Slashdot Mirror

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day show a nice picture of this.

If you're interested in this stuff, bookmark http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html, which just points to the current picture of the day.

The Solar Maximum Mission satellite was repaired in 1984, long before Hubble was even launched. The repair mission was STS 41C.

The problem of orbital radio science is dish size. To point your antenna beam at a very small slice of sky you need a very large antenna. Further, the lower the frequency of the radio signals you want to explore, the larger your dish will have to be. Size and weight will kill most large antenna designs as the largest rocket to launch these things can contain like a moving truck sized thing. Now look at aricebo. Now you could build a distributed array in space, and thats the focus of alot of NASA research right now. Constellation-X is covering some of the issues of knkowing where one element of your array is relative to another. Yea its x-rays, but same orientation issues.

Just remember that you're standing on a planet
That's evolving
And revolving
At nine thousand miles an hour.
It's orbiting at nineteen miles a second,
so it's reckoned,
'Round the sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me,
and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm,
at fourteen thousand miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred million stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle
sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us
it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years
From Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go,
that's the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute
And that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember,
when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life
Somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/ I just wanted to let people know that the latest CVS of NASA World wind has a plugin engine that allows people to do the same thing (Their is even a plugin already made to do it!)

1. Climatologists accurately accounted for the effect of urban heat islands on temperature data more than a decade ago.

No. They inaccurately accounted for the effect in their favor.

In fact, the urban heat island effect is without a doubt the best-understood phenomenon in climatology.

Argument from Authority. What method is used to alter the raw data to account for an increasing heat island effect over time. How is the ratio of change calculated. I am suspicious of curve fitting. What is the algorithm? I'll take that in C code or psuedo code if you've got it. I've read that it was just by population. Ahem. I hope that is not actually true.

Climate change isn't just evident in increasing temperatures.

Well thank god for that because at some weather stations for some time periods the temperatures actually decreased by quite a bit. I know because as you might have guessed, I browsed through online weather station data for hours. Just for fun. The results are not exactly convincing to a non-believer.

However, record after record from biological, atmospheric, hydrologic, oceonographic, and cryospheric sources show effects consistent with increased temperatures, particularly in the Arctic.

So they were doing these measurements in the 19th century as well? Again, you are not presenting any real falsifiable data. You are just saying that the evidence from all these sources is convincing TO YOU. Forgive me if I am not immediately converted from heretic to believer. How about citing some actual evidence. And not just of Arctic warming. Although that would be a start.

We have vastly more data from both observed and proxy records

Can't disagree with that can I?

as well as much more accurate climate models.

More accurate? How do you test for that exactly? Are the models better at predicting... well something. I guess you would have to recalculate global warming annually from all the available weather station data and see whether the computer model accurately predicts the changes. No matter how accurate the models they still don't prove that human combustion was the cause.

Look, you'd be hard pressed to find a reputable climatologist anywhere in the world who will say that global temperature increases aren't pretty ironclad.

I agree with you. By definition. Any scientist who criticizes the Global Warming religion would be labeled a crank and would soon lose their job. They would no longer be "reputable". It wasn't always that way. Now critics of Global Warming are hard to find. And yet the temperature records have not changed. And there really is no better way to measure temperature changes over hundreds of years. Melting permafrost doesn't prove it anymore than any other local temperature variation would.

While there may be some evidence that is suggestive of a global warming effect in the past century, it is anything but irrefutable. It is anything but ironclad. The debate has been politicized. It isn't even about science anymore. Because most climatologists believe in it does not make it true. Because most people believe in it does not make it true. The case for Global Warming has yet to be proven. The case for Global Warming caused by human combustion and leading to major catastrophy has yet to be proven. And it will never be because it doesn't need to be. Nearly everyone is already convinced of it without evidence. Based merely on a scientific consensus. Why bother gathering more evidence when you can just take a poll?

The average temp in the arctic has risen 1.2 degress per DECADE

Have any references for THAT. Although it still wouldn't prove global warming, just Arctic warming at one weather station. Seriously. Where can I find that data? Do you have an Arctic weather station I can search for data at GISS?

Or maybe some data I can request from CDIAC. Nice chaps. I'm sure they would be willing to help.

In any case, I was talking about GLOBAL average temperatures not arctic ones. Interesting that you didn't respond to that.

Truly ignorance is bliss.

ad hominem attack. You are calling me ignorant. You realize that you are acting just like the stereotypical environmentalist?

Its people like yourself who make excuses like, you don't understand climate change and you think the instruments scientists are using aren't accurate

Here's yet another semi ad hominem attack. In a roundabout way you are trying to make the whole idea of instrument accuracy as far back as the 19th century seem ludicrous. It is not. Go find me a thermometer that I can buy even in 2005 that is designed for measuring air temperature. You will see that most of them are only accurate to +/- 0.5 deg celsius at best and then only within a narrow temperature range (if you read the fine print). This is not accurate enough to detect temperature changes of only 1 degree. Remember we are talking about 2005 here. Not 1865. What were the temperature gathering devices like in 1865? Do you have to research it first? Who's the ignorant one?

Burry your head in the sand like most people do

Ad hominem. Why are you all so predictable?

As and arm of Aviation Technical Services--which also provides air-traffic control for the U.S. Antarctic Program--Mac Weather's(McMurdo weather office) main task is to issue forecasts for aviation.

Jeff Prucinsky of Mac Weather reports, "I do not believe that there has ever been a recorded case of lightning in the Antarctic."

The reason is that lightning requires clouds that are tall enough to have large areas of positive and negative charge. Because Antarctica is so flat and white, there is little convective activity, and no chance for clouds to form high enough, Prucinsky said. With no tall clouds, there is no lightning.

here's one and another.
there's plenty more.

Here is some money that NASA could "invest" in another x-prize like compitition.

They already are.

NASA's Centennial Challenges Program

2005 Tether Challenge

2005 Beam Power Challenge

Slashdot article from a few months ago

Granted, it'd be nice to see them offer more money, but Congress is currently keeping them from awarding prizes larger than a certain amount.

..when the Apollo 12 crew brought back a camera from Surveyor 3. Some microorganisms survived a few years on the moon. See a nasa page for details.

There was also "one flown shuttle main landing tire" in there, so that had to have been placed there after STS-1 in 1981

Night vs. Day.

South Korea is the most "connected" nation in the world, with some 80% of households having broadband, and the average broadband connection being 4 MBits/s.

North Korea, well, can hardly feed themselves.

Take a look at North Korea vs South Korea in this NASA "Earth at night" image

There was also "one flown shuttle main landing tire" in there, so that had to have been placed there after STS-1 in 1981

..when the Apollo 12 crew brought back a camera from Surveyor 3. Some microorganisms survived a few years on the moon. See a nasa page for details.

Night vs. Day.

South Korea is the most "connected" nation in the world, with some 80% of households having broadband, and the average broadband connection being 4 MBits/s.

North Korea, well, can hardly feed themselves.

Take a look at North Korea vs South Korea in this NASA "Earth at night" image

There was also "one flown shuttle main landing tire" in there, so that had to have been placed there after STS-1 in 1981

..when the Apollo 12 crew brought back a camera from Surveyor 3. Some microorganisms survived a few years on the moon. See a nasa page for details.

What I can't understand is, why didn't "management" come in and screw this all up?

:-) Well, as an engineer, I'm the natural enemy of management, so it pains me to admit this. But honestly, the management for this mission has been simply exceptional, and that's a largely uncredited reason for our success.

Remember the Spirit Anomaly, where we lost contact for a while, a couple of weeks after landing? For all we knew at the time, we'd lost the rover. Pete Theisinger and Richard Cook, who were then the project manager and deputy project manager, went down to the press conference alone, so that (a) the engineering team could work on the damn problem without being distracted by the press, and (b) only their faces were associated with the problem. When things were going well, they brought engineers and scientists to the press conference (and let them do most of the talking). When things went wrong, they took the heat.

The tradition continues with our current project manager, Jim Erickson. To take a recent example, Jim went down to the testbed to help shovel the dirt for the special "sandbox" we had to set up to figure out how to extract ourselves from this dune. (Jim's the guy squatting on the far left of this image. That wasn't one of the days he was digging.)

They couldn't have done it without us. But I have to say, we couldn't have done it without them, either.

Night vs. Day.

South Korea is the most "connected" nation in the world, with some 80% of households having broadband, and the average broadband connection being 4 MBits/s.

North Korea, well, can hardly feed themselves.

Take a look at North Korea vs South Korea in this NASA "Earth at night" image

Hey -

On the Nasa Home Movies page, there is a very nice photo montage called

"Rover Team Album" 2:49 at 11meg

It has some very cool electronica music to go with it. I've been searching, but can't find any indication as to exactly what the music is.

Anyone have any ideas ?

You can get to it from here :

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/me r_main.html

Select the "One Year on Mars" (View Flash Feature) link at the right, then choose "Home Movies" from the set of image links in the popup window.

Night vs. Day.

South Korea is the most "connected" nation in the world, with some 80% of households having broadband, and the average broadband connection being 4 MBits/s.

North Korea, well, can hardly feed themselves.

Take a look at North Korea vs South Korea in this NASA "Earth at night" image

The printed URL as it appears in the previous post was incorrect; here's the corrected version:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast16jul_1 .htm?aol4257

It is obvious from the "according pattern" of ...

Sorry, I meant "accordion". And, here an image illustrating the gradual increase in slippage. You start to see crescent-shaped slip marks which gradually grow more distinct and closer together until the crumbly soil pattern eventually emerges.

There was also "one flown shuttle main landing tire" in there, so that had to have been placed there after STS-1 in 1981

There was also "one flown shuttle main landing tire" in there, so that had to have been placed there after STS-1 in 1981

There was also "one flown shuttle main landing tire" in there, so that had to have been placed there after STS-1 in 1981

There was also "one flown shuttle main landing tire" in there, so that had to have been placed there after STS-1 in 1981

There was also "one flown shuttle main landing tire" in there, so that had to have been placed there after STS-1 in 1981

There was also "one flown shuttle main landing tire" in there, so that had to have been placed there after STS-1 in 1981

Is it just me, or if you look at this you can see a small spacecraft firing some sort of proyectile towards Earth? Left corner over the storm.

Looks a lot like skylab http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/Images/skylab/skylab4 _orbit.gif
As I recall, Skylab was built from mostly spare parts NASA had. Maybe MOL made it to space (As a peaceful mission) after all?

A sail probe to Pluto would probably be the easiest one to do since it's off the plane. Everything else would be a more interesting problem to solve. This is nothing new since they had this concern with the Pioneer probes and the asteroid belt.

There was also "one flown shuttle main landing tire" in there, so that had to have been placed there after STS-1 in 1981. But, it's also a designated museum room, so all the stuff in it had been put there on purpose and is hopefully only suitable as museum artifacts.

It's going to be launched by The Planetary Society not NASA.

PS. Mod parent Funny

The 1967 COSPAR treaty on Planetary Protection expressly forbids this. Planetary Protection is taken very seriously at NASA and other space agencies - Japan complied to the treaty for MUSES-C, ESA complied for Beagle, the USSR says that they complied during their Mars missions, but who really knows - and any mission that targets a body in the Solar System must have a Planetary Protection Plan. For a destination like the moon or Mercury, it is just a short paragraph saying why we don't need to do much. But Mars, Europa or Titan (for instance) the projects will need to do much much more. This will include determining if the landing destination might have water (or a liquid organic like methane for Titan), reducing the bio-load on the spacecraft going to those places, determining contaimination probabilities, etc.

The principles of solar sails have been perfectly well understood for decades, and used in varying degrees for the entire time. Note the sails at the ends of the solar array tips on Mariner 4 (little blue squares) :

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/past/mariner3-4.h tml

That was in 1964.

The only unique thing about this flight is that it's the only purpose of the mission.

Brett

Night vs. Day.

South Korea is the most "connected" nation in the world, with some 80% of households having broadband, and the average broadband connection being 4 MBits/s.

North Korea, well, can hardly feed themselves.

Take a look at North Korea vs South Korea in this NASA "Earth at night" image; it's really telling. South Korea is amongst brightest countries in the world, while North Korea is just this sudden dark, dark "void" sitting conspicuously between South Korea and China.

This article describes how Streptococcus was found living on the flag we planted with the Apollo 12 mission. I would assume that atmospheric conditions and UV radiation levels are very similar to those found on Mars.

Not just spacecraft: Earth microbes can hitch a ride to Mars on meteorites, too.

Just as meteorites from Mars are found on Earth (eg. in Antarctica), meteorites from Earth may reach Mars, and these meteorites may carry microbes. Some scientists think there's an exchange of biological material between the two planets.

The Mars rover Opportunity recently found an iron meteorite on Mars.

The Surveyor 3 camera is on display in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

More details one this is available on chapter XI of the analysis report in PDF.

..when the Apollo 12 crew brought back a camera from Surveyor 3. Some microorganisms survived a few years on the moon. See a nasa page for details.

If you really want to read about it, you can go Here, Here and/or Here.

What could be a better use of that money to open up more imagery of Europe and Asia for ALL to see.

In a related vein, new laboratory studies theorize that terrestrial microbes that hitchhike on our Mars-bound spacecraft could survive the journey and harsh Mars UV environment indefinetely, and even possibly grow if they found water ice.

NASA's policy on this is summarized here.

As though the current vehicles aren't? Opportunity has already moved 1.1 feet - and they've been taking their time (trying everything out on Earth before they do on Mars). There was little doubt on the part of the team that they'd be able to get out; this issue has been way overblown by the media and by Slashdot.

• the NASA Press Release
• NASA's Phoenix website at the University of Arizona
• NASA Mars Exploration website
• NASA's page on future Mars missions

• the NASA Press Release
• NASA's Phoenix website at the University of Arizona
• NASA Mars Exploration website
• NASA's page on future Mars missions

• the NASA Press Release
• NASA's Phoenix website at the University of Arizona
• NASA Mars Exploration website
• NASA's page on future Mars missions

NASA's WorldWind has a bittorrent download. It's about 180MB. I downloaded it the other day and sat there and watched it for 30 seconds. It didn't transfer any data. I go tired of watching and went to the restroom (~5 minutes). When I came back and checked on it, it was done already.

I figured it took maybe 3 minutes to download (i'm on a pretty fast connection).

Just one more success story.