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I wonder if they couldn't have been a combined effort for an even greater return. Then again, I'm just glad both of them are fulfilling their goals instead of both burning up on entry due to a conversion of units error.

Since Mars Express used an earlier launch opportunity shared by the Mars Rovers your suggestion is pointless. Also MRO is collaborating with the Italian Space Agency with the Subsurface Radar experiment. Otherwise NASA collaboration with ESA is on the wane for many reasons.

And blueberries. Don't forget the blueberries found by the Opportunity rover.

Mmmm.... blueberries. Must ... get ... breakfast.

NOAA has a video on global warming that does not match their written conclusion.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20060925/?p rint=1&1=1&2=2&3=3

If the warming is due to pollution, then why does eastern China and Africa warm up first, followed by Latin America? Why does North America and Europe warm up last?
Wouldn't the industrialized areas warm up first? (If for no other reason, than because they have the greatest density of pollutants.)

Why does the hot-spot off Western Latin America look like El Nino? Are they claiming that pollution is causing El Nino?

"That means that further global warming of 1 degree Celsius defines a critical level.... if further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about three million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today."

Sergei led the way into the top of the Progress. Sergei said the nose of the docking probe "smells like space". It did have kind of a burnt toast odor to it--very faint.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/newsroom/pressrel eases/20031208a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v428/n6985/ab s/nature02470.html

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/pluto.html

http://biocab.org/Cosmic_Rays_Graph.html#anchor_77

http://biocab.org/Global_Warming.html#anchor_32

Now I'd like to see someone try to blame the system wide warming on our driving SUV's. I'm sure someone out there will. LOL!!!!

Here's a very informative speech delivered this past Monday on the US Senate floor by senator James Inhofe Chairman, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It's not your normal uninformed rant we've come to expect from our politicians. http://epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id= 263759

Interesting BBC Radio segment

Source on Warmer = more Rainfall

Jeez. I read the article, and somehow missed that it loses energy as it moves in the direction of thrust. That does explain why it makes a good 'hover' engine. But then it would still lose power as you climb. (Unless you plan on 'flying' within a few feet of the surface the whole time.)

As for good ways to create forward thrust from electricity? Electric motors driving ducted fan props. See NASA's Pathfinder. (Which isn't ducted.) Ducted fans work best at lower speeds, so if you wanted a jet-speed craft, it wouldn't be good. But for cars and other 'slow' vehicles, it would work great.

Audible shit in space

From reading the ALSJ I have come to the conclusion that a lot of what we hear comes to us by direct conduction through the ground, things we are sitting on, things we are touching, etc.

There are many examples of people operating machinery, vehicles and tools where the sounds were reported as heard and/or can be heard on the tapes recorded on the ground.

Good thing no one actually puts Laptop computers in their lap.

That doesn't make any sense, though, since photons always travel at the speed of light and can never rest.

You do realize that the entire Constellation effort is for moon landings by 2020 and is driven by a Bush mandate right? You seem to be implying that the Ares I and CEV are somehow not a part of the lunar architecture. That's about the most ignorant thing I have heard in a while. I am sure you just couldn't resist a chance to take a swipe at Bush - if you did some research you would see that Bush is actually rebuilding NASA after Clinton neglected throughout his presidency. Please read up on NASA's strategic plan, and program implementation before posting further on the subject.

You do realize that the entire Constellation effort is for moon landings by 2020 and is driven by a Bush mandate right? You seem to be implying that the Ares I and CEV are somehow not a part of the lunar architecture. That's about the most ignorant thing I have heard in a while. I am sure you just couldn't resist a chance to take a swipe at Bush - if you did some research you would see that Bush is actually rebuilding NASA after Clinton neglected throughout his presidency. Please read up on NASA's strategic plan, and program implementation before posting further on the subject.

Meanwhile, all the stunts of 'respected scientists' starting a drive to 'save' a magazine are just stunts, probably part of jockying for funding. They don't want the competition in a set government grant pie.

That's an asinine statement. Neither Roger Shawyer nor New Scientist are competing with any of these people for grants, and even if they were, what New Scientist does or does not publish has absolutely no influence on funding decision. You are completely ignorant of how science is actually done.

As it happens, I know one of the scientists in question personally (John Baez, actually a mathematician, as is Peter Woit). Greg Egan isn't a professional scientist at all; he's a science fiction author. The people supporting the "Save New Scientist" campaign are not doing work in any way related to Shawyer's ridiculous EM Drive. Rather, they are all science popularizers (check out Baez and Woit's blogs as well as Egan's science essays in SF magazines). They are tired of trying to undo the damage to the lay public being done by New Scientist; their audience can't tell when New Scientist is reporting on real science, highly speculative theories, or pure crap.

If it can, then all the 'proof' that it can't work will be like the mathematical proof that the Wright brothers couldn't fly. Bumble Bees can't fly either, in theory (old theory by the way).

Those are both urban legends to one extent or another. Nobody ever had a mathematical proof that the Wright brothers couldn't fly. There were some arguments that other designs using particular materials couldn't fly. As for the bumblebee story, it's probably apocryphal, and nobody ever thought that aerodynamics was incompatible with bumblebee flight. (At best, certain simplifying approximations may have been incompatible with bumblebee flight — but simplifying approximations are incompatible with any kind of flight, if they're crude enough.)

It's (the criticism) just meaningless drivel. Like Cold Fusion, this idea will stand or fall based on whether it can be reproduced or not.

If it violates conservation laws that have been experimentally confirmed millions of times over, you don't need to bother reproducing it. The criticism is perfectly on target. It's not like this guy's apparatus is working at some scale or energy regime that hasn't been thoroughly tested before, where there might still be new physics lurking.

After all, it's not like it hasn't happened before. (like with Copernicus, then Gallileo, then Newton, then Maxwell, then Einstien, then with Born and friends, then with... Well, you get the idea.)

If you think those cases are comparable to this wingnut's claims, you need to go back and read your history of science again.

I'd figure I would post this for two reasons. One it just sounds cool and it's related to the discussion. Unfortnately, it seems like we have a long way to go to completely replace a human muscle.
http://ndeaa.jpl.nasa.gov/nasa-nde/lommas/eap/EAP- armwrestling.htm
http://ndeaa.jpl.nasa.gov/nasa-nde/lommas/eap/amer ah/the-human-opponent.htm

I'd figure I would post this for two reasons. One it just sounds cool and it's related to the discussion. Unfortnately, it seems like we have a long way to go to completely replace a human muscle.
http://ndeaa.jpl.nasa.gov/nasa-nde/lommas/eap/EAP- armwrestling.htm
http://ndeaa.jpl.nasa.gov/nasa-nde/lommas/eap/amer ah/the-human-opponent.htm

And while your shuttle fleet was grounded, they launched two manned spacecraft in orbit.

Yeah, with a copy (they have blueprints) of a Russian Soyuz capsule. They didn't innovate, they copied. Welcome to the space race, 40 years late ...

Pretty soon your shuttles are grounded forever, and you're going back to having nothing to send people into orbit.
Oh, and a couple of years later your planned CEV ( a copy of the Russian Soyuz) might launch.
Guess where China will be when the US launches the first CEV...

And while your country is spending gazillions on invading Iraq and others, they improve their economy with 10 percent each year.

Since when? And for how long? I'm skeptical of the figure but I will tell you this, rises are followed by falls. And if you think the american economy is crappy... well you don't live here and you have no idea. I can't complain... gas is cheap again and I take home more than it costs me to live... but irradiated seeds? Any first-year biology student will tell you what happens with irradiated seeds.

Since 1978 or something. They have room for a lot more economic expansion. Looking at the American Poverty Rate i don't think your economy is that great since 2000!

As for the space seeds, your NASA is doing the same thing.

It's also today's APOD picture:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060921.html

For those who were "too lazy; didn't read" the comments on the badastronomy page, the transit only lasted one second. So not only was it great camera work, it was great timing, too.

It's also today's APOD picture:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060921.html

For those who were "too lazy; didn't read" the comments on the badastronomy page, the transit only lasted one second. So not only was it great camera work, it was great timing, too.

"we can prove with some pretty good evidence that the north pole hasn't gone through this amount of change recently (within a couple of hundred thousand years)"

Who's "we?" Do you have a link to any of this evidence? I ask, because many sources indicate that global average temperatures have been a lot higher than they are now [link] [link] many times during the past "couple of hundred thousand years." It seems odd that during none of these warmer periods there would be less ice, but due to varying weather patterns it's possible.

But if the whole point is to say that this is an unprecedented period of global high temperatures in recorded human history, it's not. Depending on the source, the medieval warm period was a little warmer or about the same temperature. It looks like we will move into the warmest period in recorded human history in the next 10-20 years, but we're not there yet.

Do you even read the links you include? From your own link:
"The goal was to recover ice frozen 120,000 years ago, from before the last major ice age, when the world was warmer than it is today." How's that a good link to support your post saying
"the north pole hasn't gone through this amount of change recently (within a couple of hundred thousand years)"
The whole point of their research was to look at times within the last 200,000 years when the north pole was going through similarly dramatic climate change.

"admitted that global warming was real and was going to have severe environemental and economic impact. You don't find this alarming?"

You've now moved completely off-topic, and equated yourself with those global-warming advocates who think that anyone who believes any climate research that doesn't make this period of global warming look more devastating and unprecedented is some anti-global-warming conspiracy theorist. Nothing in BMO's parent or grandparent to your post denied any aspect of the modern theory of industrial global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. He just pointed out some things, like that this Slashdot article makes unverifiable and unlikely claims, like that this arctic ice melt has never happened before during "most of recorded human history." It should have said "in recorded arctic history," which is only about 50 years old, if that, and means nothing on a geological scale. Equating pointing out errors like this to not finding global warming alarming is zealot-speak.

This would only be true if actually all of the arctic ice swam in water. Unfortunately that isn't true, there are huge ice masses on land such as the Greenland ice sheet with a thickness of 1,200 m.

"We can extract ice cores and easily date the layers."

No, actually, we can't. You're thinking _ANTARCTIC_ ice layers, not Arctic. Arctic ice is _sea ice_ and as sea ice, it melts and refreezes and it _moves_ all over the damn place.

Arctic sea ice oscillates twice a day.

"Contrary to historical observations, sea ice in the high Arctic undergoes very small, back and forth movements twice a day, even in the dead of winter. It was once believed ice deformation at such a scale was almost non-existent."

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2004/107.cfm

And there are larger circulations at work, too.

http://nsidc.org/seaice/processes/circulation.html

And ice cores? The ice at the Arctic was 9 feet thick _at its thickest parts_ back in 1958. Just where are you going to get ice cores?

"http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/prrl9935.html"

"the rate of change is unprecedented"

Prove it. You just pulled that statement _right out of your behind_.

The rate is unprecedented, because _nobody has measured it before_. We've only been measuring since 1958. We don't know if this is a long term cycle or not. There's _not enough data_. Using your thought process, the "Little Ice Age" was "unprecedented"
  too, and were that happening today, you'd be screaming about how we're all going to die because we'll all freeze to death.

I stand by my statements, as they're backed up by fact. Your post, however, certainly _is_ handwaving.

--
BMO

Something to consider: Vinyl can be read by archeologists; by looking at the groove under a microscope, they can infer that it's sound. CDs use a complex error correction algorithm that will take years to reverse engineer, and decoding an MP3 off of a hard drive will be even more difficult.

That's a sounding rocket. In terms of performance, it seems comparable to the WAC Corporal of 1944, or maybe the Aerobee of 1947.

Nothing wrong with building one cheaply, but it's not a step forward.

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/Numbers/Math/Math ematical_Thinking/designing_a_high_altitude.htm

http://www.amsat.org/amsat/balloons/balloon.htm

That's because the nature of the problem is not fully understood by most people and rarely if ever expressed correctly. The catch phrase "Global Warming" can only be used to scratch the surface of the very complex and somewhat dynamic problems (notice plurality) associated with manufactured climate change.

Take for example the following EA article and image which shows a 20 year delta of oceanic surface temperatures. Note that that the delta in thermal variance is reduced the closer to the equator you look, but that at the poles (where ocean currents and thus global weather patterns are regulated) change is significant. These thermal deltas are symptomatic of rapid and potentially catastrophic climactic changes that may or may not involve warming.

This comes right after delivery of new ISS components and right before the arrival of a new crew and first female space tourist.

News flash: In 2006, in the western world, except when it comes to physical activity, being a woman while X is not notable unless X is notable by itself. Being the "first female space tourist" is not a "first" that anyone should care about. Being one of the first few space tourists is. Being behind the Ansari X-Prize is. Being a woman is not.

Anyway, the post is wrong. Ansari isn't the first female space tourist, Laika, was, or perhaps some American fruit flies were.

Here ya go!
http://eo1.gsfc.nasa.gov/new/extended/sensorWeb/ph aseAntenna.html

We just finished packing up the K10's (we have more than one) and will be heading back to California tomorrow. I'll see if I can post pictures soon.

As one of the primary designers of K10's avionics, I can authoritatively answer questions!

1.) K10 and the other robots that were out in the desert are research platforms and are not intended to fly in space. As such, we can get away with many things including the use of commercially available non-space qualified parts.

2.) Our entire group at NASA Ames primarily runs on Linux (desktops and robots)! We also have a good Mac contingent as well.

3.) K9, it's predecessor, was designed for research in autonomous exploration/science on Mars. Yes, it was named after K-9 in Dr. Who.

For more information on the avionics inside K9 and K10, see:

http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/publications/pdf/0851.pdf

I love my job.

ATHLETE is one of the coolest damn things I've seen in a long time, designed and built by a team of absolutely brilliant engineers. Think of a two-meter-tall six-legged metal spider on roller skates. Or, heck, just check the link above.

The current ATHLETE is a prototype (of course); the ones we send to the moon -- if we're selected -- will be twice that size. Yes, Slashdotters, welcome our four-meter-tall six-legged roller-skate-wearing metal spider overlords!

For additional coverage of K-10, ATHLETE, Centaur/Robonaut, and other vehicles participating in this test, check out the updates from JSC.

I love my job.

ATHLETE is one of the coolest damn things I've seen in a long time, designed and built by a team of absolutely brilliant engineers. Think of a two-meter-tall six-legged metal spider on roller skates. Or, heck, just check the link above.

The current ATHLETE is a prototype (of course); the ones we send to the moon -- if we're selected -- will be twice that size. Yes, Slashdotters, welcome our four-meter-tall six-legged roller-skate-wearing metal spider overlords!

For additional coverage of K-10, ATHLETE, Centaur/Robonaut, and other vehicles participating in this test, check out the updates from JSC.

Why the concern about miniature black holes? Every single day, perfectly ordinary cosmic rays impact the Earth's atmosphere with more energy than the LHC could ever hope to achieve. If modern accelerators can create miniature black holes (and there's a good chance they can), then so can cosmic rays.

The LHC is specced to accelerate protons to 7 TeV, and they'll be colliding two proton beams head-on for a total of 14 TeV (1.4×10^13 eV). In comparison, Oh My God! particles are in the vicinity of 10^20 eV (10 million times LHC), and even cosmic rays of 10^16 eV (1 thousand times LHC) are a fairly ordinary occurence. And if you're thinking that the LHC is creating a type of collision that doesn't happen in nature, most cosmic rays are themselves protons or nuclei, which then collide with air nuclei to produce particle showers, the exact same thing the LHC is doing. The collisions are proton-proton in both LHC and nature, so there's no good reason why the LHC would produce black holes but strong cosmic rays wouldn't.

What's more, there's no justification for fearing short-lived microscopic black holes. Black holes aren't cosmic vacuum cleaners; they don't magically pull things in. Things fall in because of gravity -- i.e. because the black hole is heavy -- and a microscopic black hole doesn't have a strong gravitational field, because it just doesn't weigh that much. That means that a microscopic black hole can only grow because things randomly wander into it -- and keep in mind that it's far, far smaller than an atom. Instead, Earth would pull the black hole into it!

Now, assuming that by some miracle the particle physicists were exactly right about the existence and behavior of protons yet exactly wrong about Hawking radiation, a miniature black hole granted such immortality would fall right through the Earth, whoosh past the center, zip through the other side, then proceed to orbit within the Earth in a similar fashion for the next 10,000 years, gradually nibbling away at the occasional nucleus that happened to be in the way. Eventually it would grow in mass enough that it would settle within the solid iron core of the planet, where it would eventually eat enough to destabilize the core, causing massive earthquakes and very slowly devouring the Earth from within, ultimately resulting in a black hole smaller than a marble (9 mm, roughly 0.2 in), possibly surrounded by an asteroid-size chunk of solid rock that could support its own weight with a hollow core.

Frankly, though, I'm more worried about George W. Bush gaining highly improbable mutant powers, flying into space to save the Space Shuttle, inadvertently merging with the Dark Phoenix, and scheming to destroy the world. It's about as likely, i.e. no chance in hell, and worrying about it occupies the same amount of time, i.e. zero seconds lifetime total.

• SOHO (LASCO C2/EIT)
• Vortex Dynamics in Superconductor
• TRACE

If you take the ISS and the shuttle out of the budget, the rest of NASA has been flat or losing money for years. Start here and compare the numbers to prior years. Look at the numbers for basically everything but Space Station, Space Shuttle, and Space Flight Support, and you'll see what I mean.

Being an astronaut is an incredibly hard job and I salute the brave men and women who risk their lives (and sanity) in the name of science.

As a job, being an astronaut today is not that great. The guys who go up on the ISS are being worked really hard for their whole tour, because it's now so hard to get people up there. The workload has increased substantially since the number of flights declined. There's a good chance the tour of duty in space may be longer than expected, due to problems on the ground. (The Soviet-era cosmonauts had it even worse; one guy was up on Mir for 438 days, being unfortunate enough to be up during the collapse of the Soviet Union.)

But that's not the worst part. NASA has too many people for the flight slots, so many of the "astronauts" will never fly. Right now, there are 100 flight-eligible astronauts, most of whom are doing mid-level management jobs. (NASA's phrase is "will serve in technical assignments until assigned to a space flight.") Or worse, filling the daily "lunch with an astronaut" slot. NASA is no longer training new astronauts.

Being an astronaut doesn't make you famous any more. Here's the list of active astronauts. How many have you heard of?

For those who hates streaming video and want to see the launch, here is a 14 MB MP4 file that can be downloaded.

For those who hates streaming video, here is a 14 MB MP4 one that can be downloaded.

"... if the mission is scrubbed again, the space agency must abandon for a few weeks its efforts to send the shuttle off on a construction mission to the International Space Station."

Making decisions under some kind of desperation is a recipe for disaster. For pilots, it's called get-home-itis. It results in pushing one's luck just a little too hard. http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/directline_issues/dl2_leg .htm
IIRC it's what killed JFK Jr. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/transportation/july -dec99/kennedy_7-19.html

She made it into orbit successfully. Liftoff was at 11:14:55 Eastern time.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/launch/i ndex.html

Well shame on NASA for not consulting /. before deciding to put their launch complex in Florida. Those silly morons. I'm sure there is no real good reason to launch from Florida anyway.

Slashdot nonsurprisingly is a day behind. The shuttle is still scheduled for launch. Check here for details.

The shuttle Atlantis is set for liftoff from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 11:41 a.m. EDT this morning. This "news post" is a little delayed. See NASA Launch Blog and NASA Online TV for up-to-date info.

for news about something like the shuttle, where the status changes from day to day,
it really pays to check a primary source. like
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/ind ex.html

This article is a little late wouldn't you say, the shuttle launches this morning baring any further delays. Also I believe they are choosing to fly with the damaged fuel cell as it is not a threat to the safety of the crew.
Good Update: http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/3484
Countdown ticker: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/ind ex.html

For those of you who want to read more on it. I'm currently ploguhing through his paper and and a few others but if anyone of the top knows whether Lieu used sigma8 from the WMAP 3yr results and how he selected clusters and estimated cluster mass... Skimming Lieu's paper his conclusion already claims that it is not inconsistent with previous SZE data for individual clusters. Anyways back to digesting papers.
 
Linkys

A primer on the SZE

[PDF WARNING]
Their paper on astro-ph

The WMAP 3 year results paper

[/PDF WARNING]

Agreed. If this is what nanotechnology has come to mean, then we need to abandon the word entirely, and move on to a new one. When I think of nanotechnology I think of molecular manufacturing, and Fullerene nanogears, you know, the sort of nanotechnology that actually moves around and does stuff.

Source for GUI is not open. Source for GCM is available at GISS. We'd love to do Linux but our interface language, 4D, does not support it. Please file requests with them until we re-do with a cross-platform language or web-based technologies.

good thing they found water on mars. No, just kidding, but seriously, there's water on mars.

Link

  These data are CO2 concentration of the air occluded in Siple Dome ice core,
  Antarctica. The study was conducted between January 2001 and March 2003 on a
  deep ice core from Siple Dome Core A, located at 81.66 S, 148.82 W. The data
  covers up to the Termination II (around 140,000 years ago). The parameters are
  depth in meters and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in part per million
  (ppm). The deepest depth (>995 m) show CO2 values of more than 390 ppm

You could... However, you'd then have to exclude all of the games from 2000.