SCIENCE IN THE NEWS WEEKLY
An Asteroid Blast and a Russian Trip to Mars
As if there weren't enough natural disasters to worry about, now there's evidence that we're not always aware when asteroids will strike from space. An asteroid exploded high above Indonesia last month, NASA reported weeks later. This one did no harm but released about three times more energy than the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima.
The chief of Russia's space agency says it's time to harness nuclear power for space exploration. Anatoly Perminov has proposed a new nuclear-powered spaceship for prospective manned missions to Mars and other planets.
And it appears Einstein is still right about some fundamental properties about our universe. After timing the travels of gamma rays of differing energies and wavelengths emitted when the universe was half its current age, scientists observed that they arrived at a target within nine-tenths of a second of each other. Einstein's theory of relativity, remember, instructs that the speed of light is constant, independent of its energy, direction and many other factors.
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