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A lot of the raw data to monitor climate change is space-based data. We now know where the energy goes into weather and seas, and we can see forest and agricultural usage only from space. This will give us the tools we need to enforce climate change.
Beautiful photos and videos from the cameras on the Space Station, and human damage seen from there will have a massive impact on people's passion to see this earth fixed and cared for.
go and spend a while looking at https://www.nasa.gov/topics/ea...
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/1238...
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/go...
https://weather.com/tv/shows/t...
Space Science is going to help us understand how El Nino and El Nina work - and that is critical for the lives of millions of Americans.
Yes, porkbarreling by Senators for useless space projects needs to stop. That is why NASA is supporting SpaceX, etc and focusing themselves on deep space missions like Pluto and Juno.
Anyone living on the Moon or Mars will be living underground. Humanity will move to the stars - we will solve these problems.
Look at the Space Budget, and the War Budget and see where money is really being wasted. Fix the health bureaucracy in America if you want to see money not being wasted.

A lot of the raw data to monitor climate change is space-based data. We now know where the energy goes into weather and seas, and we can see forest and agricultural usage only from space. This will give us the tools we need to enforce climate change.
Beautiful photos and videos from the cameras on the Space Station, and human damage seen from there will have a massive impact on people's passion to see this earth fixed and cared for.
go and spend a while looking at https://www.nasa.gov/topics/ea...
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/1238...
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/go...
https://weather.com/tv/shows/t...
Space Science is going to help us understand how El Nino and El Nina work - and that is critical for the lives of millions of Americans.
Yes, porkbarreling by Senators for useless space projects needs to stop. That is why NASA is supporting SpaceX, etc and focusing themselves on deep space missions like Pluto and Juno.
Anyone living on the Moon or Mars will be living underground. Humanity will move to the stars - we will solve these problems.
Look at the Space Budget, and the War Budget and see where money is really being wasted. Fix the health bureaucracy in America if you want to see money not being wasted.

The GRIP experiment studies the long-duration spaceflight effects on the abilities of human subjects to regulate grip force and upper limbs trajectories when manipulating objects during different kind of movements: oscillatory movements, rapid discrete movements and tapping gestures.

To date I still don't think any really ground-breaking science was done at the station.

Really?

appears to be a certainty doing this, if they go out above the Van Allen Belt.

Dunno....

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/28427...

In 1989 a solar event caused a widespread long duration blackout in Quebec. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/ea...

If an event like the 1859 Carrington solar event occurred today, our modern infrastructure would be devastated. The geologic record indicates that these occur at least every few hundred years https://mic.com/articles/11774... . At our current state of readiness most of the US could be without power for an estimated six months. The spare parts to repair our power grid simply do not exist. Because so much of our economy runs on technology dependent credit (not cash) the world would face a rapid economic collapse. No phones, no internet, no fuel and soon no food - no joke. http://news.nationalgeographic...

Fortunately this is an unlikely event so we roll the dice and are happy in our ignorance. I would estimate the risk of this issue to be more than a 1000 times that of terrorist attack. The cost of insuring against this risk is not high. The logic for being prepared is unassailable. Hopefully as an open minded intelligent well educated person such as yourself, now armed with the facts you will draw the same logical conclusion.

This is not about politics, it's about the duty of a functional government.

I've nothing more to add on this topic, so this will be my final reply.

Your assertion that Moore's Law is dead is akin to a similar assertion over 100 years ago that "everything that can be invented has been invented", and that the patent offices should be closed.

Go download Google's open source Tensorflow (an AI Machine Learning library), and try some real machine learning on real-time sensors and data streams. You'll quickly realize the highest end workstations can't keep up.

Now delve into a bit of devices physics. The easy gains in speed for silicon transistors have been made. There are still advances to be made, but different device physics that allow switching into the terahertz might just reset the clock on Moore's Law, which is just what's needed in all sorts of fields, such as AI.

So if there's now 20x as many galaxies as before, does this also imply that there's 20x as much observable baryonic matter? Moreover, since regular matter has been previously estimated to be less than 5% of the universe, what does this mean for the ratio of matter to dark matter, given that a naive recalculation would put regular matter close to 100%?

Bush said that in January 2004, towards the end of his first term. Despite all the flak he gets from the left, he is responsible for the biggest increase in science R&D in the last half-century.

And still no cited studies. For someone who raves about the scientific method so much, you don't care much for actual data or observation - just the same empty claims, repeated louder each time. You still haven't even stated with any clarity which hypothesis you think has been falsified, let alone by what.

For example, the 1990 IPCC report makes not one but four projections about future temperature rises, right there in the Executive Summary. The most extreme of those (Scenario A, Business as Usual) predicts a 1C rise by 2025 - and we're already getting close to that. However the other scenarios predict rises as low as 0.1C per decade (depending on global emissions), and we're well ahead of those. So yeah, 1990 IPCC predictions so far confirmed by real observational data, rather than the mysterious numbers in your head.

Though of course, models of any system with underlying randomness aren't invalidated by a couple of outlier numbers anyway, only by a sustained series of observations that collectively fall outside the three-sigma probability range - since the scientific method isn't nearly as black & white as your hugely over-simplified idea of it. Go talk to some particle physicists; you might learn something about that.

And still no cited studies. For someone who raves about the scientific method so much, you don't care much for actual data or observation - just the same empty claims, repeated louder each time. You still haven't even stated with any clarity which hypothesis you think has been falsified, let alone by what.

For example, the 1990 IPCC report makes not one but four projections about future temperature rises, right there in the Executive Summary. The most extreme of those (Scenario A, Business as Usual) predicts a 1C rise by 2025 - and we're already getting close to that. However the other scenarios predict rises as low as 0.1C per decade (depending on global emissions), and we're well ahead of those. So yeah, 1990 IPCC predictions so far confirmed by real observational data, rather than the mysterious numbers in your head.

Though of course, models of any system with underlying randomness aren't invalidated by a couple of outlier numbers anyway, only by a sustained series of observations that collectively fall outside the three-sigma probability range - since the scientific method isn't nearly as black & white as your hugely over-simplified idea of it. Go talk to some particle physicists; you might learn something about that.

As does water vapor, which is why it's a greenhouse gas

Lots of water vapour in the air also tends to condense and form clouds, which are white and reflect energy away from the Earth. The greenhouse effect happens when shorter wavelengths (which can penetrate carbon dioxide) hits the ground and are re-radiated as infra red. The IR is then unable to radiate into space because of the greenhouse gasses. If you have a lot of white clouds in the air, then the energy is simply reflected. This causes cooling, which causes the air to be unable to gold as much water vapour, which causes rain, and the system largely balances with respect to water vapour.

Not quite so simple. Clouds also reflect thermal infrared, and so they have both warming and cooling effects. Whether the sum is warming or cooling depends, among other things, on the cloud altitude. The first-order effect is that clouds reduce the day/night temperature swings.

Last I heard the prevalent theory was that if you continue long enough down that road you get enough weather to flip you over into an ice age

That's one of the predictions.

A while back, there was a hypothesis that climate warming could affect thermohaline circulation, cutting off one of the mechanisms circulating heat northward from the equator, and hence triggering a northern-hemisphere glaciation ("ice age"). I don't think anybody was able to come up with a reasonable model showing this happening, though, so nobody credits that hypothesis right now. It was never a "prediction"; it was a hypothesis that never got well accepted (except by Hollwood, which will take any excuse to make a disaster movie.)

There's a nice breakdown here for different technologies, table 1. Keep in mind that they cite things in kg/kW, not kW/kg; you have to have an energy source, energy conversion, and heat rejection mechanism - and if it's manned, a neutron shield (although there's a variety of possibilities beyond a dedicated shield, such as shielding with cargo, propellant, significant distances, etc); and that the conversion efficiency must be accounted for.

http://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/S... is as good a summary as any about NASA's current ion engines, while the APL paper by Neumann, Bilek and McKenzie for the http://scitation.aip.org/conte... has information about the Neumann Drive.

Short version is that xenon drives vary in specific impulse and power efficiency depending on the power levels, while Neumann Drives vary in specific impulse and power efficiency depending on the fuel used, while the power level affects how many pulses per seconds. Higher power levels appear to cause faster wear of the grid in Gridded Ion Thrusters, or the chamber in the case of Hall Effect Thrusters, as well as needing more investment in Power Processing Units and so on. Additionally, there is the issue of tankage, regulators and so on for dealing with the xenon itself, which means it's not a straight 1:1 comparison. That said ...

TLDR : Magnesium in a Neumann Drive runs about 9 uN/watt and 11 000s specific impulse. A NSTAR running at ~1000 watts input has about 32 uN/watt and 2850s of specific impulse.

I was curious if they were bringing a significant enough quantity of eggs to support this breading program. Breading isn't any good without a binder.

This Official NASA Research is studying the egg problem.

There is also a proposal to import green cheese from the Moon.

Look, we know Juno wasn't designed for this sort of mission and is not well equipped or positioned for it. But if researchers determine that its observations could help pinpoint more details of the plumes...

But they can't. Juno isn't a mission to look at Jupiter's moons, it's not in the right orbit to look at Jupiter's moons, it doesn't have instruments to look at Jupiter's moons. It's designed for looking at Jupiter and Jupiter's plasma and field environment.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_p...

There's already a mission planned to investigate Europa: Europa clipper.

http://www.nasa.gov/press-rele...

Look, we know Juno wasn't designed for this sort of mission and is not well equipped or positioned for it. But if researchers determine that its observations could help pinpoint more details of the plumes...

But they can't. Juno isn't a mission to look at Jupiter's moons, it's not in the right orbit to look at Jupiter's moons, it doesn't have instruments to look at Jupiter's moons. It's designed for looking at Jupiter and Jupiter's plasma and field environment.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_p...

There's already a mission planned to investigate Europa: Europa clipper.

http://www.nasa.gov/press-rele...

Oh look, it's this guy again - cite him a study and watch him yell "NO IT ISN'T!" and start frothing at the mouth :-)

Pro tip, dude - look a few posts up. Someone already tried posting your version, only to find it's not "better data" at all. I'm guessing you took all of Watts' claims as gospel and never realised it's based on only a single ice core (and thus says nothing at all about global temperatures). Or are you just still pushing your whole "nuh uh, you're all wrong because Greenland" schtick?

The data it's based on is also not global. It's from a single ice core in Greenland - the very definition of cherry-picked data, and hardly comparable to global temperature reconstructions.

Indeed this is being seriously looked into. For instance NASA (my latest gig!) and the FAA.

Check out the Google an Amazon whitepapers here.

Indeed this is being seriously looked into. For instance NASA (my latest gig!) and the FAA.

Check out the Google an Amazon whitepapers here.

Here is a table that lists it at 78% (and claiming 73% for 2015)
BUT, that does not include the 17% extra coal that China recently admitted to burning (and that is STILL to low).
Here we see that America used 33% coal for our electricity, and it is dropping still.

Now as to how I got the less than 15% for America vs close to 50% for China, Here is NASA's OCO-2 map of Oct-Nov, 2014. That time frame was picked because Ag does not play a major part during that timeframe. This is basically a base-line of emissions. Sadly, OCO2 is not fully capable of showing TRUE amounts. The numbers indicated are rough estimates. If you look carefully at China, it has an area bigger than Europe and bigger than the entire American eastern seaboard that runs from the atlantic to past the mississippi, that is emitting at 401+ (basically, it topped the sensors) PPM. This is China's BASE from 2 years ago, and current OCO-2 data shows that it has INCREASED last year (contrary to the lies put out by gov groups). America, has that area, smaller than China, and is around 395-397 ppm. It is a great deal less CO2 being emitted. Then we have Europe. which is around 393-395. It is similar in size to America's eastern seaboard, but, it is also less.
OCO3 was supposed to come out this year, and it would tell us EXACTLY how much is being emitted. However, after O talked with China about emissions, OCO3 was delayed for 2 years. This is an item that is easy to take up to space (ride up to ISS), and then is simply plugged in on the outside of the ISS. It is TRIVIAL to set this up. So, it appears that O was talked out of adding which NASA is pretty upset about. So am I. My gut feeling is that this will show that China is at or MORE than 50% of global emissions. In addition, Europe is also likely to come up. Oddly, the most monitored nation on this planet, is America so, we are likely at what we thought.

So, out of the two of us, the only one pulling from their ass and not having a grasp of this, is you. And sadly, you are probably another far leftie idiot that runs around screaming about America emitting without giving a flying fuck about China or where all the growth is occurring.

The bill includes specific milestones for an unmanned exploration mission by 2018 and a crewed exploration mission by 2021.

So in other words its a ton of hot air and complete horseshit. At best it's a way to secure funding for NASA under a label that'll be hard to attack

This is the authorization bill, not the funding bill.

It tells NASA what to do. Funding them to do that is separate.

The "unmanned exploration mission by 2018" refers to the Insight lander; the "crewed exploration mission by 2021" probably refers to SLS launch EM-2 (testing the launch system with a crew.)

If you weren't convinced that "25 years to Mars" is a horseshit timeframe, its appearance in a Congressional budget bill should remove all doubt.

This isn't a budget bill.

IBM 360s were used by hackers. I did it.

Had a job programming IBM360s for the Govt. Did some amazing things on those and hacked a crap-load of code together for them.

You've seen my work, I'm positive. Ever see a space shuttle launch or land? http://history.nasa.gov/comput... - shuttle GN&C computers were modified IBM 360s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - jump to 1 min into the video and be amazed at how perfect that landing is. That's my code dude. After maingear touchdown, the astronauts don't really control the elevons.

Check out Fig. 2 for an example. Compare, for example, the altitude range for aerobraking vs. aerocapture on Venus, versus the altitude range for aerobraking vs. aerocapture for Mars. On Mars you have very narrow altitude windows in order to get a specific deceleration profile, and error within those windows has significant consequences. Furthermore, on Venus you have no specific location to "land" on, just a specific latitude, while on Mars, your choice of landing site is highly critical.

Basically, Venus is a lot more forgiving of mistakes. You'll note that the Soviets had terrible results with Mars probes, but did quite well with Venus.

It seems the majority of Antarctica is gaining more ice faster than the peninsula is shedding it... http://www.nasa.gov/feature/go...

Refs for ballute entry: 1 2. Let me know if you'd like more :)

While I find the idea of a research station floating in the Venusian atmosphere really cool, I care most about what we can do now. .. Why aren't we doing that?

For some proposals in various stages of development to look up, check out VAMP, VEVA, VEP, EVE, VESSR, VISE, VME, VER, SAGE, Zephyr, Venera-D and VALOR :) I'm sure I'm missing a bunch. About half of those are balloons.

It's all about money. Mars gets the lion's share of NASA's robotic exploration budget. Everywhere else fights over the scraps.

Refs for ballute entry: 1 2. Let me know if you'd like more :)

While I find the idea of a research station floating in the Venusian atmosphere really cool, I care most about what we can do now. .. Why aren't we doing that?

For some proposals in various stages of development to look up, check out VAMP, VEVA, VEP, EVE, VESSR, VISE, VME, VER, SAGE, Zephyr, Venera-D and VALOR :) I'm sure I'm missing a bunch. About half of those are balloons.

It's all about money. Mars gets the lion's share of NASA's robotic exploration budget. Everywhere else fights over the scraps.

That's easy for you to say after the fact. And velcro+tang aren't the best examples, they're quite simply concepts.

But look at the 2016 list of spinoffs: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spino...

Lots of stuff on there that would have been deemed unnecessary or a waste of money by private investors.

It is also at odds with reports of no global warming since the late 1990's.

Want to know how everyone knows you're an idiot? You cited the daily mail to "prove" there was no global warming.

Where's the "no warming since the 90s"?

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...

It is also at odds with reports of no global warming since the late 1990's.

Want to know how everyone knows you're an idiot? You cited the daily mail to "prove" there was no global warming.

Where's the "no warming since the 90s"?

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...

And yet.

Ore genesis didn't take place on the Moon but the surface material seems to be reasonably mixed to not require it.

You think based on very little evidence. An obvious rebuttal here is that certain ore genesis processes on Earth required volcanism or asteroid impact, both which have happened on the Moon. For example, the nickel deposits of Norilskâ"Talnakh are thought to be formed by sulfur chemistry transferring nickel and other metals into a layer of magma pinned under the Siberia Traps eruptions (which would be in the top ten lunar maria by surface area, if it happened on the Moon instead of on Earth).

The famous Bushveld complex is a concentration of platinum group metals thought to be caused by an asteroid impact melting into a magma body and then selectively crystallized out last as the magma body slowly cooled.

So we have two mechanisms for substantial differentiation and ore genesis on Earth, which would apply just as well to parts of the Moon.

Further, there's direct evidence of significant differentiation possible with the "orange soil" discovered by astronaut Harrison Smith during the Apollo 17 sortie which had high concentrations of titanium (8% by mass) and "rich in zinc" which probably came from late stage volcanism on the Moon's surface.

I was wondering the same thing, why would they be expelled from their galaxy? They don't explode asymmetrically, do they?

They sorta do. Mostly symmetrical is still just asymmetrical enough to produce high velocity neutron stars - and there's no reason to suspect the same doesn't apply to black holes produced by supernovae. The difference being that you can detect the neutron stars from their radio emissions. Black holes, not so much.

I found the relative velocity through the JPL small body database - a very slow 8 km/sec. Looking at the orbital diagram, it was more like the Earth passing the asteroid rather than the other way around!

Purdue's impact calculator has it at a 51 kiloton explosion, versus 541 kilotons for a projectile the size of the Chelyabinsk meteorite

Now who's welcome?

If the effect were strong, it would have been picked up by epidemiological studies long ago. There are much more pressing medical issues that require reducing particulate emissions, which is why many countries have already cleaned up their act: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/ear...

You're still an idiot. NASA grants as milestone payments apply to the program itself Read it!

Sure... No earthquakes close to Hawthorne...

Some data from seismic monitors.. http://scedc.caltech.edu/recen...

http://earthobservatory.nasa.g...
http://www.kolotv.com/content/...

Actually about 100 years ago, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was working out and publishing the theory of how humans would eventually use rockets to reach the Moon, and other places in space:

Ion thrusters, the propulsion of choice for science fiction writers have become the propulsion of choice for scientists and engineers at NASA. The ion propulsion system's efficient use of fuel and electrical power enable modern spacecraft to travel farther, faster and cheaper than any other propulsion technology currently available. Chemical rockets have demonstrated fuel efficiencies up to 35 percent, but ion thrusters have demonstrated fuel efficiencies over 90 percent. Currently, ion thrusters are used to keep communication satellites in the proper position relative to Earth and for the main propulsion on deep space probes. Several thrusters can be used on a spacecraft, but they are often used just one at a time. Spacecraft powered by [ion] thrusters can reach speeds up to 90,000 meters per second (over 200,000 mph). - Source (NASA)

Compare this 90,000 m/sec speed to the 300,000,000 m/sec speed of light. It is, as I said, a high but quite limited and limiting speed.

I find this excerpt from the NASA report to be the most telling. (Emphasis mine.)

Thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust. Specifically, one test article contained internal physical modifications that were designed to produce thrust, while the other did not (with the latter being referred to as the "null" test article).

So, they tested the real drive, and a dummy fake drive, and measured thrust for both of them. That's a pretty good sign that the thrust is indistinguishable from noise in the experimental setup.

Actually, Pioneer 11 did it first in the mid 1970's

Look, I've never used LTO so I could be talking out my ass, but I must disagree with this:

"For the purposes of photos or video a 2:1 ration would be a safe assumption to use."

Compressed video uses some of of the most advanced domain-specific file compression routines available, without going to the fractal-based stuff that NASA uses. There is no way that LTO's compression (or any other general compression routine) is going to put a dent in a H.265 compressed video file.

JPEG may show a 15-20% improvement, since the new JPEG encoding that DropBox developed showed a 22% improvement so there is some wriggle room in JPEG.

However, from what I've read I am very confident that LTO compression does wonders for general office files: databases, spreadsheets, accounts, documents, server logs, and so on.

BTW, I found the posts about LTO to be very interesting and I think I may invest in a second hand tape drive and start using it. One way to get more mileage out of the unit will be to prepare backups for family and friends. Currently I maintain two file servers at remote locations (home and office) and allow friends and family to backup to them via DropBox. If I had an LTO drive I could simply take snapshots of the DropBox backup folder and send the tapes off site. The security of the backups are low-risk, since the data is already encrypted by the DropBox client before it even leaves the user's PC. I'm not really happy with DropBox but for now it fills a need. Maybe in the future I will switch to something more powerful like OwnCloud.

Look what a bunch of very young engineers pulled off almost 50 years ago (apollo)

Here is a picture of those young engineers; http://history.nasa.gov/SP-410...

There are only about 8% of the USHCN Sites, sited so that the expected error is less than 1C, which is pretty damning considering the warming for the century is estimated at 0.7 degrees Celsius.

In the meantime, maybe the JWST could get a few pics and spectra.

The telescope will be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana in October of 2018.

Those relativistic postage stamp sized probes are a dream at present. Long before we could develop the technology for this, or get funding, we will study this planet with the advanced space-based instruments with capabilities far beyond anything now existing. No probe will be sent until we reach the limit of what we can do within our own solar system - nothing is faster than analyzing the light that already gets here, and even the most extravagant telescopic system will be cheaper than the probe project and all its supporting infrastructure.

That leads us to consider the HABEX Mission a pretty cool project under development using the huge and really cool looking Starshade vehicle to provide a coronagraph for a telescope in a separate vehicle thousands of kilometers away. Having a nearby target like this gives leverage with Congress to appropriate the funds.

You are correct. 189 million miles (from TFA) is 17 light minutes. The STEREO satellites are positioned opposite Earth from the Sun http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa....

> most likely the result of the small bandwidth they can work with due to the computer not being booted up or something - because for example the "BIOS" can only receiver commands at 1kb/s or something

That, or since it's low on power, the data rate is much lower than max. (That's to be expected, over long distances, lower power signals need to be slower.)

The transceiver is capable of up to 427 Kbps or 720 Kbps, depending on the source you read.
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/im...
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/sp...

As you said, it's entirely possible that the main computer can do that data rate, but the IPMI/DRAC/ILO is far slower, or the lack of available power dictates a slow rate.

> most likely the result of the small bandwidth they can work with due to the computer not being booted up or something - because for example the "BIOS" can only receiver commands at 1kb/s or something

That, or since it's low on power, the data rate is much lower than max. (That's to be expected, over long distances, lower power signals need to be slower.)

The transceiver is capable of up to 427 Kbps or 720 Kbps, depending on the source you read.
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/im...
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/sp...

As you said, it's entirely possible that the main computer can do that data rate, but the IPMI/DRAC/ILO is far slower, or the lack of available power dictates a slow rate.