Slashdot Mirror

Since the linked-to AP article is mostly just a picture, with nothing on the tech., here you go:

https://phys.org/news/2018-04-...

http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/deskt...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Pretty cool, but maybe not space & cost effective on a spaceship.

Apart from atmospheric heating, the bottom of the F9 is exposed to the exhaust of three engines for a minute or so during reentry

There may be some kind of a boundary layer escape but this flow is generally supersonic so the bulk of it will go elsewhere. Of course some gases will get there...the question is how much, both in repropropulsion, and in ascent/subsonic retropropulsion (the two seem comparable). A recent German analysis has some simulations in it (on page 11), and interestingly, the "business-end" temperatures seem better during the retro burn, not outside of it. They even explicitly spell it out: " After retro-propulsion heat flux peaks on lower skirt and nozzle region".

Granted for the thrusters, but the problems with the harpoons didn't surface until the conclusion of a 9-year-long test of the flight spare in a vacuum. Should they have postponed the launch by 9 years?

I thought one of the projects goals was to do things within a budget especially considering how many nations in the EU were involved in building it. You'd probably only see a single nation sourced spacecraft with this kind of capability.

Conversion efficiency. Just because a lump of coal burns with say 500W, doesn't mean you can actually recover 500W of electricity. It's just not going to happen. Since you obviously don't know anything about RTGs or even power, here's some info. NASA claims its most advanced model of RTG carries 4.8 kilograms of plutonium. It puts out about 110W of electricity. That's an efficiency of about 4.6%. Philae's solar panels were projected to produce 32 watts in direct sunlight at 3AU. Oh yeah, and those 110W RTGs are about the size of a person, and weigh 45 kilograms, the thing is freaking huge. It would be scraping by with tiny amount of power for an RTG on Philae. You'd end up needing batteries anyways.

I'm ordinarily a nuclear fanboy, but I have enough grounding in reality to realize RTGs aren't some holy grail of spacecraft power. Shocker, I know, but KSP isn't an accurate model of space travel.

Most of Philae subsystems (like the landing system) are based on a RTX2010 processor. It's 16-bit, and in the landing system it's running at 1.7MHz, with 64K RAM, 16K PROM, and... Forth as its native "assembler"/"machine language".

Outside of its very original machine language, and being X-ray-hardened, these specs are quite typical to standard "industrial" control systems - processors running subsystems of a larger machines, controllers of CNC devices, and so on.

Where are the Europeans? Oh, I don't know... (http://www.astrium.eads.net/, http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10008/, http://www.cnes.fr/web/CNES-en/7114-home-cnes.php)

Mars clearly has faults and tectonics, but nothing like Earth.

This is a youtube video with history of discoveries https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJsUDcSc6hE , http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/ - has more up to date info. There are two projects to find almost all asteroids in comining decades http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Synoptic_Survey_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-STARRS Pan STARRS already works to some degree see http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/ again, Those projects, which work now, are in process of upgrade http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2117062/Nasa-boosts-funds-telescope-team-hunting-dangerous-asteroids.html and then there will be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_Terrestrial-impact_Last_Alert_System Europeans too have project to deploy some telescopes http://belissima.aob.rs/Conf2012/Milani_2012.pdf and Russians think of this too. There are also satellites which look for asteroids like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Earth_Object_Surveillance_Satellite there are pending projects in Europe http://www.dlr.de/fa/Portaldata/17/Resources/dokumente/abt_17/projekte/Handout_Asteroid_Finder.pdf ( I think it can be resumed later ) and in Russia. There are consents http://b612foundation.org/sentinelmission/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Earth_Object_Camera of satellites with infrared telescopes. combined we have: we know almost all big asteroids > 1 km ( 95% now ) , so probability the Earth is hit hard is less, than, say 30 years ago - because we know 95% of big asteroids are already do not hit us in near future ( btw asteroid which caused dino extintion was several km wide, we know maybe 99.9% of all such asteroids now). Currently we have quite a high rate of discovery ( which will be much bigger in 2020s due to planned big asteroid hunting telescopes ) so in 30 years - we have only unknown asteroids few meters wide ( similar to than in Chelyabinsk ), we could be faster if mentioned satellites are launched and they work as expected. But even if we keep just today's rate of discovery the worst we could unexpectedly get - is a destruction of a city, in 30 years even with the current rate ( given planned improvements though ) of discovery we will have very low probability to have even this unexpected event.

The arm itself was developed by the robotics and mechatronics department of German Aerospace Center (DLR) as explained by this article. The extremtech article fails to mention that.

The costs for this plant are very high of course because its a new thing.

This simple power point PDF reallyshows the numbers of the solar thermal salt plant in spain that is run as a research plant.
http://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/institut/thermischept/Solar_Thermal_Energy_Storage_Technologies_Hannover2008.pdf

They actually concluded that Salt is Not the only option. The problem with salt is rust, and so you have to use carbon coating on all the steel parts, which makes it expensive.

Simple using concrete was a very attractive option also.
And then that means that hemp concrete is also possible which is much cheaper again.

Actually, if you take a look at their basic development strategy (near the bottom of the page), it looks like there's a few different directions they're interested in potentially taking this: a suborbital microgravity platform, a suborbital point-to-point transportation, and orbital transportation. In the case of microgravity research you want to be able to launch often, so returning to a landing strip makes that easier and more economical. Same for point-to-point transportation: if you're delivering cargo or people on a hypersonic delivery craft, you don't want to have to spend time to recover it from the ocean. Finally, for orbital transportation there's convincing arguments both ways, although one benefit of a glider-based reentry is that it tends to have lower G values.

They can actually do much better, from what I gather on this site. Their highest 300 MHz high resolution spotlight mode will do down to 1.1x1.1 meter, but the main mode that'll sweep the earth is significantly coarser. Still in relative terms I must say the development here is huge...

I found a page at the institutes site which conducted the research project. I'm afraid it's german only: http://www.dlr.de/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-1/86_read-13498/ But there seems to be a whole department designated to research these type of heat reservoirs which also puts more effort into further develop storing heat in concrete: http://www.dlr.de/tt/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-4727/7819_read-12192/

I found a page at the institutes site which conducted the research project. I'm afraid it's german only: http://www.dlr.de/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-1/86_read-13498/ But there seems to be a whole department designated to research these type of heat reservoirs which also puts more effort into further develop storing heat in concrete: http://www.dlr.de/tt/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-4727/7819_read-12192/

I found a page at the institutes site which conducted the research project. I'm afraid it's german only: http://www.dlr.de/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-1/86_read-13498/ But there seems to be a whole department designated to research these type of heat reservoirs which also puts more effort into further develop storing heat in concrete: http://www.dlr.de/tt/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-4727/7819_read-12192/

The telescope was designed and built under the management of the German Aerospace Center with funding from the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie; BMWi).

http://www.pa.op.dlr.de/acoustics/essay1/brechung_en.html

Wrong generation: 1939 calling

Some Physical information about the asteroid and Orbital Information. The first link mentions the diameter to be 30-70m, hopefully they are gonna land on the 70m of the asteroid yea?

2 Years ago a space probe crashed on Jupiter, killing my rich uncle....

Actually, plenty of HSRC images have been released already, but the fact that you didn't know that just proves your point about ESA being bad at PR. (Or do you mean the Super Resolution Channel of the HSRC? Because you may be right about that, I can't find anything. If so, my apologies.)

here

BAD science reporter! BAD! no treat for you.

Actually, I think the article might be right - the total mass carried to Mars won't be the same as what enters the Martian atmosphere, thanks to there being various support equipment attached to the orbiter. Dodgy mass-to-weight calculations were probably never involved. :-)

The original Beagle 2 apparently had a mass of 65kg, probably including support equipment, so the new Beagle is over twice as massive.

It seems they really got the science instrumentation right for the old lander, so let's hope they get everything else working too. Instruments do have a tendency to fly on missions they weren't originally intended for - the camera on Mars Express, the High Resolution Stereo Camera (a mere 20.4kg) was originally designed for the ill-fated Russian Mars 96 probe, for example.

With a bit of luck, Beagle 2's successor will safely reach the surface of Mars in 2009, so the important work can start...

Check out
http://www.dfd.dlr.de
The German Remote Sensing Data Center. DFD

These guys process sat data etc. Some cool pics here.

English link at top.
Go to sat data on left, then gallery.

G/

I will certainly give it a try then!

Until now I have sticked with tcsh for one single reason: history substition!

Basically it lets me insert text from my history (including the current line) using few symbols (e.g. !$ is the last argument of the previous line) -- it's extremely powerful, e.g. it allows to search in the history and can do substitutions in results, or head/tail for paths etc.

I use it a lot to keep down the number of characters I need to type, and I have even assigned hotkeys to some of the substitutions I use the most.

This is really the make-or-break feature for wether or not I want to use a shell, so I really hope zsh has something similar!?!

"...please read this overview."

TRANSLATION:

...please support and increase Roland Piquepaille spam and advertising clickthrough rates.

If you really want more details and pictures about the Mars Underground Mole then you can

• read this SpaceDaily four-part article on Mars Drillers
• read the Mars Underground Mole PDF with diagrams, photos and tables
• look at a whole range of Mars-related projects from the 2003 Sixth International Conference on Mars
• read a Deutsche Welle interview with German Aerospace Center Chairman Sigmar Wittig - DLR developed the Mars Express mole that inspired the MUM project
• read a National Space Society two-part interview with Dr. Brian Glass, MUM co-investigator
• read about a MUM inspired student project or
• watch a NASA Mars Underground Mole Quicktime movie animation.

It's much better than supporting craven self-interested people who are just after advertising like Roland Piquepaille, blog spammer.

Some interesting, more detailed information about Rosetta's activities can be found on the Lander Control Center's page. An overview of the commissioning activities is also available. It's a bit terse and sometimes not really up-to-date, but you can see some technical details. For your information, from the latter page on the commissioning activities:

• Block 1: Main Subsystems. 12.03. - 17.03.2004
• Block 2: Remaining subsystems and Experiments on HPC / CIU main. 09.04. - 15.04.2004
• Block 3: Remaining subsystems and Experiments on LPC / CIU red.; Lander internal interference tests; Consert Instrument Clock Drift Correction. 16.05. - 25.05.2004
• Block 4: Lander unit combined operation; Lander/Orbiter CONSERT Solar Panel Influence (Pointing Scenario). 03.10. - 05.10.2004
• Block 5: Romap listening to RPC test on Orbiter level (Interference Scenario). 19.10. - 27.10.2004
• Block 6: Lander cruise preparation. 27.10. - 28.10.2004

So I assume we're between Block 3 and Block 4 now.

Some interesting, more detailed information about Rosetta's activities can be found on the Lander Control Center's page. An overview of the commissioning activities is also available. It's a bit terse and sometimes not really up-to-date, but you can see some technical details. For your information, from the latter page on the commissioning activities:

• Block 1: Main Subsystems. 12.03. - 17.03.2004
• Block 2: Remaining subsystems and Experiments on HPC / CIU main. 09.04. - 15.04.2004
• Block 3: Remaining subsystems and Experiments on LPC / CIU red.; Lander internal interference tests; Consert Instrument Clock Drift Correction. 16.05. - 25.05.2004
• Block 4: Lander unit combined operation; Lander/Orbiter CONSERT Solar Panel Influence (Pointing Scenario). 03.10. - 05.10.2004
• Block 5: Romap listening to RPC test on Orbiter level (Interference Scenario). 19.10. - 27.10.2004
• Block 6: Lander cruise preparation. 27.10. - 28.10.2004

So I assume we're between Block 3 and Block 4 now.

If you're looking for a great light-weight but full featured graphical text editor geared toward programmers under Linux I highly recommend Cream for Vim. On the other hand, if you'd rather have an easy to use editor in shell that doesn't suck for coding, I would suggest JOE (Joe's Own Editor) which you can download here.

No I didn't know about K1. Only that Kistler seems to be in Chapter 11. Interesting idea though.

BTW have you seen this? Fascinating... I have been also thinking along those lines, flying back a winged first stage to launch base using air breathing engines. Should definitely work.

As for the 3d, the camera uses a very smart method to get both forward, downward, and backwards imaging of a given pixel and this is sufficient to create a computer generated picture of the landscape from almost any angle. The pictures are not projections of imaging onto altitude data from other satellites or something of the sort. The shading is as the camera saw it.

(I am not afilliated with the people who built the camera, I am just an interested onlooker. Info in this post may be inaccurate, but is, to the best of my knowledge, not. Try this page for a brief intro to the camera).

Of interest is this one picture, which shows the Spirit Rover landed in an area that is green

and a tip of the hat to the what color is mars debate, with this image comparison

Of interest is this one picture, which shows the Spirit Rover landed in an area that is green

and a tip of the hat to the what color is mars debate, with this image comparison

Gusev crater Spirit landing site photographed by ESA Mars Express in true color.

There's non-composited versions of the images available - there's still that weird, slightly 'painted' look to them, but I imagine it's partly due to us being brought up on grainy, monochrome images from other probes. :)

I found a page with some fairly in-depth information on the camera. There's also some other images that it's taken, of both Mars from a distance and of Earth. It's interesting that the instrument was originally designed for the ill-fated Russian Mars 96 mission - but the quality is still impressive now.

It's a big instrument - it comes in at a hefty 21.2kg, compared with the 60kg Beagle 2. Still, 2m resolution is rather impressive...

oops - i forgot the link: here

Sounds like an environmental nightmare. Less water in the Mediterranean basin would raise temperatures in the region - which are already terrible in summer. You would have saline dust blowing on to productive agricultural land, carrying with it industrial residues with who-knows-what health consequences. Productive fisheries would collapse, tourist resorts be left stranded and shipping would be made more complex.

It sounds terrible, one of those ideas we associate with the Soviet Union's attempts to manage Nature on a biblical scale. Perhaps the people who proposed this should go and look at the Aral Sea?

Best wishes,
Mike.

A paper by Lee, SeeBass and Sobieczky gives the passenger capacity of the OAW SST as 700 passengers.

The airspeed vab, solved in body-fixed coordinates, contains the x-, y-, and z-components of the aircraft's velocity relative to the surrounding air. The airspeed is the difference between the inertial velocity vb and the wind vwb, which are both also formulated in body-fixed coordinates. -Taken from this site

So, if i understand this correctly, the airspeed-velocity, would be the velocity of the aircraft (or sparrow) with the wind speed subtracted. Wouldn't the wind have to have a direction though, making it a vector as well?

Maybe MS is just facing up to the fact that CLI Rulez, :-)

The Aral sea used to be the 4th largest lake in the world. (Quick quiz: name the top 3.) It's now the 12th largest. (Slower quiz: name the intervening 8.)

Not only has it lost half its surface area since 1985, it seems to have lost two thirds since 1960. outlines are interesting. I wonder what it's like on that island that's almost a peninsula.

And while this has little to do with global warming, it's a prescient example of significant human-caused environmental change.

I would like to see languages preserved for translation of old documents. Think about the rosetta stone and how important it was in translating the bible. If would be nice to have languages with some form of context so that in the future if translation would be easier if all the natural speakers were dead

Rus

"Unfortunately most recipes are written for people that already know how to cook."

A good resource to deal with this is to keep a copy of "The Joy of Cooking" handy. I think the recipes in there are just okay, but it's the Rosetta Stone for cooking recipes.

Unfortunately, his statement is true of a lot of computer "recipes" as well. I always try to identify a "Rosetta Stone" book for every technology I dive into. For example, I was lost in the Linux Documentation Project until after I read Mark Sobell's A Practical Guide to Linux.

No wonder they can't find it, check the webpage of the GPS part makers GPS Tracking of the IRDT-2 Re-entry Capsule quote: "...The IRDT-2 capsule will be launched by a Volna rocket from a Kalmar type submarine in the Baltic sea north of Murmansk..."

Murmansk is nowhere near the Baltics...

The technology for this was originally developed by the Russian Mars program: "Inflatable Rentry and Descent Technology" is a nifty replacement for parachutes, IMHO.

The russians have done this before, though not from a submarine succesfully until now :)

Speaking as someone on the inside, I DO know why Hemos is pre-occupied... His wife just forked a new process (see man vfork() for more details) and gave birth to their first child, a beautiful young daughter. Congrats, Hemos :) :)

See http://www.dfd.dlr.de/sr tm/html/scene_understanding_en.htm (when the /. effect is over...).

It's informative!



well, if you don't, then here are the links...

German Space Operstions Centre's

and

A reminder if you enter your coordinates manually and are in North America: longitude should be negative

It's informative!



well, if you don't, then here are the links...

German Space Operstions Centre's

and

A reminder if you enter your coordinates manually and are in North America: longitude should be negative