Good Morning MOTleyville, It's Saturday May 25th, 2013
MOT is here every morning @ 6:30 am
Two Wounded Warriors Fight Back
Memorial Day is a time when the country pauses to remember those in the military who have made the ultimate sacrifice for the country. It’s also a reminder of the soldiers who have come back from war alive but wounded in irreversible ways.
Lt. Jason Pak and Lt. Eric Zastoupil, both graduates of the West Point Military Academy, are among over 1,500 soldiers who have lost limbs fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this special Memorial Day edition of On the Radar follows their journeys of recovery.
Pak was on patrol in southern Afghanistan when the unexpected happened.
"I stepped on a mound and I just blew up,” Pak told On the Radar, “and then the next thing you know, my guys were rendering first aid."
The former West Point soccer player lost both of his legs and two fingers that day. Zastoupil similarly fell victim to an IED explosion Afghanistan, losing his left leg. While both soldiers faced challenging recoveries following their injuries, neither lost their fighting spirits.
Michael Phelps 2016 Olympics?
When he was 16 years old, Michael Phelps walked into his agent's office in Portland, Maine, and announced, "I want to change the way America views this sport."
Sixteen years later, he has. He changed it during his career, and even after his retirement. There's an international swim meet this week in Istanbul, and nobody's talking about it. But people are talking about Michael Phelps.
Will Phelps return to the pool for the 2016 Games? Reports say yes; he says no. But the fact that he's still such a topic, nearly a year after his last Olympic swim, shows how much he's changed swimming and how much he can still affect it if he comes back.
The possibility of Phelps' return is not shocking – there was doubt cast on his retirement even before he retired in the first place – but this is a rare case where a famous athlete un-retiring is both logical and welcome. He's accomplished everything he's desired in four Olympiads, yet there's more reward waiting for him if he goes for a fifth.
Weather Watcher Satelilte Fails
A key satellite positioned to track severe weather in the eastern United States has failed, just as the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season is about to start.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) activated a spare satellite, which will provide coverage of the East Coast, while it is trying to fix the failed one, the agency said in a status report on its website on Friday.
"There is no estimate on return to operations at this time," NOAA said.
The Atlantic-Caribbean hurricane season starts on June 1 and lasts six months. NOAA expects this year's season to be "extremely active," with 13 to 20 tropical storms and seven to 11 of those strengthening into hurricanes.
The agency's three current Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, known as GOES, were built by Boeing and designed to last 10 years. The failed spacecraft, GOES-13, was launched in 2006.
NOAA typically operates two GOES spacecraft over the United States, overlooking the East and West coasts, plus one on-orbit spare. The satellites are outfitted with imagers to watch for clouds and developing storms, and atmospheric sounders to measure temperatures and humidity.