The magazine quotes Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who identifies it as the failure-prone Bulava ballistic missile, launched from a submarine. McDowell said the Russian Navy is in the right geographical position to launch it. He added that Russia has denied that it was their missile, but "this could be because another Bulava failure is a huge and embarrassing setback for their programme."

As for why the perfect spiral shape was created:

McDowell says the shape suggests the failure occurred well above the atmosphere. If it had occurred at lower altitudes, atmospheric drag would have caused the missile to fall quickly to Earth, creating a downward-pointing corkscrew pattern whose contrails would have been blown "this way and that" by wind, he told New Scientist.

The Bulava missile has three stages that fire in succession as it climbs up in altitude. "Probably what happened is that stages 1 and 2 did just fine and were discarded in turn, and then stage 3 started burning and almost immediately went wrong," McDowell says.

He says the third stage's nozzle, which directs the rocket's exhaust plume, may have fallen off or been punctured, causing the exhaust to come out sideways instead of out the back. "The sideways thrust sends the rocket into a spin, spewing flame as it goes," he says.

"If thrust was terminated right away, then you wouldn't see the spiral," he continues. "The unusual thing this time is that the missile was allowed to carry on firing for a bit after it went wrong."

UPDATE: Jonathan McDowell writes in to say:

The Russians did send out a 'notice to mariners' in advance warning of a rocket launch, and they have now (Dec 10) admitted that there was a launch of the Bulava and that the third stage failed. Hope that answers some of the comments on your page.

via New Scientist

Do Not Live in a City
Sorry, LA, New York, Chicago, etc. For all your cultural happenings and tall buildings you are a shit place to watch rocks burn up brilliantly in the atmosphere. Happen to be in Bandlands National Park tonight? Get ready for awesome pieces of space blasted in your face. The New York Academy of Sciences is sponsoring a viewing at Manhattan's Inwood Park from 9pm-12am, but we're guessing there will be less meteor-viewing and more awkward cognitive scientists looking for a date. But, if you're into that sort of thing: Go!

Get drunk
The best time to view the shower is from 1am to sunrise (look to the Northeast for the constellation Leo), so you've still got plenty of time to get plastered. It's chilly out there, and if you end up not seeing any meteors then you're basically just sitting on the ground in the dark. Might as well have a few shots of whiskey in you.

Do not say "oooooh" and clap every time you see a meteor.
Seriously, if NASA is correct there will be 30-40 meteors per hour at the shower's peak. So just chill out. This is a time to quietly reflect on our puniness in the vastness of space; not your uncle Chad's world famous Fourth of July Fireworks extravaganza. Don't be that guy at the meteor shower.

Preferably live in Asia
While us Westerners will be grasping after a mere 30-40 meteors per hour, according to NASA certain parts of Asia will be graced with more than 400. Bring back some pictures, Obama!

Bring a date
—So, how did you and Adrian meet?
—Well, one night he invited me to this meteor shower. As we were sitting in the dark watching chunks of space rock plummet spectacularly to Earth he turned to me and said that the only thing more beautiful than that was me. Then we made out for like five hours. What about you and Roger?
—Oh... um... eHarmony.com?

photos courtesy of aresauburn's and Kahunna's Flickr

Last month, NASA slammed a satellite into the moon at a high speed so that they could study what sort of stuff came up in the impact. While those who watched the bombing live saw nothing, NASA says that they totally found water! On the moon! Water on the moon!

Moon water, guys! We were totally wrong about space. Obviously this means we should go back to the moon as soon as possible, in order to bottle its water and sell it to celebrities.

No indication of the moon wobbling dangerously off its axis, starting an inexorable descent towards earth. No huge chunks of the moon breaking off, starting an inexorable descent towards earth. No angry aliens rising out of the moon's core in their battle crafts, starting an inexorable descent towards earth. No reason to call out the Army's top secret interstellar fighting force. In contrast to this direct quote from NASA's director of nerd propaganda, yesterday:

''This is going to be pretty cool,'' LCROSS project manager Dan Andrews told The Associated Press. ''We'll be going right down into it. Seeing the moon come up at you is pretty spectacular.''

Well. There was a helluva momentary gray shift. One area of the picture became a somewhat different shade of gray. So...it must have been crazy, if you were standing on the moon. In one of those known extraterrestrial civilizations.

Let's just shut down NASA and stick with Hollywood.

It is a wonderful piece of alternate universe American history, in which President Nixon had to explain to a nation that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were going to die on the moon.

In a move that should earn them national kudos, MIT-goer Oliver Yeh and his equally brainy friend, Justin Lee, grabbed these images of earth by putting a cell phone into a Styrofoam box, stuffing the box with disposable hand warmers and attaching it all to a helium balloon. The camera snapped a picture every 5 seconds for a journey 17 miles above the planet and back after the balloon popped. A GPS in the phone helped track it all down. And it only cost $150!

Meanwhile, NASA's over paid nerds are looking to build a base on the moon, which will serve as a stop-off station for missions to Mars, a trip that will itself make astronauts radioactive. To achieve all of their unnecessary and harebrained schemes, NASA would need another $3 billion a year. MIT costs about $48,000 a year — give or take a few grand.

Wouldn't the country be better off just sending kids to MIT and receiving these pictures in return, rather than sending red-blooded Americans into space to become the Fantastic Four? Who needs that dang universe, anyway?

Paul Root Wolp, an adviser to NASA's chief medical officer, told the Times that some astronauts refuse to participate in experiments during missions because they're scared their medical information will become public, and that insurance companies will use the information against them:

Q. You mentioned earlier that NASA does biomedical research in space. How do the astronauts feel about being research subjects?

A. For the most part, they want to help. There have been some who, in some situations, have refused.... [Some] opted out because they were concerned that medical information collected on them couldn't really be private and might interfere with their getting health insurance after retirement. But on a flight with seven people, if one opts out, you've cut your research population significantly.

If astronauts can't get healthcare, then you, dear reader, are screwed.

What the hell do we have to show for manned space exploration besides neat pictures and a brief feeling of patriotic goodwill in the middle of Vietnam? Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong are demanding that Obama send men to Mars, ASAP, because... why? Because they had a blast on the moon and wouldn't want future generations to miss out on space-golf?

Because George W. Bush got a little overexcited one day, NASA is currently planning to build a colony, on Mars. They are building new Space Shuttles, as the old ones are rickety death traps. These new shuttles, and the plan to take them back to the moon by 2020, will cost $100 billion. After spending that $100 billion we will, as mentioned, just be going back to the damn moon, where we have been. By 2025 there might be a moon base! The bit where we go to Mars doesn't happen until some time after 2025—which, coincidentally, is also when there won't be racism anymore, according to Sandra Day O'Connor. The roaring 2020s will kick ass!

Mars, and the moon, are not actually going anywhere any time soon. And it would maybe be nice to have an extra $100 billion lying around in the budget for the next ten years to throw at, who knows, insuring a couple million Americans, maybe? Or if we are determined to spend that $100 billion on getting Americans boldly from one place to another place, how about spending that $100 billion on high-speed trains and urban mass transit, to help us cut down on all that oil we burn, and maybe forestall the day when we destroy our atmosphere and actually do have to flee the planet in a hurry?

It was pretty fucking awesome that we actually sent men to the moon, to walk around, collect rocks, and go back home, 40 years ago. But now would be a good time to dedicate ourselves to putting jobs of some kind back in Michigan. By the end of the decade, we will put affordable fresh produce in depressed black neighborhoods!

So, President Obama, we call on you to ignore those brave space explorers of yesteryear! Demand NASA shift its priorities to developing useful science! We won the space race, and now look at us: we are broke and sick. Let us not worry about space until we've taken care of our shit back here, unless a meteor the size of Texas is bearing down on us.

Meanwhile, if you're reading this, go outside and celebrate our freedom from alien persecution everywhere. Have a great holiday, and Sarah Palin, please stop fucking up and resigning so I can get drunk during the day in peace tomorrow.

The astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, has been talking about UFOs and aliens and Roswell Incidents and government coverups and ESP and "remote healing" since like forever, so who cares what he says at some UFO conference? CNN does!

NASA denied it all, of course, but hey NASA, try to deny this: a new planet just like ours!

European astronomers said Tuesday that they had discovered the smallest planet yet found orbiting another star. The planet could be as little as only 1.9 times as massive as the Earth and belongs to a dim red star known as Gliese 581, which lies about 20 light-years from Earth in the constellation Libra.

Yes, the liberal New York Times says the planet is "surely blasted with too much radiation and heat to be livable."

But is it? PROVE IT.

Mike Griffin, the administrator of NASA, would like his organization to continue to be an overfunded mess, leeching billions annually that could go to useful science and instead spending it on the failed, deadly space shuttle program and terribly ill-advised and scientifically pointless trips to the moon and Mars. He is maybe concerned that Obama will change those priorities! So he threw a big space-bitch-fit.

In a heated 40-minute conversation last week with Lori Garver, a former NASA associate administrator who heads the space transition team, a red-faced Griffin demanded to speak directly to Obama, according to witnesses.

In addition, Griffin is scripting NASA employees and civilian contractors on what they can tell the transition team and has warned aerospace executives not to criticize the agency’s moon program, sources said.

The rest of the article is very long and worth reading if you wish to understand just how dysfunctional the agency that sends people into space to die upon reentry is, these days.

Were Larry and Sergey aboard the Gulfstream? If so, someone ought to tell Google shareholders that the companies' cofounders were in close proximity to a flaming fireball. And someone ought to tell American taxpayers that Nasa is now scheduling its missions around the viewing requirements of loopy billionaires. (Illustration by the European Space Agency)

[via Slog]