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Don't worry, 17 "Mike Hunt"s are already listed on the CD. Its nice to see that we're sending our sense of humor along with our hardware.

Just because the discovery of giant stars gets all the press coverage, doesn't mean NASA isn't involved in fundamental science and research that may be applicable to the real world.
NASA provides a yearly list of spinoff products Also NASA doesn't have to create a new product that everybody buys to be useful. Better understanding of materials, new measurement techniques, or even new ways to model systems, all have practical benifits. The average person on the street may not care, but design or manufacturing companies could be interested.
You can browse the Technical Reports Archive and find alot of engineering research on things from Water Treatment to Evaluating manufacturing and assembly errors on rotating machinery

Just because the discovery of giant stars gets all the press coverage, doesn't mean NASA isn't involved in fundamental science and research that may be applicable to the real world.
NASA provides a yearly list of spinoff products Also NASA doesn't have to create a new product that everybody buys to be useful. Better understanding of materials, new measurement techniques, or even new ways to model systems, all have practical benifits. The average person on the street may not care, but design or manufacturing companies could be interested.
You can browse the Technical Reports Archive and find alot of engineering research on things from Water Treatment to Evaluating manufacturing and assembly errors on rotating machinery

Just because the discovery of giant stars gets all the press coverage, doesn't mean NASA isn't involved in fundamental science and research that may be applicable to the real world.
NASA provides a yearly list of spinoff products Also NASA doesn't have to create a new product that everybody buys to be useful. Better understanding of materials, new measurement techniques, or even new ways to model systems, all have practical benifits. The average person on the street may not care, but design or manufacturing companies could be interested.
You can browse the Technical Reports Archive and find alot of engineering research on things from Water Treatment to Evaluating manufacturing and assembly errors on rotating machinery

Just because the discovery of giant stars gets all the press coverage, doesn't mean NASA isn't involved in fundamental science and research that may be applicable to the real world.
NASA provides a yearly list of spinoff products Also NASA doesn't have to create a new product that everybody buys to be useful. Better understanding of materials, new measurement techniques, or even new ways to model systems, all have practical benifits. The average person on the street may not care, but design or manufacturing companies could be interested.
You can browse the Technical Reports Archive and find alot of engineering research on things from Water Treatment to Evaluating manufacturing and assembly errors on rotating machinery

For a more informative discussion of the life cycle of a star, see this article or this article. There are others, too. Just google for star life cycle.

Hi, I'm the person who made the submission. Since making the submission, it's come to my attention that there will indeed be at least some sort of live coverage on NASA TV -- I suspect the article I linked to may be in error.

From the NASA TV schedule:

January 14, Friday
3 a.m. - 3:30 a.m. - Live Coverage and Commentary "Cassini Turns Towards Titan - Interruption of Radio Contact" - JPL/ESA
5 a.m. - 6 a.m. - Live Coverage and Commentary "The Huygens Probe Enters the Atmosphere of Titan" - JPL/ESA
7:30 a.m. - 8 a.m. - ESA News Briefing "Mission Status" - JPL/ESA
8:30 a.m. - 9:15 a.m. - ESA Commentary on Huygens Probe Mission - JPL/ESA (Mission Coverage)
10 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. - ESA Commentary "Cassini Turns Back to Earth - Data Transmission Begins" - JPL/ESA
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. - Huygens Probe News Briefing (will confirm if we are receiving data from Huygens via relay by Cassini)
1 p.m. - NASA Update with Sean O'Keefe - KSC
5 p.m. - 6 p.m. - ESA Commentary and "Presentation of First Triplet Image of/data from Titan" - JPL/ESA

We're bouncing bloody lasers off the stuff they left there. What kind of proof people really need to believe we've landed?

As a general thumb of rule, you can assume almost anything that's astronomy related is not true colour. Using filters always give you more information because each filter only allow a single information through (i.e., amount of Oxygen, Nitrogen, Hydrogen). Then you can look at the picture and say "oooh, I have lots of atomic O here, I wonder why" and etc. :)

As far as stars go, only Betelgeuse is large enough and close enough to get (slightly) more than a pixelated pinpoint. And stars tend to be bigger than planets.

NASA is developing the Terrestrial Planet Finder which should discover and image even smaller extrasolar planets when it is launched in a few years. Sooner than that, the Kepler Mission "will survey the extended solar neighborhood to detect and characterize hundreds of terrestrial and larger planets in or near the "habitable zone," defined by scientists as the distance from a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface."

NASA is developing the Terrestrial Planet Finder which should discover and image even smaller extrasolar planets when it is launched in a few years. Sooner than that, the Kepler Mission "will survey the extended solar neighborhood to detect and characterize hundreds of terrestrial and larger planets in or near the "habitable zone," defined by scientists as the distance from a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface."

Go to nasa's site (ice_berg_ram.html, there click on the 15A Iceberg Blocks McMurdo Sound link on the end of the page.

Now, in the last paragraph, you can find this: "As a result, many chicks could starve, says Antarctica New Zealand in the Associated Press."

They got chicks in Antartica and they need rescue? I'm so there!

Is there an analogy between this and meteors? We keep not seeing little ones until they're on us or even past us - is it the same with icebergs?

Probably :), although there hasn't been such a big iceberg from Antarctica for quite a while (Refering to Iceberg B-15 / B-15A, which has been around since March 2000, causing starvation of ALL penguin chicks due to inability of their parents to get food because of much greater quantities of sea ice in McMurdo Sound).

If a big section of ice were to break up, would it affect sealevel in a significant way? Even if we know these bergs won't, how much warning will we get before a a big one happens?

Its not the fact that the sea ice breaks up, its the fact that the sea ice is holding back billions of tonnes of ice that is currently on Antartica, which would raise sea levels, and sea levels only have to rise by a small amount 30 to 40 cm / 1 foot for catastrophy to occur. huge areas of the world will become submerged, many millions (possibly billions) of people will be displaced.

In Green mars a large portion of antarctica breaks up, raising Earth's sealevel by around 8 metres. Though it's not due to happen 'til 2127.

Whilst Green Mars is fiction, the rise in sea levels caused when Antartica does melt aren't, and at the rate we're going, the melting of the Antartic ice will be inevitable in less than 10 years time, due to positive reinforcement from the amount of CO2 that humans are pumping into the environment (SUV's, Air planes, Coal / Gas fired powerstations etc...).

I don't want marketing, I want real space travel, and that requires being a little harsh on all the marketing that surrounds this.

How would you define "real space travel"?

Judging by the cockpit view, this sure seems like space travel as far as I'm concerned.

The Wright Brother's big advance was controlled, powered flight. Lots of people could shoot a projectile from one end of the field to the other, which is all (effectively) that was accomplished by Burt Rutan.

SpaceShipOne is equipped with (and makes heavy use of) a reaction control system, which operates in the same general fashion as the reaction control systems on other spacecraft.

1. Nasa.gov says "According to the big bang, the universe was created sometime between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago from a cosmic explosion that hurled matter and in all directions.".
2. Some guys at U Mich (GeoSci students?) say "About 15 billion years ago a tremendous explosion started the expansion of the universe."
3. Cambridge Cosmology says "About ten billion years ago, the Universe began in a gigantic explosion"

That's the first three results. How about Dictionary.com? "big bang [n.] The cosmic explosion that marked the origin of the universe according to the big bang theory."

So if I'm wrong in referring to it, in general and metaphorical terms (like the name "big bang" itself), as an "explosion", at least I stand in good company. So now that I've spent all this time defending my use of a single word, I can actually get to the relevant parts of your post (I don't mean anything personal by that, I promise ;)

I already admitted the error of attempting to tie an accelerating universe to problems with the Big Bang, I don't know why you wrote so much more about it, but thanks anyway, interesting stuff. I do find the accelerating universe a fascinating tangential subject. (If your response contains something along the lines of "the fact you think acceleration and the big bang are tangential to each other shows your complete ignorance, etc etc" I will stop reading)

'The mathematics of the Big Bang model are easier to work with when the vacuum energy density is zero: the equations are simpler, and various things are easier to calculate . . .and physicists will always consider the simplest case first.'

Yes, and I believe that eliminating the "ZPE" components because they complicated the equations has done enormous harm to our understanding of physics. (Similar to what happened to Maxwell's original equations when Heaviside butchered them)

I can tell you are a strong adherent to good experimental data (as am I)... a book I cannot recommend strongly enough to you is "The Field" by Lynne McTaggart. (Think I mentioned this in an ancestor post) It is chock full of recent experimental results concerning quantum physics and consciousness, from good solid double-blind placebo controlled studies. I am not given to superlatives, but this book will blow your

So can anybody calculate how mutch more power would these new type of power shells produse if they where to implement this tecknology in ISS (International Space Station)

I mean if they where to change the plan and from now one use this new stuff to produse power on the station.

There are now produsing what ? http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast13nov_1 .htm

:)

Pedants like to point out that there is no "Dark Side of the Moon" when referring to Earth's Moon, because during the month all portions of the Moon eventually have a full "day" of sunlight.

In the case of Iapetus, there really is a dark side, not because one side never sees the sun, but because it is just, well, dark. For some reason half of Iapetus is dark, and the other half is light - much like those Star Trek guys.

Here's NASA's page on the subject of Iapetus' dark side.

The ridge is conspicuous in the picture as an approximately 20-kilometer wide (12 miles) band that extends from the western (left) side of the disc almost to the day/night boundary on the right. On the left horizon, the peak of the ridge reaches at least 13 kilometers (8 miles) above the surrounding terrain.

reaches 20 kilometers high (12 miles). It extends over 1,300 kilometers (808 miles) from side to side,

Two pages are linked in the /. post, the first page says:

"One of these features is a long narrow ridge that lies almost exactly on the equator of Iapetus, bisects its entire dark hemisphere and reaches 20 kilometers high (12 miles)."

But the second page says:

"The ridge is conspicuous in the picture as an approximately 20-kilometer wide (12 miles) band that extends from the western (left) side of the disc almost to the day/night boundary on the right. On the left horizon, the peak of the ridge reaches at least 13 kilometers (8 miles) above the surrounding terrain."

So how high is that ridge?

Two pages are linked in the /. post, the first page says:

"One of these features is a long narrow ridge that lies almost exactly on the equator of Iapetus, bisects its entire dark hemisphere and reaches 20 kilometers high (12 miles)."

But the second page says:

"The ridge is conspicuous in the picture as an approximately 20-kilometer wide (12 miles) band that extends from the western (left) side of the disc almost to the day/night boundary on the right. On the left horizon, the peak of the ridge reaches at least 13 kilometers (8 miles) above the surrounding terrain."

So how high is that ridge?

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05423
the real death star...looking....moon......thing.

That's no moon.

It's a SPACE STATION!

I have a very bad feeling about this...

But yah, with the waistline and the rather omnious circular crater in the center, it does make you wonder if a Rebel refugee has taken refuge at Saturn.

It's a ridge on the planet surface, not a ring.

But I don't see why it is "amazing in such a small moon". Aren't larger irregularities to be expected with smaller bodies? For instance, the Mariana-Everest difference is about 19 km, so Earth's crust can be described crudely as "R0 +/- 9.5 km". Olympus Mons on Mars is at 26 km above surrounding ground. Comets are not even spherical - the "peaks" are as big as the rest of the "planet". So why is Iapetus's ridge considered surprising? I'm more interested in the ridge being *only* as tall as Olympus Mons, which is on a planet 5 times the size of Iapetus.

This cant be coincidence..

This is slightly offtopic from the Portland situation, but I have been trying to obtain SRTM (shuttle radar topography mission)data from the JPL for a project I am working on in Mexico. You can get the 1 arc second resolution data (approximately 30 m resolution) for the U.S. with no problem. However the best they will provide for outside of the U.S. is the 3 arc second data (approximately 90 m resolution). There is a "Memorandum of Understanding" between NASA and the NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) that the higher resolution data for outside of the U.S. is not to be released. http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/mou.html Pardon my stupidity, but how are you protecting our national security by allowing the release of more detailed topographic data for the United States, while not allowing the release of the same types of data for outside of the U.S.? This past week I filed a FOIA request with the NGA. All I want is a small block of data from a small patch of Sonoran desert in northern Mexico. Maybe I will get it, but I am not holding my breath.

That's one nice joke, but this beeing /. I can nitpick all i want, and might even be moded up for it.
So I have to point out that the "official" address is actually : 122.13013W x 47.64483N
Your coords point to something that looks like an empty field near residential housing a few KM North.
You wouldn't want the Air Force to hit the wrong target.

P.S. I had to lookup the coords using NASA's excellent Open Source WorldWind.
Did you just happen to have the coordinates written on a post-it or something ? :)

Murphy(c)

I think they are referring to when things became available. The space shuttle was designed and built during the 70s, but didn't get launched into space until April 12, 1981 http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/archives/sts-1 /index.html

Well, I guess the retards here don't count either. I'd cite tons of other pinko-commie-we-hate-america sources, but you're an AC, and not worth the effort :)

-WS

This means the Big Bang was "tuned" to produce exactly this density

Actually, if you go and look at the published, refereed technical paper (the first one at WMAP papers you'll see that the most probable value for Omega_total is 1.02+-.02. This is consistent with a flat universe (1.0), but is also consistent with a closed, large radius of curvature universe. Other experiments produce similar values (some referenced in the paper), also slightly greater than one but with error bars that include 1.0.

It always makes me cringe a little when people stand up and show data plots of the various cosmological parameters that are consistent with flat, but also consistently tend towards very large radius closed, and then declare the universe to be flat. And I've been at a lot of those talks. I'm fine with them saying "It's nearly flat" or "it's got such a large radius that we can treat it as flat for most purposes" or "it's flat enough to be consistent with inflation", but it's not convincingly dead-ass flat. The data always seem to be centered around "very-nearly-flat-but-closed"

I was talking to a cosmologist friend about this, and his comment was "Yeah, but it would be perverse if the universe were that close to flat, but not really flat". To which my reply is "The universe is a perverse place-- it doesn't have to be flat just to make the mathematical description pretty". Life as an experimenter is way more fun when the data give you those tiny deviations from the theory-- they're often real, and they're hinting at something missing from the theory.

ok, i'll give you that i've seen people get BS and MS degrees in CS at GT who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, but the highest honors on my BS degree indicates i was setting the curve, not riding it.

also, the terms i use aren't obscure or fancy to the people i work with. they're everyday speak.

granted, my work with Boeing is a result of my advisor sweet-talking Boeing, but what led to my internship with NASA was a paper i wrote contradicting some presumptions made by a big shot working for NASA/JPL. The paper also discusses some hacks for improving speed, and adding flexability without hurting speed.

If discovering and implementing publication-worthy improvements to a piece of software that won an ACM Systems Software Award in 2001 is not enough evidence i can program, i'll just let you assume i'm a "bureaucrat".

hell, i'll assume you're just a mindless code monkey if you don't know any functional languages with static type checking and type inferencing.

Let's compare budgets and see if Voyager still kicks the Ham's butt... Here are some rough estimates putting the voyager program at rougly $3-5 billion. I can't confirm, but I suspect that's several orders of magnitude higher than the Ham's.

"The Big Bang theory isn't about beliefs as you seem to use the word. It's about the best explanation that fits the evidence."

It is perhaps the best CURRENT explanation. But it is not as good a theory as it was even a few years ago. There are questions that the Big Bang theory has no explanation for.

For example, as recently as 1998 it was discovered that the universe is "flat". A tiny difference in the density of the universe, either up or down, would make it curved. This means the Big Bang was "tuned" to produce exactly this density. The odds of that happening by chance are estimated at 1 to 10^50.

The Big Bang does not explain the increasing evidence that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating .

The Big Bang theory does not adequately explain (IMHO) the "Horizon Problem", which is that the universe looks uniform in all directions, from galaxy evolution to background radiation. (Yes, I am aware of "Inflation Theory", which seeks to address the Horizon Problem, but it's pretty shaky. Here's a paper disputing the ability of the inflationary model to produce homogenous CMBR if you are interested.)

Dead-Tree References:
"The Field", Lynne McTaggart - Recommended for everyone, written for laymen.
"Science and the Akashic Field", Ervin Laszlo - This is a bit more technical.

Well, it's partly that, but keep in mind, planetary nebula are very much three-dimensional objects. For example, the Ring Nebula is actually, in all probability, more or a barrel shape like the Butteryfly Nebula. However, because we're seeing it edge-on, we see it as a ring, rather than it's true shape. And the result is color concentration on the edges.

Similarly, some of the perceived complexity in objects like the Ant Nebula may be due to perspective, as we see it from an angle.

And speaking of the Ant Nebula, as is mentioned in the APOD article, another likely contributing factor to nebular complexity is the presence of other bodies orbiting the new white dwarf, such as a companion star or planetary body. These objects likely manipulate the shape of the nebula via gravitational or electromagnetic forces.

Well, it's partly that, but keep in mind, planetary nebula are very much three-dimensional objects. For example, the Ring Nebula is actually, in all probability, more or a barrel shape like the Butteryfly Nebula. However, because we're seeing it edge-on, we see it as a ring, rather than it's true shape. And the result is color concentration on the edges.

Similarly, some of the perceived complexity in objects like the Ant Nebula may be due to perspective, as we see it from an angle.

And speaking of the Ant Nebula, as is mentioned in the APOD article, another likely contributing factor to nebular complexity is the presence of other bodies orbiting the new white dwarf, such as a companion star or planetary body. These objects likely manipulate the shape of the nebula via gravitational or electromagnetic forces.

Well, it's partly that, but keep in mind, planetary nebula are very much three-dimensional objects. For example, the Ring Nebula is actually, in all probability, more or a barrel shape like the Butteryfly Nebula. However, because we're seeing it edge-on, we see it as a ring, rather than it's true shape. And the result is color concentration on the edges.

Similarly, some of the perceived complexity in objects like the Ant Nebula may be due to perspective, as we see it from an angle.

And speaking of the Ant Nebula, as is mentioned in the APOD article, another likely contributing factor to nebular complexity is the presence of other bodies orbiting the new white dwarf, such as a companion star or planetary body. These objects likely manipulate the shape of the nebula via gravitational or electromagnetic forces.

I think this (http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/wheels-i mage02.html ) is an example of government research going to a consumer product....

Think large....

NASA Internet Robotics Resources Index "Last updated: October 28,1998", so some of the stuff might be dead but it should lead to someplace more recent.

At least the cockpit electronics have been upgraded - to 32 bit computers (among others 386). I'd guess that that's just the part the pilots/astronauts interact with, the avionics is probably still the old hardware, which was not 8 bit, but something derived from IBM's S/360 line with 32 bit, but only 104k of proper core memory. If you want to know more, I suggest you read at least chapter four of Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience

At least the cockpit electronics have been upgraded - to 32 bit computers (among others 386). I'd guess that that's just the part the pilots/astronauts interact with, the avionics is probably still the old hardware, which was not 8 bit, but something derived from IBM's S/360 line with 32 bit, but only 104k of proper core memory. If you want to know more, I suggest you read at least chapter four of Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience

Troll uncovered

The principal effect of this increase in actual and effective power is that earth stations are no longer 100-foot dish reflectors with cryogenically-cooled maser amplifiers costing as much as $10 million (1960 dollars) to build. Antennas for normal satellite services are typically 15-foot dish reflectors costing $30,000 (1990 dollars). Direct-broadcast antennas will be only a foot in diameter and cost a few hundred dollars

For people who claim to know so much about masers, you weren't very quick to point out that they've been tried and discarded.

Feel free to peruse the other historical references to inferior technology here.

Take your photoshop tricks somewhere else.. We've seen the orginal image - PIA05466

NASA's LMLSTP was a baby-steps project to achieve this -- basically, humans and wheat in a bell jar for 90 days.

true. 1999's failed Mars Polar Lander contained a microphone.

JPL guys were (and are) doing miracles to keep the craft functional.

JPL is not performing a great deal of real-time operational control over the Voyager craft. They are more monitoring what is left of the various experiments and power levels.

The miracle was performed back in the 70s when these craft were built - they certainly engineered them damn tough! Say what you will about how we've lost 2 shuttles, but NASA has shown some huge successes in our robotic craft: Voyager, Pioneer, NEAR, Deep Space 1 and MERs.

A 25 Year Partnership - Voyager and the Deep Space Network

Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM)

Science being performed during VIM

Weekly Status Reports

JPL guys were (and are) doing miracles to keep the craft functional.

JPL is not performing a great deal of real-time operational control over the Voyager craft. They are more monitoring what is left of the various experiments and power levels.

The miracle was performed back in the 70s when these craft were built - they certainly engineered them damn tough! Say what you will about how we've lost 2 shuttles, but NASA has shown some huge successes in our robotic craft: Voyager, Pioneer, NEAR, Deep Space 1 and MERs.

A 25 Year Partnership - Voyager and the Deep Space Network

Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM)

Science being performed during VIM

Weekly Status Reports

JPL guys were (and are) doing miracles to keep the craft functional.

JPL is not performing a great deal of real-time operational control over the Voyager craft. They are more monitoring what is left of the various experiments and power levels.

The miracle was performed back in the 70s when these craft were built - they certainly engineered them damn tough! Say what you will about how we've lost 2 shuttles, but NASA has shown some huge successes in our robotic craft: Voyager, Pioneer, NEAR, Deep Space 1 and MERs.

A 25 Year Partnership - Voyager and the Deep Space Network

Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM)

Science being performed during VIM

Weekly Status Reports

JPL guys were (and are) doing miracles to keep the craft functional.

JPL is not performing a great deal of real-time operational control over the Voyager craft. They are more monitoring what is left of the various experiments and power levels.

The miracle was performed back in the 70s when these craft were built - they certainly engineered them damn tough! Say what you will about how we've lost 2 shuttles, but NASA has shown some huge successes in our robotic craft: Voyager, Pioneer, NEAR, Deep Space 1 and MERs.

A 25 Year Partnership - Voyager and the Deep Space Network

Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM)

Science being performed during VIM

Weekly Status Reports