nasa

The Pentagon should thank NASA hacker Gary McKinnon for "exposing the fragility" of U.S. military systems, according to Terry Waite.

Waite, who was held hostage in Lebanon for four years after being kidnapped in 1987, said that McKinnon's motives were "harmless," according to an article by Jack Doyle, a Press Association legal affairs correspondent.

"Gary is clearly a very clever chap," said Waite. "He has that unique ability to find his way through the Internet jungle and enter the inner recesses of the Pentagon. Full marks for his ingenuity. Was Gary … Read more

Update at 4:44 PDT: Space Shuttle Discovery has successfully lifted off as scheduled.

If the weather cooperates--and forecasters predict that it will--Space Shuttle Discovery will take off for the International Space Station on Sunday evening. A hydrogen gas leak delayed a planned launch last week.

NASA said blastoff is scheduled for 7:43 p.m. EDT from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Commander Lee Archambault is set to lead a crew of seven on the STS-119 mission, which is aimed at installing the fourth and final set of power-generating solar arrays to the ISS. The arrays will provide electricity … Read more

The Kepler spacecraft vaulted away from Cape Canaveral late Friday, boosting a powerful space telescope into orbit around the sun for a $591 million mission to search for Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars.

"I think people everywhere want to know whether, with all the stars out there, do they have planets that are Earth-sized?" said principal investigator William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center. "Are Earths frequent or are they rare? And this gives us that answer. It's the next step in mankind's exploration of the galaxy."

The Kepler spacecraft's three-and-a-half-year mission … Read more

In the vastness of the universe, there are likely to be nearly countless planets. The big question for humans, of course, is whether even a single one of them could support life.

NASA's Kepler satellite, which is scheduled to lift off at 10:49 p.m. EST tonight, is headed out to keep watch on a patch of the Milky Way for at least three and a half years. Unlike the Hubble space telescope, Kepler won't be taking brilliant pictures suitable for framing. Instead, it will look for minute changes in the brightness of stars--some 100,000 of … Read more

A date has been set for a High Court judicial review of NASA hacker Gary McKinnon's case.

The review, set for June 9 and 10, will focus on whether McKinnon's diagnosis with Asperger's syndrome was taken into account during his appeals process.

McKinnon's mother, Janis Sharp, told ZDNet UK about the judicial review date via an e-mail on Friday. Sharp said she had felt "broken" and "beaten up" by a Crown Prosecution Service decision on Thursday not to prosecute McKinnon in the U.K., but that she was now "getting back … Read more

The Crown Prosecution Service has decided it will not prosecute self-confessed NASA hacker Gary McKinnon in the U.K., edging him closer to extradition to the U.S.

McKinnon's diagnosis with Asperger's Syndrome, a condition on the autistic spectrum, had not been taken into account in the decision, a Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) spokesperson told ZDNet UK on Thursday.

U.S. authorities last year won the extradition of McKinnon to face charges of breaking into 97 military and NASA computers. In December, McKinnon's legal team sent a letter to the CPS in which he confessed to offenses … Read more

Support is building in the British Parliament and from legal experts for self-confessed NASA hacker Gary McKinnon to be tried in the U.K.

Liberal Democrat peer Lord Carlile of Berriew, Queen's Counsel, the independent reviewer of Britain's antiterror laws, told CNET News sister site ZDNet UK on Wednesday that McKinnon's diagnosis with Asperger's Syndrome, a condition on the autistic spectrum, means he should be tried in Britain rather than in the U.S.

McKinnon was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome last summer by Cambridge University autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen. Despite the diagnosis, the Home Office … Read more

In an unprecedented space collision, a commercial Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite ran into each other Tuesday above northern Siberia, creating a cloud of wreckage, officials said today. The international space station does not appear to be threatened by the debris, they said, but it's not yet clear whether it poses a risk to any other military or civilian satellites.

"They collided at an altitude of 790 kilometers (491 miles) over northern Siberia Tuesday about noon Washington time," said Nicholas Johnson, NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "The U.S. space surveillance network detected a large number of debris from both objects."

Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael Carey, deputy director of global operations with U.S. Strategic Command, the agency responsible for space surveillance, said initial radar tracking detected some 600 pieces of debris. He identified the Russian spacecraft as Cosmos 2251, a communications relay station launched in June 1993, and said the satellite is believed to have been non-operational for the past 10 years or so.

"As of about 12 hours ago, I think the head count was up (to around) 600 pieces," Carey told CBS News late today. "It's going to take about two days before we get a solid picture of what the debris fields look like. But you, I think, can imply that the majority of that should be probably along the same line as the original orbits."

He said U.S. STRATCOM routinely tracks about 18,000 objects in space, including satellites and debris, that are 3.9 inches across or larger. Tracking priority and "conjunction analysis"--identifying which objects may pose a threat to manned spacecraft--is the first priority.

"It's going to take a while" to get an accurate count of the debris fragments, Johnson said. "It's very, very difficult to discriminate all those objects when they're really close together. And so, over the next couple of days, we'll have a much better understanding."

Asked which satellite was at fault, Johnson said "they ran into each other. Nothing has the right of way up there. We don't have an air traffic controller in space. There is no universal way of knowing what's coming in your direction." … Read more

While we inadvertently promote a chain restaurant's free luncheon, we also talk a lot about space. Which annoys Brian Cooley to no end. We talk about Google Mars, and contacting the ISS and the NASA-sponsored Singularity university. But he gets his revenge when he announces the retirement of the inventor of the BMW-butt.

Google Earth adds Mars roving http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10154741-52.html

Google privacy counsel facing criminal charges http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F02%2F02%2F2337207 https://www.privacyassociation.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1745&Itemid=228… Read more