Slashdot Mirror

This article is bogus. About 95% of the planets have been detected so far by causing subtle doppler-motion shifts in their parent stars. The lower threshhold of measuring this doppler shift from earth observatories can only measure the really massive and/or fast (close-in) planets. Several planned space-based observatories will improve on this. They will either have more sensitive doppler or use alternative methods such eclipsing transits (Kepler probe) , or direct observation of planets.

Actually, I would say that all of the technologies mentioned in the article are working in the lab today (the "nanomachines" I'll comment on in a second). I work in the field of nanotechnology, and I can tell you that nanotechnology is just a hype word that means things that are small. You could say that anything a chemist does is "nanotechnology" because molecules are on the nanometer scale. My guess is that the nano-fibers refered to in the article are similar to the electroactive polymers described here. As for little robotic nanomachines that detect impact and make the armor stiffen, I think those words came from the mouth of a man who probably doesn't really understand the technology in question. The closest things to what I would consider a nanomachine that could possibly be used by 2020 are biological in nature: viruses, proteins, etc. I doubt that is what he really meant to say. Much more likely is that they will develop a new material using nanotechnology that will be some sort of super non-Newtonian fluid. Think silly putty or corn starch mixed with water. These fluids act like solids when they encounter sharp forces, but they act like liquids for slow forces. I will agree that powering all this equipment will be the limiting factor, but I don't think this is an insurmountable problem. They will probably use a variety of power producing technologies and everything will be interchangable. For example, you could have fuel cells, solar cells, and harness the power created by walking (by compressing some device in the soles of the boots with each step), and you could charge your night vision goggles using whichever power source is available at the time. Different sources would take different lengths of time to charge the goggles depending on the amount of power produced.

Tether in space is much more important in space walks than seat belt in your car. It is simply a safety issue. Devices which help maneuvering, like gas-guns, may fail, or may be lost. Even White was tethered during his experiments with Hand-Held Self-Maneuvering Unit . Soviets also experimented with such devices, but they are not as essential in space walks as you think, and certainly do not eliminate the need in tethers.

You will have your neck broken...

What kind of acceleration are you imagining? It doesn't look like Apollo astronauts pulled serious Gs after the first stage.

Not saying that I'd like to accelerate even at 1 G upside down, but it's not likely to be lethal. Fighter pilots experience negative Gs in some situations. It can lead to "red out", but I've never heard of broken necks...

MESSENGER stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging

Which was up there for all of 6 months, with two crews.

Skylab was up a lot longer, and accomplished a lot more (especially given the engineering problems the first astronauts up encountered - and SOLVED.

Mr. AC, you might want to read a bit about the history of NASA around and after the Apollo 11 flight; you are woefully uninformed about the impact the budget cuts for NASA had on the skilled and trained engineers who were there.

You might also want to peruse some of the budget history from the late 60s/ early 70s, and particularly WRT to the shuttle designs and the politics involved therein.

Idiot, yourself. You have no clue what you are talking about.

FY,
SB

One problem I can think of is that L1 isn't stable; any spacecraft parked there will go off station over a timescale of around 20 days, unless it receives corrections to its orbit around the sun. Having to put an orbital control system on each piece of hardware you park there would make the cost unattractive.

Besides, the L1 is already used for scientific purposes -- amongst others, SOHO and ACE are in halo orbits around the Lagrange point, and I'm sure the scientists who rely on them (including some of my work colleagues) wouldn't welcome L1 becoming a junk yard.

OK that diddn't work for some reason, so here's another link. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures/jul03.html

Sorry for the mixup.

If you want to see these babys in action, heres a modified version being tested at jpl (as well as a few other robot designs). http://realserver1.jpl.nasa.gov:8080/ramgen/Vklect ure-SearchingandCrawling-071703.rm?mode=compact/

If the emergency radios don't work ... We used to joke that the controllers would climb to the top of the tower and wave fire extinguishers to warn the planes away.

I though that was what hand lights were for.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a flight plan. Now how the hell you gonna die because some FAA form can't get filled out right? All it was was a paperwork requirement. Planes still fly, pilots still know how to land them rubber side down.

Exactly. Use of evolvable hardware techniques for developing RAD-HARD circuits are all the rage in the DoD right now--especially for detecting logic damage (although it seems this article is all about memory damage--crawl before you walk). Radiation damage has the potential to alter circuitry without destroying it--i.e. turn an AND gate into a NAND gate. If the chip can recognize that and reroute its logic, you have an identical chip in function with just a slightly different design.

http://ehw.jpl.nasa.gov/events/nasaeh04/

See also a pretty photo, along with some explanations of the term "blue moon".

The definition of two full moons in a month is now "correct" due to common usage. The urban legend has now become fact.

Apparently the earlier definition has to due with the oocurance of two full moons in a season. This ties in with the supposed American indian names from the colonial era. (note that the several thousand indian tribes would likely have a variety of names, IF they bothered to name them) This is actually more closely related to the European system of moon names, from which we get things like "harvest moon", or the Pascal moon (before Easter) (More on which below)

There is this Folklore of the "Blue Moon" article An informative acticle is the Nasa Science Article on the subject, which traces the current usage to an old article in a 1946 Sky and Telescope Magazine.

Sky And Telescope has their own article on the subject, including their own mea culpa here: What's a Blue Moon? -- from Sky & Telescope. Describes how a 53-yr old mistake by Sky and Telescope propagated the modern definition of "Blue Moon."

In an article "Once in a Blue Moon", folklorist Philip Hiscock traced the calendrical meaning of the term "Blue Moon" to the Maine Farmers' Almanac for 1937. But a page from that almanac belies the second-full-Moon-in-a-month interpretation. With help from Margaret Vaverek (Southwest Texas State University) and several other librarians, we have now obtained more than 40 editions of the Maine Farmers' Almanac from the period 1819 to 1962. These refer to more than a dozen Blue Moons, and not one of them is the second full Moon in a month. What's going on here? [...]

The almanac also follows certain rules laid down as part of the Gregorian calendar reform in 1582. The ecclesiastical vernal (spring) equinox always falls on March 21st, regardless of the position of the Sun. Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, 46 days before Easter, and must contain the Lenten Moon, considered to be the last full Moon of winter. The first full Moon of spring is called the Egg Moon (or Easter Moon, or Paschal Moon) and must fall within the week before Easter.

At last we have the "Maine rule" for Blue Moons: Seasonal Moon names are assigned near the spring equinox in accordance with the ecclesiastical rules for determining the dates of Easter and Lent. The beginnings of summer, fall, and winter are determined by the dynamical mean Sun. When a season contains four full Moons, the third is called a Blue Moon.

Why is the third full Moon identified as the extra one in a season with four? Because only then will the names of the other full Moons, such as the Moon Before Yule and the Moon After Yule, fall at the proper times relative to the solstices and equinoxes.

On APOD there a picture of a moon that's really blue.

... which would mean something if Canada's population distribution was anything like the US. It isn't. While the US seems to have one of the most homogeneous population distributions on the globe, the vast majority of Canadians live within 200 km or so of the US border (try naming a major Canadian city that isn't) and then tend to clump around urban centers. You can play connect-the-dots with Edmonton, Red Deer and Calgary over in Alberta, while major US cities like Chicago and Houston are a little tough to pick out if you don't know where to look.

One line 10 km long is cheaper to deploy than ten lines 1 km long.

They are at it again!

Spirit's right hand side front wheel is damaged (drawing about 2-3 times more power than all the others - they think its a problem with particles in the gear chain).

Those incredible folks over at Nasa are currently looking at how to carry on without it (it can still operate but only when absolutely necessary).

They have been practicing driving in reverse and dragging the limp wheel along.
This in itself wouldn't be a major issue if the machine were under direct human control, but they are currently rewriting the operating commands for its autonomous driving mode - hazard avoidance etc.

How many others go to the trouble of rewriting the OS to work around a hardware disability?

Heres a link: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/20040716. html

I agree with the comments in the article. Commodity clustering is NOT the answer. It consumes tons of energy also. Everything in the article seems dead on correct. Parallel processing is not the big nirvana everyone thinks. Some jobs can't be done that way. It's ironic that this was posted today because i was looking up info on google about superconducting supercomputer.

You may wish to consider the information that NASA has posted about dark matter. They explain it somewhat superficially, but at least they hit the major facts involved. The only reason it's called "dark matter" is because it's stuff that's there (we can see the effects of it) but we can't see the matter, itself.

The caption for the original photo, it says that it was taken from 540,000 kilometers (324,000 miles) away. The Cassini image was taken at 1.7 million kilometers (1 million miles) away.

The caption for the original photo, it says that it was taken from 540,000 kilometers (324,000 miles) away. The Cassini image was taken at 1.7 million kilometers (1 million miles) away.

This picture is by Voyager, in 1980: APOD 990425. Doesn't look much worse to me (IANAA). No idea how close to Mimas Voyager was compared to Cassini, of course.

After fifty years of effort, it's clear that chemically-powered launchers are a dead end. Chemical fuels will never get any better. Weight reduction has gone about as far as it can go. Our launchers are terribly fragile, and not getting any better.

If you could build a spacecraft with the weight budget of a commercial airliner, space travel would be straightforward, craft would be reliable, and the technology would be useful. But chemical fuels are just too weak to do the job.

Chemically fueled rockets are the Zeppelins of the space age. They're big, fragile, and have too little load capacity. They work just well enough that you can delude yourself into thinking the technology can become widely useful. But it just can't happen.

This was well known fifty years ago. NASA, and Apollo, led us down a techological blind alley, trying to improve Kennedy's poll ratings.

Until we get something better than chemical rockets, we should stick to unmanned flights.

NASA had a Breakthrough Propulsion Program from 1996 to 2002, but nobody got a solid, reproduceable result of any value.

Nuclear rockets are quite possible; prototype engines were tested in the 1950s. But a crash would be a major disaster. We still can't do fusion. Nor can we create antimatter efficiently. But, fundamentally, we have to harness a better power source or we're not going anywhere.

While the microchip would almost certainly have been invented without the space program, manned space exploration has produced more new technology which NASA has (and continues to) licensed to private corporations which have then gone on to develop those technologies into new products. The fact that these technologies were not developed first by private sector entrepreneurs is evidence enough that it would have, at least taken longer for technologies developed in the space program to be duplicated by private effort. Humans can go a long way on good enough, and I think sometimes it takes circumstances where the old good enough fails completely before something radically new yet much better can be developed.

Seems to me humans might want to extend our reach beyond Earth so that the species has a better chance of survival. A stray meteor or comet could hits us any day. I think this illustrates at least one practical reason for sending humans into space.

Here's a story, Recently Discovered Near-Earth Asteroid Makes Record-breaking Approach to Earth that illustrates my point.

A smaller scale experiment can give insights to a larger problem. Thus, before the Wright brothers flew, they made (essentially) toy airplanes.

We already know that the earth's ecology more-or-less works (leaving aside some human intervention), but we don't have much understanding of how or why it works, or what might lead to our current niche in the ecology abruptly reducing in distribution and scope (aside from certain obvious threats). Small scale experiments in space allow us to get a better understanding of the principles, and possibly try some purturbation analyses.

Yes, in theory, this can be done on Earth as well. But there are other synergistic benefits to doing it in space (EG, getting free soup)... and just because it can be done on Earth, doesn't mean it will be done. How much biosphere research is done from NASA? How much of that would go away without the need to occaisionally keep some %^&%* lucky bastards alive up there every now and then?

(Disclaimer: I work with someone who was one of those %^&%* lucky bastards.)

From the article:
Casting an eye on the space shuttle's contribution to science, van Allen suggests they have been modest, "and its contribution to utilitarian applications of space technology has been insignificant."

The still only partly put together International Space Station, van Allen points out, has already garnered a price tag of some $30 billion. "If it is actually completed by 2010, after a total lapse of 26 years, the cumulative cost will be at least $80 billion, and the exuberant hopes for its important commercial and scientific achievements will have been all but abandoned," he argues.

Given that NASA has not and will not renounce, abjure, and utterly forsake the folly of the last 25 years of their human spaceflight program (Shuttle and Space Station), I think he has a valid point. Sean O'Keefe, NASA Administrator, says that NASA "gets it" in relation to the need to change, but I don't see much evidence of that. They seem to understand the need to improve their effectiveness, but they don't seem to understand that the bigger problem is a lack of relevance.

To give an example, consider the contributions of Charles Lindbergh to aviation. I just finished reading his biography, written by A. Scott Berg. Lindbergh helped to solve many practical problems and helped the early airlines set up routes. Over his lifetime, the problems of civil aviation were solved well enough that he saw little point in going for additional performance (supersonic commercial transport).

But where Lindbergh was Promethean in his outlook, NASA leadership seems to be Olympian. Wherever there has been a choice to be made between jealously guarding access to space and opening up "the high frontier," they have come down in favor of the status quo.

So, if NASA wants to be taken seriously, they need to address the credibility gap. They need to demonstrate their contributions to the "utilitarian applications of space technology" that Van Allen refers to. Their plan to scuttle the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission is the most recent demonstration of their values.

That does not mean that human spaceflight is a bad idea, only that NASA has not demonstrated why they should be entrusted with this responsibility.

Manned spaceflight will require us to develop an understanding of the requirements of supporting human life in a finite ecology located in space.

I half-expected that to link to a really crappy movie. :)

The Honorable Prof. Van Allen has long been a detractor of crewed spaceflight. This is old news. And not very surprising, either.

I am an Iowa Physics and astronomy student. Van Allen works only two floors up from me. Although I don't know him personally, I have certainly read the various articles and commentary posted by his door.

Why not surprising? Professor Van Allen is a pioneer of robotic spaceflight. As a plasma physicist, humans are of little use to him in any place other than on the ground doing data reduction. That's okay, but there are other scientific disciplines such as geology and SETI (which is certainly taken seriously among radio astronomers, contrary to some popular belief) where human investigators are hard to replace.

Is orbiting the earth in an elderly tin can a waste of our time and money? Maybe, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't go to Mars.

Even if you don't believe that the scientific merits of spaceflight are worth the cost, consider the technological benefits. Attempting a new task of spaceflight is a technological challenge that yields benefits felt in every corner of society.

The only thing that can be said for the human cost is that astronauts do their jobs fully cognisant of the risk. They know they could be making more money in a safer job in the private sector, but they do it anyway. They have that "ideology of adventure" that Professor Van Allen does not.

When NASA sent out job offers for the astronaut class of 2004, candidates were asked if they would still want the job, even if there was a chance they would never fly in space. All but one said yes. These are people who are fully committed to the enterprise of crewed spaceflight, even at great personal risk. I for one would not stop them from voluntarily assuming that risk "in peace for all mankind." I would also happily join them.

Judging by the latest SOHO images, it looks like the sun spots are already past us... But IANAA (I am not an astronomer).

Judging by the latest SOHO images, it looks like the sun spots are already past us... But IANAA (I am not an astronomer).

Yes, it counts. http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/spinoff1997/t2.html

For those that care, here's the link for the NASA site on Messenger. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/i ndex.html

Well as long as they don't use feet and inches they should be safe

While most other planets have been well studied, Mercury has not even had half its surface mapped! Messenger has non-visual light detectors including a laser altimiter which will let it map the whole planet, counteracting its slow rate of rotation. I hope the launch goes well and look forward to the data return. Kudos to NASA for doing some good science on what is considered a less sexy target than some others which seem to hog all the research money.

I can back this up. McMurdo uses a satellite earthstation located at an uninhabited island several miles south of "town" itself, which is on the southern coast of Ross Island:

Black Island

The connection is a T1 that goes from town to Black Island via point-to-point microwave. Part of the T1 is used to carry voice telecom, fax lines, and MPEG-encoded television from the US.

Black Island was chosen because it can see (looking north) over the large bulk of Mt Erebus to make LOS with a geosync bird at the equator. See photo on the page, above. That's the dish in the dome, and you can see how high up the horizon Mt Erebus protrudes. McMurdo is at 77.88 degrees south, so a equatorial sat is still above the horizon.

Pole, at a full 90 degrees south cannot see a real equatorial geosync bird. But, birds that are decaying in orbit become highly variable in the N/S direction, so they appear to wobble up and down on the horizon. When it's up, it's usable. There are no mountains or ground clutter at Pole, so it only has to be up a little bit. Geosync birds do not move in the E/W direction, so the dish only has to track up and down. A previous poster who described the dish spinning around to track the horizon is sniffing skua dung.

I participated in a project to try to establish other lines of communication out of McMurdo via the NASA TDRS sats. I think I'm the sitting guy in this photo.

Black Island is 'uninhabited', but people stay there for various periods of time to keep an eye on troublesome equipment. They brew a lot of beer there, during the down times.

I was present during the season of the construction of the current dome and dish on Black Island (though I was not at BI itself at the time). During a critical period of construction, part of the dome was finished, but it still had gaps in it. A massive storm (Herbie) came up, and shredded the whole dome with 120+Mph winds, spreading debris for miles. A new dome had to be flown in at the last minute, and landed in a heavy cargo plane on the rapidly-melting ice runway. But the new system has worked very well for the last 10 years, and McMurdo has excellent connectivity.

I can back this up. McMurdo uses a satellite earthstation located at an uninhabited island several miles south of "town" itself, which is on the southern coast of Ross Island:

Black Island

The connection is a T1 that goes from town to Black Island via point-to-point microwave. Part of the T1 is used to carry voice telecom, fax lines, and MPEG-encoded television from the US.

Black Island was chosen because it can see (looking north) over the large bulk of Mt Erebus to make LOS with a geosync bird at the equator. See photo on the page, above. That's the dish in the dome, and you can see how high up the horizon Mt Erebus protrudes. McMurdo is at 77.88 degrees south, so a equatorial sat is still above the horizon.

Pole, at a full 90 degrees south cannot see a real equatorial geosync bird. But, birds that are decaying in orbit become highly variable in the N/S direction, so they appear to wobble up and down on the horizon. When it's up, it's usable. There are no mountains or ground clutter at Pole, so it only has to be up a little bit. Geosync birds do not move in the E/W direction, so the dish only has to track up and down. A previous poster who described the dish spinning around to track the horizon is sniffing skua dung.

I participated in a project to try to establish other lines of communication out of McMurdo via the NASA TDRS sats. I think I'm the sitting guy in this photo.

Black Island is 'uninhabited', but people stay there for various periods of time to keep an eye on troublesome equipment. They brew a lot of beer there, during the down times.

I was present during the season of the construction of the current dome and dish on Black Island (though I was not at BI itself at the time). During a critical period of construction, part of the dome was finished, but it still had gaps in it. A massive storm (Herbie) came up, and shredded the whole dome with 120+Mph winds, spreading debris for miles. A new dome had to be flown in at the last minute, and landed in a heavy cargo plane on the rapidly-melting ice runway. But the new system has worked very well for the last 10 years, and McMurdo has excellent connectivity.

I stowed away on Cassini and am posting from inside a crate of pudding. Not sure why they packed that...

You can find out exactly where I am here.

So, you wanna experiment with advanced homebrew human-computer interfaces; but you don't want to risk dangerous and painful do-it-yourself brain surgery in an nonsterile garage or basement lab.

What about: subvocal speech input a and wireless earpiece ?

During the Apollo 12 mission, they recovered material from the Surveyor 3 probe. Examination of one of the recovered pieces showed that microbes had survived for over two years on the moon.

While the moon doesn't have an atmosphere worth mentioning for heating the probe during descent, it does become boiling hot during the lunar day. And, considering that you'll want to protect many instruments from extremes of heat, it may actually stay much cooler than 'boiling' inside the probe during the landing.

Finally! Proof that people in the 50's had handwriting as bad as my own!

I,

Have been doing these types of simulations with airplanes for about 15 years now. And I certainly wasn't the first to do it. So it's pretty old hat to me and a lot of other folks.

The most prevalant aviation simulation tool is called SIMMOD by the FAA.

Take a look at NASA's FAST system to see a real life working example used by air traffic controllers today.:

http://www.ctas.arc.nasa.gov/project_description/f ast.html

However, is private industry insterested in science? As I have said before, private industry in space is good, however there is a place for NASA. I am having great difficulty thinking of a corporation which would greenlight the Kepler Mission or LISA.

However, is private industry insterested in science? As I have said before, private industry in space is good, however there is a place for NASA. I am having great difficulty thinking of a corporation which would greenlight the Kepler Mission or LISA.

BAAFAMUST (Because Acronyms Are Fun And Make Us Sound Technical).

How do I become a pilot?

Air Force pilots are generally officers who compete for the pilot training slots. Air Force flight training has strict vision requirements. The vision requirements are 20/50 for pilots and 20/200 for navigators. Vision for both must be correctable to 20/20. Applicants who have a history of Photo Refractive Keratectomy (PRK), Radial Keratotomy (RK), or Laser In-Situ Keratomileusis (LASIK) are ineligible for aviation duty.

Is surgery to improve visual acuity allowed?

No, any type of surgery to improve visual acuity, e.g. radial keratotomy, photorefractive keratectomy, LASIK, etc., will disqualify you for the Astronaut Candidate Program ...

...but I can see the studio spotlights and that cheapass tinfoil on the lander don't fool me.

ahh I love the hoax lunar stories. try this one. not may remember but the voice and images, telemetry from apollo 11 had to be relayed from different tracking stations around the world. One of them in Honeysuckle creek (DSN 44) was receiving data from Apollo by directly pointing the dish at the moon. The data was then transmitted via Telstra to the yanks.

So the hoaxers have to contend not only with the Apollo crew, the ruskies but also csiro. Not exactly Occam's Razor is it?

ahh I love the hoax lunar stories. try this one. not may remember but the voice and images, telemetry from apollo 11 had to be relayed from different tracking stations around the world. One of them in Honeysuckle creek (DSN 44) was receiving data from Apollo by directly pointing the dish at the moon. The data was then transmitted via Telstra to the yanks.

So the hoaxers have to contend not only with the Apollo crew, the ruskies but also csiro. Not exactly Occam's Razor is it?