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I think a bigger concern would be whether the connectors are properly held together and maintain electrical connection. The boards should be fine.

You can find lots of DEBI info by looking through the past two weeks of my journal. You'd have to follow links from my web page link below in my sig. I won't link it directly since the machine will probably tank after only a few concurrent connections.

Unfortunately, that page is incomplete and misleading, as it only mentions the probes that actually got near Venus. For example, the page lists Mariner 2, but not Mariner 1. Mariner 1 went off course due to a sofware error resulting from a missing hyphen. Venera 1, though in the list, suffered a communications failure and was a complete failure. Also failing was Sputnik 7, whose 4th stage didn't ignite. Sputnik 23 and 24 never made it from Earth orbit. Sputnik 25's 3rd stage blew up the entire craft. Cosmos 21 failed to leave Earth orbit. Venera 1964A and Venera 1964B failed to achieve Earth orbit. Venera 1964C did, but couldn't leave orbit (renamed Cosmos 27. Soviets apparently named things in Earth orbit as 'Cosmos', even if they were failed missions to somewhere else). Zond 1 is on the list as being succesful, but contact was lost with it 2 months before it got to Venus. Also failing: Cosmos 96, Venera 1965A, Cosmos 167, Cosmos 359, Cosmos 482. Obviously there have been far more failed missions to Venus than your list implies.

Most of the failures occured during the orbital entry phase, during which time they shut off the transmitter, and therefore don't have up to the second data on the reason for the failure.

That's why some folks at NASA develop more sophisticated control software that can take of failures. The RAX experiment on DS1 probe successfully demonstrated this approach viable.
However, at the moment the project suffers major rewrite in C++, notorious for its 'safety', for reasons having very little to do with engineering...

I haven't read the whole site in a while, but IIRC, it describes the typical problems with software: underscoping the problem (in the 60s, most people assumed that the computer hardware development would be the majority of the effort), code bloat (the computer required much more memory than originally planned), buggy production code, schedule slips, problems caused by cruft. When the project started, they just waded right in to coding with few tools and little awareness of the need for proper engineering practice.

This particular case was made more difficult by the program loading procedure: the program ROM was made one bit at a time by hand threading magnetic cores on to tiny wires then embedding it in a solid block of epoxy. The write-compile-debug cycle could be weeks. If bugs were discovered late in the schedule, the astronauts just had to work around them. The software devleopers did have mainframe-based simulators for development, though.

With the gigabytes of space available for today's software, I'm surprised that any modern space projects get finished at all.

I haven't read the whole site in a while, but IIRC, it describes the typical problems with software: underscoping the problem (in the 60s, most people assumed that the computer hardware development would be the majority of the effort), code bloat (the computer required much more memory than originally planned), buggy production code, schedule slips, problems caused by cruft. When the project started, they just waded right in to coding with few tools and little awareness of the need for proper engineering practice.

This particular case was made more difficult by the program loading procedure: the program ROM was made one bit at a time by hand threading magnetic cores on to tiny wires then embedding it in a solid block of epoxy. The write-compile-debug cycle could be weeks. If bugs were discovered late in the schedule, the astronauts just had to work around them. The software devleopers did have mainframe-based simulators for development, though.

With the gigabytes of space available for today's software, I'm surprised that any modern space projects get finished at all.

Software Patch has already been done.

And yes, senior coders should be involved, not just entry level...

15,000 / 50 = 300 kelvin

300 kelvin = 26.85 C = 80.33 F
[Temperature Conversion Page]

So, about 50 times room temp.

"After testing on this system is finished this summer, we will focus on development of a fully regenerative system that could fly up to six months or more,â he added. Del Frate said a production version of the Helios with the regenerative fuel cell system is of interest to NASA for environmental science, the military and AeroVironment for various roles, primarily as a stratospheric telecommunications relay platform.

The latter role will be the focus of a flight demonstration planned for September at PMRF, in which the Helios Prototype will carry advanced broadband Internet connectivity and antenna systems developed by Japan's Communication Research Laboratory and the Telecommunications Advancement Organization of the Japanese Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Post and Telecommunications.

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.

• Fact sheet -- with wingspan diagrams
• Photographs -- including recent (i.e., Kauai, June 7)
• Quicktime and MPEG movies -- none from this year, yet

May 29 Press Release

June 7 Press Release

If you click on that Kauai picture from the Dryden home page, look at the window title: the payload is denoted as "amphitech radar" -- which I surmise means something that weighs about the same as what they think they would need for a sufficiently suitable unmaned AWACS drop-in replacement.

• Fact sheet -- with wingspan diagrams
• Photographs -- including recent (i.e., Kauai, June 7)
• Quicktime and MPEG movies -- none from this year, yet

May 29 Press Release

June 7 Press Release

If you click on that Kauai picture from the Dryden home page, look at the window title: the payload is denoted as "amphitech radar" -- which I surmise means something that weighs about the same as what they think they would need for a sufficiently suitable unmaned AWACS drop-in replacement.

• Fact sheet -- with wingspan diagrams
• Photographs -- including recent (i.e., Kauai, June 7)
• Quicktime and MPEG movies -- none from this year, yet

May 29 Press Release

June 7 Press Release

If you click on that Kauai picture from the Dryden home page, look at the window title: the payload is denoted as "amphitech radar" -- which I surmise means something that weighs about the same as what they think they would need for a sufficiently suitable unmaned AWACS drop-in replacement.

• Fact sheet -- with wingspan diagrams
• Photographs -- including recent (i.e., Kauai, June 7)
• Quicktime and MPEG movies -- none from this year, yet

May 29 Press Release

June 7 Press Release

If you click on that Kauai picture from the Dryden home page, look at the window title: the payload is denoted as "amphitech radar" -- which I surmise means something that weighs about the same as what they think they would need for a sufficiently suitable unmaned AWACS drop-in replacement.

• Fact sheet -- with wingspan diagrams
• Photographs -- including recent (i.e., Kauai, June 7)
• Quicktime and MPEG movies -- none from this year, yet

May 29 Press Release

June 7 Press Release

If you click on that Kauai picture from the Dryden home page, look at the window title: the payload is denoted as "amphitech radar" -- which I surmise means something that weighs about the same as what they think they would need for a sufficiently suitable unmaned AWACS drop-in replacement.

• Fact sheet -- with wingspan diagrams
• Photographs -- including recent (i.e., Kauai, June 7)
• Quicktime and MPEG movies -- none from this year, yet

May 29 Press Release

June 7 Press Release

If you click on that Kauai picture from the Dryden home page, look at the window title: the payload is denoted as "amphitech radar" -- which I surmise means something that weighs about the same as what they think they would need for a sufficiently suitable unmaned AWACS drop-in replacement.

• Fact sheet -- with wingspan diagrams
• Photographs -- including recent (i.e., Kauai, June 7)
• Quicktime and MPEG movies -- none from this year, yet

May 29 Press Release

June 7 Press Release

If you click on that Kauai picture from the Dryden home page, look at the window title: the payload is denoted as "amphitech radar" -- which I surmise means something that weighs about the same as what they think they would need for a sufficiently suitable unmaned AWACS drop-in replacement.

• Fact sheet -- with wingspan diagrams
• Photographs -- including recent (i.e., Kauai, June 7)
• Quicktime and MPEG movies -- none from this year, yet

May 29 Press Release

June 7 Press Release

If you click on that Kauai picture from the Dryden home page, look at the window title: the payload is denoted as "amphitech radar" -- which I surmise means something that weighs about the same as what they think they would need for a sufficiently suitable unmaned AWACS drop-in replacement.

Not to be a wet blanket, but while Helios is really neat it's not terribly useful. Only 762 pounds of payload available, minus mandatory equipment. For the cost to build and operate the vehicle it clearly doesn't have any commercial potential. It might be cheaper than launching a satellite in some cases, if it can provide the same functionality, but that's about it.

The biggest problem is that it's still more or less a solar powered craft -- and solar energy just doesn't have the density to do anything useful and still be mobile.

Although... maybe something like this could make a reasonable alternative to those Broadband Broadcasting Balloons (say that three times fast!), since these craft can fly at higher altitudes and make roam to areas where they may be needed more.

=Smidge=

The US Magellan Mission to Venus returned much larger-scale satellite images using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and topography and bathymetry as well -- of darn near the whole planet. The SAR images are at a spatial resolution of about 75m, and because the polarisation of the returning radio waves was recorded along with the intensity, a lot more information about the surface material was recovered. Also, the Magellan mission was the most effective NASA mission to date, in terms of GB of data recovered per dollar spent. It was done on a shoestring.

Chairface (From "The Tick" comics and cartoon) wrote his name on the moon, but apparently The Tick made it all the way to Venus

Oops, the video feed needs /elv/ since it is on a Delta II which is an Expendable Launch Vehichle.

I hope this two missions take place, mainly because I want to get the project I work on off this stinky dirty ball. They took our rockets because of planetary restriction which we don't have.

If you can stream, checkout a video feed of the 17A/B pads which hold the Rovers A & B resp. Plus it has the countdown!

The panoramic camera does indeed have stereo vision. I happen to be a student helping with the development of Science Activity Planner which is the primary program used by the scientists to analyse data and plan mission sequences (final analysis of data is done by other tools, but for tactical planning SAP is used).

Anyways, there is a public version planned which includes the ability to not only make 3-D images using your graphics accellerator, but also to take two 2D images taken by the pair of pancams and color them so that 3D glasses (red/blue) reveal the terrain. It's actually a very cool feature (I've tried it out while at JPL) and should hopefully be easy to use on the public version.

Not quite as good as a View-Master, but close enough.

That said, the public version of SAP should also let you create your own "missions" using the same tools the scientists do. The data distribution will be immense, however, and we are considering using bittorrent. We need a bittorrent client that Joe User can install easily however.

Any suggestions?

MER has a Panoramic Camera on top of the arm.

The Pancam Mast Assembly (PMA) allows the cameras to rotate a full 360Â to obtain a panoramic view of the Martian landscape. The camera bar itself can swing up or down through 180Â of elevation. Scientists will use Pancam to scan the horizon of Mars for landforms that may indicate a past history of water. They will also use the instrument to create a map of the area where the rover lands, as well as search for interesting rocks and soils to study.

The Pancam cameras are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand (270 grams or about 9 ounces), but can generate panoramic image mosaics as large as 4,000 pixels high and 24,000 pixels around. Pancam detectors are CCDs (charge coupled devices). These devices form the image, just as film does in a film camera.

As far as selling images go, well, you'll probably be able to download some next January, keep your fingers crossed for some sort of stereoscopic ones...

...a bay-to-bay transfer in EVA suits seems to be something that any astronaut should be able to accomplish

...come to think of it, it might be worthwhile to provide special suits for this kind of thing.

NASA designed a 'rescue ball' for just this contingency. It was never deployed. Personal Rescue Enclosure

Finally my name and the name of 3,551,644 other people will be sent to mars (on DVDs on board of the two landers, more details here)

I hope E.T. will check this out soon :D

I think the reason behind sending two rovers is the potential for getting almost twice the science for a very modest investment since you only have to do your R&D once. A rough guess for sending one rover would be ~1B$ and adding a second would only add 200M$.

There's plenty of that already. IIRC all of the landers have had such cameras. This is one link and this is another to such images but there are plenty more (Google is your friend...). What I'd really like to see is, however, more than still images - ie. some movement by the rovers and so on. However, I assume that the scientific value of that wouldn't be much higher than that of high resolution still images and thus doesn't justify the amount of data that needs to be transferred.

There is a stereo camera on Beagle 2. There were also two cameras on Mars Pathfinder which were used to produce stereo panoramas.

Especially since the Rovers A and B will be bringing foam.

See the bit about hubcaps.

e;

Considering how much damage something as small as a paint fleck can do, at high speeds, a 1.5 pound chunk of anything can be dangerous.

Lots of Earth Scientists around the world are using GPS for precise plate motion measurements. It's all differential processing with respect to global reference frames defined by a number of sites and other space-geodetic methods (like VLBI). Check out the graphs from this page for some real numbers. They've been doing this sort of thing for the last 10-20 years now.

Slightly OT, but just to mention that imaging microwave radar (as those mounted in the ENVISAT or ERS satellites, for example) is also being used to monitor small changes in elevation, using a technique based on interferometric SAR (which is behind the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission.

The benefit of using a satellite orbiting around the Earth is that you don't need to deploy all the "base stations". If you want to find out more, google for "differential interferometry" or somesuch :-)

Have a good read.

They said they would put "over 1 billion euros" on that. What about some prospective? ESA's budget for 2002 was around 2,8 bn euros. With this sort of money for last four years they were able to put together a mission to Mars - and that's about it. NASA's budget is around 15 bn Euros and it is barely enough to keep the Shuttle fleet flying and make around two scientific missions a year (look for example at the state US Mars exploration is in). And that is not all the money US spends on space - there is also DoD budget.

A single Ariane 5 launch costs around $150 M which is roughly $140 MEuros, so this is good for around ten launches. Proton and Soyuz are cheaper - $80M and $40M respectively. (a table of launch vehicles costs). But of course this money won't be spent directly on launches, you have to have something to launch first.

Europe's space program has been so far driven mostly by France and to some extent Britain. Others were just interested, but with no real substance. All projects of manned missions were dropped along the way (and there were a few - a small shuttle designed by French that was supposed to be Ariane's payload - I forgot the name, German SSTO Sanger plane and similar British project). As a result Europe has no experience in building manned spacecraft - unless they would get it from Russians. I'm afraid that 1 bn Euros won't be enough to put together a manned mission unless it would be just flying Russian spacecrafts with Europe's yellow stars logo painted on them.

If Europe would spend this money on building a GPS-like system, then 1 bn Euros is a significant amount, however again not enough to build the system - and keep it running (Russians build one to guide their warheads but couldn't afford to keep it up).

What is most likely however is that this money won't be spent on a single mission or project. As the article says this money would be "pumped into the sector to overhaul its manufacturing and marketing programmes". It means that it would be divided into many small donations to various projects just to keep the industry afloat. So it is nice, but is far from enough if Europe really wants to be a player in the Space Race.

And - BTW - Deutsche Telekom's loss for 2002 was "over" 24 billion euros.

Not only does North Korea have trouble keeping their power grid up, they barely even have a power grid.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I think this picture says more about North Korea than any article ever could. It's a Nasa compsite image of the Earth At Night. It shows man-made light levels. It beautifully visualizes a combination of population density and "development".

For anyone weak in geography, look at the top and all the way to the right. The bright snake shape is Japan. Go to the bottom-left of the snake and look up-left a smidgen. That bright squarish area is South Korea. It looks like South Korea is an island floating in the sea, but it isn't. North Korea is directly above South Korea. North Korea is a big black hole. If you look carefully you can see a single white dot directly above the top left corner of South Korea. That dot is the capital of North Korea.

That black hole of a country has the world's THIRD LARGEST ARMY and they want to build NUKES. They are diverting their entire economy (what little there is of it) to supporting that army and building weapons. The North Korean government is incredibly isolationist and paranoid. They claim various international organizations are "conspiring" against them. They make no secret of the fact that they want/plan to "liberate" South Korea.

North Korea is like some homeless guy who doesn't have any shoes or food because he spends all his money hoarding knives and bullets. His brother happily lives in a nice house with his wife and kids, and this guy wants to invade that house on a "liberation mission". To top it off, this guy actually has a nuclear reactor to build a nukes with.

Anyway, another facinating thing to look for on the map is the Nile River. It on the top right of Africa. It's a very thin bright line with a kink in it. Each bank of the river is densely populated and well developed, but beyond that it is pitch black and empty.

-

In addition to these missions, also keep an eye on the NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan, arriving later this year, as well as ESA's SMART-1 mission to the moon to be launched soon. Future plans include NASA's Mercury Messenger, and ESA's Venus Express and Bepi-Columbo.

In addition to these missions, also keep an eye on the NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan, arriving later this year, as well as ESA's SMART-1 mission to the moon to be launched soon. Future plans include NASA's Mercury Messenger, and ESA's Venus Express and Bepi-Columbo.

In addition to these missions, also keep an eye on the NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan, arriving later this year, as well as ESA's SMART-1 mission to the moon to be launched soon. Future plans include NASA's Mercury Messenger, and ESA's Venus Express and Bepi-Columbo.

Such ships will take multiple lifetimes to build, several dozen generations to travel in, multiple lifetimes to disembark, and they need to be good enough to be able to turn around and come back in the event of an un

we could have been to Mars and back 3 times by then (and I hope we will have)

We will have. There are several Mars missions in progress, including sample return missions (see here).

However, if there were manned Mars missions planned, we wouldn't have any money left for all this neat science.

The sooner we get ourselves (and more importantly, all our heavy, polluting industry) off this planet, the better.

Going into space won't help with that. Conserving energy and resources, family planning, and other measures will.

They have an "Ice Team" to check the external tanks.

Bulk storage cryogenic tanks use vacuum space for insulation similar to the "two coaxial metal cylinders" mentioned above.

(signed) Richard Nixon

"The experiment was part of an effort to determine why small particles of spray-on foam insulation flaked off of the inter-tank section of the external fuel tank on Space Shuttle mission STS-87 as the Shuttle ascended. The new lightweight insulation material was developed to comply with an EPA mandate to reduce ozone-depleting chemicals released into the atmosphere. Although such flaking or erosion of the insulation off the external tank posed no safety hazard to the Shuttle or its crew, engineers wanted to determine its cause to prevent future maintenance and operational problems. The flights aboard Dryden's F-15B were just one of many tests to which the new insulation material is being subjected. "

Wha? Are you saying that if life exists on 2 of our 9 planets, that it doesn't change the statistical probability of life elsewhere?

Not sure where you received your nominal math skills, but this certainly DOES change the probability. You see, the probability that life exists elsewhere is based on our current knowledge of how prevalent it may be. Finding life on Mars make this idea MUCH more prevalent. We are finding new planets surrounding stars every DAY. Recent modest estimates show that there may be 1-30 BILLION terrestrial planets, just in this galaxy ALONE. So, I'm sorry, but it definitely DOES change the probability estimate.

I can't believe the moderators here sometimes...

Free as in green cheese ...

As usual, the Astronomy Picture Of the Day has a very nice picture and explination of this.

And as a bonus, today's APOD is one of the kewlest sunset pictures I've ever seen.

M@

As usual, the Astronomy Picture Of the Day has a very nice picture and explination of this.

And as a bonus, today's APOD is one of the kewlest sunset pictures I've ever seen.

M@

To get a better idea about life on Mars, we really need a robotic sample return mission. Such missions are planned for the near future. Having samples returned should make it much easier to settle the question of whether there is life on Mars.

With sample return mission, we can also afford to do things like look for DNA, RNA, and proteins. That would be impractical and too high risk to do with just a robotic lander, but it would be cheap and easy to perform those tests on returned samples.

Don't forget that, over the next month, NASA is launching two Mars Exploration Rovers, with one of the primary goals looking for evidence of life. Specifically, they hope to find evidence of liquid water sometime in Mars' past:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/science/

The Personal Rover Project