People in the Australian outback found themselves dodging a massive 400-foot balloon carrying a payload of scientific equipment this week when the launching of NASA’s Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT) went awry. The balloon crashed through a fence and turned over a sports utility vehicle before stopping its rampage.
The mishap potentially destroyed $2 million of astronomy experiment, including a gamma-ray telescope built by astronomer Steven Boggs and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, California.
If you look carefully, one of our Australian legal brethren is chasing the balloon with business cards and contingency contracts.
For the full story, click here.
Kudos: Elaine M.
For those in search of air o roma
http://www.clusterballoon.org/learning/learning.htm
For the rest:
Fly Away: Man Uses Balloon, Lawn Chair to Float Away
When the mischievous children’s book monkey Curious George wanted a lift, he simply grabbed onto a bunch of brightly colored balloons and sailed away. Kent Couch used a makeshift aircraft, composed of a lawnchair and balloons to fly across the Oregon sky. He felt short of his goal, which was to reach Idaho. In real life, an Oregon man has followed his lead — and added a lawn chair.
Kent Couch traveled nearly 200 miles and more than nine hours in such a contraption Saturday, with little more than a pair of sunglasses, a radio and a parachute at his side. He attached more than 100 helium-filled balloons to his lawn chair and took off from his gas station in Bend, Ore.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3365726
That is the result of grading on a big curve for students of science when accompanied by a concurrent lessening of curricula requirements.
I read just yesterday, where another University was required to offer basic high school math. Today’s high school is yesteryear’s grade school…
Be wary of those upcoming shake n’ bake 2L law school grads too…
Just another N. Korean missile test.
The 5th Dimension:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWVe3AB8OY8&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
Australia is just in a awkward spot. They got hit by Skylab too which spread debris between Esperance, Western Australia, and Rawlinna, Western Australia.