Gizmorama - May 13, 2013

Good Morning,

Here's something you don't read too often - Air Force's experimental scramjet aircraft hits Mach 5.1 -- 3,880 mph! What?! That's unbelievable, right? Hey, who really needs to travel that fast?

Learn about this and other interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Air Force's experimental scramjet aircraft hits Mach 5.1 -- 3,880 mph --*
OXNARD, Calif. - The final flight of the X-51A Waverider test program saw the scramjet aircraft reach Mach 5.1 over the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. Air Force said Friday. The unmanned hypersonic researcher craft traveled more than 230 nautical miles in just over 6 minutes Wednesday over the Point Mugu Naval Air Warfare Center Sea Range off California before crashing into the ocean as intended, an Air Force release said. The X-51A took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California under the wing of a B-52H Stratofortress before being released at about 50,000 feet. A solid rocket booster took the X-51A to about Mach 4.8 at which point the craft's scramjet engine ignited and accelerated it to Mach 5.1 -- about 3,880 miles per hour -- at 60,000 feet. Scramjet stands for supersonic combustion ram jet, which has no moving parts; fuel is mixed with air rushing into the combustion chamber at supersonic speeds and then ignited. "It was a full mission success," Charlie Brink, X-51A program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory, said in a statement. "I believe all we have learned from the X-51A Waverider will serve as the bedrock for future hypersonics research and ultimately the practical application of hypersonic flight."


*-- Hubble captures dramatic image of gas left over from supernova --*
GREENBELT, Md. - NASA says the Hubble telescope has captured a sharp image of the wispy red remains of a star similar to our sun that exploded as a supernova 150,000 years ago. Reduced to just a web-like gaseous shell, the object known as SNR B0519-69.0 -- or SNR 0519 for short -- exploded about 150,000 years ago but the first light from the explosion only reached Earth about 600 years ago, the space agency said. Thin, blood-red shells of gas in the image released by NASA this week are the only remnants of the unstable progenitor star. There are several types of supernovae, but SNR 0519 is known to have been a white dwarf star -- a sun-like star in the final stages of its life, astronomers said. The remnants of SNR 0519 are located more than 150,000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Dorado, which also contains most of our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, which orbits the Milky Way galaxy as a satellite and is the fourth-largest in our local group of galaxies, they said. Hubble's image was taken 600 years after the supernova would have been first visible from Earth; the actual explosion is now 150,600 years in the past.


*-- Scientists say stones are linked to 1908 cosmic blast over Siberia --*
MOSCOW - A Russian researcher says stones he found in 1988 may be fragments of the largest celestial body to hit the Earth in recorded history. Andrei Zlobin of the Vernadsky State Geological Museum at the Russian Academy of Sciences in central Siberia says the stones he found in a river in 1988 may have been part of the so-called Tunguska meteorite that exploded over the area in 1908. Although the Tunguska blast was 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945, scientists have so far failed to find any fragments of the celestial body that caused it. Some scientists believe it was an ice asteroid or comet that exploded in the atmosphere and evaporated, leaving no traces on the surface below. But Zlobin says three stones found in the Khushmo River near the impact's site have traces of melting and indentations often formed during a meteorite's passing through the atmosphere. The samples are still pending a chemical analysis. Even if a link to the Tunguska event is confirmed, the samples would not necessarily disprove the ice comet theory because the comet's nucleus could have contained small stones, experts said.

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