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Umm nice troll, That would be buy seats on the soyus because it cheaper to fly then the shuttle, which is still grounded(whole other issue). Did you read the story you linked too? The ISS was almost put completely on hold because Russian could not afford to build the pieces of the ISS they where committed to build. I am not saying that other countries are not making HUGE strides in space but where did you get this whole notion of we are broke as the reason for that comment? I mean here is NASA's budget and operating plan for 2006 http://www.nasa.gov/about/budget/ Having a 16 billion dollar budget doesn't sound broke to me. (yes the U.S. has a huge amount of dept and that sucks for us, Bush sucks.) Maybe its not enough to do all the thing they want to do because of cutbacks but I am not that well informed on that subject. Oh here is a link to the Russian financial issue that put the whole ISS in jeopardy though http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/progress_iss_ 020425.html

No kidding, just ask John Young on Apollo 16:

[In the following, John doesn't realize he still has a hot mike. Charlie is only faintly audible through John's mike and the following undoubtedly contains transcription errors.]

128:50:37 Young: I have the farts, again. I got them again, Charlie. I don't know what the hell gives them to me. Certainly not...I think it's acid stomach. I really do.

128:50:44 Duke: It probably is.

128:50:45 Young: (Laughing) I mean, I haven't eaten this much citrus fruit in 20 years! And I'll tell you one thing, in another 12 fucking days, I ain't never eating any more. And if they offer to sup(plement) me potassium with my breakfast, I'm going to throw up! (Pause) I like an occasional orange. Really do. (Laughs) But I'll be durned if I'm going to be buried in oranges.

From http://www.history.nasa.gov/alsj/a16/a16.debrief1. html

Taking a more educated approach you have to look at the modern scientific research
that has been done in regards to the Casimir Effect .

http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/15/9/6

Merely one of the modern day brilliant scientists looking into this efect is Puthoff .

http://www.keelynet.com/gravity/putnasa.htm

Please read the references at bottom of the page, discredit one doubtful, all ludicrously so .

Excerpt of nasa study:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/po ssible.html#vac

Zero Point Energy (ZPE), or vacuum fluctuation energy are terms used to describe the random electromagnetic oscillations that are left in a vacuum after all other energy has been removed. If you remove all the energy from a space, take out all the matter, all the heat, all the light... everything -- you will find that there is still some energy left. One way to explain this is from the uncertainty principle from quantum physics that implies that it is impossible to have an absolutely zero energy condition.

Add up the energy for all those different frequencies of light and the amount of energy in a given space is enormous, even mind boggling, ranging from 10^36 to 10^70 Joules/m3.

If you choose to call the research scientists at NASA quacks, that is your prerogative.

Zero Point energy absolutley sounds like fairy tale science, but every once in a blue moon
something comes along that truly stuns the world .

Like Warp Drive research being funded with this concept at the root of it .

http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=16902006

At times like this, Technology does approach being indistinguishable from what some call magic, hehe .

Ex-MislTech

As I recall, there are already some very high power and large wind tunnels at the NASA Ames research center in Mountain View California. http://windtunnels.arc.nasa.gov/. For those of you that live in Silicon Valley, I'm sure you are all familiar with the gigantic wind tunnel that is large enouph to handle a complete mid-sized airliner.

The Great Stellarium (open source):
http://www.stellarium.org/
Celestia (also free):
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
NASA's astronoly picture of the day:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/

Stellarium is really a must-download for anyone even slightly interested in astronomy. It's another open source software success.

There is always the moon from our overlords... but moon through NASA's WorldWind too.

Nasa has up a Skywatching site with all sorts of fancy pictures.

I strongly suggest looking through this article (Yes, I know this is Slashdot, how could I suggest such a thing) as I found the summary made me extremely skeptical. If the information is not falsified, I would say it is certainly worth investigating, even with a hefty grain of salt. . . or would that be grains? . . .anyway I digress. I found the electron microscope pictures quite intriguing, it certainly "looked" like a cell, though I understand this sort of observation is hardly irrefutable. I did not see any evidence of the particles replicating which would suggest life (they could replicate and still not be considered "life" ofcourse). I believe a good analog would be the potential bacteria found in a Martian meteor.

before anyone gets all excited about this. Look here:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/wa rp.html

what does "winning in a collision" even mean?
i'm honestly tyring to understand how having a heavier car will help you in a collision. the only way to be safer in a collision is to minimize the acceleration that you undergo. you do this by maximizing the time that the collision takes. that is the main factor in the forces that are applied to the colliding vehicles.

for instance, you are in a car with mass m1 going v1 and you hit a car with mass m2 going v2. if both final speeds are 0, car 1 will experience a force of

f = m * a, and a = (v final - v initial) /t

f1 = m1 * (0 - v1) / t

and car 2

f2 = m2 * (0 - v2) / t

so, the way to minimize the force that the cars experience is to maximize the time the collision takes.
and the way to maximize the time is to design the car so that the materials absorb the energy of the applied force better, not to make the cars heavier.

basically, you want the front (or whatever side of the car is hit) to absorb the energy from the collision, not the passenger compartment.
if you have a heavy car designed like a brick, you'll be screwed in a collision because the energy from the collision will find its way to the passengers.
but if you have a light car that is designed really good, you'll be safer in a collision than a heavy car.

just look at f1/indy cars/nascar. they undergo some pretty brutal collisions but are far lighter than your average suv (only like 1500 lbs for an indy car and 3,400 for nascar).
http://www.nascar.com/2005/news/headlines/official /07/14/ford_fusion/
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Education/Racecar/de velopment.html

but the drivers survive those brutal collisions because the cars are designed well.
if you are in a nascar car and you collide head on with an 5000 lb suv at 40 mph, you'll probably suffer no injuries, while the driver in the suv will probably be hurt a little bit, even though your car weighs over a 1000 lbs less.

I'm happy with my moonbuggy, the safest vehicle out there. http://moonbuggy.msfc.nasa.gov/images/mbmid.gif

The particles in the ISM follow the Mazwell-Boltzmann distribution of velocities with a temperature
of actually 2.725 K. Read here what the guys who measured it have to say (WMAP experiment).

Specifically, Mercury's day is 58.65 earth days long, while its year is 87.97 earth days long (source: NASA JPL).

From the same source, we see that Mercury's minimum temperature is about 100K (comfortably colder than liquid nitrogen). Obviously that would occur on the currently-dark side of the planet. So while there's no permanently-dark side of Mercury, there's certainly a cold dark part of mercury somewhere at any given point in time, and that coldest part is only about 50K away from Pluto's temp (presumably an average).

Moral of the story: computers wouldn't like the cold on Pluto, but they wouldn't like the 700K highs on Mercury either. Also, as a wise man once said, "It's funny. Laugh."

That no one is visiting the moon anytime soon..

Russians sent several Moon robots (Lunokhods) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990109.html and got Moon rocks back. That's much easier way to get stuff from the Moon than manned missions.

If you subscribe to NASA Science News you get to read about it on December 23rd. Link

Click "Join mailing list" at the top.

old? December 23rd, 2005
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/22dec_luna rtaurid.htm

Would help if they didn't use Flash, and actually had links to the Nasa site, so we could save them for our wallpapers, instead of clicking taking you to the next pic.

i.e.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040305.html

http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/photo/comet3d.html -

Stardust's mission has gone relatively smoothly- I've been checking in every few months because I can't help but be impressed by scale of this experiment. And this time, they ever thought to put a parachute in the return capsule, unlike that other probe which captured solar wind particles, then smashed into the desert floor when the stunt 'copters didn't make the catch. (The sun must've been in their eyes...) The comet pass-through two years ago might have been overshadowed by the Mars Rover(s) story- one of 'em landed just around the same time as Stardust's Wild 2 encounter.

I heard about those, there is the 1953 Miller Laboratory Experiment with the amino acids and that one recently where scientists think that life may have started in deep space http://web99.arc.nasa.gov/~astrochm/vesicle.html which sounds more like the one you are referring to.

I think there are problems with these types of experiments, because it takes the application lots of intelligence to prove that life started without intelligence.

Then you have the problems of the statistics of just 1 cell coming about by chance and the numbers are obscene, 10 to the 100th power or something like that.

Worse still you have the chicken and egg situation again. Proteins can not form without DNA, DNA can not form with proteins.

The GOES satellites are in an equatorial orbit. they have a view of the US from there, but are not directly over the US.

The significance of this particular story is that a thin, attenuated light echo was used to locate a supernova that is no longer visible. APOD has had far more spectacular light echoes but usually you can plainly see the primary source of the echo at the center since they are only a few years old. In this case the echoes they found were hundreds of years old- thin expanding rings of reflected light hundreds of light years in diameter- with centers that were completely dark. The echoes were only found serendipitously using digital image processing during a search for something else (dark matter).

While it wasn't a supernova, the January 2002 flash from star V838 Monocerotis in the Milky Way made a nice, photogenic light-echo quite recently. The star, its flash, and the subsequent light echo are interesting for several reasons:

1. The reason for the flash remains unexplained by theory, and the star has been posing problems for theorists ever since. Stars that make problems for theorists are always interesting.
2. Although the flash was not a supernova, it made V838 Mon the brightest star in the entire Milky Way for a few days. The star's normal intensity was about 1 Sun, but at its peak the brightness was equivalent to 600,000 Suns. (For comparison, Rigel shines with the light of 40,000 Suns, and Deneb, one of the most powerful Milky Way stars known, shines with the light of up to 250,000.) But the flash was not a supernova (not bright enough) nor a nova since the star did not lose its outer envelope. The star swelled to a huge size (it would have reached the radius of Jupiter's orbit) and remained cooler at its surface than it had been before the flash.
3. The star has a lot of interstellar dust surrounding it for light-years in every direction, which makes for good pictures as the light-echo from the flash widens and illuminates successive rings of dust around the star. (In any light-echo the rings are circular paraboloids, really, centered around the star-earth line, with the star at the focus of the paraboloid. The light echo you see is effectively reflecting off a huge "parabolic mirror" made of dust and pointing at you.)
4. V838 Mon is in the Milky Way (only 20000 light years distant) so we can get better pictures of its light echo than the light echos associated with any recent supernovas. (The closest recent supernova was SN1987A and that was in the LMC, not the Milky Way.) People discovered this thing only a few days after it happened and we now have a sequence of very nice shots covering it at all times starting at the very beginning of the echo.

V838 Mon has been featured on APOD eight times since 2002. Its light echo is now 8 years in diameter and is still vividly lighting up successive rings of crap in the vicinity of the star. There are many animations of the echo on the web but look for the more newer ones since they have more frames that include observations from 2004-2005.

No widely accepted theory has succeeded in explaining the exact mechanism that caused the flash but astronomers generally agree that V838 Mon is a member of a new class of variable star that has been seen only twice before: M31-RV, a red variable in Andromeda that had a flash in 1989, and V4332 Sagittari, a red giant in Sagittarius that flashed in 1994. Current ideas include both cannibalism of a binary companion and planet swallowing.

The summary is a bit misleading. Light echoes are by no means a recent discovery. APOD viewers like me have seen them since at least 1997.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap971023.html

Since it is Christmas, I shall be kind to such a response. Mars is experiencing Global Warming.

So is NASA lying? Or don't you believe in their facts?

The very best displays are those that show up on NASA's GOES East 1km Visible Satellite Imagery.

Another NASA article says the dust stuck on the astronauts, and that they noticed weird symptoms inside the spaceship.

The explosion was "equal in energy to about 70 kg", which does not mean it exploded like 70 kg of TNT would have. This explosion was much more concentrated. It is unknown how much and in which shape the dust is blown around, but it is probably quite a big area, which means you don't have to be hit by the meteoroid.

Obviously they can calculate the objects kinetic energy from the intensity of the flash. This will give them mass or speed, but not both. Perhaps the speed came from their assumption about the origin of the meteoroid, but that could still be wrong, of course.

BTW if anybody is interested in exactly what it was like to be walking on the moon in the 60's and 70's I recommend they have a look at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

MisterBuggie wrote:

I'm curious, this is the first I've heard of Earth having a ring.

AOL

And, it would seem we're in good company. NASA hasn't heard of one, either.

Cheers,

b&

http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Har rison/BlackHoleThermo/BlackHoleThermo.html

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answer s/011125b.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/C007571/english/adva nce/core3.htm

The only part that is really recent is that replication itself starts easily from the goo. The only "trick" seems to be cycling the reagents in & out (think a tidal pool) and using lots of little samples (again, think a tidal pool) rather than one big one. A quick google turns up lots of examples which (if you piece them together) cover the whole gamut. A small sampling:

• Regular enzymes
• ribozyms
• DNA enzymes
• A dinosaur optical pigment
• ..and so on and so forth.

--MarkusQ

I can't believe I didn't get on either of the name list microchips on this probe. Poot!

I can't believe I didn't get on either of the name list microchips on this probe. Poot!

I can't believe I didn't get on either of the name list microchips on this probe. Poot!

I think Caltech should of taken over Los Alamos. Los Alamos would be a Caltech 'Department'. :-)
Just like JPL is a department of Caltech. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/

But then I'm biased, I work at Caltech.

acc to http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/journey-probe. cfm, the probe released by galileo hit jupiter's atmosphere at about 4 times that.

Let's hope for a smoother reentry than that of the Genesis probe

acc to http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/journey-probe. cfm, the probe released by galileo hit jupiter's atmosphere at about 4 times that.

It seems a bit strange to me that an "all metal aircraft" can have sufficient heat insulation for an orbital re-entry... someone can clarify this?

You have access to the moon rocks? Sweet! Can I have just a little one please?

Request one yourself.

Well, you can prove that at least one thing was left behind by bouncing a laser off the reflector array deployed by Apollo 11. Don't bother trying it with your laser pointer though.

Didn't they leave a laser http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/21jul_llr. htm target on the moon, that is designed to bounce back a laser aimed at it? Perhaps if you could independently confirm the existance of that mirror, you could prove that there have been men on the moon.
It would also give you the chance to play around with some cool high-intensity lasers as well!

The chip is placed in a vacuum, which then gets injected with a vapor of cadmium ions. When the appropriate voltages are applied to the electrodes, a cadmium ion with a free electron becomes trapped, floating between the cantilevers above the etched hole. In order to actually use the atom's free electron for computation, Monroe explains, the ion must be probed by a laser beam that reads the electron's spin state.

http://science.msfc.nasa.gov/ssl/pad/solar/sun_win d.htm

Is it possible for solar wind to affect the ions and electrons making these calculations?

The article is interesting in the use of GPS recievers to gather information. Let's look at two datasets.

From Wikipedia: "The accuracy of the GPS signal itself is about 5 meters (16 ft) as of 2005 and has steadily improved over the last 15 years. Using differential GPS and other error-correcting techniques, the accuracy can be improved to about 1 cm (.4 in) over short distances."

From NASA: "Large earthquakes often cause permanent movement of the Earth's surface, a result of the motion that occurs deep underground. The tsunamis spawned by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake on December 26, 2004, were the result of motions of the sea floor above the earthquake fault. Seismic measurements and computer models show that the Burma Plate slipped up to 20 meters (66 feet) at the location of the earthquake, 18 kilometers underground. The sea floor above moved less, up to 5 meters (16 feet) vertically and 11 meters (36 feet) horizontally."

So, the practical uses of this, even without error-correction, are theoretically viable for creating an early warning system for Tsunamis.

The article states that it should only really take 70 seconds for "a good idea of the final deformation". Linking this data to website and government run servers, the early warning system for Tsunamis would be far greater and accurate that say, tornado early warning systems. Consider the following exerpt from PBS's NewsHour: Developing a Global Tsunami Warning System: "STUART WEINSTEIN, Geophysicist, Pacific Tsunami Warning Center: I think the 'holy cow' moment didn't occur until we started getting the first preliminary reports over the wire services that, in fact, a damaging wave struck Phuket, Thailand and Sri Lanka.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Were you frustrated?

Stuart WeinsteinSTUART WEINSTEIN: Very frustrated. Frustrated and to a certain extent humiliated. It's humiliating for me as a geophysicist working for a tsunami-warning program to learn first of a tsunami from a wire service than from a tide gauge. That -- it doesn't get any worse than that, quite frankly.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Thousands of miles away at NOAA's Pacific Marine Research Lab in Seattle, tsunami researcher Vasily Titov was also frustrated. It took him until 4 a.m. in the morning of the next day to run this computer model, because he didn't have tsunami readings either."

Considering the earthquake hit at 00:59 GMT, and the wave first makes landfall at Sumatra 01:30 GMT, then 02:30 GMT in Thailand, then 03:00GMT in Sri Lanka and India... having a result from this system at 01:00GMT (70 seconds) automatically piped to the national emergency centers of governments, could have at least mobilized aid faster in Sumatra, and could have evacuated thousands in Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India.

A total of approximately 275,000 died in the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004. At a cost of even $10,000 per detector, 5000 detectors for $50million USD would have only cost $181 for every person that died.

http://www.nasa.gov/mro/ is file not found, or some such thing, too.

The New Horizons probe to Pluto launches next month. The latest news has the probe launching between January 17 (a six-day delay from the original plan, due to a fuel tank problem) and February 14.

As Paul Marsh did here detecting the MRO on its way to Mars, one of the benefits of setting up the receiving system while the probe is outbound is that the signal starts out strong, so your first-generation system can be somewhat crude. As the signal weakens (over the years in the New Horizons case), you can gradually refine your setup (and perhaps count on new technology to be developed in the meantime).

BTW, for those interested in the technical details of telecommunications with NASA deep space probes, a good place to start is the Future Missions Planning Office site. It contains communication link design tools, HTML links to applicable CCSDS standards, etc.

http://aom.giss.nasa.gov/srsun.html

Does that make you feel warm & fuzzy....or just warm?

Say, where is your evidence that global mean sea level (not at some local, selected spot) has fallen since the 19th century.

I read, after 10 seconds on google, here that:

"Sea level is indeed rising. This determination is made when one averages changes in sea level over the entire globe for the past century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated that the global average sea level has risen 10 to 25 cm (4 to 10 inches) in the past century. However, sea level is affected by many factors, including local ones, so sea level change at any single location may be either a rise, a fall, or no change at all."

Of course, nasa and the IPCC may be just lying about this. So we need to see the counter evidence.

Actually, the effects of the depletion of the ozone layer and global warming on each other is pretty circular- UVB destroys small phytoplankton in the Antarctic. This contributes to global warming [see HERE], as well as a collapse in the polar and sub-polar oceanic food supply. I also hope you appreciate that global warming helps to slow the repair of the ozone layer by raising the temperature of the stratosphere. Just because you haven't been taught something, it doesn't mean it's wrong. And yes, the UVB is absorbed no matter *where* it's absorbed, but to be honest I'd rather it were absorbed higher up, and not by the micro-organisms that help to keep our climate stable. In any case, the ozone disappearing and reappearing *is* cyclical, but most recent science takes it for granted that CFCs and our activities on earth are seriously affecting that pattern.

Four dead polar bears in the open ocean. Therefore they died because they drowned. Therefore its because the Arctic has warmed recently. Therefore the warming is caused by "Global Warming" caused by human fossil fuel use.

But wait, the Arctic from 70-90 is still not as warm as the 1930s, as can be seen from long station records all across the high Arctic (for example Nuuk or Ostrov Dikson ) This was well before large increases in carbon dioxide.

Since the poster child for linking climate change with carbon dioxide use has been shown to be a product of bad statistics and the whole multiproxy study paradigm shown to be without significance (see Bürger, G., and U. Cubasch (2005), Are multiproxy climate reconstructions robust?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L23711, doi:10.1029/2005GL024155.) I'd say the whole "Cry Polar Bears are drowning" schtick to be Yet Another Fake Panic.

Therefore, hence, or in conclusion: I call bullshit.

Of course this message has been brought to you by Exxon Mobil, the Bush Administration, the Republican Party, the Freemasons, the Illuminati and all stations to Satan.

Four dead polar bears in the open ocean. Therefore they died because they drowned. Therefore its because the Arctic has warmed recently. Therefore the warming is caused by "Global Warming" caused by human fossil fuel use.

But wait, the Arctic from 70-90 is still not as warm as the 1930s, as can be seen from long station records all across the high Arctic (for example Nuuk or Ostrov Dikson ) This was well before large increases in carbon dioxide.

Since the poster child for linking climate change with carbon dioxide use has been shown to be a product of bad statistics and the whole multiproxy study paradigm shown to be without significance (see Bürger, G., and U. Cubasch (2005), Are multiproxy climate reconstructions robust?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L23711, doi:10.1029/2005GL024155.) I'd say the whole "Cry Polar Bears are drowning" schtick to be Yet Another Fake Panic.

Therefore, hence, or in conclusion: I call bullshit.

Of course this message has been brought to you by Exxon Mobil, the Bush Administration, the Republican Party, the Freemasons, the Illuminati and all stations to Satan.

the field shift is kind interesting considering it is accelerating. And acceleration can't occur without an outside force acting on it.

additionally, more can be found on the white dwarfs in general Here.