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Well, http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.g ov/19980223621_1998381731.pdf (a link from wikipedia entry on G-force) says that untrained humans are able to stand 17 g's for a prolonged time without any harm. With some cushioning/dampening/special suits passengers should survive 20 g's easily, since research like http://csel.eng.ohio-state.edu/voshell/gforce.pdf says that 40 g's are reasonable for rapid deceleration.

I predict another inconclusive result.

It's this simple, people are afraid of change, many people will not do change because it puts the testing of their reputation on the line. (many CEO's, CIO's, IT Directors, IT Managers, and the likes) Even though it is very evident the cost savings and the possibilities of re-allocating money to other projects that have never been touched because of current issues with M$ products or incompatibilities with others. These people are not comfortable with change and they do not want to put any effort or time in to making a significant change (they would rather deal with what they have been dealing with because of the possibilities of not having a job tomorrow, if they were wrong). Even if of it is evident that the benefits out weigh the eventual cost, productivity, time and effort of another product that they don't have now.

No one is willing to take risks anymore. They would rather agree with one another that it will not work out in the end. Even though I don't agree with these peoples though process, I do agree that it can be a task to get everyone to buy in to the change that would take place with the sagnificant change switching to OSS or Linux, but it is not impossible if you spend time to outline, plan and prepare for this type of rollout.

There are many success stories of people switching to OSS and Linux for their small, meduim and large size companies, who have taken the plunge to save money and troubles.

Ask the following companies - (I will kill two FUD's with one stone here - the use of OSS and Linux)

NASA - http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Projects/Columbia/co lumbia.html
- http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/

DELL - http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/pow er/en/ps1q03_insights?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

Walmart - http://www.wirespring.com/ (firecast runs on Linux andfirecast is and OSS)

Sony - http://www.computerpartner.nl/article.php?news=int &id=2804
- http://mtechit.com/linux-biz/media_companies/sony3 .html

Google - Summer of Coders (need I say more?)
- http://code.google.com/

IBM - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource

Boeing - http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO-boeing.html
- http://www.zdnetasia.com/toolkits/0,39047352,39379 125-39094247p,00.htm

Wall Street, Merrill Lynch, ETrade, TowerGroup, Shahrawat (even as far back as 2002 - they must be Linux and OSS giants now!)
- http://www.forbes.com/2002/03/27/0327linux.html
- http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/lin ux/story/0,10801,75271,00.html
-

other to name Remax, People Soft, Byte, Cisco, Credit Suisse

For a much longer lists.. and why enjoy the following!

- http://mtechit.com/linux-biz/

-

It's this simple, people are afraid of change, many people will not do change because it puts the testing of their reputation on the line. (many CEO's, CIO's, IT Directors, IT Managers, and the likes) Even though it is very evident the cost savings and the possibilities of re-allocating money to other projects that have never been touched because of current issues with M$ products or incompatibilities with others. These people are not comfortable with change and they do not want to put any effort or time in to making a significant change (they would rather deal with what they have been dealing with because of the possibilities of not having a job tomorrow, if they were wrong). Even if of it is evident that the benefits out weigh the eventual cost, productivity, time and effort of another product that they don't have now.

No one is willing to take risks anymore. They would rather agree with one another that it will not work out in the end. Even though I don't agree with these peoples though process, I do agree that it can be a task to get everyone to buy in to the change that would take place with the sagnificant change switching to OSS or Linux, but it is not impossible if you spend time to outline, plan and prepare for this type of rollout.

There are many success stories of people switching to OSS and Linux for their small, meduim and large size companies, who have taken the plunge to save money and troubles.

Ask the following companies - (I will kill two FUD's with one stone here - the use of OSS and Linux)

NASA - http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Projects/Columbia/co lumbia.html
- http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/

DELL - http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/pow er/en/ps1q03_insights?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

Walmart - http://www.wirespring.com/ (firecast runs on Linux andfirecast is and OSS)

Sony - http://www.computerpartner.nl/article.php?news=int &id=2804
- http://mtechit.com/linux-biz/media_companies/sony3 .html

Google - Summer of Coders (need I say more?)
- http://code.google.com/

IBM - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource

Boeing - http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO-boeing.html
- http://www.zdnetasia.com/toolkits/0,39047352,39379 125-39094247p,00.htm

Wall Street, Merrill Lynch, ETrade, TowerGroup, Shahrawat (even as far back as 2002 - they must be Linux and OSS giants now!)
- http://www.forbes.com/2002/03/27/0327linux.html
- http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/lin ux/story/0,10801,75271,00.html
-

other to name Remax, People Soft, Byte, Cisco, Credit Suisse

For a much longer lists.. and why enjoy the following!

- http://mtechit.com/linux-biz/

-

If you want to count it that way, then Keck beats the LBT, with two 10m mirrors working together as an interferometer.

http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/squ id_highlights.html "When a giant squid washes ashore, Roper hurries to the site. He takes many photographs and measures the length and width of the squid's body the length of the tentacles and arms, and the width of the eyes. He will add the information to his collection of clues. One clue was discovered at a party when Roper and two other scientists cooked a piece of giant squid. They expected a giant delicacy But it was awful. The taste reminded them of ammonia, a strong-smelling substance. They tested the tissue and found a lot of ammonia. They think that ammonia makes the giant squid less dense than seawater, so it won't sink. It can easily stay at a good level for finding food without constantly swimming and wasting its energy "

If you were a professional astronomer I'd say it sounds like you'd be better off finding a different organization to work for.

Try looking at cited sources on published papers for starters. http://arxiv.org/ will give you plenty of pre-publications. Here too http://sesame.stsci.edu/library.html

I'm well out of touch but here's what you get just from Google:

Skyview is a must. Images in any wavelength (multiple instruments)
http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Learn about the FITS data format. Not just pretty pictures by any means.
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Chandra data
http://cxc.harvard.edu/cda/public.html

You want Hubble data? (and software to process it)
http://archive.stsci.edu/

More software to process astro data:
http://www.stsci.edu/resources/

SOHO use to publish their images in real time and if you want data...and apparently still do.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/data.html

There's lots more out there if you look at the major space instrument's web pages. I'm sure some of it is paid and a lot of it is held back for a year or so, but there's a LOT out there.

If you were a professional astronomer I'd say it sounds like you'd be better off finding a different organization to work for.

Try looking at cited sources on published papers for starters. http://arxiv.org/ will give you plenty of pre-publications. Here too http://sesame.stsci.edu/library.html

I'm well out of touch but here's what you get just from Google:

Skyview is a must. Images in any wavelength (multiple instruments)
http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Learn about the FITS data format. Not just pretty pictures by any means.
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Chandra data
http://cxc.harvard.edu/cda/public.html

You want Hubble data? (and software to process it)
http://archive.stsci.edu/

More software to process astro data:
http://www.stsci.edu/resources/

SOHO use to publish their images in real time and if you want data...and apparently still do.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/data.html

There's lots more out there if you look at the major space instrument's web pages. I'm sure some of it is paid and a lot of it is held back for a year or so, but there's a LOT out there.

If you were a professional astronomer I'd say it sounds like you'd be better off finding a different organization to work for.

Try looking at cited sources on published papers for starters. http://arxiv.org/ will give you plenty of pre-publications. Here too http://sesame.stsci.edu/library.html

I'm well out of touch but here's what you get just from Google:

Skyview is a must. Images in any wavelength (multiple instruments)
http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Learn about the FITS data format. Not just pretty pictures by any means.
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Chandra data
http://cxc.harvard.edu/cda/public.html

You want Hubble data? (and software to process it)
http://archive.stsci.edu/

More software to process astro data:
http://www.stsci.edu/resources/

SOHO use to publish their images in real time and if you want data...and apparently still do.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/data.html

There's lots more out there if you look at the major space instrument's web pages. I'm sure some of it is paid and a lot of it is held back for a year or so, but there's a LOT out there.

Here are a couple of links to brilliant Java-JOGL Web-Startable apps

NASA WorldWind Java Developers Kit (very google-earth like)
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/index.html

Jake 2
Quake II port to Java with online references comparing frame rates to original Id C-code
http://bytonic.de/html/jake2.html

I have tested both of these on Linux and Windows with no problems.
-tve

Apparently, there were many, many unanticipated problems with lunar "dust".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6460089. stm
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap980327.html
http://dailybeacon.utk.edu/showarticle.php?article id=51367

As expected, enginerds never seem to want to underestimate a problem especially when they've heard of a similar problem before...

NASA would be wise to also carefully contemplate what is inducing the dust to rise to form dust storms in the first place. They already have access to THEMIS images from the Mars Odyssey Mission that suggest that there is filamentation of Martian dust storms at both the leading and trailing edges. For a sample image (there are others too), go to:

http://themis.asu.edu/zoom-20060512a

Furthermore, we also know that Martian dust devils can contain lightning bolts at their cores:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/14jul_dust devils.htm

In addition to that, we also know that firsthand accounts from people who have seen the inside of a tornado and lived to tell about it indicate that tornadoes here on Earth tend to shimmer like a fluorescent light from the inside. This is typically obstructed from the outside by dust. There's a brief mention here. I'm sure there are other sources for this information:

http://library.thinkquest.org/C003603/english/torn adoes/insidetheeye.shtml

This could indicate that tornadoes and Martian dust devils are actually both electrical plasmas, and that the electrical activity is inducing the vortex -- not the other way around.

It is possible that vortexes are the natural result of the right-hand rule within electrodynamics. Peter Thomson's Charge Sheath Vortex site is an excellent tutorial on how this may be so:

http://www.peter-thomson.co.uk/tornado/fusion/Char ge_sheath_vortex_basics_for_tornado.html

He demonstrates his point at the end by creating a miniature vortex using electricity in a petri dish.

My point here is that NASA should seriously consider that the Martian dust is molecularly bipolar and is responding to solar and other electrical plasmas that are affecting the Martian planet. The evidence from both Mars and Earth suggests that it is a possibility.

We already know for a fact that upper atmosphere lightning exists. The weather scientists told us that this was not possible, and they were proven to be wrong. It's now easy to find pictures of upper-atmosphere sprites on the web. Try these:

http://usjma.jp/~sprite/sprite2005.11pic.html

http://www.usjma.jp/~kaminari/Sprite%202006/S%2020 06%20%203/sprite2006.3.13.html

http://www.usjma.jp/~kaminari/Gallery/Gallery%20SP RITE/galleryhome.html

http://www.usjma.jp/~kaminari/Gallery/Gallery%20SP RITE/Carrot/gscar01.html

So, why isn't it possible that they could also be wrong about current theories about tornadoes? And why in the world are those dust storms filamentary? When we see enigmatic features on Mars, we should create future missions to follow that data. As of recently, NASA has been exclusively following their script instead of the anomalies. We need to be doing both.

Technically, the Mars Sample Return http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/technology/samplereturn/i ndex.html is a precursor mission (i.e., before manned landings) that's been "on the books", so to speak, for a while. It's a developmental mission model, having been bounced back-and-forth between front and back burners for a while, now, but the technology is all there. It's very expensive, as you can imagine, so that's part of the reason why it's not "ready" yet. Other reasons have to do with local infrastructure - we'd like to have a handle on good surface communications on Mars - and the fact that the science community can't really decide on a reasonable surface target. That's being helped by MER, and will really get a
good kick in the pants by the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), which will be launching in 2009.

Of course, the public have very varied opinions about this...for example,when you Google "Mars Sample Return" you still get http://www.icamsr.org/ as your first hit. Sheesh.

Uphill battle, maybe.

--joe.

The real question which everyone is missing is what does it smell like? Everyone knows moondust smells of Gunpowder so does martian dust smell of some other medieval technology (perhaps mead?)

Nasa just released a java (jogl) version of world wind (well an SDK for obtaining and rendering the data). Thought it might interest you.

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/index.html

matfud

I'm greatly looking forward to seeing your solution for keeping vital components at acceptable temperatures without any power.

polonium-210?

Actually, Plutonium 239. The Mars Science Lab uses a General Purpose Heat Source (a radioisotope brick) to both generate power using thermoelectrics, and as a source of heat during the martian night. A pumped fluid loop is used to cool the electronics during the day, and heat them at night.

When heating is needed, some of the fluid is diverted to two hot plates around the general purpose heat source.

A nice overview is "Mars Science Laboratory Thermal Control Architecture" which can be found at:
http://marstech.jpl.nasa.gov/publications/Bhandari -final-paper-2005-01-28.pdf

As to the cost, people seem to forgot that NASA can't just run out to home depot and pick up any old toilet. Our toilet systems are dependent upon gravity to operate, which makes the basic mechanics of our toilets useless in space.

Our toilets are also very, very simple. For $100, you get a shiny, but relatively heavy ceramic bowl with a couple simple levers, one valve, and a siphon (note that conventional siphons don't work in space). It uses about 5 kg of water per flush, and all the waste flows downhill into part of a much larger system that cost $billions (if you live in a city). 5 kg/flush x 6 astronauts x 5 flushes per day x $1000/kg to orbit means you'd spend $19 million on water for a conventional toilet in about 4 months.

The Russian space toilet uses no (or close to no, I'm not sure) water for operation. It separates and dries solid waste into containers that are burnt up in the atmosphere with discarded cargo ships. The liquid waste is distilled. The NASA life support cycle chart shows this distilled water going into the potable supply, although another source said it's kept separate because the astronauts are reluctant to drink it. Either way, the result is a lot of saved water.

So the $19 million cost covers the mechanism that captures the waste products with not release into the station atmosphere, the mechanism that separates the wastes, the mechanism that packages the solid waste, and the mechanism that recycles the liquid waste. Actually, reading the articles, it sounds like this might be an entire modular bathroom including handwashing, toothbrushing, and other miscellaneous appliances in addition to the toilet. Add onto that the fact that this is two-off product (whereas Halsey Taylor defrays their development costs over 100,000's of units sold), and the need to design it to be lightweight, and I begin to suspect that $19 million is an outstanding deal for NASA.

Age is compounding the problem. JPL has a good article up at http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/20070612. html.

At Mars Exploration Rover Mission there is still no official statement that the Rovers are no longer operating normal. It seems that this site is not always up to date, but if I count correctly, images from the Rovers are still arriving. The last status report of Spirit is from June 2, for sols 1234-1239. The last Spirit images are from Sol 1247. The last Opportunity images are from Sol 1226. If I counted correctly, that must have been yesterday or today.

The summary doesn't make this clear, but the 'revisit' to Tempel 1 (nor the other additional tasks) does not involve establishing orbit; according to TFA it will be a flyby. Thus the Dawn mission - if it achieves it's objectives - will still be the "first spacecraft to enter into orbit around two different planetary bodies other than the Earth and Moon" (from the Wikipedia article).

Incidentally, Dawn was scheduled for launch at 1609 EDT (2009 GMT) on 7th July 2007, but has now been delayed by approximately 24 hours, to 1604-1633 EDT (2004-2033 GMT) on 8th July 2007.

Do you have other facts to share? ;p

Do you have other facts to share? ;p

Hence the "(some)" in that quote. Personally I agree with you, and I consider my self to be an environmentalist.

Of course, oceanographers already do this sort of thing, though not on such a large scale (with so many objects I mean). And of course, they use modern technology, including satellites (See for example http://vathena.arc.nasa.gov/curric/oceans/drifters /drifters.html ).

In that post I was aiming for a "funny" moderation, yet it seems that there are some unamused moderators who think it is redundant(!), even though it was the second post! Ah well.

and load up sensors to test every single one of them,

The landed weight is 348 kg. It's mission is not to "explore strange new worlds and go boldly where no man has gone before..." it is:

The scientific goals of the rover missions are to gather data to help determine if life ever arose on Mars, characterize the climate of Mars, characterize the geology of Mars, and prepare for human exploration of Mars. To achieve these goals, seven science objectives are called for: 1) search for and characterize a variety of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity, 2) determine the distribution and composition of minerals, rocks, and soils surrounding the landing sites, 3) determine what geologic processes have shaped the local terrain and influenced the chemistry 4) perform "ground truth" of surface observations made by Mars orbiter instruments, 5) search for iron-bearing minerals, identify and quantify relative amounts of specific mineral types tha contain water or were formed in water, 6) characterize the mineralogy and textures of rocks and soils and determine the processes that created them, and 7) search for geological clues to the environmental conditions that existed when liquid water was present and assess whether those environments were conducive to life.

Very limited, very specific. Hopefully one of the first Mars landers, not the last. It took some five years (IIRC) to go from that paragraph to the actual spacecraft. During that time there were innumerable meetings / arguments / pointed emails about what scientific packages would fly on the landers. Some of those decisions were likely pretty prosaic - It might simply have been that they actually had some or all of the technology in a package that could be built and tested in the time frame and budget allotted.

You somehow manage to find some deep, dark defects in the soul of NASA in a pretty mundane engineering exercise.

You should get out more often.

The Mars Science Laboratory is slated for launch in 2009.

You can see daily images and weekly updates about both rovers on the excellent official site. If you'll forgive the plug, you can also keep up with all the planetary probes on my (non-commerical) site: ridingwithrobots.org.

Physical impacts have been seen on the planets. For example in 1994 there was a
comet that hit Jupiter. A little closer to home, the moon is regularly hit by objects. So yes there is a reasonable basis for thinking that planets get hit by hard objects.

I submit that the mars meteorite would probably be a better line of argument to use for your hypothesis.

I'm totally with you. Although, I think the Voyager missions are even more humbling.

Voyager 2 weekly reports (from 1995 to 2007, not sure where the 1977 to 1995 ones are) available:
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-reports /

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/video/movie s/opportunity/VictoriaDigitalStory.mov

JPL produced Video of Project Manager John Callas discussing the entry.

Are you kidding? You do understand the distinction, right? If not let me lay it out for you:

Open Source -- here's the source, take a look

Free Software -- here's the source, take a look. Oh, and you can modify it and distribute it as well. But, with those rights you must also grant the recipients of the software the same rights.

The distinction is real clear if you start looking at software where the source is available, but the rights to use, modify and/or redistribute are not. For example: there are sources publicly available for NASA CLARAty, but if someone wanted to use the source in a commercial endeavour that user is prohibited from doing so by their license: http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov/man/software/license/o pen_src/index.php (NOTE: this is not true of all NASA open source)

Please, do not spout your nonsense any more. And when you wish to contribute this drivel regarding FS/OS please keep in mind that RMS really did found that which you speak of and trying to discredit him with an essay by ESR, whose big contribution is a book from the '90s*, you only make yourself look silly.

* I do like ESR, however it is important to remember that RMS and his earnestness in holding to the ideology of freedom is really the root of the freedoms we have in the Free Software movement.

How long before flight control surfaces that function by deforming or bending specific areas of the wing

About 20 years ago

Let's start with a Slashdotting of NASA...

• Scalable Dynamic Chimera Methods for Unsteady Aerodynamics is one of those packages mere mortals like us will have either no use for or will have to just drool over.
• Fully Unstructured Navier-Stokes 3D is a nice Fortran-based CFD, requires some hefty paperwork to obtain, and may need you to use G95 rather than GCC's GFortran, due to compiler bugs.
• OVERFLOW and related CFD software.
• Three Dimensional Multi-block Advanced Grid Generation System is the component that actually lets you do a lot of the necessary grid work for CFDs.
• Viscous Upwind ALgorithm for Complex Flow ANalysis is the hardest of the CFD codes at NASA to obtain, but if you want to work on anything hypersonic, it's the best place to start. Do Not Use hypersonic airflows for CPU cooling.

• Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flash Simulator - well, you never know.
• Geant4, for the subatomic nuclear physicist in your life...
• Open Field Operation and Manipulation is a nice open-source CFD package.
• Parallel Basic Local Alignment Search Tool gives you a parallelized search engine for nucleotides and proteins.
• Stanford Exploration Project provides some nice parallel geophysics applications and tools.
• Tachyon Parallel Raytracer is a nice example of what you can do with parallelism and graphics.

• Kerrighed is an up-and-coming clustering system for Linux. I saw it demonstrated at SC|05 - and was less than impressed. It needed a lot of work at that point. However, it looks like it has improved a lot since then, and it would be unreasonable to not mention it.
• MOSIX is the second-oldest clustering technology to gain a fan following to rival Star Trek. It's very good, though hard to get if you're not in academia. Arguably for entirely fair reasons.
• OpenMOSIX was originally a fork from MOSIX but is now essentially its own clustering technology. Development is nowhere near the speed I'd like, it does need far more eyes, but is well-known and highly regarded. Moshe Bar is also one of the coolest developers I've encountered.

• DAKOTA is a program for profiling parallel applications and should be useful in telling you where you are gaining and losing.
• HPC Toolkit is another toolkit for profiling HPC applications.
• is yet another profiler for parallel software. Between this and the others I've listed, you should have more information than sequential programmers ever get to work with.
• Performance API is a facility used by most of the profiling software to provide an architecture-independent view of performance counters. I have it on good authority that some (now former)

Let's start with a Slashdotting of NASA...

• Scalable Dynamic Chimera Methods for Unsteady Aerodynamics is one of those packages mere mortals like us will have either no use for or will have to just drool over.
• Fully Unstructured Navier-Stokes 3D is a nice Fortran-based CFD, requires some hefty paperwork to obtain, and may need you to use G95 rather than GCC's GFortran, due to compiler bugs.
• OVERFLOW and related CFD software.
• Three Dimensional Multi-block Advanced Grid Generation System is the component that actually lets you do a lot of the necessary grid work for CFDs.
• Viscous Upwind ALgorithm for Complex Flow ANalysis is the hardest of the CFD codes at NASA to obtain, but if you want to work on anything hypersonic, it's the best place to start. Do Not Use hypersonic airflows for CPU cooling.

• Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flash Simulator - well, you never know.
• Geant4, for the subatomic nuclear physicist in your life...
• Open Field Operation and Manipulation is a nice open-source CFD package.
• Parallel Basic Local Alignment Search Tool gives you a parallelized search engine for nucleotides and proteins.
• Stanford Exploration Project provides some nice parallel geophysics applications and tools.
• Tachyon Parallel Raytracer is a nice example of what you can do with parallelism and graphics.

• Kerrighed is an up-and-coming clustering system for Linux. I saw it demonstrated at SC|05 - and was less than impressed. It needed a lot of work at that point. However, it looks like it has improved a lot since then, and it would be unreasonable to not mention it.
• MOSIX is the second-oldest clustering technology to gain a fan following to rival Star Trek. It's very good, though hard to get if you're not in academia. Arguably for entirely fair reasons.
• OpenMOSIX was originally a fork from MOSIX but is now essentially its own clustering technology. Development is nowhere near the speed I'd like, it does need far more eyes, but is well-known and highly regarded. Moshe Bar is also one of the coolest developers I've encountered.

• DAKOTA is a program for profiling parallel applications and should be useful in telling you where you are gaining and losing.
• HPC Toolkit is another toolkit for profiling HPC applications.
• is yet another profiler for parallel software. Between this and the others I've listed, you should have more information than sequential programmers ever get to work with.
• Performance API is a facility used by most of the profiling software to provide an architecture-independent view of performance counters. I have it on good authority that some (now former)

Let's start with a Slashdotting of NASA...

• Scalable Dynamic Chimera Methods for Unsteady Aerodynamics is one of those packages mere mortals like us will have either no use for or will have to just drool over.
• Fully Unstructured Navier-Stokes 3D is a nice Fortran-based CFD, requires some hefty paperwork to obtain, and may need you to use G95 rather than GCC's GFortran, due to compiler bugs.
• OVERFLOW and related CFD software.
• Three Dimensional Multi-block Advanced Grid Generation System is the component that actually lets you do a lot of the necessary grid work for CFDs.
• Viscous Upwind ALgorithm for Complex Flow ANalysis is the hardest of the CFD codes at NASA to obtain, but if you want to work on anything hypersonic, it's the best place to start. Do Not Use hypersonic airflows for CPU cooling.

• Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flash Simulator - well, you never know.
• Geant4, for the subatomic nuclear physicist in your life...
• Open Field Operation and Manipulation is a nice open-source CFD package.
• Parallel Basic Local Alignment Search Tool gives you a parallelized search engine for nucleotides and proteins.
• Stanford Exploration Project provides some nice parallel geophysics applications and tools.
• Tachyon Parallel Raytracer is a nice example of what you can do with parallelism and graphics.

• Kerrighed is an up-and-coming clustering system for Linux. I saw it demonstrated at SC|05 - and was less than impressed. It needed a lot of work at that point. However, it looks like it has improved a lot since then, and it would be unreasonable to not mention it.
• MOSIX is the second-oldest clustering technology to gain a fan following to rival Star Trek. It's very good, though hard to get if you're not in academia. Arguably for entirely fair reasons.
• OpenMOSIX was originally a fork from MOSIX but is now essentially its own clustering technology. Development is nowhere near the speed I'd like, it does need far more eyes, but is well-known and highly regarded. Moshe Bar is also one of the coolest developers I've encountered.

• DAKOTA is a program for profiling parallel applications and should be useful in telling you where you are gaining and losing.
• HPC Toolkit is another toolkit for profiling HPC applications.
• is yet another profiler for parallel software. Between this and the others I've listed, you should have more information than sequential programmers ever get to work with.
• Performance API is a facility used by most of the profiling software to provide an architecture-independent view of performance counters. I have it on good authority that some (now former)

Let's start with a Slashdotting of NASA...

• Scalable Dynamic Chimera Methods for Unsteady Aerodynamics is one of those packages mere mortals like us will have either no use for or will have to just drool over.
• Fully Unstructured Navier-Stokes 3D is a nice Fortran-based CFD, requires some hefty paperwork to obtain, and may need you to use G95 rather than GCC's GFortran, due to compiler bugs.
• OVERFLOW and related CFD software.
• Three Dimensional Multi-block Advanced Grid Generation System is the component that actually lets you do a lot of the necessary grid work for CFDs.
• Viscous Upwind ALgorithm for Complex Flow ANalysis is the hardest of the CFD codes at NASA to obtain, but if you want to work on anything hypersonic, it's the best place to start. Do Not Use hypersonic airflows for CPU cooling.

• Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flash Simulator - well, you never know.
• Geant4, for the subatomic nuclear physicist in your life...
• Open Field Operation and Manipulation is a nice open-source CFD package.
• Parallel Basic Local Alignment Search Tool gives you a parallelized search engine for nucleotides and proteins.
• Stanford Exploration Project provides some nice parallel geophysics applications and tools.
• Tachyon Parallel Raytracer is a nice example of what you can do with parallelism and graphics.

• Kerrighed is an up-and-coming clustering system for Linux. I saw it demonstrated at SC|05 - and was less than impressed. It needed a lot of work at that point. However, it looks like it has improved a lot since then, and it would be unreasonable to not mention it.
• MOSIX is the second-oldest clustering technology to gain a fan following to rival Star Trek. It's very good, though hard to get if you're not in academia. Arguably for entirely fair reasons.
• OpenMOSIX was originally a fork from MOSIX but is now essentially its own clustering technology. Development is nowhere near the speed I'd like, it does need far more eyes, but is well-known and highly regarded. Moshe Bar is also one of the coolest developers I've encountered.

• DAKOTA is a program for profiling parallel applications and should be useful in telling you where you are gaining and losing.
• HPC Toolkit is another toolkit for profiling HPC applications.
• is yet another profiler for parallel software. Between this and the others I've listed, you should have more information than sequential programmers ever get to work with.
• Performance API is a facility used by most of the profiling software to provide an architecture-independent view of performance counters. I have it on good authority that some (now former)

Let's start with a Slashdotting of NASA...

• Scalable Dynamic Chimera Methods for Unsteady Aerodynamics is one of those packages mere mortals like us will have either no use for or will have to just drool over.
• Fully Unstructured Navier-Stokes 3D is a nice Fortran-based CFD, requires some hefty paperwork to obtain, and may need you to use G95 rather than GCC's GFortran, due to compiler bugs.
• OVERFLOW and related CFD software.
• Three Dimensional Multi-block Advanced Grid Generation System is the component that actually lets you do a lot of the necessary grid work for CFDs.
• Viscous Upwind ALgorithm for Complex Flow ANalysis is the hardest of the CFD codes at NASA to obtain, but if you want to work on anything hypersonic, it's the best place to start. Do Not Use hypersonic airflows for CPU cooling.

• Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flash Simulator - well, you never know.
• Geant4, for the subatomic nuclear physicist in your life...
• Open Field Operation and Manipulation is a nice open-source CFD package.
• Parallel Basic Local Alignment Search Tool gives you a parallelized search engine for nucleotides and proteins.
• Stanford Exploration Project provides some nice parallel geophysics applications and tools.
• Tachyon Parallel Raytracer is a nice example of what you can do with parallelism and graphics.

• Kerrighed is an up-and-coming clustering system for Linux. I saw it demonstrated at SC|05 - and was less than impressed. It needed a lot of work at that point. However, it looks like it has improved a lot since then, and it would be unreasonable to not mention it.
• MOSIX is the second-oldest clustering technology to gain a fan following to rival Star Trek. It's very good, though hard to get if you're not in academia. Arguably for entirely fair reasons.
• OpenMOSIX was originally a fork from MOSIX but is now essentially its own clustering technology. Development is nowhere near the speed I'd like, it does need far more eyes, but is well-known and highly regarded. Moshe Bar is also one of the coolest developers I've encountered.

• DAKOTA is a program for profiling parallel applications and should be useful in telling you where you are gaining and losing.
• HPC Toolkit is another toolkit for profiling HPC applications.
• is yet another profiler for parallel software. Between this and the others I've listed, you should have more information than sequential programmers ever get to work with.
• Performance API is a facility used by most of the profiling software to provide an architecture-independent view of performance counters. I have it on good authority that some (now former)

While I agree that B5 showed some of the most realistic space combat to date (only recently surpassed by BSG), I have to call shenanigans on that NASA story. The only references to anything even close to that I can find online are unsupported "trivia" references, and all of them suspiciously have exactly the same wording. If you can find some more substantial evidence for the claim, then I'll believe you. Until then, I'll go on believing that NASA worked on several designs for Orbital Maneuvering Vehicles (OMVs - "space tugs") and has been studying them since the start of the space shuttle program. All of them predate B5 and none of them owed any allegiance to any sci-fi television show.

Actually, although terraforming is not really feasable, venus is actually a very attractive place to build a colony. Although the surface of the planet is quite inhospitable, at cloud top level conditions are extremely well suited for earth life. In addition, breathable air is a lifting gas, so your colony naturally floats on the cloudtops and solar energy is very abundant.

http://powerweb.grc.nasa.gov/pvsee/publications/ve nus/VenusColony_STAIF03.pdf

Here's a "kids" page, that addresses the magnetic field of Mars (and Venus). As Venus also has very little magnetic field, perhaps I'm wrong about that whole stripping thing. This site seems to be saying that it's a combination of Mars' low gravity and weak magnetic field. Keep in mind that Titan (with its weak gravity) also has an atmosphere. OTOH, Mercury with a very strong magnetic field does not have an atmosphere. Just some rambling thoughts.

I think crystallization is the problem with freezing a reflector. There's a lot of history in liquid mirror telescopes. Check this comment, and NASA, too.

The transit telescope is useful for orbital debris studies, and even asteroid discovery. The mercury had to be cleaned (mostly by careful sweeping) every week or two. I'm told that one annoyance of the Cloudcroft, NM, site was "moth seaon", when moths would enter the dome and fall into the mercury.

And what environmental factors could possible cause that on the moon, which has no atmosphere or tectonic activity?

That's an astute question. Perfect spheres are hard to come by in astronomy, though they're out there (Abell 39 is probably the best example: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0101/abell3 9_wiyn_big.jpg). The famous Ring Nebula (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060625.html) is an object that people thought was a ring, but it turns out to be barrel-shaped and pointed at us. That happened a lot. Bipolar objects are very common, since lots of objects either spin or have disks, which shapes the outflow into two lobes of some kind.

Just as an example of the complexity of each box in that graph: I found a description of the hydrofluoric acid leach process here (page 39 in the pdf, page 33 in the paper):

"Laboratory investigations using HF acid to dissolve and react with lunar soil at low temperatures (110 C) to produce mixed metal fluorides and water have been performed by R. Waldron of Rockwell International (Waldron 1985). Although fluorination of all lunar oxides appears possible, many complex operations are required to separate the metal fluorides and to recover the HF reagent. The process, as proposed by Waldron, utilizes 78 process modules, excluding external support systems. Sodium is used to reduce aluminum fluoride for aluminum production. Iron can be obtained through electrolysis of iron fluorosilicate and magnesium can be obtained through reduction by silicon and calcium oxide."

Even that, though is a gross simplification. Just saying "reduce X with electrolysis" doesn't give an idea of the complexity. For example, here's how you reduce aluminum by electrolysis. Now trace back all of those consumables...

So, does CO2 explain the global warming on Mars?

How much money does the government get in taxes from business that make smoke detector

Huh? The home smoke detector was invented and patented by Kenneth House and Randolf Smith. Hell, even NASA admits they didn't invent it.

Surprise surprise, yet another technology erroneously attributed to NASA...

1) The Software shall not be used for commercial production or sale of any commercial product or derivative incorporating the Software. Should the user desire to use the Software for any such commercial purpose, the user must contact the Office of Technology Transfer at Caltech to obtain permissions and pay the appropriate royalty; and ...

Sucks that short-term politics and pet pork takes precedence over the future of humanity itself.

Too bad. NASA joins the sorry list of software authors (like ffmpeg), who provide cool stuff, but can't be bothered to cut releases. One has to setup and configure their YaM-Lite piece of software (a Perl-wrapper around CVS), and then use that to get their various software modules.

Yes, you can ask for a slice of the code as of a certain date, but you need to know, when it was stable. You could also, presumably, ask for a certain code branch, but that is still a moving target...

Better than no code at all, of course... But extra pain to port it.

It's counterintuitive, but shielding can actually make more radiation. The problem is that when a high energy cosmic ray strikes a nucleus, it can make a whole bunch of secondary particles which still have a lot of energy. Then those particles interact again, and so on, producing a "shower" of particles that can interact with your film. Sensitive neutrino experiments go far under the earth's surface to avoid cosmic rays, and even there they get a fair number of (low interacting) muons. I helped test a large space astronomy observatory and we regularly got blatted by cosmic ray showers, even though the observatory was inside a pressure vessel with thick steel walls. Proper shielding is an art.

Burying your film underground may make things worse too... if you live in an area rich in radioactive soil or radon gas. Building materials like concrete can often also be contaminated with uranium.