Telescope to Give Early Warning on Deadly Asteroids

It's not exactly space sharks with laser beams, but it could be the first step.

A nonprofit foundation formed a decade ago has announced its intention to build a telescope to detect Earth-targeted asteroids. The head of the foundation is Rusty Schweickart, who should know a thing or two about things outside Earth's orbit. The Apollo 9 astronaut is chairman emeritus of the foundation, which aims to raise in the hundreds of millions of dollars in order to fund the telescope project, to be titled Sentinel. The chairman and CEO of B612 is former shuttle astronaut Ed Lu, who septa long periods of time abroad the International Space Station.

After the success of SpaceX, private groups might find it a bit easier to raise money and find success in space. B612 is pointedly not asking for NASA for help, although it the foundation says it will work with a face familiar to NASA: Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., which worked on teams that produced both the Kepler and the Spitzer telescopes.

The telescope would be an infrared one and would orbit the Sun, on a trajectory similar to the planet Venus. Launch date is planned to be in 2017, and the minimum lifespan for the telescope is between five and six years. During that time, scientists hope to identify hundreds of thousands of uncharted asteroids, the idea being that we will have a long time to mobilize Bruce Willis or whoever needs to be involved to deal with any potential threat.

The B612 Foundation takes its name from the Earth name for the home of The Little Prince. In the novel by Antoine de Saint Exupery, the Prince says he comes from Asteroid 325 but that Earth people call it B-612. 

Chasing ET with Tweets

Tweets in Space!

That's the plan for the National Geographic Channel, as part of its promotion for a TV show about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Channel staff will gather up tweets sent to #chasingufos on June 29 and blast them into space via Puerto Rico's Arecibo Radio Telescope.

It's all part of an effort to get people to watch a TV program about something that happened 35 years ago. The event was the "Wow" signal, a 72-second transmission from space received way back in Year 1 of Star Wars movie releases (1977). Some lucky astronomer had his receiver trained to a certain frequency and got a big surprise when a very unusual signal turned up. (For the record, it was 6EQUJ5. SETI geeks will be familiar with this.)

Anyway, back to TV, so this publicity stunt (and I am NOT being paid for this blog post) is to air on August 15, the day in 1977 when the Wow signal got noticed here on Earth. The tweets will enter space on the same day.

So, on to the unknowns: We don't know what the frequency meant (still don't), we don't know where it came from (the telescope that "saw" it isn't around anymore), and we don't know how to find it again. The whole thing could be just an interstellar belch. But it might not be. It just might be ET phoning home. 

Through some serious number-crunching, scientists have narrowed to three the possible origin locations of the Wow signal, so they'll be blasting the tweets to all three, just in case. 

The project managers insist that it's all about the crowd-sourcing, in that they promise to send out any and all tweets posted on that day and bearing that hashtag. This would be a far cry from the gold-disc standard of virtual noise that went out on the Voyager spacecraft because all of that material was chosen by closed committee.

The hope is that the sheer volume of noise created by the tweet blast will be enough for anyone who happens to be listening or otherwise hurtling within earshot an opportunity to sit up and take notice. 

Stay tuned.

Mike Tyson Takes a Shot at Broadway

You'll have only one shot at this, so get your credit card ready … for Mike Tyson on Broadway.

In the euphemistically titled Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, the famed boxer will present his side of the story, his story, as written by him and his wife. Tyson himself will be delivering the lines, so it's about as first-person as you can get.

The website promoting the show promises a "riveting one-man show." Not so sure how riveted I'd be, but I'm not a huge boxing fan, either. Still, it might be entertaining to see just full of himself Tyson can be. I do recall that he used to give rather festive interviews, especially after he won his fights (which he managed to do a whole lot of during his career).

I am a fan of the show's director, Spike Lee, who says that Tyson is a "great storyteller." Well, that might be true, as far as it goes. Whether his stagemanship surpasses his showmanship and ringmanship remains to be seen.

The show, which ran in Las Vegas earlier this year, runs on Broadway for just six night, from July 31 to August 5.

At 90 minutes, the show is sure to be longer than some of Tyson's fights.

Juicy new treat: bacon sundae

Yes, I eat healthy foods. Yes, I know it's good for me to do so. No, I'm not a junk food junkie. But bacon sundae? I'm there.

Burger King is introducing this sweet-and-savory beast of a dessert item, and I can totally see the benefit: it's all taste buds.

It's vanilla soft serve ice cream topped with fudge and caramel. But they don't stop there. No, they add bacon crumbles (so it's sort of healthy, like a salad with Bacon Bits). But they don't stop there, either. You get a full-on strip of bacon to go with it. (You can dip the bacon in the sundae, as if the bacon is a cookie, if you want; or, you can just crunch it plain.)

I'm down with the fact that it's 510 calories in all. That doesn't bother me, nor does the fat content of 18 grams or the sugar content of 61 grams. In fact, nothing bothers me about this dessert at all. (For the record, I like Bacon Chocolate, too.)

The company swears that they're pulling this in their menu until September 3. Until then, it's full speed ahead into bacony sundae goodness.

A Crypt Fit for The King, or You

Seems a bit creepy to me, but I can't afford it anyway. 

Someone, however, will get the chance to be interred in the tomb that once housed Elvis. At least, that's the intended purpose of the crypt that once held the King for all of two months before he was reburied at Graceland.

(Let me just say here for the record, too, that this whole business of Elvis being dead is a vicious rumor designed to foment discord among the faithful. But that's another story.)

Anyway, a guy named Darren Julien, who makes his living auctioning off famous things once belonging to famous people, has put up for auction a whole new lot of stuff, in a big sell-off in June titled "Music Icons." One of those celebrity possessions is the actual tomb, which is still in the actual Kingly mausoleum in Memphis's actual Forest Hill Cemetery. 

(For those of you who believe this) Elvis was buried there next to his mother, the great Gladys, until such time as Graceland was ready to receive long-term internees. Since Gladys (and her son, if you choose to believe this line of thinking) was/were moved out of the crypt, it has remained empty. So there's plenty of room for you or whoever happens to be the highest bidder at the end of the auction.

So circle June 23 on your calendar if you want a piece of the action. Bidding starts at $100,000. If you do win it, no need to wait to occupy it. You could certainly outfit it yourself, and you might even see Elvis one day.

End of the World Postponed, Again

The world isn't going to end after all, at least not this December.

That's the word from a group of archaeologists who have found a Mayan calendar that doesn't end at 2012. No, if early reports are anything to go by, it will take these brave diggers a few generations just to untangle the delicate bob and weave of the complexity of this newly discovered calendar. (The Maya couldn't make things easy, could they?)

See, this intrepid bunch of doomsday-naysayers (not really, but I couldn't resist the phrase) were digging in and around and under the ancient city if Xultun, which is in present-day Guatemala, the northeastern part, when they found traces of ancient paint. That's not so much of a surprise, except that the ancient paint was on a depiction of a Maya king and another nearby painting wasn't a painting at all but a calendar.

This calendar had the usual cycles and cycles and more cycles that we're used to seeing on these sorts of things. So the baktun (400-year cycle) that ends on December 21 isn't the last one after all. It's just the one that ends on that day. The next one begins on the next day. Experts in this sort of historical timekeeping had long speculated exactly that, but the doomsayers among us had rushed to their judgement (day) long before that. And really, what sells better than the End of the World?

So, go ahead and book your Christmas holidays because you will be around to enjoy them. (And, if this is some sort of conspiracy by the Deniers, then you won't have to worry about forfeiting all that Christmas cash anyway because you — and the cash — won't be here.)

Woman, 80, Lands Plane When Husband Pilot Collapses

An 80-year-old woman overcame her own frailness and lack of flight time to land a small plane when her husband pilot collapsed.

Helen Collins and her husband, John, were flying from Florida to Wisconsin. John said his neck was sore earlier that day, but he insisted that he was fine for flying. Toward the end of the flight, he collapsed. That left Helen to fly the plane.

Helen dialed 911 and explained her situation. A pilot on the ground at Cherryland Airport talked her through the landing procedures that she vaguely remembered from when she herself flew planes, about 30 years ago. (She had flown solo but never something as large as the twin-engine Cessna she was now in charge of.)

The plane was running out of fuel, and one engine was sputtering. Undeterred, Helen soldiered on. 

Another pilot in a similar plane joined Helen in the sky, and the two of them got Helen's plane on the ground intact, despite a rather bumpy landing that resulted in broken landing gear. Her son Richard was waiting for them. (Their other son, James, also a pilot, had volunteered to help with the flying, but John insisted on flying by himself.)

John, 81, died. He was the chief executive of the family manufacturing business in Sturgeon Bay, Wis., and had been flying for more than 30 years, including volunteer stints for Angel Flight, an emergency hospital fight service.

Helen was released from a local hospital after being treated for injuries including a crushed vertebra. She had undergone two open-heart surgeries in recent years but showed no signs of heart trouble during her emergency landing.