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You want Sun? You got Sun! http://www.nasa.gov/mov/171957main_Roll_In_FOUR_Limb_Flare_Vid1.mov

I'm thinking of, for example, this NASA image of the Sun (blasting a jet right through the Earth back in 2003).

thanks, we were obviously looking at vastly different time scales. I found a reference at http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19980037618_1998078057.pdf . Now I have to track down the references therein for the isotope enrichment mechanism.

If men were meant to fly, they'd have wings.

One man's nonsense is another man's dream. Why dismiss something that's considered technically feasible? NASA scientists are taking it seriously, too.

Once this structure has been built, and a few satellites loaded into orbit, it will begin to make sense even to the extreme skeptics. It would be nearly silent in operation, safer than riding a missile into orbit, and much cheaper once the initial construction cost is covered.

The materials are almost there; as I understand it, what is lacking at present is a way to mass manufacture the carbon nanotube ribbons that will be needed. Once this is accomplished, and the initial elevator flung up and its value proven, larger and more powerful elevators will follow as every major nation rushes to get in on the action. The dream of cheap Earth-to-orbit transport will have been achieved and robotic mining equipment will be sent to the Moon and the asteroids.

Probably this new age will take several decades to dawn (and it may well be other countries than the U.S. that dominate) but someone will do it.

They tried to do that once and failed, so they're skittish about the whole current carrying tether thing.

In order to make a power available from a space elevator you'd need superconductors. Even on a relatively short (12.5 mile) cable they got 3500 volts@amp.

Actually on second thought, I'm not sure they would get ANY current to flow. The reason current flows is because the conductor is traveling with respect to the magnetic field. That probably doesn't apply to a stationary space elevator. A skyhook, or a series of space elevators sure. Also, if instead of generating power you feed it power from solar panels, you can alter its orbit.

During a speech he once gave, someone in the audience asked Arthur C. Clarke when the space elevator would become a reality.

"Clarke answered, 'Probably about 50 years after everybody quits laughing,'" related Pearson. "He's got a point. Once you stop dismissing something as unattainable, then you start working on its development. This is exciting!"

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast07sep_1.htm

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/solarsystem/2006_mag_recon.html

So is that idiot going to sue the Sun too?

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/solarsystem/2006_mag_recon.html

I havent seen any massive blackholes emerge and gobble up the sun or solar system. How the hell would the puny LHC be able to do it?

The jerks suing are just trying to make a name for themselves.

If I were given the job, I'd sent up robots to dig an artificial cave. The robots could be radio-controlled -- the Moon is close enough to the Earth for that to work. Dig a hole, cover it with beams brought from Earth, they layer 4.5 tonnes per square meter of regolith on top for protection from solar radiation events and galactic cosmic rays.

Then deploy one of Bigelow's inflatable habitats in the cave. Then send up the humans...after the robots have set everything up for them.

Without an atmosphere to burn up or dismantle most of what comes at it, is there really a plausible way to shield your structures from essentially anything at any speed?

I don't think meteors would be a big problem, but an underground shelter would protect against those too.

Heh -- the CAPTCHA is 'reactor'. Which reminds me -- I would also power the base with nuclear power. Why saddle yourself with solar power and restrict humanity to the lunar poles?

Which one? The Swift satellite detected a record four GRBs that day.

While I share your views on the war(s), I don't think it's fair to say that NASA is being robbed to pay for it. Most of the federal budget goes to entitlement programs (SS, Medicare), and interest on the debt; this spending is mandatory. Defense gets about half the discretionary spending. NASA gets a whopping 0.6% of the federal budget. All of NASA's funding is a drop in the bucket compared to the war, which is funded principally on deficit spending.

In fact, NASA is the one of the few non-defense, discretionary programs to actually get an increase, and I believe the only such program to keep pace with inflation. Griffin gave a speech to the LPSC a few weeks ago, in which this was discussed. You can read the transcript of it here.

Griffin also stressed that Mars cannot continue to get peak funding indefinitely. If it does, nobody else gets a Flagship mission. According to the NRC report card, NASA got an 'A' for Mars, but a 'D' for Outer Planets, so it makes sense to redirect the available funds to concentrate on our weakness. A Flagship to Europa, Titan, or Jupiter system will be selected later this year. The Mars program is NOT being cut to zero. It's being returned to its historical average.

While the rovers are truly awesome, they're on sol 1500 of a 90 sol mission. This is the super-extended mission. There are three spacecraft in orbit around Mars (Odyssey, Mars Express, MRO), a lander on the way (Phoenix), and another rover (MSL) in production. I think Mars is well covered.

Pick another reason (and there are plenty).

California is huge with NASA and aerospace, and have you looked at whom it sends to Congress? Just because the space shuttle doesn't launch from there doesn't mean the state isn't cleaning up. Moffett Field, JPL, Vandenberg AFB, Skunk Works, Edwards AFB... to name a few. The state is also big on the military, which you won't see in the national news these days either.

Maybe the cuts in NASA are designed to hurt California. Guess where the Mars rovers are controlled from.

Pick another reason (and there are plenty).

California is huge with NASA and aerospace, and have you looked at whom it sends to Congress? Just because the space shuttle doesn't launch from there doesn't mean the state isn't cleaning up. Moffett Field, JPL, Vandenberg AFB, Skunk Works, Edwards AFB... to name a few. The state is also big on the military, which you won't see in the national news these days either.

Maybe the cuts in NASA are designed to hurt California. Guess where the Mars rovers are controlled from.

They should sell one of the rovers to any institution willing to pay for it rather than let it die a slow death of neglect. A deployed rover with a proven track record is better than an $800 million shot that might arrive and land successfully.

The Planetary Society immediately comes to mind as a serious buyer. They launched the Cosmos 1 Solar Sail on an all-private budget of $4M. The mission failed due to hardware problem (hey, it really is rocket science), but it proved that private charitable organizations are quite capable of raising $4M for space exploration.

The Planetary Society was also instrumental in getting the word out (and raising funds to rescue the data) regarding the Pioneer Anomaly.

More important than the funding angle is the political one, but the Planetary Society has worked extremely closely with NASA over the past 30 years. The collaboration has been sufficiently close that they've actually flown hardware on the ill-fated) Mars Polar Lander. The Society's work with NASA on Spirit and Opportunity goes all the way back to when the rovers were named in the first place, as well as the calibration target" for the rovers' cameras.

In other words, $4M isn't just a business possibility, the handover of a rover from NASA to the Planetary Society is a political possibility too.

No, it couldn't. One thing that is definitely known is that the dark matter is not made of regular atoms (baryonic matter). Baryonic matter is known to comprise no more than about four percent of the total density of stuff in the universe, versus about 25 percent for dark matter. If the universe were 25 percent baryonic, all sorts of measurements would come out differently than they do:

(1) The primordial abundance of elements, which is observed to be about 76 percent hydrogen and 24 percent helium and a trace of lithium, would be very different. See here

(2) The signatures of acoustic oscillations in the Cosmic Micrwave Background would be much larger than they are observed to be. See here

(3) Any extra baryons would show up in the hot gas between galaxies in large clusters, which is very accurately measured by X-ray satellites. See here.

(4) Dark matter consisting of small condensed objects like Jupiter-sized planets would show up in gravitational microlensing surveys. They don't.

We don't know what dark matter is, but we sure as hell know what it's not, and it is not ordinary matter that just happens to be dark. There are multiple, independent lines of evidence which support this conclusion.

a fresh firefox with 10 tabs opened 137mb used - given the speed the tabs loaded, all of them have _way_ less than 1mb worth of text/images on them (2 slashdot windows, a couple of forums, gmail, and http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/) so at this rate (10mb per tab) you could open a hundred thousand tabs (assuming memory consumption is directly proportional to the number of tabs open)

Actually, Some Linux Systems are already dealing with RAM on the Terabyte level. :)

The oceans absorb CO2 as well. Pointing to only one side of a natural cycle is a prime example of willful ignorance.

The oceans are currently absorbing 7 billion tons of CO2 more than they outgas each year, with terrestrial absorption at 5 billion tons net per year.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/CarbonCycle/carbon_cycle4.html

A scientific consensus describes, not proscribes, the accumulated data & scientific theories. Read that again; descriptive, not proscriptive. Denying a consensus with nothing more than bluster and ad hominem retorts is a blatant denial of science. Provide relevant & complete evidence or you are no better than the creationists.

It is incredibly disheartening to see so much willful ignorance & denial of science on this site.

Have we shot any cheese-eating bistro crawlers into space yet?
Russia did, and so did NASA.

http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/chretien.html

Not to mention others.

Notice the article just says "sources." Unless you're talking about military stuff, usually that term means the reporter read it on either wikipedia or some random person's blog.

In fact, the astronauts do choose their foods (pdf) well ahead of time, but that doesn't mean they won't feel more like a gummy bears than M&M's during the actual mission, and perhaps propose a trade. Astronauts take their job seriously, and I'd rather doubt many of them would seriously consider stealing food during a mission.

If someone gets stuck with too much creamed spinach, it's their own fault.

People have been bouncing single photon's off of the Moon for almost 40 years, using Lunar Laser Ranging, or LLR.

Typically, with LLR a dense "pancake" of photons (maybe 1 meter across and a few mm deep) is shot at the LLR site on the Moon, and one photon returns per shot.

Ajisai is a relatively large Japanese satellite intended for Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR). Even though the SLR return is typically many photons, not just one, the ratio of (photons received back / photons sent) is still extremely tiny, and I rather doubt that they are sending one photon up to get one back.

So, this sounds more like a press release than an actual advance.

Calling this a bust is completely unfounded; if you just read the comments being made by the Cassini team itself...

http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/Enceladus%20Flyby/posts/post_1205608134918.html

Paul

________________

The Meridiani Journal
a chronicle of planetary exploration
web.mac.com/meridianijournal/

Nope, not a fake. You can see the originals right here on NASA's site:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/217427main_iss016e032312_hires.jpg
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/217432main_iss016e032313_hires.jpg

Nope, not a fake. You can see the originals right here on NASA's site:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/217427main_iss016e032312_hires.jpg
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/217432main_iss016e032313_hires.jpg

A dwarf planet is not a planet. Yeah, try wrapping your head around that one. They used some scientific formula that takes its mass compared to the mass of all the objects around it and how far away those objects are, and all the other planets have results thousands of times bigger than the dwarf planets'. For instance, about everything in the vicinity of Jupiter has either crashed into it, become a satellite, or was ejected far away from it. As for Google Earth, I hear it's worse than the programs already out there. Want to see the sky from your location? Use Google Earth. Want to view the sky from locations other than Earth? Use Celestia. Want to explore the geography of other planets? Use NASA World Wind. Want precise measurements in arcseconds of how objects would appear to surface-dwellers of other planets? NASA has a tool for that, too. On Mercury, the Sun appears 32 times bigger than the Moon or Sun look from Earth. It has the planets and all their biggest moons, plus Pluto, but Ceres and Eris aren't included yet.

You might try telling that to NASA.

Really expensive custom job. I've heard that the Certs alone (never less testing, etc.) to get the batteries to fly was outrageous. Even the batteries we use were (very) tough to locate.

http://www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/RT/2003/6000/6910dalton.html

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm

No need to get so confrontational.

-b

This pass was just the first of several that were already planned for this year. The next is slated for August, and another for October. The August pass will focus on visual data, and the October pass on particle analyzers. There's additional official info from NASA as well.

These craft - their software, hardware, and the interactions between them - are so complex that there is no way to exhaustively test everything. It's complex enough that you can't even determine what an exhaustive test criteria would be. If we wanted exhaustive testing to ensure that nothing wrong ever happens, we'd never get anything off the ground. Mistakes happen, the unforeseen happens, and when communications take hours to go through, it is just plain hard. You live with it, correct mistakes as they happen, and make the best of it. They'll get a chance to try again. They have already logged tremendous amounts of data that couldn't have been gotten any other way - it's not like the whole $1.5b mission is a bust. This probe, the largest and most complex NASA has ever launched, has been operating continuously, with very few problems and no critical failures, for over a decade now.

NASA, in general, is a lot more stringent with its software than most organizations. If you would like to know more about it, you could start here.

NASA's raw Cassini image feed is getting hammered pretty hard at the moment, but there are a few shots here too.

NASA's raw Cassini image feed is getting hammered pretty hard at the moment, but there are a few shots here too.

If this image is any indication, then it pretty much is the top of the plume.

It should be noted, it also has a mass spectrometer. While this can't identify whether a given particle is dust or ice, I believe it can determine the ratio, so while measuring density on the cosmic dust analyzer, they can make a good guess how much of it is water and how much is dust based on the results from the spectrometer.

And furthermore, Cassini will fly a mere 32 miles over the surface of Enceladeus. Considering the detail visible from 2600+ miles away on a pass several years ago, there should be a couple really great images result from this pass.

It's rather amazing to think that NASA can successfully fly this spacecraft within 32 miles of an object 300 miles in diameter, while moving at 32,000 mph in an elliptical orbit that carries it over 1 million miles away from Saturn at the extreme, with very limited manuevering fuel. Go Cassini!

This is even better: an interactive, 3D version

It can really analyse the water samples? Wow, I'm impressed.

This...is...Star Trek! ;-)

Actually, you can do quite a lot with computer-controlled devices that the original manufacturer did not intend originally. Galileo, for one thing, was capable of transmitting a huge amount of data even though it was crippled so much that anyone except the JPL people would probably give up. I bow to those guys. Perhaps they are going to use this?

Any chances in the future that NASA will try a Star Dust mission to retrieve some of this water? ( http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/main/index.html/ )

It would be interesting to see if there are anything of interest (say bacteria) in the water. I believe it is pretty hard to find any water source on earth that doesn't contain anything "alive".

Yep id does. See http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/cassini/20080310/enceladus-20080310-browse.jpg/

dude get rid of the tinfoil hat, tinfoil grows metal whiskers that can penetrate the skull and make a direct connection to the brain for the mind-control rays beamed from outer-space by Xenu; for goodness sake use aluminum or tin-lead alloy foil for your hat!

Energy for lighting is one of the main resource hogs around the world. Staring at an image of the earth at night, it doesn't take much to see how dependent we are.

Apparently, it really is a supernova: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080118.html Mystery solved :)

Maybe the end of the current supply of Plutonium, could encourage better research into ion drives. Deep Space 1 already showed it was possible, not to increase the effectiveness:
  - http://nmp.nasa.gov/ds1/
  - http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/97/ioneng2.html

Maybe the end of the current supply of Plutonium, could encourage better research into ion drives. Deep Space 1 already showed it was possible, not to increase the effectiveness:
  - http://nmp.nasa.gov/ds1/
  - http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/97/ioneng2.html

Uranus already has rings: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap960430.html

Yes. In fact, there's already a mission planned: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Set for launch later this calendar year, the LRO will be put into a low polar lunar orbit for about 1 year. Among its objectives are the creation of high-resolution lunar maps (it is equipped with a laser altimeter), seek suitable landing ellipses for future craft, and search for evidence of water ice and other resources.

Aikon-

Wake me up when they find a moon orbiting a ring.

Here ya go...well sort of:

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=2901

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-release-details.cfm?newsID=820

"You've got 'Ring around the collar'..."

Now, we find we've got "Rings around URhea..."

What's next? "Rings around Uranus?"