Slashdot Mirror

Sick Boy writes "The Dutch solar car Nuna II, using ESA space technology, finished first in the World Solar Challenge, a 3010 km race right across Australia for cars powered by solar energy. Having set off from Darwin on Sunday 19 October, Nuna II crossed the finish line in Adelaide in a new record-breaking time of 30 hours 54 minutes, beating the previous record of 32 hours 39 minutes set by its Dutch precursor Nuna in 2001."

merryprankster writes "Europe's first mission to the Moon is set for blast off from Kourou in French Guiana just after midnight, local time, on Sunday. SMART 1 will study the composition of lunar rock through X-ray observations. The probe uses a new solar electric propulsion system which converts solar energy its panels into motion via the expulsion of ions. Details at the ESA mission site."

Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'Pay-as-you-go motoring just around the corner,' the European Space Agency (ESA) says that "road tolls could be made fairer if satellite-assisted distance pricing is implemented." Experiments are currently underway in Ireland, Portugal and Germany, before a possible extension to other countries. Potential benefits of such a road tolling system would be fairer implementation of charging on a 'pay for use' basis. All these experiments are using the US-operated Global Positioning System (GPS). But in 2010, when the system is fully implemented, it will use the Galileo satellite system."

Rolo Tomasi writes "ESA's reusable launch vehicle demonstrator, Phoenix, was recently wind tunnel tested to determine its low speed aerodynamics. A free flight for Phoenix is planned for early summer 2004. In case you haven't heard of it yet, here's an article from last year, describing the Phoenix/HOPPER concept. Here's another page at ESA, but it seems to be available only in German. What's interesting is the first sentence of the DLR press release, stating that (my translation) 'Europe's future and competitiveness in space substantially depend on an autonomous access to space and 'on a drastic decrease in the transport costs of getting there.'"

W33dz writes "The BBC is reporting today that the Aral Sea on the border of the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan has lost half its size and 75% of its volume in the last 15 years. The article includes some stunning pictures from both NASA and the new European Space Agency's Envisat satellite. This seems especially poignant since the US Government is hosting a summit on a proposed International Earth Observation System in Washington this month (BBC article). The meeting is intended to defend much of the Bush Administration's environmental policy and has an amazing guest list filled with the Who's Who of US politics."

Thanks to Gamers.com for their article pointing out that the IDSA (International Digital Software Association) has changed its name to the ESA (Entertainment Software Association). The article indicates that "The former IDSA's updated title does not in any way alter the organization's mission of representing and serving the needs of video game publishers in North America", and it's likely the organization will continue with both aggressive games-as-free-speech lobbying and similarly aggressive copyright enforcement. There's a new official ESA site, which, it must be noted, has absolutely nothing to do with launching rockets.

Nebukadnezar writes "Two weeks ago, Mars-Express tested its sensors and took some marvelous data and pics of the Earth-Moon system from a distance of about 8*10^6 km. Nice to see our neighborhood once in a while. BTW check out the spectrometer readings of Earth: water shows up very clearly. I wonder what this instrument will tell us about water on Mars..."

An anonymous reader writes "NASA's long planning horizon today details a history of science facts and their sci-fi roots. The study is based on a collaborative European Space Agency project, 'Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction for Space Applications.' More than 200 technical dossiers are described--from holodecks to terraforming comets--but one of the fundamental questions posed is: what is the best communication device to scale-up expert opinion itself? Other than some future, expert version of the internet itself, is that a a collaborative Matrix? Other such interesting collections are from: MIT Media Lab's ThinkCycle, Da Vinci Institute, and the unpretentious HalfBakery of ideas."

Joost Schuur writes "At 11:18 PM EDT on Monday, Opportunity, the second of 2 NASA Mars Exploration Rovers took off aboard a Boeing Delta 2 Heavy rocket after several delays and begun its 305 million mile trip to the Red Planet, where it will join its sister vehicle Spirit, which launched June 10th. Spirit and Opportunity will land on opposite sides of Mars, travelling up to 40 meters a day, and use a series of instruments to search for water, including the Rock Abrasion Tool, which will grind into rocks to give scientists a peak inside. Things are going to get crowded next January in orbit, as both NASA missions join the European Mars Express mission also launched this month and the Japanese Nozomi probe, which would finally complete its troublesome 5 year journey. Those stuck on Earth can take advantage of the closest Mars opposition in 60,000 years and watch with a telescope, or follow the images provided by the International MarsWatch 2003 group."

Joost Schuur writes "Two down and one to go. After several delays, due to bad weather, Mars Exploration Rover 'Spirit', the second of three Mars probes destined for the Red Planet this year has launched successfully. An identical probe, named Opportunity by 9 year old Sofi Collis, is set to launch June 25th. Earlier this month, the European Space Agency's Mars Express took off in Baikonur and is already well on its way. All three will rendezvous December/January 2003/4 and include landing modules, when late-comer, Japanese probe Nozomi will catch up after a 5 year trip and several course corrections that sent in in a slingshot maneuver around the Sun to build up enough velocity."

mikerich writes "The European Space Agency and the Russian Space Agency will launch the Mars Express spaceprobe today using a Soyuz-Fregat out of Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Launch is scheduled for 17.45 UT (18.45 BST), so far all preparations have gone smoothly and the forecast is excellent. The launch will be streamed over the Web by ESA. Mars Express consists of two components, a large Martian orbiter which will be searching for sub-surface water and studying the Martian atmosphere. Its seven science packages have been built by teams from Europe, Russia, the United States, Japan, and China. Amongst the science packages is a radar for studying geological structures. Mars Express will map most of the planet in high-resolution colour stereoscopic 3D and perform a high-resolution mineralogical survey of the planet. Mars Express is also carrying the tiny Beagle 2 lander designed by a team led by Professor Colin Pillinger of the Open University. Beagle 2 is Britain's first planetary space probe and designed specifically to look for life using the most advanced techniques currently available. For those in the UK, the story of Beagle 2 is being told on BBC 2 on Monday 2nd June at 23:20." Dan B. writes "The BBC is running an article on the European 'Mars Express', Europe's first interplanetary rocket. This is the first of three probes heading to the Red Planet this Summer, as it nears it's closest point from the Earth in thousands of years."

An anonymous reader writes "The Rosetta mission planners have announced today that after an indefinite launch delay earlier this year, their goal of landing on a comet is back on track. Their new baseline target is a rendezvous with the comet, Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in November 2014. En route to the comet, Rosetta will inspect two asteroids (Otawara and Siwa) at close quarters."

Plissken writes "Nasa along with the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency have launched a towards Saturn in hopes of obtaining vital data to help understand the mysterious, vast region. The Cassini-Huygens mission is composed of two elements: The Cassini orbiter that will orbit Saturn and it's moons for four years, and the Huygens probe will dive into the depths of Titan and land on it's surface. If all goes well, more than 200 scientists worldwide will study the data collected."

Slashback tonight brings you yet another handful of updates and amplifications to previously posted stories, including some naysaying to Lessig's idea of the spectrum as commons, more free books from Baen, and the European answer to GPS. Read on for the details.

Sir, you just need to trust us. geekee writes "An article on CNN claims that the proposed passenger-screening system for air travelers is much more innocuous than previously claimed. Now it is claimed that the Transportation Security Administration "will not view credit records, traffic violations or other personal data", according to Admiral James Loy. He also claims records of travel will not be maintained. "Airline reservation agents would provide a traveler's name, address, phone number, date of birth, and travel plans to the TSA, which would then check that information against a variety of commercial databases and an FBI watch list.", according to TSA spokeperson Heather Rosenker."

Thinking of the children means more than hiding their eyes. Jim Tyre writes: "You pointed out that my censorware.net piece ["CIPA Before the Supreme Court"] provided a nifty link to where the official supreme court oral argument transcript would be when available online. It's now available."

What's good for the mercantilists ... wait, no doesn't have the same ring. Lawrence Lessig says that the current radio spectrum is vastly underutilized, and that new technology can extract much more use from it, creating a true radio commons. Zo writes to point out that many Salon readers disagree: "Radio waves, bandwidth, the spectrum. . .Don't we know *anything* for sure?

Sir, these books smell fine ... what's the catch? silentbozo writes "Avid Slashdotters will remember the Baen Free Library, which puts up free web versions of Baen titles for ANYONE to download and read without having to mess around with encryption and DRM. They went a step further with this experiment last fall with the release of David Weber's War of Honor which had a bunch of novels in html, rtf, doc, palmdoc, and othe formats on CD (bound into the hardcover), which you could copy and give away to anyone. Well, they're at it again. In May, they'll have another CD for those of you who didn't get War of Honor, bound into John Ringo's Hell's Faire.

I got hooked reading John Ringo's books after browsing through my copy of the War of Honor CD... and it's a great way of catching up on the previous books in the series. Hell's Faire looks really good - I personally am looking forward to finding out what happens to the O'Neals as they fight the Posleen on Earth, and to the crew of Bun-Bun... Eat anti-matter Posleen-boy!"

As secure as ... well, you pick. Anthanos writes "pGina [http://pgina.xpasystems.com], a modular authentication framework for Windows, has come a long way since it was last noted on /. nearly a year ago. Since then a full-fledged LDAP plugin, PAM plugin, and chaining have all become part of the feature set. The kicker is the recently released Slashdot plugin, which allows authentication of Windows clients with... yup you guessed it, Slashdot Accounts! XPA Systems has even begun offering services revolving around this GPL product. Seems this may be the solution for people looking to merge authentication of Windows clients with MacOSX, Solaris, and other *nix boxen."

Let's see a handheld that uses both, please ... Mattias Östergren writes "Well aware of the risks with dependency of GPS the European Space Agency (ESA) have developed their own satellite navigation system, EGNOS. EGNOS is more accurate than GPS and the signal also tell you how much it could be off.

The first reference station have just been installed on the roof of the Land Survey in Gävle, Sweden. There is a Swedish press release about it."

Orlando writes "The BBC are reporting that Arianespace are all set for sending Smart1 to the Moon in July. The mission's primary objectives are testing planetary exploration technologies. This is particularly good news after the recent Arianne rocket explosion." China's also planning a moon mission. The U.S. is planning to sit around and watch.

Slimbob writes "About 2 years ago an Ariane 5 rocket malfunctioned and left a very expensive Artemis satellite in an unusable orbit. Well, over the course of 18 months, the European Space Agency actually managed to push the satellite into a usable orbit using measly 15mN ion thrusters! They managed the feat by reprogramming about 20% of the original control software and uplinking the patches to the satellite! See the ESA press release . Achievements include the first first major reprogramming of a telecommunications satellite, the first orbital transfer to geostationary orbit using ion propulsion, and the longest ever operational drift orbit."

Slimbob writes "About 2 years ago an Ariane 5 rocket malfunctioned and left a very expensive Artemis satellite in an unusable orbit. Well, over the course of 18 months, the European Space Agency actually managed to push the satellite into a usable orbit using measly 15mN ion thrusters! They managed the feat by reprogramming about 20% of the original control software and uplinking the patches to the satellite! See the ESA press release . Achievements include the first first major reprogramming of a telecommunications satellite, the first orbital transfer to geostationary orbit using ion propulsion, and the longest ever operational drift orbit."

JPNews writes "The European Space Agency is designing a program (www.esa.int) to re-configure dying television transmission satellites to be used as a XM Radio-like satellite radio network. 'Once in position, 35,000 km away in space, TV satellites will remain in orbit forever, but their useful life amounts to 15 years or less... further life can be squeezed from a low-propellant TV satellite switched over to mobile digital radio broadcasting where precision position control is less important.'"

Hobnut writes "This space-scoop on the BBC reveals that the Rosetta mission has been cancelled. Well.. for now at least. It looks as if we'll have to wait indefinitely before we can do comet-surface science with the Euro-Space agency. I wonder if this has anything to do with last month's Ariane 5 explosion (ESAs launch vehicle) , which will surely go down in history as one the worlds most expensive fireworks. Let's hope the mission is back on soon."

Soft writes "The latest version of the European Ariane 5 booster ("ESC-A") has failed on its first launch. Liftoff was good up to booster separation but the core stage shut down one minute afterwards or so. The rocket was supposed to lift ten metric tons (22,000 lb) to geostationary transfer orbit, versus 6.7 for the previous Ariane 5G (and 5 and 5.3 for the latest Atlas 5 and Delta 4). Arianespace planned to retire its other launchers (Ariane 4, Ariane 5G) in favor of Ariane 5 ESC-A. Next launch, of space probe Rosetta, was due in mid-January."

JoeRobe writes "An ESA review board has given the green light for launch of the Rosetta Spacecraft in January 2003. The Rosetta Mission is one of the ESA's boldest missions to date. Over the next eight years, the spacecraft will conduct two asteroid (Otawara and Siwa) flybys and finish off by dropping a lander onto the surface of comet Wirtanen."

JoeRobe writes "An ESA review board has given the green light for launch of the Rosetta Spacecraft in January 2003. The Rosetta Mission is one of the ESA's boldest missions to date. Over the next eight years, the spacecraft will conduct two asteroid (Otawara and Siwa) flybys and finish off by dropping a lander onto the surface of comet Wirtanen."

JoeRobe writes "An ESA review board has given the green light for launch of the Rosetta Spacecraft in January 2003. The Rosetta Mission is one of the ESA's boldest missions to date. Over the next eight years, the spacecraft will conduct two asteroid (Otawara and Siwa) flybys and finish off by dropping a lander onto the surface of comet Wirtanen."

JamesO writes "The BBC says that the ESA is going to Venus, reusing the Mars Express design. Also here. Launch seems to be expected in 2005." And knownsense writes "Space.com is reporting that Mars is coming to closer to Earth. It will be closer by around 191 million miles and will end up 85 times brighter about August next year. This apparently is the first time it's been this close since the Neanderthals."

JamesO writes "The BBC says that the ESA is going to Venus, reusing the Mars Express design. Also here. Launch seems to be expected in 2005." And knownsense writes "Space.com is reporting that Mars is coming to closer to Earth. It will be closer by around 191 million miles and will end up 85 times brighter about August next year. This apparently is the first time it's been this close since the Neanderthals."

An anonymous submitter writes "The INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory has successfully launched from Baikonur at 4:41UT this morning. See ESA's launch page. Launch, upper stage, and solar panel deployment (the times when we held our breath) all went without a hitch. The most sensitive gamma-ray observatory yet is now beginning operations. See ESA's Integral pages for more about the mission."

An anonymous submitter writes "The INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory has successfully launched from Baikonur at 4:41UT this morning. See ESA's launch page. Launch, upper stage, and solar panel deployment (the times when we held our breath) all went without a hitch. The most sensitive gamma-ray observatory yet is now beginning operations. See ESA's Integral pages for more about the mission."

dankelley writes: "The BBC is reporting that the European Space Agency has successfully launched the first of a new generation of weather satellites. This is 25 years after the first weather satellite, meteosat. This new generation will supply images at 15 minutes, compared with 30 minutes in the first generation. This should help with rapidly-developing weather events. Also, the 'view' will be in 12, rather than 3, visible/IR wavelength bands. The improved spectral resolution is hoped to facilitate climate modelling. Details are available on the ESA webpage devoted to the launch."

dankelley writes: "The BBC is reporting that the European Space Agency has successfully launched the first of a new generation of weather satellites. This is 25 years after the first weather satellite, meteosat. This new generation will supply images at 15 minutes, compared with 30 minutes in the first generation. This should help with rapidly-developing weather events. Also, the 'view' will be in 12, rather than 3, visible/IR wavelength bands. The improved spectral resolution is hoped to facilitate climate modelling. Details are available on the ESA webpage devoted to the launch."

An anonymous reader writes "This BBC story discusses the prospects of probes returning to the moon. The article first mentions the ESA's SMART-1 probe, which will overfly the Apollo landing sites during 2003, and then talks with US scientists about why NASA should send probes back."

!splut writes: "A New Scientist article reports that Pheonix, the prototype of a new reusable space launch vehicle nicknamed the Space-Hopper, has been cleared for its first test flight. The vehicle is designed to take off horizontally and use a disposable booster to reach orbit, though the prototype will be dropped from a helicopter for the test flight. If the European Space Agency decides to continue development it could reduce the cost of launching small to medium-sized satellites, and could be ready by 2015." A better story is running at space.com.

Odie writes: "Since the first discovery of a planet around another star in 1995, some 60+ planetary systems have been discovered. That's about one every two month, most of them uninhabitable Jupiter-sized heavyweights. Not much statistics to put in the Drake equation. Recently though, the OGLE team has come up with more than 42 new candidates. Nice in itself, but what is spectacular is that they spent only 32 days finding them! At that rate COROT should soon find plenty of worlds to explore for you budding Starfleet sailors! "

Dr. Merkwürdigliebe writes: "Envisat, also called "The Green Eye", was successfully launched from Kourou in French Guyana by an Ariane 5 rocket. At a hefty 8 tons and 10 meters in lenght, it's ESA's biggest launch yet. The satellite, financed by Europe's ESA members and Canada, carries 10 very sensitive instruments for monitoring the Earth's climate and once deployed should provide scientists with more detailed and much needed data on the general health of the planet, which could prove critical in better understanding of various environmental issues, such as pollution, climate change, ozone-damage, etc."

Dr. Merkwürdigliebe writes: "Envisat, also called "The Green Eye", was successfully launched from Kourou in French Guyana by an Ariane 5 rocket. At a hefty 8 tons and 10 meters in lenght, it's ESA's biggest launch yet. The satellite, financed by Europe's ESA members and Canada, carries 10 very sensitive instruments for monitoring the Earth's climate and once deployed should provide scientists with more detailed and much needed data on the general health of the planet, which could prove critical in better understanding of various environmental issues, such as pollution, climate change, ozone-damage, etc."

An anonymous submitter writes: "The space news site Space Flight Now has an article about the first direct "observation" of so called dark matter. Galaxies appear to have more gravitation (mass) than we can currently observe. The theory of dark matter tries to explain this missing mass by the existence of massive bodies too faint to detect. These bodies include everything from dim stars to exotic particles called WIMPs. The previously dark matter, a dwarf star, was detected when it passed in front of a brighter blue star, creating a gravitational lens. It is thought that there are many more like it out there creating all that extra gravity, we just can't see them." Wired has another story; or see the European Space Agency's original article.

Slashback with more (below) on: censorship in germany, Xbox gushing, *nix-ish Window managers on That Darn Operating System, and more. Enjoy!

Even the Gates family probably hates being ripped off by region coding. jmcmurry writes: "I just tried out my daughters Winnie The Pooh from Poland, which can only be played (until today) on my Mac Cube running OS X (I did the region free crack when running OS 9). I own an Xbox with DVD player and thought, hey wouldnt hurt to try it out, since I was in the market to buy a Region Free DVD player (which can cost $400 an up) I plugged everything in, put the DVD in, and lo and behold, it plays the DVD from Poland (region code 2) This makes up for the cost of the Xbox ..."

Nein! Nein! Speaking of things that do (or don't) work by region, several readers submitted information which indicates the pooh-poohing of alleged censorship-by-DNS manipulation in Germany's state of Nordrhein-Westfalen was premature. It turns out that some interesting redirects which seemed to be a technical error or a misguided proof-of-concept, and which were quickly turned off, were reinstated shortly thereafter.

Thorsten Hornung was among the several to write on this topic. "Meanwhile ISIS has reblocked the sites, as Heise online reported (German!) due to pressure from the president of the local Government Mr. Büssow.

The local government of Düsseldorf which is responible for media services in North Rhine-Westphalia has posted a statement on its site (German) about the initial lift of the blockade saying that it believes the censoring meassures have been lifted due to complaints by users. Much worse is that furthermore public accuse people complaining about the censorship to be Right Extremists: 'The local government believes, due to the content of many emails it received today, that they [People Complaining] are users of Right Extremist Internet Content.'

The German Constitution (Grundgesetz) does not allow censorship however there are some restrictions on free speech especially regarding Nazi propaganda."

Winners sometimes use Gnomes. Prashant writes: "Cygwin is turning out to be a breeze of fresh air for people stuck on windows for one reason or another. I can use the familiar bash shell on any platform(win, *nix) I am on, and don't have to deal with the DOS prompt. I use all the gnu tools from cygwin distro. rcs, cvs, vim, perl, python, ruby, apache the list goes on. Not only that, I successfully ran postgresql on Cygwin. The XFree86 port of Cygwin itself can be huge cost saving over commercial X-servers for Windows. I have tried KDE on Cygwin version 1.1.2. I was impressed with it. Here is something new: GNOME ported to Cygwin as well. Let the rivalry ontinue on Windows.

It's all about having options. I would love be 100% Linux user but again sometimes it's not you who decides what os runs on your machine. So till Windows gets replaced by Linux by the authorities, happy cygwining."

This addition brought to you by ... Solar Power! basfromasd writes "The winner of the 3000 km World Solar Challenge race from Darwin to Adelaide has reached the finish in a record breaking time. The winning car, Nuna, was built by the Alpha Centauri team, consisting of 10 university students of TU Delft and University of Amsterdam. Some technical details can be found at their site and at ESA. Results and pictures of the race are at the Centre for Photovoltaic Engineering of UNSW website. Well done for a first time contestant, showing that skill and intelligence can match the resources of factory sponsored teams. They found some good sponsors though: GaAs solar cells are not cheap. Neither are Li-Ion batteries. Some of the solar cells were used in the Hubble Space Telescope before and brought back to earth in 1993. The other cars did not make it before today's curfew. The runner up, Aurora, stopped just outside of Adelaide for the night and is expected to finish tomorrow morning."

nbrimhall writes "The International Herald Tribune has a story here about the European Space Agency's plans to create a alternative to the U.S. controlled GPS. It includes some interesting information regarding the cost and possible contributors (including Canada and Russia)."

heby writes: "Last night ESA successfully tested the first laser link between two satellites (SPOT 4 and Artemis). SPOT 4 is supposed to serve as a data communications relay between Artemis and the receiving station in Toulouse. The link is running at 50Mbps and the two satellites are currently orbiting at 832km and 31000km respectively.
According to ESA "The main challenge in establishing an optical link between satellites is to point a very narrow beam with extreme accuracy to illuminate the partner spacecraft flying at a speed of 7000 m/s." Way to go, ESA!"

heby writes: "Last night ESA successfully tested the first laser link between two satellites (SPOT 4 and Artemis). SPOT 4 is supposed to serve as a data communications relay between Artemis and the receiving station in Toulouse. The link is running at 50Mbps and the two satellites are currently orbiting at 832km and 31000km respectively.
According to ESA "The main challenge in establishing an optical link between satellites is to point a very narrow beam with extreme accuracy to illuminate the partner spacecraft flying at a speed of 7000 m/s." Way to go, ESA!"

uglomera writes: "LEON, the open-source CPU developed for the European Space Agency, has been successfully manufactured and tested by Atmel on an Atmel ATC35. Gaisler Research, whose CEO Jiri Gaisler wrote the VHDL model of LEON, also offers a real time kernel, simulator, a cross-compiler, etc. for this SPARC-family processor designed for space applications. Check it out." You can find more good information on the LEON processor on the Gaisler site, including diagrams and further reading. Open Source hardware running Free software -- wheee!

BigTed writes: "An international effort involving four satellites is set to study the effect of the Sun and the solar wind on the Earth's magnetosphere. This mission (Cluster II) is trying to achieve what Cluster I failed to do in 1996.
Yesterday the first pair of satellites were given the go ahead to launch in Russia (see the semi-live coverage)."

cyberm writes: "The European Space Agency has started a project to scan science fiction books for new ideas and technologies. " I like this idea - and not just because I have a massive science fiction book collection. If you look at the past, science fiction authors have routinely come up with the inventions of tomorrow - Jules Verne is a great example of classical science fiction that did so, but today's hard science fiction authors, like Kim Stanley Robinson, or David Brin are building tomorrow, IMHO.