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I know we don't have the previous satellite images from years gone by, but would it be practical to use some sort of image diffing program to look for changes in satellite imagery in the future? Yes, you'd get all the new building activity and whatnot, but we should also be able to tell when new craters hit (or other bigger changes happen) automatically. 'course, I've no idea how often global satellite images are updated, or how long it takes, so it might not be practical any time soon... Hundred years or so from now, it would be fun (if nothing else) to watch movies of how areas changed, both from direct human changes (buildings, etc) and from natural forces (coastal erosion and so on).

As for how long it would take to re-image the entire planet: a little more than a month, at minimum, but probably more like a year on average. The calculation is easy: it takes about 90 minutes to make one orbit of the Earth in low orbit. If we assume a conservative low orbit altitude of 100 miles and a conservative aperature for the orbital camera of 22 degrees, we get a ground track about 40 miles wide. The Earth's circumference is about 24,000 miles so it would take 600 orbits to get imagery strips covering the entire equator (assuming a polar or near-polar orbit). That would take at least 600*90 minutes = 5400 minutes / 60 minutes in an hour = 900 hours / 24 hours in a day = 37.5 days.

You can already get time-lapse movies and comaprison photos showing coastal erosion and human impact, the difference over only 10 years is quite noticable (heck, the difference from year to year for barrier islands is astonishing).

Are you sure the pics in that Pop. Sci. article were from orbit? Many very impressive "spy satellite" pictures out there actually came from U-2 spy planes. I don't think we had that kind of resolving power from orbit 25 years ago.

Well, the Mars Global Surveyor did take a picture of (albeit farther away) of Spirit's landing site-tracks, heat shield, and parachute. You can't see the actual rover. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mgs_mer.gif

This might be of interest to you. From the nasa website: "The Mars Orbiter Camera can resolve features on the surface of Mars as small as a few meters or yards across from Mars Global Surveyor's orbital altitude of 350 to 405 kilometers (217 to 252 miles). From a distance of 100 kilometers (62 miles), the camera would be able to resolve features substantially smaller than 1 meter or yard across" Take a look at the pictures on this site: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/mg s-images.html especially the Mars Odessey as seen by the Surveyor

The Surveyor orbits at 235 miles above Mars.

"Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can communicate with the Deep Space Network antennas on Earth using two different kinds of radio waves:

X-band: the current standard in communications, which, when amplified, will allow the orbiter to send data back to Earth more than 10 times faster than previous missions.

Ka-band: a previously untested radio frequency 4 times higher than X-band, which would allow scientists to bring data back even faster

From the viewpoint of a Deep Space Network antenna on Earth, the orbiter spends about one-third of its time in every orbit behind Mars. During these times, the orbiter is "occulted from the Earth." During occultations, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter cannot usefully send or receive radio signals.

So, out of 16 hours of daily Deep Space Network tracking, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will send data to Earth for 10 to 11 hours for about 700 days. The data rate will be about 0.5 to 4 megabits per second. With these figures in mind, the estimated volume of data returned by Mars Reconnaissance Orbit will be about 34 terrabits. That's equivalent to 4 terrabytes of data--about as much as can be stored on 6,500 compact disks. It's also 10 to 20 times more data than previous Mars missions and more data than all previous planetary missions combined.
".

From here.

I don't see that in the ALSJ. They got a quantity light but Armstrong had the vehicle on the ground within the required 60 seconds. And in any event the low quantity was a consequence of sloshing in the tanks and Armstrong could feel the fuel sloshing around by that time. He knew the gauge was wrong.

As a result if they have to abandon a shuttle in orbit there is absolutely no way to recover the vehicle. Sure the landing gear should have a manual arm switch (there will be a breaker for it anyway), and during a normal manual descent it could be armed 10 seconds before deployment, but there must be hundreds of things which the computers could break during the flight which would cause loss of the mission.

link to JPL Mission Control webcam http://137.78.244.28/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camer a=&showlength=1&resolution

NASAtv coverage has begun. http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/

Realtime Dopplar radar from MRO: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/realtime/mro-doppler_ lg.html

This is gonna be fun!

link to JPL Mission Control webcam http://137.78.244.28/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camer a=&showlength=1&resolution

NASAtv coverage has begun. http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/

Realtime Dopplar radar from MRO: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/realtime/mro-doppler_ lg.html

This is gonna be fun!

The current theory is found in this link

Yes, it's on its way to Titan.

I would counter that by pointing out that a gold-gold ion collision on RHIC involves at least ~1200 particles

There could be a million particles, and it still wouldn't be in thermodynamic equilibrium. Without this, describing a "temperature" has little meaning. When they make references to a temperature in there, they are simply saying that gold particles at that temperature would collide with a similar energy. But since there is nothing even close to thermodynamic equilibrium, a formal temperature cannot really be defined.

Actually, the solar observing projects haven't (yet) been cut completely--

STEREO is set to launch this year (but no one knows when, due to problems with a battery used in the system to destruct the third stage of the rocket in case something goes wrong)

SOLAR-B is set to launch this year as well (it's a joint JAXA project, though)

SDO should be on track as well

That's not to say that these projects aren't hitting financial problems -- STEREO's delay is a problem, as it costs more to keep the spacecraft in storage on the ground than it does to track them in space.

Actually, the solar observing projects haven't (yet) been cut completely--

STEREO is set to launch this year (but no one knows when, due to problems with a battery used in the system to destruct the third stage of the rocket in case something goes wrong)

SOLAR-B is set to launch this year as well (it's a joint JAXA project, though)

SDO should be on track as well

That's not to say that these projects aren't hitting financial problems -- STEREO's delay is a problem, as it costs more to keep the spacecraft in storage on the ground than it does to track them in space.

Actually, the solar observing projects haven't (yet) been cut completely--

STEREO is set to launch this year (but no one knows when, due to problems with a battery used in the system to destruct the third stage of the rocket in case something goes wrong)

SOLAR-B is set to launch this year as well (it's a joint JAXA project, though)

SDO should be on track as well

That's not to say that these projects aren't hitting financial problems -- STEREO's delay is a problem, as it costs more to keep the spacecraft in storage on the ground than it does to track them in space.

NASA = National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Not a word in there about science.


That has got to be about the dumbest fscking argument I've ever seen. Do you actually think that counts for something? Here's something called a fact. Watch out. This might hurt.

Quoted from the law which created NASA and guides it's purpose. http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/about/space_act1.h tml#POLICY

DECLARATION OF POLICY AND PURPOSE
Sec. 102.(d) The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives:

            (1) The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;


Sounds like science to me. Back under the bridge you little troll!

Cost of war in Iraq: 245.727 billion
NASA's 2006 Budget: 16.656 billion

Glad to see my government has no problems blowing 14 years worth of operating expenses on something that by all appearances will never have a positive outcome, while letting vital programs for all of earth collapse.

Dang... I just saw this on slashdot a few minutes after I submitted it myself. For the curious, here's my version of the submission, which includes some different info and a link to a SpaceRef story which has more pictures of the capsule:

SpaceX has revealed that for the past few years they've been secretly developing the Dragon space capsule, which will be the first privately-built manned orbital spacecraft. The company has already built a full-scale working prototype and thoroughly tested its life support system, with the capsule development using 'only a small part of the $100 million [CEO/founder Elon Musk] has invested in SpaceX to-date building the Falcon 1 [orbital rocket] and getting started on the larger and more powerful Falcon 9.' According to Musk, 'I feel very confident about being able to offer NASA an ISS-servicing capability by 2009 and am prepared to back that up with my own funding.' It's believed that Musk will also compete for crew/cargo delivery contracts to private space station modules built by Bigelow Aerospace.

All in all, I'm very excited about this announcement. I'm sure SpaceX wishes that they could have gotten their Falcon I rocket off the ground before announcing the capsule, but the deadline for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems (COTS) program was a few days ago. The COTS program is the means by which NASA hopes to award competitive contracts to delivery crew and cargo to the International Space Station, in order to reduce reliance on the Russians and promote the development of private spaceflight. Since the capsule is a critical part of their COTS proposal, SpaceX pretty much had to let the secret out.

I don't deny that that the Space Shuttle is a marvel of engineering, but scaling it down to the point where it could fit under by a YB-type carrier AND carry a decent payload just doesn't seem feasible, unless the Air Force has already mastered hypersonic flight with scramjets.

Well there are the remarkable correlations between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature, even over the 650,000 years spanned by Antarctic ice cores.

What may be even more remarkable is the correlation between solar activity and atmospheric temperature.

There is increasing opinion that solar activity is a primary cause of warming. In fact, solar output has been increasing about .05% since 1970.

This is a decent summary.

I think it is time to have another go at a jupiter atmosphere probe. This time try for a hot hydrogen balloon, heated by an RTG. If we don't do the basic research we will never understand the biggest planet in our solar system.

Of all of the interesting phenomena in the outer solar system I'd say further investigation of Jupiter's atmosphere is down the list. Some missions of greater interest:

• Neptune/Triton orbiter
• Titan rover
• Asteroid sample return
• Europa orbiter/lander

An excellent point, but Venus is completly covered in clouds. Venus can't accumulate any more clouds, so a balancing of temperature on Venus due to extra cloud cover cannot occur. Earth, however, still has a "buffer" because only about 60% of earth is covered in clouds.

In case someone was wondering if clouds really did cool the earth, here is an exerpt from "The Earth Observing System":

"Whether a given cloud will cause heating or cooling depends on several factors, such as the clouds height, its size, and the make-up of the particles that form the cloud. The balance between the cooling and warming actions of global cloud cover is very close although, overall, cloud cover produces cooling on a global basis."

http://eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov/eos_homepage/for_educa tors/eos_edu_pack/p04.php

actually, it's already begun; http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/sh ownh.php3?img_id=13209

Yep Hottest year ever.

Cause now we can have vineyards in England again, right?

Or there is a massive food surplus out of an unfrozen North?

Yes it is warmer than we are used to but it's not unreasonably hot in comparison with human history. We've had warmer.

Now what I want is a series of concrete measures to solve it. If you are going to complain don't just do fear. Come up with a way to solve it with out asking for us to live in communes.

Oh and our Sun is a G2 sequence that over time will heat up and have small spectral shifts in it's output. We don't have that many years of data of good spectra data for it. Nor has an exhaustive study been done on effects of nonlinear optics in the low UV region with common earth elements.

http://science.nasa.gov/ssl/pad/solar/sunspots.htm

The sun spot number has have a recorded correlation with temperatures. UV and X-ray emissions are affected and another possible effect as they may be absorbed far more readily than normal.

Which would explain why mars is warming too. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age _031208.html

here you go, i thought this was a nerds site not one for lazy fskers, you overweight by any chance ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_change

or perhaps a middle school project would explain it better
http://pumas.jpl.nasa.gov/PDF_Examples/02_10_97_1. pdf

Ground-based telescope systems are actually important, contrary to popular /. opinion. For example, Swift takes about a minute to slew its Ultraviolet and Optical Telescope (UVOT) to a gamma ray burst (GRB). When Swift first triggers on a GRB, it sends that information to the ground, which is then sent throughout the world to astronomers and robotic telescope systems alike. Those robotic systems are then observing the GRB (provided that it's night and not raining at the telescope's location) within a few seconds of Swift triggering on the GRB. Thus, they are able to observe the *early* optical and infrared afterglow, while Swift is still slewing to the GRB.

There are also cataclysmic variable surveys, transient surveys, and other uses of the robotic systems when they're not pursuing GRBs. These are far easier and cheaper to develop and deploy than space-based telescopes. Each mission has it's limitations, but there is good science to be done by each. Thinking Telescopes has more information about robotic systems and the software behind them.

So yes, the days of a professional astronomer staring through a telescope to study the stars is probably long over. But that does not mean that ground systems are obsolete or outdated. Hell with the budget cannibalization going on at NASA, astronomers are going to loose the largest means of space based missions: Explorers. So when we can't launch into space, we'll build on the ground or make balloon experiments to observe in energies that are blocked by the ozone (amazingly enough, these are still done).

And the picture they use in the bloody article is a RADIO telescope! Radio really isn't affected by contrails or climate change! The biggest concern is in the optical to infrared ranges, where the moisture and clouds do the most damage to light (diffraction, reflection, etc). Radio and microwave suffer most from cell phones, gps units, radio and television broadcasting, etc. That's why radio observatories are out in the middle of *no where*.

Ground-based telescope systems are actually important, contrary to popular /. opinion. For example, Swift takes about a minute to slew its Ultraviolet and Optical Telescope (UVOT) to a gamma ray burst (GRB). When Swift first triggers on a GRB, it sends that information to the ground, which is then sent throughout the world to astronomers and robotic telescope systems alike. Those robotic systems are then observing the GRB (provided that it's night and not raining at the telescope's location) within a few seconds of Swift triggering on the GRB. Thus, they are able to observe the *early* optical and infrared afterglow, while Swift is still slewing to the GRB.

There are also cataclysmic variable surveys, transient surveys, and other uses of the robotic systems when they're not pursuing GRBs. These are far easier and cheaper to develop and deploy than space-based telescopes. Each mission has it's limitations, but there is good science to be done by each. Thinking Telescopes has more information about robotic systems and the software behind them.

So yes, the days of a professional astronomer staring through a telescope to study the stars is probably long over. But that does not mean that ground systems are obsolete or outdated. Hell with the budget cannibalization going on at NASA, astronomers are going to loose the largest means of space based missions: Explorers. So when we can't launch into space, we'll build on the ground or make balloon experiments to observe in energies that are blocked by the ozone (amazingly enough, these are still done).

And the picture they use in the bloody article is a RADIO telescope! Radio really isn't affected by contrails or climate change! The biggest concern is in the optical to infrared ranges, where the moisture and clouds do the most damage to light (diffraction, reflection, etc). Radio and microwave suffer most from cell phones, gps units, radio and television broadcasting, etc. That's why radio observatories are out in the middle of *no where*.

Escape velocity is defined as @sqrt(2GM/r). G is 6.67e-11 m^3 s^-2 kg^-1. M and r (hald the diameter) for this asteroid are 2.7e11 kg and 290 m, respectively.

So, Ve for this asteroid is = @sqrt(2*6.67e-11*2.7e11/290) = 0.35 m/s

This number is a *lot* lower that I would have guessed without having done the calculations.

I stand corrected... if you can land any kind of functioning acceleration system, achieving escape velocity for material pitched off the asteroid will be no big deal, even if you want to use really big rocks.

The Navy's rail gun gives a muzzle velocity of 2500m/s for a 20kg round. A system operating at even a fraction of this power level would be able to fling even very, very large rocks off at escape velocity.

I believe that if we don't have the commitment -- in hearts, minds, and dollars -- from the American people for a manned mission to Mars, then we just shouldn't do it.

Preferably with some signs of life, but aliens are not required - Hollywood will fill in the rest.

I've gone through this entire thread and haven't found a single argument for that first A, Aeronautics. I've been working with NASA for years on the Small Aircraft Transportation System program. We were just informed that there is going to be no funding support for it this year.

Why is it that 99.999% of NASA's "customers" travel by air and .001% travel into space, but the budget is so lopsided that that almost 98% of the funding is going to Space flight? We're not done innovating in the atmosphere yet! We need to get the national airspace system up to date so it can handle the future needs/growth of air flight. We need to make smaller airplanes safer... we need to do a lot and NASA is the governments only arm that is doing this type of research.

NASA is the only government agency that is tasked with doing three things... Space Science, Space Flight and Aeronautical Research. I think we need to break it up in to 3 distinct organizations along those lines. That way we could focus on what each one does best without killing the others.

Bill

I don't see a Hubble mission anywhere on the list of upcoming shuttle missions.

A couple of useful things came out of it, but not much.

There's a searchable database of spinoff technology from NASA. It's not a small amount. A lot of the things seem minor, but there's just a huge, huge number of them, including high-power switching transistors, heat pipes for laptops, etc.

It's difficult to say "well, the entire industry came from NASA..." and so it doesn't look nearly as impressive. But a large, large number of techniques and inventions for NASA end up going into commercial production. Even stupid stuff like U-shaped circuit board connectors and food fatigue. There are more important things there, like LSI design techniques and breadboards.

A couple of useful things came out of it, but not much.

There's a searchable database of spinoff technology from NASA. It's not a small amount. A lot of the things seem minor, but there's just a huge, huge number of them, including high-power switching transistors, heat pipes for laptops, etc.

It's difficult to say "well, the entire industry came from NASA..." and so it doesn't look nearly as impressive. But a large, large number of techniques and inventions for NASA end up going into commercial production. Even stupid stuff like U-shaped circuit board connectors and food fatigue. There are more important things there, like LSI design techniques and breadboards.

A couple of useful things came out of it, but not much.

There's a searchable database of spinoff technology from NASA. It's not a small amount. A lot of the things seem minor, but there's just a huge, huge number of them, including high-power switching transistors, heat pipes for laptops, etc.

It's difficult to say "well, the entire industry came from NASA..." and so it doesn't look nearly as impressive. But a large, large number of techniques and inventions for NASA end up going into commercial production. Even stupid stuff like U-shaped circuit board connectors and food fatigue. There are more important things there, like LSI design techniques and breadboards.

A couple of useful things came out of it, but not much.

There's a searchable database of spinoff technology from NASA. It's not a small amount. A lot of the things seem minor, but there's just a huge, huge number of them, including high-power switching transistors, heat pipes for laptops, etc.

It's difficult to say "well, the entire industry came from NASA..." and so it doesn't look nearly as impressive. But a large, large number of techniques and inventions for NASA end up going into commercial production. Even stupid stuff like U-shaped circuit board connectors and food fatigue. There are more important things there, like LSI design techniques and breadboards.

A couple of useful things came out of it, but not much.

There's a searchable database of spinoff technology from NASA. It's not a small amount. A lot of the things seem minor, but there's just a huge, huge number of them, including high-power switching transistors, heat pipes for laptops, etc.

It's difficult to say "well, the entire industry came from NASA..." and so it doesn't look nearly as impressive. But a large, large number of techniques and inventions for NASA end up going into commercial production. Even stupid stuff like U-shaped circuit board connectors and food fatigue. There are more important things there, like LSI design techniques and breadboards.

A couple of useful things came out of it, but not much.

There's a searchable database of spinoff technology from NASA. It's not a small amount. A lot of the things seem minor, but there's just a huge, huge number of them, including high-power switching transistors, heat pipes for laptops, etc.

It's difficult to say "well, the entire industry came from NASA..." and so it doesn't look nearly as impressive. But a large, large number of techniques and inventions for NASA end up going into commercial production. Even stupid stuff like U-shaped circuit board connectors and food fatigue. There are more important things there, like LSI design techniques and breadboards.

A couple of useful things came out of it, but not much.

There's a searchable database of spinoff technology from NASA. It's not a small amount. A lot of the things seem minor, but there's just a huge, huge number of them, including high-power switching transistors, heat pipes for laptops, etc.

It's difficult to say "well, the entire industry came from NASA..." and so it doesn't look nearly as impressive. But a large, large number of techniques and inventions for NASA end up going into commercial production. Even stupid stuff like U-shaped circuit board connectors and food fatigue. There are more important things there, like LSI design techniques and breadboards.

Torino scale (maximum): 2

A two is the bottom of the category "Meriting Attention from Astronomers", above "Normal" but below "Threatening". From the site, about a two on the Torino scale:

A discovery, which may become routine with expanded searches, of an object making a somewhat close but not highly unusual pass near the Earth. While meriting attention by astronomers, there is no cause for public attention or public concern as an actual collision is very unlikely. New telescopic observations very likely will lead to re-assignment to Level 0.

If there's a clearer way to say "stop panicking everytime we see something", I'm not sure what it is.

I think someone forgot the conversion number to put inside the parenthesis as yards does not equal meters at a factor of 1:1 ... Should've been, 580 metres (638 yards). Also, 500 is not correct as according to the JPL, the diameter is 580 meters.

This is a 2 on the Torino scale:

A discovery, which may become routine with expanded searches, of an object making a somewhat close but not highly unusual pass near the Earth. While meriting attention by astronomers, there is no cause for public attention or public concern as an actual collision is very unlikely. New telescopic observations very likely will lead to re-assignment to Level 0.

For anyone interested in the hard numbers, here's NASA's impact risk summary of 2004 VD17.

For those like myself who prefer pretty pictures, here's the 3D orbit diagram of 2004 VD17 (Java required).

For anyone interested in the hard numbers, here's NASA's impact risk summary of 2004 VD17.

For those like myself who prefer pretty pictures, here's the 3D orbit diagram of 2004 VD17 (Java required).

They only have 3 to spare:

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/resources/orbi ters/orbiters.html

Conceptual development of the spacecraft ia actually a lot farther along than most people realize.

Actually all of these database problems are solved by Migration in ruby on rails. Not only do they allow you a database agnostic representation of your database schema defined purely in ruby (for sql server, mysql, sqlite, db2, oracle, postgres). They also give you schema versioning capabilities that tie into your deployment tasks if you're using switchtower.

I also find the idea of having to write my queries in a specialized 'portable' query language pretty annoying. If you use standard SQL it is portable anyhow and adding one more level of indirection so I can do the same thing is, not too bright. But with migrations you don't have to worry about any of that anyway.

This is also pretty informative about web applications and frameworks
http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov

Ruby, by design, takes less lines to do the same thing than most statically typed languages mainly because of its heavy usage of lexical closures. Closures are implemented as what people see as 'blocks' in ruby, which allows code to be more meaningful and terse.

The ball is expected to remain in orbit for three to four years.

ISS loses about 2 KM of altitude per month if it doesn't use it's engines to gain some altitude (it's in a rather low orbit, so it does go through a tiny bit of our atmosphere, and this does slow it down) and if they ever did fail to gain altitude every few months, this drop would accelerate greatly as it got down more into our atmosphere. As a consequence of the square-cube law, smaller objects will generally drop even faster (because the ratio of surface area/mass increases as you get smaller, and so your deacceleration due to drag increases similarly.) Suitsat is probably a good deal less dense than a golf ball, and irregularly shaped, so it will certainly be much more draggy, and even though it's more massive I'd expect it to stay up for a shorter period of time, but even so ... a factor of 30 difference in how long they stay up seems awfully high.

Three to four years sounds like about how long the ISS would stay up without any thrust, but maybe it's longer than that. And a golf ball is pretty good at slipping through the air (that's what the dimples are all about) so maybe it's will stay up so long just because of that.

Or maybe Pavel Vinogradov has one hell of a swinging arm ...

LDEF taught us a lot about impact damage from space junk, since it was up there for a long time, and was retrieved.

"With a relative impact velocity of 10 km/s, a piece of aluminum debris which is ~0.7 mm in diameter can penetrate through a typical 2.5 mm thick aluminum satellite wall. During its 5.75 year exposure, LDEF saw one (1) impact of this size per 7 [square meters] of exposed surface area in the RAM direction. In addition to this, LDEF experienced ~1 impact [per square meter], on ram-exposed surfaces, which could have penetrated a typical 1.5 mm thick aluminum electronics box."
-http://setas-www.larc.nasa.gov/LDEF/MET_DEB/md_im pact.html

1 impact per square meter over 6 years in orbit. So, you need to make your spacecraft really small, or really thick, or you need to go up for very short periods of time and cross your fingers. And that's without golf balls whizzing past.

Also; if you and the golf-ball are in very similar orbits, this means the golf ball will have a speed very close to yours, relatively speaking. ISS is in a very low orbit, going around 7700 m/s. If you and the ball are both travelling 7700 m/s though, having your orbit be off by only 1 degree relative to each other means a 134 m/s impact, or 482 km/h, which is still going to leave a nasty bruise.

See also this screencast for a comparison of Ruby on Rails, Zope (Plone), TurboGears, and Django. Oh, and J2EE which fares ... rather poorly in my opinion.

Warning: the screencast is 36 minutes long!

Firstly - I don't actually work for NASA, but this should be fairly accurate info...

The next major revision *should* be also done in Java meaning some nice cross-platform capability. Sun is pretty interested in the whole thing last I heard. Should be out some time this year, I really don't have a clue when.

There is a forum section for ports: http://forum.worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/index.php?show forum=27

And someone has created a 2D WW clone in Java which runs on Linux, but apart from that, it's all talk and no walk the talk...understandable really since it's not exactly a thing for anyone but someone in a full-time team to be able to do.

Problem is NASA just hasn't had the budget to fund extra developers to do a cross-platform rewrite which is why there isn't one yet, and is also why they switched from OpenGL to C# & MDX back in ~summer 04 - to get something out before the funding was cut.

It's not a lack of will or interest, our goal as a community is to get free imagery out there and get it used, to make these tools available to all to hack away for their own needs, and so on. Home, schools, military....you name it.

World Wind is open source and frankly without us ~20 - 30 'core' volunteers (~10 of us originate from when WW was slashdotted in Sep 04, including me) it wouldn't be anywhere close to what it is today. But switching to a cross-platform method or any one person / small group coding their own just hasn't been do-able.

If there was one thing I'd say it would be 'support NASA' because they've done some great things with World Wind and they've listened to us, the community (most of the time ;) and done things a government agency would never do (*we* got them to use Bit Torrent to distribute the downloads, *we* got lighttpd running on their servers, etc). Write to NASA management, write to government officials...get the $$ and get the imagery, and we'll show you what we can do.

If anyone wants to drop by and contribute, please do, it's all good fun and freeee to be hacked away at. http://www.worldwindcentral.com/ and http://forum.worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/ - see ya there ;)

Firstly - I don't actually work for NASA, but this should be fairly accurate info...

The next major revision *should* be also done in Java meaning some nice cross-platform capability. Sun is pretty interested in the whole thing last I heard. Should be out some time this year, I really don't have a clue when.

There is a forum section for ports: http://forum.worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/index.php?show forum=27

And someone has created a 2D WW clone in Java which runs on Linux, but apart from that, it's all talk and no walk the talk...understandable really since it's not exactly a thing for anyone but someone in a full-time team to be able to do.

Problem is NASA just hasn't had the budget to fund extra developers to do a cross-platform rewrite which is why there isn't one yet, and is also why they switched from OpenGL to C# & MDX back in ~summer 04 - to get something out before the funding was cut.

It's not a lack of will or interest, our goal as a community is to get free imagery out there and get it used, to make these tools available to all to hack away for their own needs, and so on. Home, schools, military....you name it.

World Wind is open source and frankly without us ~20 - 30 'core' volunteers (~10 of us originate from when WW was slashdotted in Sep 04, including me) it wouldn't be anywhere close to what it is today. But switching to a cross-platform method or any one person / small group coding their own just hasn't been do-able.

If there was one thing I'd say it would be 'support NASA' because they've done some great things with World Wind and they've listened to us, the community (most of the time ;) and done things a government agency would never do (*we* got them to use Bit Torrent to distribute the downloads, *we* got lighttpd running on their servers, etc). Write to NASA management, write to government officials...get the $$ and get the imagery, and we'll show you what we can do.

If anyone wants to drop by and contribute, please do, it's all good fun and freeee to be hacked away at. http://www.worldwindcentral.com/ and http://forum.worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/ - see ya there ;)

Ok, lets look at the first three papers on NASA's site that I run into:

Novel Composite Membrane for Space Life Supporting System

Novel manufacturing process for unique mixed carbide refractory composites

Novel Tunable Dye Laser for Lidar Detection

I hate when people gripe about generalized "academics" just because they're not familiar with the topic being discussed. Yes, there *are* things to criticize about peer review, and which some people (such as Sokal) have abused amusingly. But such broad sweeping generalizations are grossly unfair to the academic community as a whole. If you had to explain every single word that you used, your wordcount would go up a hundredfold. Applied sciences deal with many concepts that simply cannot be summed up concisely.

What word would you use to replace "lidar"? Do you want the author of the last paper to have to write out "holographic polymer dispersed liquid crystals" each time instead of HPDLC? Should the second author have to define STTR when the work is being done as part of a SSTR project? Do they need to explain what a "hafnium/silicon based carbide composite" is for people unfamiliar with some of those words? What about "microporous aminosilicate membrane"?

Technical terminology isn't used to try and sound impressive (99% of the time). It is used because it is the right terminology.