Mountain Views News          Saturday, June 19, 2010

8

The World Around Us

 Mountain Views News Saturday, June 19, 2010


U.S. High School Students Help Recover Spacecraft

 For millions of American high-school 
students, early June means long hours 
studying for final exams. But for three lucky 
teenagers, getting a passing grade in their 
astronomy class meant traveling halfway 
around the world—from Massachusetts to 
the Australian Outback—to work side-by-
side with a NASA-led expedition of space 
scientists.

 The researchers were there to study the 
brilliant fireball created June 13 when Japan’s 
Hayabusa spacecraft, finally coming home 
after seven years and 3 • billion miles in 
interplanetary space, slammed into Earth’s 
atmosphere at more than 7 • miles per 
second. Hayabusa had made several landings 
on the asteroid Itokawa in November 2005, 
and researchers are hoping that bits of the 
asteroid’s surface will be found sealed inside 
the spacecraft’s sample-return capsule.

 The asteroid, measuring 540 meters by 270 
meters by 210 meters, is quite porous and 
made up of pieces ranging from small gravel 
to big blocks and boulders up to 50 meters in 
length. The mission marked the first attempt 
to return samples from an asteroid.

 The Japan Exploration Aerospace Agency, 
or JAXA, is heading the Hayabusa project, 
which was launched May 9, 2003. NASA is 
supporting the mission.

 Getting to take part in Hayabusa’s return 
was the culmination of months of work 
for students James Breitmeyer and Yiannis 
Karavas, both 17, and Brigitte Berman, 
16. They attend the Dexter and Southfield 
Schools in Brookline, Massachusetts, where 
Ronald Dantowitz and Marek Kozubal from 
the schools’ Clay Center Observatory helped 
them build tracking platforms crammed 
with high-end imaging cameras; ultraviolet, 
infrared, and visible light spectrographs; 
and an IMAX-quality high-definition video 
system for recording the reentry.

 Most of this high-tech gear was installed on 
NASA’s DC-8 research aircraft in Palmdale, 
California, alongside other instruments 
brought by researchers from Germany, 
the Netherlands, Japan, and several U.S. 
institutions. The plane—with the students on 
board—then headed to Australia.

 During Hayabusa’s hypervelocity 
homecoming, the jet cruised at an altitude 
of 41,000 feet near the spacecraft’s landing 
zone in the Woomera Protected Area, a 
desolate, 50,000-square-mile military test 
area about 500 miles northwest of Adelaide. 
As the spacecraft made its fiery reentry, the 
scientists recorded the brightness and spectra 
of the sample capsule and pieces of the 
disintegrating main craft.

 “The students did their jobs well and have 
been superb representatives of our schools 
to NASA and to the international science 
community,” notes Dantowitz, adding that 
one of the student-run DXSF cameras 
streamed live video of the spacecraft reentry 
directly from the aircraft window to the world 
via satellite.

 The remains of the spacecraft will now will 
be transported to Japan for analysis and the 
opening of the sample collection chamber.

 “JAXA’s Hayabusa mission has opened up a 
whole new world to us and now we have many 
more questions than answers, which makes 
this a very exciting time to be in planetary 
science,” said Paul Abell, a research scientist 
at the Tucson, Arizona–based Planetary 
Science Instutite, who was part of the recovery 
operation and a member of the team that 
investigated the asteroid’s composition.

 For more information and an image of the 
Hayabusa reentry:

 http://www.subarutelescope.org/

 You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@
MtnViewsNews.com.


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Something For Nothing

 The name LimeWire has long been synonymous with 
getting online music and videos free of charge. LimeWire is 
basically a software package that uses various P2P (peer-to-
peer) protocols to access shared files on computer networks. 
Limewire’s network of choice is the gnutella network, but 
users of the software don’t have to know such details in order 
to get started. All that’s required is to obtain the LimeWire 
client, install it on an internet-connected computer, create 
a user account and log in. The software takes care of all the 
rest, including finding the music or video requested in title 
searches. Unlike iTunes, Napster and other licensed online 
music services, the networks used by LimeWire don’t really 
seem to care if the content trading on their networks was 
legally purchased or owned by the sharing party and it 
often seems as if no real attempt to stop users from illegally 
sharing files on their networks is being made at this time. 
The company that creates and distributes the software, 
LimeWire LLC, has been the target of several lawsuits 
by various entertainment industry groups, including the 
RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and 
the NMPA (National Music Publishers Association), both 
suing for “pervasive online copyright infringement” with 
the latest complainant, the NMPA, asking for equitable 
damages and relief said to amount to billions of dollars in 
lost revenue and sales. 

 Besides being a magnet for lawsuits because of its 
copyright-infringing activities, LimeWire and other P2P 
software products have earned themselves a somewhat 
sullied reputation as being vectors for the dissemination of 
malware and other security vulnerabilities. There have also 
been several well-publicized cases of end users having their 
machines hacked into and their identities stolen due to 
security vulnerabilities with the Limewire client software 
and the changes it makes to the users system once installed. 

 Coupled with the more than 30,000 lawsuits filed by 
the RIAA against individual P2P network users trading 
in illegal music and software, one would think that the 
allure of getting something for nothing would’ve worn off 
long ago. Despite the risk of infection, security breaches 
and lawsuits, P2P networks continue to thrive because of 
several factors - including high-speed internet connections 
and the relatively low risk of being directly prosecuted 
for participation in illegal file-sharing. For some users, 
“Something for Nothing” is still the best deal going. Just 
remember, however, that “Something for Nothing” is never 
really free – and you may not like the consequences …


TUTORING IN YOUR 
HOME

Basic Math, Algebra, Geometry, 
Math Analysis, AP Calculus, 
AP Chemistry, Physics, Reading 
Comprehension, Phonics, SAT I & II

Call Roy Wu 

(626) 818-2587


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