View of the Rim of Endeavour...[ 2386 ]

NASA image: The Rim of Endeavour

Opportunity's View of the Rim of Endeavour

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its panoramic camera to capture this view of Endeavour Crater's rim after a drive during the rover's 2,676th Martian day, or sol, of working on Mars (Aug. 4, 2011). 

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The drive covered 396 feet (120.7 meters) and put the rover with about that much distance to go before reaching the chosen arrival site at the rim, called 'Spirit Point.'

Endeavour Crater has been the rover team's destination for Opportunity since the rover finished exploring Victoria crater in August 2008. Endeavour, with a diameter of about 14 miles (22 kilometers), offers access to older geological deposits than any Opportunity has seen before. 

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This view looks toward a portion of the rim south of Spirit Point, including terrain that Opportunity may explore in the future.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell

.Another "An-24" crushes this month..[ 2385 ]

2nd An-24 Plane Crashes in Month By Andrew McChesney The St. Petersburg Times Published: August 10, 2011 (Issue # 1669) MAXIM STULOV / Vedomosti An An-24 similar to this one skidded off the runway and broke apart while landing at the Blagoveshchensk airport.  -  MOSCOW — An An-24 plane carrying 36 passengers and a crew of five crash-landed Monday in stormy weather in the capital of the Amur region on China’s border, injuring 12 people, emergency officials said. The accident could cause the Kremlin to increase pressure on airlines to phase out the aging twin-engine turboprop, which President Dmitry Medvedev said last month should be grounded after a July 11 crash-landing killed seven. In the most recent incident, an An-24 operated by IrAero airline skidded off the runway and broke apart while landing at the Blagoveshchensk airport, according to the Amur region branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry. Low visibility, strong winds and heavy rain contributed to the accident, it said. An investigation has been opened. Eight of the 12 people injured in the crash remained in hospital Monday night with non-life-threatening injuries like cuts, bruises and glass splinters, Interfax said. Among those hospitalized was a boy of about 3, with bad bruises, and his father, who suffered a fractured knee, it said. “No other injuries have been identified on the child: no head injuries or damage to the internal organs,” a local hospital said in a statement carried by Interfax. The boy’s mother was expected to arrive Tuesday from the family’s home in Ekimchan, a village in the Amur region. Also injured in the crash were the plane’s pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer, emergency officials said. Medvedev called for the grounding of all An-24s after an Angara Airlines plane crash-landed in the Ob River on July 11, killing seven of the 37 people on board. The pilots attempted an emergency landing after an engine caught fire during a flight from Tomsk to Surgut. But the An-24, which entered production in 1959, continues to fly. The plane is a mainstay for cash-strapped airlines that serve hard-to-reach areas of Siberia and the Far East, and its grounding would cut off hundreds of remote communities from the rest of Russia. - Medvedev has also ordered the phaseout of another aging regional plane, the Tu-134 twin jet, after an aircraft operated by RusAir crashed and exploded as it landed in thick fog in Karelia’s capital, Petrozavodsk, on June 20. Five of the 52 people on the flight from Moscow survived. In Monday’s crash, the An-24 was on a multi-stop trip through the Far East, flying from Irkutsk to Chita before crash-landing in Blagoveshchensk. The plane was to have finished its journey in Khabarovsk. - Irkutsk-based IrAero, founded in 1999, operates a fleet of about a dozen planes, including Bombardier CRJ200 regional jets, according to its web site. - Blagoveshchensk, a city of 214,400, is on the Amur River, which separates Russia from China, and is located opposite the Chinese city of Heihe.

Moscow slams Tallinn over Nazi ...[ 2385 ]

Moscow slams Tallinn over Nazi “executioner” exhibit

RT .,Published: 09 August, 2011, 15:44, 
Posted 10 August 2011., 11:25 Athens time
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Alfred Rosenberg

Russia says that Estonia is continuing its attempts to re-write history and glorify Nazism masking their evil deeds as “a struggle for national freedom”.
The latest events in Estonia point towards the Baltic state’s ostensible refusal to accept the decisions of the Nuremberg Trials, the Russian Foreign Ministry's Press and Information Department said in a statement published on Tuesday.
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In particular, the department referred to the Estonian History Museum's exhibition dedicated to Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946) – a Tallinn-born influential member of Germany's Nazi Party who was one of the key architects of its ideology. He was the head of the Nazi party's foreign affairs department and Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, Rosenberg was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials and executed in 1946.
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The republic's Ministry of Culture and the museum administration ignored protests by national minorities over the exhibit, which, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry, is “a jeer at the memory of the millions of civilians who were killed on orders from one of Hitler’s executioners.” That, Moscow states, shows the type of historical understanding Tallinn officially seeks to cultivate within society.
Back in July, the Jewish Community of Estonia sent a letter to the Minister of Culture complaining that the Rosenberg exhibit made no mention of his war crimes. The community criticized the exhibition in the History Museum as well as the one at the Gustav Adolf Gymnasium for the glorification of Nazi crimes.
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According to Moscow, a military competition called Erna Rekt (Raid) annually held in the former Soviet republic with the support of the Estonian Defense Ministry, is yet another attempt to falsify history.The competition is named after a Nazi international subversive group in Hitler’s Abwehr intelligence service, which operated in the rear of the Soviet army in 1941.
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The Russian ministry stated that attempts to portray the group’s participants as “Estonia liberators” is “a shoddy misinterpretation of historic realities”. The saboteurs were taking part in an aggressive war on the side of the Axis powers, which were enemies to all the nations who had initially signed the UN Charter.

“Covering up their crimes with reference to the “fight for national liberation” is blasphemous,” the ministry concluded.

Α Bigger Panama Canal.? .[ 2384 ]

Bigger Ships, So a Bigger Panama Canal

VoA, from 07 August 2011

Photo: AP

Workers dig an area where a new set of locks of the Panama Canal will be built in Cocoli, near Panama City

This is the VOA Special English Technology Report.
The Panama Canal opened almost one hundred years ago. More than one million ships have passed through the waterway since nineteen fourteen.

The Panama Canal connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It reduces travel by thirteen thousand kilometers. It avoids the need for ships to sail around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America.
More than forty ships pass through the canal each day -- more than fourteen thousand each year. Now, a major expansion project will permit more ships -- and bigger ships -- to pass through the canal.
Jorge Luis Quijano is the Panama Canal’s executive vice president of engineering. He told VOA's Zulima Palacio that the canal is operating at its limit.

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JORGE LUIS QUIJANO: "The present canal has a total capacity of about three hundred and forty million tons a year that it can handle, that's the maximum capacity. With the expansion we expect to double that, over six hundred million tons that we can handle in a year."
Ships pass through a series of locks. These locks raise a ship to the level of Gatun Lake at the canal entrance on the Atlantic side. They lower the ship back to sea level on the Pacific side.
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For years, shipbuilders limited the size of many ships so that they could fit through the Panama Canal. But now many shipping companies use bigger ships to transport more goods as a way to reduce costs.
Jorge Luis Quijano says the expansion project will allow many of these larger ships to use the canal.
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JORGE LUIS QUIJANO: "This new canal actually is offering a larger vessel that it can handle, with deeper draft with a longer and wider vessel."
Workers are building the new locks alongside the old ones, which will remain in use. The existing locks are three hundred five meters long and thirty-three meters wide.
The new ones will be four hundred twenty-seven meters long and fifty-five meters wide. They will be able to handle ships with drafts of more than fifteen meters. Currently ships can ride only twelve meters deep in the canal.
Engineers could not make the new locks too big. Mr. Quijano says the plans had to balance the size of the locks with the cost for ships to use the canal.
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JORGE LUIS QUIJANO: “We had to look at the optimal size of vessel that would make the return on the investment of a high value to us. So we chose what size of vessels that could actually pay for this project.”

And that's the VOA Special English Technology Report, written by June Simms. You can watch a video about the project at voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Steve Ember.

NASA's modified Boeing 747 ..[ 2383 ]

NASA's modified Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft 

NASA's modified Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft briefly flew in formation over the Edwards Air Force Base Test Range on Aug. 2, 2011. 

The aircraft were scheduled to be in the air on the same day, NASA 911 (plane in the foreground) on a flight crew proficiency flight, and NASA 905 (rear) on a functional check flight following maintenance operations. 

Since both aircraft were scheduled to be in the air at the same time, SCA pilot Jeff Moultrie of Johnson Space Center's Aircraft Operations Directorate took the opportunity to have both SCA's fly in formation for about 20 minutes while NASA photographer Carla Thomas captured still and video imagery from a NASA Dryden F/A-18. In addition to Moultrie, 

NASA 905's check flight crew included pilot Arthur "Ace" Beall and flight engineer Henry Taylor while NASA 911 was flown by Larry LaRose, Steve Malarchick and Bob Zimmerman from NASA Johnson and Frank Batteas and Bill Brockett from NASA Dryden.

Image Credit: NASA/Carla Thomas