CHI-COMS take out their new Flat-top

The CHI-COMS took their 2nd hand Soviet Boat out for a spin....I'm not sure about you, but the Soviets are long on getting things together, but what they produce is not long lasting. The B-52 is still flying because it was built 50+ years ago by the USA....Things the Soviets make, don't last like that.

We'll see how the carrier fares but I feel that they may find they have bought a lemon - Let's just say I feel our Flat-tops out duel their flat-top (singular)


At least the deck doesn't have planes: Satellite captures first picture of China’s aircraft carrier which it claimed is just for ‘research’By Daily Mail Reporter
15th December 2011

A satellite photo captured China's first ever aircraft carrier on the Chinese coast's Yellow Sea Thursday by a commercial U.S. satellite company.

The aircraft carrier has generated intense international interest because of the open-ended possibilities the country may have for it as a future military power.
Little on the ship had been said by China after purchasing it from Ukraine in 1998, spending years refurbishing it from one with no engines, weaponry or navigation systems, to one seen sailing last week.

A DigitalGlobe analyst says they found the image Tuesday while searching through their satellite's photos.

Stephen Wood, director of DigitalGlobe's analysis center, said he's confident the ship is the Chinese carrier because of the location and date of the photo. The carrier was on a sea trial at the time.

China has said the carrier is intended for research and training, which has led to speculation that it plans to build future copies.
The former Soviet Union was the first to start building the carrier, which it called the Varyag, but never finished it.

China publicly announced around 50 separate naval exercises in the seas off its coast -- usually after the event

When the Soviet Union collapsed, it ended up in the hands of Ukraine, a former Soviet republic who then sold it to China.

China initially said little about its plans for the carrier but has been more open in recent years, said Bonnie S. Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

'It wasn't until the Chinese actually announced they were sending it out on a trial run they admitted, `Yes, we are actually launching a carrier,'' she said.

China publicly announced two sea trials for the carrier that occurred this year, she said.The carrier's progress is in line with the U.S. military's expectations, said Cmdr. Leslie Hull-Ryde, a Defense Department spokeswoman.

A Defense Department report to Congress this year said the carrier could become operationally available to the Chinese navy by the end of next year but without aircraft.

'From that point, it will take several additional years before the carrier has an operationally viable air group,' Hull-Ryde said in an email.
She declined to comment on the DigitalGlobe photo, saying it was an intelligence matter.

DigitalGlobe, based in Longmont, Colo., sells satellite imagery and analysis to clients that include the U.S. military, emergency response agencies and private companies. DigitalGlobe has three orbiting satellites and a fourth is under

Russian scientists are tunneling through 15000 ft. of Antarctic Ice to get to frozen Lake Vostok - These guys never saw " The Thing" have they???

OK....Soviet scientists are tunneling through 15000 ft. of Antarctic Ice to get to frozen Lake Vostok....They are hoping the lake will reveal new forms of life and show how life evolved may have evolved in the times before the ice age....riiiighhttt...

Maybe they should have reviewed the 1982 movie " THE THING" by John Carpenter

The overview of that movie - "An American scientific expedition to the frozen wastes of the Antarctic is interrupted by a group of seemingly mad Norwegians pursuing and shooting a dog. The helicopter pursuing the dog crashes leaving no explanation for the chase. During the night, the dog mutates and attacks other dogs in the cage and members of the team that investigate."

The team soon realises that an alien life-form with the ability to take over other bodies is on the loose and they don't know who may already have been taken over."

Oh yeah, I'd want to drill through an ice cap better than 2 1/2 miles deep to see what is down there or what may still be there...especially after reading that.

They should have listened to YODA -

Luke Skywalker: I won't fail you. I'm not afraid.

Yoda: You will be. You... will... be.


Scientists Race To Breach Antarctica's Lake Vostok
Redorbit.com
Posted on: Saturday, 5 February 2011, 07:48 CST

Russian scientists are set to pierce through Antarctica’s frozen surface to reveal the secrets of an icebound lake that has been sealed deep there for the past 15 million years.

Alexei Turkeyev, head of the Russian polar Vostok Station, told Reuters by satellite phone that scientists have “only a bit left to go.” His team has been drilling for weeks in a race to reach the lake -- buried 12,000 feet beneath the polar ice cap -- before the end of the brief Antarctic summer.

With the quickly returning onset of winter, scientists will be forced to leave on the last flight out on February 6. “It's minus 40 (Celsius/Fahrenheit) outside,” said Turkeyev. “But whatever, we're working. We're feeling good. There's only 5 meters left until we get to the lake so it'll all be very soon.”

Scientists are hoping the lake will reveal new forms of life and show how life evolved may have evolved in the times before the ice age. The lake could also offer scientists a glimpse of what conditions exist for life in similar extremes on Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa.

“It's like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before. We don't know what we'll find,” Valery Lukin of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg, which oversees the expedition, told Reuters.

The discovery of the hidden network of sub-glacial lakes of Antarctica in the 1990s has sparked much enthusiasm among scientists the world over.

Explorers from the US and Britain are following the trail of Russia’s scientists with their own missions to probe other buried lakes, which are among the last of the world’s hidden and unexplored areas.

“It's an extreme environment but it is one that may be habitable. If it is, curiosity drives us to understand what's in it. How is it living? Is it flourishing?,” Martin Siegert, head of the University of Edinburgh's School of Geosciences, who is leading a British expedition to a smaller polar lake, told Reuters reporter Alissa de Carbonnel.

Experts explain that the ice sheet traps in the planet’s geothermal heat and prevents the lakes from freezing. Sediment from the lake might show scientists a window to the past, back millions of years to tropical prehistoric times, said Lukin.

Lake Vostok is the largest, deepest and most isolated of the frozen continent’s 150 sub-glacial lakes. It is overly saturated with oxygen, more so than any other known environment on Earth.

John Priscu of Montana State University, a chief scientist with the U.S. program to explore another Antarctic lake, said Russian scientists are “leading the way with a torch.”

Priscu said beneath the frozen crust, far from any sunlight, in the vast sub-glacial lake creatures may lurk around thermal vents in the lake’s depths. “I think Lake Vostok is an oasis under the ice sheet for life. It would be really wild to thoroughly sample... But until we learn how to get into the system cleanly that's an issue,” he told Reuters.

Explorers, about to breach the lake for the first time, now face an important question: How do we go where no one has gone before without spoiling it or bringing back some foreign virus?

“I feel very excited but once we do it there is no going back,” said Alexei Ekaikin, a scientist with the expedition at Vostok Station. “Once you touch it, it will be touched forever