Dozens dead in Indonesian quake

At least 75 people are dead and thousands are trapped under rubble after a strong earthquake shook the island of Sumatra, officials say.

The epicentre of the 7.6-magnitude quake was about 50km (30 miles) off the coast of the Indonesian island, near the city of Padang.

There are reports of widespread destruction to buildings and bridges.

It comes hours after a tsunami triggered by a separate South Pacific quake killed more than 100 people.

A tsunami watch issued by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in the wake of the Indonesian quake has been lifted.


More

New quake hits stricken Sumatra

An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8 has hit Sumatra, a day after another powerful quake devastated much of the Indonesian island.

Officials now say at least 200 bodies have been found from the earlier 7.6 magnitude quake, which triggered landslides and cut power lines.

Hundreds of buildings, including hospitals, collapsed in Padang, the capital of West Sumatra province.

Rescue workers said the number of dead is expected to rise significantly.

"Our prediction is that thousands have died," said Rustam Pakaya, head of the health ministry's disaster centre in Jakarta.

More

FORUM

Deadly tsunamis strike in Pacific

Tsunamis caused by a powerful earthquake in the Pacific kill more than 90 people in Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga.

About 7:00 am, a powerful earthquake measuring 8.3 on the Richter scale hit 120 miles south of American Samoa. Damages are unknown. Tsunami's are soon expected to impact the Pacific Region. Located in this region are American Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Pago Pago, French Polynesia, New Zealand and Australia.







FORUM

Saturn at Equinox

Click on image to enlarge

Saturn at Equinox
Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA
Explanation: How would Saturn look if its ring plane pointed right at the Sun? Before last month, nobody knew. Every 15 years, as seen from Earth, Saturn's rings point toward the Earth and appear to disappear. The disappearing rings are no longer a mystery -- Saturn's rings are known to be so thin and the Earth is so near the Sun that when the rings point toward the Sun, they also point nearly edge-on at the Earth. Fortunately, in this third millennium, humanity is advanced enough to have a spacecraft that can see the rings during equinox from the side. Last month, that Saturn-orbiting spacecraft, Cassini, was able to snap a series of unprecedented pictures of Saturn's rings during equinox. A digital composite of 75 such images is shown above. The rings appear unusually dark, and a very thin ring shadow line can be made out on Saturn's cloud-tops. Objects sticking out of the ring plane are brightly illuminated and cast long shadows. Inspection of these images may help humanity understand the specific sizes of Saturn's ring particles and the general dynamics of orbital motion.

Source

FORUM

Hangin' by a thread

Residents wait for rescuers at a building during flooding caused by Typhoon Ondoy in Cainta Rizal, east of Manila Sunday, September 27. Manila was blacked out and airline flights were suspended as a powerful typhoon battered the main Philippines island of Luzon, disaster officials said.

href="http://www.stevequayle.com/News.alert/09_Photo_of_Day/090928.photo.of.day.html">Source

FORUM

Philippine Flood, September 26, 2009

FORUM

Nephilim Rising MUST SEE!

From the Swami







FORUM

NASA's Apollo DSE "Black Box" Transcripts - revealing the unscripted truth about the Moon (Part 1)

In this examination into NASA's "black box" transcripts, we will look at just a few of the many interesting and revealing comments made by the astronauts throughout the Apollo program that were captured by the CSM's DSE system, as well as touch on some of the scripting protocols employed during the various TV broadcasts made from the CSM during the journey to and from the Moon and while in lunar orbit. Contrary to what many think, those TV broadcasts were in fact elegantly scripted affairs, designed to rigidly control the amount of data that we, the general public, would have available to analyze. Because of this, the DSE and DSEA internal crew conversation transcripts can provide us, in the astronauts own words, an unscripted and less-guarded insight into some of the incredible things they really witnessed during their journey to and from the Moon.

During the Apollo lunar landing program, NASA made use of two primary flight telemetry/voice recording systems aboard their spacecraft. One of these systems was inside the Command/Service Module, and the other was mounted within the Lunar Module. These two systems were known as the DSE (aboard the CSM) and the DSEA (aboard the LM). The "Data Storage Equipment" systems essentially served as Black Box cockpit voice recorders, designed to tape some of the internal conversations between the astronauts while they were out of radio contact with Mission Control in Houston. After contact was re-established during the flight, Mission Control could then dump (downlink) the recorded data from the CSM to Earth, where it would be analyzed.

Unfortunately, NASA today claims that the original DSE Black Box tapes from the Apollo missions are missing and are presumed lost. However, these DSE recordings were transcribed shortly after the contents of the tapes were originally dumped from the CSM to the Earth, and several years after the Apollo program ended, these transcripts finally were declassified and then released to the NASA archives.

In coming segments, we will examine many more impressive statements made by the NASA astronauts that were captured by the various cockpit voice recording systems utilized during not only the Apollo program, but during the earlier Gemini Earth-orbital flights as well. There is much more to come!



FORUM

To Fly Free in Space

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

To Fly Free in Space
Credit: STS-41B, NASA
Explanation: At about 100 meters from the cargo bay of the space shuttle Challenger, Bruce McCandless II was further out than anyone had ever been before. Guided by a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), astronaut McCandless, pictured above, was floating free in space. McCandless and fellow NASA astronaut Robert Stewart were the first to experience such an "untethered space walk" during Space Shuttle mission 41-B in 1984. The MMU works by shooting jets of nitrogen and has since been used to help deploy and retrieve satellites. With a mass over 140 kilograms, an MMU is heavy on Earth, but, like everything, is weightless when drifting in orbit. The MMU was replaced with the SAFER backpack propulsion unit.

Source


FORUM

Floods bring chaos to Philippines

Nearly a month's worth of rain fell in just six hours in the capital
At least five people have been killed and thousands evacuated as floods caused by heavy rain brought chaos to the Philippines.

One town is said to be completely under water. Power has been cut off to parts of the capital, Manila, where hundreds of people are trapped on rooftops.

The government has declared a calamity, allowing access to emergency funds.

Television pictures showed water flowing down roads like rivers, with the floods chest-deep and rising.

The equivalent of a whole month's rain fell over six hours, as Tropical Storm Ketsana lashed the archipelago, causing the worst flooding in Manila for 20 years.

Nearby 2,000 people were evacuated and hundreds more were stranded on rooftops.

Mayor Mon Ilagan of the town of Cainta, in Rizal province to the north, told local media his town was "almost 100% under water".

READ MORE
FORUM

THREE SATELLITES IN THREE MINUTES

THREE SATELLITES IN THREE MINUTES: Last night, Mark Staples stood beneath a Spanish moss-draped oak tree on the shore of Little Lake Santa Fe in central Florida. He tilted his camera up to shoot the Moon when, with no warning, a satellite flashed through the branches. "It was a lucky shot," he says, but that was just the beginning:

A minute later, the Hubble Space Telescope glided by. "I used the moss to block the Moon so that I could photograph the HST

I turned around and saw the International Space Station just clearing the trees over the city lights of nearby Starke (image). In all, I caught three satellites in three minutes!"

Source

FORUM