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NASA uses tcsh. Eat that, you bash loosahs...

Looking at the project site itself: http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov/ it seems that most pages are restricted. whenever I want to see some real documentation, it's asking for creditentials.

they even describe this in length here: http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov/man/overview/access/in dex.php

so it's no free software, it seems... :(

Looking at the project site itself: http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov/ it seems that most pages are restricted. whenever I want to see some real documentation, it's asking for creditentials.

they even describe this in length here: http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov/man/overview/access/in dex.php

so it's no free software, it seems... :(

Do I detect the smell of burning martyr? Let me guess, another one who takes scientific scrutiny of his claims as attempts at censorship.

He's just got a sharp sense of humour. Mind you, looking at the immediate reaction of "he's not a true climatologist" I can see why.

There is something scarily religious about people that really believe in global warming - that the earth is doomed unless we make sacrifices, or buy indulgences in the form of emissions trading permits.

Personally, I don't know. And I reckon in my life time the worst case rise of a degree or so is no biggie. I'd rather choose a richer world than one which is a degree cooler but with a trashed economy. Mind you, I suspect doing nothing will not cause a catastophe, either economic or environmental.

Lie, some countries have kept records of climate ever since the invention of the meteorological instruments in the 17th century, today we have over 7000 stations that measure land temperatures, we also use satellites to measure sea levels, water and troposphere temperatures.

Hmm here's what Nasa say

http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/ghcc_cvcc.html
Mankind's impact on the global climate and whether pollution from modern energy use is indeed warming the Earth have become important issues for national and international policy makers. Political pressure and public sentiment are based on complex data sets that, alone, cannot tell the whole story. The ultimate question is whether our climate is becoming warmer because of the slow build-up in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. The answer is not clear, because much of what we know about global climate change in inferred from historical evidence of uncertain quality. Reliable ground-based measurements by scientific instruments have been made just in this century

As Lubos Motl put it (sorry another physicsist this time at Harvard, guess that means you can ignore his arguments just like you ignored Nobel prize winning physicist Freeman Dyson's)
http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/01/global-mean-temp erature-1978-2004.html
I guess that you won't be surprised that we may be heating the surface a bit. On the other hand, stratosphere seems to be cooling quite clearly, as NASA's satellite graphs show. I am certainly not claiming that the cooling of the stratosphere proves that the global warming theory is wrong; it does not prove that it is correct either. They usually say that the cooling comes from ozone depletion:
The GHCC people from NASA are, of course, cautious, and they don't use simplified cliches such as that they have proved global cooling. Instead, they say that the answer about the existence of human-induced greenhouse global warming is not clear.

So basically the old measurements are unreliable and the new ones don't give unambiguous evidence of any simple warming trend.

In the absence of total catastophe right now and I mean like in The Day Tomorrow not some dubious trendline in cherry picked noisy data, I'm afraid I'm all for waiting and seeing. I still don't trust any model of climate enough that I spend Kyoto sized chunks of cash based on its predictions of the climate in a century or so. Hell, I wouldn't even bet a tenner on them being right next week.

Now at this point, I'd expect a load of one liners about the difference between climate and weather. But that's bunk. It's a big chaotic system - we can't predict it next week and we can't predict it next century, anymore than we can predict the stock market over short or long terms. Mind you, if your computer models have let you make a few billion on the stock market, I'm definitely interested. Hell I'll even believe in your loony religion if you pay me cold hard cash.

Let me make sure I'm crystal clear on this issue: the US public funds NASA billions of dollars over many years to play about with robots in space, and then the same public is not allowed to use the software THEY PAID FOR to create down to earth, commercial robots? Think again NASA!

http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov/man/software/license/o pen_src/index.php

I'd be interested to see what kind of weapon they're planning to pop out the bottom of this thing @ Mach 6. Doesn't seem like a terribly bright idea...

At some point, you don't need the stealth, because by the time anyone realizes you're coming and gets some sort of weapon 100k ft into the air, you'll probably have already landed.

Interesting, a little bit more of information and beautiful pictures can be found on the page of the Dryden flight research center: SR-71 and YF-12

Interesting, a little bit more of information and beautiful pictures can be found on the page of the Dryden flight research center: SR-71 and YF-12

No seriously, NASA is an acronym not a proper name. National Aviation and Space Administration. Kindly get it right.

tm

Err, nowhere in the summary does it mention the JPL as a license, it mentions the JPL as an entity which just so happens to be the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

However if you did RTFA you'd notice that the license shouldn't be considered "Open Source."

They hire professionals to do research at NASA. You would need to list hydroponics as your main career, not a hobby.

Other than that. PVC pipe is too heavy, and they use LEDs rather than light bulbs, and find plants that respond to specific frequencies of light.

Right, like nothing's ever come out of NASA that's used daily. Like anything could ever be spun off from technologies developed by NASA. Especially in the past 5 years

Right, like nothing's ever come out of NASA that's used daily. Like anything could ever be spun off from technologies developed by NASA. Especially in the past 5 years

Right, like nothing's ever come out of NASA that's used daily. Like anything could ever be spun off from technologies developed by NASA. Especially in the past 5 years

Sally Ride celebrates the anniversary of her first space flight today. Sally Ride was the first American woman in space (not the first woman, however). She has a certain stature in the science community. Her popularity as an astronaut has allowed her to gain more mainstream support for her activities that encourage children, especially girls, to seek careers in science and engineering.

+10. As of right now, every other post is not about what this person has done -- spending nearly six months orbiting the earth -- but the fact that we shouldn't be filtering on sex. I'm not sure what they're claiming -- it's not like she gets higher pay or a new car for spending more time in space. She didn't get a certificate to hang. She just gets to spend (wait for it) ..more time in space. It's just a statement of fact, so I'm not sure why every Slashdotter is suddenly concerned about equity when they've never been before.

Keep in mind, if the space station was a more accurate sampling of reality, we'd have a roughly equal number of women and men on board. Of course, that assumes you would have equal numbers of men and women in the armed forces, as scientists, and in other 'prereqs' for NASA. But we don't -- that's why this kind of thing is special, that's all.

The first situation was that of a common, public belief in the "sound barrier." The myth of the sound barrier had its beginning in 1935, when the British aerodynamicist W. F. Hilton was explaining to a newsman about some of the high-speed experiments he was conducting at the National Physical Laboratory. Pointing to a plot of airfoil drag, Hilton said: "See how the resistance of a wing shoots up like a barrier against higher speed as we approach the speed of sound." The next morning, the leading British newspapers were misrepresenting Hilton's comment by referring to "the sound barrier."41 The idea of a physical barrier to flight --that airplanes could never fly faster than the speed of sound-- became widespread among the public. Furthermore, even though most engineers knew differently, they still had uncertainty in just how much the drag would increase in the transonic regime, and given the low thrust levels of airplane powerplants at that time, the speed of sound certainly loomed as a tremendous mountain to climb.

But Mach devised a special optical arrangement (called a shadowgraph) by which he could see and photograph shock waves. In 1887, he presented a paper to the Academy of Sciences in Vienna where he showed a photograph of a bullet moving at supersonic speeds.

It's too bad the US isn't building a National Ignition Facility to produce fusion in the laboratory using the largest lasers on the planet.

If only there were physicists scrutinizing the data produced by something like Gravity Probe B here in the US.

Something like a Z Machine would be really useful for high energy physics, but the fundies in the US won't allow it.

Then there is NASA, sitting its laurels of times long past, not making any effort to replace [1] the ill-conceived shuttle.

The US isn't attempting to measure the rate of polar ice cap melting using precise measurements of the exact center of mass of the entire planet. No, because physics in the US sucks and that sort of work is best left to others.

If the NSF wasn't completely dominated by neo-cons it might have funded Kip Thorne and let him build the most sensitive laser interferometer on Earth.

There aren't a dozen people orbiting the planet attempting to assemble the largest space based solar collector in history; the physics involved are far beyond anything practiced in the US. I can just imagine Americans in space, risking life and limb. They'd probably find themselves using staple guns to keep from getting killed on live TV. The US is too cowardly for any of that.

If Europe had only had the wisdom to exclude the US from LHC, Fermilab's mistakes wouldn't have led to their current magnet problems. There's the US again, setting back physics by another decade.

Then there are the beef-eaters in Detroit, oblivious to any concept that doesn't involve guzzling gas.

Those damn Christens did manage to stifle US fusion research; the next big Tokamak is being built in France for crying-out-loud. There's hardly even any US funding involved.

That article is right. The US is nothing but a swill of gun-toting suburbanite consumers, polluting and terrorizing the world.

[1] Watch the quarterly report video on the right panel; bunch of silly US bubba cowboys trying to engineer a rocket. What a laugh.

It's too bad the US isn't building a National Ignition Facility to produce fusion in the laboratory using the largest lasers on the planet.

If only there were physicists scrutinizing the data produced by something like Gravity Probe B here in the US.

Something like a Z Machine would be really useful for high energy physics, but the fundies in the US won't allow it.

Then there is NASA, sitting its laurels of times long past, not making any effort to replace [1] the ill-conceived shuttle.

The US isn't attempting to measure the rate of polar ice cap melting using precise measurements of the exact center of mass of the entire planet. No, because physics in the US sucks and that sort of work is best left to others.

If the NSF wasn't completely dominated by neo-cons it might have funded Kip Thorne and let him build the most sensitive laser interferometer on Earth.

There aren't a dozen people orbiting the planet attempting to assemble the largest space based solar collector in history; the physics involved are far beyond anything practiced in the US. I can just imagine Americans in space, risking life and limb. They'd probably find themselves using staple guns to keep from getting killed on live TV. The US is too cowardly for any of that.

If Europe had only had the wisdom to exclude the US from LHC, Fermilab's mistakes wouldn't have led to their current magnet problems. There's the US again, setting back physics by another decade.

Then there are the beef-eaters in Detroit, oblivious to any concept that doesn't involve guzzling gas.

Those damn Christens did manage to stifle US fusion research; the next big Tokamak is being built in France for crying-out-loud. There's hardly even any US funding involved.

That article is right. The US is nothing but a swill of gun-toting suburbanite consumers, polluting and terrorizing the world.

[1] Watch the quarterly report video on the right panel; bunch of silly US bubba cowboys trying to engineer a rocket. What a laugh.

"Quickscat is a different story. Quickscat was a NASA R&D bird . See http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/quikscat/index. cfm I'm not clear whether it was initially launched as NASA only and handed off to us, or if they "owned" the satellite while we did the ground systems for it."

As one of those toilers at JPL who worked on QuikSCAT: The instrument is a copy of one that was being built for a Japanese satellite. It was built in 13 months (hence the Quik) from spares from the one already in process, modified to fit on a commercially available satellite bus (Ball BCP2000) and launched on a surplus obsolete TitanII the AirForce had sitting around. The rush (normal spacecraft development is a 4-5 year process) was because the existing instrument, NSCAT, was on a satellite that failed after 6 months, leaving a big hole in the data, so QuikSCAT would fill in until the Japanese satellite launched and came on line (it launched late, and later failed)

The instrument was designed as part of an effort to collect 10 years or more of continuous data as part of an overall "understand the interactions of air and sea" program. So JPL developed a ground data system oriented towards that need (hosted at PODAAC). As it happens, we also had a real time feed of the data to NOAA (think of a "tee" early in the data pipeline), which, it turns out, has been very useful in the forecast business (back in 1999 and earlier, when this was all being done, people weren't sure it would be useful.. certainly not to the point of kicking in large sums of money to that end..). It took several years for the forecast community to start heavily using QS data (they were justifiably nervous about depending on an experimental satellite that was never intended to run this long...)

QS is actually operated by LASP in Colorado.

An article has appeared in a recent issue of Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics with a curious title "Multi-scale analysis of global temperature changes and trend of a drop in temperature in the next 20 years." Wow, that's a mouthful! Imagine publishing a paper in a respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal in which you predict global cooling over the next few decades? Apparently, the authors were not moved by the 46.6 million websites found when doing a quick search of the internet for "global warming."

The article was produced by Lin Zhen-Shan and Sun Xian of the Nanjing Normal University in China (obviously, English is not their first language, if you couldn't tell from the title, and some of the following quotes from their article are a bit awkward). The work was funded by the Chinese National Science Foundation, and not by coal interests in China. We have no reason to suspect that Zhen-Shan and Xian are puppets of any group with any interest in denying global warming in the coming decades.

Interesting how our government is worried about scientific satellites going well past their "designed lifetime,..." Isn't there another project that went (and is still going) well past it's designed lifetime. Maybe they ought to let the Mars Rover team design the next hurricane satellite?

I work at NOAA, in the satellite group National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/

The US government regularly under-funds satellites & space systems. You can see this with the huge cost overruns on NPOESS http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive05/NPOESS_11 2105.html Why did NPOESS cost overruns happen? "Hey, lets do a contract on some incredibly experimental sensors involving high risk research and make sure they are on a fixed budget". Not smart.

I am off on a tangent though - Quickscat is a different story. Quickscat was a NASA R&D bird . See http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/quikscat/index. cfm I'm not clear whether it was initially launched as NASA only and handed off to us, or if they "owned" the satellite while we did the ground systems for it.

NASA does R&D type of satellites - proof of concepts, risk reduction, etc. We in NESDIS-NOAA often take over running them, or we run their sensors on our satellites. Well, these proof of concept satellites were never intended to be part of a series providing a continual new functionality.

NESDIS/NOAA has two major satellite series that will always (in the future) have spares for:
GOES series http://osd.goes.noaa.gov/
POES series http://www.oso.noaa.gov/poes/ (although the newest will be NPOESS via a joint program with DoD replacing our POES and DoD's DMSP)

There is another satellite that is likely to fall soon too - Windsat/Coriolis http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Projects/windsat.html While Windsat is technically a Navy satellite, we run that one too, and it has no replacement either. Fortunately, Windsat is more about Navy stuff than it is about Hurricane tracking...

Bill Proenza, as a consumer of NESDIS' satellite data, sees NOAA efforts on the publicity side as being detrimental to the funding of the NOAA-NWS-National Hurricane center funding. Well, for the sake of accuracy, a few million dollars isn't going to fix our funding shortfalls...

Until Congress starts funding new satellite development properly (not like NPOESS) this problem won't go away.

See El Nino may calm 2006 hurricane season and The 2006 Hurricane Season Was Near Normal for explanations.

The fact that we notice an increasing trend in average global temperatures, and that we know from basic subjects like physics that this increased energy will translate into more severe weather, doesn't mean that we suddenly become perfect weathermen able to predict the next 6 months with perfect accuracy. The failure of a short-term prediction like that has absolutely no bearing on the validity of the global warming phenomenon.

2006 may have been normal, but 2005 was the most active Atlantic hurricane season in recorded history. It doesn't make sense to base decisions about the future of the human race on what amounts to one lucky year. There'll be more lucky years in future, too. But at the same time, the incidence of Katrina-like years, and worse, is going to go up. And that's just one of the effects that will be felt.

This graph in this article seems to indicate sunlight is mostly red.

This graph in this article seems to indicate sunlight is mostly red.

There is little doubt that the climate has warmed up a tad lately. Even the article up above mentions this. However, the change has been tiny and again, as mentioned in the article above, the climate has been much warmer than it is now. It has also been much colder.

There is more to the whole global warming fiasco than CO2, though. In fact, it is kind of minor compared to some of these other things.

I would just like to point out a few things:

An Erupting Solar Prominence from SOHO
...nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2...
  Plants revealed as methane source

Think of it this way, if you where in the hospital on life support would you want the latest tech or something that powers a cell phone now adays?

NASA ain't hiding anything. All the information is available.

Look at the documentation that resulted from the investigation after Columbia. It is understood, that because of the design of the Shuttle, that impacts will continue to occurr for it's lifetime. What's important, is that these can be minimised, so that we don't encounter damaging impacts like with Columbia, and when they do occur, repair techniques have been implemented.

If you look on the NASA website, all the photos from the RPM as Atlantis approached the station are available. There are photos hilighting the damage. A raised thermal protection blanket on an OMS pod. There are photos of engineers investigating repair techniques. In the third space walk today, you can watch them repair the damage on NASA TV. This is not hidden from you.

Photos of repair techniques being tested are in the link below. If you go forward a page or two, there's a photo of the blanket in question, and earlier pages show high res photos from the RPM.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle /sts-117/ndxpage16.html
This was all covered in a press conference too.

If you look at other sites than NASA's, or you watch the press conferences, again broadcasted on nasa tv, you can get even more information:
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content/?cid=5129
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content/?cid=5133

Nothing is hidden. Nothing is amiss. The real information is under your nose and available.

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp1/exp1 shepmarfeb.pdf

So, NASA uses Comic Sans to publish astronaut logs?

How cute.

Pluto is big enough to have a moon (okay, so Pluto/Charon is really a double planet).

Sure, but the asteroid Ida has a moon, Dactyl, as well, so I'm not sure that's useful criteria for planethood.

The station is grounded to itself. That is, there are ground paths throughout the structure. I assume also that docking spacecraft have some sort of static discharge probe to equalize their potentials.

Beyond that, they eject plasma from the station to maintain the desired potential. NASA info here.

Yeah.. But the original comment was that "(...) all manned spacecraft equipment (...)". So yeah... I know, it was a point of detail (does/doesn't astronauts personal computers account as spacecraft equipment ?) !

Anyway.. Now.. I'm not criticizing the quality of NASA produced software.. I'm fairly sure it is extensively tested ! But claiming that it is "mathematically proved" that a program is bug free (or at least works as intended under all conditions) was going a bit too far.. Hence my comment about Rice's theorem !

PS : At the time when the Shuttle's GPCs were IBM S/360 derivatives (the AP-101), it seems more likely that the OS controlling module loading (OPS1, OPS2, OPS3, etc..) was a TOS/360 derivative.. But that changed in the mid '90s (AP-101s).. The article at http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shut ref/orbiter/avionics/dps/gpc.html describes fairly extensively the system and the fact that they were '70 era computers, the use of the word IPL (for boot), the fact that modules are stored on tape, would seem to substantiate the TOS/360 theory.. It also seems the AP-101s architecture is backward compatible with the AP-101 !

Finally, again, it seems the computers on the Russian side are NOT Russian "made" computers, but european built machines (c.f. last night's press conf.). And the US computers didn't take over.. The only thing that is happening is that the Shuttle is taking over the ISS' propulsive attitude control should the CMGs (Control Moment Gyroscopes) overload.. (note that the CMG computers seem to be OK so far !).. I very much doubt the Shuttle GPCs are equipped to perform the tasks of the ISS bound computers (that control Propulsive attitude control, the Elektron, humidity scrubbers, etc..)

The problem, of course, is that once Atlantis undocks, should the LANEs not be fit, the ISS won't be able to do its necessary attitude changes following the shuttle's undocking and *THAT* is a major concern !

--Ivan

Hello, my name is Narinda and I am your technical support representitive, now just insert the recovery disk and call me back in two hours.

Tech Support in Space ..

These photos (taken from the ISS with a digital camera) look all right to me: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/ISSArt/

Does anyone have any idea how efficient the solar panels are? According to the STS-117 Fact Sheet (1.8 Mb PDF) on the NASA Space Shuttle page the panels generate 60 kilowatts and are 240 feet long. But that doesn't tell us the width of the panels, only the length, so I can't figure out the kilowatts per unit area. Does anyone have more details?

Does anyone have any idea how efficient the solar panels are? According to the STS-117 Fact Sheet (1.8 Mb PDF) on the NASA Space Shuttle page the panels generate 60 kilowatts and are 240 feet long. But that doesn't tell us the width of the panels, only the length, so I can't figure out the kilowatts per unit area. Does anyone have more details?

Flowing currently. Not just occasional outflow events from the edges of a cliff. Louros Valles has a river at it's bottom and extremely complex, fractal patterns along it's course. I'm not saying it's got a raging class 5 river, but it looks swampy/pond-like and wet. The colors are from the HRSC camera and approximate natural color (ie. the greens and purples in the balanced image are real). Read their description below.

ESA released image:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEM6TZ57E SD_1.html

Contrast and brightness leveled out, bottom cropped off image:
http://www.wakeshield.net/sandbox/LourosValles_bal anced.jpg

Prediction, per my image: When we land in Louros Valles, the greens will prove to be living "berries" like the rover found in Meridiani. The purple in the image will be... something alien. 8)

From ESA site:
'Sapping' is erosion by water that emerges from the ground as a spring or seeps from between layers of rock in a wall of a cliff, crater or other type of depression. The channel forms from water and debris running down the slope from the seepage area.

You can also search for "Mars ponds" for links like this:
http://www.curiousnotions.com/mars/

This is claimed to be a dried out pond, but it sure looks to have residual liquid in it (unlike Burns Cliff!):
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/9806/marspond_mgs_ big.gif

It's a really interesting subject, very much on the edge of discovery.

Josh

So why do these stories about NASA, the ISS etc.. so rarely link to nasa.gov?

You can go here and get much better, more detailed information about the solar panels, the crew, the rest of the mission, watch live video, etc. Your tax dollars pay for it, you should use it.

It is the most comprehensive site for news in information regarding, imagine this, NASA. The only instance where it's probably not appropriate is when there is some requirement for investigative reporting, otherwise, things like the Boston Globe are likely to give the watered down, science lite AP version of what NASA tells them.

The international space station's newest power source, a set of solar wings, made its debut yesterday.

...your response to point #2, that's what's wrong.

Stop looking at that bogus, photoshopped, false-color crap. LOOK AT THE ORIGINAL IMAGE. The area is part of Burns CLIFF. What you've been scammed with (and you have most definitely been scammed) is a highly modified, context-free crop pulled from a panoramic photograph of the wall of a crater. Would it have killed you to verify what you wanted to write before posting?

All nice and spruced up in Photoshop. Yes, very persuasive.

Others who have posted to this story have done a far better job than I to illustrate how ridiculous these claims are. How about following the link to the original image that someone else posted? Doesn't look so much like water when it hasn't been cropped, pulled from its original context, Photoshopped, and false-colorized to death, does it? And notice too ... it's the side of a cliff. Of course, that's no problem if you don't believe that water is affected by gravity. Then again, apparently there are plenty of Slashdot readers who believe that the extreme cold and minimal atmospheric pressure have no impact on the viability of liquid water, so why would they think that gravity could affect it either?

http://kepler.nasa.gov/ After Kepler launches we will know about an additional 1-2k planets. 4-6 years after it launches we should know about at least one Earth 2.0.

The pancam actually takes quite nice pictures. If you go to the Mars rovers site, you can see quite a few of them in their press release images.

However, that is not an ordinary jpeg straight from a color CCD. It's a false-color composite of images taken in several different colors ranging from infrared to near ultraviolet. NASA does it this way to preserve some of the very precise light data that is lost otherwise, and to enable much more than the 3 color channels a consumer camera has without sacrificing resolution.

The two guys purporting this is water used a false-color combination of the raw images which made the flat portions appear blue. Whether they genuinely believe this is water or are just trying to make headlines, I don't know, but selecting an image with the regions of interest deliberately colored in a way the general public could easily associate with water is rather sneaky either way.