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These can be illusions, of course.

In all the APOD picture of Saturn I found a reference to Spokes and a picture that contains them.

Here is a link to Voyager spoke images

Single Image

Gallary

Here is a link to Voyager spoke images

Single Image

Gallary

Perhaps it is just a bad picture, Nasa has a much clearer one. I don't see anything like that on the picture linked in the article, but maybe I'm just missing it.

There were no real current Astonomy Picture of the Day references so I linked to a search on Saturn. This gives quite a few different views of Saturn and some other related material as well.

I'm sorry, maybe I'm just an idiot, but I don't really see any of the 'spokes' in the image you linked to.

Could somebody paste a big red arrow on there for the outer-space-cluefully-impared, such as myself?

Thanks.

From the NASA site:
2.27.04 - Implementation Plan for International Space Station Continuing Flight - NASA releases an update to its plan demonstrating a commitment to implementing the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, where applicable, to the International Space Station program.

+ Read the Plan (3.5Mb PDF)

From the NASA site:
2.27.04 - Implementation Plan for International Space Station Continuing Flight - NASA releases an update to its plan demonstrating a commitment to implementing the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, where applicable, to the International Space Station program.

+ Read the Plan (3.5Mb PDF)

The problem is, NASA is very conservative. They like experiments but Astronauts really hate change. Nothing has changed since 1970s and they like it that way.

My goodness, not even Mars is beyond the reach of Disney!!

That's probably why NASA already have the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter scheduled for launch in 2009. This is still being spec'ed out but optical links, which are currently described as testing\Proof of concept and primary Ka-Band capabilities (once proven in MRO below) are both in plan right now.

Next year's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has significantly better telecoms relaying capability than the existing Odyssey\MGS orbiters - 6Mbits/sec using Ka-band. This goes with some major upgrades to the DSN as this currently has 10Mbit/sec limitations for telecoms at Mars distances AFAIK. This JPL presentation has lots of detail on the near term\medium term plans and proposals and where the IPN fits in. This indicates that the bandwidth of optical links to mars would be in the 30-300Mbps range.

That's probably why NASA already have the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter scheduled for launch in 2009. This is still being spec'ed out but optical links, which are currently described as testing\Proof of concept and primary Ka-Band capabilities (once proven in MRO below) are both in plan right now.

Next year's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has significantly better telecoms relaying capability than the existing Odyssey\MGS orbiters - 6Mbits/sec using Ka-band. This goes with some major upgrades to the DSN as this currently has 10Mbit/sec limitations for telecoms at Mars distances AFAIK. This JPL presentation has lots of detail on the near term\medium term plans and proposals and where the IPN fits in. This indicates that the bandwidth of optical links to mars would be in the 30-300Mbps range.

Own a ball point pen?
Got velcro on anything?
Have any friends who survivied breast cancer?
Own a cordless anything (drill, phone, etc)?
Know anyone on a pacemaker?
Ever seen a firefighters breathing gear?
Know anyone on a heart pump or kidney dialasis?
Got one of those water filters on your faucet?

Space has helped us out a lot. For more information read check out these pages

NASA Spinoff Database
NASA Fact Sheet

Own a ball point pen?
Got velcro on anything?
Have any friends who survivied breast cancer?
Own a cordless anything (drill, phone, etc)?
Know anyone on a pacemaker?
Ever seen a firefighters breathing gear?
Know anyone on a heart pump or kidney dialasis?
Got one of those water filters on your faucet?

Space has helped us out a lot. For more information read check out these pages

NASA Spinoff Database
NASA Fact Sheet

This brings up an interesting step in the path towards trying to settle Mars... would it be a smart idea to have communciations satellites orbiting Mars before we send the first humans?

The current set of satellites provide communication links between the landers and Earth.

Sure, try Jupiter, or mabye Uranus. Of course, they aren't nearly as prominent; Saturn's rings are the only ones that can be easily seen by an amateur observer. However, I'd think that any solar system with gas giants has a decent chance of having ringed planets, as it's really just dust and rocks that have fallen into a stable orbit and haven't globbed together into a moon. We couldn't really directly detect ringed planets around other stars from Earth; the distances are just too great. It would be great, though, to send some sort of interstellar probe to a distant solar system and have our heirs recieve images of a Saturn-like ringed planet.

Sure, try Jupiter, or mabye Uranus. Of course, they aren't nearly as prominent; Saturn's rings are the only ones that can be easily seen by an amateur observer. However, I'd think that any solar system with gas giants has a decent chance of having ringed planets, as it's really just dust and rocks that have fallen into a stable orbit and haven't globbed together into a moon. We couldn't really directly detect ringed planets around other stars from Earth; the distances are just too great. It would be great, though, to send some sort of interstellar probe to a distant solar system and have our heirs recieve images of a Saturn-like ringed planet.

The APOD site had this picture of a "named" rock a couple of days ago.

I belive you're referring to the Skylab space station with the thing about the umbrella. It was launched unmanned and was supposed to deploy automatically, but there was a problem due excessive vibration in the Saturn V rocket during launch. Because of this, a meteoroid shield ripped off alongside half of the solar panels, and the internal temperature reached around 50C.

The posterior manned mission Skylab 2 corrected the problem with a parasol that lowered the temperature to twentysomething degrees quite fast.

Don't mod the above off-topic, it's still about space! I submitted this story yesterday and it was rejected :( so here is probably the only place you're going to see it and it's really interesting imho! Cassini is entering the final phase of its 7 year journey to saturn and starting now will be sending back images and other measurements at a "rapid and steady pace". In a few months Cassini will enter orbit around Saturn after performing what should be a spectacular ring plane crossing.

A nice photo from the Cassini mission.

Nice idea, but crap physics. Here's why:

From chemistry and Avogadro's Law, the weight of one mole of a substance is the same as the atomic weight of that molecule, and has a volume of 22.4 liters at standard pressure and temperature (0C and 29.92 inches). So, for 78% N2 (28), 21% O2, and 1% H2O (32), air weighs about 1.28 kg/m3, or almost exactly 1kg per cubic yard. The same yd3 of Helium (2) would weigh only 68 grams. So a cubic yard of helium displacing air provides 932 grams of lift. (The mass != weight quibble isn't really relevant here, OK?)

Allowing the airship to have the same volume of the USS Akron, 6.5 million ft3 is 224 tonnes (metric) of air displaced by 16.4 tonnes of He, so the maximum potential lift is 208 tonnes.

Now the problems start.

Blimps use balonets to allow for helium expansion with heating and especially altitutde changes. For a maximum altitude of 10,000 feet (700mb), the blimp must allow for 30% expansion (1000mb at surface to 700mb at altitude) if it doesn't want to vent helium. Zepplins and other airships handled this through flexible bags containing the helium/hydrogen.

The movie in the article's website said their airship would rise some 10 miles before floating back down. Ten miles is 50,000 feet, or about 100mb. This requirement limits the on-ground volume of helium to only 10% of all available to allow for expansion. Thus the maximum lift would fall 208 tonnes to only 20.8 tonnes.

Okay, how about only five miles/25,000 feet? Pressure there is about 350mb, so you can only start with 35% helium volume, or 72.8 tonnes possible lift.

Now, somebody explain how to build a 6.5 million ft3 volume container for less than 20 tonnes (or 70 tonnes) that can be pressurized, as stated in the movie, to compress the Helium enough to start descent. Oh, not to mention the pressure tanks and multi-kilowatt vertical turbine to electically power the flyweight air pumps filling those tanks. The paint on the hull would weigh more than the cargo.

This might work on a planet like Jupiter, where the air pressure is around 10,000mb and more the deeper you go, but until somebody comes up with aluminum-strength aerogel, I think this plan is crap.

But according to this 2003 article, "Pet owners are expected to lavish $31.5 billion on their animals" - more than twice that total!

Hey, you got to take care of your pets and all that - nobody's arguing that. But people have to have a sense of proportion. We spend less on NASA than we spend on dogfood? Then maybe the cost-benefit ratio makes a little more sense.

Hello Mr Tyler.. .. going down?

I am not aware of any other uses for the term "nova" than in "supernova".

Along with the ordinary use of "nova" there is also something called a hypernova. Think of it as a supernova's big brother.

I was privileged enough to be at the colloquium where Hans Bethe unveiled his theory about hypernovae and gamma ray bursts. You can find an interesting paper on hypernova at Cornell's arxiv.org.

Cheers,
Justin Wick

P.S. The papers done the research group I'm in at Cornell talk about things similar to this accretion process. They can be found here.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.

The original links went to NASA/GSFC, but the Beowulf project central site has moved.

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2004/0220stardis k.html

Both the asteroid and the comet are both going around in elliptical orbits, where the comet orbit has a larger eccentricity, but getting to each one is basically the same. Getting to the comet will have a more complicated trajectory, but the orbital guys have that problem pretty well licked. If you can do ISEE-3/ICE you can do just about anything.

I'd love to see an option on the google toolbar of "report link as googlespam", but I can imagine the manpower that'd be required to sift through submissions (you can't just do it automatically).

That's a great idea. I recall hearing about a NASA project using volunteers on the internet to classify craters on Mars from images. To combat innacurate submissions they had many different people classify the same image and filtered out the spurious results.

For Google, a statisticaly meaningful number of "googlespam" hits for a page could reduce its pagerank. Use the parallel processing power of millions of human brains to defeat spammers. Some form of abuse prevention would be nessecary, of course, but Google already has a cookie on my machine and many talented software engineers.

I would cheerfully offer a half second of my lifetime to demote scumbag spammers in google's ranking. In fact, I expect it would elicit a gleeful cackle from me as I hit the button.

Take THAT evil spammer scumbag!

Energy and momentum are conserved. A slingshot slows down the planet by a tiny bit (just like you move the Earth when you jump in the air). The speed at which you leave the planet isn't any faster relative to the planet, but since the planet itself is moving, your speed relative to what you're aiming at can be increased.

A coworker of mine and I wrote a script to download and generate every possible 3D image from NASA's MER website. It goes through and finds all matching left and right images then makes them into an anaglyph.

If you've got your red/blue glasses you can see them here. We update them with new images every morning. Some of the images are useless but there are also a bunch that NASA never generates for us. They are separated by rover and Sol.

an old launch pad (boy, the anchor bolt refurb on that UT was a BASTARD, nevermind any of the rest of it), into a fairly useful facility, but the new new rocket was a piece of shit and they finally decided to just blow the whole damned facility to hell and be done with it, but we sure had some fun there with it for a while.

Inspire project

If you look at Mars from Earth then the majority of the time you will see a cresent.

Only two planets ever show a cresent as viewed from Earth. Mecury and Venus. From Earth, you never ever see much of the night side of Mars. You may see the morning or night terminator plus a little bit of shadow. Not enough to do a proper study.

Here is about as much of the night side of Mars you'll ever see from Earth.

Voyager 2 got to Neptune in about 12 years. Pluto was actually closer than Neptune during that time. I guess it could still have taken longer to get to Pluto because of the positions of other planets that you'd use for a gravity assist, but I really doubt it'd take an entire generation.

Interesting, especially in light of a previous post indicating that there aren't any craters visible on Venus.

Further to my previous response to this false assertion, this page on the Magellan website discusses the fact that small craters on Venus have been assigned female first names.

Clicky clicky.

Yes, I agree, as another poster noted, it's the planets beyond Saturn that really get neglected: Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

At least Cassini is going to Saturn. I can't wait for that, especially the probe to Titan.

I really wish more probes would go to Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. I find them absolutely fascinating. I guess it's a cold temperature thing--I'm fascinated by cold.

I really hope I'm alive to see the New Horizons misson arrive at Pluto. I think I've come to the decision that I'm going to make every effort to keep myself alive until I can see pictures of Pluto. That's going to be absolutely amazing.

Not that Pluto is such an impressive planet--or planetoid?--just that to actually see it would be such an impressive feat.

It does seem strange to have located the Australian site in Canberra when so much dry and isolated desert is available in the rest of the country.

A JPL tech report gives some rainfall statistics on the three sites. Goldstone is certainly the driest of the three, there's no question about that.

Another interesting thing about the RA experiment is the way the error was found and fixed. Because the RA was written in Lisp, it had interactive debugging and loading features, and the race condition was diagnosed without having to stop the experiment, and patched without having to reload the whole system. The same project team member (Erann Gat) said it "proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem."

I'm not sure if "allow" is the problem. First there must be the will to do it, the wish for cooperation. A very nice read is the SP-4209 The Partnership: A History of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project website. There is a lot of info on that mission there, the first real cooperation in space between USA and USSR, AFAIK. I guess it's more or less applicable to the China situation too..

Here is one page on the subject.

There probably is some lightning in the dust storms, but nowhere near the scale we get here on Earth. Although large, the dust storms are still very thin.

From what I can tell none of the probes are looking, but I'd say if it was a common phenomenon then it would have been detected already.

Here's a link to the NASA press release describing all the details to that fix of the Galileo orbiter. I remembered it because I sometimes work at JPL and walked into a lab where a JPL-er was packing up what looked like a home-brew old time reel-to-reel tape player. It turned out that it was the sister device to the Galileo flight system and the guy I was talking to was one of the brains who had figured out the fix! JPL press release

The govermnent already funds way more medical research than does NASA.

NIH's current budget is about $29 billion (NIH funds the vast majority of biology/medical research in the US). NASA's current budget is about $15.3 billion.

Just another day in the life of a sys admin!

What if the National Science Foundation got to directly and substantially compete with NASA, though? (As other examples there are also the Department of Defense (such as the Air Force or DARPA); the FAAs AST; and the NIH, etcetera.) The National Science Foundation has no research facilities of its own, and it conditions grant-awards on successful completion of a peer review process involving experts from academia, industry and the government. If the National Science Foundation (for example) got more funding allocated for its space endeavors along with the authorization to directly compete against NASA, it could utilize NASA centers as long as doing so withstands peer review scrutiny. This could boost NASA's public image, as people would be more likely to believe that whatever remains of NASA is not merely a product of executive or legislative pork-barreling, stacked evaluation boards, and bureaucratic inertia.

NASA's $13.6 billion annual budget dwarfs the $170 million budget for the National Science Foundation's space-related projects (which are presently focused merely on ground-based astronomy). The NSF therefore has to reject close to 75% of the space-related research proposals it receives. The Congressional Appropriations subcommittee on VA, HUD and Independent Agencies decides how much money it will allocate to both NASA and the National Science Foundation. Why not boost the NSF's space budget and, more significantly, broaden the scope of space activities for which future NSF money is earmarked? The NSF could already compete regarding funding nanotechnology research, space plasma investigations (related to nuclear fusion, for example), and microgravity studies. Does it really make sense to maintain the presently large budget discrepancy? source)

photo 1

photo 2

More on the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp ecology can be found here:

Link 1

Link 2

Soil Crust Analogs on Earth???
Likewise a USA Today article Imprint shows Mars craft landed in 'weird stuff' describes "The soil was stripped up and folded in an interesting way," said Jim Bell, who designed the panoramic camera that Spirit used to photograph the "mud-like" patch. "It has quite alien textures."

Might this soil crust on Mars be same/similar to the biological soil crust found at Arches National Park (Moab, Utah)?

Additional details regarding biological soil crusts maybe are to found here:

intermediate details

advanced details

photo 1

photo 2

More on the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp ecology can be found here:

Link 1

Link 2

Soil Crust Analogs on Earth???
Likewise a USA Today article Imprint shows Mars craft landed in 'weird stuff' describes "The soil was stripped up and folded in an interesting way," said Jim Bell, who designed the panoramic camera that Spirit used to photograph the "mud-like" patch. "It has quite alien textures."

Might this soil crust on Mars be same/similar to the biological soil crust found at Arches National Park (Moab, Utah)?

Additional details regarding biological soil crusts maybe are to found here:

intermediate details

advanced details

... or we could just drive the current rovers to where their backshells impacted. They're close by (440m for Opportunity) and have been imaged by Mars Global Surveyor. I also believe that Opportunity imaged some of its own jetissoned landing equipment as well.

See MGS Images of Parachute and Backshell and Opportunity's image of its own parachutes and backshell.

While this surely isn't a 500-pound high-speed impact, it certainly did kick up some dirt and has the HUGE advantage of already having been launched.