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Like the fictional tricorder, the PSA will have sensors that can detect the pressure and temperature of the ambient air, as well as concentrations of gases such as CO2. For astronauts living in a sealed aluminum can in the vacuum of space, this kind of information can be a matter of life and death.

No one is going to use a fission based launch system though, too many hippies alive still.

If you are interested (as I was) in hearing more about the SOHO recovery, here is a link with some good info:

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/operations/Recovery

Current ISS position, updated every minute.

Yesterday in the office: I had my iBook beside me, running Celestia. Try this: Current time, realtime, Select ISS, Go to ISS, Sync Orbit. Maneuver a bit around the station till you're where the Destiny module window is, then adjust the viewpoint so you get a nice horizon view. (Or just Track Sol.) Then just leave it running. Voila: anytime you feel like seeing what the ISS crew can see from Destiny, just look at Celestia. :)

(Interestingly enough, comparing the Celestia ISS view with the Station Location website, I found that Celestia's synchronization is a teeny bit off, but not by much. Nice work!)

As noted on the web page, there's the Centennial Challenges program is organizing a workshop in Washington DC on June 15-16. You can register online (please, authentic registrations only!). This sounds like an excellent opportunity to help shape history.

Here's the blurb from the web site:

To kickoff Centennial Challenges, NASA's new program of prize contests, NASA will host a workshop on June 15-16 in Washington, DC. The purpose of the workshop is to:

1. Gather ideas for Challenges,
2. Develop rules for specific Challenges and gauge competitor interest in various potential Challenges, and
3. Promote competitor teaming.

This workshop will be a key input into Centennial Challenges planning, helping to determine what specific Challenge competitions NASA announces in 2004 and 2005 and the rules of those competitions. All potential Centennial Challenge competitors, including interested members of industry, academia, students, and the general public, are invited to attend.

As noted on the web page, there's the Centennial Challenges program is organizing a workshop in Washington DC on June 15-16. You can register online (please, authentic registrations only!). This sounds like an excellent opportunity to help shape history.

Here's the blurb from the web site:

To kickoff Centennial Challenges, NASA's new program of prize contests, NASA will host a workshop on June 15-16 in Washington, DC. The purpose of the workshop is to:

1. Gather ideas for Challenges,
2. Develop rules for specific Challenges and gauge competitor interest in various potential Challenges, and
3. Promote competitor teaming.

This workshop will be a key input into Centennial Challenges planning, helping to determine what specific Challenge competitions NASA announces in 2004 and 2005 and the rules of those competitions. All potential Centennial Challenge competitors, including interested members of industry, academia, students, and the general public, are invited to attend.

Now, the hypothosis of global warming has not been irrefutably proven and certain discrepencies have not been accounted for.

For instance, A volcanic erruption can cause so much more so called "greenhouse" gasses to be released into the atmosphere than all the polutants man has expelled since the first machine of industry.

Since there is no explanation for the past trend nor the fact that looking even further back the entire planet had a higher median temperature. as is evident by the many hypothosis that the thunder lizards may have died due to an ice age... I don't really have to point out there weren't humans then to contribute to that natural disaster that caused a dramatic shift in the planet's climate.

When the news came down that SOHO was probably gone for good, otherwise very controlled, steady, Dave Bowman types were seen leaning against the wall weeping, or bawling in front of the console. It was as if we were all in mourning for a suddenly lost friend -- except that, another time, a member of the spacecraft team did pass away (for reasons of his own) and the collective gestalt emotion was not as strong about him as about the spacecraft itself. That's not a statement about the callousness of the individuals involved -- but rather about the strength of the emotional upset that came from the loss of the mission.

Perhaps that's because the mission becomes such a strong focus of the team's lives that it really does encroach on an emotional place normally reserved for our closest friends and family. We're conditioned, and society is structured, to deal with human tragedy; but losing our ``friend'' leaves us with an equally large void and no societal preparation for it.

For your article from late 2001, I'll give you an article from the very same agency.

Then, how about looking at the various timescales?
Yes, earth has been warmer in the past, and over the 2-4billion years of its existance, there are longer periods warmer. Imagine the universe is only 3K warm. Great. What does that mean for our situation at hand?

Now have a look at the very same link you provided, which is probably more of our concern, the time of human civilisation. As you can see,
the climate has been actually colder in average (Hence the often cited "fear of the Ice Age" in the 70s). But not only that, judging from the previous curves, 2000 AD should be the peak of its curve.

But, a time-scale which has ticks every 10 millenia is also a bit out of scale. Strangely enough, most people are more concerned about the next decades up to a century, not millenia.

Have a look at the curve, which is probably more of our concern. Should that not be recent enough, here some more, including one from 2003.

> But how much, and is it even measurable compared to a massive volcanic eruption?

Let's start with the fact that vulcans contribute their CO2 regardless whether humans contribute or not. So anthrophogenic CO2 is added to their exhaust.

Now to the data. According to these geologists, anthropogenic CO2 emissions are roughly 150 times the estimated emissions of volcanos.

tiny electric motor? with a drivetrain? that wouldn't be my first thought... seems like they could make the sole out of something spongelike containing magnetorheological fluids and some electomagnets to vary the stiffness and sponginess

The BBC Article says that: "This form of matter comprises more than 70% of the Universe's mass, far more than the stars and galaxies we can see." This is technically correct. The WMAP results are that 73% of the energy density of the universe is "dark energy." The remaining energy density is matter. From galactic rotation curves, gravitational lensing, etc. we suspect that dark matter accounts for around 80% of the matter (mass) in the universe.

..or doesn't it just look like the MegaMaid body, floating through space ?

After posting this, I found a page that might be a start... :-)

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/eph

Click "Target Body" and enter "Toutatis". The body will be found, and you can then request the data. The question is what (if any) options to enable for it, etc...

Any other near-Earth asteroid as big as Toutatis would almost surely be spotted decades or centuries before any possible impact.

LOL - we've catalogued what... 10% of N.E.O's? At least it's anti-FUD...

Aren't the Columbia Hills called that because the hills are named after the last crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Am I the only one who thinks this "crater" looks like a giant antlion trap? Especially with the loose "sand" looking stuff in the bottom center... I could totally see a gigantic martian antlion reaching out of that thing and rending poor opportunity into bits. Let's hope they didn't neglect to include phasers when designing these rovers =)

Am I the only one who thinks this "crater" looks like a giant antlion trap? Especially with the loose "sand" looking stuff in the bottom center... I could totally see a gigantic martian antlion reaching out of that thing and rending poor opportunity into bits. Let's hope they didn't neglect to include phasers when designing these rovers =)

Am I the only one who thinks this "crater" looks like a giant antlion trap? Especially with the loose "sand" looking stuff in the bottom center... I could totally see a gigantic martian antlion reaching out of that thing and rending poor opportunity into bits. Let's hope they didn't neglect to include phasers when designing these rovers =)

If Opportunity exhausts the scientific possibilities at Endurance Crater, the next target, according to NASA press releases is some "etched terrain" several kilometers to the south. Presumably they would be weighing the possibility of getting to that versus the benefits of spending the rest of the mission at or inside Endurance.

Wiggled! Thank you, thank you, JPL, for making mission photos so available to everyone. This is exciting stuff.

Grr, use html for links! :)

click for pic

For those who are unaware - Scott Maxwell is one of the 'drivers' of the rovers. So he really means it when he says 'we'; and not in the sense of "'we' lost the game" when simply referring to the home team :)

Pictures

"The big question is, if we can get down, can we get back out?" Wallace said.

"The big question is, if we can get down, can we get back out?" Wallace said.

photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html

I am really looking forward to when Spirit reaches the Columbia Hills. If Spirit successfully reaches the top of the hill the view will be breathtaking. Not only could we see the landing site but also see the actual rim of Gusev Crater more clearly. It will be an amazing sight!

I'd like to see that, too. But unfortunately, the current thinking is that we won't be climbing the hills when we get there.

In fact, I just had that conversation with Larry Soderbloom, one of the top scientists on the mission. My side was, basically: "But, Larry, the view would be so cool." :-) He readily agreed, but unfortunately, there's just nothing scientifically compelling up there. (As best we can tell from orbital imagery, that is.)

However, MOC images (MOC is the camera system on the MGS spacecraft) show that there's a lot of cool stuff in the hills' vicinity, making them a worthwhile destination anyway. There are rock outcroppings on the hills themselves, which we'll be able to see fairly well even without climbing to them, and several geological features of great interest in the 500m or so around the hills. (Now that we've upgraded the rovers' flight software, we're regularly covering 70m+ per sol -- indeed, we just set a new Spirit single-sol record of 92m -- so 500m is roughly a week of driving.) As a result, that area is likely to give us our best chance of telling the "water story" we came to Gusev to find.

Incidentally, we're shooting for reaching the hills in about 40 more days (we're targeting sol 160; we just planned sol 119). Stay tuned.

FWIW, as spectacular as the view would be in other respects, I don't think the Gusev Crater rim would look any better from the top of the hills. It's faint because of the high tau (atmospheric opacity) caused by the global dust storm that preceded our landing, and which is still settling. Maybe the view would be better from a little higher, but I doubt it. The good news is that the rim is showing up better and better as the atmosphere clears, so we'll get better views of it over time even without climbing the hills. (If you've never noticed the rim in the images, you can see it in this image if you look carefully -- look to the right of the hills, at the right-hand edge of the image. It's faint, but that's the rim of Gusev Crater.)

Of course, this doesn't work if something unexpected happens like lots of soil slippage or a rock giving way (that would have to be one large rock). The rovers are programmed to go around rocks, not over them, so the chances of it tipping over are pretty low. Soil slippage like the type Opportunity saw at Eagle crater isn't going to cause the rover to tip. It was have to be a full-on landslide.

Well, they've been sitting there since Friday and will spent the next two sols (Martian days) looking at the crater. Here's an amazing hi-res TIF. If you ask me, it looks to steep to go down. But on the other hand, this is the most exciting target in the Meridiani plains...

The Altitude record set by NASA with a ballon lifting 3/4 of a ton :

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/news-release/releases/200 2/h02-163.htm

161,000 feet is a good starting point for a floatation based launch platform
firing a rail gun canister of material into low orbit .

It can be picked up in Low orbit by a robotic type device , and fired again
into high orbit if the initial shot cannot get it free of the gravity well .

We can do inflight refueling , we can land a robot on an asteroid during the
NEAR project , we can do this with the right grey matter at the helm .

At this time the forces are too great for a human to withstand it , but the
equipment/supplies to support a human in space weigh far more than the human .

Using a high altitude launch platform for materials, and supplies it would bring
down costs a great deal .

Alot of ppl mention the reverse force when firing a railgun , this can be eliminated
by firing equal weight of water in a cylinder towards the earth .

Thus a nullifying equal force , both rail guns back to back simultaneous firing .

As for humans, perhaps something like one of the X-prize craft could launch from this
altitude and reach high orbit .

Getting the first 49 kilometers with just simple lighter than air gas lift would
be a good jump start .

Ex-MislTech

Here is another article (along with a huge picture!) at the official JPL NASA website.

Here is another article (along with a huge picture!) at the official JPL NASA website.

Atlantis is currently parked in the shuttle hanger, waiting for a mission sometime in 2005 or 2006... (Future Shuttle Schedule)

Perhaps not a scuba diver, but a submersible would. Deepest dive is at just over 4 miles.

Santorini. I've been there, and I've seen what remains and has been excavated of the (now underground) city. IIRC it was a part of the advanced Minoan civilisation of Crete, which disappeared for no apparent reason. I guess the economic and environmental damage caused by a volcanic event like this could go some way towards an explanation, but I don't really remember the history too well..since I was only about 7 when I went :)

http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/images/santor ini.jpg

see that island? it used to have a middle.

yeah, cause you know what the fuck you're talking about.

Now that jokes about 190 dB have died out, it's time for us geeks to learn how the damn thing works. The thing that has reportedly flown on the Space Shuttle (and many other space missions) is properly called "pulse tube cryocooler", good background is here.

And where I work the joke was "Hey, Ben and Jerry switch to pulse tubes, NOW they'll become cheaper! ;-) "

Paul B.

No, really. While I was interning at JSC, we got a tour of the robotics lab and got to see Robonaut in action. There's a picture floating around out there somewhere where I'm shaking Robonaut's hand. My eyes are closed and I have a really goofy look on my face. Robonaut is bigger than a person, though not by a lot, and has extra degrees of freedom. It can do things like swivel its wrists in a full circle.

While Robonaut is Really Cool, it's not quite as cool as the article implies. It has extremely limited autonomy...they're still teaching it to do things like tell the difference between a wrench and a screwdriver, since machine vision is not a trivial problem, though when I was there they had gotten it to the stage where it was capable of following commands like "Robonaut, get wrench."

It does much better when piloted by a human. The operator puts on a helmet and Power Glove-looking ensemble, and Robonaut will mimic the operator's actions. The operator has to move slowly, however, because Robonaut can't move all that quickly, and if there are too many intervening actions, the program will miss them and it will take the shortest distance between the start condition and end condition, even if there were intervening movements.

I saw it tie a knot in a rope, under operator guidance, and it was able to take a pen from a programmer's hand, hold it correctly (not clenched in a fist, but held between thumb and forefinger) and write with it.

It doesn't have legs. And the head looks like Boba Fett's helmet. When I asked, the explanation I got was that it's designed to look like a Roman Centurion's helmet, but when the designer told me that, he got a really shifty look on his face, so I know the truth.

Anyway...Robonaut linkage.

-Carolyn

Geosyncronous orbit is 22,500 miles. The ISS and space shuttle orbit at around 200 miles. That is why the ISS can be seen from the ground.

The hubble is more or less parked in it's orbit because it doesn't have much in the way of thrusters. So, if lack of fuel and engine power constitutes a reason, there you have it.

I am not a robot engineer, but this look like state-of-the-art to me...

hypothesis: Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will warm the Earth (first proposed in 1895, by Svante Arrhenius
experiment: measure temperature and carbon dioxide, wait
result> CO2 and temperature both rise

fits your definition of the scientific process, no?

Seems to me you failed 9th grade science class.

no, we learned that in 7th grade. Maybe it was the fact I was in a gifted and talented class?

ok, let's go back 1000 years and then look at some model results. (graph in the middle of the page, the IPCC site is slow at the moment)

In the grand scale of the Earth the observations just a century so of data might as well be one days data.

True, but on the grand scale of me, or a city, or a civilization, 140 years is quite a long time. And applying theories to data (and data to theories) is what science is all about). If you're doing historical science you can make a prediction about what you expect to see in data obtained from the past. Do you not believe in geology?

a: carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere (see the Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory)

b: carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation (graph)

So an increase in CO2 should lead to an increase in temperature, which we observe. Any questions?

The NASA earth observatory thang has some images taken from MIR of the area. Maybe that's about as close as I'd want to get for now.

So feel free to take what I've said as you will. I can assure you, though, that the translation "it is finished" is at least as valid as "the debt is paid" if not a more accepted translation of what Jesus says.

By the way, all this comes by means of analysis from myself, a second year Greek student at the University of Illinois, so you could probably ask most people who know Greek and they could confirm what I have written here.

Words change their meaning over time. Sometimes quickly sometimes globally and especially locally. Ask a Brit what a fag is and he will tell you something completely different than an American. Only 40 years ago gay only meant happy, yet today its usage overwhelmingly means homosexual. Your understanding of ancient Greek cannot be trusted to be accurate. I don't think anyone's can, especially not for the hairs you are splitting. To deny this obvious truth would be to embrace intellectual dishonesty.

I find it disturbing that so many humans are infected with this incredible hubris that leads them to believe there's a being that knows everything down to the spin and location of every sub atomic particle but is intimately concerned with these relatively microscopic humans on this sand grain of a planet. You elevate your status unduly.

Have some perspective.

Some different, if not better, pics here: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/target/Titan

here

No. For a 3D space simulator you want visible-light images of the atmosphere, not radar surface images.

This voyager2 image is what you want.

What we should do is not to complain that these pictures are bad, instead let us acknowledge the science and engineering that let us take pictures this good.

As a quick comparison, here's a picture of Titan taken by Voyager 2. Note the complete absence of visible surface features - the atmosphere was too murky for them to be seen.

It's definitely some very impressive science and engineering which has let people peer through the atmosphere and take far more useful images of a distant moon - from a distance of ~1,600 million kilometres instead of ~4.5 million kilometres. And through Earth's turbulent, hazy atmosphere too.

... but this is another source of fantastic pics that have been taken of various objects in our solar system

NASA Planetary Photojournal

I don't know many (any?) people that "believe" in the big bang theory. There are a lot of people that sort of accept it as a likely consequence of Einstein's theories, but there are competing theories that are becoming more credible as of late.

(0) Scientific theories aren't meant to be "believed"; they represent our best understanding of the present evidence. That science accepts this limitation on what it claims as knowledge is one of its great strengths.

(1) The Big Bang theory stands on its own, it is not a consequence of relativity (special or general) nor of any of Einstein's other theories.

(2) The expansion of the Universe is extremely well established back to when the universe was 0.002 percent its present age, and its mean temperature was equivalent to the surface of a star.

(3) There are no competing theories that are "more credible" than the Big Bang theory at this time. BB theory has evolved a bit, but all the new stuff fits nicely in the big bang/expanding universe paradigm.

(4) The recent WMAP measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background matched the predictions of Big Bang theory to an exquisite precision not often seen in Science. It's a slam-dunk. In short, if you and the people you know do not accept the Big Bang theory based on current evidence, then I would guess that you have some (religious?) reason to want to "believe" in something else, or you are simply ignorant of the evidence.