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The California snowpack is at 110% of average in 2024, the state Department of Water Resources (DWR) said on Tuesday, after conducting the annual snow survey. Officials measured the snow depth at Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada mountains, recording a depth of 64 inches, which is 113% of the annual average. Measurements from elsewhere in the mountain range were used to calculate the combined average of 110% — a good sign of a healthy water supply. While some expected a dry winter, especially after the wet 2022-23 winter produced record snowfall in parts of the state, the 2023-24 winter...

The most powerful Pacific storm of the season started barreling into the Sierra Nevada on Thursday, packing multiple feet of snow and dangerous winds that forecasters say will create blizzard conditions likely to close major highways and trigger power outages into the weekend. Much of the Sierra Nevada was under a blizzard warning stretching through Sunday, with the biggest effects expected Friday afternoon into Saturday. As much as 10 feet (3 meters) of snow is possible in the mountains around Lake Tahoe by the weekend, with 3 to 6 feet (.9 to 1.8 meters) in the communities on the lake’s...

California is bracing for a powerful winter storm that could bring up to 10 feet of snow and high winds to the Sierra Nevada. “A second winter storm will impact the West Coast on Thursday and Friday,” the National Weather Service’s (NWS) Weather Prediction Center said in a forecast discussion Thursday. “The storm will create heavy mountain snow that will affect many passes. Multiple feet of snow are likely (over 80% chance) for higher elevations, especially above 5000 feet, including many Cascade and Sierra Nevada Mountain passes,” the notice added. “Extremely heavy snow rates surpassing 3 inches per hour are...

<p>NASA’s next cargo delivery vehicle—a spunky little space plane that looks like it could be an offspring of the space shuttle—is getting ready to fly.</p> <p>The svelte and snub nosed Dream Chaser will soon be shipped to the Mojave desert in California where it would begin a series of ground tests that would eventually culminate with a flight from an altitude of 2.5 miles high.</p>

NASA has selected SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Sierra Nevada Corp. to fly cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) starting in 2019, the agency announced today (Jan 14). Between 2019 and 2024, NASA will purchase a minimum of six uncrewed cargo missions from each of the three companies, agency officials said in a media briefing today. The space agency has the option to purchase additional re-supply missions from any of the three providers, and will likely do so, said Kirk Shireman, program manager for the ISS. SpaceX and Orbital ATK were selected as cargo providers in NASA's first round of...

The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal. Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are being launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois. Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”, according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation,...

long-lost lake in California may reappear after heavy rains in the state. Tulare Lake, a freshwater dry lake in the southern San Joaquin Valley, dried up about 80 years ago. It shrank when the land was developed for agriculture and rivers were diverted elsewhere. It became farmland in the middle of the 20th century. It has flooded occasionally since then, but this year is looking to be the wettest yet. California has been hit by severe storms in recent days, as well as throughout much of winter. Forecasters have estimated there will be 4 inches of rain and 4 feet...

The Science Channel investigated a section of the valley and discovered many clouds of smoke pouring from beneath the ground. Using InSAR data that has been monitoring the region for the last 20 years, geophysicist Jared Peacock pointed out a worrying aspect of the caldera that might portend problems. InSAR is a remote sensing method that employs a laser to concentrate a beam of radiation on a target, bouncing back to a sensor on an antenna, providing a comprehensive map of a region. One of the most concerning sites in InSAR was near Mammoth Lakes, a hamlet in the Sierra...

UPDATE Aug. 17, 9:44 p.m. More mandatory evacuations have been ordered Tuesday evening for the following areas: All areas between Mormon Emigrant Trail and Highway 88; The intersection of Perry Creek and Hawk Haven; The east side of Fairplay Road from Perry Creek extending south to Cedarville Road, including Slug Gulch, Omo Ranch, and all roads off of Slug Gulch and Omo Ranch; All roads off of Omo Ranch from Cedarville Road to Highway 88 The south side of Highway 50 north of Sly Park extending west to Snows Road. The north side of Highway 50 from Larsen Drive to...

It started with a petrified tree, half-buried in the mud of the Mokelumne River watershed in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The site intrigued Greg Francek, a ranger for East Bay Municipal Utility District, as he was walking the valley last summer. He inspected further, and what he recently discovered led to one of the most significant fossil discoveries in California history. Advertisement "I looked around the area further and I found a second tree," Francek said in an EBMUD statement released this week, documenting the discovery. "And then a third and so on. After finding dozens of trees I realized...

The U.S. Forest Service estimates that dead stands in the Creek fire contain 2,000 tons of fuel per acre. As of Saturday, the fire had charred more than 196,000 acres, destroyed 365 structures and was threatening 14,000 more in the vicinity of Big Creek, Huntington Lake and Shaver Lake. Firefighters don’t expect to contain it until mid-October. For those who have studied the potential fire effects of the vast beetle kill, the Creek fire is a harbinger. One of hundreds of major blazes to erupt in this record-breaking fire season in California, the Creek fire has underscored the urgency of...

While the CRS stalwarts of Cygnus and Dragon are regular visitors to the ISS, Program Manager Kirk Shireman cited the need for “dissimilar redundancy” in adding Dream Chaser to the mix – a key selling point previously used by SNC during Dream Chaser’s crew transportation aspirations. The only blot on her report card was a landing gear failure during a 2013 landing test at the Dryden Flight Research Facility in California. The test was designed to verify and validate Dream Chaser’s low-atmosphere aerodynamics, flight control surfaces, flight characteristics for approach, flare and landing, and landing systems. However, as it approached...

Acquiring space launch company Orbital ATK in an all-cash $7.8 billion merger, Northrop took possession of Orbital's Minotaur and Antares medium-lift rocket families. It acquired Orbital's ongoing project to build a new "OmegA" class heavy lift rocket as well, with which to compete against the likes of United Launch Alliance and SpaceX for large commercial and military satellite launches. Northrop Grumman also inherited Orbital's ongoing NASA contract to resupply crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) with needed consumables under the agency's CRS-1 and CRS-2 "Commercial Resupply Services" contracts -- missions valued at as much as $14 billion across the...

In a statement, SNC said that NASA concluded that the Nov. 11 free flight of the Dream Chaser engineering test article, at Edwards Air Force Base in California, met or exceeded all the requirements of the company’s last remaining funded milestone in its Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) award from 2012. During the flight test, the Dream Chaser was released from a helicopter at an altitude of about 3,750 meters and glided to an autonomous runway landing 60 seconds later, reaching a top speed of 530 kilometers per hour during its descent. ... The milestone, formally known as Milestone 4B, was...

The process of the Sierra Nevada spring snow melt sped up this week as a heat wave brought triple-digit temperatures to parts of the Western United States. A thawing snowpack that's massive after a brutal winter fed rivers and reservoirs with high-flowing runoff. One place that saw a stunning impact from all the runoff is Lake Tahoe. More than 12 billion gallons of water poured into the lake over the past week.

Sierra Nevada Corporation was looking to make the hiring push over the course of a year. Most positions will be in Colorado, she said, but many positions, including administrative staff and some technical and engineering positions, will be in the Reno-Sparks area. ... The company is growing thanks to several new government and commercial contracts it has received this year, she explained, citing a new contract to resupply the International Space Station starting in 2019. Sierra Nevada Corp. received several contracts to provide hardware for NASA's 2020 Mars mission, according to a statement from the company released earlier this month.

Several feet of new snow is expected in the Sierra Nevada mountains this weekend as another El Niño-influenced storm moves into Northern California. In what some are calling a "March Miracle," the Sierra have been hit by a series of powerful storms this month. That's important because the Sierra snowpack is a key source of water for California, which is in its fourth year of a drought. The storms have boosted the snowpack and replenished reservoirs. Heavy showers pummeled L.A. and Ventura counties Friday afternoon, and forecasters said there was a chance of some light rain in some areas of...

. September 18, 2014 Newt Gingrich : NASA Commercial Crew Plan Is Scant Progress ===================================================== It didn't take a rocket scientist to predict that NASA's plan to pay Russia to launch American astronauts into orbit wasn't going to turn out well. Three years after NASA retired the space shuttle program, relations between the United States and Russia are worse than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Americans have reportedly been paying Russia $70 million a seat to send our astronauts to the International Space Station. That's three and a half times what the Russians charge private...

The orbital airframe structure for the first commercial Dream Chaser mini-shuttle that will launch to Earth orbit just over two years from now has been unveiled by Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) and program partner Lockheed Martin. Sierra Nevada is moving forward with plans for Dream Chaser’s first launch and unmanned orbital test flight in November 2016 atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The winged Dream Chaser is being developed under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program aimed at restoring America’s indigenous human spaceflight access to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station (ISS).

The mission will be automated and unmanned, but if all goes well Sierra Nevada hopes to have a human flight by sometime in 2017.