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• Putting a finger in the solar wind with ACE.
  
• Testing suborbital plasma jets with APEX.
  
• Probing a comet nucleus with CONTOUR.
  
• Mapping Mercury with MESSENGER.
  
• Dual spacecraft imaging solar eruptions in 3D with STEREO.
  
• ... and many more, some missions still active 27 years after launch.

It's a joint operation. Lots of other folks involved, too. See their mission page.

In fact, it is the first deep space craft to be run by someone other than NASA.

How are you defining "deep space craft"? The Soviets sent missions to Mars and Venus (and the Comet Halley).

A little seen nugget at The Enterprise Mission begins "Occasionally, something comes across our desks that is so obvious, so undeniable, so conspiratorial, that we just can't help but rub our critics noses in it."

This article links the current NEAR mssion to a View-Master reel from the 1950's. In a nutshell (it goes way deeper) there is a building on Eros, known about for decades, and they are going to check it out!

NEAR has taken a pic of the building already (spot it here) and if you compare it to the reel, you'll be spouting "Yikes" all day.


-Robert Bast
Survive2012

Thought I'd point out a few corrections to the thread...

1. The US has landed probes on venus. But the russians still have the best record.
2. Considering Jupiter is a Gas Giant, as you go deeper into it's atmosphere the pressure and temperature get higher and higher. Any probe you send burns up. The "solid" part of the planet is under such extreme pressure/temperature conditions that it is not yet possible to build a probe that will survive to this point.
3. The offical Near Page is http://near.jhuapl.edu/
4. The point of the landing is to get as near as possible to the Eros while still taking usefull data. They have mentioned before it's not an attempt to land, just a practice in which they are hoping to gain useful data. How many of us remember pioneer-venus's and magellan's end of life atmosphere probing? Led the way to our areo-braking efforts on Mars. Or the Lunar Prospector end of life experiment with the moon. Interesting gamble to find water...
5. Someone mentioned valentines day, I remember they had targeted Feb. 14 as the touch down date. Why it changed, I don't know. Also, for the last V day they snapped a wonderful valentines day photo of Eros, http://near.jhuapl.edu/iod/20000213b/index.html

Thought I'd point out a few corrections to the thread...

1. The US has landed probes on venus. But the russians still have the best record.
2. Considering Jupiter is a Gas Giant, as you go deeper into it's atmosphere the pressure and temperature get higher and higher. Any probe you send burns up. The "solid" part of the planet is under such extreme pressure/temperature conditions that it is not yet possible to build a probe that will survive to this point.
3. The offical Near Page is http://near.jhuapl.edu/
4. The point of the landing is to get as near as possible to the Eros while still taking usefull data. They have mentioned before it's not an attempt to land, just a practice in which they are hoping to gain useful data. How many of us remember pioneer-venus's and magellan's end of life atmosphere probing? Led the way to our areo-braking efforts on Mars. Or the Lunar Prospector end of life experiment with the moon. Interesting gamble to find water...
5. Someone mentioned valentines day, I remember they had targeted Feb. 14 as the touch down date. Why it changed, I don't know. Also, for the last V day they snapped a wonderful valentines day photo of Eros, http://near.jhuapl.edu/iod/20000213b/index.html

I've been checking out the picture of the day since this time last year. There is some awfully interesting geology going on up there.

Eros is covered in regolith. As it slides down the walls of the craters, it exposes new surface which hasn't been darkened by the solar wind. Old craters melt into the background. Fine regolith pools in the bottom of craters.

I imagine that some impacts jolt the asteroid enough to shake everything up a little. I the microgravity near Eros, it shouldn't take much of a jolt to make something "airborne". Much of the same physics that describes shaking containers of different sized objects must describe what's going on here.

In principle you could use a 50bps (or even slower) signal to do GPS work, but in practice it would be too hard and expensive to nail down bit transitions accurately enough

In the early 1960's, scientists at The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in beautiful Laurel, Maryland, determined the orbit of Sputnik from listening to the doppler shift of the radio signal as it passed. APL's chairman came up with the neat concept that if you knew the orbit of the satellite, you could determine the position of the receiver from the doppler shift as well.

This was the birth of TRANSIT, the first satellite based navigation system. It transmitted orbit ephemeris every 2 minutes, and the receivers used the doppler shift curve to figure out location.

TRANSIT also had satellites called "Oscar" long before OSCAR (i.e. Orbiting Satellites Carrying Amateur Radio), which lead to many confusing conversations when I first worked at Johns Hopkins APL.

Sorry bollixed up the url, it should be:

SuperDARN Convection Maps

One of the newer technologies is SAR, synthetic aperture radar, which is mainly used to image windspeed over a body of water. Basically the way SAR works is this: The satellite transmits a beam towards the ocean surface. If the surface is smooth, it will bounce off the surface and away from the satellite. When the wind blows, the surface becomes rough, and some of the beam is bounced back at the satellite. The more that gets bounced back, the more the wind is blowing. It's a little more complicated than that, but...

As for GPS, apparently you can use GPS signals to monitor different things like this, based on how the signal is changed when it bounces off of a body of water. GPS can also be used to figure out how much moisture is in the air, etc. based on how the signal is changed from when the satellite sends to when you recieve it.

For more on SAR and Remote Sensing in general, check out some of the links on my page.

One of the newer technologies is SAR, synthetic aperture radar, which is mainly used to image windspeed over a body of water. Basically the way SAR works is this: The satellite transmits a beam towards the ocean surface. If the surface is smooth, it will bounce off the surface and away from the satellite. When the wind blows, the surface becomes rough, and some of the beam is bounced back at the satellite. The more that gets bounced back, the more the wind is blowing. It's a little more complicated than that, but...

As for GPS, apparently you can use GPS signals to monitor different things like this, based on how the signal is changed when it bounces off of a body of water. GPS can also be used to figure out how much moisture is in the air, etc. based on how the signal is changed from when the satellite sends to when you recieve it.

For more on SAR and Remote Sensing in general, check out some of the links on my page.

These guys are the ones who built near. more nice pictures and some videos. Near stuff.

Those are very few pictures. More pictures (and picture archive) is at: http://near.jhuapl.edu/.
------------------------ -------------------------

Actually, the NEAR mission has been one of the most successful recent NASA missions. It was built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (where I work!!!) at a cost $3.6 million below budget. Here's the JHUAPL press release.The NEAR mission is an example of the goals of NASA's latest rhetoric: "faster, better, cheaper". The official JHUAPL NEAR web site is here.

Actually, the NEAR mission has been one of the most successful recent NASA missions. It was built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (where I work!!!) at a cost $3.6 million below budget. Here's the JHUAPL press release.The NEAR mission is an example of the goals of NASA's latest rhetoric: "faster, better, cheaper". The official JHUAPL NEAR web site is here.

The project home page has a lot of great photos and also daily updates on the project.

--
lukas

The ISTP site has a nice page that links to all the instruments that will be studying this in real-time. For those who want to watch the Ionosphere, try the SuperDARN Ionospheric Radars real-time page. (Gratuitious Plug - This is my page).

For those of you who want to keep up with the mission, check out the NEAR Image of the Day. There's an update each day as well as an archive in case you missed a few days :-)

Direct link to movies at NASA website Enjoy!
Chief Prosecutor
Advocacy Department

There are plenty of good stills and movies here.

---

-Will

NASA's great successes: Cassini, Galileo, Voyager, Pathfinder, Viking, and most of all Apollo.

These are the things that occasionally make me proud to be human.

Inside the gouge, however, only smaller craters are present, indicating that the area within the gouge is younger than the surface along the terminator.

The project homepage is here. Mirrored here.

For example, consider the bubble designs by Michael Savage, consisting of a large air filled bubble, a layer of plastic, six feet of water (for cosmic ray shielding) and another layer of plastic (gold coated to control glare).
http://www.luf.org/bin/vie w/GIG/GalacticInformationGuide
http://www.luf.org/

Or consider the huge O'Neill habitats.
http://www.ssi.org/space_art.html

Sometimes, you just need to so something on a big enough scale.
http://www.imax.com/films/distributi on/L5.html

NASA needs to get over its fascination on building tin can space ships to go to planets (and tin can space stations to support that). It needs to start researching and doing civil engineering in space -- making new land and cities in space.
http://www.spaceandrobotics.org/debate.h tm

At least some people at NASA get it:
http://near.jhuapl.edu/

Maybe NEAR status will help. Diagrams and numbers.

hrmm they're planning on cutting budgets that projects have planned on and budgetted against. one of the problems that i've noticed at labs i work at ( jhuapl) is that in order to get grant money / projects from nasa, you must underbid the next guy. while the underbids are usually reasonable it's hard to plan out ahead for a long term project. new technologies will definantly emerge during the life of the project, and the project teams may very well develop some of these. but with new toys comes a higher price, yet you are held to the price that you quoted. what do you do then?

now that there stands a chance of a smaller budget for messenger (the satellite to mercury) or the possiable cancelation of the project, i wonder how lean it will start to get around here.

i work at jhuapl ( johns hopkins applied physics lab ) and we're the one behind the messenger project. everyone here was pretty excited that we got the project. we had another project ( aladin ) which was almost like the comet harpooning ( we were going to collect samples from one of mar's moons ), but that one didn't get selected.

we've got a 8 node 1 master test cluster that is in a 43" [ i think ] high x 19" rack. compared to a irix challenge [ think fridge ] or any of the other racks we have, our beowulf is just a tiny little beast.