The good: The Falcon capsule detached from Hayabusa which had soil sample from the Itokawa asteroid. The capsule was caught on video by a NASA plane over Australia as it reentered the atmosphere. Some people have called it the robotic equivalent of Apollo 13.
The bad: "Well...it is worse". It looks like the well is damaged (read here for more technical details) I am sure a lot many excellent engineers at BP are working overtime but maybe they need to have some outside views on this. I mean, for one, we developed a technology that seems eerily similar to the one that Kevin Costner has been selling to BP because in space we have devised systems that separate liquids of different densities.
and see how it works in microgravity:
But the issue here is not a water-oil separation, it's really about determining how the subsurface flow extend under the sea floor. And if you ask me, it really look like an interesting inverse problem. I don't care much about the politics underlying all this but so far as I can tell, it sure qualifies as the starting point of a catastrophe. Can we rise to this challenge and have a similar outcome as that of Apollo 13 ?
The bad: "Well...it is worse". It looks like the well is damaged (read here for more technical details) I am sure a lot many excellent engineers at BP are working overtime but maybe they need to have some outside views on this. I mean, for one, we developed a technology that seems eerily similar to the one that Kevin Costner has been selling to BP because in space we have devised systems that separate liquids of different densities.
and see how it works in microgravity:
But the issue here is not a water-oil separation, it's really about determining how the subsurface flow extend under the sea floor. And if you ask me, it really look like an interesting inverse problem. I don't care much about the politics underlying all this but so far as I can tell, it sure qualifies as the starting point of a catastrophe. Can we rise to this challenge and have a similar outcome as that of Apollo 13 ?
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