Slashdot Mirror

Here's a photo of Rhea from nasa.gov. Gives some nice background information on the moon as well.

I prefer Greek or Roman mythology over placenames Redstone , conceptual names Endeavour, Opportunity, Discovery , or quasi-patriotic names like Colombia .

three solid rocket motors as well as separation mechanisms and canards

He won't be alone they are sending along some ducks for company

Orion
A mock-up of the Orion space capsule heads to its temporary home in a hangar at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

In late 2008, the full-size structural model will be jettisoned off a simulated launch pad at the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to test the spacecraft's astronaut escape system, which will ensure a safe, reliable method of escape for astronauts in case of an emergency.

NASA's Constellation program is building the Orion crew vehicle to carry humans to the International Space Station by 2015 and to the moon beginning in 2020.

Image Credit: NASA/Sean Smith

Orbital Science is the manufacture of the Orion CEV Launch Abort System

Nice to see NASA try to give the Astronauts a way out of a potentially deadly situation. Please give them credit for that much.

This is also good for the people in Southern New Mexico that live and work near White Sands Test Facility and White Sands Missile Range . As well as Tuscon Arizona, where Orbital is located, as it helps the economies of both regions.

Meanwhile, a series of other technology checks are underway to test Orion parachutes and the shuttle-derived solid rocket booster of Ares I's first stage. NASA successfully launched a 1:100 scale model of the Ares I rocket in January.

In the article they actually admit that it's an Estes rocket. OMG, I built models bigger than this thing when I was 12! And they came back in fewer pieces (by law), all of which were reusable, than NASA is going to get. Where the hell is my money going!?

Maybe that's what we need - A LAW! Oh...wait...

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4205/app-c.html#section2 Ah, Saturn V... good times. Glad we've once again remembered it's a better idea to have the astronauts at the TOP of the stack rather than stuck to the SIDE of the stack.

have often thought about the moon - it used to be sterile, but now there is human / earth bacteria everywhere around the landing sites. NASA does not sterilize probes it sends. What's that? Bacteria can't survive? Actually, they probably can - many species are capable of withstanding cosmic rays and zero atmosphere, etc.

Bacteria can survive in temperatures close to absolute zero, cosmic radiation and hard vacuum of outer space? Amazing.

I found that hard to believe, but NASA proved it some time ago.

NASA does not sterilize probes it sends

It always amazes me that people will post the most slimmed down third party
summation of a detailed article that appears on a non-commercial site:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/multimedia/mro20080303a.html

The original story from NASA contains some fascinating additional details, a beautiful picture of the Earth and the Moon taken from Mars orbit, and links to thousands of other Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter images that were also released yesterday.

Here are the links at which all the images taken by the HiRISE instrument can be found from low res to high res raw data :

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/gallery/press/20080303a.html/
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_007338_2640/


jdb2

There was a period during the 90's when the market got flooded with cheap Trinitrons. The tubes were fine but the drive circuitry sucked. Perhaps that what you had.

My Trinitrons are all still going strong. I VASTLY prefer them to LCDs despite their humongous bulk. This picture is a good reason. Look at it on an LCD and a good Trinitron and the difference is night and day. Contrast levels on the Trinitron show details that are completely lost on LCDs.

What is the current / projected budget for Cyber Command, and what percentage / amount of that budget do you plan to offer to either the SBIR Program or X-Prize style challenge competitions?

One of the movies on that page simulates how sunlight would fall on the moon during it's entire orbit. You can see a few spots where there is sunlight almost the entire rotation. These are good candidates for moon base locations because solar panels can get power almost continuously.

I hope they didn't put a lot of time into this movie http://www.nasa.gov/mov/214261main_Lunar_Landing_Anim_4_Web.mov. The nerd in me was really excited as I clicked the link. Then not so much as I watched it.

Frame dragging would have more effect (accelerating or decelerating) at the equator than at the poles, which is the reverse of what we see in TFA.

I did a little black hole research, and it appears that the jets come from magnetic fields, not from frame dragging. But the full cause remains unclear, so you might be half-right.

Your actually thinking of the Alcubierre "warp drive", not Star Trek warp drives. In ST, they use a system that pushes the ship into deeper regions of "subspace", more akin to layers of an onion. The Alcubierre drive makes a stable bubble of spacetime using exotic matter and moves through normal space.

I don't need to make one, I can rip the press release straight out of ftp.hq.nasa.gov, /pub/pao/pressrel/1999/99-114. You can also see how they followed up on it at http://oig.nasa.gov/old/inspections_assessments/g-00-021.pdf. Everyone makes mistakes.

NASA didn't gamble on the weather, they prepared what was necessary for the 90 day mission, showed up and succeeded, even through brutal dust storms. They've continued, dusterless, for 1327 days beyond their original spec, that's more than 14x the time they planned for. You're essentially accusing the crew of Apollo 17 of stupidity and lack of preparation for spending 56 days on the moon, and finally saying they might have to leave soon because they didn't bring the chemicals to clean the CO2 out of their oxygen scrubbers. (They're still game to try and stay a week or two more though.)

Your excuse follows, and yes, it was very stupid of them.

Douglas Isbell
Headquarters, Washington, DC Sept. 30, 1999
(Phone: 202/358-1753)

Mary Hardin
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
(Phone: 818/354-5011)

Joan Underwood
Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, CO
(Phone: 303/971-7398)

RELEASE 99-113

MARS CLIMATE ORBITER TEAM FINDS LIKELY CAUSE OF LOSS

          A failure to recognize and correct an error in a transfer of
information between the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft team in
Colorado and the mission navigation team in California led to the
loss of the spacecraft last week, preliminary findings by NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory internal peer review indicate.

          "People sometimes make errors," said Dr. Edward Weiler,
NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science. "The problem
here was not the error, it was the failure of NASA's systems
engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes to
detect the error. That's why we lost the spacecraft."

          The peer review preliminary findings indicate that one team
used English units (e.g., inches, feet and pounds) while the other
used metric units for a key spacecraft operation. This
information was critical to the maneuvers required to place the
spacecraft in the proper Mars orbit.

            "Our inability to recognize and correct this simple error
has had major implications," said Dr. Edward Stone, director of
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We have underway a thorough
investigation to understand this issue."

        Two separate review committees have already been formed to
investigate the loss of Mars Climate Orbiter: an internal JPL peer
group and a special review board of JPL and outside experts. An
independent NASA failure review board will be formed shortly.

          "Our clear short-term goal is to maximize the likelihood of a
successful landing of the Mars Polar Lander on December 3," said
Weiler. "The lessons from these reviews will be applied across the
board in the future."

          Mars Climate Orbiter was one of a series of missions in a
long-term program of Mars exploration managed by the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Office of Space Science,
Washington, DC. JPL's industrial partner is Lockheed Martin
Astronautics, Denver, CO. JPL is a division of the California
Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA.

                                              - end-

• Egregious Oversights - According to one of the scientists working on the project:

  We actually had built a dust experiment to test out some methods of removing dust. It had been scheduled to fly on the Mars-2001 Surveyor Lander, but the 2001 lander mission was cancelled after the failure of the 1999 Polar Lander (which used the same basic spacecraft design). In fact, we talked about dust removal technology for the MER, but it simply turned out that the most reliable solution was to increase the size of the panels so that they would still be at nominal power after 90 days worth of calculated dust accumulation.

• Billion-Dollar-Probes - Cost: Approximately $820 million total (for both rovers)
  $645 million for design/development + $100 million for the Delta launch vehicle and the launch + $75 million for mission operations
• Cars on the moon - Didn't have solar panels.
• insurmountability - No one claims the problem was insurmountable.
• Burt Rutan - Aerospace Engineer. He could probably make the rovers fly in the Martian Atmosphere, but wouldn't be able to help much with the dust.
• engineers at any major oil company - These engineers don't tend to work with solar panels, but with the massive profits available to these companies, bending their R&D budgets towards a dust-removal system would probably have some great conclusions as well.
• fucking dusters - Significantly more complex than just a fucking duster will be able to remove. Don't think 'dust' think 'grime'.

4. Draw Conclusions and recognize stupidity
The hardest part of this process is recognizing stupidity where it lies. I can't do this for you, so I'll leave this as an assigned exercise.
5. Actually make excuse for stupidity to public
The creative task involves coming up with a good excuse. The best aren't pious but sincere and have a dose of self-depreciative humor, which shows your recognition of the mistake, preferably with a solution to not repeating it, the best explanation for the mistake, newfound understanding, and your willi

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 (NASA's Earth Observatory site is currently offline)
(alternate link) http://www.visionlearning.com/library/module_viewer.php?mid=95

Solar irradiance does directly track historical temperatures; however, the past 30 years have shown increasing temperatures with steady solar irradiance.

Direct satellite measurements of solar irradiance find no rising trend since 1978, the start of measurements. Sunspot numbers have leveled out since 1950. The Max Planck Institute reconstruction shows that irradiance has been steady since 1950 and solar radio flux or flare activity shows no rising trend over the past 30 years.

An increase solar irradiance would warm all layers of the atmosphere as there would be more heat radiating through all atmospheric layers back out to space. An increased greenhouse effect would reflect more heat to the surface, thus warming the lower atmospheric layers and cooling the upper atmospheric layers. The second case is what is being observed.

http://www.mps.mpg.de/dokumente/publikationen/solanki/c153.pdf
http://www.pmodwrc.ch/pmod.php?topic=tsi/composite/SolarConstant
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Sunspot_Numbers_png
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SUNSPOT_NUMBERS/MONTHLY.PLT
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Solar_Cycle_Variations_png

Here, see for yourself. No complicated science, just photos:

http://www.everybodysweather.com/Static_Media/Polar_Ice_Cap_Melter/index.htm

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2003/1023esuice.html (scroll down)

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/09/15/arctic.nwestpssg/index.html

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/09/060914-arctic-ice.html

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/arctic-20070515.html

http://geology.com/nasa/antarctic-ice-sheet-melting.shtml

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMYTC13J6F_index_0.html (scroll down)

Here, see for yourself. No complicated science, just photos:

http://www.everybodysweather.com/Static_Media/Polar_Ice_Cap_Melter/index.htm

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2003/1023esuice.html (scroll down)

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/09/15/arctic.nwestpssg/index.html

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/09/060914-arctic-ice.html

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/arctic-20070515.html

http://geology.com/nasa/antarctic-ice-sheet-melting.shtml

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMYTC13J6F_index_0.html (scroll down)

Interesting.

Go directly to the NASA GISS site and check the data. It shows that 2007 is tied for second warmest since they've been tracking. The other temperature sources show the same thing. Daily Tech is either using bad data or deliberately lying.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

*Maybe* looking at something more than a few months is more valid when looking at long term trends like Global Warming trend???????? You know, a few weeks or months of cold doesn't mean "global cooling".

Also, the sun just started a new 11-year cycle this year. The solar output was marginally dropping for few years now and now it will increase. Cheers and enjoy more denying in spite of reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_minimum
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10mar_stormwarning.htm?list862664

Back in the 60's or so they figured out the whole red giant phase of stellar evolution and realized the sun would expand to about the diameter of the earth's present orbit when it reached this point. It was a fascinating bit of trivia for Carl Sagan and the common folk to pass around that the sun would engulf the earth, but further investigation showed the sun would likely lose something like 30% of it's mass as heat from helium fusion blew away the outer layers (a process that looks really freaking cool from a distance). This would cause the earth, due to conservation of its orbital energy, to assume a much larger orbit...about as far out as Mars is today.

Therefore the popular notion was thought by many astronomers to be wrong. But in fact, nobody had ever done a really detailed model of the process until the subject of this article. It turns out, the professionals were wrong, and the common folk were correct, if only because we were a couple decades behind the times academically.

If you don't believe me, here's the archived wikipedia page for earth from last Friday. It's since been updated.

Tin Whiskers
PDF http://nepp.nasa.gov/WHISKER/reference/tech_papers/2006-Leidecker-Tin-Whisker-Failures.pdf

"1) is there now a known lifetime vaccine for chicken pox?"

Just a few years ago, they thought that it would last 18-20 years. Just long enough to put every child that got it as recommended by the CDC at the point that they are uninsured and in a high risk taking group. Today they are saying ~5 years.

There is one known lifetime vaccine for chicken pox. It is called getting chicken pox. Actually catching the disease is the only known way to gain lifelong immunity.

I don't have good story on hand. The problem is that the CDC and the AMA recommend the vaccine for everyone. Once that happens, you are not likely to see a lot of dessent. Particularly when there is so much money to be made by supporting the recommendation. Here is a link to a document on the CDC's site that points out that the death rate from chicken pox prior to the vaccine was 100 per year. According to NASA, there are more people hit by lightning each than that and 92 a year of the strikes are fatal. We don't see a nationl push to start dressing our population in rubber suits. That and avoiding a lightning strike does not increase your odds of being killed by lightning later in life. No one is disagreeing that catching chicken pox as an adult is WAY more dangerous than as a kid. The pro-vaccine folks are just not discussing it at all.

Now, I don't suggest you take my word for it. Go to the very people that are recommending the vaccine. Just don't accept their recommendation. Look at their core data. Run the numbers yourself. Then ask yourself the appropriate questions. Does the immediate risk prevention outweigh the long term increase in risk. Is the chances of death REALLY more than what I take on a daily basis with hundreds of other activities I do? Is my child likely to be insured and able to afford to keep getting boosters for the rest of their life? Is my child going to actually go through the effort of keeping up on the booster shots for the rest of their life? Is the increased risk of adult death for my child worth the money I can make by not missing a weeks worth of work? Is it important enough to me that the public school gets that extra weeks worth of funding for my child not missing a week due to illness?

Occam's Razor folks, it's probably Sol's fault.

That doesn't meet the requirements of Occam's Razor: "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." "it's probably Sol's fault" isn't a solution in that it doesn't explain climate change that we've been seeing. Take a look at solar output over the last 30 years. Then take a look at temperature graphs. You cannot make the one explain the other, so you have to disregard it as a valid solution. Now look at a graph of carbon dioxide levels and see how well it matches the temperature graph. Using Occam's razor, CO2 levels causing the rise in temperatures is the simplest solution that actually fits with observed data.

I think that would be a safe bet considering how long these 2 have lasted.

They have already been working on a few ideas in the labs.

NASA also provided the Radio Isotope Generator. Almost all of the data from the Spacecraft comes via NASA's Deep Space Network, rather than via ESTRACK.

It cost $1.7bn to replace the space shuttle Challenger. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttle_faq.html#1

Ulysses may have done a great job studying the sun, and may think it's hard work is over. But I suspect Ulysses is going to have a long and difficult 10-year journey home, for which it will eventually become better known than for its actual work it went out there for.

Watch out other NASA satellites (I'm looking at you, Cassini): I'd advise not making any moves on Penelope.

I'd like to hope that the "geniuses" comment featured in the article post, but I honestly can't tell. I think some of the previous posts point out, better than I can, how unseemly sarcasm would be in this case.

For information on how successful the Ulysses mission has actually been, including its recent historic third pass over the north solar pole, Please refer to the Ulysses home page at JPL:

http://ulysses.jpl.nasa.gov/

In any case, I'd like, perhaps, to suggest that the article post could either have been written, or otherwise reviewed, with more editorial skill. Then again, maybe that's asking too much. And that statement was not intended to be sarcastic.

Cheers,
--joe.

"The Lunar Array for Radio Cosmology (LARC) project

Hydrazine is not explosive. It is very reactive, but not explosive. People watch to many movies.

Net velocity for the two masses (satellite and the missile) probability somewhere around 1 kilometer per second, assuming the missile had a mass that was about half the satellites upon impact and they where traveling at roughly the same velocity, only in opposite vectors. 1kps is really slow for orbital velocities. For example the space shuttle has an orbital velocity around 7kps to obtain a stable low earth orbit. Not quite the .09kps for a space shuttle de-orbit velocity, but by no means a stable low earth orbit velocity. Shuttle information: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shutref/sts/requirements.html

oh, I personally agree that the primary reason for the shoot was saber rattling. But the "stated" reason, hydrazine exposure, has merit, IMHO.

Is this good enough?

Thank Wikipedia's source, NASA, for that one.

To be fair to Wikipedia, they cite their source for that claim. And the source is...

...(drumroll!)...

NASA

That's not accurate, there is much evidence supporting the idea of massive particles which do not interact via the electromagnetic, strong, or weak forces. There is, for instance, the observation of lensing in the Bullet Cluster last year which put to rest many of the modified gravity theories. There is also the recent observation reported earlier on /. of a galaxy composed of stars whose motion can be described without dark matter. The latter observation is particularly damning, if the effect were due to a misunderstanding on our part of the gravitational force or some quantum mechanical property of normal matter then it should be seen everywhere.

I find it amusing that just this morning I read that the Air Force is in an uproar about needing $100B dollars over the next five years, just to prevent it's fleet from becoming anything less than cutting-edge.

Yet, NASA receives a mere $16.2B per year - and even with planned increases will not exceed the amount the Air Force is asking for in addition to what it already gets.

In short; I find it ridiculous that you can call anything "obsolete" that is barely funded, but has a much more sophisticated task to do. When NASA is as well funded as the Air Force, and can still not perform to par, then you can complain about it being obsolete.

I also was slightly annoyed at his use of 'a few years' without giving any examples of a destination that could be reached in that time. In fact there is no known destination outside of our system that could ever be reached in that time. The closest star, proxima centauri, is 4.2 light years away, but it seems like a relatively uninteresting system. The next closest is Barnard's Star, which sounds a bit more interesting and that is about 6 light years away. And of course accelerating any ship into the range of 0.7-0.9C would be quite a feat even if a suitable space drive were to be invented. And then if you take into account a reasonable level of acceleration and deceleration, we are probably in the range of at least 6 years to the nearest star and certainly no less than 5 years. And, yes, this is from the POV of the astronauts, not mission control. Of course, a Voyager-like craft would be capable of reaching Proxima Centauri in only 80,000 years and we wouldn't have to worry about relativistic paradoxes or having to slow down by some nearly unimaginable amount before arrival.

"What goes up must come down."

There are theoretical limits based on the energy which can be stored in the bonds. The only good-looking reference I could find on short notice was http://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/conghand/inpower.htm (I'm on a modem... forgive me)