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you sure about that?

you sure about that?

you sure about that?

you sure about that?

Russian coppied version was faster than Concorde:
Tu-144 aircraft

and also here some not far past details about this thing:
Tu 144 in nasa

• January 21 Charts
• January 23 Charts
• January 24 Charts (warning: 1.3MB)

Oh, and here are some previous TPS Reports thrown in for good measure.

• January 21 Charts
• January 23 Charts
• January 24 Charts (warning: 1.3MB)

Oh, and here are some previous TPS Reports thrown in for good measure.

• January 21 Charts
• January 23 Charts
• January 24 Charts (warning: 1.3MB)

Oh, and here are some previous TPS Reports thrown in for good measure.

• January 21 Charts
• January 23 Charts
• January 24 Charts (warning: 1.3MB)

Oh, and here are some previous TPS Reports thrown in for good measure.

They say "gas clouds" like there are known clouds of gas following the earth. I am certainly a neophyte when it comes to astronomy, but I would have thought SOMEONE would have mentioned this to me at SOME point.

Interferometers in space will experience less noise than down here and can be made much larger. In particular, instruments for gravity wave detection like LISA, which will be 5 million km on a side. And the other 2 are great observatories are the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. You never wanted X-ray glasses?

...is the sound of all the Mars Loons loading up their copies of Photoshops to see what they can find.

I hope they Have a nice day

Although gamma rays are probably not visible to any species native to this planet, you should keep in mind that our inability sense something does not mean that it is significantly different from something we can.

Consider this: The human eye cannot percieve ultraviolet radiation. Therefore, for us, it is not "optical", and definately outside of the visible spectrum. However, bees regularly use ultraviolet radiation to differentiate between flowers, which would make ultraviolet radiation "optical" as far as a bee is concerned.

Following this line of reasoning leads us to the conclusion that the visible spectrum varies and is a human-centric (mammal-centric?) arbitrary slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. As long as the electromagnetic radiation in question has similar properties to visible light, the same adjectives as used to describe visible light should apply.
(Although something tells me that there's a few differences between what's coming from my 60 watt bulb and a star gone nova...)

Well... when you ever wanted the answer to Fermi's Paradox ("if they existed, they'd be here") - this may well be it. More-or-less regular events like this, purging a sphere of maybe 5000 LY clean of any higher forms of life may explain why we never see any traces of other advanced lifeforms

Stars aren't all packed at the same density in our galaxy, or others. Where stars are less dense, these purging events would be less common, and Fermi's aliens would have a chance to continue existing. Of course, in that case, they'd be there not here .

But how did you come up with the 5,000 lightyear figure? I went to NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site, and looked for eta Carinae. This helped me find this link to a 1999 note on hypernovae. It says a hypernova would be about ten times more destructive than a supernova. IIRC a supernova's civilization killing ability is confined to a sphere 30 to 100 lightyears in diameter. Do you have a more recent, or alarming, link to the destructive power of a hypernova?

Well... when you ever wanted the answer to Fermi's Paradox ("if they existed, they'd be here") - this may well be it. More-or-less regular events like this, purging a sphere of maybe 5000 LY clean of any higher forms of life may explain why we never see any traces of other advanced lifeforms

Stars aren't all packed at the same density in our galaxy, or others. Where stars are less dense, these purging events would be less common, and Fermi's aliens would have a chance to continue existing. Of course, in that case, they'd be there not here .

But how did you come up with the 5,000 lightyear figure? I went to NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site, and looked for eta Carinae. This helped me find this link to a 1999 note on hypernovae. It says a hypernova would be about ten times more destructive than a supernova. IIRC a supernova's civilization killing ability is confined to a sphere 30 to 100 lightyears in diameter. Do you have a more recent, or alarming, link to the destructive power of a hypernova?

Would it increase your changes of getting cancer? Shields that reduce gamma ray intensity by 50% include 1cm (0.4 inches) of lead, 6cm (2.4 inches) of concrete or 9cm (3.6 inches) of packed dirt. On the good side, gamma radiation is only as harmful as x-ray or beta particles. This NASA site however says that most gamma radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere, which is why you need balloons or sattelites to really see gamma rays.

EGRET stands for the Energetic Gamma Ray experiment.

space may be full of resources, but unlike the resources in India, we have NO way to get TO them, extract them, and send them back, in any sort of reasonable way.

Thats a limited view on what counts as a resource. Without the money that went into space exploration, we would not have satelites. We wouldnt have GPS, we would have trans-global phone calls, we wouldnt be able to talk to people in Antarctica (the guys that discovered the hole in the ozzone layer - that was pretty essential research given the cost), we wouldnt have satelite TV, we wouldnt have live news reports from the other side of the world, etc.

we've flushed TRILLIONS of dollars into space exploration

Wheres that money gone? Its paid peoples wages, its bought goods. It's stayed in the U.S. economy.

Whats it got out of it? Scratch resistant lenses, blood presure measurers, pacemakers. I suggest, as the other guy said, you should read up on the medical benefits. The environmental/social benefits include things like the EPA, Greenpeace and Earth Day. Of course, theres Scores more benefits.

' Same thing goes for this moronic 'search for life'. I'm sure there IS life elsewhere in the galaxy. Will we ever find out or be able to do anything about it? Nope. Too far away. Who gives a crap

Lots of people actually, however SETI isnt government funded so thats not a valid argument.

What the HELL did going to the moon get us? ABSA-fucking-loutley NOTHING except a bunch of damn rocks sitting in a display case.

A picture of Earthrise. A realisation of how fragile our planet was. Also bragging rights over the USSR, which was important after they launched sputnik and Yuri first.

we've got damn good collaborative evidence that the speed of light is the end of the speedometer

So, sorry, I didnt realise that was you Mr. Hawking. The BPP is/was working on ways. Obviously its a long way off, but the potential might be there.

we're already doing that juuuuust fine in Iraq

Iraq, space exploration. I see the connection *rolls eyes*

Early astronauts used 100% oxygen atmospheres at a low pressure without any problems.

Except being torched.
I know you meant toxicity-wise, but jeez, that was a dumb accident.

contracts, on the other hand, represent the exact opposite of free market economics. Government contracting does not represent voluntary association but coercion: The consumer (you and I) do not choose for ourselves whether or not to patronize these businesses.

In this case, the customer is the government. That's why they are called government contractors, and not citizen contractors. And, yes the government contracting market (by law) is pretty damned free. Anyone is free to bid on upcoming contracts. If you have a small company, there are a number of SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) contracts available every year, from every department related to the government. The linked SBIR page is about NASA's SBIRs, but there are literally a total of thousands available from DoT, DoD, NIH, NIST, NIMA, etc. If you're a big company, then you go through a similar, yet more formal process to bid on contracts. As is the case with most government-related things, there's more paperwork to complete, and in some cases due to the sensitive nature of the contract, you might be required to have some level of security clearance before you can bid, but other than that it is really wide open. I happen to know of a few recent large contracts that have been competitively bid on by very small companies, so small businesses are not just limited to SBIRs (which are capped at $1M, I believe).

In relation to your statement:

consumer (you and I) do not choose for ourselves whether or not to patronize these businesses. We choose between paying our taxes, leaving the country, or going to jail.

You clearly don't remember history class in high school, or maybe you didn't take it yet. We live in a republic. We elect representatives to make key decisions for us...that's the whole point of a republic. If you don't like the decisions being made, well, that's the citizen's fault for electing a bad decision maker. You are perfectly free to vote, write letters to your representatives, write articles in the newspaper, put up a blog, participate in protests and rallies, and bitch and moan on /. to express your opinion. But please don't complain that you are being coerced and that you have no choice, because you do.

My classes are in a NASA facility and the instructors work for the IV&V group there. Let me tell you, these folks have a TOTALLY different approach to writing and testing software than the folks at the company I work for. Not only a different ballpark but a different game altogether. Coding is not engineering.

Besides, it is a great buzz word!!!

Has anyone else noticed that a disproportionate number of "cool-techonology" things rely on the letter "X" ?

Begin Rant :
XML, XGA, x86, X.25, Xmodem, XP & OSX (each borrowing from XEROX), XT, XOR, XXX (in every computer ?), 3DFX, and because this is Slashdot I should flame Microsoft for DirectX and ActiveX.

But the unix community deserves most of the blame. After all we have Linux, Unix, and other variants which we want to be POSIX, not to mention the grand-daddy of them all: an entire window system which we simply call "X", which perpetuates this sort of thing, because whereas we previously had terminals and clocks we now have x-terminals and xclocks. Indeed, thanks to the "X Window System" we can rename all of our programs, SOME OF WHICH DID NOT PREVIOUSLY INCLUDE THE LETTER X.

But it goes much deeper. Just look at what we call supersonic jets, radiation, and chemical elements. As if that were not enough, we have set the millions of people in math courses around the world to the mysterious task of trying to find "x". The worst part is, as soon as you've figured out what x is, in the very next problem IT COULD BE SOMETHING ELSE !

So I am asking slashdot when will this maddness end ? When can we turn our attention to the other "unpopular" letters, like "q", "w", and "p" ? Despite their consistent sponsorship of Sesame Street, these letters yearn for the attention currently squandered on "x". Is it too much to ask that we all run wclock ?

the scientific community does not withhold information about potential meteor threats.

http://impact.arc.nasa.gov

the article on the NEO Impact Symposium and secrecy issues is interesting, and addresses your issues of media hush-hush.

also, if there WERE a meteor threat headed our way, how would we deal with it? that is still up for debate. the money has not come NASA's way that will allow for full research on the topic.

Since when have CCDs bled "in two perpendicular directions"? If I posted enough links of CCDs bleeding in only one dimension, would you eat a crow? From one of my favorite satellites, Yohkoh. From a random web page. A great shot of the infamous UFOs from SOHO. And finally, from the Hubble website itself, a great example of CCD bleed and diffraction spikes in the same photo! The CCD bleed is the bar, and the diffraction spikes are the crosshairs. Check your facts before you post.

The Wired article references in one place NIMA's (The National Imagery and Mapping Agency) recent SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) a pretty amazing feat (according to my father, who works for NIMA) which managed to take data to get a topographic map of most of the world in an amazingly short time. When this data is finally processed (I heard estimates of 2 years when it was taken), it should be extremely useful, but I'm not sure the resolution is sufficient for this kind of task. The factsheet (factsheet) says data will be at 30 meter resolution for most of the globe, which, though good, I can't expect is good enough in itself to fly a plane with.

Perhaps the dependence on GPS and other data makes it viable?

For those who failed to click this link on the day it was posted (it changes every day, yes EVERY DAY, not just weekdays, not just when the guy isn't on vacataion, EVERY DAY for like 7 years people.)

The image in question can be found at this, non-changing link:
APOD for 030327.

MMMMmmmm.... APOD.

M@

While I love the Astronomy Picture Of The Day and the similarly-cool Hubblesite pics of this event, All the good-sized images have that annoying twinkly-crosshairs look to them. The Hubblesite pics include this small image without them, but all of the large-format images that I can find have the "star filter" applied. Does anyone know where I could find a large, unaltered image or images?
--

For those who want a screen filling larger image, 1651x1651, it is the subject of today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD).

-Adam

Light Echoes from V838 Mon.

I suspect this was probably discussed in Slashdot back in the day, but couldn't get the search engines to give me a good reference.

Guess what agency pumps carbon dioxide equivalent to driving a SUV two million miles into the atmosphere every time a shuttle launches? NASA.

Just curious where you found that information. I can't seem to find any reference to NASA shuttle launches emitting any CO2. Considering their rocket fuel is liquid hydrogen an oxygen, water vapor is about all the engines ought to leave behind.

As for the results being skewed because they're funded by NASA, that's completely ridiculous. They fund research as to how human-related CO2 emissions affect global climate. And they're working on cutting CO2 emission in other aircraft to zero.

I'm also skeptical that 150,000 wind turbines could provide power for the entire United States, considering most modern wind turbines generate less than 1 MW of power. In any case, your comment almost reeks of as much disinformation as the previous poster's--only coming from the opposite side of the argument. Debunking a disinformation with...more disinformation doesn't seem very effective to me.

Guess what agency pumps carbon dioxide equivalent to driving a SUV two million miles into the atmosphere every time a shuttle launches? NASA.

Just curious where you found that information. I can't seem to find any reference to NASA shuttle launches emitting any CO2. Considering their rocket fuel is liquid hydrogen an oxygen, water vapor is about all the engines ought to leave behind.

As for the results being skewed because they're funded by NASA, that's completely ridiculous. They fund research as to how human-related CO2 emissions affect global climate. And they're working on cutting CO2 emission in other aircraft to zero.

I'm also skeptical that 150,000 wind turbines could provide power for the entire United States, considering most modern wind turbines generate less than 1 MW of power. In any case, your comment almost reeks of as much disinformation as the previous poster's--only coming from the opposite side of the argument. Debunking a disinformation with...more disinformation doesn't seem very effective to me.

In this show:wild weather, the host, Donal MacIntyre, presented information that graphed rainy days against days of the week in major American cities. Sure enough it rains much more on Friday thru Sunday than the rest of the week. Why? Because all that work week traffic ends up seeding the clouds until so much particle build up causes rain. By Monday, the corresponding lack of traffic, allows the weather to dry out again.

Now if weather varying predictably by the day of the week isn't man made, then I don't know what is.

Yet fooling the press and the anti-scientific does not fact make. Those who dispute global warming are like Flat Earth types and creationists, rallying around fallacy and refusing to consider facts they find inconvenient. It's all Cargo Cult Science.

Some /. readers are probably adept enough at math to review the raw data and decide for themselves: solar irradiance data has been tracked and known for many years and is built into climate models that show, unequivocally, the consequences of human induced climate change. Even Bush finally admitted it.

Will the earth survive such changes? Of course it will. Will the human race survive? Probably. Will the long term cost of continuing to burn fossil fuels exceed the short term cost of switching to low carbon-load alternatives? Almost certainly.

But when evaluating the arguments of anti-environmentalists, which seem so utterly out of sync with even basic science, one must remember that, like their spiritual mentor James Watt, those that believe that Armageddon is around the corner will do nothing to protect the rights of future generations.

Yet fooling the press and the anti-scientific does not fact make. Those who dispute global warming are like Flat Earth types and creationists, rallying around fallacy and refusing to consider facts they find inconvenient. It's all Cargo Cult Science.

Some /. readers are probably adept enough at math to review the raw data and decide for themselves: solar irradiance data has been tracked and known for many years and is built into climate models that show, unequivocally, the consequences of human induced climate change. Even Bush finally admitted it.

Will the earth survive such changes? Of course it will. Will the human race survive? Probably. Will the long term cost of continuing to burn fossil fuels exceed the short term cost of switching to low carbon-load alternatives? Almost certainly.

But when evaluating the arguments of anti-environmentalists, which seem so utterly out of sync with even basic science, one must remember that, like their spiritual mentor James Watt, those that believe that Armageddon is around the corner will do nothing to protect the rights of future generations.

The following links have graphs and images. Here and here.

Here's a link to the original item from NASA, which includes a link to the abstract for his paper; unfortunately, the link on that page to the PDF for the paper is broken.

Here's a link to the original item from NASA, which includes a link to the abstract for his paper; unfortunately, the link on that page to the PDF for the paper is broken.

That was exactly the point in my last post. When the gamma rays are gone the show isn't over.

From this one might assume Wolf-Rayet stars might already have undergone an event which might have caused a GRB (gamma ray burst)?

No. These massive stars have (usually) burned through most of their supply of hydrogen and are furiously burning helum. They are losing their outer layers in a fierce wind, rather than an explosion, which will continue for years. Their mass loss is driven by the absorption of light by C,N, and O that they have cooked up. Super- and hypernovae lose mass due to the sudden collapse of their cores; the explosive energy comes from gravitational potential energy, mostly. Two different processes. I should note that Wolf- Rayet stars are generally close to blowing up as supernovae, or if we're lucky, a hypernova with its jet pointed at us (a.k.a. a GRB). This link for another over-simplified answer.

Coincidentally yesterday NASA came out with this article about the October event. HETE satellite catched a gamma-ray burst "[it] spotted the burst, nailed down a location, and notified observers worldwide within a few seconds, while the gamma rays were still pouring in". It turns out that there is a "Gamma-ray burst Coordinates Network", and an Automated Telescope in Japan that started observing just 193 after the burst was detected. cool story.

Coincidentally yesterday NASA came out with this article about the October event. HETE satellite catched a gamma-ray burst "[it] spotted the burst, nailed down a location, and notified observers worldwide within a few seconds, while the gamma rays were still pouring in". It turns out that there is a "Gamma-ray burst Coordinates Network", and an Automated Telescope in Japan that started observing just 193 after the burst was detected. cool story.

For those of use who've grown used to making "Woo, imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!" jokes yet have no clue what a Beowulf cluster actually is, the definition, history and so on is available at:

NASA's Beowulf site

In brief overview:
In the summer of 1994 Thomas Sterling and Don Becker, working at CESDIS under the sponsorship of the ESS project, built a cluster computer consisting of 16 DX4 processors connected by channel bonded Ethernet. They called their machine Beowulf. The machine was an instant success and their idea of providing COTS (Commodity off the shelf) base systems to satisfy specific computational requirements quickly spread through NASA and into the academic and research communities. The development effort for this first machine quickly grew into a what we now call the Beowulf Project. Some of the major accomplishment of the Beowulf Project will be chronicled below, but a non-technical measure of success is the observation that researcher[s(sp)] within the High Performance Computer community are now referring to such machines as "Beowulf Class Cluster Computers." That is, Beowulf clusters are now recognized as genre within the HPC community./i

I think the conventional 0.01s to 1000s figures are how long they last in gamma rays. Do the bursts last longer in other forms of light?

Also, does anyone know what the Wolf-Rayet star has to do with anything? Is it a possible burst candidate? I read the origional article and the gsfs.nasa.gov link and I didn't find any mention of this.

Does the "Wolf-Rayec" star classification refer to a massive star about to collapse?

All Astronomy Picture of the Day ( here) says about it is that Wolf-Rayec stars are around 40x the mass of the sun and provides a broken link :(

To confuse the issue more, Weisstein's World of Science ( here )says Wolf-Rayec stars are:
"A type of star whose spectra consist of very wide emission bands as well as absorption lines in the violet region. These lead astronomers to conclude that these stars are surrounded by rapidly expanding shells of gas. Wolf-Rayet stars are classified as irregular variable stars, and are sometimes also called W stars."

From this one might assume Wolf-Rayet stars might already have undergone an event which might have caused a GRB (gamma ray burst)?

From the article: "They could be the birth cry of black holes formed from the ruins of a supernova or the result of colliding black holes or neutron stars." Those are hardly new theories. The article doesn't say how the observers happened to catch the burst as it happened, what observers were able to see in the "weeks" (which is a long time for a gamma ray burst) that followed, or what the artist's conception of a Wolf-Rayet star has to do with any of this. On the whole, a very disappointing article. This story, published last October 8 by NASA is much more informative.

Nasa is building a satellite capable of catching gamma-ray burst on the fly. Here's the link.

Yeah, but then you would have to take the samples (and astronauts, and gear) down into the Moon's gravity well, and eventually bring them back up again. Which is not to say that I'm opposed to a Moon base--it would be a valuable research site for any number of reasons. It's just that if you need a waypoint on the way back from Mars, why not use a preexisting continuously manned space station in earth orbit?

"spend a day moving it at 4mph"

The transporters only go ~1mph.

According to NASA, the shuttle orbits at 17,440 mph miles per hour and all shuttle missions combined have logged 19240 hours, for a total of about 333256040 miles. This works out to one fatality per 23,804,002 miles travelled.

According to The Public Purpose, in 1996 the US had 1.058 traffic fatalities per 100,000,000 passenger miles.

The statistics aren't directly comparable because the auto statistics are per passenger mile and the shuttle statistics are per mile, but if we assume most US vehicles have a single occupant (my observation while driving), being in the shuttle is about 4 times as dangerous per mile as riding in a car.

According to NASA, the shuttle orbits at 17,440 mph miles per hour and all shuttle missions combined have logged 19240 hours, for a total of about 333256040 miles. This works out to one fatality per 23,804,002 miles travelled.

According to The Public Purpose, in 1996 the US had 1.058 traffic fatalities per 100,000,000 passenger miles.

The statistics aren't directly comparable because the auto statistics are per passenger mile and the shuttle statistics are per mile, but if we assume most US vehicles have a single occupant (my observation while driving), being in the shuttle is about 4 times as dangerous per mile as riding in a car.

No, the space station was placed in that orbit as a compromise so that both the American (Shuttle) and the Russian (Soyuz) vehicles could get to it. Baikonur and Cape Canaveral are at quite different lattitudes. ISS is half way in between.

> Let's do it over. And do it right.

I'll be honest. I agree with most of your criticisms. But your remedy would be disasterous. If we axe the shuttles and drop ISS into the Pacific, you are starting from square one. The US population isn't interested in constructing anything grand anymore. If we had nothing in orbit, things would stay that way.

If you stop, you'll never get started again. The only politically viable option is to move along one step at a time. Let's make sure that we make each little step count.