Slashdot Mirror

That's all [insert name here] bullship. Don't know who to blame but I searched for more data and found several pictures like that.
Like this (don't know exposition time) and this (five minute exposition, march 11).
All have similar streaks, the only difference is the streak on the "UFO" picture seens to be alone and probably move faster (since it's a 15 seconds exposition) or that's just zoom effect. And probably was the first to be photographed, so that's might be the reason it created so much hype between NASA people.
This is what I belive to be the original image, taken from this page.
There is some discussion here but I didn't read it all.

Sorry for the double post Was really just a mesa

This image is from March 11, same day as Slashdot article about the image of the earth as seen from Mars.

March 11

I meant to say 150k km, or 150.000.000meters. according to what NASA says the diameter of Jupiter is c.a. 142.984.000meters. Wikipedia is not as correct as most people assume. Infact, wikipedia blew up the figure 10888x in this case.

According to the Linear impact risk page, the total impact energy for 2004FH would be 380Kilotons of TNT, i.e. about 30 Hiroshima bombs.

High in the atmosphere - Hmm, is the EMP effect from a nuclear airburst actually dependent on the energy source being nuclear?

Acording to the NEO Close approach page the relative velocity of 2004 FH will be 8.0 km/s.

I may be reading the impact risk table wrong, but right now it seems to say that the distance it will miss by on Jan 12, 2053 is .01 earth radius. I assume that this means that we are very near the center of the area of uncertainty about where it will impact, and that the areo of uncertainty is currently extremely large.

On the other hand, I seem to recall that most previous predicted near misses had us further out from the centroid, and as the orbital data was refined, the area of uncertainty shrank until we were no longer in it. I suspect that reducing the uncertainty without changing the orbital prediction would raise the calculated risk with time.

As I read it the impact energy would be about equal to a 300Kiloton bomb. Not a particularly large hazard area if it came straight down (it probably won't), but it would certainly be big enough to mess up somebody's day. For that matter, has anyone actually run a prediction of what the effects (thermal, weather, etc.) would be from a grazing strike where it travelled parallel to the surface for a long way before breaking up or leaving the atmosphere?

Any object approaching from angles significantly above or below the equator will have only a very small chance of nailing a geostationary satellite.

If it's a solid lump of rock (ie, not permeated with ice or some other frozen gaseous substance) it could make it, possibly. A solid lump of metal - sure. From what I recall about several other asteroid studies, including the one of the "potato" (Quail's having a flashback) is that they are an amalgam of dust, rocks, etc. Such an object should explode/come apart when heated sufficiently by entry into the atmosphere. A few pieces probably will hit the ground, but they should be of insufficient size to cause significant harm unless you're in its path or a car.

Asteroids move faster than the speed of sound in Earth's atmosphere. As a result, the air pressure ahead of a fireball can substantially exceed the air pressure behind it. The difference can be so great that it actually crushes the object

As others have said, probably not, but the effect in the other direction is pretty substantial, changing the asteroid's direction by about 15 degrees.

Note also that, as good a job as LINEAR and others do, there is a class of asteroids that are damn hard to see form the ground - the "Aten"-class asteroids, which orbit mostly inside earths orbit and thus come at us from out of the sun. These ones also need to be catalogued and a watchfull eye kept out for.

The JPL web page about this asteroid gives a diagram of its orbit, and it is mostly within the Earth's orbit. They don't say whether the picture is the "before" or "after" picture --- the pass near Earth changes its direction by 15 degrees, which will make a noticeable change to its orbit.

An 80ft asteroid caused Meteor Crater at 1.2km wide. A 100ft one may likewise not burn up. Meteor Crater

For those too lazy to click the link, this is the relevent quote from the press release.

...is roughly 30 meters (100 feet) in diameter...

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/programs/linear.html isn't working for me...

• Which should be shattering to all those who felt their Solar-model-with-lightbulb-as-sun was truely 'to scale.'
• 
  Affleck was not immediately available for comment.

If that's the intended use. Perhaps they could team up with NASA which already has a winged flying prototype.

Just so somebody else doesn't have to look this up, geosynchronous orbit is at 19,323 nautical miles, while the various radar and broadband blimps are proposed to be at around 12 miles up. So satellites have an inherent 100ms delay each way, the blimp version would only have a one-way delay of 0.06 ms.

Actually, Europa does have an atmosphere, at least according to the JPL. This site also has some good quick facts about Europa.

Since the whole purpose of this probe would be to detect life, I would think they'd be attempting to insert a probe at a location most likely to support life. The surface is frozen, but many scientists hope that there is liquid water underneath, and this probe is designed specifically to melt its way down to the warmer regions and then look for life near likely locations like geothermal vents. Now that I think of the probe melting ice, the probe itself will have to be heated which would be enough to 'wake' the bacteria up.

If you don't believe me, look at the x-15 x-15 in full ablative coatings. The pilots wouldn't fly it unless they put a painted on top of it...

If you don't believe me, look at the x-15 x-15 in full ablative coatings. The pilots wouldn't fly it unless they put a painted on top of it...

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/E/Europa Orb.html

Icy moons orbiter

A show? Was it "just a show" when the space shuttle Enterprise began drop tests from the 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft to validate its performance on final approach and landing?

Tests of this type are very important. If it weren't for the 5th and final ALT test, the first flight crew (Young and Crippen aboard Columbia for STS-1) might have found themselves in a pilot-induced oscillation and crashed on landing, which would have been disastrous and delayed the program even more than it had been by that point - delays which led to the loss of Skylab when drag brought it down before a Shuttle could reach it to reboost it.

A show? Was it "just a show" when the space shuttle Enterprise began drop tests from the 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft to validate its performance on final approach and landing?

Tests of this type are very important. If it weren't for the 5th and final ALT test, the first flight crew (Young and Crippen aboard Columbia for STS-1) might have found themselves in a pilot-induced oscillation and crashed on landing, which would have been disastrous and delayed the program even more than it had been by that point - delays which led to the loss of Skylab when drag brought it down before a Shuttle could reach it to reboost it.

Not anymore... See NASA for details.

Umm. Says who? Let me quote from this webpage:

The Earth's atmosphere protects us from most NEOs smaller than a modest office building (50 m diameter, or impact energy of about 5 megatons). From this size up to about 1 km diameter, an impacting NEO can do tremendous damage on a local scale. Above an energy of a million megatons (diameter about 2 km), an impact will produce severe environmental damage on a global scale. The probable consequence would be an "impact winter" with loss of crops worldwide and subsequent starvation and disease. Still larger impacts can cause mass extinctions, like the one that ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago (15 km diameter and about 100 million megatons).

A 2 kilometer wide "big rock" as you call it would cause life-ending destruction on a worldwide scale. True we'd probably survive as a race and eventually recover but billions would die. I'd call that a "life-ending level of destruction on a worldwide scale".

Now obviously would it be better to let that 2km rock hit the Earth or break it into smaller pieces? These smaller pieces that survived the atomosphere would still hit with the impact of thermonuclear bombs (read up on the Tunguska event sometime) and destroy everything for miles around ground zero. Obviously if one of these fragments impacted in or near a large city the death toll could be in the millions -- but I'll take that any day over a nuclear winter and billions of people straving to death.

Two remote control, barely semi-autonomous, short lived robots which cost four times as much as they should have doesn't come close to cool.
If it weren't for the fact that it's the most hyped up mission in the last decade, it would be about as publicized as the average military satalite launch is. Non of the rovers have done anything which weren't already known facts and have already been done during the first mission. It's been known for decades that there's water on Mars.... it's in the POLAR ICE CAPS! Nearly every solid planet in the system likely has ground water if you look closely enough. So far this mission has been as marvelous and ground breaking as the Segway.

The only cool thing which has come out of NASA in a long time is the Deep Space 1

. It will be many years yet before the old fogies over at NASA stop their restrictive progress out into space like frail old men walk down the street.

I don't know what Dubya's camp is up to with all this space exploration/Mars stuff, but it just seems fishy to me.

First they spend (waste, IMO) billions sending probes to Mars (right after wasting millions or billions on a war) ...

I don't know what Dubya's camp is up to with all this space exploration/Mars stuff, but it just seems fishy to me.

First they spend (waste, IMO) billions sending probes to Mars (right after wasting millions or billions on a war) ...

I don't know what Dubya's camp is up to with all this space exploration/Mars stuff, but it just seems fishy to me.

First they spend (waste, IMO) billions sending probes to Mars (right after wasting millions or billions on a war) ...

I don't know what Dubya's camp is up to with all this space exploration/Mars stuff, but it just seems fishy to me.

First they spend (waste, IMO) billions sending probes to Mars (right after wasting millions or billions on a war) ...

I don't know what Dubya's camp is up to with all this space exploration/Mars stuff, but it just seems fishy to me.

First they spend (waste, IMO) billions sending probes to Mars (right after wasting millions or billions on a war) ...

Here's a link to Ed Lu's notes from when he was on the space station. He has some great essays about life on the ISS including some notes on taking photos of earth, exercise, life in zero-g, etc. Some of it is very basic if you've got a Physics degree, but for the rest of us it's fun writing and he has a friendly writing style.

For the more on-topic note, check out letter #2, flying. Gives a good basic explanation of how propulsion works in zero-g and could give the layman (like me) a basic understanding of his proposal.

I'll use Pluto for comparison, as others have today. This is what Hubble can discern of Pluto. They had the advantage of knowing where to look and... well the Hubble. Pluto isn't very bright at all. Its a magnitude 14 object (the higher the magnitude, the less bright the object). To give you an idea of just how bright that is (isn't), Sirius, the second brightest star in sky (Good old Sol is a bit brighter from our standpoint), is a magnitude -1.4 object (yes, NEGATIVE) and Polaris, the "North Star," a respectable 1.5. Suffice to say it doesn't stick out. Its reccommended of amateur astronmers seeking to observe Pluto that they tune in on its coordinates over the course of several nights and look for the little dot which seems to move over this time... which is kind of how it was discovered, if I remember correctly.

Breaking news: GNAA now tracked by NASA

Correction - Neptune was farther from Pluto from January 21, 1979 to Feb. 11, 1999 but at this time Pluto is farther from the sun than Neptune.

Of course, there's debate as to whether Pluto-Charon is a planet with a moon, or a double planet...

- Thomas;

I would say that NASA (and everybody else) has always had a single planet focus. Doing a quick scan of the Planetary Exploration Timeline at NASA shows two other probes with two planets visited: Pioneer 11 and Mariner 10; a planet and sun combo: Ulysses; and then a sprinkling seven or eight planet and comet or comet and comet probes. All the rest (around 200?) are single target missions. (It's early, my counts may be off.)

The thing about the Voyager missions is there was a window in 1977 where the gas giants would line up for the Grand Tour--where we could use the gravity assist from one planet to get to the next in a reasonable amount of time. Now, this only happens every 175 years, so I doubt I'll be around to see the next Grand Tour mission. So

However, like most grand tours, the Voyager missions did suffer from the "If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium" syndrome of taking some pictures and quickly moving on to the next destination. Most of the probes nowadays are more like picking a beach and spending your entire summer vacation there, so you have enough time to become familiar with the locale. (Or, to use the correct terminology, a flyby mission versus an orbiter mission.)

Of course, you could just as easily blame this problem on the existence of the metric system as on the Imperial one.

Just as easily? No way. I don't blame imperial. I blame its use amongst other Metric values.

But, metric is way more simple! You want to change up or down through the prefixes? Just shift a decimal point and change the prefix.

31/32 of an inch? 25/64 of an inch? Come on!

You have short tons and long tons, which vary by a small amount. And then now you have Metric Tons! You guys are going to keep the confusion alive even after you have converted to Metric!

The problem here is not with one system or the other, but with the fact that there were two.

Exactly my point. Potential for disaster increases.

The _real_ problem is that the units on a bare number weren't specified.

I find it really hard to beleive, that NASA would allow a bare number to get through a project of that magnitude to completion, without ever being questioned (How much mass does it have? 12. 12 what?). Doing that and mixing up Imperial/Metric might seem like both stupid mess-ups, but a bare number should not get through QA processes, whereas a single human error like accidentally reading a Metric value to be Imperial could be beleivable.

Can you provide a link to back that up? I've searched NASA's sites, I can't find something that specific.

The root cause (for this and other similar mishaps), as far as I can tell, is in the acceptance of two different units being acceptable in a field where extremely small tolerances can make astronomical mistakes.

What about avoiding errors where you're finest tolerances do not mesh cleanly between the units?

NASA wants US school children to learn the Metric system.

Jupiter is next, AFAIK. Don't know of any missions being planned to Neptune or Uranus.

No, Viking 2's orbiter ran out of fuel in August 1980. Have a look at this website for more information.

Except that the Earth is currently more like 330 million km from Mars

Actually, we just went through the minimum disatance seperation between earth and mars... it should be currently around 60 million km from mars. Got my info here Nasa

Here is your moon view.

There are also images of Orion.

For some reason, I found these shots more emotionally salient. They are just stars, but there was something unexpectedly touching to me about seeing Orion in the night sky just as I see it here. The idea that I might see on Mars something that is so familiar to me in winters here on Earth resonated with me.

I guess I'm just as capable of realizing that Mars occupies the same space as me by making Mars more familiar, as it is by making Earth seem more alien.

If you look at this image - it seems to me the bright artifical object may be the heatshield.

high res
low res

high res
low res

The Huygens mission page at NASA

Shamelessy reposted with some edits from Metafilter... ....But what is that glint to the left side?

I thought at first it was just a digital photo artifact, but seeing as how the flash of white appears in several photos from Spirit's navcam on Sol66, my next thought was ALIEN BUILDINGS!!!

Okay, not really. My next thought was that it might be the lander's backshell or heatshield. So I looked up a map of the rover's intended route, and orbital images of the landing site with labels. Take a look at the photos, the maps, and the scales. Apparently the lander's heatshield had impacted a nearby crater; that's Bonneville.

Shamelessy reposted with some edits from Metafilter... ....But what is that glint to the left side?

I thought at first it was just a digital photo artifact, but seeing as how the flash of white appears in several photos from Spirit's navcam on Sol66, my next thought was ALIEN BUILDINGS!!!

Okay, not really. My next thought was that it might be the lander's backshell or heatshield. So I looked up a map of the rover's intended route, and orbital images of the landing site with labels. Take a look at the photos, the maps, and the scales. Apparently the lander's heatshield had impacted a nearby crater; that's Bonneville.