Typhoon Hit Fukushima, Japan

 

A powerful typhoon slammed into Japan on Wednesday, leaving 13 people dead or missing in south-central regions and halting trains in Tokyo before grazing a crippled nuclear plant in the tsunami-ravaged northeast.

Officials at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, where engineers are still struggling with small radiation leaks due to tsunami damage, expressed relief that Typhoon Roke's driving winds and rains caused no immediate problems there other than a broken security camera.

"The worst seems to be over," said Takeo Iwamoto, spokesman for plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., after the storm passed just west of the plant and then headed north.

More than 200,000 households in central Japan were without electricity late Wednesday. Police and local media reported 13 people dead or missing in southern and central regions, many of them believed swept away by rivers swollen with rains.

The storm, packing sustained winds of up to 100 mph (162 kph), made landfall in the early afternoon near the city of Hamamatsu, about 125 miles (200 kilometers) west of Tokyo. The fast-moving storm went past the capital in the evening and then headed into the Tohoku region, which was devastated by the March 11 earthquak tsunami.

In Tokyo, where many rush hour commuter trains were suspended, thousands of commuters trying to rush home were stuck at stations across the sprawling city.

"The hotels in the vicinity are all booked up, so I'm waiting for the bullet train to restart," Hiromu Harada, a 60-year-old businessman, said dejectedly at Tokyo Station.

Fire department officials reported three people injured in Tokyo. In the trendy shopping district of Shibuya, winds knocked a tree onto a sidewalk, but no one was hurt. Pedestrians struggled to walk straight in powerful winds that made umbrellas useless.

At the Fukushima plant, engineers are still working to stabilize the reactors six months after three of them melted down when the tsunami disabled the plant's power and back-up generators.

Iwamoto said the storm passed without damaging the reactors' cooling systems, which are crucial to keeping them under control. However, a closed-circuit camera that shows exteriors of the reactor buildings abruptly stopped, and plant workers were investigating, he said.

Workers were trying to prevent pools of contaminated water from flooding and leaking outside the complex, said Junichi Matsumoto, another power company spokesman.

"The contaminated water levels have been rising, and we are watching the situation very closely to make sure it stays there," Matsumoto told reporters.

As the storm headed further into the north, it triggered landslides in parts of Miyagi state that already were hit by the March disasters. Some 2,500 people, including 472 quake and tsunami survivors living in shelters in the town of Onagawa, were ordered to evacuate due to fear of flooding. The local government requested the help of defense troops. Dozens of schools canceled classes.

The disaster-struck region had a chilling reminder of its earlier disasters when a magnitude-5.3 earthquake struck late Wednesday just south of Fukushima in the Ibaraki state. Officials said the temblor posed no danger to the plant, and that it did not cause any damage or injuries in the region.

Heavy rains prompted floods and caused road damage earlier in dozens of locations in Nagoya and several other cities, the Aichi prefectural (state) government said.

Parts of Japan's central city of Nagoya, about 170 miles (270 kilometers) west of Tokyo, were flooded near swollen rivers where rescue workers helped residents evacuate in rubber boats.

Police in nearby Gifu prefecture said a 9-year-old boy and an 84-year-old man were missing after apparently falling into swollen rivers.

More than 200 domestic flights were canceled and some bullet train services were suspended.

Toyota Motor Corp., Japan's No. 1 automaker, shut down its plants as a precaution.

Machinery maker Mitsubishi Heavy Industries told workers at its five plants to stay home, company spokesman Hideo Ikuno said.

Nissan Motor Co. spokesman Chris Keeffe said workers at its Yokohama headquarters and nearby technical facilities were being told to go home early for safety reasons, and that two plants were not operating.

A typhoon that slammed Japan earlier this month left about 90 people dead or missing.




The man, who has not made a mistake, probably never did anything new! A E.

6 Ton Satellite Debris to Fall in next 36 Hours

 NASA scientists are doing their best to tell us where a plummeting six-ton satellite will fall later this week. It's just that if they're off a little bit, it could mean the difference between hitting Florida or landing on New York. Or, say, Iran or India.

Pinpointing where and when hurtling space debris will strike is an imprecise science. For now, scientists predict the earliest it will hit is Thursday U.S. time, the latest Saturday. The strike zone covers most of Earth.

Not that citizens need to take cover. The satellite will break into pieces, and scientists put the odds of it hitting someone at 1-in-3,200. As far as anyone knows, falling space debris has never injured anyone. Nor has significant property damage been reported. That's because most of the planet is covered in water and there are vast regions of empty land.

If you do come across what you suspect is a satellite piece, NASA doesn't want you to pick it up. The space agency says there are no toxic chemicals present, but there could be sharp edges. Also, it's government property. It's against the law to keep it as a souvenir or sell it on eBay. NASA's advice is to report it to the police.

The 20-year-old research satellite is expected to break into more than 100 pieces as it enters the atmosphere, most of it burning up. Twenty-six of the heaviest metal parts are expected to reach Earth, the biggest chunk weighing about 300 pounds (136 kilograms). The debris could be scattered over an area about 500 miles long.

Jonathan McDowell, for one, isn't worried. He is in the potential strike zone — along with most of the world's 7 billion citizens. McDowell is with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"There's stuff that's heavy that falls out of the sky almost every year," McDowell says. So far this year, he noted, two massive Russian rocket stages have taken the plunge.

As for the odds of the satellite hitting someone, "it's a small chance. We take much bigger chances all the time in our lives," McDowell says. "So I'm not putting my tin helmet on or hiding under a rock."

All told, 1,200 pounds (544 kilograms) of wreckage is expected to smack down — the heaviest pieces made of titanium, stainless steel or beryllium. That represents just one-tenth the mass of the satellite, which stretches 35 feet long and 15 feet in diameter.

The strike zone straddles all points between latitudes 57 degrees north and 57 degrees south. That's as far north as Edmonton and Alberta, Canada, and Aberdeen, Scotland, and as far south as Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America. Every continent but Antarctica is in the crosshairs.

Back when UARS, the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, was launched to study the ozone layer in 1991, NASA didn't always pay attention to the "what goes up must come down" rule. Nowadays, satellites must be designed either to burn up on re-entering the atmosphere or to have enough fuel to be steered into a watery grave or up into a higher, long-term orbit.

The International Space Station — the largest manmade structure ever to orbit the planet — is no exception. NASA has a plan to bring it down safely sometime after 2020.

Russia's old Mir station came down over the Pacific, in a controlled re-entry, in 2001. But one of its predecessors, Salyut 7, fell uncontrolled through the atmosphere in 1991. The most recent uncontrolled return of a large NASA satellite was in 2002.

The most sensational case of all was Skylab, the early U.S. space station whose impending demise three decades ago alarmed people around the world and touched off a guessing game as to where it might land. It plummeted harmlessly into the Indian Ocean and onto remote parts of Australia in July 1979.

The $740 million UARS was decommissioned in 2005, after NASA lowered its orbit with the little remaining fuel on board. NASA didn't want to keep it up longer than necessary, for fear of a collision or an exploding fuel tank, either of which would have left a lot of space litter.

Predicting where the satellite will strike is a little like predicting the weather several days out, says NASA orbital debris scientist Mark Matney.

Experts expect to have a good idea by Thursday of when and where UARS might fall, Matney says. They won't be able to pinpoint the exact time, but they should be able to narrow it to a few hours.

Given the spacecraft's orbital speed of 17,500 mph (28,160 kph), or 5 miles (8 kilometers) per second, a prediction that is off by just a few minutes could mean a 1,000-mile (1,610-kilometer) error. It probably won't be clear where it fell until afterward, Matney says.

If it happens in darkness, it should be visible.

"If someone is lucky enough to be near the re-entry at nighttime, they'll get quite a show," says Matney, who works at Johnson Space Center in Houston, also in the potential strike zone.

Space junk in general is on the rise, much of it destroyed or broken satellites and chunks of used rockets. More than 20,000 manmade objects at least 4 inches (10.16 centimeters) in diameter are being tracked in orbit.

It's mostly a threat to astronauts in space, rather than people on Earth. In June, the six residents of the International Space Station took shelter in their docked Soyuz lifeboats because of passing debris. The unidentified object came within 1,100 feet (335 meters) of the complex, the closest call yet.

___The man, who has not made a mistake, probably never did anything new! A E.

Typhoon Roke rampaging Nagoya, Japan

More than 1.3 million people were advised to evacuate on Tuesday as typhoon Roke approached Japan, threatening the industrial city of Nagoya with heavy rain and landslides.

In Nagoya in central Japan's Aichi prefecture about 1.1 million people were urged to evacuate, while other cities in western Japan also issued evacuation advisories on a smaller scale, public broadcaster NHK said.

No major disruptions to plant operations were reported.

The eye of the typhoon was 210 km (130 miles) east-southeast of the southern island of Tanegashima, moving east-northeast at 20 km (13 miles) per hour as of 5 p.m. (0800 GMT), the Meteorological Agency said.

"In Aichi, the heavy rain is causing some rivers to overflow. I would like to ask people to exercise the greatest caution against potential disasters from torrential rain, strong winds and high waves," an agency official told a news conference.

The city of Nagoya asked Japan's military, called the Self-Defense Forces, to send in troops for disaster prevention, a city official said.

Typhoon Roke follows on the heels of tropical storm Talas, which left about 100 people dead or missing in western Japan earlier this month.

Tokyo Electric Power Co said the typhoon had caused no damage to its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, where reactor cooling systems were knocked out by the March 11 earthquakes and tsunami, triggering a radiation crisis. The plant, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, was unaffected by Talas.

The man, who has not made a mistake, probably never did anything new! A E.

Bird Flu in Nadia District West Bengal, India

inistry of Agriculture

20-September, 2011 13:16 IST

Bird Flu Confirmed in Poultry Samples of Tehatta 1 Block in Nadia District Culling Operations Ordered Virus Contained Within Poultry Farms of Affected Area

Bird flu has been confirmed in poultry samples collected from two villages of Tehatta I block in Nadia District of West Bengal. Samples forwarded to the ERDDL, Kolkata and High Security Animal Disease Laboratory (HSADL), Bhopal have tested positive for H5 strain of Avian Influenza. It has been decided to immediately commence the culling of birds and destruction of eggs and feed material to control further spread of the disease. It has also been decided that the entire poultry will be culled within a radius of 3 kms. of the foci of infection. In addition to the culling strategy, surveillance will be carried out over a further radius up to 10 kilometres. Apart from this, surveillance is being intensified throughout the State to monitor further spread of infection. West Bengal Government has been asked to furnish a daily report on the control and containment operations to the Department of Animal Husbandry, Dairying and Fisheries in the Ministry of Agriculture. The Centre has advised a series of strategic actions to be taken immediately in the area by the Animal Husbandry and Public Health Departments. These include declaration of infected and surveillance areas, ban on movement of poultry and its products in the infected area/closure of poultry and egg markets and shops within a radius of 10 kms. from the infected site, ban on movement of farm personnel, restricting access to wild and stray birds, restricting access to the infected premises, destruction of birds, disposal of dead birds and infected materials; clean-up and disinfection followed by sealing of the premises and issue of sanitization certificate, post operations surveillance, imposition of legislative measures etc. along with necessary measures laid down in the Contingency Plan (2005) of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. As regards compensation for loss of poultry on account of culling and destruction of birds, the rate for payment of compensation has been indicated to the State Governments. The Government of India has conveyed the decision to share costs of compensation on 50:50 basis with the State Governments and authorized State Governments to utilize funds available with them under the programme of ‘Assistance to States for Control of Animal Disease’ (ASCAD), which is a Centrally Sponsored Scheme. The payment of compensation should be ensured immediately and simultaneously to culling. International Organizations will be notified by the Central Government at its level.

NASA twin space crafts fly to Moon

 A pair of spacecraft rocketed toward the moon Saturday on the first mission dedicated to measuring lunar gravity and determining what's inside Earth's orbiting companion — all the way down to the core.

"I could hardly be happier," said the lead scientist, Maria Zuber. After two days of delays and almost another, "I was trying to be as calm as I could be."

NASA launched the near identical probes — named Grail-A and Grail-B — aboard a relatively small Delta II rocket to save money. It will take close to four months for the spacecraft to reach the moon, a long, roundabout journey compared with the zippy three-day trip of the Apollo astronauts four decades ago.

Grail-A popped off the upper stage of the rocket exactly as planned 1½ hours after liftoff, followed eight minutes later by Grail-B. Both releases were seen live on NASA TV thanks to an on-board rocket camera, and generated loud applause in Launch Control.

The pair are traveling independently to the moon, with A arriving on New Year's Eve and B on New Year's Day.

"Grail, simply put, is a journey to the center of the moon," said Ed Weiler, head of NASA's science mission directorate, borrowing from the title of the Jules Verne science fiction classic, "Journey to the Center of the Earth."

The world has launched more than 100 missions to the moon since the Soviet Union's Luna probes in 1959. That includes NASA's six Apollo moon landings that put 12 men on the lunar surface.

NASA's Grail twins — each the size of a washing machine — won't land on the moon but will conduct their science survey from lunar orbit.

Beginning in March, once the spacecraft are orbiting just 34 miles above the moon's surface, scientists will monitor the slight variations in distance between the two to map the moon's entire gravitational field. The measurements will continue through May.

"It will probe the interior of the moon and map its gravity field 100 to 1,000 times better than ever before. We will learn more about the interior of the moon with Grail than all previous lunar missions combined," Weiler said.

At the same time, four cameras on each spacecraft will offer schoolchildren the opportunity to order up whatever pictures of the moon they want. The educational effort is spearheaded by Sally Ride, America's first spacewoman.

The entire Grail mission costs $496 million.

Zuber, the mission's principal investigator and a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the precise lunar gravity measurements will help her and other planetary scientists better understand how the moon evolved over the past 4 billion years. The findings also should help identify the composition of the moon's core: whether it's made of solid iron or possibly titanium oxide.

Another puzzle that Grail may help solve, Zuber said, is whether Earth indeed had a smaller second moon. Last month, astronomers suggested the two moons collided and the little one glommed onto the big one, a possible explanation for how the lunar highlands came to be.

Knowing where the moon's gravity is stronger will enable the United States and other countries to better pinpoint landing locations for future explorers, whether robot or human. The gravity on the moon is uneven and about one-sixth Earth's pull.

"If you want to land right next to a particular outcrop (of rock), you're going to be able to do it," Zuber said. "There will be no reason to do another gravity experiment of the moon in any of our lifetimes."

Zuber said the Grail findings should eliminate cliffhangers like the Apollo 11 landing in 1969 by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. They overshot their touchdown site in part because of the subtle gravity changes in the moon's surface below; they almost ran out of fuel before safely touching down on the Sea of Tranquility.

"It will be easier next time," Zuber promised.

For now, NASA has no plans to return astronauts to the moon, Earth's closest neighbor at approximately 240,000 miles away. That program, called Constellation, was canceled last year by President Barack Obama, who favors asteroids and Mars as potential destinations in America's future without the shuttle.

This is the second planetary mission for NASA since the space shuttle program ended in July, and attracted a large crowd to Cape Canaveral. NASA expected as many as 6,000 to 7,000 guests for the morning liftoff, about half the throng that jammed Kennedy Space Center for the Juno launch to Jupiter at the beginning of August.

Grail was supposed to soar Thursday, but high wind interfered. Then NASA needed an extra day to check the rocket after engine heaters stayed on too long. High wind almost stopped NASA again Saturday; the launch team had to skip the morning's first opportunity, but the wind dissipated just in time for the second.

The year's grand finale will be the launch of the biggest Mars rover ever the day after Thanksgiving.

"NASA is still doing business even though the shuttles stopped flying," Weiler told reporters earlier this week.

Grail is the 110th mission to target the moon, according to NASA records. Missions have been launched by the United States, Soviet Union, Japan, China and India.

The previous moonshot was two years ago: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Just last month, the moon-circling probe beamed back the sharpest pictures yet of some of the Apollo artifacts left on the moon from 1969 through 1972 — and even moonwalkers' tracks. NASA released the photos earlier this week.

___

Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/grail/main/index.html