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Southern hemisphere won't see anything

Really? We've got the Pi-Puppids plus a circumpolar "bright" comet, C/2001 Q4 (NEAT).

Also, the Lyrids are not the first meteor shower of the year; the first of several showers before the Lyrids are the Quadrantids. Downunder, but not left out...

As suggested by NASA's Michael Meyer, there is an ethical component to decisions we make as we move outward from our planet to explore other worlds. As such, NASA's Planetary Protection Advisory Committee has a bioethicist on it. The first cases of interaction between life from two worlds could happen as we explore Mars, or perhaps Europa. This will likely be limited to simple lifeforms. At some point we'll have to deal with more complex issues.

As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes the introduction of superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Star Fleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or an accidental contamination of said culture. This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral obligation.

BTW, something that should have been in the original submission: Planetary Protection Office website

Just a data point: I graduated college with a BSEE degree in fall 1988 and started working pretty much the first of the year in 1989. My starting salary working in the Chicago area was $32k. Using the Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator that works out to about $47k in 2003 dollars.

At the time $32k was considered slightly above average for starting pay for an engineer. On the other hand, engineers were in higher demand then. These days I'd think $40k would be about average.

According to this Salary Wizard the US national average pay for a "Software Engineer I" is $52,364. Take that however you want. It sounds pretty high to me.

And according to the update on Wikipedia page for GP-B was sucessfully placed in orbit:
The satellite was placed in orbit at 11:12:33 AM (18:12:33 UTC) after a cruise period over the south pole and a short second burn.

Couldnt verify that with the GP-P Offical Site or NASA GP-P Site but I may have not been looking hard enough.
:P

And according to the update on Wikipedia page for GP-B was sucessfully placed in orbit:
The satellite was placed in orbit at 11:12:33 AM (18:12:33 UTC) after a cruise period over the south pole and a short second burn.

Couldnt verify that with the GP-P Offical Site or NASA GP-P Site but I may have not been looking hard enough.
:P

are the systems onboard a modern aircraft really so fragile that my cell phone will bother them?

Yes, they are. You have to understand that navigational aids used in airplanes have been designed about 50 years ago, when EM interferences wasn't as much of a concern.

For just a report of a _pager_ causing VOR gauges anomalies, read this callback issue. I believe I have seen more of the same in other issues, although I can't be bothered to check right now.

That is, inertia in big science funding?

In 1995, the GP-B was described as the "only experiment ever devised to test [the existence of frame-dragging]."

However, in 1997 NASA announced that it had successfully tested frame dragging. See also here.

The BBC article has it slightly wrong. The launch was delayed because of changing high level winds, and they could not confirm that the launch vehicle had the proper information loaded. Details here.

Actually, at the speed of light, traveling towards the arth from Alpha Centauri, light from Sol would be traveling at 600,000km/sec in relationship to him. Light originating from his ship would be travling at normal speed to him, but faster or slower in perspective to anyone (or anything) he was passing.

That's something I don't quite grasp.

The milky galaxy is spinning at x km/s. The galaxy itself is moving away from the center of the (our?) universe at x km/s. A photon on the outward rotation of our planet, on the outward rotation of our solar system, on the outward rotation of our galaxy, moving away from the center of the universe (myself, as my girlfriend says I believe) would be traveling far faster than say a photon moving in the opposite direction from say the opposite side of the same planet.

To each other, their relative speeds would be 600,000km/s, even though to the casual observer standing on the planet, each one would be moving at 300,000km/s.

A photon moving towards the center of our universe could/would encounter one of our example photons moving outward from the center of the universe at a *MUCH* higher speed.

We'll name the photon coming from our planet at max speed Pa , and the incoming photon Pb.

Pa = speed of light (it's speed at creation) + rotation of the planet + rotation of the galaxy + rotation of the universe

Pb = speed of light (assuming it came from an absolute stand still in relation to the universe)

So, the speed of incidence would be Pa + Pb, which to either photon would be rather high.

A little NASA trivia

So, if you were to walk across your yard (at the equator) at 4mile/hour in the same direction as the rotation of the earth, you're really moving at roughly 1004 miles/hour.

> Actually, the US does have vast streches of forests (that are growing, not shrinking), though I wouldn't call them secret.

Over the last century the US has almost exactly 300 million hectar of forests. The US claimed in 2000 that their forests absorbs 310 million metric tons of CO2. In 1996, the US emitted 5.000 million metric tons of CO2. Hardly a net minus.

> One of the things the US wanted in Kyoto, but didn't get, was credit for CO2 absorbtion.

The Kyoto Protocol Article 3.3 gives credit for "afforestation, reforestation and deforestation since 1990".
And the fact that a (non-growing) forest absorbs CO2 seems to be a temporary effect. They can only puffer an additional amount of CO2.

Yeah. Danged media. Not a bad article, tho, despite the speculation. But this got me:

Article quote: The way Opportunity's luck has been going, it would not be surprising to learn the rover has detected Martian microbes.

Although it's not equipped to, like the Viking landers were. Opportunity is a geological explorer, not a biological one.

SB

There isn't any kind of evidence there ever was life on Mars.

This article raises the speculation that life from Mars survived a high temp impact, ejection through the harsh radiation and temperatures of space and "cross-polinated" earth?

This is not supported by any facts and is pure speculation.

the world's best primer on Mars

It was Apollo 12 that brought back bits of one of the Surveyor soft-landers. They brought back a piece of insulation, and when they examined it back on earth they found either a spore or a bacterium deep in the middle. So, it wasn't exactly exposed to all the conditions of space, except for the heat, cold and hard radiation.

And of course, there's also the bacterium that withstands high doses of radiation, Deinococcus radiodurans. NASA's been looking at it, apparently:

"Meet Conan the Bacterium"

Neither. It is a satellite.

SOHO (Solar & Heliospheric Observatory) is a joint mission of ESA and NASA. The on board telescope has a coronograph: that is it masks out the sun central body to permit the study of the outer part of the Sun's atmosphere (that is known as the corona). This makes it also great for the observation of comets when they do a "very close to the sun" passage.

The home page is here and the Bradfield comet images are (for the moment) here .

Neither. It is a satellite.

SOHO (Solar & Heliospheric Observatory) is a joint mission of ESA and NASA. The on board telescope has a coronograph: that is it masks out the sun central body to permit the study of the outer part of the Sun's atmosphere (that is known as the corona). This makes it also great for the observation of comets when they do a "very close to the sun" passage.

The home page is here and the Bradfield comet images are (for the moment) here .

.... they're looking towards the center of our galaxy, although a globular cluster might also be a good candidate.

.... they're looking towards the center of our galaxy, although a globular cluster might also be a good candidate.

OFMG! He's right, it's the Goatse Nebula!

Actually, you're too late. You know how porn drives technology? Well, the goatse guy is so nasty that his technology is already vastly superior to ours. You could say he stretches the limits of physics.... Anyway.

View this image of a nebula, hosted on one of NASA's servers: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021102.html

Absolutely frightening.

warp drive is a cooler way of avoiding time-dilation IMHO, you wont need to get a ship (travelling below c) to your destination first. of ocurse there's a slight problem of creating all the needed energy, but then again, keeping wormholes open got that problem as well! ;-)

Hey, it looks like there's already a precedent for using rock (heh, get it) music names. Satriani's pretty cool, didn't know he was still putting out music. I might have to check it out!

Are you kidding?

Every day or so, I head over to this site to check out the latest images. Some of the high-res color photos look like something I could have shot with my digital camera out in the desert somewhere, but then I remember: they were taken on ANOTHER FREAKING PLANET. It really is a amazing thing to be alive to see. The folks at NASA and the JPL should be proud of themselves.

Opportunity already drove 100 meters in one day. Ofcourse the terrain on Meridiani is completely different compared to Gusev.

All the scientists here at JPL are very happy to see that we'll be getting more science, however one of the issues is that we're going to be moving to a less efficient planning cycle, planning for two days per rover at a time. Also it will all be being done on earth time, which is nice for scientists, however it means things have to be planned very far in advance.

Also one of the problems we are experiencing is that a lot of the mission software was originally designed to only run at JPL on our computing environment, and is very difficult to take back to home institutions because it is so specialized.

I'm currently working on making the Science Activity Planner (the tool used by all scientists to do high level planning before they start sequencing) work collaboratively over the web. It's exciting because we're dramatically increasing the amount of people who can participate in high level planning. You can grab the public version, called Maestro, here.

One of the other challenges is the bandwidth and latency associated with transfering autogenerated data products (imagery etc) to all of our satalite institutions. I'm currently working on ways to reduce the necessary bandwidth but without lossy compression there's only so much one can do.

Anyways, this part of the mission will test out a paradigm known as "Distributed Mission Operations". You can download a paper written by my supervisor about how this was used on Pathfinder here.

Future mars missions will last far too long to bring scientists away from their home institutions and pay for temporary housing etc (which is a significant cost). Scientists want to be with their collegues and families during the long periods of exploration.

Hopefully this will prove that it is both feasible and desireable. There are several studies going on about this, but I'm not aware of any relevant links.

Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers

This was posted on JPL's rover site on Thursday. It's got a lot more info.

The sun provides an interesting example of polarity flips, which only take 11 years and thus are fairly well studied. The way it does it is different than Earth, as the sun's convective layer is what produces the field, and the convective layer extends to the surface. None the less, during the flip, the sun's surface sprouts many magnetic poles, almost always in pairs. We call them sunspots. Current theory suggests that the polarity flip actually occurs because the sun sheds the old polarity like a snake sheds its skin. It's not the sunspots or x-ray flares themselves that do it, it's the gigantic explosions known as Coronal Mass Ejections that violently heave enormous quantities of magnetic gas/plasma into space. The Earth can't shed a magnetic field this way, which might help explain why it takes so long. Multipole explanations of polarity flips are not that esoteric.

<a href="http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap960112.ht ml">Lunar bull's-eye</a>

Better sources for space related stuff:
spaceref.com
space.com
spaceflightnow.com
spacedaily.com
the rovers' homepage
and just for fascinating pics and educative descriptions: Astronomy Picture of the Day

They often carry the same stories, but usually one of them will have the scoop. There are more sites, but these ones are definately worthy of a daily visit, and some have plenty links to other interesting sites. Have fun :D

Better sources for space related stuff:
spaceref.com
space.com
spaceflightnow.com
spacedaily.com
the rovers' homepage
and just for fascinating pics and educative descriptions: Astronomy Picture of the Day

They often carry the same stories, but usually one of them will have the scoop. There are more sites, but these ones are definately worthy of a daily visit, and some have plenty links to other interesting sites. Have fun :D

For comparison purposes the best Isp from a chemical rocket system in use is pretty much Lox/H2 which gives you an Ispvac in the 460s range.

More info here: http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds1/tech/ionpropfaq.html

And yes, I am a rocket scientist.

Quick google search reveals this too:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/ice/ice_mercu ry.html

(1) Reporters early on asked how soon Opportunity would leave the crater it landed in to explore other areas.

Because it was a scientifically rich target. Besides, Opportunity would have spent that first half of its mission looking for a decent target with what happened to be in front of the rover when it landed in that mimi-crater. Besides, what is the hurry. In order to understand the stuff on the plain well, it pays to investigate the crater so that we have data to compare (control and variable in experimental contexts).

(2) It was announced with great enthusiasm that the rover teams were going to "go to mars time"...

They have done experiments on this in the past... it's challenging to do this. I would have said the team should have at least warmed up a couple of weeks on the new schedule.

(3) Personnel changes: The director of the mission (I forget his name) got promoted several weeks after the landings.

It's not like day-to-day operations are as demanding as they were. Practice makes perfect, and now they don't need as many people to run the rovers as they used to.

(4) Reporting to the public. It really started out great, with live video of the control center during both landings...

So go to this web site. It's got daily updates with streaming video. So I have no idea what you're talking about there. At the very least you can take a look at the raw images there being downloaded from Spirit and Opportunity. It's easy to "make your own Mars images" with Photoshop or the GIMP with these pictures. :^)

Earth rocks on the Moon

Apollo landed on 40,000 lines of beautiful, bug free code. Yes, Mission critical can be done perfectly, it just takes half the GDP of the USA to do.

Also brings up the joke if they can land a guy on the moon in 40,000 lines...What the heck is going on with Windows 95 that it needs 16 million?

Couldn't find a HTML link fast, Word doc:
Word reference

If I knew that, I'd patent it.

Obviously, you use elemental transmutation, that's where all the other elements came from anyway. (Ringworld is made of "scrith", though what exactly that is, besides being amazingly strong, isn't gone into.) Also, Jupiter is theorised to have a rocky/metallic core, 20-30 times the mass of Earth.

I believe you are thinking of the X-43A Scramjet test vehicle.

The write up is a direct copy from the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Well one of the questions arose that since iron is required by all life that we have thus found for some metabolic path or another is it because of its ferromagnetic properties? The answer was yes, look here.

... you copy a text verbatim from another site, you may want to mention that? It's not that difficult:" Credit & Copyright: Thomas Nylen & Andrew Fountain (PSU), NASA, NSF Russell Croman". There.

Couldn't gravitational lensing be a possible means for testing frame dragging?

Theoretically, yes.... there's a recent paper that works out the numbers for lensing from a spiral galaxy, and it's roughly on the order of a few micro-acroseconds. Possibly detectable by SIM or GAIA.

[TMB]

Given that you have worked on this project, would you care to comment on the other projects such as SUMO and LATOR which also aim to test Einstein's relativity?

Your 1997 NASA link actually goes to the previous 1995 statement.

However, in 1997 NASA announced that it had successfully tested frame dragging. See also here.

However, in 1997 NASA announced that it had successfully tested frame dragging. See also here.

However, in 1997 NASA announced that it had successfully tested frame dragging. See also here.

Um, you're not much of a developer, I hope? Or, if you are, do you do most of your work in perpetually late mainframe projects? What you're proposing sounds frighteningly much like writing a specification for the software system at the start, then developing it. This is known as the waterfall model, and there is a lot of consensus that it, well, sucks. Not to put too fine of a point on it.

Elin

This is a newsworthy story as the this guy is going to be one of the first to use ISS to test crystal growth . . .

Okay, I'll be nice since you said "one of the first". I just want to point out that ESA has already flown a crystal growth experiment to ISS three times. The experiment is called PromISS from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. The PromISS experiment box and samples were sent to ISS via Russian Progress and Soyuz modules. PromISS operates inside the ESA built Microgravity Science Glovebox within NASA's Destiny Laboratory.

PromISS first flew on the Odissea Mission, also known as the Belgian Taxi Flight, in 2002. PromISS-2 flew again in 2003 on the Cervantes Mission (Spanish Soyuz Mission) and the third set of experiments is currently being performed on ISS as part of the Delta Mission (Dutch Soyuz Mission).

- charboy

. . . it must have some vapor pressure that would cause it to slowly sublime in the vacuum of space. That sublimation would occur much more quickly for small droplets than large. Anybody have numbers?

According to the Orbital Debris Quarterly News in the Jan 2004 edition (see pages 6-7) there is "no noticeable sublimation over the 8 year time period.". This quote comes from an article written by Paula Krisko who is also mentioned in the space.com article.

- charboy

. . . it must have some vapor pressure that would cause it to slowly sublime in the vacuum of space. That sublimation would occur much more quickly for small droplets than large. Anybody have numbers?

According to the Orbital Debris Quarterly News in the Jan 2004 edition (see pages 6-7) there is "no noticeable sublimation over the 8 year time period.". This quote comes from an article written by Paula Krisko who is also mentioned in the space.com article.

- charboy