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Perhaps you should familiarise yourself with Cassini-Huygens

If it takes 6 years to get there, you want to be able to do as much as possible, rather then do the equivilant of 'You know, we should have brought that metric set of spanners' when you get there.

Cheap, low cost is OK for scouting and test missions, where the turnaround time is short. Say the Moon, Mars, Venus and testing engine designs

Saturn is a bloody long way away. Cassini is the orbiter, and Huygens is going to go way beyond 'Pretty Picutres' - it's going to enter Titan's atmosphere, land in the ocean and perform spectral analysis on anything it can find.

Low Cost is a waste of time here - you want it to work first time, keep working and not break, otherwise it'll be 10 years before we build another one and get back there.

I see no reason at all to 'Scoot around taking pictures' - Been There Done That. Let's try something new and risky for a change.

Perhaps you should familiarise yourself with Cassini-Huygens

If it takes 6 years to get there, you want to be able to do as much as possible, rather then do the equivilant of 'You know, we should have brought that metric set of spanners' when you get there.

Cheap, low cost is OK for scouting and test missions, where the turnaround time is short. Say the Moon, Mars, Venus and testing engine designs

Saturn is a bloody long way away. Cassini is the orbiter, and Huygens is going to go way beyond 'Pretty Picutres' - it's going to enter Titan's atmosphere, land in the ocean and perform spectral analysis on anything it can find.

Low Cost is a waste of time here - you want it to work first time, keep working and not break, otherwise it'll be 10 years before we build another one and get back there.

I see no reason at all to 'Scoot around taking pictures' - Been There Done That. Let's try something new and risky for a change.

Maybe we could send Deep Space 1 out there to take a look, since it is one of the best examples of how things SHOULD be done in NASA's history.

Low Cost (comparitively) and Durable (lasts far beyond mission parameters) is really the way to go.

There are so many interesting things in our own solar system, we should make a DS2 or something to just scoot around the system taking pictures for us to marvel over.

Never underestimate the power of pretty space pictures to excite the mind.

The Ground Systems Department at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center has a "new" system called Telescience Resource Kit (TReK) that allows experimenters to hook personal computers in their home labs up to experiments they are running aboard the International Space Station. The main entrance page is here, but most of the links are password protected...

The Ground Systems Department at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center has a "new" system called Telescience Resource Kit (TReK) that allows experimenters to hook personal computers in their home labs up to experiments they are running aboard the International Space Station. The main entrance page is here, but most of the links are password protected...

The Ground Systems Department at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center has a "new" system called Telescience Resource Kit (TReK) that allows experimenters to hook personal computers in their home labs up to experiments they are running aboard the International Space Station. The main entrance page is here, but most of the links are password protected...

No, it was DSS-63, a 70-meter dish.

Those sheep don't stand a chance...

This page seems to imply that arraying the antennas is possible. Why won't this work for Pioneer 10?

Actually, there have been plans for a while now to put a network of relay satellites around Mars.

Hi, I'm Alsee's secretary.

I'm sorry, but he isn't taking requests from Canadians.

-

It is everything BUT a vacuum, not that a vacuum is an especially healthy environment either...
From micrometeors to smaller dust particles, ions from the solar wind, extreme temperature variations, you have no idea what Pioneer has had to endure for the past 30 years!

Take our solar system. Do you realize that a cube containing everything in the system would be made up of mostly... nothing?! Why should areas outside of out solar system have more stuff? See, in real life, things are much different:

(From the Pioneer Mission Status page)
Now, Pioneer is in the vacuum of space where the average spatial density of molecules is one trillionth the density of the best vacuum we can draw on Earth. We expect Pioneer to last an indeterminate period of time, probably outlasting its home planet, the Earth.

I hate to be a stickler for detail (well, maybe hate is a strong word), but this particular deep space project uses a longer band transmission then 8 Ghz. As was linked to from another post, Pioneer's "Uplink was accomplished at 2110 MHz, while data transmission downlink was at 2292 MHz."

As for atmospheric interference, "The data were received by NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN)...". The atmosphere is not a factor, but for different reasons.

Guys, read the page more closely, or go to here. DS1 was retired in 2001!

Non Sequitur \Non seq"ui*tur\ [L., it does not follow]
n 1: a reply that has no relevance to what preceded it

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Here's a graph which includes the logarithm of the temperature Voyager's reading of the solar wind plasma which surrounds it. Converting back from the logarithm, this temperature displayed here varies from about 5000 K to about 50000K. Of course, in such high vacuums the heat transfer is minimal. Another source for more detailed data is here.

Placing most electronics in 1 atmosphere of air at those temperatures would boil them, but that's as irrelevant as the 5 K comparison as this is high vacuum.

It's very hot... in space. KHAAAAAAN!

There are rad hardened Pentium Processors

Heres some information on radiation hazards for the most used orbits around earth. (LEO / HEO / Geostationary) /winke

A picture of DSS 62: The dish that picked up Pioneer 10
http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/div/vlbicor/pic_htm/d ss62.htm

PIONEER 10 AT ARECIBO
http://www.seti.org/science/ao-p10.html

Pioneer Home page
http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/p ioneer/PNStat.html

Earth (the dot in the middle) as seen from 3.7 billion miles away by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, on 6/6/1990:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/pale_blue_dot.h tml

A Ride Under the Arecibo Radio Telescope
http://www.seti-inst.edu/science/under_the_mesh.ht ml

Barring some freak gravitational occurrance, never.

DS1 is in a solar orbit and won't be leaving the solar system.

If you don't believe me, read the last log entry.

Both of the Voyager spacecrafts are pushing the edges of solar influence as well.

Communications were maintained via (1) the omnidirectional and medium-gain antennas which operated together while connected to one receiver and (2) the high-gain antenna which was connected to another receiver. These receivers could be interchanged by command to provide some redundancy. Two radio transmitters, coupled to two traveling-wave tube amplifiers, produced 8 W at 2292 MHz each. Uplink was accomplished at 2110 MHz, while data transmission downlink was at 2292 MHz. The data were received by NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) at bit rates up to 2048 bps enroute to Jupiter and at 16 bps near end of the mission.

Where exactly is the Pioneer headed to. Is it intended to eventually make a circular path and eventually head home, or will it just continue to wander out into space?

"Pioneer 10 was only intended to last 21 months, but it's been going for nearly 30 years."

Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy.

I'm sure if you're willing to pay $350 million, most PC makers would be willing to work with you on that.

Considering I paid roughly 0.00000228% of that, I'm willing to deal with a reboot every month or so.

-Bill

I'm sure that you can get almost anything you like as sturdy as Pioneer 10 if you're prepared to spend $300 million on getting it built...

(Pioneer 10 cost $75 million in the 1970s - which corresponds to something like $300 million today.)

From the Pioneer Status web page:

Pioneer 10 distance from Sun : 81.86 AU Speed relative to the Sun: 12.228km/sec (27,355 mph) Distance from Earth: 12.10 billion kilometers (7.52 billion miles) Round-trip Light Time: 22 hours 25 minutes

There was one more Pioneer 10 contact on 12/5/02. The Deep Space Station (DSS) near Madrid (DSS-63) found the signal but could not lock onto the receiver, and so no telemetry was received. The signal level was just under the threshold value. The uplink from DSS-14 at Goldstone, sent 12/4/02 at a power level of 325 kw, confirmed that the spacecraft signal is still there (Round Trip Light Time = 22 hr 24 min).

Project Phoenix also picked up the signal from Pioneer 10 at Arecibo in Puerto Rico.

LARRY LASHER, PIONEER PROJECT MANAGER

(Copyright NASA)

Exactly. Pioneer 10 cost ~$200 million to design and build, plus another ~$150 million to launch and operate. Here's more information on it.

Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy.

Manufacturers can make equipment this sturdy today. But are you willing to use an 8088 running at 4.77 Mhz? And if not, how much will you pay to get 30 years of service out of more modern processors and peripherals. Pioneer 10 cost $200 million to build in the 1970s.

Here's some details about the fix. They isolated the problem to a bad LED, and ran current through it to melt away the damage... pretty cool.

About Galileo, some tales from several years ago, mentioning the current tape problem.

I would like to hear what exactly the engineers did. I have a feeling it was the interplanetary version of whacking your TV set to stop the whine.

Not all twiddle-the-computer exercises work out well. NASA is not one to dwell on failure, but they'll hand-deliver a press release to your door for great news. E.g., I read that contact with one of the Viking landers was lost years ago after someone sent bad data to its antenna tracking system. The lander was very late in its lifespan, but would you like to have been the guy who did it? We've found reasons to keep in touch with even the Voyagers (or should I say V'gers?), as well as the nearly 4x too old Galileo.

The Web is so cool: Galileo's current position

And Galileo tour guide -- the Galileo stuff at the NASA site is a little dusty. :)

Should we have a moment of silence with spunky Galileo burns up? Do you think the Jovians will retaliate?

About Galileo, some tales from several years ago, mentioning the current tape problem.

I would like to hear what exactly the engineers did. I have a feeling it was the interplanetary version of whacking your TV set to stop the whine.

Not all twiddle-the-computer exercises work out well. NASA is not one to dwell on failure, but they'll hand-deliver a press release to your door for great news. E.g., I read that contact with one of the Viking landers was lost years ago after someone sent bad data to its antenna tracking system. The lander was very late in its lifespan, but would you like to have been the guy who did it? We've found reasons to keep in touch with even the Voyagers (or should I say V'gers?), as well as the nearly 4x too old Galileo.

The Web is so cool: Galileo's current position

And Galileo tour guide -- the Galileo stuff at the NASA site is a little dusty. :)

Should we have a moment of silence with spunky Galileo burns up? Do you think the Jovians will retaliate?

Well, the reason it sits so high with respect to the ecliptic once again traces back to the Russians, who need to be able to launch Soyuz and Proton missions from Baikonur way up in the frosty northlands. That's the party line, probably delivered because the questioner was 12 years old.
However, it's also trivial to look up earlier shuttle missions like STS-9 and see that NASA launched at high inclination orbits. Spacelab-1, 57 degree inclination. Oddly enough, you can see all of the planet from 57N to 57S latitude this way.

Not very good for science at all.

Well, the reason it sits so high with respect to the ecliptic once again traces back to the Russians, who need to be able to launch Soyuz and Proton missions from Baikonur way up in the frosty northlands. That's the party line, probably delivered because the questioner was 12 years old.
However, it's also trivial to look up earlier shuttle missions like STS-9 and see that NASA launched at high inclination orbits. Spacelab-1, 57 degree inclination. Oddly enough, you can see all of the planet from 57N to 57S latitude this way.

Not very good for science at all.

I'm a helios man myself. Once they get those puppies finalized, you'll see small towns able to cover footprints larger then most states. Specifically, this will be much more practical in mountainous areas or simply those with lots of deep ravines.
In Montana they've had trouble because people tend to build in narrow valleys (more water, less wind, etc.) and thereby are choosing the areas with the *worst* possible radio wave accessability. The higher you go, the less that matters.
Rustin

Thing is IF they were to win this battle (acacia not the porn industry) where would they drawn the line? So many differnt people acording to their claims are infringing on their patents Nasa for one, all major internet news sources stream content over the internet too so where do you stop? Do you sue the government for infringing on your patents? Take down the news Media? This is a pretty good example of why the government should do some major changes on how patents work so they don't get abused like this.

The ISS has never done any science.

A negative is easy to disprove: PCS Results

If there was ever any hope that it would, that hope is gone now that the number of crew has been lowered -- they're being kept busy full-time now just doing what's necessary to stay alive.

The Bush Administration decision to not launch the Habitation Module has severely crippled ISS research, but it has not eliminated it.

A fair way to handle the fiasco would be to force all NASA programs to compete in the same kind of peer review that's required for NSF and DOE science.

Are you familiar with the process to apply for the opportunity to do science on ISS? It's not so different from getting an NSF or DOE grant. The investigators doing research on ISS are real scientists that do real, published, peer reviewed research.

This would have the effect of killing off the crewed space program, while steering more funding to uncrewed probes, which are what actually do the science.

Unmanned probes can do important science, but not the same kind of science that can be done on ISS. Both are important.

NASA _should_ scrap the ISS, now. Don't OS/2 it. (Pardon me while I put on the flame retardant suit.) Sure, a lot of money has been dumped into it. Fine. Leave it there for a while and if we can figure out a way to use it well, then go ahead.

remeber that someone did spend at least $5,000/pound to put that metal up there (possibly much, much more, depending on low earth orbit vs. Geosync orbit - pdf on launch costs here. Surely it'd be worthwhile to devise a means to "recylce" that material in orbit, rather than just letting it burn up in the atmosphere, ala MIR. hah, maybe I'll take my secret space yatch up there, and tow the damn thing off to a personal scrapyard somewhere. 393,733lbs @ 5,000/lb = $1.97 billion, just to get the metal up there. I know you didn't suggest letting the ISS burn up in the atmosphere, but it kinda sounded to me like that was what you were implying..

The ISS has never done any science.

Using remote controlled rats reminds me of those controversial military dolphin programmes that both the Soviets, and the Americans seemed to carry out.
Even though I'm not exactly an animal rights activist this still all sounds a bit... unnecessary. Especially when there are alternatives.

I worked briefly in a SAR robot project, while I was at Edinburgh University. Myself and two other MSc students got together and built 2 SAR robots, to participate in the SAR event at Robocup 2001, Seattle. Even though our project wasn't really ready in time (read, the heat-seeking robots rather chase the CNN cameraman than find victims, and didn't report at all to the base station) I did learn a lot from just being there.

For example, I learnt how difficult it is to remote control a robot using only its on-board cameras/sensors. One of Murphy's Urbies was due for repair when its human-operator managed to drive it down a flight of stairs, and I quote Murphy, "without ever touching the stairs". :)
And this difficulty is ever so larger when the robots go inside rubble, with lack of light, and the well known radio control problems/outages.
Human control also limits the number of robots you can deploy, assuming you need 1 operator per robot.

Autonomous robot swarms are only possible if the robots are small and cheap, so you can deploy dozens or hundreds and accept a number of 'losses'. But this approach has its own disadvantages, such as small size meaning less sensorial capabilities for example. What good are dozens of little crawlers that just step on top of the victim's heads without ever detecting them?

In the event debriefing meeting, where sponsored teams had to make a small presentation, this Few_Big_Expensive vs many_small_cheap issue was debated. I believe there must be a compromise, and whoever finds the right balance will be half-way there.

As far as rats... I'd rather hear about research into fluorescent heat-seeking 'intelligent' jelly, that is poured on top of the rubble, seeks victims, attaches itself around their body keeping them worm (but intelligent enough to stay away from eyes, hears, nose, and mouth) and nutritionally rich so the victim can eat it if required... ;)

Huh? How can the midwinter solstice be the first day of winter?

Or is winter 1 day long where you are?

Check out Robert Nemiroff's Comedy of Science-page for more of this. Nemiroff is also the man behind "Astronomy Picture of the Day" and he did a thesis on my subject long ago, so I have actually referred to him as having made a fundamental contribution to the field... :-)

Well ... Pease is not well-known because it's most likely not true. I just double-checked on Google, and yes you're right that resources are abundant but they're far from unananimous or even supportive. (Interestingly, virtually all the pro-Pease sites are in Australia or New Zealand, suggesting an alternative conspiracy -- or merely the affliction of regional pride. I'm not a fan of hypothesized conspiracies.)

Pease appears to have left the ground, but he conceded it was uncontrolled and ended in a crash. He did not later pursue the "first flight" trophy, and it was one hotly desired. The flight is described as "undocumented" with widely varying estimates as to distance and such. Undocumented history means unreliable history, and of further suspicion is that his aircraft did not prove itself in the long run, either.

A question that interests me more than who was first is whose airplane led to productive development in aviation. That would be the Wright Flyer, though Europeans soon pulled far ahead. An odd bit of deja-vu is that engineers are looking again at Wright-style wing-warping (Java applet) as a method of controlling modern fighter jets. Also intriguing is the habit we all -- not just Americans -- have in taking nationalistic pride in the accomplishments of people we not only have never met, but who are quite dead.

Now, if you really want some baloney, it is NASA somehow taking credit for the first flight by celebrating it. When was NASA, or even NACA formed anyway? 1915?

NASA has the mission summary here.

I noticed this anniversary was comming up because I just wrote a report about human based exploration. From what I found on the web, it seems radiation is what is stopping us from going to Mars. Near Earth we are protected by a magnetic feild, however the Moon, and Mars don't produce this field, so we need to take shielding with us. [A new movie is based on the molten metal core of Earth; I noticed it in the theater today before ST X] Polyethyelene is a very good radiation shield, because it has so much Hydrogen in it.
I expect the next missions to the moon to be robotic. However we will go back and set up a lab there. It makes much more sense, than shooting for a 2 year mission to Mars with untested technology and ground crews.

As someone has already pointed out, Neil Armstrong was a Naval officer.

The last man on the moon was Gene Cernan, who was also a Naval officer.

They do have one thing in common though, they both graduated from Purdue University, and only one year apart (Armstrong '55, Cernan '56).

I'm not sure about the last man on the moon, but Neil Armstrong was a US Navy pilot according to this NASA bio page.

This page at NASA gives the up side.
I'll put a small quote from it here;
The classical example, often cited, is the discovery of x-rays by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen in 1895. Within a year of their discovery, x-rays were being put to practical use in medicine, and in time became of enormous value in medicine, industry, and scientific research. Roentgen's discovery resulted from experimenting with electron beams in evacuated tubes. Had he been directly seeking something of value for the medical profession, he would most likely have put away his electron beams and taken up some more "practical" line of investigation, and the discovery of x-rays would have been postponed.

If you demand a guarentee of payoff for scientific investigation, virtually all research would stop. There just isn't anything that's a sure thing.

Planetary modelling just might allow us to have some idea of how fast we are burning this biosphere out, or get a solid handle on weather patterns, floods, and droughts.
Or who knows it might lead to self tieing shoe laces.

Check out his book The Pinball Effect for history on how unrelated inventions created almost everything we associate with modern civilization.

...the current state of the space business. In the last 4 months, there have been no less than five (5) disatrous blows.
- Loss of CONTOUR
- Russia's pullback from ISS
- TWO new Ariane5 failures only weeks apart
- Loss of Astra-1K

And it's not that it makes me think the technology isn't there - it is. I know it is; I've seen it firsthand. But the PR mess that it creates is the worst part, especially since we are in the midst of the 'give-no-money-to-space-since-they-lose-satellites -even-though-we-realize-that-no-space-program-will -have-100%-success' attitude. And we end up forgetting all the good which we get out of it: the amazing data we're getting from Galileo (still!) and Mars Odyssey; all the good stuff left to come, like Deep Impact and the two new Mars Rovers (which will hopefully take off as scheduled, but I have my doubts. Weekly checks of the status reports on the Athena Instruments site are not too promising).

But I suppose that I am rambling. It makes me angry and sad at the same time, since I have a sinking feeling that the reasons behind the current Ariane failure will be all too similar to the reasons for the failure of the initial Ariane 5. I just hope that in the near, the VERY near future we can have a string of spectacularly successful missions so that people (i.e. congress and the dudes withh $$$) realize that these are dollars well spent.

Hmm, I guess it's how you judge the overlap. It's a good question, for one, whether we would have gone to the Moon when we did, or ever, without the race against the Soviets, a race with strong military overtones. Or to ask how much it would have cost to go to the Moon if ICBM and the Cold War had never happened. Either way, it is undeniable the U.S. was terrified of the Soviet Union, particularly its (largely imagined) nuclear missile capability. Kennedy ran in 1960 partly on a fabricated "missile gap" platform.

Small nukes? I don't think they got really small until the 60's, when we became interested in MIRV's. The ICBM business took its own path when it switched to the far more manageable and reliable solid fuel rockets, the Minuteman series. (I remember a Titan exploding when I was a kid because a wrench was dropped down the silo. It took them a while to figure out where the warhead has gone.) Obviously the Saturn V was designed with a special civilian purpose, but its roots were predictably military.

It was also not clear for a while whether we might have a manned military presence in orbit. Happily we went the stabilizing route of the ABM treaty instead. Oh yeah, the former ABM treaty -- but that's a whole 'nuther topic!

My point anyway was to humbly acknowledge that the American dominance of space flight wasn't just due to our brilliance and hard work and love of discovery :); we subsidized it with many billions for grim military reasons, some altogether necessary. The secondary point, before anyone could say the cold war didn't waste trillions, was that military objectives are an inefficient way to pursue civilian space exploration. Programs like Ariane went straight to the target (I'm hoping here that Ariane never had military purposes?).

Gee, NASM even has a page on the military origins of the space race. I'm finding these things through Google, things I fuzzily recall reading elsewhere over the years. Anyway, what I'm seeing at the moment is a pervasive military motivation, even if the ways the monery was spent didn't always make sense. I would bet Americans somehow felt more secure that it was Americans landing on the Moon rather than Soviets. I remember the vague worries about being incinerated in the 70's quite clearly.

I don't believe that the civilian space program has ever fully disengaged from the military. The Space Shuttle itself was designed with significiant military purposes in mind. IIRC most of the military business went elsewhere after Challenger, and our satellite launching rockets may still be behind because of exaggerated hopes and hypes that the Shuttle could do it all. As the subsidies have been reduced the space program has suffered, to the point that I believe the military is very concerned with maintaining our current launch capabilities. I assume that the market for military satellites is still strong, and that the U.S. won't be launching these on foreign rockets anytime soon.

Everyone writing software for a living should read the Ariane 5 Failure Report: Ariane5.html
and the description of the Mars Pathfinder "reset" problem: pathfinder.html
Another good study to read covers the loss of the Mars Polar Lander: marsreports.html

NASA have a small project called the Breakthrough Physics Program whose job it is to give credible-sounding crackpots a go, on the offchance that one of them might be right. It's Pascal's Wager - though the chances of one of them being right are minimal, if one actually IS then the payoff is immense.

So NASA pick up this Blacklight bloke who is peddling a perpetual motion machine that flatly contradicts the most accurate scientific model ever constructed of any system (the quantum-mechanical model of the hydrogen atom) and give him a fair go. They perform a few experiments to test his claims, and in the end they say 'Meh. Well, maybe, kind of, sorta, but not so as you'd notice. Results inconclusive.'

Thing is, they have to say 'inconclusive'. If they didn't, they'd have to explain to their bosses why they've just spent a good deal of taxpayers' money on snake oil, and their funding is at risk. So they return the Scottish verdict, they stay in work, and the snake oil peddler goes away claiming that NASA scientists endorse his scheme and that the only reason they said 'inconclusive' was because Big Oil made them cover it up.

They really need to work on their diagrams, but that's beside the point. Did they ever stop to think that maybe the internal cooling of the earth could be affecting gravity in any way? It's just an idea, and would probably be shot down, but that might be contributing to something.

If not, the Earth needs to get some more exercise.