Orbit

A cabal of corrupt corrections officers and members of the Black Guerrilla Family gang enjoyed nearly free rein inside the Baltimore City Detention Center, federal authorities allege, smuggling drugs and cellphones into the jail and having sexual relationships that left four guards pregnant. An indictment unsealed Tuesday names 25 people - including 13 women working as corrections officers - who face racketeering and drug charges. Twenty of the accused also face money-laundering charges.

A total solar eclipse will occur over parts of northern Australia and the southern Pacific Ocean on Tuesday, and you can watch it from Maryland via a webcast. The eclipse begins at about 3:35 p.m. EST, with its path starting in  Australia's Garig Ganak Barlu National Park in the Northern Territory. The instant of greatest eclipse will be reached at about 5:12 p.m. EST. The eclipse path ends at 6:48 p.m. EDT just west of Chile. While it won't be visible to many populated areas of the globe, an official broadcast is being done from Cairns, Australia.

Observers decrying the end of space shuttle flights, presaged in the Bush administration's announcement that no new orbiters will be ordered, should look at the bigger picture. First, barring an amazing series of catastrophes, today's four-orbiter shuttle fleet will be flying well into the next century. Not bad for a vehicle based on technology already 30 years old. Shuttles will clearly never achieve the flight schedule NASA planners envisioned when the world's first re-usable space plane roared off Cape Canaveral 10 years ago, but shuttles still have an impressive record, including the world's only in-orbit satellite repairs.

Is there anything that the U.S. technology community, with an assist from the federal government, can do that would simultaneously achieve the following: a) help hone our economic edge to help us prosper a bit more over a long term; b) maintain and improve upon the technological advantage we have with the rest of the world in space and aeronautics; c) help us on the military side; and d) maintain, retain and sharpen the technological minds of some of our smartest citizens? Such a thing does exist, but a case for it has not been made - because it was not possible to make it until now. Earlier this month, a private company, SpaceX, successfully launched an American-built rocket vehicle system, docked with the International Space Station, and returned successfully to Earth with an intent and hope of commercializing orbital access.

And now, from the people who brought you Chernobyl: Nukes in space.The University of Maryland College Park last week staged what physicist Roald Sagdeev, the former head of the Soviet space program now on the faculty at College Park, called "one of the most unusual meetings in the post-Cold War era."Russian scientists, Pentagon and NASA officials, satellite designers and astronomers gathered in a windowless classroom for a sometimes-emotional debate over Department of Defense plans to launch a nuclear reactor, built by the former Soviet government, into orbit.

Only three months after NASA's Messenger spacecraft became the first to orbit the planet Mercury, scientists are already tossing out some long-held ideas about the place, and wondering at some surprising and unexpected discoveries. "In many cases, a lot of our original ideas about Mercury were just plain wrong," said Larry Nittler, a Messenger scientist from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Among the surprises from the Maryland-run mission: • Mercury has unexpectedly high abundances of potassium and thorium — elements that scientists thought would have evaporated as the planet formed so close to the young sun. Now they'll need a new theory of how (and where)

A fireball in the eastern sky that startled early-morning commuters from Washington to New York yesterday was not a meteor, but an old Soviet rocket re-entering the atmosphere after 26 years in orbit. The United States Space Command said the Vostok launch vehicle was sent into orbit in 1975 and sizzled back into the atmosphere some 10 miles off the Delaware coast about 5:51 am. yesterday. Witnesses said the brilliant yellow and white fireball took at least 20 seconds to cross the sky from south to north.

Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union sent thrills and shivers around the world with a brief announcement: Its rocketeers had launched a tiny, beeping artificial satellite named Sputnik into orbit. With it, they launched a revolution. "I still have a mental picture of the newspaper inside the vending machine on Euclid Avenue. The news was absolutely electrifying," said Robert Williams, then a schoolboy in Ontario, Calif.

Oct. 4 1957 The Space Age began as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into orbit.

You don't need a spacecraft to reach Joe's Orbit. Just chart a course toward a local crafts shop. If you find yourself laughing at lamps with antennae or an eyeball, yet admiring the wit behind their whimsy, you've landed in the right universe.Steel, recycled glass bottles, plastics, concrete and colored marbles inhabit this world. They meld to become lamps, vases, frames, mirrors, candlesticks, salt shakers, decorative bowls or small tables. Joe's Orbit may seem alien to some, but the three-year-old company -- based in a Capitol Heights warehouse -- supplies more than 1,200 retailers.

News Roundup   •••• Like the Muppets and the Russians before them, the “Angry Birds” have taken to space. You can download the game now . I haven't reached the ending yet but I've already got a strongly-worded email to Rovio about it saved as a draft just in case. [ Rovio ] •••• Lawmakers in California and Virginia are proposing a bill that would require almost all video games to carry a warning label stating “exposure to violent video games has been linked to aggressive behavior.” That makes me so angry I just want to go and punch a defenseless person and steal their coins.

Only three months after NASA's Messenger spacecraft became the first to orbit the planet Mercury, scientists are already tossing out some long-held ideas about the place, and wondering at some surprising and unexpected discoveries. "In many cases, a lot of our original ideas about Mercury were just plain wrong," said Larry Nittler, a Messenger scientist from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Among the surprises from the Maryland-run mission: • Mercury has unexpectedly high abundances of potassium and thorium — elements that scientists thought would have evaporated as the planet formed so close to the young sun. Now they'll need a new theory of how (and where)

With a 30-minute blast from its main rocket engine, NASA's Messenger spacecraft slipped into orbit around the planet Mercury Thursday evening, becoming the first craft from Earth ever to circle the closest planet to the sun. At 9:10 p.m., when early telemetry indicated that the rocket burn had finished and the probe had been captured by Mercury's gravity, a round of applause went up from the mission control room at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied...

Fifteen years of planning and 61/2 years of maneuvering in space will all come down to the crunch Thursday evening as mission managers in Maryland try to slip NASA's Messenger spacecraft into orbit around Mercury. The braking maneuver, playing out 96 million miles from Earth, will have to slow the desk-size planetary probe by 1,929 mph and ease it into a polar orbit around the planet closest to the sun. Failure will leave Messenger's managers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab near Laurel with less than 10 percent of the fuel the craft left Earth with, and limited options for recovery.

While some folks wish to see their names up in lights, students at Folly Quarter Middle School can boast that their names have gone up in space. The students at the Ellicott City school recently participated in the NASA and Lockheed Martin Student Signatures in Space (S3) program, which allows youngsters to sign posters that are scanned onto a disk and sent into orbit. The students signed the posters last spring, and their signatures were sent up in space in late February via the space shuttle Discovery.

W hat do we know about what we know? Consider the following two examples. The first: It takes 365 days for Earth to orbit the sun, right? Not exactly: Every four years we have a leap day, which means an actual "year" is 365 days and six hours. But that's not precise either, because there are no leap days in years evenly divisible by 100, except the subset of years evenly divisible by 400 - which is why there was a Feb. 29, 2000, but there was no extra day in February 1900 and won't be one in 2100.

Catching up to a 43-foot space telescope that is zipping around the planet at 17,000 miles an hour takes more than just putting the shuttle's pedal to the metal, NASA officials say.By the time the Endeavour's crew finally attempts to capture the Hubble Space Telescope -- sometime before dawn Eastern time tomorrow -- the astronauts will have solved a complex problem in orbital mechanics and completed a critical act in the 11-day repair drama.If the crew misses the rendezvous on the first try, the shuttle will have little fuel for a second attempt.

A total solar eclipse will occur over parts of northern Australia and the southern Pacific Ocean on Tuesday, and you can watch it from Maryland via a webcast. The eclipse begins at about 3:35 p.m. EST, with its path starting in  Australia's Garig Ganak Barlu National Park in the Northern Territory. The instant of greatest eclipse will be reached at about 5:12 p.m. EST. The eclipse path ends at 6:48 p.m. EDT just west of Chile. While it won't be visible to many populated areas of the globe, an official broadcast is being done from Cairns, Australia.

When Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar lander and became the first human to set foot on the surface of the moon 40 years ago this week, it was, as he announced, "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." In those heady times it was widely assumed humanity had arrived on the verge of a new era of space exploration that would shortly lead travelers to Mars and beyond. That did not happen, however: The race to the moon, which grew out of the Cold War military competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, had outlived its political usefulness by the time of the last Apollo landing in 1972.