A new NASA program, called Astrophysics Science SmallSat Studies, aims to turn their gaze outward, toward the cosmos. As Nasa points out in announcing PhoneSat, smartphones already have many of the features that a satellite needs, including fast processors, built-in cameras, and a variety of sensors. Find out what happens when a tornado hits an urban area next. But it turns out that you’re paying people a lot of money to make decisions on the information in an organization, and they’re going to make the decisions based on analyzing and synthesizing the data, combining data sources that the IT group didn’t think about. Make a Planet Mask! Using those criteria, we could make the case that Nostradamus did indeed foresee Earth’s collision with a comet. It’s hard for us even to fathom such an incredible length of time, but J. William Schopf, the paleobiologist who first discovered the fossils in 1993, helps put things in perspective in his book “Cradle of Life: The Discoveries of Earth’s Earliest Fossils.” If the entire history of Earth were compressed into a 24-hour day, Schopf says, humans would have arrived within the last minute of that day. By carefully dissecting and exploring these structures, scientists have access to some of the only remaining clues about what the first life on Earth was like.

Such information could help scientists back home better judge if the planet could support life as we know it. Although the lander accomplished the fiery re-entry by itself, it did have a little help from two small cubesats that were flying in tandem with the mission during its cruise phase. As most stars in the galaxy are in binary systems, there might be a surprising number of asteroids ejected as interstellar vagabonds if their orbits are being perturbed by the orbital dance of two suns. For instance, while the quatrain many feel predicted the London fire of 1666 contains the number 66 (“twenty threes the six”), it doesn’t specify a century or even that the number 66 is referring to a year at all. I believe there are many other instructors who feel the same. So on that matter, at least, Nostradamus and the scientific community are on the same page. If Nostradamus wasn’t the source of all of the 2012 doomsday predictions, surely the Mayans had something to say about the matter, right?

Clearly, this makes it difficult to determine whether Nostradamus made any specific predictions about the year 2012 in his famed prophecies. Randi, James. “The Mask of Nostradamus: The Prophecies of the World’s Most Famous Seer.” Prometheus Books. Similarly ominous prophecies litter Nostradamus’ writings, and while it’s impossible to say any are specifically about the year 2012, it’s also impossible to say with certainty that they aren’t. Batteries are increasingly important as Chrylser, like the rest of the auto industry, embraces electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. While the idea of stealing energy from a star to power a weapon seems like the way to go, “it’s just not clear how you do it,” says Hendry. The remainder of the normal 8- to 12-minute flight was without power and ended in a 200-mph glide landing. The committee concluded that the Constellation program was massively underfunded and that a 2020 Moon landing was impossible. Back in 1989, a British scientist, Martyn J. Fogg, published a paper in which he suggested somehow placing a manmade black hole on Jupiter, and then using it to generate enough energy to warm the temperatures on the giant planet’s moon Europa to Earthlike levels.

In 2010, though, Chinese researchers did get some attention by building a device called an omnidirectional electromagnetic absorber that they likened to a “mini black hole,” in that it could absorb microwave radiation in the manner that an astrophysical black hole could swallow up a star and its energy. Nostradamus’ Centuries consists of hundreds of four-line rhyming verses called quatrains written in French, Greek and Latin, among other languages. So what does “The Centuries” tell us about 2012? What’s more, some people believe Nostradamus’ writings tell only part of the story and that Nostradamus was behind a book of prophetic drawings as well. But did the book say anything about the year 2012? With his quatrains rife with ambiguity and his supposed “lost book” being someone else’s work entirely, we aren’t left with anything suggesting Nostradamus considered the year 2012 to be significant in any way. It’s therefore thought that the solar system lost a lot of planetesimals in its formative years, and asteroids would have been slingshot and ejected into interstellar space. The camera’s lenses are made of a radiation hard BK7, a common type of glass used for space telescopes, which is also sufficiently hardened against the impacts of dust.