Olympic ideal not burning bright in Italy

(CNN) -- The debate about the Olympics in China hasn't had much impact in Italy.
Hot themes such as boycotting the Games never really made it to the front pages here, and there were no protests or episodes of violence that were seen on the streets of Paris and London when the Olympic torch came through those cities.
It is true that this time the Olympic torch didn't touch Italian soil as it did before Athens 2004 but still the main feeling here is of a general disinterest.
This may be because Italians are interested in football more than in any other sport, and the other big event of the summer, Euro 2008, is much more relevant from a media's point of view than the Olympic Games.
Mediaset will be there in Beijing of course with four journalists in the field, but at the moment we're not particularly pushing them with "battage" or any other preliminary coverage.
In Italy, China is still perceived as a very far away place and there is a quite blurred idea of what the Olympics may mean to the Chinese people.
It is hard to predict the effect the Games will have over the commercial relations and geo-political equilibrium between western countries and "the Celestial Empire."
Even so, there is something decadent in the way our sports media has had to concentrate on particular stories related to fencing, swimming, rowing, or any other sport that Italians excel in, in order to maintain their share of viewers from the general public.
Because of this, we have neglected to cover the discussions on the general and historical context of where the Games will take place. In some way, this is a kind of betrayal toward theChinese population.
China is focusing on Beijing 2008 as an event of global interest and the place where the rest of the world will see what China is able to do.
The Chinese people seem to be whole-heartedly supporting the Games, but there is the issue about their freedom to criticize their political system and own personal freedoms.
The Beijing Games then is not just for sport's sake, and it's a difficult task western journalists face to let the rest of the world understand its significance.

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Image Science Centre

The scheduled power outage which would have affected the availability of the IMAGE Science Center has been postponed. Updates for the outage will be posted when it has been rescheduled.

On 18 December 2005, after 5.8 years of successful operations, IMAGE's telemetry signals were not received during a routine pass. Currently, IMAGE has not responded to commands and a press release on this unfortunate event has been issued. The IMAGE mission was designed as a two-year mission but has exceeded all its scientific goals and has produced a fire hose of stunning images of the previously invisible region of space in the inner magnetosphere.
The Final Report of the IMAGE Failure Review Board has now been released. The most likely explanation of the failure was the result of an induced "instant trip" of the Solid Sate Power Controller (SSPC) supplying power to the transponder. Other possible, but very unlikely causes, could not be eliminated, however. The report as well as the full presentation of the review board presented on 04 April 2006 is available on the Mission Publications page.
The IMAGE spacecraft was launched from Vandenberg AFB on 25 March 2000, at 20:34:43 UT. IMAGE was the first satellite mission dedicated to imaging the Earth's magnetosphere, the region of space controlled by the Earth's magnetic field and containing extremely tenuous plasmas of both solar and terrestrial origin. Invisible to standard astronomical observing techniques, these populations of ions and electrons have traditionally been studied by means of localized measurements with charged particle detectors, magnetometers, and electric field instruments. Instead of such in situ measurements, IMAGE employed a variety of imaging techniques to "see the invisible" and to produce the first comprehensive global images of the plasma populations in the inner magnetosphere. With these images, space scientists were able to observe, in a way never before possible, the large-scale dynamics of the magnetosphere and the interactions among its constituent plasma populations.
IMAGE used neutral atom, ultraviolet, and radio imaging techniques to:
Identify the dominant mechanisms for injecting plasma into the magnetosphere on substorm and magnetic storm time scales;
Determine the directly driven response of the magnetosphere to solar wind changes; and,
Discover how and where magnetospheric plasmas are energized, transported, and subsequently lost during substorms and magnetic storms.