the cost of a round-trip flight to Mars down to about $500k per person.

In other words, the two orders of magnitude is what SpaceX is trying for and they have rocket scientists who have crunched the numbers to see if it is possible. That is certainly not something calculated on the back of a bar napkin but somebody who is building these rockets and has put something into space.

A terrible article about hydrogen reduction reactors and mining the moon from 5 years ago.

I interned at NASA (GSFC) about a decade ago where I worked on a computer vision / robotics project. However, during the course of the internship, I was exposed to other teams, one of which was working on studies of lunar regolith and its viability as a water ore. I'm really not a chemistry guy, so most of what I heard went over my head, but the gist of what I heard was that they weren't sure which [of many] approaches would be most effective/efficient (highly dependent on location as well, which makes sense even if you just think about mining on Earth). Wish I had some citations to contribute.

I think the best option would be a merging of a rover and a 3d printer that can replicate itself.

Right now I think the sticking point is the IC's, entirely possibly other parts as well.

The moon was ejected from the earth, so all the elements that are here are there as well.

http://www.space.com/23031-moo...

If they can get a 3d printer to make all the materials including IC's they got a shot at it.

Just remember the simple concept of doubling a penny every day for a month.

Good point - though that's not the only reason... http://www.space.com/13247-moo...

This is why you're seeing this laser today. This is your "use case."

Only an extremely powerful and fast laser can defend against a hypersonic missile. This laser is a defensive weapon, created to counter the Chinese hypersonic threat, although no one is saying it specifically.

> I'm rather certain, from internal logic, that you don't have a citation for that.

I'm rather certain you are an asshole.

"NASA Chief Bolden's Muslim Remark to Al-Jazeera Causes Stir"

http://www.space.com/8725-nasa...

>I'd love to see what the surface of Venus looks like.
http://www.space.com/18551-ven...

We've had I think several probes that got deep enough to photograph the surface, even if they didn't last long.

the most inhospitable places on earth are like paradise compared to mars.

I dunno, Mars was pretty balmy compared to Chicago the other day...

Did you stop to consider that it might be because Sun's Current Solar Activity Cycle Is Weakest in a Century?

All software ends up a bloated pile of cr@p eventually
UNLESS
You have policies in place to prevent it (like code reviews) as well as no quick fix's, rush jobs, or hacks.....
Yeah right! Never worked in a company like that Ever!
Maybe the guys who get to code stuff like satellites and Mars rovers get the luxury of time to get things right/perfect

Nevermind did a quick google.
Bug 1
Bug 2

It's funny, but the NSA actually has the best telescopes and has donated some of their old ones to NASA.

It would cost a lot more than the Apollo project to get a permanent self-sufficient base on the moon or mars, probably hundreds of times more, maybe thousands, especially is it has to be truly self-sufficient (no external supplies ever, no margin for error).

And a super-volcano is not going to wipe out the human race. Maybe 99% (mostly via starvation) but that still leaves millions. Same for a comet/asteroid strike, nuclear war, etc. (a super-virus might do it). As far as knowledge preservation, a lot could be done regarding that on Earth.

Have any sources for your estimate? Note that I already proposed spending 50 times the Apollo costs to set up a permanent self-sufficient Lunar base, while others have pegged the cost of a manned (though not self-sufficient) Lunar base at $35B (or 1/4 the cost of Apollo). I'm curious how you arrived at a figure that's 200 - 2000 times higher. The Mars costs are more nebulous since if we did build a lunar base and can find sufficient natural resources there or via asteroid mining, that would drop the cost of a Mars base dramatically so it's not out of line to expect that setting up the base on Mars is not dramatically more than the cost of setting up the Lunar base.

Perhaps 4 - 6 decades to get to the Moon and Mars is too optimistic without a clear and present threat to drive the project faster, but I don't think the cost estimates are out of line.

since Boeing showed these 2 years ago, I'm sure the retrofit is ready by now. The Air Force will never give up their backdoor access to space. This picture here is about all I can find...but if they drew out plans like that then the Air Force probably has it built already.

Get a clue, its not just the US/NSA that does this. They are just the ones that are getting beat up in the press.

Yep, it's too bad the NSA doesn't actually protect national security, and is instead just ensuring all the other state sponsored enemy spies can get at more info than a contractor like Snowed did.

Imagine what it would be like if the government wasn't allowed any secrets or wiretaps. Our public policy would be the same policy we actually furthered around the world -- We wouldn't have to worry about diplomats making secret arms deals behind our backs; If such things were actually required to save lives then we'd understand the circumstance. The only reason we can't trust their actions is because secrets mask their motives, even when they are on the up and up.

We have amazing spy satellites launched via the biggest rockets in the world already. They would simply have more funds to split with NASA and be more benefit to actual security, science, disasters relief, while ensuring no force can make a move against us without us knowing instantly. They could even map submarines from space with ground/water penetrating radar. Better space collaboration would ensure decommissioned tech helps the space exploration initiative. No spies can threaten a government without secrets.

If the NSA were actually protecting the national security of America then they could be tasked with finding all the backdoors in the hardware and software. No one could put backdoors in for fear the NSA would find out, publish it, and ruin their business. Today they stay silent and let the public purchase systems the NSA likely knows have been compromised by enemy spies -- This saves the NSA time: They can just use the existing backdoor instead of put their own in. If the NSA weren't allowed secrets, they'd be eliminating exploits instead of leveraging them and our hardware, firmware, and OS's would be more secure. Eventually other governments would have to start up their own programs of outing intentional exploits just to ensure their people they weren't compromising public security. In addition to the Space Race, we'd have a Privacy Race, where competition would be in building the most secure systems. Public and private sector security experts could be assisted with new tools to show where flaws lie. Security would be a selling point and methods of provable security would be devised (I have done so myself on small scales). Computers and programs have finite state, so provable security is not impossible: Instead of spying the data centers and supercomputers could be tasked with hardening all the hardware and software. People would buy the USA security endorsed systems with pride. We'd have less identity fraud -- one of the most prevalent crimes. Conspiracies could be silenced through truth not ignorance. If we outlawed government secrets and required scientific evidence that their programs were helpful not harmful then we could trust our governments more than any citizens ever could before.

Sadly, we're too primitive and politically oppressed to apply the simple Scientific Method to governance. None can have assured trust or security from prying eyes because we allow the government to have secrets. That the priority of secrets is valued above security by the spies is obvious and evidenced by the way they compromise security and do not inform the world that we are buying insecure products. They risk spies accessing more than Snowden ever dreamed due to the priority they place on secrecy over security in their digital spying programs. These secret programs aren't getting beat up nearly as bad as they should be in the p

I disagree because your statement is blatantly false. The NSA can not serve a useful purpose. Simple application of the mathematics of information disparity proves you can't prove your statement to the contrary. As a scientist, I don't believe things without evidence, especially not statements lacking disprovability.

You're aware Omnivore, Carnivore, ECHELON, and PRISM's room 641A existed before 9/11. They failed to prevent 9/11, and every terrorist attack since the 70's. The NIST helps secure our encryption systems. By what amazing feat of mental gymnastics do you arrive at the conclusion that a secret research group can be proven to be helping secure our communications? No, that's asinine. I require evidence. The government secrecy is directly opposed to both freedom and security.

Especially since we've got an army of hubble-esque telescopes zipping around the earth providing total global situation awareness. You don't need warrantless wiretaps with that kind of spy power.

Bonus, the NRO helps with natural disasters, weather, and space sciences. Defund, NSA, DHS, etc., spit the funding between NASA and the NRO. The folks benefiting from domestic spying could instead make their money selling space wares... Ah, but then they wouldn't be able to do insider trading quite so well at all.

You can't be serious, right? By what logical misstep do you propose we trust again a spy who has proven to be a double agent? The same goes for an OS compromised by malware, there is no "removal" of malware, you nuke it from orbit, because it's the only way to be sure.

They want to have their cake and eat it too. We should either have no privacy indoors & in our communication between indoor areas while having expectation to not be spied on outdoors, or have zero protection of privacy outdoors & assurances that our communications are not compromised. Look, if you want to spy on my conversations you can just stand next to me, or aim a laser microphone at my windows or glasses. You don't need to tap the coms lines because folks can buy a burner phone and install their own encrypted voice and text applications. It'll be to late to do anything by the time it's deciphered. The domestic spying and wiretaps only prevent legitimate use of the technology.

Unfortunately, information theory tells us we can not have assurances that our communications are not spied on unless we eliminate the secret spying operation. We have a chance to eliminate secrets and stand brave among the most powerful nations who have mutually assured nuclear peace, and against which no terrorist can pose a threat. Scaremongers would have you believe the terrorists are nothing to sneeze at, yet every year the flu claims SIX TIMES the lives as a 9/11 scale attack. Cars and Cheeseburgers are 400 times more deadly every year than 9/11. Even the most devastating of terrorist threats is not even a flesh wound. We need proportional protection: If you're so scared of 1/400th the threat a Happy Meal poses, then allocate 1/400th of the taxes we spend on heart disease and accident prevention to the NSA and DHS. We need no secrets. Without secrets no spy can harm us.

The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

- John F. Kennedy

As a rational human being: If you, Snowden or anyone would say that the NSA can serve a useful purpose then the burden of proof is on you to provide evidence to support your unproven claim. Don't forget to prove your hypothesis you will need to more significantly disprove the null hypo

All they need to do is drop an 'A'.

Been there, done that. Thus no expectation of privacy outdoors, I'm fine with that. It's the tapping of communications indoors and between indoor places that I have a problem with -- Since Omnivore, Carnivore, ECHELON, and PRISM's Room 641A existed before the NSA failed to prevent 9/11. So, the decades of NSA unconstitutional wiretap spying is demonstrably expensive and useless, while the other NRO spying advances space research, directly helps the military, and doesn't invade your home. I'll take NASA Johnson Style.

Hubble's mirror design changed to match the existing mirrors already deployed in spy satellites -- Aiming an army of Hubbles at earth? That's some awesome spying capability; No terrorists or enemies could make a significant move against us without us finding out immediately already thanks to space spying programs. And, when we launch more impressive satellites the old spy-sats can be donated to NASA and pointed into space, or sent to other planets.

Why not just hold a vote? I'm sure the citizens would be in favor of giving NASA all the funding allocated to the NSA and DHS since you're 4 times more likely to get hit by lightning than face terrorist attack... Every year: Heart Disease and Accidents kill four hundred times more people than a 9/11 scale attack, but we're not having a War on Cheeseburgers, or War on Automobiles. "Terrorist Threat", yeah, apparently NSA hasn't heard: They've convinced us to wear tinfoil hats despite the far more dangerous threat of lightning.

We need proportional protection. Cut the anti-terrorism budget for NSA, DHS, etc. to 1/6th the funding we have for anti-flu, since the flu kills six times more people than a 9/11 scale attack, every year. Give the funds to NASA, or the NRO if you're really scared of your own shadow. Problem solved.

FWIW the Z-1 prototype suit is designed to operate at 8.3 psi. Because the suit obviates an airlock, the ramp down and ramp up time needed to equalize pressure with a spacecraft can be incorporated into the spacewalk mission without having the astronaut sit around doing nothing.

Interestingly, this landing may affect NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer operation:

http://www.space.com/23675-china-moon-lander-trouble-nasa-ladee.html

I am ever thankful that when the new magic of the world of men, the LHC, was set loose, that the world did not fall into shadow, for there are deeper and darker pits than even those found in Moria.

Just wait; once we get the Slingatron built and working, we'll just toss all that garbage into the sun.

Er, well, towards it.

Becoming a star requires at a minimum many times the mass of jupiter. As small stars exist, there's therefore a likelihood that there are gas giants almost as big a the minimum to make a star.

A quick google seems to suggest that's 8% the size of the son

As Jupiter is 0.1% size the son, 11x the size of jupiter doesn't seem that big. We should be able to find "planets" up to almost 80x larger

http://www.space.com/21420-smallest-star-size-red-dwarf.html http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=jupiter%20mass%20compared%20to%20sun&t=crmtb01

Those are objects known as Brown Dwarfs which would put them at a different category than Jovian planet. I believe that the minimum mass to establish fusion is something on the order of one tenth solar mass. Brown Dwarves radiate Infared radiation due to heat from residual gravitational collapse. Presumably the standard is considerably higher than Jupiter which also radiates more heat than it absorbs from the Sun.

Becoming a star requires at a minimum many times the mass of jupiter. As small stars exist, there's therefore a likelihood that there are gas giants almost as big a the minimum to make a star.

A quick google seems to suggest that's 8% the size of the son

As Jupiter is 0.1% size the son, 11x the size of jupiter doesn't seem that big. We should be able to find "planets" up to almost 80x larger

http://www.space.com/21420-smallest-star-size-red-dwarf.html
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=jupiter%20mass%20compared%20to%20sun&t=crmtb01

http://www.space.com/23801-china-moon-rover-lunar-landing-history.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/world/asia/china-prepares-to-launch-moon-rover-mission.html

You smell like a Young Republican! Go David Duke, right?

no water

Not exactly. Aside from the huge amount of water ice that can be found in the always-dark craters near the poles, there's also the regolith itself. NASA plans to mine the regolith for water.

Half the reason why a lunar space elevator makes sense is because of the tremendous value of having a source of water (and consequently hydrogen and oxygen for fuel/oxidizer) in a shallow gravity well.

An eyesore to ruin the moon with ads that you can't avoid and can be seen by everyone on Earth and can't be removed because...they own it.

You have no idea how frickin' BIG the Moon is, do you?

The amount of material and energy required to make something on it big enough to be visible from Earth would be way too prohibitive.

Here: let me help you a bit...

But I'm too lazy for TFA

Don't bother, it's garbage. Linux has nothing to do with it, it isn't affecting C&C (NASA says it's simply a nuisance) and TFA got every single thing wrong. It's a worm, not a virus. They don't know how it got there, there are both Linux and Windows laptops up there and NASA says they have to check all the Windows (not Linux since it's a Windows worm) laptops for it.

From now on I'm checking closer before voting stories up. Any story posted by DavidGilbert99 gets downvoted by me. David Gilbert, article author and submitter, is a troll. ibTimes should fire him, that article is pure unadulterated bullshit, see here.

TFA was bad, I read it. I wish I'd read it before I voted in the firehose :(

Sorry, guys. That one line "As these systems are based on Linux, they are open to infection" discredits the author and the rest of the article. Since Windows viruses like the Stuxnet virus they say infected the station, Linux has nothing to do with it.

Wondering if it even happened I googled. space.com:

A virus designed to swipe passwords from online gamers has inexplicably popped up in some laptop computers aboard the International Space Station.

The low-risk virus was detected on July 25, but did not infect the space station?s command and control computers and poses no threat to the orbiting laboratory, NASA officials said.

?This is basically a nuisance,? NASA spokesperson Kelly Humphries told SPACE.com from the agency?s Johnson Space Center in Houston

According to a NASA planning document obtained by SPACE.com, the virus was identified as W32.Gammima.AG. The California-based retail anti-virus software manufacturer Symantec describes it as a Windows-based worm which spreads by copying itself onto removable media.

It has nothing to do with Linux, TFA is either a troll or an MS shill. The submitter should be ashamed of himself for submitting such a piss-poor article (and I'm ashamed I voted before reading). TFA linked in the summary is garbage. It didn't even get the damned virus right. There are far better accounts, including the one I linked above.

First that theory assumes the the moon became instantly tidally locked from near the moment of its creation, which seems highly unlikely for a body born of an impact, followed by re-impact. (The debris impacts on the far side would occur more often, because the near side would not be shielded by the earth, but that works ONLY once the proto-moon is tidally locked.).

I'm not sure there is much in the way of evidence for exactly when the moon became tidally locked.

This is the current leading theory. Yes, it is very recent, but in the video I linked to you'll see lots of famous physicsts that you should recognize.

It's been a while since I was in physics studying this kind of thing, but it seems to me that since it is a smaller body and formed around the earth at a much smaller distance from the earth and then moved out, that there would be only a handful of parameters that would determine how long a tidal lock would take. First would be the small mass of the moon and smaller iron core, which would lead to faster tidal lock than say a planet around a star. Second would be the distance from the Earth (smaller the distance the faster it would occur). Thirdly, the impact between the 2 'proto-moons' would directly influence the rotation rate and axis of rotation of the moon (although from a disk around the earth, the eccentricty with respect the earth would be minimal). Since the moon was very close to the earth around its formation, and it formed in orbit around the earth, I would assume that a tidal lock would have occured very soon after its formation. Probably somewhere there is a simulation to show this.

Here's an article that explains why the composition is likely to be different for more fluid materials upon the theorised collision of the 2 'proto-moons'. This explains in principal that the less solid objects were drawn to the near side (as per the original article linked to in the summary), leaving a thinner crust on the near side. The only new interesting take-home is that the period of bombardment of comets and asteroids (due to the stabilization of the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus throwing them towards the inner solar system) was likely slightly less violent than predicted before.

I don't think you can actually light the thing in space anyways - without a constant active supply of fresh oxygen, fire cannot last long at all in space. On earth, gravity enables the hot carbonized air to rise while fresh oxygen comes from the sides. In space this doesn't happen, so the flame suffocates itself quickly.

http://www.space.com/13766-international-space-station-flex-fire-research.html

With its fins and aerodynamic shape, GOCE will maintain a stable position in orbit as it approaches entry.

Why don't they use the reaction wheels make it tumble before reentry?

Because it doesn't have reaction wheels.

Krag said that GOCE components that are the typical suspects for surviving re-entry are a tank and magnetotorquers, as the spacecraft has no reaction wheels. "The rest of the components are âunrecognizableâ(TM) incomplete, irregular fragments," he added.

http://www.space.com/23171-european-gravity-satellite-falling-from-space.html

Metal doesn't burn easy, and this is likely moving a *lot* slower than most iron meteors that manage to burn up anyway.

Really?
Here's what we send up: http://i.space.com/images/i/000/010/556/original/Sacriflight_AW.jpg?1309195668

Here's all we got back:
http://i.space.com/images/i/000/003/207/original/080228-cs-02.jpg?1292266925

Here's what it looked like coming back:
http://www.wfaa.com/video/featured-videos/RAW-VIDEO--189393891.html

Metal burns just fine, and light aluminum burns extremely well. I once saw a guy welding on the tongue of an airstream trailer, and the structure caught fire. Before the fire department could get there, the entire trailer structure was a white ball hovering above the ground, too bright to look at for more than a second or two.

Metal doesn't burn easy, and this is likely moving a *lot* slower than most iron meteors that manage to burn up anyway.

Really?
Here's what we send up: http://i.space.com/images/i/000/010/556/original/Sacriflight_AW.jpg?1309195668

Here's all we got back:
http://i.space.com/images/i/000/003/207/original/080228-cs-02.jpg?1292266925

Here's what it looked like coming back:
http://www.wfaa.com/video/featured-videos/RAW-VIDEO--189393891.html

Metal burns just fine, and light aluminum burns extremely well. I once saw a guy welding on the tongue of an airstream trailer, and the structure caught fire. Before the fire department could get there, the entire trailer structure was a white ball hovering above the ground, too bright to look at for more than a second or two.

Educated guess? I think it's safe to assume that since it's been observed for awhile that this particular asteroid is between a few months old and 4.6 billion years old. Presumably the paper when published will validate the 200,000 year thought. Maybe somebody was playing pool with planets 200,000 years ago and we're just now finding out about it?

" Key members of the U.S. House of Representatives are seeking to require the National Science Foundation (NSF) to justify every grant it awards as being in the 'national interest.' "

Although I agree that the Republican proposal is asininely stupid, I really can't blame them, because they are reacting against Obama --- such as the equally insanely asinine order from Obama to Nasa to make the Muslims to " feel good ".

Before you guys accuse me of Islamophobic, I do provide proofs with links below ---

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7875584/Barack-Obama-Nasa-must-try-to-make-Muslims-feel-good.html

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-muslim-self-esteem-nasa-in-complete-disarray/

http://www.space.com/8725-nasa-chief-bolden-muslim-remark-al-jazeera-stir.html

Voyager 1 isn't in space yet.

"Interstellar space," I hope you mean, and there's a lot of people who believe that it has at this point.

NASA launched a telescope on a balloon for the ISON approach last weekend, didn't work out though.