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While there are still 105 days until the opening of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, the Olympic Torch Relay has already begun.

Some 12,000 people will participate in the relay, which runs from October 30, 2009 to February 12, 2010 (the longest relay in Olympic history). The relay participants “will run, walk, paddle, wheel, sail, and even fly” the flame across Canada, says an October 28 press release from the Vancouver Organizing Committee.

Fly? How do you carry the Olympic flame on board an aircraft?

The easy way—in a miner’s lantern for safekeeping.

The Vancouver 2010 lantern. Image copyright VANOC/COVAN

On October 29, Greek officials entrusted the Olympic flame to a Canadian delegation, which included two flame attendants. The attendants—22-year-old Dina Ouellette and 23-year-old Aronhiaies Herrne—used a wand to capture the flame and light a miner’s lantern, the Vancouver Organizing Committee reported. The delegation—and the flame—boarded a Canadian Forces CC-150 Polaris, and were scheduled to arrive in Victoria, British Columbia at 7:15 a.m. (Pacific Time), Friday, October 30.

What’s cool about the universe is that if you stare at nothing long enough, you’ll see something big. That’s what scientists have done with the Hubble Space Telescope a few times, creating the enchanting Hubble Deep Field images with swarms of galaxies that have opened our eyes to the immensity of the cosmos.

But sometimes the universe comes to you, as it did last April 23 when a gamma ray burst now named GRB 090423 was detected by NASA’s orbiting Swift satellite. Gamma ray bursts are the most violent explosions known, and occur when a star perhaps 20 times the size of our sun exhausts its fuel. Its core collapses under the force of the star’s gravity and becomes a black hole while outer layers fly off. Then matter falling into that hole produces a powerful jet of gamma rays that flare outward in opposite directions. If one of those jets is pointed at us, it is so energetic that (we now know) we can detect it from a distance of 13.1 billion light years, which is how far away this burst originated. That’s more than 95 percent of the distance across the known universe, and 190 million light years farther away than the previous record holder.

Artist's concept of the evolution of a star into a gamma ray burst. Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller/NSF

Astronomers estimate the explosion occurred 630 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars were forming. Astronomers also think the first stars formed no earlier than 150 million years after the Big Bang. So GRB 090423 would have been only a few hundred million years old when it blew. That sounds like a big number until you compare it to the age of stable stars such as our sun that burn for 10 billion years before they swell into a red giant, then smolder into a white dwarf for another five billion or more.

Here’s a good video on the Nature web site that explains it.

Two years ago, then-NASA Administrator Mike Griffin got into trouble by appearing to censor the results of a pilot survey that reportedly showed a higher than expected number of airplane accidents and near-accidents. Some accused NASA of squelching the truth to protect the airline industry. Congress harrumphed, Griffin denied any wrongdoing, and NASA agreed to release the data in a “redacted” or edited form, while pointing out that the survey methods and results had never been properly vetted. The agency then asked the National Research Council to determine whether the survey, called the National Aviation Operations Monitoring Service (NAOMS), had been done correctly.

The short answer: no. The NRC panel—which includes experts in aviation, survey methodology, and statistics—found all kinds of problems with NAOMS, from poor question wording to a failure to eliminate possible sources of bias. They recommend that the survey, which was jointly managed by NASA and the Battelle Memorial Institute, “not be used for generating rates or trends in rates of safety-related events in the National Airspace System.”

Besides, says the panel, the Federal Aviation Administration is already developing a pretty good tool, called the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing System, or ASIAS, to search existing safety databases for easier analysis.

Read the NRC report here.

Score one for the rocket engineers.

To quote Ed Mango, the launch director for today’s Ares I-X rocket test, his team at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center did a “frickin’ fantastic” job on their first outing, which gathered data for the designers of NASA’s proposed Ares 1 crew launcher. It appears the engineers got all the information they needed, and everything went smoothly. “The team is tired, but extremely satisfied,” said NASA Constellation program manager Jeff Hanley.

Good for them. They needed a win. It can’t be easy working on Ares these days, not with the big, black cloud hanging over the program’s head. Kennedy center director Bob Cabana referred to “the naysayers” during his post-launch congratulatory speech. Man, does he have that right.

Norman Augustine and his Presidentially-appointed panel on the future of human spaceflight didn’t question the Ares rocket’s technical soundness so much as its very purpose. When the program started, NASA hoped Ares 1 would be flying by 2012, soon enough to ferry astronauts to the space station shortly after the shuttle retires. Now, several budget cuts later, the agency says Ares can’t fly until 2015. The Augustine committee (based on an independent assessment by the Aerospace Corporation) predicts it will be two years later than that.

Most advocates of human space exploration hope that by 2017 a commercial launcher will come along that can beat Ares’ predicted high price. According to the data on page 16 of this presentation, Ares 1 will cost $13.5 billion to build and $557 million per launch, at the rate of two flights a year. That doesn’t sound like much of an improvement over the space shuttle, which was widely criticized as being too expensive.

Ah well. That argument is for another day, and I feel a bit churlish raining on the Ares 1-X parade when they’ve already seen enough clouds for one day. So congratulations, folks. That was frickin’ fantastic.

The scrub of today’s Ares I-X launch, now scheduled for 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, October 28, is a good reminder of all that can go wrong when launching a new rocket. But the problems that led to today’s scrub didn’t involve any of the vehicle’s technologies, unless you include a lanyard trying to pull off a stuck probe cover on the tip of the vehicle. The bungee-type cord had to be unceremoniously stretched, probably by people with advanced engineering degrees, for a few minutes until it snapped away. The applause in the room, audible on NASA TV, left a colleague and me amused.

Mainly, today’s culprit was the threat of bad weather, including upper level winds at the altitude where the vehicle would encounter maximum dynamic pressure; and an atmospheric condition that causes static electricity to build up on the outside of the vehicle as it flies, which would block the ground controllers’ ability to destroy the I-X if it flew off course. These passed, and when everything looked great and the clock was ticking again, with just a few minutes to go, the Homer Simpson of cargo ships strayed into the restricted waters east of the launch site, triggering a hold until bad weather could return…

Ares I-X, still on the launch pad.

Part of me—no, all of me—fully expected a scrub, having grown up in an era when only two of every five shuttle flights launched on the first attempt, and almost one in ten required more than four attempts. The two humdingers that share the record: STS-61C in 1986, and STS-73 in 1995. Each left on the seventh try. Last July, STS-127 made a run at tying them, but Endeavour got off on the sixth effort.

Granted, shuttle launches are forced to rely on good weather at emergency landing spots around the globe. And some shuttles that, for example, chase down the International Space Station have a launch window of just a few minutes.

But scrubs ain’t cheap. NASA admits that each time they fuel and drain a shuttle, $500,000 goes up in hydrogen and oxygen vapors, and $700,000 in personnel costs.

It’s worth mentioning that between November 1967 and May 1973, NASA launched 13 Saturn V rockets (including Skylab), 10 of them manned, and not a single launch was ever scrubbed. Apollo 14 saw a brief delay due to weather, and Apollo 17 saw one due to a computer glitch. But no astronaut ever unbuckled from a Saturn V on launch day and took the elevator down.

Was that just the “go fever” of the Apollo era? After Apollo 11 had met JFK’s deadline, NASA still launched Apollo 12 into a driving rain. When the rocket was struck by lighting half a minute later, the crew rebooted their pinwheeling control panels and flew on.

But the stakes are sky-high for NASA and Ares right now. The thought of a catastrophe on the first Ares flight is awful. They did the right thing today.