August 15 News Items

Ariane Launches Two Satellites (Source: SpaceToday.net)
An Ariane 5 successfully launched two commercial communications satellites Tuesday. The Ariane 5 ECA lifted off from the Kourou, French Guiana spaceport and placed the Spaceway 3 and BSAT-3a satellites into geosynchronous transfer orbits about a half hour later. Spaceway 3, a Boeing 702 spacecraft weighing over 6,000 kilograms, will be used by Hughes Network Systems to provide Ka-band broadband data services throughout North America. BSAT-3a, a Lockheed Martin A2100A satellite weighing 1,980 kilograms, will be used by the Broadcasting Satellite System Corporation of Japan to provide television programming. The launch is the third Ariane 5 launch of the year; three more are planned through the end of the year.

DirecTV to Offer High-Speed Internet From Current Group on Power Grid (Source: Wall Street Journal)
Satellite-television provider DirecTV Group Inc. announced a wholesale agreement today with Current Group LLC to provide high-speed Internet service over electric-power lines. Under the agreement, DirecTV will market a bundled package of Current's broadband and voice over Internet protocol, or Voip, services.

U.S. to Expand Domestic Use Of Spy Satellites (Source: Wall Street Journal)
The U.S.'s top intelligence official has greatly expanded the range of federal and local authorities who can get access to information from the nation's vast network of spy satellites in the U.S. The decision places for the first time some of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials. The move was authorized in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking his department to facilitate access to the spy network on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement.

'Lunar Ark' Proposed in Case of Deadly Impact on Earth (Source: National Geographic News)
The moon should be developed as a sanctuary for civilization in case of a cataclysmic cosmic impact, according to an international team of experts. NASA already has blueprints to create a permanent lunar outpost by the 2020s. But that plan should be expanded to include a way to preserve humanity's learning, culture, and technology if Earth is hit by a doomsday asteroid or comet, said Jim Burke, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

FSU Facility Duplicating Conditions of Supernovas (Source: FSU)
How is matter created? What happens when stars die? Is the universe shrinking, or is it expanding? For decades, scientists have been looking for answers to such "big picture" questions. For the past few months, physicists at Florida State University have begun using a groundbreaking new research facility to conduct experiments that may help provide answers to just such questions. RESOLUT -- short for "REsonator SOLenoid with Upscale Transmission" -- is located within the John D. Fox Superconducting Accelerator Laboratory on the FSU campus. Over the past few months, FSU researchers have begun using RESOLUT to create very rare, extremely short-lived radioactive particles similar to those that form inside exploding stars -- and then using the analytical data produced in the experiments as the basis for hypotheses about the behavior of matter and the physical properties governing the universe.