However, bad weather and communications were hampering more helicopter sorties.
But bad weather and communications were hampering more helicopter flights, said Ang Tshering of the Nepal Mountaineering Association.
Other telescopes keep track of solar eruptions as an early warning system of stormy space weather endangering communications and navigation satellites.
Twenty-two of the most seriously injured people are understood to have been taken by helicopter for treatment in the village of Periche on Saturday, but bad weather and communications were hampering helicopter flights, said Ang Tshering of the Nepal Mountaineering Association.
The asteroid, known by the distinctly un-catchy name of 2012 DA14, will pass by on Friday, coming within 17,200 miles of our planet — "so close that it will pass inside the ring of geosynchronous weather and communications satellites" — but leaving us unscathed, NASA officials said.
Gordon F. MacDonald, a fellow early advocate on climate change, writes a chapter on space that largely shrugs at manned interplanetary travel — a near-heresy in 1968 — by cannily observing that while the Apollo missions would soon exhaust their political usefulness, weather and communications satellites would not.
The asteroid, which is a hundred and sixty feet long and weighs a hundred and sixty thousand tons, will come within seventeen thousand two hundred miles of us — less than one-tenth of the distance between Earth and the moon, and closer than many of our geosynchronous weather and communications satellites.
GEO is commonly used by weather and communications satellites.
In addition to weather forecasts, communications has added a new layer of safety to climbing both familiar and unclimbed peaks.
Sure, we can point to tens of billions of dollars a year now in direct benefits from such things as better weather forecasting, communications and resource exploration satellites, to the ubiquity of Google Earth epitomizing GPS-based systems from farming and construction to container tracking.
