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Anyone know how this is different from the existing Landsat 2000 data that's been available for years ?

https://zulu.ssc.nasa.gov/mrsid/

Other than the fact that its mostly in the MrSid format ?

he problem for people who don't accept the 100+yr old repeatable observation that C02 acts as a GHG is to point to an alternative explaination for the observed warming. In other words natural "forcings" have been accunted for, so where is the extra warming coming from if not from GHG emmissions?

You do realize you're competing with Nasa, using Nasa images, and Nasa has no ads: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/index. html

This has been discussed here. The moon is not the right place to do this. (why should it be down in another gravity well?) The right place is where DSCOVR aka Triana is to be placed.

The location for that is L1 (Lagrange-1), the neutral gravity point between the Sun and the Earth. That location will always view a sunlight earth.

FYI, one reason that Triana was not actually launched was that it was proposed by vice president at the time Al Gore. (Some wanted to call it GoreSat)

We've had this baby ready to launch for years, but for some mysterious reason NASA is having trouble doing anything with climate research. All they need to do is strap it on a DELTA IV rocket.

NASA is a US government organization http://nasa.gov/. It's always going to be internally vulnerable to politics, budget cuts, but also shares one trait that plagues many government branches-inefficiency. As the Ansari X-prize demonstrated, NASA is good for some stuff concerning space flight, including doing key research that could not easily be done by private individuals, but at the same time, it is not a one-organization-fits-all solution.

I believe you were looking for this http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0504/WaterOnMars2_ gcc_big.jpg

How much evidence do we need in order to show that there's water on mars?

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/figures/PIA01907_ fig1.jpg look for o' Higgin's looks like a face from a statue

• "[...] Spirit backed up over Gertrude Weise [...]"
• "Spirit acquired full color 13-filter images of Gertrude Weise [...]"

Here are four examples [large graphic] of what it would take to send a canister about the size of a Shuttle payload (or a school bus) past our nearest neighboring star...and allowing 900 years for it to make this journey.

Well....If you use chemical engines like those that are on the Shuttle, well..., sorry, there isn't enough mass in the universe to supply the rocket propellant you'd need.

So let's step up to next possibilities, nuclear rockets with a predicted performance that's 10 to 20 times better!

Well...it's still not looking all that good. For a fission rocket you would need a BILLION SUPERTANKER size propellant tanks to get you there, and even with fusion rockets you would still need a THOUSAND SUPERTANKERS!

Even if we look at the best conceivable performance that we could engineer based on today's knowledge, say an Ion engine or an antimatter rocket whose performance was 100 times better that the shuttle engines, we would need about ten railway tanker sized propellant tanks.

That doesn't sound too bad, until you consider that we didn't bring along any propellant to let us stop when we get to the other star system...or if we want to get there quicker than 9 centuries.

Once you add the desire to actually stop at your destination, or if you want to get there sooner, you're back at the incredible supertanker situation again, even for our best conceivable rockets.

In conclusion, we'd really like to have a form of propulsion that doesn't need any propellant! This implies the need to find some way to modify gravitational or inertial forces or to find some means to push against the very structure of spacetime itself.
Energy: - yet another challenge
Our third big challenge is energy. Even if we had a nonrocket space drive that could convert energy directly into motion without propellant, it would still require a lot of energy. Sending a Shuttle-sized vehicle on a 50 year one-way trip to visit our nearest neighboring star (subrelativistic speed) would take over 7 x 10^19 Joules of energy. This is roughly the same amount of energy that the Space Shuttle's engines would use if they ran continuously for the same duration of 50 years. To overcome this difficulty, we need either a breakthrough where we can take advantage of the energy in the space vacuum, a breakthrough in energy production physics,

Fun trivia: The Earth is actually farthest from the sun during the northern hemisphere's summer.

There is no discrepancy. Senator Inhofe assembles a list of crackpots with PhD's. It proves nothing. Have any of these scientists published a paper on climate change? One can find denialists of the theory of gravity, or quantum mechanics. Science is not an opinion poll. There is no controversy in the published literature on climate science. Oreskes surveyed the climate change literature here. She found that out of 928 peer-reviewed papers on climate change, not one disagreed with the consensus position.

What standard of proof would convince you? How much evidence do you want? There are mountains of evidence to support the consensus view that the earth is warming, and humans are the cause.

Would you be willing to accept a $1000 wager that GISTEMP will keep increasing? I would gladly wager this sum.

Look at the list of scientific societies on this page. That represents the consensus of tens of thousands of scientists around the globe.

However, it's not linear. If you want a decent discussion on W/m^2, NASA has a reasonably well-written article on it. There's also some good news in there - the rate of increase of total forcing has actually gone down somewhat since 1980. (Unfortunately, the total forcing is still going up, but at least it's not accelerating anymore!)

Here is another article on the subject.

Bruce, Many regions of the magnetosphere seem like possibilities for LDEs, including the bow shock or the magnetopause. There are articles looking into these possible sources linked to from one of the pages your search pops. The consensus seems to be that magnetospheric causes are unlikely.

NASA was able to detect the hot air pockets in the center of a hurricane using a clever indirect method. They dispatched two solar-powered rovers with B&W cameras to the center of hurricane Bonnie.

Since the rovers carried no atmospheric equipment, they used the haze apparent in B&W stills to estimate the moisture density of the air, and obtained a temperature estimate using an IR camera.

Of course, the major aim of the Bonnie mission was to search for life within the hurricane, so the rovers were equipped with a rock abrasion tool (RAT), an alpha particle detector, an extremely accurate iron detector, and some magnets.

Read about the Hurricane Exploration Rover Mission

Check out the movies on this page for a tetrahedron you'll remember. Also it's the shape of the ammonium molecule, if you've done some organic chemistry that's burned into your mind.

Its not exactly a real map, its just a really basic heat map, having the ability to zoom in and such isn't really going to be much of an improvement over viewing the jpeg http://ipac.jpl.nasa.gov/media_images/ssc2007-09a_ medium.jpg Even if it was more than a heat map. the planet doesn't even have anything mappable, its a gas giant so its continuously changing (although maybe there would be some more permanent features like the great red spot on Jupiter). I imagine the Google landmarks for it would consist of "(A) The hot bit.", at leas on Mars and the Moon there are some craters etc... Having other planets on Google maps would be nice, but there aren't any maps of any of them yet :(

There is a little confusion about how the elements are created, and where HE1523 got all it's metals from...so here is a quick primer on the way things work.

The big bang forms hydrogen, dueterium, some helium, and a tiny amount of lithium. In fact, the theory of what should be formed (called Big Bang Nucleosynthesis), and what is observed, agree incredibly well.

Most stars just burn hydrogen into helium, fusing the two hydrogen atoms. More massive stars burn hotter, and so they can ignite helium burning, forming carbon, nitrogen, oxygen etc. The hotter the star gets, the heavier things can be fused, all the way up to iron. All of these processes *release* energy, if you can get it hot enough to start the reaction.

After iron, to make heavier elements you have to *put in* energy, so the way elements are formed is different. Instead of fusing two things together, you now just add a single neutron to the nucleus. This is a very different process (called neutron capture)...and can happen veeeery slowly (in stars) or very rapidly (in supernova explosions).

So, uranium and thorium are both elements which are made in the rapid process (r-process) -- they are only made in supernova explosions...because in a supernova, the neutron density is very high, so catching one is more likely.

Anyway...the point of all this is that, by observing uranium, we KNOW there had to have been at least one dying star going supernova, which made the uranium. Then that gas collapsed again later, to make anna's star.

So far, no-one has yet managed to find a first-generation star, but it's a big area of research at the moment, and is one of the things anna is trying hard to find. By looking at these very old stars, we get a good picture of how a supernova works, because we see the product of ONLY ONE of them. With young stars, there might have been hundreds, all polluting the gas at different times...and disentangling that is really tough.

As for the age of the universe, WMAP told us that very precisely -- 13.7Gyr (with an error of only ~0.1Gyr). The age we derived from HE1523 is much less precise...but nucleocosmochronometry (stellar age dating), is an incredibly tough thing to do, but it does offer independant confirmationg of the WMAP result.

..just like on that South Park episode about the kids who said 9/11 was done in the studios too. Or something.

"There's not at all a problem with this," Chapman said. "We have total confidence in the integrity of the repairs but I'm telling you right now that your mind will have a hard time convincing your eyes."

The only shuttle launch that ever had the external fuel tank painted was the first - Columbia (RIP), April 12th 1981, where the tank was painted white to match the rest of the vehicle.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap010412.html

1 degree in 100 years, maybe
Where did you get that number? The IPCC Summary for Policy Makers (page 23) says that the most optimistic scenario (which has peak CO2 emissions by 2015, and CO2 emission cut at least in half by 2050) gives us 2.0-2.4 degrees C warming. That's a big deal. James Hansen has a very good, if long explanation of the science and the consequences. Compare that very rosy scenario 2-2.4 degree C temperture rise over the next century with the fact that the depth of the last ice age was only 5 degrees C cooler.
Buckle your seat belts and hold on, its gonna be a wild ride.
Oh, and the claims that the IPCC says that sea level is only going to rise by 40 cm by 2100 contains a caveat. They don't have a good model for how Greenland and West Antartica are going to melt, so they included _no_ contributions from them. A collapse of either one of them (admitedly not likely by 2100, but possible) gives us something like a 7 meter rise in sea level.

1) Solar intensity does fluctuate noticeably, and in a known pattern http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/17jan_solc on.htm

2) Correct, Mars isn't Earth. It is free of human influence and yet still experiences drastic climate changes.

3) Correct, and yet a majority of the proponents of global warming on Earth point to Regional changes (in this case at the poles). Why is this ok for showing global warming here, but not there?

Those were not good talking points to be flinging about.

I would make the argument that significant change in an ecosystem will usually be bad for the dominant species that have adapted to live in that ecosystem. Change can of course give opportunities to other species that have struggled to live in an ecosystem. The obvious examples are the past mass extinctions, especially the one that gave rise to the dinosaurs, as well as the one that destroyed the dinosaurs and gave rise to mammals.

Significant change destroys. It destroys existing systems. It plays havoc on most species. It creates starvation for species that have grown to need the existing systems that are being swept away. Of course, this allows new species to rise and fill the vacuum. Change is the prime driver of evolution. Evolution works at its fastest when there is mass death and destruction.

And today, we are the dominant species on the Earth. The agricultural systems that we rely on are built on our current climatic conditions. Farms are located in certain places that have the perfect combinations of good soil, and good weather. Too much rain, or too little, or rain at the wrong time can destroy crops. If the rain moves from an area with good soil to an area with bad soil, then this will reduce crop yields, even if our farmers follow the rain. Moving the water by canal or pipeline is an option, but it is expensive (how much did the Panama Canal cost to build?).

I can think of no better an example of the problems of climate change than the Australian drought. Australia has already lost 1% of its GDP due to drought conditions. And without significant rain in the coming weeks, the country faces draconian water restrictions: Brisbane is at stage 5 water restrictions right now, which effectively means flushing the toilet every 7 uses and keeping shower water in a bucket for later use. Agriculture along the Murray Darling River (the main agricultural river system) faces a complete cutoff of irrigation. That means the death of the many grape vines that form the basis for Australia's wine industry.

Here is a map that shows how rainfall patterns have changed. The interior (where no one lives) is receiving more rain. The coasts (where almost everyone lives) are receiving less rain. The rainfall patterns have changed, and the Australians are struggling to adapt to the new conditions.

Further, global warming, whether true or not,...

Global warming may or may not happen...

How did this get modded up? Global warming IS happening! Measuring global average temperature is a solved problem. The only issue still up for debate is how much humans are affecting it.

Seriously, take a look at the graph in the link.

I don't want to hear that. Don't misunderstand; I don't begrudge a single dime spent on it. I take it on faith that those who know best are building something incredible. Analysis of the early universe is crucial to cosmology. I get it.

There are two things happening here: The first is that the angular resolution of a telescope depends on the wavelegth. The longer the wavelength, the lower the resolution. JWST is about four times larger than Hubble but it is optimized for a wavelength that is 4 times longer so it replaces Hubble in resolution at 2 microns. Secondly, for ten meter telescopes on the ground, their 10 micron resolution is not as good as the best seeing, so since the resolution and seeing basically add in quadrature (sqrt(resolution^2+seeing^2)), you can get pretty close to the actual resolution of the Keck at 10 microns. So, since the Keck is larger that JWST, it can do better on resolution. It can't, by a long way, do better on sensitivity. Hubble beats ground based telescopes on resolution because the seeing on the ground is larger than the actual resolution of telescopes of the same size or even larger.

The high-resolution "pretty pictures" aspect of Hubble means a lot. Perhaps more that is appreciated in academia. If all the money and drama of NASA produced nothing but Hubble it has been worth it. NASA is billing JWST as Hubble's replacement. Is it? Really? Honestly?

I think that it more than replaces Hubble in the sense that it has the same resolution, but since the universe was smaller early on, less of it is spread out over the same amount of sky so that the physical scales are magnified optically. Beyond the epoch of reionization, you can't see anything in the visible because the universe is opaque, but at 2 microns, you'll have improved resolution compares to what Hubble observes when the universe was half to a quarter of its present age. Because of this magnification, it quite important to have the deepest possible and highest quality Hubble images, especially at Z band where the Hubble ACS is actually fully sampled so that we can really know that new sources observed with JWST are not present in Hubble images. The magnifiaction means that you have to work harder because photons are sread out over more pixels in the camera. Hopefully the ACS can be repaired in the next servicing mission.

Personally, the most thrilling aspect of contemporary astronomy is extrasolar planets. The ESA is detecting Earth size objects from the ground. Will JWST be able to contribute to this? I can't help but wonder what sort of space-based planet finding/resolving capability could be had for $4.5G.

This is getting more specialized as a field. I think the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/newworlds/tpf- 20070411.html is going to make this search more systematic. JWST may be able to do followup on discovered planets though as Spitzer has done: http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2005/03/upcoming _extras.html

Note all the question marks. I'm not making an argument. I just haven't got a frig'n clue what to think about JWST as a "Hubble replacement." Convince me. I want to hear that this machine will carry on producing the sort of output that inspires the public to keep NASA funded because, one way or another, Hubble is going down and this is what we're going to be left with, if we're fortunate.

Public support of Hubble has been crucial to keeping NASA focused on ways to avoid not discarding this great asset. My second favorite boss once related to me something that was said during the debate about funding the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). The question was why should we fund this when we have all these other priorites and

Err. No. We did *not* predict dark matter. We were not expecting dark matter or anything like it when the Zwicky first saw that there had to be some "more" matter in the galaxies to explain the observed rotational curves. He probably first said: "Gee, well, that looks funny!" Zwicky probably said something a lot better actually, as he was known for his, often rude, mannerisms.

The astonishing discoveries in science come when humans really have no clue what is coming next! Case in point: The November Revolution in Physics . That was the last time that the whole paradigm of understanding of particle physics shifted! That was back in 1974 and hasn't changed since! One new totally-unexpected particle, called the J/psi, was found and boom... the consequences were huge, for now, you *knew* that there had to more particles, namely the top and the bottom and that the W and the Z were predicted as well. Only after the discovery of all these predicted particles did the public came to accept the Standard Model and particle physics became a mature field. But, back in 1974, there were those who could see ahead in the light of this new discovery.

A large shift in the understanding of the universe happened already in astrophysics with the CMB(Cosmic Microwave Background) measurements. I liken it very much to the November Revolution. The CMB observations, first from COBE and later from WMAP and various other ground based observations, show with high statistics that there is something missing if we assume that the universe is all baryonic matter. Imagine a puzzle where there is a missing piece and now, you think of a piece that fits in this place. Well, dark matter fits the bill very well and other observations, also back it up. So somehow, dark matter is required by experimental results... Now, those who can see ahead make predictions on what we will --hopefully -- discover next: a dark matter candidate particle at the LHC, annihilation products of dark matter in space, a signal in gamma rays from annihilation, plenty of lensing examples in galaxies,.. This is called phenomenology for a reason. You get an idea inspired by experimental results from an experiment and look at what other phenomena you would observe in the light of your idea/theory.

End of my rant.

To put your "inexorableness" theory in perspective. There are more humans living on the planet right now, then has ever lived in total in the history of earth. So take humans and divide them into two groups: Group1: from the beginning of human evolution to 1920 and Group2: from 1920 to today. Group2 is significantly larger in population. Do you think Group2 achieved more? Really?!! I dont think so! I see most of the population watching TV and going to work where they try to minimize thinking! Group1 had to struggle more for survival and had to be more inventive to survive. The pressure is off on Group2. Laziness is settling in fast.

Why does this need a sunshield at all? The article says that the telescope should be parked in the 2nd Lagrangian point L2, which is 1.5 Gm from the Earth and should be permanently shaded from sunlight. Isn't the whole point of sending something to L2 that it is not exposed to the sun? Also, how is the energy supply supposed to work? Anyone out there who can shed some light on these questions?

L2 = 1.5e9 m
Sun - L2 = 151e9 m

r_Earth = 6.4e6 m

Maximum size sun for complete shading by earth:
r_max = 6.4e6 * 151e9 / 1.5e9 = 644e6 m

r_Sun = 700e6 m

No full shade at L2.

Even more important. The telescope won't be at L2 exactly but use an elliptic orbit around L2 with a major axis of 1.5e9 m and a minor axis of 374e6 m. So earth will not be in front of the sun all the time. http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/orbit.html

Nyh

I recall that the Orion program which is currently under development will have the capability to do the job. It is slated to replace the shuttle and also have the ability to reach the moon. One of the goals was to be able to do a service mission of the JWT far far away. More info here. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/ma in/index.html/

I knew it was pretty big, but it wasn't until I saw a picture of the mockup with people next to it that I realized just how big it was. Suddenly you understand why it's a segmented mirror and lot's of folding pieces.

The captcha is spectrum...how fitting.

..."JWST is named after James E Webb, Nasa Administrator during the Apollo lunar exploration era; he served from 1961 to 1968."
To add more evidence. Look, wikipedia!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Edwin_Webb
To 1-up wikipedia. Look, NASA!
http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/whois.html
The man whose name NASA has chosen to bestow upon the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is most commonly linked to the Apollo moon program, not to science. Yet, many believe that James E. Webb, who ran the fledgling space agency from February 1961 to October 1968, did more for science than perhaps any other government official and that it is only fitting that the Next Generation Space Telescope would be named after him.

Uh, what about this: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0403/hudf_hst_big. jpg The resolving power of a telescope is not the only measure of its utility. Hubble is in the unique position of being able to see extraordinarily faint objects, because it doesn't have to see through the glow of Earth's atmosphere. The only way to image objects as distant as those in the udf is to point a telescope at them for an extremely long time. However, on Earth's surface this long integrating time would lead much more quickly to a totally washed out image just due to the faint glow the entire sky acquires because of scattering in the atmosphere.

Given that the press conference isn't until May 15, I can't say for sure, but based on the brief blurb on the NASA website, it's almost certainly a gravitational lensing measurement.

It's true that dark matter doesn't interact directly with light, but it does curve space (ie. generate gravity), which light travels through. So light feels the gravitational effect of dark matter, a phenomenon known as "gravitational lensing". Essentially, the images of background galaxies going through a concentration of dark matter become magnified and distorted.

I don't know whether this is a strong lensing or weak lensing measurement. In strong lensing, the distortion is extreme and the images of the background get stretched into long tangential (and radial, though they're rarer) arcs like this. In the case of weak lensing, the distortion in any one image is small, but all images in a certain area are distorted coherently so you can statistically disentangle the signal.

Given the distorted images of the background galaxies, you can determine what mass distribution was responsible for those distortions, thereby producing a "mass map". It appears that in this case (again, based on the brief blurb), the mass map shows some sort of ring-like structure that isn't seen at any other wavelength (which non-dark matter would produce).

[TMB]

Although I'm not an astrophysicist, I have studied astrophysics as an undergraduate and know some things about dark matter theories and cosmology. You are absolutely correct in saying that dark matter must be non-baryonic under current models. Baryonic dark matter is excluded because big-bang nucleosynthesis models (which take observed primordial elemental abundances as input) show that only ~4% of the mass of the universe can be baryonic matter.

You are, however, incorrect in stating that dark matter shares no properties with ordinary matter besides gravity. All energy, including electromagnetic radiation and dark energy, affect the curvature of spacetime. Dark matter also has the property that it behaves in the same way as matter when the universe expands, i.e. that its density decreases as the cube of the scale factor (which determines the rate of expansion). Ordinary radiation and dark energy each behave differently in this regard, so dark matter is indeed uniquely matter-like in a very important way. Aside from galactic rotation curves, very good data from the WMAP project that studies the cosmic microwave background has determined that ~30% of the universe must be matter-like. Combined with the BBN studies, this means that 26% of the universe, by mass, is dark matter, which thus outnumbers ordinary matter by more than a factor of 6.

You are also incorrect in assuming that we haven't found dark matter. There is actually a very excellent photo of colliding galaxies that shows convincing evidence of dark matter. The caption does a decent job at giving an explanation of the photo's significance. If you want a more thorough explanation, both of the photo and why the result is significant, I recommend this blog maintained by several well-known cosmologists.

Thank you for actually providing something intelligent. Most evolutionists just flame. So yes, it has been observed that hyrdogens can fuse into helium. Has it ever been observed with any higher order elements such as uranium?

Those earth bacteria are pussies

Actually, they're far from it. Apollo 12 landed near one of the old Surveyor probes, and the astronauts took cultures from the probe that had been sitting on the moon for three years. Surprisingly, there were still Earth bacteria living on the probes, after three years of exposure to the vacuum, the freezing/burning cycle of the Lunar day, and the harsh radiation from the Sun. Here's an interesting article on the subject.

I also recall reading an article recently (can't find it now, unfortunately) about a scientist who worked on some of the Mars probes. He said that there were bacteria that actually evolved in their clean rooms to thrive through all the crap they were trying to do to sterilize the probes before launch. The things actually evolved to eat some of the cleansers they were using or something like that, as I recall. When asked if he thought those bacteria were still ont he probes, he said something like "Oh yeah, they're up there now, on Mars. We couldn't get rid of them."

-- Dave

> Being exposed to the near-vacuum of space for an extended period of time, aren't the bacteria likely to be "pulled apart" at the molecular level?

No.

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answer s/970603.html

Vacuums are basically harmless. There isn't much difference in the forces involved between being in a vacuum and being at twice ordinary Earth pressure. In fact, humans can survive being unprotected in space for short periods of time, with no permanant damage:

You will of course die if you don't get some oxygen fast. Don't even try holding your breath to get an extra few minutes - the pressure will damage them. Just let the air escape and hope for rescue.

First, Eta Carinae is not visible to anyone north of 27 N, so in the US only people in or south of Miami will see it. In Africa, you basically have to be in a country that doesn't touch the Mediterranean Sea; while in Asia every country touching the Indian Ocean will see it, but not China or Japan. Among English-speaking countries, only Austrailia will have a great view, but the ozone layer will protect them (and the rest of the Southern Hemisphere) from direct radiation. "Scientists at NASA and Kansas University have determined that the supernova would need to be within 26 light years from Earth to significantly damage the ozone layer and allow cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation to saturate the Earth's surface. An encounter with a supernova that close only happens at a rate of about once in 670 million years(...) The new calculations are based largely on advances in atmospheric modeling, analysis of gamma rays produced by a supernova in 1987 called SN1987a, and a better understanding of galactic supernova locations and rates. A supernova is an explosion of a star at least twice as massive as our Sun." Since Eta Carinae is 300 times that distance, its blast wound need to be 90,000 times as energetic to be dangerous. A hypernova is about 100 times more powerful than a supernova, so there's plenty of margin of safety there.

Here's the NASA article about it.

It doesn't matter how much "water" you're observing coming off of the comets if you cannot identify the source. What's particularly striking is that in the single instance where we've been able to observe the inside of a comet (when Comet Linear disintegrated), there were no water traces whatsoever in the immediate debris.

false

An objective-minded person might infer from that that the traces of "water" you're seeing are in fact a byproduct of the comet's movements through space. The Electric Comet document explains in quite clear terms that the indicators of "water" you're observing is the result of a simple chemical reaction between the solar wind and negative oxygen ions being stripped off of the comet's surface:

Sorry, wrong again. We observe both OH ions and ionized water, and we have good models that predict the breakdown of water into OH and the expected distribution based on the lifetime of these molecules within the solar radiation field.

I'm curious how you expect these people to survive. Most of them receive no funding whatsoever. They're only available option is to generate materials that inform semi-technical people of what their theory is. By allowing as many people as possible to understand their theory, they maximize their reach amongst an audience that remains open-minded.

Clearly these folks are already making a living via other means. And you're not allowing as many people as possible to understand the theory, because you aren't presenting anything that looks even remotely like a theory. Where are the equations showing the ionic interaction between ionized particles and the solar wind? Where are the equations that show that electric fields must dominate over magnetic fields? Where is it? You're not giving any hint of that anywhere. You're just uttering a bunch of nonsense about how the distributions to conform to neutral distributions, but no astronomers argue that all the molecules in a comet are neutral, but you keep implying that this is something unexplained, but it's not.

Good bye, I've wasted enough time on you.

You should read the ALSJ. Astronauts who walked on the moon absolutely wrecked their fingers, mainly because the gloves had to be short and tight for better sensitivity which meant pressing their fingers hard into the end of the glove while doing heavy work.

The other factor is the difficulty of working against gas pressure to perform simple tasks like holding a tool.

Ummm, no, Deep Impact targeted a comet (Tempel 1). http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/main/ As for the "electric universe" theory, from my pov, it's utter bunk.

Sidereal rotation period (hrs): 1407.6
Length of day (hrs): 4222.6


Source: NASA

That's why these rings are spun on their axis (which passes through the center of gravity) to simulate gravity via centripetal acceleration. Some call that "centrifugal force," but my high school physics teacher insisted (as do many textbooks) that this is an erroneous term because the force is "fictitious". (Yeah, being the smart-ass with the top grade in the class, I asked her how she explained the operation of a centrifuge -- especially one large enough to hold people, like certain carnival rides and their even bigger cousins that NASA uses for training of astronauts. The force doesn't feel so fictitious when you're inside the machine.)

There's also a big star in the middle of a ringworld, at least a Niven-style ringworld, so it's even more important not to allow the thing to collapse in on itself; spinning the structure solves this problem, but introduces another. It has been calculated that the substance the ring is made out of, called scrith in Niven's books, needs the tensile strength equivalent to the strong nuclear force to not tear itself apart. But if you can solve that engineering problem, then the ring and anything on its surface will stay ring-like and gravity won't cause everything to fall into the center of mass -- providing you spin the ring.

...Chladni pattern?

Google Earth used to be cool, but it's turning into one massive billboard (perhaps one of the ideas all along). In Sydney for Australia Day, Google (and whatever the Microsoft's copy of it is called) did flyovers with huge pre-publicity. People lay out banners, .com wannabees stuck huge logos on their rooves, people picnicked and love-maked all on the hope of becoming 'famous' (with four million other people). Google put it up and at the end of the day, Sydney wasn't Sydney any more. Instead, Sydney was transformed into one big banner ad:

http://googlesightseeing.com/2007/02/27/australia- day-flyover/

Then we had the world's biggest photojournalism fakery with Google restoring New Orleans to pre-Katrina. Beyond weird. Did they think the residents wouldn't notice?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/02/new_orlean s_demolished/page2.html

Google Earth is sponsored infotainment. If you'd like to see Earth without the Ads, there's a little mob called NASA I hear are going places: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/

• This program was intended for small power producers with a limit of 10MW. The 40MW is a press release to claim "The Biggest" and supposed to be built in 10MW stages. According to the rules there is a hard limit at 10MW. The $0.42/kWh was intended to provide a Solar PV cost study and these guys are trying to bend the rules to take advantage of the program. The 40MW will be difficult to do without getting a rule change.
• The solar insolation in Sarnia is very low for 6 months of the year and non-existent at winter solstice with 8 hours of low angle daylight. Canada has 2 peaks in electrical usage (August and February) as opposed to a warmer climate with a single summer peak. In February there is no real output from a Solar PV panel and the EROEI of Solar PV in this location is 50% of locating the same panel in the Mojave desert. They would have to pick up the solar field every fall and snowbird it to Arizona for the winter for it to put out any power.
• Solar Insolation at Sarnia in kWh/m2 on a 43degree panel (from above nasa link):
  Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May. Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec. avg.
  1.89 2.67 3.30 4.21 4.92 5.16 5.19 4.85 4.21 3.18 1.97 1.60 3.60
• The 40MW is peak output at noon on summer solstice. The plant is going to produce a lot less output for the rest of the year. They should rate output of intermittent power in MWh/day average and not in MW. MW makes sense for a coal or nuclear plant where the output is constant.

The SHPEGS project is an open renewable design project that is attempting to take advantage of the Canadian climate that has high summer solar insolation and cold winter temperatures and provide base-load renewable electricity and thermal storage from a direct/indirect hybrid solar collection system built with common materials.