We gave the BBC a hard time this morning for going a little overboard in declaring the Large Hadron Collider a broken-down mess. But here’s something cool: In a new documentary, a team simulated the blast that “Underwear Bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to create on Christmas Day last year. Their finding: Even if he had blown up the bomb successfully, it wouldn’t have been enough to take down flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Dr John Wyatt, an international terrorism and explosives adviser to the UN, replicated the conditions on board the Detroit flight on a decommissioned Boeing 747 at an aircraft graveyard in Gloucestershire, England [BBC News]. Wyatt used the same amount of the explosive pentaerythritol that the bomber carried, about 80 grams, which packs about the punch of a hand grenade. They put it on the same seat and lit off a controlled explosion, which sent a shock wave through the aluminum exterior.

The metal was permanently bowed out, and a handful of rivets were punched out, but no gaping holes appeared. The pressurized air inside the cabin would have slowly leaked out [Discovery News]. Wyatt and his cohorts say that wouldn’t have been life-threatening, and it wouldn’t have brought down the plane. However, the blast would probably have killed the bomber and the person next to him. And things wouldn’t have been all sunshine and roses for the survivors, either. Team member Captain J. Joseph said the noise and the smoke would have been awful, “not to mention the parts of the bodies that were disintegrated as part of the explosion” [BBC News]. Their eardrums could have ruptured, too.

This wasn’t a perfect simulation: Wyatt tested a 747, while the actual bomber flew aboard an Airbus 330. And the conditions inside were normal atmospheric pressure, not the pressurized state of a plane in flight. But Wyatt argues that the Airbus’ stronger composite materials mean it would have fared even better than his test aircraft. As for the pressure? “It’s over so quickly that the difference in pressure wouldn’t make a difference,” said Wyatt. “By the time the shock wave got to the door the pressure would have normalized” [Discovery News].

In Britain, the documentary (called “How Safe Are Our Skies?”) aired on BBC Two. You can still see it on their iPlayer. For those of us here in the United States, the Discovery Channel broadcasts it tomorrow night (Thursday) at 10 PM EST.

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You can’t cancel an enormous federal program without hitting pushback, and President Obama is hitting plenty of it over his proposal to end NASA’s Constellation program. In January his budget proposal put forth no funding for Constellation, the space shuttle successor program that included the Ares rockets, Orion crew capsule, and plans to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020. Instead, NASA would become more reliant on private companies to ferry its astronauts to the space station, and would explore new ideas for visiting Mars or nearby asteroids. But the proposal has already ruffled lots of feathers, prompting the President to say he will hold a conference to further outline his plan.

First, many high-profile space experts balked at the proposal. Former astronaut Tom Jones said Obama was surrendering human spaceflight, and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, one of the last men to walk on the moon, was equally displeased. “It’s bad for the country,” Schmitt said. “This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism” [Washington Post]. Dissent wasn’t universal; DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait, for one, praised the possibilities for commercial space-faring.

But even getting the new plan in place will take plenty of political wrangling. Last week reports surfaced saying that NASA chief Charles Bolden and others inside the agency were quietly preparing a Plan B, with compromise options for the members of Congress who have objected to the President’s plan. When the news reports came out, however, Bolden flatly denied them. “The president’s budget for NASA is my budget,” General Bolden said. “I strongly support the priorities and the direction for NASA that he has put forward” [The New York Times].

One of the unhappy members of Congress is Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. Hutchison, whose home state is one that stands to lose jobs when NASA’s space shuttle program ends, tried to thwart the Obama plan last week by introducing a bill to extend the shuttle for two more years (It’s currently due to retire this year). The bill, dubbed the Human Space Flight Capability Assurance and Enhancement Act, calls for spending an additional $3.4 billion between 2010 and 2012 to keep the space shuttle flying. It would require NASA to spread out its four remaining shuttle missions, now slated to wrap up by October, and potentially add additional flights [MSNBC]. Yesterday, shuttle program manager John Shannon said it could be done—if the country is willing to spend the money. It currently takes $200 million every month to maintain the shuttles.

Not everyone greeted the President’s proposal with sour grapes. Private space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for whom the move would mean more opportunities, are understandably excited. “It’s a huge move, and in the face of a lot of congressional opposition,” Musk said when DISCOVER spoke to him for a piece in the upcoming May magazine issue. Constellation, he argues, was never going to to reach it goals. It was already vastly underfunded, and would have required an infusion of cash that Americans would never give, especially in the current economic climate. “The people that are really hardcore against the cancellation of Constellation are people who, either from a political standpoint, have a ton of money being spent in their district and they don’t really care whether this succeeds or not,” he says.

Trying to get back on top in the public relations war, Obama announced this week that he would give a conference on April 15 in Florida to spell out more of his NASA vision. Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, said he hoped Mr. Obama would use the meeting to lay out a goal and a timetable for sending astronauts to Mars [The New York Times]. Nelson, who flew on a space shuttle mission in the 1980s, is a political ally of the President’s, but represents Florida, where so much of NASA’s human spaceflight program is based. The key to political victory for Obama, he says, may be overturning the idea that the end of Constellation equals the end of ambitious manned spaceflight.

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Image: NASA

Every time a psychic gets surprised by something, the world gets a little smarter. I hope.

If that’s true, then our collective IQ went up a solid 8 points when the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a suit against "America’s Prophet" Sean David Morton on claims he’s a big ol’ phony.

If only he had spelled it "profit" instead, then he wouldn’t have been falsely advertising. And given that he made a cool $6 million off of gullible dupes, that moniker would certainly fit better.

Now, of course this doesn’t mean all psychics are knowing frauds any more than a scientist who perpetrates knowing fraud indicts all other scientists.

However, science has given us spaceflight, agriculture, computers, medicine, telescopes, and a deeper and quantitative understanding of the Universe from the quantum level out to its observable edge.

Psychics have given us, well… y’know… um… oh! They make it easier for non-critical people to carry their now much-lighter wallets around.

Right. Well, to paraphrase Philip J. Fry: psychics 0, regular science a billion.

Tip o’ the crystal ball to Dale Martin.

Over the last year, scientists have discovered that the moon isn’t a bone-dry place, as we previously imagined. Water ice has been spotted not just at the lunar south pole but also the north pole, and scientists have noted that the north pole deposits contain enough water ice to sustain a human lunar base. Now, scientists studying hundreds of pounds of moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts have found that samples containing the mineral apatite have minute traces of water.

The new analyses of the samples, revealed last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, show that the evidence of the moon’s water was right under scientists’ noses for almost 40 years–they just didn’t have sensitive enough instruments to detect it. The water levels detected in Apollo moon rocks and volcanic glasses are in the thousands of parts per million, at most—which explains why analyses of the samples in the late 1960s and early 1970s concluded that the moon was absolutely arid [National Geographic].

Three different research teams found traces of water in apatite samples. Using a technique called secondary ion mass spectrometry, which bombards a sample with ions and then weighs the ejected secondary ions in a mass spectrometer to determine their atomic masses and abundances [New Scientist], scientists found water in minuscule quantities in the apatite–up to 6,000 parts per million. The apatite examined by one team was taken from one of the moon’s mares–the dark regions that are believed to have been formed by ancient magma oceans. This is the first time that water has been found in lunar magmatic material.

One of the research teams also found that the ratio of hydrogen isotopes in the apatite’s water differed greatly from the isotope mix found in earthly water, leading scientists to question where the water on the moon came from. Researcher James Greenwood believes comets may have crashed into the infant moon before its magma ocean crystallised, supplying the water. Or it may have come from a Mars-sized planet, dubbed Theia, that slammed into Earth 4.5 billion years ago to make the moon [New Scientist]. Another possibility proposed by geoscientist Francis McCubbin is that when that collission happened, not quite all the water was driven off when chunks of Earth were flung spaceward to form the moon—in other words, the water may be from an ancient version Earth [National Geographic].

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Image: NASA/ Lunar and Planetary Institute and G. Bacon (STScI)

The Cosmic Bat in Orion. Click for a larger version. Image credit: ESO

From ESO:

The Cosmic Bat The delicate nebula NGC 1788, located in a dark and often neglected corner of the Orion constellation, is revealed in a new and finely nuanced image that ESO is releasing today. Although this ghostly cloud is rather isolated from Orion’s bright stars, the latter’s powerful winds and light have had a strong impact on the nebula, forging its shape and making it home to a multitude of infant suns.

As the caption says NGC 1788 is in the constellation or Orion. If you were to neglect the Great Orion Nebula, Orion is still a fabulous place to poke around with a telescope.

I’ve spent many hours cruising around. The number of double and triple star systems is pretty amazing. I will admit to never seeing this particular feature, it’s rather small and not actually “inside” the figure of Orion, besides the brightest star in nebula is a magnitude 10, not exactly dim for a telescope but it doesn’t stand out like a triple hot blue star system either.

I may try and find it though and it’s really pretty easy to find. Just go from Rigel not quite half way to the lowest star in the shield, and to the right of 28-Eta Orionis.  Yeah, that’s right, just above the Witchhead nebula (another reflection nebula).

Want a desktop of this? Head on over to the ESO site.

Don’t forget to participate in the GAN project (click the GAN banner to the right).