Satellites

A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt. This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before - and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms.

WASHINGTON - The number of U.S. satellites watching Earth is expected to plummet by 2020, and weather forecasting, including hurricane tracking, could suffer as a result, a new report warns. The study, released last week by the nation's top science advisors, estimated that the fleet of science satellites operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would "decline precipitously" from a peak of 110 probes last year to fewer than 30 in 2020. The drop is a result of several factors, including budget problems and rocket accidents, and scientists said the United States risked blurring its vision of Earth if it did not act quickly to replace satellites expected to die during the next eight years.

Radiation from the largest solar flare in four years is expected to reach the Earth Thursday and Friday, potentially interfering with communication and navigation satellites and disrupting ground-based communication networks and power grids. The rain of charged particles from the so-called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, should also enhance the northern lights, also known as the Aurora Borealis, making them both more prominent and visible farther south, perhaps even into the northern tier of the United States, experts said.

A group of 21st-century private space entrepreneurs is expected to unveil an ambitious new venture to mine the surface of near-Earth asteroids in search of precious metals and rare metallic elements. The plan may seem like it was torn from a science fiction novel, and critics say the idea may be far-fetched and difficult for a small company to accomplish. But the company, Planetary Resources Inc., has already drawn an A-list of investors and advisors. The backers include Google Inc. Chief Executive Larry Page and Chairman Eric Schmidt, "Avatar" director James Cameron and Microsoft Corp.'s former chief software architect Charles Simonyi.

"Well, here it is," said aerospace engineer William Ailor as he paused next to the hulking metal shells arrayed along the plaza outside a visitors entrance at Aerospace Corp.'s El Segundo headquarters. The stuff is junk. But, Ailor said, it's no ordinary junk. This garbage has traveled to space and back. A 150-pound hollow sphere of blackened titanium is all that remains of a motor casing from a Delta II rocket that fell to Earth in 2001, landing in the Saudi Arabian desert west of Riyadh.

Bob Kahl slips in through a side door of the vast, abandoned hangar and looks at what's left of the assembly plant where he worked for nearly 40 years. He remembers the hum of power tools, the biting aroma of cutting oil, swarms of workers plugging away on a labyrinth of yellow scaffolding. All that's left is a few piles of broken concrete and a sea of colorless dust that coats a Palmdale factory floor the size of two football fields. "Welcome to the birthplace of America's space shuttle fleet," said Kahl, 60, smiling.

WASHINGTON - The number of U.S. satellites watching Earth is expected to plummet by 2020, and weather forecasting, including hurricane tracking, could suffer as a result, a new report warns. The study, released last week by the nation's top science advisors, estimated that the fleet of science satellites operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would "decline precipitously" from a peak of 110 probes last year to fewer than 30 in 2020. The drop is a result of several factors, including budget problems and rocket accidents, and scientists said the United States risked blurring its vision of Earth if it did not act quickly to replace satellites expected to die during the next eight years.

When space shuttle Endeavour blasted off Monday morning, it carried three tiny satellites — each the size of a postage stamp. The slim, 1-inch-square satellites on NASA's next-to-last shuttle mission are to be mounted on the outside of the International Space Station to collect data measuring the harsh conditions of space. Mason Peck, a Cornell University professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who leads the project, said the bite-size satellites, dubbed Sprite, are prototypes.

A NASA satellite designed to measure greenhouse gas emissions and pinpoint global warming dangers crashed Tuesday after a protective covering failed to separate from the craft shortly after launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The loss of the $278-million satellite came as a severe blow to NASA's climate monitoring efforts, as well as the builder of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has decided to kill a controversial Bush administration program to use U.S. spy satellites to collect domestic intelligence for counter-terrorism, law enforcement and security, a senior Homeland Security official said Monday evening. The National Applications Office program was established in 2007 to provide up-to-the-minute electronic intelligence to local and state law enforcement.

SEOUL — North Korea failed in its much-hyped effort to launch a satellite into space Friday, undercutting its claims to be a "strong and prosperous" nation on the centennial of founder Kim Il Sung's birth. After weeks of boasting by the country, the missile launched at 7:39 a.m. on a sunny, wind-free morning from a base near the west coast city of Sinuiju. U.S. and South Korean intelligence reports say the rocket quickly broke up and splashed into the Yellow Sea. "The missile traveled one to two minutes and broke apart in the air. It broke into 20 separate pieces," Shin Won-shik, a South Korean Defense Ministry official, said at a briefing Friday morning.

Using space technology to sniff out a telltale trail of penguin poop strewn about the edges of Antarctica, scientists have completed the first-ever census of an animal population taken with satellite imagery. The collaboration of British and American researchers was able to identify 44 emperor penguin colonies, including seven that were previously unknown. They counted 595,000 birds - twice as many as they expected to see. "Now that we have this baseline information, we can start asking new questions" about the Antarctic ecosystem, said Michelle LaRue, a doctoral student in conservation biology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and coauthor of a paper about the discovery, published Friday in the journal PLoS One. As depicted in the 2005 film "March of the Penguins," emperor penguin pairs battle temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit to nest at their breeding sites each year.

BEIJING - The spectacle unfolding on a launchpad on the west coast of North Korea creates a picture of a boastful and media-savvy regime willing to brush off international condemnation - but perhaps not completely unified behind its youthful new leader. Despite warnings from the United States, as well as China and Russia, Pyongyang said Wednesday that it was fueling a three-stage rocket for imminent launch, depending on weather conditions. "We don't really care about the opinions from the outside.

SEOUL - North Korea appears to be preparing for a third nuclear test, digging a new underground tunnel at a site where previous tests were conducted in 2006 and 2009, South Korea's official news agency reported. Photos taken by a U.S. satellite reveal the excavation work at the Punggye-ri site in the country's northeast, the Yonhap agency reported Sunday. The work comes as North Korea also prepares to launch a satellite, called Kwangmyongsong-3, sometime this week to commemorate the centennial of founding father Kim Il Sung's birth.

James Murdoch's resignation as chairman of satellite broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting comes ahead of a government report expected to be critical of his handling of the ethics scandal at News Corp.'s British tabloids. Murdoch, in announcing his decision Tuesday, alluded to the ongoing investigations into alleged phone hacking and police bribery by News Corp.'s the Sun and the now-closed News of the World. Problems at the tabloids last summer derailed the media conglomerate's plans to take control of Britain's dominant pay-TV provider, in which it holds a 39% interest, with a $12-billion purchase of all outstanding BSkyB shares.

Satellite broadcaster DirecTV is taking its fight against Tribune Co. to the government. In a complaint filed Monday with the Federal Communications Commission, DirecTV accused Tribune of reneging on a deal that would have kept Tribune's television stations on the satellite service. The filing also said that the bankrupt Tribune's creditors, and not its management, are calling the shots for the stations, even though they do not yet hold the actual licenses. "In another case of runaway Wall Street greed, some of America's wealthiest hedge funds and investment banks, including Oaktree Partners, Angelo Gordon, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citibank, forced Tribune's senior management to renege on an agreement that would have kept DirecTV customers connected to their local programming," DirecTV said in a statement.

Two Navy navigation satellites were launched Monday aboard a Scout rocket, and authorities were waiting to see if the satellites would enter their assigned polar orbit. The contrail from the launch was visible in the twilight sky over a wide area of Southern California. The satellites, launched at 6:57 p.m., were to enter a 600-mile circular polar orbit, he said.

In a boost for privately funded space ventures, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. expects to announce Wednesday that it has signed a $492-million contract to launch rockets carrying satellites for a mobile telecommunications company. The deal represents a major breakthrough for the Hawthorne-based rocket company, known as SpaceX, which has been pushing a low-cost way to lift commercial satellites into space. Two weeks ago, the company, co-founded by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, successfully test launched its Falcon 9 rocket, which analysts said is likely to be the vehicle that takes the satellites into orbit.

Kim Fowley pulls DVDs, fliers, CDs, a hospital admission slip and more DVDs out of a jumble of media on the mixing board of a drab Hollywood strip-mall studio. Per usual, the infamous pop schlockmeister has a beautiful young woman by his side. Fowley wants to transform Snow Mercy, a scientist-turned-dominatrix/performance artist, into his latest star. But he's got a dozen other hustles going on too, and he hands a reporter one copy after another of B-minus movies. They all feature Kim Fowley.

NEW YORK — Perched on the 36th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, SiriusXM Radio Inc.'s glass-walled lobby teemed with 52 buff bachelors, a diminutive Catholic nun and singer Chris Isaak strumming his guitar, a pint-sized white terrier at his heels. As Isaak crooned songs from his country album "Beyond the Sun," Billy Corgan was in an adjacent studio promoting the re-release of his indie rock band Smashing Pumpkin's first two albums. Minutes later, shock jock Howard Stern sauntered down the hallway from his recording studio to a private service elevator that leads to his ride.