Crew and passengers of the Irish Sea ferry Riverdance, a 6000 ton RORO Ferry are being airlifted to safety after the ferry got into difficulties in harsh weather four miles off Fleetwood.

A mayday call was received by Liverpool coastguard when the roll-on-roll-off ferry developed a 60 degree list after her cargo shifted. This list has now been reduced to 20degrees and it appears that some of the crew will remain with the ship for the time being.

Rescue helicopter 122 is on scene and rescue helicopters 177 and 116 are en route. RNLI lifeboats Lytham and Fleetwood are en route. A tanker, Steersman, is standing off the incident and providing communications assistance.

Update: 0500

The Riverdance has now run aground on the foreshore at Blackpool. The nine crew which remained with the vessel during the morning have been unable to refloat her under her own power and rescue helicopter 122 is now evacuating the last of the crew.

The US Federal Reserve has cut interest rates for the second time in just over a week with the apparent intent of staving off a recession. 9 days ago, they cut from 4.75% down to 4% and many at the time said the move smacked of desperation. They have now cut again by 50 basis points to 3.5% and it is looking increasingly unlikely that their efforts will have any positive effect.

They may actually have a negative effect if the markets start to get the jitters based on the notion that the Federal Reserve is losing their ability to influence the stock markets. After a brief rall upon the news, the Dow Jones and the NASDAQ have both taken a noticeable dives again.

This will hurt the US Dollar and as a consequence, hurt US savers who will be seeing the value of their money diminishing and their interest payments shrinking. The Federal Reserve appears to be trying to buy their way out of a mess by paying with the US citizen’s savings.

Photo Credit: Dan Smith cc-by-sa-2.5

I just picked up this story over at Arstechnica.

Apparently, web metrics firm Xiti has found that 28% of the web browser market in Europe is now running Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is an alternative to Microsoft’s operating system tied Internet Explorer product. Firefox offers improved security, performance and extendability over IE and the fact that it is free, open-source software has undoubtedly helped in it’s adoption. IE, fairly or not, has gained a bit of a reputation for having vulnerabilities and exploits. Firefox also has these but enthusiastic developers tend to produce patches with all haste.

It probably also helps Firefox’s position that, unlike IE which is only available for Windows (it is discontinued for Mac), Firefox will run on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and soon a range of handhelds.

It will be interesting to see if the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.0 increases the Mozilla market share still further.

For the record, I believe delusionofgrandeur.co.uk looks considerably smarter in Gecko (Firefox’s render engine) than in IE. You can download Firefox for free HERE.

It’s the real stuff that nightmares are made of: 250 meters across and rushing toward you from the darkness at over 20,000 miles per hour. This is no ethereal terrorerrorist bogeyman. This is asteroid 2007 TU₂₄

As the name implies, 2007 TU₂₄ was discovered in 2007, 11th October to be precise. Too late for even the greatest scientific minds to be able to devise a way to deflect it before it’s rendezvous with Earth this morning, 29th January at 08:33ZULU.

Luckily for the human race, 2007 TU₂₄ will be passing by us at a mere 537,500km distance, roughly 1.44 Earth-Moon distances. It will be a 10th magnitude object in the night sky for some and astronomers will study it briefly as it disappears back into the night.

So, why am I playing this up when I usually play down ’scare’ stories? The fact of the matter is, there are an awful lot of large (and potentially massive) rocks which cross the Earth’s orbit on a regular basis and we only know about a fraction of them. 2007 TU₂₄ isn’t by any means the biggest object out there but it would certainly hurt if it had hit us.

Had it hit central London, 2007 TU₂₄ it would have made a crater 2.5 miles wide and 1,500 feet deep. The rest of London would have been deleted from the map by the air-blast’s intense overpressure and 350mph winds out beyond the M25. A strong seismic shockwave would have shaken structures as far away as Birmingham. The immediate death toll would have been counted in the tens of millions.

The point I make is that while the government will happily spend billions of pounds starting wars and sheeple-worrying with the terrorerrorist spectre,  they spend practically nothing on protecting the population from a very real threat posed by Near Earth Objects. They’re not all 250m wide minnows like 2007 TU_24, there are 20km wide monsters out there which, if they collided with the Earth, would cause the extinction of our entire race. It’s really not a question if ‘if’ either, it’s a question of ‘when’.

So what do we do? Well, if there was a large NEO coming our way, we’d need one thing more than anything; Time. We’d need to detect the NEO as early as possible to allow for the research and development necessary for timely interception and deflection. In order to detect early, we need to look. Only the US government spends any money on wide sky surveys  for this purpose and even that isn’t much. Proper NEO survey and deflection capability would require entire space programs and even they aren’t that well funded by some standards. For example, NASA’s entire annual budget would only pay for about 2 months of current US operations in Iraq.

Unfortunately, the human race as a whole seems to have difficulty seeing beyond the fragile little biosphere which they currently inhabit. This could well be their undoing.

In the meantime, you may like to look at the UK’s biggest contribution to NEO survey and detection. Spaceguard UK Note that Spaceguard UK is not government funded.

According to press reports, a US reconnaissance satellite is expected to make an uncontrolled reentry after communication and control with the satellite was lost.

The uncontrolled nature of the reentry means that while the satellite is expected to reenter the atmosphere in the next month or so, it can’t be said for sure where the remains of the satellite will land. A large enough chunk of satellite landing in a populated area could cause damage to property or even injuries or fatalities. The greatest probability, however, is that it will hit an ocean area but this may still present a hazard to shipping or aircraft.

Knowing what sort of satellite chunks to expect is really about knowing the construction of the satellite itself. Unfortunately, the satellite in question is highly classified so the best we can do is speculate.

There’s  at least a couple of types of spy satellite up there, radar survey and optical. The US optical reconnaissance are often said to resemble the hubble space telescope (pointing down not up!). Referred to as ‘Keyhole’ or ‘Misty’ by the general public, this series of optical satellites is said to carry a mirror 2-3 meters in diameter which would probably be somewhat heavy and thick and I would guess liable to survive reentry.

Then there’s the radar satellites which I can’t think of having any single massive component although in the interests of ’stealth’ (if such a thing is possible for satellites) they may forgo highly-observable solar arrays and instead use RTGs. An RTG may release some radioactive fuel upon reentry but it would likely be released over such a wide area that it would be barely detectable above background. In the 1970s, an RTG on the Apollo 13 LEM survived reentry from lunar-return velocities and the subsequent impact without releasing any radioactive material. The biggest risk to your health from a Satellite RTG it would seem, would be if it hit you on the head.

Having looked around the web at this story, there is some discussion among amateur satellite tracking enthusiasts that this may be NROL-21 / USA 193, a satellite launched in December 2006 which failed to deploy correctly. Due to the low orbit, it is speculated that this is a radar reconnaissance rather than an optical satellite.

Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council declined to comment as to whether the satellite may be ’shot down’. The USA has successfully tested ASAT weapons in the past but could be very hesitant to use them for a few reasons I can think of:

• It may contravene the Outer Space Treaty
• The debris from a ‘kill’ would spread out and become harder to track while also presenting a hazard to other satellites / spacecraft.
• The net result of a ‘kill’ would be that you still had the same amount of mass going in roughly the same direction at the same speed but it would all be coming down in different places (depending on the drag coefficient of each fragment)

I’ll be interested to see whether we get any more news on this reentry. It really could be the case here that ‘no news is good news’

Found on Youtube, the machinima crew over at theleetworld (Smooth Few Films) have come up with a mini masterpiece telling the tale of the lives of two turrets at Aperture Science Enrichment Center.

You can find high-res version (including a HD version) of the video on the theleetworld website for download.