News Briefs 01-05-2008

Every few years, someone does a 'real tricorder' article - Most of them forget the first one.

The Mk1 Tricorder TR-107 was designed and built by Vital Technologies in 1996 under licence from Paramount. It's a reasonable piece of kit - has sensors for temperature, atmospheric pressure, light, electromagnetic fields and colorimetry, plus optional external sensors and can download data to PC and (OS9) Macs. The chassis looks like a non-folding Next Gen tricorder and it makes the standard wavering beep on start-up.

I've used one in the field on paranormal investigations since '99 and it's robust and though not as good an EM sensor as a Trifield, it's very handy, especially for checking local temp/pressure fluctuations. Clients find the tricorder-ness of it oddly reassuring!

It seems a new firm is selling them here;
http://www.sphere.mpx.com.au/tricorder.html
(Disclaimer - though a happy user of the kit, I have no connection with the firm noted above.)

Ian Vincent
Director, Athanor Consulting
vincent@athanor.org.uk
http://athanor.org.uk

Can't imagine why, but this story just inspired a likely intro for the next Crocodile Dundee sequel. Two huge crocs simultaneously chomp down on Paul Hogan's neck and ankles. As they're twisting the ends of his body in opposite directions, his grimacing face briefly breaks the water's surface, and he manages to croak out "no worries" to Linda.

Startled nomads see a burning capsule fall from the sky and save astronauts

Yi said [the nomads] helped the crew out of their charred capsule, initially poking them to see if they were alive.

"It was as if they were watching monkeys in a cage. It drew a larger crowd, and eventually we were surrounded by about 50 people," she said.

After dragging the crew into the shade, some of their helpers crawled back into the cramped capsule to bring out the satellite phone.

"We asked them to help us because they had a smaller build [and the capsule had landed hatch-down]. We were just about to set it up with batteries and all, when from faraway, a black dot came into sight," Yi said, referring to the rescue aircraft which picked up the crew.

From another article:

"[The nomads] were very surprised and could not believe their eyes," Malenchenko said. "One of them asked if the landing capsule was a boat. Another said that we might have jumped down from a plane," Malenchenko said.

When he told them they were astronauts, "They nodded but then asked again where we had come from. They could not believe that we had been to space. They believed us only when they saw the spacesuits."

From an article on the 21st:

How on earth did the Russians lose track of the descending spacecraft? Why did alarming details of the landing — including the ignition of a brush fire that set the collapsed parachute ablaze and filled the landed spacecraft with smoke — take so long to reach the public?

The twice-normal deceleration forces (peaking briefly at nine G’s, or the equivalent of nine times the force of Earth's normal gravity) were an added burden...

Why didn't ground controllers know that the vehicle had [erroneously] switched [automatically] from a gentler "guided descent" to a steeper "ballistic descent"?

...what does this emergency landing — the second in a row — say about quality control on the Soyuz production line, which has now been accelerated to double its former production rate?

Doubling the production rate of a labor-intensive operation means either massive overtime for existing workers, or a mass influx of new workers, or some combination of both bad variations. Added to this is the continuing crisis engendered by the graying space-industry workforce, as veteran workers either retire or (often) die off while still working.