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"A Pluto-Kuiper Joint."

News Flash: most of our space science comes from unmanned machines such as the Space Telescope, the Mars Spirit Rover, the Stardust comet explorer, and others. Did I mention the Mars Global Explorer, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellite, GALEX, the Cassini mission to Saturn, Genesis solar wind sampler, the New Horizons Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission (planned for 2006), etc, etc. Voyagers 1 and 2 have been operating since 1977 (are they older than you?) and are approaching the heliopause. Now that's what I call space exploration. The truth is, in space, robots rule!

Folks, I'm sorry to inform you; but unless there's serious funding, this is at best a publicity stunt, and at worst a president micro-managing NASA in a way that will get rid of the few remaining actual science programs.

Mercury should prove (or else support) his reasoning. We may get some answers there as early as October 2007.

Oh sure, I dont think the X-Prize will yeild an immediate competitor to the Shuttle, or the best rockets come to that. For instance, the Atlas 551, as commissioned for the Pluto New Horizons mission in 2006, can lift 20.6 metric tonnes to LEO for a mere(!) $110 million. But even that is too expensive - what the Xprize could eventually deliver is the technology for what the Shuttle should have been - a genuine cheap reusable craft for LEO. When the Shuttle was first concieved, they were going to have 100 missions a year.. It just never really worked out.

They are sending one to have a look around in 2006 but it will take a few years to get there.

I think the ideas were that a) Terraforming was automated, b) Once a colony was set up it got little to no assistance from home base, and c) there just was a massive civil war, and most of the series took place on planets which were on the losing side.

It still doesn't make complete sense, but it's not nearly as bad as you're making out.

Excuse me, why does the idea that the terraforming might be automated explain a bizarre "Buck Rogers" mixture of technologies? What does automation mean in the case anyhow. You remind me of story David Parnass told, of his time sitting on the SDI oversight committee. Whenever an unanswerable technical objection came up the senior General would fix the questioner with a steely gaze, and say, "Yes, but we will be using expert systems!

You say "planets" but IIRC the voice-over at the beginning said that hundreds, or maybe it was thousands, of asteroids had been terraformed.

So, what do you think it would cost to terraform even a single asteroid, the size of Eros? If this stellar system was of comparable size and complexity to our own, hundreds of asteroids would get us down to Eros sized rocks, wouldn't it? A dome to retain the air... Magical gravity generators so our heroes aren't bouncing around like basketballs... How much would it cost? PLENTY! Somebody is going to make that investment, and then leave the colonists to rely on tools as primitive as shovels? And HOW does this make sense?

Maybe these absurdities didn't ruin this work for you. Well, it ruined it for me, and I make no apology for that...

This question implies that space exploration in the past was dominated by the two superpowers. From a manned spaceflight perspective, this implication is quite correct; but from an unmanned perspective, it is rather inaccurate. Over the last three decades, a large proportion of the activity in unmanned space exploration has been undertaken by countries other than two superpowers. And let's not forget that, unlike most unmanned misisons, the moon race was about politics, not science.

Looking towards the future, quite a bit of the exploration of our solar system involves both USA/Russia and other countries, either in collaboration or in competition. Particular missions to keep an eye on include:

• Beagle 2 , the probe onboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission. Beagle 2 is scheduled to touch down on Mars this December, and amongst its tasks it will be searching for life, using techniques far more accurate than the previous tests by the Viking Lander probes. Mars Express, the spacecraft carring Beagle 2, blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Russian-built rocket earlier this year; movies of the launch can be found here
• Two Mars Exploration Rovers , which are robots based on NASA's very successful 1997 Pathfinder mission. The two rovers are due for touchdown in January 2004; they are targeted at analysing the geology of Mars.
• Cassini , a NASA probe destined for Saturn. Apart from flybys by deep-space probes, we've never had a decent look at Saturn and its satellites. On-board Cassini is the Huygens probe, which will be dropped through the thick hydrocarbon atmosphere of Titan. Titan is the largest of Saturn's moons, and the only satellite in the solar system to have an atmosphere.
• MESSENGER , a NASA mission to Mercury due for launch next year, which will arrive in orbit around the innermost planet in 2009. Amongst other things, MESSENGER will ascertain whether Mercury has deposits of water ice deep within high-walled impact craters near its poles.
• Venus Express , the European Space Agency's sister misison to Mars Express, will depart for Venus in December 2005, arriving at the planet the following summer. It will analyse the atmosphere and the surface of the planet, and hopefully explain the anomalous chemical compositions within the atmosphere, which some have suggested are due to microbial life.

So, we can see that there is a lot going on at the moment in the field of space exploration. Over the past few days, I've been watching HBO's "From the Earth to the Moon", and its made me regret that I wasn't alive during the space race. But, on reflection, there is plenty going on right now to get excited about!

No lie. You are specialized into a niche research field... something that IT companies and even most research orgs don't need. I am beginning work at the JHU Advanced Physics Lab and I was helped by having my Master's and not having a PhD. According to this profile of the organization (government-educational nonprofit R&D) only 18% of the Engineers and Scientists have Doctorates (and most are in Physics) while 51% have Master's. When asked about getting a PhD my boss and HR rep said it was completely unnecessary. There's that 5% of chief researchers commanding the masses of Master's.

This sentiment was shared by my academic advisor in grad school (when I was still considering getting a PhD): a PhD is only useful for getting a job in academics. Everywhere else it's too much unnecessary training. Even to get it at a job can be bad news since there is an implicit expectation of your company to pay you more.

Nothing prohibits non-PhD's from doing research. But having one can have long-term career consequences. My father has a PhD in Org Chem and it has made his life hell since the last recession in 1990. Being old, overeducated, and experienced can make you first in line to get cut from a job. And they'll never believe you if you say you'd work for 18 bucks an hour. Getting a PhD could be the biggest mistake of your life if you aren't protected against the whims of the economy.

Well, they are heading back to Mercury, with a launch date of 10 March 2004. This is something the scientific community has been waiting for for long time (the only previous visit were 3 fly-by by Mariner 10 in 1974-1975). As far as I'm concerned, the space probes have been much more exciting profitable (in a scientific sense) than the manned missions (and I do think the Apollo landings were boffo cool), especially the shuttle missions and the space station.

and I need to it work in zero-G (but not in a vacuum)

First off, this states that you explicitly need it not to work, i.e. "fail" in a vacuum. I doubt this is your intent. If you need something to fail in a vacuum, one idea may be to have a membrane holding back some sort of acid at air pressure, but which bursts and destroys your media at a sufficiently low pressure. If you merely don't care about failing in a vacuum, then leave that out of all future problem statements.

Secondly, to all the posters before me, it appears as though everyone assumes this person is going into space. While Cujo is from John Hopkins' Applied Physics Lab (looking at the e-mail address) which is apparently sending a craft to Mercury, it is possible that Cujo is working on a different project which is terrestrial. Perhaps a roller coaster type environment or sky diving type airplane bourne freefall. I'm not sure why you need 150GB of storage on a craft that will forever have a 9600 baud connection home (if even that fast)-- so I suspect that the poster has less lofty goals. But maybe 150GB is necessary because of the volume of data to record and the craft will return.

To combine RAID type reliability and resistance to vibration and probably some attention to power dissipation, solid state is a good possibility, especially if you have few write cycles. You can apparently get 512 MB of compact flash for $128 but someone might give you a discount if you buy 300 of them. If not, that brings you to less than $40k, which still leaves you with ~$12k to pay a student to integrate them into a smart FPGA based controller.

For pre-existing solid state solutions, google for SSD or solid state drives.

SOHO has served us well. That said, it's only made of metal plastic and silicon parts and after being blasted by the solar wind for so many years, it's bound to fail eventually. SOHO's replacement is called the STEREO mission. It will actually be 2 separate spacecraft that view the sun simultaneously, in order to acquire STEREOscopic observations of the corona and coronal mass ejections. It was sometimes difficult for SOHO to tell what direction a CME was traveling in because it had only one point of view. STEREO launches in 2005. In the meantime TRACE can do a few of the things SOHO did and while at it, do some things SOHO could never do, like take these SPECTACULAR movies and images of the corona and photosphere at very high spatial and temporal resolution.

In addition to these missions, also keep an eye on the NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan, arriving later this year, as well as ESA's SMART-1 mission to the moon to be launched soon. Future plans include NASA's Mercury Messenger, and ESA's Venus Express and Bepi-Columbo.

I don't understand why so many people are constantly bashing Goldin's faster, better, cheaper (FBC) approch. And it's not only our own /. crowd I'm thinking about, but even journalist like the person that wrote the abcnews article.

I mean, the first part of the article somewhat describes that FBC sucks, then it explains that this new mission is going to use trusted technology like, [guess what ?], bouncing airbag landing, aeroshell insertion (probably aeorbreaking too). Guess when all this "trusted" technology whas first tested ?

I'm sure Goldin must have done some things badly, but I personally don't think that FBC is one of it. Given the budget cuts that NASA has gone thru and the pressure for more "exciting" science from the general public, I really think that FBC was the logical answer. Sure it fumbled on a couple of occasions, but I won't even count the loss of the Mars Polar lander (the Metric vs US, snafu) as a cause of FBC, more like the exact reason why having common standard is a Good Thing(tm).

I still think that some wonderfull experiments have come out of FBC, Pathinder is certanly one, DS-1 too (first autonomous navigation, first Ion Drive), and not to mention the Mars Global Surveyor.

I liked the idea of trying and squeezing every last bit of science out of a project. Like the NEAR Shoemaker's landing on Eros /rant
Murphy(c)

The above poster is correct, I believe. I don't work on Messenger, but from what I've seen and from this page Messenger's orbit is highly elliptical, with it's sunshield always facing the sun (duh) so the main components should have time to cool down why at the peaks of the orbit (i.e. when it is not looking at Mercury).

APL's mission page for New Horizon's is here.

Besides the funding issue, the other main problem with New Horizons is the fact that neither of the two launch platforms (Titan 4, Atlas 5) have been certified. They both, however, did launch successfully last fall.

I think you mean Deep Space 1, which has an ion engine and flew within 1,400 miles of comet Borelly. A little extra duty for that spacecraft, not unlike Pioneer greatly exceeding expectations. The one that landed on an asteroid was NEAR Shoemaker, but it has normal thrusters. Both where extraordinary missions.

Are you going to be dead in 2020? The New Horizons project aims to launch a probe in 2006 to explore Pluto and the Kuiper belt.

The Voyager 1 probe is more distant than Pioneer 10, and will probably expire within 20 years.

I say we should turn the asteroid Eros into a space colony. Drill into one end and hollow out a burrow. Add an airlock. Power it with power sats. Then you have a space station. Over time you can build a larger alcove to house hundreds of people. Spin it up to one G. Strap some nuke drive on it and you have a real spaceship.

It's become a nearly-complete waste of money.

Sure, there have been some spectacular failures. But there have been spectacular successes as well. There's an awful lot we know about the Universe we live in, and about our own planet, that we would not know if it were not for those missions. For that matter, the Apollo project, expensive as it was, and despite the fact that it was not focussed on science, told us a huge amount about the past, present, and future of Earth.

(I have to admit, much though I emotionally like the idea of humans in space, that the uncrewed missions are a lot less expensive per quantum of discovery than the crewed ones.)

The meteors in these cases were in probably in the 10 kg range, and the craters they produced were probably a few meters across (not large enough to see from the ground or any lunar orbiter we are likely to launch any time soon).

Here's a tip for Jeff Hecht, the article's author: If you write a piece about a photograph, you *must* link to a copy of the photograph. Mkay?

For everyone else, here it is:
http://iota.jhuapl.edu/stuart.jpg

And here's a much better story about it:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2592075. stm

There is a plan to send a mission to the outer planets and the Kupier belt. I'm sure a vist to the Kupier Belt's leading citizen will be added if at all possible.

here and here

There are several good reasons to study Pluto ASAP, not the least of which is the changing of the seasons. It's not really a Pluto mission as much as it's a Kuiper Belt mission. Among other things:

• The Kuiper Belt is believed to be very representative of where comets come from, so studying Kuiper objects will give a much better insight into comets and what they are. This could also help with plans for any opssible doomsday-avoiding strategy. (I'll leave it up to you whether you consider that important or not.)
• Pluto isn't just a Kuiper Belt object, it's also the one that we know most about having tracked and studied it from Earth since it was discovered in 1930. Any information returned can be correlated with existing information.
• The plan isn't just to study Pluto. It also includes flying past several other Kuiper Belt objects.
• JPL's had some high profile failures lately, and maybe that's why you think there's a lot that can go wrong. But New Horizons is a flyby mission, and by JPL standards it's easy, and it's been done heaps of times before 100% successfully. There's probably a much better chance today of this thing working than there is in the next Mars rovers working.

And anyway, how much would scuttling this mission help to explore Mars, which compared to this tiny mission already has a massive armada of effort and funding going into it? Maybe we'd get there a couple of months faster.. except we wouldn't anyway because the optimal launch window would stay where it was.

For those interested, I've been doing the same
thing, only with auroral data added to the mix. Try here (Go down and click on the VIS or WIC links at the bottom of the page),
or here.

If you want to know about the code, go here.

For those interested, I've been doing the same
thing, only with auroral data added to the mix. Try here (Go down and click on the VIS or WIC links at the bottom of the page),
or here.

If you want to know about the code, go here.

For those interested, I've been doing the same
thing, only with auroral data added to the mix. Try here (Go down and click on the VIS or WIC links at the bottom of the page),
or here.

If you want to know about the code, go here.

There are more people looking at this for space launch than just a handful of guys in Huntsville launching model airplanes. And a lot more than $30,000 is being spent on it. These guys just did a little better PR (perhaps the fact that Huntsville is a short drive from CNN's facilities in Atlanta helped). Surely you don't expect CNN to have the latest (or even accurate) aerospace news, do you? Do they do an accurate job reporting about software? Go spend the money on (or find a library that has) a subscription to Aviation Leak and Space Technology, Janes, or better yet Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets if you really want to know what is happening.

U. of Washington EM Propulsion google cache (the original is either down or has been pulled for security reasons)

Gun Launched Satellites JH-APL (.pdf file)

A web site now exists at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

It actually has a chance of working. JHU/APL also did the work on NEAR the satellite that crashed landed on Eros and still worked afterwards.

MESSENGER - Mission to Mercury

The Gulf of Alaska (where Kodiak Island is located) is well known for its bad weather, especially in winter, where storms can get you hurricane force winds in a couple hours. Inaccurate weather models don't help predicting either. I did a report on several Gulf of Alaska phenomena which you can see here.

Asteroids are held together by gravity... that is why NEAR could land on one, and why these photos from the NEAR probe show a boulder field strewn with SEVERAL rocks.

The limiting factor on how big an asteriod can get without falling apart is a combination of centrifugal force caused by its rotation, and the Roche limit of how far away it is from a larger body that inflictes tidal forces upon it. More on the Roche limit here.

Comets may be a single cohesive body of some sort, we don't know yet. Hopefully the Contour mission will tell us what comets really are made of.

-AD

Asteroids are held together by gravity... that is why NEAR could land on one, and why these photos from the NEAR probe show a boulder field strewn with SEVERAL rocks.

The limiting factor on how big an asteriod can get without falling apart is a combination of centrifugal force caused by its rotation, and the Roche limit of how far away it is from a larger body that inflictes tidal forces upon it. More on the Roche limit here.

Comets may be a single cohesive body of some sort, we don't know yet. Hopefully the Contour mission will tell us what comets really are made of.

-AD

For those who are interested, you can watch HF propagation conditions in real-time from the SuperDARN radars here.. Also check this out.

For those who are interested, you can watch HF propagation conditions in real-time from the SuperDARN radars here.. Also check this out.

Not so.

The radiation environment on Europa is terrible. It's no place for routine operations. It will probably never be directly explored by humans.

Furthermore, navagating safely through the asteroid belt is really no problem. It's been done by 7-8 spacecraft(NEAR dipped into it when flying by Mathilde) to date without hazard. From SF movies we have this image of an asteroid belt as being a dense stream of little rocks requiring frequent twists and turns to avoid, but in fact they are millions of klicks apart, and the chances of hitting one that's too small to be discovered is effectively zero.

OTOH, hitting an asteroid something NASA has to demonstrate they can do. They missed on their first attempt at an asteroid rendezvous and spent a year chasing Eros.

First, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab did all the mission design.

Second, JHUAPL didn't "miss" Eros - see the report. ...the main engine's normal start-up transient exceeded a lateral acceleration safety threshold that was set too low. It was an onboard software problem. Also, please note that NEAR carried out much more than its planned mission even after the hose-up. You really can't accuse anyone of having trouble "hitting an asteroid".

OTOH, hitting an asteroid something NASA has to demonstrate they can do. They missed on their first attempt at an asteroid rendezvous and spent a year chasing Eros.

First, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab did all the mission design.

Second, JHUAPL didn't "miss" Eros - see the report. ...the main engine's normal start-up transient exceeded a lateral acceleration safety threshold that was set too low. It was an onboard software problem. Also, please note that NEAR carried out much more than its planned mission even after the hose-up. You really can't accuse anyone of having trouble "hitting an asteroid".

OTOH, hitting an asteroid something NASA has to demonstrate they can do. They missed on their first attempt at an asteroid rendezvous and spent a year chasing Eros.

First, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab did all the mission design.

Second, JHUAPL didn't "miss" Eros - see the report. ...the main engine's normal start-up transient exceeded a lateral acceleration safety threshold that was set too low. It was an onboard software problem. Also, please note that NEAR carried out much more than its planned mission even after the hose-up. You really can't accuse anyone of having trouble "hitting an asteroid".

I would be interested of learning when Nasa decides to perform similar probes on our more local cellestial partners Venus and Mercury, or any other local body for that matter.

Hard to tell, given the titanic budget overruns on the space station, which are very effective at consuming other missions' credits. Well, there had been MESSENGER, which was supposed to get into orbit around Mercury, but I guess this has been cancelled at the same time as Deep Impact. I am not aware of any project for Venus, maybe all the data from Magellan hasn't been digested yet?

Aside from that, I wouldn't call Mercury "more local" than Mars; it's more difficult to get there. Maybe Venus, but then landing there without melting/crushing/falling apart is even harder...

Let's see. Mass of EROS = 7.2 million billion kilograms. Mass of NEAR = 805 kg (includes propellant). Propulsion capabilities of NEAR = 100-lb thruster. Speed of impact = 4 mph (1.9 meters per second).

So. A 4mph collision between a big thing, and a thing with a mass of 0.00000000001118% or less of the big thing. Total effect: somewhat slight.

Risk assessment: "We might get some asshole debating whether the impact might throw EROS off course ... other than that, seems safe enough"

Let's see. Mass of EROS = 7.2 million billion kilograms. Mass of NEAR = 805 kg (includes propellant). Propulsion capabilities of NEAR = 100-lb thruster. Speed of impact = 4 mph (1.9 meters per second).

So. A 4mph collision between a big thing, and a thing with a mass of 0.00000000001118% or less of the big thing. Total effect: somewhat slight.

Risk assessment: "We might get some asshole debating whether the impact might throw EROS off course ... other than that, seems safe enough"

This is more or less true. But APL is operating under NASA supervision.

This is false. APL has run several space missions previous to NEAR. My father worked on FUSE and is now doing MSX. I wouldn't doubt it if other research labs did as well.

This is more or less true. But APL is operating under NASA supervision.

This is false. APL has run several space missions previous to NEAR. My father worked on FUSE and is now doing MSX. I wouldn't doubt it if other research labs did as well.

I don't think that's correct. Breaking free of Eros gravity would still leave it in orbit around the Sun. There's a minimum delta v necessary to get it on a trajectory where it would cross Earth's path when the Earth was there and an additional delta v necessary to get it in orbit around Earth.

It's all academic at this point, the burn won't take place and if it had, it would not have placed the craft in orbit areound Eros, just landed it elsewhere. See this press release from JHUAPL.

Does anyone know what OS their software is running on?

Vxworks, reportedly. It is a real-time OS.

From the NEAR FAQ
31. What kind of computer is on NEAR Shoemaker?
The computer is a 16-bit machine called a 1750A. Based on a military standard that is about 10 years old, it runs at 12 MHz and has 256 KB of storage. This is equivalent to the PCs produced in the mid-1980s.

I wanted to picture just how fast the collision would be so I did a bit of dusty highschool physics:

starting principles:
G(earth) = 9.81 ms-2
Near's impact speed = 1.9m/s m/s

Some useful formulas:
(a) v = u+at
(b) d = u*t+(a*t^2)/2

solve (a) for t
t = (u-v)/a
but u = 0 so it becomes:
t = v/a
substitute into (b)
d = u*(v/a) + (a*(v/a)^2)/2
again u = 0, so:
d = (a*(v/a)^2)/2
with actual values:
d = (9.81*(1.9/9.81)^2)/2
d = 18 cm

Now take a look at it and try to imagine it being dropped from 25cm on Earth. Bear in mind that the surface of Eros is probably soft and sandy.

The NEAR team has members from both NASA and Johns Hopkins

And I'll give a free nose goblin to anyone who can figure out who's in charge. The orgchart reads like a hedge maze.