Latest news with #WhiteSands
AsiaOne
22-07-2025
- Business
- AsiaOne
Long John Silver's slowly shifts to 24/7 operations, here are 4 outlets now open round the clock, Lifestyle News
Often feel peckish in the middle of the night? Long John Silver's has got your back. In a Facebook post on Saturday (July 19), the fast food chain shared that they have progressively been shifting to 24-hour operations since March. The next four branches in line to open round the clock are at Junction 8, Kampung Admiralty, Northpoint City and Yew Tee Point. Long John Silver's also urged diners to follow them on their socials to get updates on the future outlets that will operate around the clock. Currently, they have 17 outlets islandwide, including malls like Tiong Bahru Plaza, White Sands and Westgate. As of the time of writing, the fast food chain did not share the reason behind the move. AsiaOne has reached out for more details. [[nid:718479]] melissateo@
Yahoo
21-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
What are sounding rockets? NASA launch from New Mexico studies sun's mysterious chromosphere
States like Florida, Texas and California are no strangers to routine rocket launches − but New Mexico? Spacecraft also sometimes get off the ground from the state. Space news coverage may be headlined by crewed missions to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral or SpaceX's latest test of its enormous Starship spacecraft from the Lonestar State. But in the oft-overlooked state of New Mexico, smaller rockets often get off the ground from a NASA test site in the remote desert. The latest of the spacecraft, known as sounding rockets, most recently made a successful quick trip to space to study one of the most complex regions of the sun's atmosphere following a New Mexico launch. Here's everything to know about sounding rockets and the latest NASA mission from New Mexico near the Texas border. NASA launches sun-studying mission from White Sands, New Mexico The latest sounding rocket mission in New Mexico got off the ground around 3 p.m. local time Friday, July 18, at NASA's White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico, located near the border of Texas about 60 miles north of El Paso. Residents in the local area around White Sands may have been able to spot the sounding rocket and its contrail when it launched, a NASA spokesperson confirmed to USA TODAY. The mission was expected to last no more than about 15 minutes, NASA said in a press release. After launching, the sounding rocket took about 90 seconds to reach space and point toward the sun, another eight minutes to conduct the experiment on the chromosphere, and no more than five minutes to return to Earth's surface. Upon landing, the rocket was expected to drift between 70 to 80 miles from the launchpad so mission operators on the ground could ensure it would land safely in the large, empty desert, according to NASA. What are sounding rockets? NASA's sounding rocket program has for more than 40 years carried out missions to launch scientific instruments into space. Sounding rockets are much smaller than an average spacecraft that may launch on an orbital flight from major spaceports like the Kennedy Space Center in Florida or the Vandenberg Space Force Base in Southern California. NASA's fleet of sounding rockets range anywhere in height from about 16 feet tall to about 70 feet tall. The Black Brant IX, the sounding rocket selected for the most recent launch from New Mexico, stands nearly 60 feet tall. For comparison, SpaceX's famous two-stage Falcon 9 rocket – one of the world's most active for both human and cargo missions alike – stands at 230 feet tall when fully stacked. And the commercial spaceflight company's Starship megarocket, which is still in development, stands at an imposing 400-feet tall when both the crew capsule and Super Heavy rocket booster are integrated. Because of their diminutive stature, NASA says soundings rockets are ideal for quick trips at lower speeds to regions of space that are too low for satellites and other spacecraft to conduct observations. And because sounding rockets don't require expensive boosters, missions costs also tend to be substantially less than other orbiter missions, according to the space agency. Where does NASA launch sounding rockets? Missions occur in Virginia, Alaska, New Mexico Of the approximately 20 sounding rocket missions scheduled in the U.S. in 2025, most get off the ground from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia and the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska. Occasionally, though, a sounding rocket will launch from a missile range at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico. Prior to July 18, the most recent mission at White Sands came Nov. 23, 2024, when NASA launched a Black Brant IX sounding rocket to test a spacecraft's performance in Earth's low-density magnetosphere. The next sounding rocket mission is scheduled for Aug. 12 from Wallops Island in Virginia, according to NASA. Spacecraft studied solar chromosphere For the latest mission from White Sands, a Black Brant IX sounding rocket carried new technology to study the sun's mysterious chromosphere, located between the sun's visible surface, known as the photosphere, and its outer layer, the corona. The corona, which became widely visible from Earth in April 2024 during a total solar eclipse, is a region where powerful solar flares and coronal mass ejections can erupt to cause space weather that can disrupt Earthly technologies. NASA's SNIFS mission aimed to learn more about these events by observing how energy is converted and moves through the chromosphere to power such explosions. The mission was the first to carry technology combining a standard imager to capture photos and videos with a spectrograph, which dissects light into its various wavelengths, according to NASA. This reveals which elements are present in the imaged light source. Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@ This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: NASA sounding rocket launches from New Mexico to study sun Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
New memorial commemorates Trinity Test Downwinders
NEW MEXICO (KRQE) – On this day, 80 years ago, the United States Military tested the first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site here in New Mexico. An event that would forever change the nature of warfare. New Mexico downwinders now eligible for compensation from RECA The day is commemorated every year at the Trinity Site. But this year, the New Mexicans who suffered the brunt of that first nuclear test, celebrated a milestone of their own. 'It must have been right here someplace,' said Mela Armijo as she searched for the home she grew up in, not far from the world's first atomic explosion on New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range. 'We were the closest ones of anybody,' said Armijo. Armijo sharing just how much the explosion cost her family, 'My whole family is gone with cancer.' But today, finally after decades of fighting for recognition, cries of celebration among generations of New Mexicans who say they've suffered because they lived downwind. 'But today we come together in joy, in gladness, to reflect upon all that we've lost.' said Tina Cordova, Co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. Cordova led other victims in unveiling a new sign near the Trinity Site entrance. 'We remember the mothers and fathers who passed too soon. The children who never grew up,' said Representative Joanne Ferrary, (D) Las Cruces. For decades, New Mexicans have been fighting to be added to the RECA list or Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The state was finally added in the so called 'Big Beautiful Bill'. The provision covers leukemia claims related to the Trinity Test in New Mexico. Uranium miners who worked from 1942 to 1990 are also covered. If a family member has already passed, the family can apply on their behalf. It also increases the compensation amount up to $100,000. 'We've had sop many disappointments, but it was all worth it,' said Louise Lopez, Downwwinder. 'And through her efforts we've accomplished so much and we have more to work on,' said Bernice Gutierrez, Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. A map is located on one sie of the sign, to give a glimpse into how many people were living near the Trinity Site in 1945. The maps' creator, Bryan Kendall, was a student at the University of New Mexico four years ago when it was created. 'I saw person after person come up to the map and point, saying 'Hey I'm from here',' said Kendall. All families bonded by a chapter of our state's history. 'All of our families have suffered these harrowing cancers. They are real, they are painful, no one wants this,' said one downwinder. White Sands Missile Range said today's 80th anniversary of the Trinity Site Test marks a new era in scientific acheivment. The 51,500 acre Trinity Site area was declared a national historic landmark in 1975. In a statement, the missile range said this test not only led to the end of the war in the Pacific but also ushered the world into the atomic age. The Trinity Site used to be open to the public twice a year. One day in April and one day in October. It is now only open once a year on the third Saturday in October. The movie, 'Oppenheimer' has also been drawing in bigger crowds. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
10-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Ancient humans could have been in Americas 23,000 years ago: Study
(NewsNation) — Ancient footprints in New Mexico could change the timeline of history, putting humans in North America far earlier than previously thought. A new study has dated the footprints found at White Sands National Park, suggesting they could be as old as 23,000 years. That would mean they were created around the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum, the coldest part of the last ice age. At that time, the area was a vast wetland full of ice age animals. If the date is correct, the footprints are likely from hunter-gatherers who traveled to the Americas over the Bering Land Bridge when sea levels were lower. Hantavirus, rabies exposures confirmed at Grand Canyon National Park To arrive at the date, researchers radiocarbon-dated organic sediment in core samples from the site, which gave dates for the footprints and the entire lake and river system that once existed in the area. It's another piece of data in a scientific debate over when our ancient ancestors reached the Americas. For decades, scientists believed that the earliest humans to live in North America were the Clovis, around 13,000 years ago. But new discoveries suggest that indigenous people could have been in the area much earlier. Ancient footprints are rarely preserved, but about 60 footprints were found at White Sands, with the discovery reported in 2021. That study initially dated the prints between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. But a rebuttal a year later questioned the findings, which were radiocarbon dated using ditch grass seeds, which grow in water. Water plants get carbon from underwater, which may be older than carbon in the atmosphere and can cause samples to appear older than they actually are. Researchers used another technique to redate the site in 2023, which dated the time when quartz or feldspar grains in the tracks were last exposed to sunlight. They also used radiocarbon dating on conifer pollen found in the footprints. Those results also found the footprints were between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. Mattel introduces first Barbie with Type 1 diabetes While some scientists accepted the results, others were still skeptical, saying the samples weren't taken from the right layer. Now this third study offers more evidence, after researchers used radiocarbon-dated mud cores, finding the footprints to be between 20,700 and 22,400 years old, which supports the original estimate. Some scientists are still skeptical, suggesting underwater carbon issues could have also skewed sediment dates. There are also major questions that remain unanswered, including a lack of artifacts or settlements belonging to the people who left the tracks. It's possible that hunter-gatherers, who would have had few possessions but valued them, simply didn't leave anything behind when walking through the landscape. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
07-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Los Alamos Scientist's Insights On The GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator
Sometime around 2012, Gary Stradling looked into a deep hole at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and pondered the future of the 30,000-pound GBU-57/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bunker buster bombs, America's largest conventional weapon. The hole was made during testing of the MOP and Stradling, at the time, was division chief of the Nuclear Detection Division of the J9 directorate at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). While he was not involved in MOP testing, Stradling was 'intensely interested in the science of earth penetrating munitions having had professional engagement in related subjects at different times in my highly-varied career.' Me, standing at the edge of a MOP crater on a mountain top at White Sands Test Range, where detailed studies of massive earth penetrators were studied for effectiveness against deeply buried targets by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) —formerly Defense Nuclear Agency.… — Gary Stradling (@gary_stradling) June 24, 2025 In addition to leading the Hypervelocity Impact team at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), he served as a science advisor, detailed from LANL to the Nuclear Forces Policy Office of the Secretary of Defense. He later served with the Office of Military Applications at LANL and is now retired. We spoke to Stradling about his observations of the testing that led up to the MOP and its recent use against Iranian nuclear facilities during Operation Midnight Hammer, which resulted in 14 being dropped by B-2 Spirit stealth bombers on two very hardened locations that were key to Iran's capacity to produce nuclear weapons. The questions and answers were lightly edited for clarity. You can read more about the fascinating 15-year development of the MOP in our deep dive here. Q: Talk about how researchers dug into the mountain and blew it up. Can you provide more details about that? A: Well, the mountain in White Sands, they specifically picked mountainous areas that were solid rock, and they used state-of-the-art tunneling technology to make the kind of cavities in the mountain that you would put this kind of [Iranian nuclear] facility in. I think that there is a lot of work that DOD has done in these kinds of facilities that is highly classified, and I couldn't talk to you about it. This is very sophisticated work. It is not casual, and it's not speculative. These are real experts who are doing the work. Careful, technical, quantitative work to be able to deliver this kind of war-fighting capability to the services. Q: Describe the scene as you were looking into the MOP hole. A: The picture that you have of me is standing at the entrance hole where the MOP went into the mountain that had a crosshair on it, and the hole was really close to the crosshair, and it was a big hole, and I'm standing right at the edge of the barrier to keep people from falling into this big hole. And the hole went down into a chamber that had been mined into the hard rock below that was intended to simulate, or to be very much like these hardened facilities. Q: When you were looking at this hole, what were you thinking in terms of what the weapon could be used for? And did you ever imagine that it could be used as accurately as it was in Operation Midnight Hammer? A: Well, during my time at Los Alamos in the nuclear weapons directorate, when I came back to Los Alamos in 2000, I was in what was called the Military Applications Office and worked closely with STRATCOM and developmental ideas for how nuclear weapons could be used for some of these applications. So I had the opportunity to look at what it really takes for a weapon to penetrate into the ground. And one of the things that became clear to me was that this is not just something that if you hit it harder, you go deeper, or if you make it bigger, you go deeper. There are real limitations to how deep you can get into rock when you plunge something into it. It's very interesting to have gone from that background, that computational background, to standing over such a hole that had been blown into a mountain. One of the things that has been discussed is, can you do what they call multiple miracles – sequential miracles? If you can drop a weapon – if you've got three B-2s up there – and they each drop a weapon that can vector itself to a very highly accurate position in a mountain, and you can penetrate with one and blow a hole, and then all of that material is suspended. And you have another one come in immediately afterwards and penetrate through much softer material, until you get into hard material, and you penetrate that, and then you explode, and you levitate all that material. Then you bring a third one in after it, you could start thinking about digging really deeply in. Now, I've got no idea whether this operation, Midnight Hammer, I think, is the term that was used, whether that was such a sequential process with that kind of accuracy [it was, each hole got six MOPs]. But, gee, that's awesome, to be able to have subsequent devices, avoid the blast of the previous ones, and yet penetrate in and, like a sledgehammer, drive through again and again into a harder material. Q: So you have to make sure that the subsequent MOPs don't get affected by the overpressure and explosive force of the previous ones, right? A: Right. So you'd have to have those in a sequence that took all of that into account. You're surely going to have suspended material. But if you can avoid the shock from the initial explosion for the second and third penetrators – you know that that is really highly, highly tuned delivery, and we have gotten very good now. I'm not saying that I know anything about that. I'm just saying that that was part of the discussion during the time that I was working on it, could we actually do these sequential miracles and get these things on target? And when we watch Elon Musk land rocket ships, we go, maybe we're in that kind of a world. Q: When you were there, what was the sense of whether these so-called multiple miracles would ever come to pass? A: Oh, I think everybody was optimistic and skeptical simultaneously. We know how hard these jobs are. Q: You talked about doing computational work. What were you considering as you were doing computational work on how these things could achieve the maximum effectiveness? A: Early in my career, I was diverted to a project called the Hypervelocity Impact Project … It was a project at Los Alamos that mirrored other things that had been going on in other places. There was a place in Germany where you take small particles and you accelerate – you put a charge on small iron particles and you accelerate them through a very large electric field using a Van de Graaff accelerator. And so we had particles that were growing between five and 50 kilometers per second that were not just atoms, but they were chunks of iron, very small chunks, but they were macroscopic. And then we measured the impact craters into different kinds of materials, and we calculated what those impacts would look like. So we gained a pretty good idea of how effective such a technique would be. One interesting fact about the MOP: The US appears to have tested it against a real underground facility just 30 kilometers south of the site of the world's first nuclear weapons test. Thread from a recent OSINT side quest. 1/10 — Fabian Hinz (@fab_hinz) June 25, 2025 So later, when I came back from the Pentagon and was in the Military Applications Office, people were talking about using penetrators with nuclear weapons, a theoretical discussion. I don't know if there ever was a nuclear penetrator program. And so I got a chance to study the physics of the penetrators. The question of how much acceleration or deceleration could nuclear weapons tolerate? Because, as one of these MOP devices goes into a solid rock mountain is going to decelerate rapidly, and if you've got fragile stuff inside the casing, you could break it. So those are the the kind of questions that you had to deal with. And of course, you can design just about anything because we have very clever people, but that's one of the questions. So how deep can you go with a penetrator? If you just have a solid piece of tungsten, and you deliver it at infinite velocity, would it go all the way through the Earth? And the answer is no, it would go a certain depth, and then would stop. Even if it was solid tungsten, three feet in diameter and 30 feet long, there is going to come a point where it's going to lose all of its momentum, and that energy will be dissipated into sort of a half sphere. So understanding that there are limitations to penetrators, and there are limitations to what kind of forces, shock forces that the explosive package can tolerate, is part of the question. So that was very interesting for me, then to be standing on this mountain, looking down in this hole, and then touring the … facility that had had the experience of having a MOP device dropped on it. Q: What year was that? A: Probably 2012 or 2013. Q: Is there a concern that radioactive materials like enriched uranium could be disturbed by the force of the MOPs? A: If you're blasting into a facility that has nuclear materials, it's always possible for some of that material to vent out as that shock wave goes through the material and finds ways to you know, you don't know whether it is completely enclosed or whether you've got ventilation ducts or whatever. But I frankly don't think that's a big issue. It's enormously overplayed by the green community that the amount of material that you'd have and its effect on anything is. My sense is that it's very small. Q: You mentioned that you have experience in developing the signatures to look for radioactive materials and enrichment. Can you talk about that? A: There is a large national and international technology effort to understand, detect and analyze signatures of nuclear proliferation. This has been an ongoing DOD/DOE effort for decades; the IAEA in Vienna does some of this. The U.S. has a large nuclear monitoring system that at one point was under my purview. I funded that and the staff who were the DOD overseers of that. There are contractors who do this work. Some of the national laboratories do a lot of work on that. So, there are seismic sensors and where they're positioned and how they're monitored and analyzed can tell you whether you see a lot of seismic activity on the Earth. And you have to understand the geology of the Earth. And then when you see signals, you will see if there's a nuclear explosion or an earthquake. You will see it across what is becoming a vast array of seismic sensors today, and you could do a lot of analysis on the nature of the explosion and its location. So that's one very interesting thing. Can you tell if Iran conducts a nuclear test? If North Korea conducts a nuclear test? Pakistan, India, etc. If they conduct a nuclear test, there is a lot that this community is going to know about it. And so also, if somebody conducts a nuclear test, you have more than seismic activity. You can watch the mining activity using overhead imagery. You can smell – you can sniff the air and see whether there are radioactive materials that have particular characteristics that would result from a nuclear test. And if there's a fair amount, you can know about the nuclear test by knowing what the salad of isotopes is that comes off of the test. And so you've got their half lives, and you can detect what their isotopes are, and so on. So there is a great deal of work that goes on. The office that I had at DTRA was a relatively small office compared to the work being done at the Department of Energy and at the Air Force, and also other international partners that work in this area. Q: And as chief of the DTRA office developing technologies for detecting nuclear proliferation, particularly clandestine nuclear testing, that's where your experience comes in with how to find this stuff, correct? A: Right. The Proliferation Technology Office really had responsibility for figuring out how to enhance, how to make better our capability to know exactly what potential proliferators were doing and what activities they were conducting. There's a huge effort across the intelligence community to know who the scientists are and what kind of technologies are going there, and whether we could embargo technologies to slow down the spread – a huge effort going on from early days to try to limit the spread of nuclear weapon technology, the kinds of things that are at the cutting edge now. Can you sense? Can you smell the air? How close can you get to the event? Where can you take a sample? Can you measure something seismically? Can you see a flash if there's a nuclear explosion? Can you see a flash from space? And would that flash tell you? Would it tell you with confidence that it was a nuclear flash, or might it be something else? Might it be a meteorite? So those are the kinds of things that the Proliferation Technologies Office cared about. And we weren't alone. DOE has groups working on that, and has an organization that works on that, and also people at Los Alamos here up on the Hill are actively working in some of those areas. And I actually contracted as a DTRA manager. I contract with Los Alamos to help me in some of those areas. Q: As far as we know, Iran is still not at the threshold of creating a nuclear weapon. What are the kinds of things that would have been done to get a sense of what's happening in Fordow and Natanz and Isfahan, and what might be happening now in the wake of these attacks? A: The time it takes to refine uranium is much less once you have a few percent concentration. The time it takes to go from natural uranium to a few percent is long. The time it takes to go from 8% to weapons-grade is short. And I think that legislators and the general public just don't appreciate that the process of refinement can go very fast in the late stages. It's not linear in any sense. Q: If you were a betting man, what would you say the odds are of the Iranians having a nuclear device sometime this year? A: Howard, I can see your headline right now. Dr. Stradling, former DTRA blah, blah, blah says the Iranians … I actually would not make such a guess, such a headline. I would just say I think that to presume that they don't have one is overly optimistic. To presume that they don't have sufficient nuclear material, to presume that they don't have a tested device, we may not have intelligence that tells us they do, but to presume that they don't is, I think, overly optimistic, and I really love President Trump. He's my kind of guy. I mean, he has amazing huevos and a determination to do good in a way that I see good, and yet he wants to have positive reports. And I understand him saying, 'Somebody told me that this was the best, you know, the best penetrating attack ever in the history of mankind,' and that's the way he talks. But I don't want him to be embarrassed by finding out later that the uncertainty of the battlefield still applies, even to this latest attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities – that things don't go as well as we expected, and that's the nature of warfare. Contact the author: howard@
