Slashdot Mirror

Crew? Not a chance. There is absolutely no reason to send crew on a mission like this. It would just complicate a mission that computer controls could already do more than well enough, and send the price through the roof. We're already doing completely automated asteroid *landings* (harder than it sounds, because they have very irregular gravity fields). There's no way that the 20 tonnes includes a human payload and all of the associated baggage.

No humans, no coming home. Also, they mention 20 years prep time - i.e., they're not planning to build it until a threat is discovered, and the couple billion dollar cost would be amortized over that time to perhaps 100 mil per year, split around the world's space agencies. I'm sure that's more than enough time and low enough cost. Also, a 200 meter asteroid is hardly a worldwide cataclysmic event if it hits; it's like a single large nuclear weapon hitting a random place on the planet, if you can trust the impact calculator.

fractionation - During isotopic fractionation, heavy and light isotopes partition differently between two compounds or phases. Isotope fractionation occurs because the bond energy of each isotope is slightly different, with heavier isotopes having stronger bonds and slower reaction rates. The difference in bonding energy and reaction rates are proportional to the mass difference between isotopes. Thus, light elements are more likely to exhibit isotopic fractionation than heavy isotopes.

That's a pretty good summary, but people should know that Mars has two moons. However, they're not nearly as big as Earth's moon and are probably captured asteroids, not the result of a giant impact, so they don't invalidate this theory.

That's a pretty good summary, but people should know that Mars has two moons. However, they're not nearly as big as Earth's moon and are probably captured asteroids, not the result of a giant impact, so they don't invalidate this theory.

(Actually Clay Sherrod, who seems to be the first to have imaged this storm, isn't an amateur but he's active in the ALPO Mars section which consists mainly of amateurs and he images at a small observatory, not some huge government funded observatory with various gigantic telescopes.)

The thing is, the big expensive government funded telescopes, or the Hubble, for example, can take better photos of Mars than amateurs can. But there is the question of coverage . . . the big expensive telescopes just don't have the resources (ie, observing time) to image Mars (or any other particular object or planet) several times a night whenever that object is visible.

But amateurs do have the observing time available and they do the work . . . result is, amateurs do a lot of the meat & potatoes of keeping an eye on things like Mars or Jupiter.

More of Sherrod's photos of the beginning of the Mars dust storm and numerous photos of this Mars apparition.

Since Sherrod is imaging Mars pretty much every possible night, he was on the spot to catch this as it happened . . .

Also, if you haven't been following trends in astro-imaging, you may be amazed at the quality of images people are now getting using relatively modest telescopes (generally 8 to 14 inch scopes, the sort of thing you can buy basically off the shelf for maybe $800 to $5000) coupled with inexpensive webcams.

See numerous amateur astronomer's images of this apparition of Mars here. (warning--LOTS of images on that page).

Here's some more info on Cytokines:

http://microvet.arizona.edu/Courses/MIC419/Tutoria ls/cytokines.html

I wish TFA was a little more specific on which kind of cytokines they found... I guess we'll have to wait for the human studies.

Really, though, this should be no surprise. It's been known for some time that stress to the body results in immunological cytokine release.

The symptoms (pre-RSS) that they mention, like depression, fatigue, etc, are eerily similar to Epstein-Barr... I wonder if the immne system is revved up by the repetitive motions (hence feeling sick), or inhibited, like the EBV toxin.

Are the damn squirrels dead yet?

From this page it looks like the two telescopes in combination have a resolution 10x that of Hubble. Hubble's primary mirror is 2.4 m in diameter compared to the LBT's 8.4 m (but atmospheric distortion lowers the resolution of ground-based telescopes). The main advantage to the dual-telescope set-up is not the increased resolution, but the ability to do optical interferometry: cancel out the signal that you don't want, or select for the signal that you do.

The Keck Telescope in Hawaii is also designed to do optical interferometry, though I'm not sure what kind of results they have gotten so far.

"They mated and were done in about two minutes. I guess he thought they were finished and went back to eating his celery. All of their matings before had been brief, usually only one or two copulations. But she turned around and stared at him again, just like before. He tried to turn away, but she stayed inches away from his face. They ended up mating thirty-three times that day. It was so funny, because he kept that celery in his hand the whole time and never got a chance to eat it. At the end of the day he came inside and passed out with that sorry wilted stalk still clenched in his fist."

"They mated and were done in about two minutes. I guess he thought they were finished and went back to eating his celery. All of their matings before had been brief, usually only one or two copulations. But she turned around and stared at him again, just like before. He tried to turn away, but she stayed inches away from his face. They ended up mating thirty-three times that day. It was so funny, because he kept that celery in his hand the whole time and never got a chance to eat it. At the end of the day he came inside and passed out with that sorry wilted stalk still clenched in his fist."

Terra Mater (Mother Earth)is not commonly held to be the same as the Goddess Bona Dea (Fauna). They would typically have seperate shrines, often in the same area, built by the same people. One is a personification of Earth itself, the other of living things. Of course here and there the lines might well blur.

I am fauna, but not terra. The child, but not the mother. I come from, but do not share identity.

In any case, the current official name of the earth is Earth, which is Germanic.

http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanet s/earth.html

KFG

Step 2: put fingernailsized flash memorychip on place of fingernail

Now just a way to power them up and use them. Any ideas?

Hmmmmmmm...

I don't know why they are so worried about imaging the Mars Polar Lander crash site. HiRISE will be doing that, and at a much better resolution when it gets there next year.

Uhmm....., very, VERY?

Here's some info about those last lines regarding the "hoax."

http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/NOT_faked/
http://www.apollo-hoax.me.uk/index.html

No I did not read it, because I pretty much knew what it stated. After reading your post I took a quick look at it and here is what you might be interested in:

B. University Property. E-mail services are extended for the sole use of University faculty, staff, students and other appropriately authorized users to accomplish tasks related to and consistent with the University's mission. University e-mail systems and services are University facilities, resources and property as those terms are used in University policies and applicable law. Any e-mail address or account assigned by the University to individuals, sub-units, or functions of the University, is the property of the University.

I was given the email account for academic purposes. If you want to filter out non-school related email it is simple, have the server only accept emails from its own domain. If every student, teacher, staffer has an email from said domain then they can all communicate within the university system. Here is the policy and guideline document if you want to have some fun.
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA ELECTRONIC MAIL POLICY

Before Einstein explained the precession of Mercury's perihelion, many scientists believed there was a planet Vulcan inside Mercury's orbit. Some even "spotted" it.

(For the "spotted" link, search on "Vulcan".)

You can also read about it here.

Thanks for the fascinating links! Interesting trivia: To get the newly-cast 20-ton mirror out of the oven, they glue it onto a set of large metal discs, then lift it out. Now that's adhesion!

The Steward Observatory Mirror Lab had an open house yesterday for observatory personnel, which I attended.

The spin-cast oven is huge. In these pictures, you only see the top portion of it, it actually fills the floor below as well. I believe this is the only large spin-cast mirror facility in the world. The idea behind spin-casting is that, by spinning the molten glass as it is slowly cooled, you automatically get a paraboloid top surface. This makes the final shaping of the mirror much easier, since the first-order shape is already there.

Actually, in the case of the GMT, it will use seven mirrors, six of which are off-axis. The off-axis mirrors will obviously have a more complicated surface than a typical on-axis paraboloid. The mirror being cast now is an off-axis mirror; it is a proof-of-concept that they can grind an eight-meter chunk of glass to an off-axis paraboloid shape with a surface RMS of 20 nanometers (!).

In a few months when the mirror has cooled and solidified, it will be removed from the oven, cleaned, ground, and eventually, polished. The stress-lap polisher is very impressive. It has a network of stress actuators above it, which can dynamically change the shape of the polisher's surface as it travels across the mirror.

It's interesting that the "Aggie Daily News" was chosen as the linked story, which makes it sound like UT Austin and Texas A&M are the major players in the GMT, along with a handful of other, unnamed institutions. In fact, the Carnegie Institute is the impetus behind the project, and the U of Arizona is providing the mirrors. I think this UA News article is much more informative.

The Steward Observatory Mirror Lab had an open house yesterday for observatory personnel, which I attended.

The spin-cast oven is huge. In these pictures, you only see the top portion of it, it actually fills the floor below as well. I believe this is the only large spin-cast mirror facility in the world. The idea behind spin-casting is that, by spinning the molten glass as it is slowly cooled, you automatically get a paraboloid top surface. This makes the final shaping of the mirror much easier, since the first-order shape is already there.

Actually, in the case of the GMT, it will use seven mirrors, six of which are off-axis. The off-axis mirrors will obviously have a more complicated surface than a typical on-axis paraboloid. The mirror being cast now is an off-axis mirror; it is a proof-of-concept that they can grind an eight-meter chunk of glass to an off-axis paraboloid shape with a surface RMS of 20 nanometers (!).

In a few months when the mirror has cooled and solidified, it will be removed from the oven, cleaned, ground, and eventually, polished. The stress-lap polisher is very impressive. It has a network of stress actuators above it, which can dynamically change the shape of the polisher's surface as it travels across the mirror.

It's interesting that the "Aggie Daily News" was chosen as the linked story, which makes it sound like UT Austin and Texas A&M are the major players in the GMT, along with a handful of other, unnamed institutions. In fact, the Carnegie Institute is the impetus behind the project, and the U of Arizona is providing the mirrors. I think this UA News article is much more informative.

The Steward Observatory Mirror Lab had an open house yesterday for observatory personnel, which I attended.

The spin-cast oven is huge. In these pictures, you only see the top portion of it, it actually fills the floor below as well. I believe this is the only large spin-cast mirror facility in the world. The idea behind spin-casting is that, by spinning the molten glass as it is slowly cooled, you automatically get a paraboloid top surface. This makes the final shaping of the mirror much easier, since the first-order shape is already there.

Actually, in the case of the GMT, it will use seven mirrors, six of which are off-axis. The off-axis mirrors will obviously have a more complicated surface than a typical on-axis paraboloid. The mirror being cast now is an off-axis mirror; it is a proof-of-concept that they can grind an eight-meter chunk of glass to an off-axis paraboloid shape with a surface RMS of 20 nanometers (!).

In a few months when the mirror has cooled and solidified, it will be removed from the oven, cleaned, ground, and eventually, polished. The stress-lap polisher is very impressive. It has a network of stress actuators above it, which can dynamically change the shape of the polisher's surface as it travels across the mirror.

It's interesting that the "Aggie Daily News" was chosen as the linked story, which makes it sound like UT Austin and Texas A&M are the major players in the GMT, along with a handful of other, unnamed institutions. In fact, the Carnegie Institute is the impetus behind the project, and the U of Arizona is providing the mirrors. I think this UA News article is much more informative.

It's one piece of glass, with a single, smooth surface on the front, 8.4 m in diameter. The hexagonal "pieces" are holes on the backside. It basically looks like a big honeycomb. This design gives you great stiffness and strength, with only 20% the weight that a solid mirror would have.

Arecibo Observatory is still the biggest single telescope, though there are even larger arrays.

And of course the GMT is being built as a single scope with one focus, while things like the VLT, Keck and LBT use interferometry to get sharper images.

(And adaptive optics! I want telescopes with frickin' laser beams strapped to their heads!)

Photos

Just to be through and for those lazy moon consipiracist...

1. If you mean the lack of surface dust being blown away, that's because the rocket was reduced to low power during landing. Further more, the whole capsule is moving across the landscape, further spreading the rocket's blow over a large area, hence the near non-existence of dust being blown away.

2. Looks at flag on earth, tell me its dark at the side away from sun. The flag used on the moon have a relatively thin fabric, hence the sunlight ACTUALLY filters through them (against, look at several flags on earth, you can see this is the truth.

3. Don't go out much? I know you're refering the the non-parellel shadow argument. Go out to some area with rolling hills during sunset, take note of the shadow created by object, you'll see that they're not-parellel.

4. YOu're right, there's no wind on moon. But that's actually the reason the flag appears to wave. Try this at home. Get a piece of cloth, hold it by its upper two corners (so it resembles the flag on moon). And wave it a bit, notice how it continues to wave for a bit before stopping? The reason it stopped is because the air dampens its motion. On moon, having no air, when the astronaut planted the flag and jostle it, the waving motion can be maintained for a while. (If you're talking about how the flag stays open, there's a second, horizontal alluminum bar above the flag holding it up).

5. Again, do this simple experiment. Take a camera (no, ANY camera). Wait for a clear night, where you can see stars. Now, find a relatively big subject and shine a VERY bright spotlight (the sun in vaccum act as a VERY bright spotlight). Car light works well. Now, try taking the picture of said subject WHILE keeping the star visible. Impossible, right? That's the reason there's no stars. The brightness on the moon is so bright that the camera couldn't get the exposure length required to get the star in without having the rest of the scenery whited out.

Here's one website where I got most of my rebuttal from.
http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/NOT_faked/
Finally, go ask the people who does this. They'll tell you EXACTLY what the Apollo program give them. (If you ask nicely enough, they'll even show you, "Look there's the mirror where we bounce laser off of.")

One of the biggest problems with any in-order microarchitecture is stalling due to L1 cache misses. What does an in-order machine do when a memory operation misses in L1 and a dependent operation is next in line? Sits there. An OOO machine can continue to do useful work on non-dependent instructions in its instruction window.

In some instances, an advanced Itanium/EPIC compiler can play around with the memory latencies and try to hide them - for example, schedule a bunch of non-dependent instructions right after a long-latency load from memory. This requires a lot of program and pointer analysis, and is doable only sometimes (things like heavy array-based computations, for example).

So, on real-world programs that may have varied memory access patterns, the Itanium family isn't going to do very well, but on many of the scientific and floating-point benchmarks (regular memory access patterns that the compiler can understand), it flies.

Granted, this memory latency thing is becoming a problem even on OOO microarchitectures, because there's only so much the processor can do before it has to stall waiting for the data to come back from memory. Check out a few papers on runahead execution, which helps to mitigate this problem on either OOO or in-order microarchitectures. I wouldn't be surprised to see the next major incarnation of the Pentium or Athlon line have this feature.

most animals are fed grain and other animals, not grass. I'm not sure what century you live in :)

And there is indeed a crisis in global clean, fresh water resources. If you use google you will see several journal articles discussing this. http://ag.arizona.edu/AZWATER/awr/dec99/Feature2.h tm

Interestingly enough, I recently wrote an editorial for the University of Arizona's "Arizona Summer Wildcat" regarding the topic of violence in video games after watching the "60 Minutes" segment on Grand Theft Auto. I agree with the masses that violence in video games does not correlate to violent behavior, and instead, those particular individuals were predisposed to commit such crimes. My article can be found here.

It was BW. They used the spectral information from the DISR device (think of it as a single pixel of full very accurate color) and then used it to interpolate color for a whole image. Anywho, it's bizarre but the highest quality polished images didn't seem to come from the DISR group (bleech) but instead from amateurs, mere hours after descent no less. One should keep in mind this is all through an 1 byte/sec link from the probe....

It's not too difficult, conceptually. The star's mass is a function of its brightness. So, you already know the mass of the star. The orbiting planet causes the star to wobble a bit. The more massive the planet, the more the star wobbles. Weight is not the same as mass, by the way. Weight is what you get when you place a mass in a gravitational field. More info on this: http://ethel.as.arizona.edu/~collins/astro/subject s/srchplanet5.html

Now, let's orbit these solar cells at 500 km altitude, i.e. a diameter of 13,756.3 km or circumference of 43,217 km. The article doesn't say how wide the ring should be, but to block 1.6% of the sunlight to a circle 12,756.3 km in diameter would require a strip about 160 km wide. That's 6.9 million square kilometers of solar cells in the full ring.

Now the silicon wafer in a solar cell is really quite thin, typically around 300 microns thick, so that's only 2.074 cubic kilometers of silicon all up. Density is 2330 kg/m3, so that's 4,833 megatonnes of silicon required, or about 0.0000005% of the earth's resources. I think we have enough.

Of course, the energy required to manufacture that sort of area of solar cells would be pretty high, but think of the returns. The earth receives about 1370 W/m2 in orbit, so multiply that by the area of cells facing the sun (2.04 million square km), and you get about 2.8 billion MW of incident radiation :-) Let's say these cells aren't particularly efficient, maybe 10%, plus transmission losses of another 70%, and you still have 84 million MW of usable energy, all day, every day.

Now, in 1997 we used 380 quadrillion BTUs, globally, or about 111 quadrillion watt-hours. That's an average consumption of 12 million MW, comfortably within our budget for some time. An energy-producing system with a capacity of 7 times the entire global requirements is worth quite a bit.

There's only one downside to this - if we divert all this energy down to earth & use it, it all ends up as heat in the end, which completely nullifies the original purpose of the ring (if you remember) of preventing global warming! D'oh!

Putting a lander on Phobos should be interesting, since the moonlet is covered by a meter-thick layer of dust. When I imagine a craft making a landing, I picture throwing a rock into a bowl of flour. On the plus side, maybe we'll make the first sizable, intentional man-made crater outside the Earth.

I guess Phobos is better then Deimos... the latter is thought to have a layer of dust several hundred feet thick (or should that be "several dozen meters thick"?

These mirrors are a radical departure from the conventional solid-glass mirrors used in the past. They are honeycomb on the inside; made out of Ohara E6-type borosilicate glass that is melted, molded and spun cast into the shape of a paraboloid in a custom-designed rotating oven.

It didn't seem all that likely that most /.ers would care about evaporative cooling, since even in Arizona they only work part of the year (like now, although today the Phoenix dew point got up to 10C. I woke up just knowing it had gone up because the cooler was blowing full speed and it still wasn't all that cool.) Never mind next month when the monsoons start. AC time then for sure.

• this penrose interview as well as
  
• the Quantum Consciousness website and
  
• The Center of Consciousness Studies/
  

"Crops become harder to grow"

Evidence? Where I live, warmer weather increases the length of the growing season. Crops are easier to grow.

Warmer weather can also mean reduced rainfall and draught in some areas thus causing desertification:

• Desertification and Drought
• Web resources on desertification

"Crops become harder to grow"

Evidence? Where I live, warmer weather increases the length of the growing season. Crops are easier to grow.

Warmer weather can also mean reduced rainfall and draught in some areas thus causing desertification:

• Desertification and Drought
• Web resources on desertification

If you really want to read about it, you can go Here, Here and/or Here.

If you really want to read about it, you can go Here, Here and/or Here.

Retrorockets are 2 for 3 on Mars (Viking I and II used this method), although I tend to agree that the airbag system is more robust in that it avoids the necessity for a near zero-velocity touchdown. There is a rough cut animation of the Phoenix' EDL available.

• the NASA Press Release
• NASA's Phoenix website at the University of Arizona
• NASA Mars Exploration website
• NASA's page on future Mars missions

You, claiming to know TFSM, should also know that anything large and strong enough to survive re-entry as a projectile from space will have JUST as much destructive power as a nuclear device.

The definition of WMD only lists those three, as they're the ONLY WMD that currently exist (that the world knows of). Do you really think that "space projectiles" won't be added to that list the first time a titanium slug the size of a volkswagen wipes out Mexico City?

As I said, it helps to know the subject matter rather than handwaving freakoutery.

Well, I suppose it matters which government drops it. After all, we, as Americans, possess NO WMD's, do we?

Technically? You're right. But that doesn't mean Mocha's wrong, either.

The solution is the same as it always was: implement a proper relational database with temporal data types, and data "warehousing" will become trivial.

Until then, you might want to read this book (if you haven't already). Just looking through the examples makes me weep for a true relational implementation but we're stuck with SQL for now.

I dunno. Ask.

http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/

The Arizona Center for Consciousness Studies has a nice website, http://consciousness.arizona.edu/. Days and days of reading. As I understand it Stuart Hameroff, the director, worked with Penrose on the physiological side of their quantum consciousness model (among presumably other things).

A post about non-S/2005 S1 objects seems a bit off-topic, and so probably deserves no response, but i must point out that the Phoebe image referred to is hardly the "best image so far"! We have 10000000000 times better resolution (it's too late at night to count digits... ;-) from Cassini in June 2004. Just crawl out from under fuzzy little rock where you've been living, and have a look at, for example: http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=198 or http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=203 - the smallest craters you see are about the same order of size as football stadiums.

A post about non-S/2005 S1 objects seems a bit off-topic, and so probably deserves no response, but i must point out that the Phoebe image referred to is hardly the "best image so far"! We have 10000000000 times better resolution (it's too late at night to count digits... ;-) from Cassini in June 2004. Just crawl out from under fuzzy little rock where you've been living, and have a look at, for example: http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=198 or http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=203 - the smallest craters you see are about the same order of size as football stadiums.

Cosmos was probably my first introduction to the canals too - I always loved the (admittedly slightly cheesy) panning shot over the dusty, dry canal and dead Martian city, to the strains of Holst's Mars. I literally cried like a child when I heard of Sagan's death, he was a childhood hero of mine. But anyway - the best accounts of the canals controversy that I have read were in Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900 (New York: Dover, 1999) and especially Stephen J. Dick, The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). If you like electronic books (and I don't!), this is less scholarly but very good, and of course there's Percival Lowell's 1895 classic, Mars .