China is just a week away from launching its third manned spaceflight into orbit and apparently hoping for a sell-out crowd.

The country is selling tickets to watch for the planned late night Sept. 25 launch of its Shenzhou 7 spacecraft, but buyer beware: Each seat goes for about 15,000 yuan, or about US$2,206 and ticket buyers will need to provide identification and a reference from their employer to vie for the limited spaces, according to the Chinese Web site China Daily and the newspaper Wenhui Daily.

While hefty, the ticket price apparently includes a flight to China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the northwestern Gansu province, as well as a four-day stay to watch the planned space shot, state media reported.

China first invited space fans to buy tickets for a rocket launch last year, when the country launched the Chang’e 1 moon probe from the Xichang launch center in southwestern Sichuan province. But those tickets went for about 800 yuan, or US$117, per person. Some 2,000 people watched the lunar mission’s launch from a pair of platforms about 1.5 miles (2.5 km) away, according to press reports.

But the northwestern-located Jiuquan launch site is much more remote than Xichang, and offers fewer amenities and other tourist hot spots, China Daily reported.

China’s Shenzhou 7 mission will launch atop a Long March 2F rocket carrying the first-three man crew for the country. During what is expected to be a three or four day mission, Chinese astronauts Zhai Zhigang, Liu Boming and Jing Haipeng are expected to fly China’s third manned spaceflight and make the country’s first-ever spacewalk.

Zhai, a fighter pilot with the Chinese Air Force, is billed as the one making the 40-minute spacewalk, and will apparently toss out a small satellite designed to beam images of the landmark orbital excursion to Earth, according to Chinese media reports. China is the third nation, after Russia and the U.S., to launch humans into space. It launched a one-man mission (Shenzhou 5) in 2003 and a two-man flight (Shenzhou 6, pictured here) in 2005.

Chinese space officials, meanwhile, are apparently planning their new spaceport - the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island - with an eye towards space enthusiasts.

According to China Daily, the China National Space Administration expects some 21,000 people to be living around the Wenchang spaceport by 2010, which should also sport enough surrounding development to handle up to 12,000 space fans.

So that’s good, if fairly expensive, news for Chinese space aficionados.

Incidentally, China isn’t the only country to sell tickets for space launch viewers.

Here in the U.S., you can put down cash to watch NASA launch space shuttle missions from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., like next month’s Atlantis flight to the Hubble Space Telescope. But you’ve got to get yourself to Florida first.

You can also watch a Russian Soyuz rocket launch astronauts toward the International Space Station from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, courtesy of the folks at the Virginia-based firm Space Adventures. Like China’s Shenzhou 7 offer, Space Adventures has an all-inclusive travel package (it is a long way to Baikonur, after all) for the upcoming Oct. 12 launch of Expedition 18 astronauts and millionaire computer game developer Richard Garriott, who is paying US$30 million for a short space station trip.

• China’s First Spacewalk: A Prelude of Things to Come
• Shenzhou Rising: China’s Second Manned Spaceflight
• Special Report: Emerging China, Engaging China

Hit or miss…there’s already lots of fallout from the potential impact of asteroid WD5 smacking into Mars on January 30th.

I’ve got some email suggesting that perhaps WD5 is not a space rock, but an old spacecraft — such as Mars Observer — coming back to haunt the red planet.

However, according to asteroid specialist, Donald Yeomans at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 2007 WD5 does not have an orbit that is consistent with a Mars spacecraft. When specialists integrate the object’s orbit backward in time, it does not get near Earth within the past few decades, he advised me.

Clearly, if Mars does get whacked, scientists will have a field day.

I asked Mark Boslough — a collision dynamics expert at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico — what might happen if asteroid meets Mars.

The density of Mars’ atmosphere is similar to Earth’s at 20 kilometers (12 miles) or so above the surface, Boslough said. A stony or chondritic asteroid of the size of WD5 would not explode in Earth’s atmosphere above this altitude. “So this won’t be an airburst…it will either hit the ground intact and make a single crater, or break up and generate a cluster of craters,” he added.

Boslough said an educated, but speculative, guess is that, if indeed the object strikes Mars, surface material from the red planet would be lofted to very high altitude as a visible column of dust within an atmospheric plume.

Such a wallop might prove biologically interesting too - given the idea that Mars underground could be a cozy spot for microbial life.

John Rummel, Senior Scientist for Astrobiology in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA HQ, told me that an asteroid hit on Mars would be an event that could be studied by orbiters now circling Mars - particularly by the super-powerful camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

“An impact that we could witness/follow-up with MRO would be truly spectacular, and could tell us much about the hidden subsurface that could help direct a search for life or life-related molecules,” Rummel said.

Depending on the results of such an impact, the site might be something for the Mars Science Laboratory to land near. That mega-rover is to be launched toward Mars in 2009.

The Mars-approaching asteroid is about the size of the object that blasted out Meteor Crater, in northern Arizona, about 50,000 years ago. Speed of WD5 is calculated at about 30,000 miles per hour.

So the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter would have a front-row seat in surveying the hit, making use of its High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) - the most powerful camera ever to orbit another planet.

“If the asteroid hits Mars, we’ll get a great look at the crater within a few days of impact,” said HiRISE principal investigator Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson.

The chance that a rogue mini-world — asteroid 2007 WD5 — will smack into Mars on January 30th has increased from 1.3 percent to 3.9 percent.

That’s the new estimation from officials at the Near Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), stemming from several sky watching teams in Alaska, New Mexico, and in Arizona.

“The impact probability resulting from the recent orbit refinement has increased to a surprising 3.9 percent…about 1 in 25 odds,” explain JPL’s Near Earth Object Program website, updated today regarding the asteroid meets Mars altercation.

Still, there remains an uncertainty, although a Mars impact is still possible. However, the most likely scenario in the weeks to come is that more observations of the asteroid will allow that uncertainty to shrink - so that a Mars impact is definitely ruled out.

The JPL website notes that, in the unlikely event of an impact, the head-on collision would take place on January 30th at 2:55 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, with an uncertainty of a few minutes.

Nothing to set your watch by…but a big event in our time.

Former Apollo astronaut, Rusty Schweickart, is on a globe-trotting quest to raise international awareness regarding near-Earth asteroids that can threaten our planet - trying to pull together “mission rules” for dealing with a trouble-making near-Earth object (NEO).

As Chairman of the Association of Space Explorers Near-Earth Object Committee, Schweickart is organizing a set of workshops to shape a report headed in 2009 for the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS).

The first workshop was held last May in Strasbourg, France.

Next month a workshop will be held in Sibiu, Romania, followed by an April 2008 confab tentatively set for Guanacaste, Costa Rica, and a fourth workshop to be held possibly in September 2008, perhaps in the United States.

Drawing from his human spaceflight background, Schweickart sees need for a set of NEO mission rules — established well ahead of time — that outline “if this happens, this is what you will do.”

“It’s a decision-making process,” Schweickart told me, setting up criteria, rules, policies, etc., so that timely response can be made. “You can argue about mission rules for months and months…even years in some cases. But that’s what you don’t want to do when confronted with a problem.”

For more information, go to:

http://www.space-explorers.org/committees/NEO/neo.html

 

 

A 50-year-old pastor in San Antonio was killed after being struck by lightning while hiking with his sons.

Lightning kills about 66 people in the United States every year. Many of those deaths involve obvious tempts of fate by people who ignore the rumble of thunder and remain outdoors.

But bolts can strike entirely out of the blue, too. Last month a Florida man was killed by lightning under clear skies.

Weather used to be something that happened to humans, something we could wonder about. Those days were wonderful. Since we couldn’t do anything about it and had little clue what was coming, only to the extent that it killed the crops, ruined a picnic or blew some homes down did weather become more than a topic of polite conversation. I remember as small child having a real sense of wonder about the weather, mostly because I didn’t understand much of it (I also wondered why the forecast was always wrong).

Weather still happens to us, but now we all know more about it and the forecasts are more precise. You can plan an outdoor lunch at a New York cafe at 1 pm comfortable in the certainty that the squall won’t arrive until 3. Thanks to the Internet and the Weather Channel and cable news and radio weather on the 8’s, we have a dash of knowledge. Thing is, that just makes us worry more. If lunch is really good and the waiter’s a little slow and you order an second espresso …

More than TV or the web, however, scientists are to blame for our modern-day obsession with weather. They’re always putting more numbers and labels on the phenomena and trying to make it more and more simple for us regular folks, but in reality they make it more complex.

A thunderstorm is no longer rain and lightning on the way, it’s a “line of storms” with an “intense cell” that’s bright red and likely contains “damaging straight-line winds,” a euphemism for a tornado insofar as your trees are concerned. A hurricane is no longer just a storm with an eye and high winds and big waves … a thing to get the hell away from. Now it’s merely a Cat 2 but there’s the potential that it’ll go frighteningly Cat 4 before landfall, there’s the increased storm surge on the right side of the eyewall to watch for, there’s the “cone of possibility” and the probability that it’ll stall in the Gulf and six different forecast models and … well, maybe I’ll just stay put and worry.

This complexifying of the weather took one giant leap back in the late 1960s, when Herbert Saffir gave us the Saffir-Simpson scale so we could worry in great detail about hurricanes. (In 2005, Hurricane Wilma went off the charts and one scientist suggested the scale needed to be revised. Saffir’s response: “As simple as it is, I like the scale. I don’t like to see it too complex.”)

Then in 1971 came T. Theodore Fujita’s Fujita scale, which allowed the experts to attach numerical concern to a tornado after the fact based on damage. (Nowadays, forecasts warn of potentially devastating F4s and F5s, so as you huddle in your cellar you can worry more. And, just for good measure, the scale was recently revised so now you won’t even understand it.)

Last year, scientists introduced the Northeast Snowfall Impact Scale, giving it the we-know-nobody-will-actually-use-this acronym NESIS. It’s used to evaluate the impact of a powerful snowstorm soon after it strikes. While obviously useless to the public, at least we don’t have to worry about it.

Today, scientists announced an El Nino scale. C’mon, scientists! Give it a rest.

The ENSO Intensity Scale (don’t forget this name; it could save your life someday) varies from W1 to W5 (W=warm). El Nino’s cooler sister, La Nina, will be rated C1 to C5. Forecasters plan to issue watches and advisories. I’m going to have to leave my NOAA radio on 24/7 now. Honey, El Nino is coming! Grab the kids, the umbrella, we’re heading to Hong Kong!

While it’s true that the strength of El Nino in the Pacific can impact rainfall in the United States and hurricane formation in the Atlantic and other weather around the globe, the connection is one of many factors that combine to play out over weeks and months, and knowing whether El Nino is a W5 or a C32 has zero meaning for the average person on a given day. The old way of talking about El Nino (it’s strong, or weak, or waning, or done) was fine. But weather and climate scientists get bored with the weather, routine as it often is, and so maybe they dream this stuff up just to keep the research grants flowing.

By the way, I don’t know if El Nino affects Hong Kong. One more thing to worry about.

There’s more. An Arizona meteorologist said last week the local National Weather Service office was thinking that the Southwest’s monsoon should be renamed something like “summer thunderstorm season” to better reflect the danger posed to the public. What, monsoon doesn’t sound ominous enough? To me, it sounds far more ominous than a routine thunderstorm. Heck, most people don’t even know what monsoon means, and that alone engenders fear (it also gives the the Southwest a real exotic feel). Plus, monsoon has more O’s than ominous. On the O-scale, thunderstorms rank just a 1.

There’s been a minor outcry from the public on this one, and the NWS has apparently shelved the idea.

I should note that all these scales can be traced back to the original disaster measure, the Richter Scale, introduced in 1935. You know the Richter Scale. It’s simple, right? Well … It’s no longer in use, as scientists have since developed the more complex moment magnitude scale.

Also, for the record, there is the Torino Scale, which gauges the threat of asteroid impact and planetary annihilation. It usually sits at zero or 1 on a scale that goes up to 10 (planet-wide destruction). We never have to worry about the Torino Scale unless we really have to worry about the Torino Scale. Then again, scientists actually argue about the worth of this scale, so maybe we should worry.

Here in Phoenix today, by the way, I see a thunderstorm developing to the north. But the monsoon hasn’t officially arrived, so I’m not going to worry.

There is a lot of media coverage now about the wildfires out West. And you can feel the underlying sentiment that this is epic stuff, the concern that global warming is behind it. Some media have even stated the connection after recent fires. Problem is, in today’s Internet world, bad news spreads like, well, you know.

In the long term, scientists indeed see a connection between global warming and increased wildfire activity. But you can’t blame any one fire, or even one season, on climate change. Too many other factors (logging, not logging, rain, wind, idiots who start fires) are at work.
And 2007, despite what you’ve read, has not been that bad. While anyone suffering a fire in their neck of the woods right now probably thinks it’s a terrible fire season, so far this year is not as bad as last year and is only slightly worse than the 10-year average.

As of this morning, there are 56 fires more than 500 acres in size burning in the United States. Seventeen new wildfires started yesterday.

There have been 49,167 wildfires so far this year. By this time last year, there were 61,180.

Acreage burned to date:

• 2007: 2.29 million
• 2006: 3.99 million
• 10-year average: 2.27 million

You can see this all charted here.

Things are heating up at the National Hurricane Center (NHC). While Nature isn’t brewing up any storms, the new director’s job appears to be in jeopardy as a special NOAA task force has been dispatched to conduct an investigation. Disruptive, says the director, Bill Proenza.

Proenza has criticized his supervisors at NOAA for not funding the center adequately and for not replacing QuickSCAT, an aging forecast satellite. Meanwhile, three forecasters at the NHC have called for Proenza’s ouster.

”I don’t think that Bill can continue here,” said James Franklin, one of five senior forecasters at the center. “I don’t think he can be an effective leader.”

Let’s hope they sort it out before the real tempests arrive.

UPDATE: Proenza says he won’t leave, even though half his staff now wants him out.

While June is a month when torrential rains sometimes come from hurricanes (where are those hurricanes, by the way?) instead just a good-old-fashioned storm brought 18 inches of rain to parts of Texas.

Here in Arizona, just the width of New Mexico away, it hasn’t rained for weeks and weeks, adding to the 12-year drought that, perhaps, ought to be called the new norm rather than a drought.

Nature is fickle, always has been. But this is a wild week. Chicago also got a tropical-storm-like downpour yesterday. Britain got a deadly drenching this week and expects more.

While a single week like this does not necessarily have anything to do with climate change, it illustrates the sort of thing we may see more of: Scientists expect weather to become more extreme, with more intense storms, more rain in some place, and more intense droughts elsewhere.

A “bolt from the blue” killed a Florida man yesterday. David Canales, 41, was outside landscaping and had no warning of any thunderstorm activity, according to The Miami Herald.

The phenomenon, called a “bolt from the blue” by the National Weather Service, is rare but unknown. See a photo of one.

Lightning kills about 66 people in America every year. Many of them are golfers or others who do not heed obvious signs to go indoors and lose a one-sided game of chicken with Nature. Canales, however, is just one very, very unlucky person.