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This is what it looks like without the shadows. (From 2001 Mars Global Surveyor)

"The aesthetic quality that Isidis, Melas, Eos, and Athabasca are just.. well, breathtaking, but the winds this time of year on Eos could just rip the head off a horse."

Now this would be a good /. poll. Hematite has my vote. Cool name, best conditions according to this chart of rankings.

The folks at Yale were not the only ones looking at the sky that night. SpaceWeather.com has some links to other images here.

/Don

Here is a link offering more info on NY40, and some more info here. And there is a video here.

The state of near-earth asteroid detection is pretty pitiful. We need years of warning if we're to divert an asteroid, not days.

Asteroid hunting should be part of the basic curriculum for astronomy programs, if it isn't already. Multiply a half dozen students by every university in the world and you've suddenly increased our detection capacity by several orders of magnitude.

Ever hear of the Apollo-Soyuz mission? Picture

Space and tech has information on a lot of production and experimental spacecraft. Including payload user manuals in the expendable launch vehical section. The Soyuz payload user manual makes great three AM reading :) According to the documentation there, the Atlas V is in the same category as the Proton and the older Shuttle configurations. IE, roughly 20 tons to LEO, including the Colombia. The Atlas V is just barely more powerful for LEO than the Proton (45238 lbs vers 44035). But, is not as powerful as the current shuttles for LEO, at 65000 lbs. FYI, Columbia has a limited LEO capability. In it's original configuration, it was limited to around 10000 lb payloads. And, granted, GSO is a different ball game.

DS1 was an experimental probe. At the end of the mission NASA landed it on Eros (one of the largest near Earth asteroid). DS1 was also capable of navigating on its own with its build-in software. The reference point for navigation was the second brightest star, Canopus.

What crack are you smoking? DS1 never landed on EROS. JPL DS1 Site

Errr. No. The Gemini's lifted on Titan II's. Atlas didn't have enough thrust to loft the capsule. That's why the official NASA history of the Gemini program is titled On The Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini .

Atlas was used to loft the Agena upper stage used as docking target in the latter Gemini missions though.

The latest Mission Status from February has the velocity numbers you're looking for.

there is entirely too little experimental and experiental data for any strong claims about the safety of RTG containment to be made

Rubbish. NASA RTG containment systems have been tested in real-life missions on re-entry twice, once in 1968 from a failed meteorological satellite, and once in 1970 from the remains of Apollo 13. On both occasions the RTG containment worked fine. Lab studies on both the re-entry and the explosion-on-launch scenarios have been extensive, and NASA's RTG systems have been tested to and survived nearly 4x the pressure produced from a rocket explosion on a Shuttle-type spacecraft.

The physics and engineering behind an effective RTG containment system are quite simple. Frankly, a good Victorian-era engineer could have done it (although it would certainly have been a lot heavier than modern systems).

NASA has a nice little piece on RTG safety that they wrote for people concerned about Galileo's power system. It's available here.

Of course, you are free to disagree with NASA's findings, but it seems like good enough evidence to me.

I noticed that a drawing of a circle is copyrighted. It's a the top of the list on NASA's webpage on the Voyager photograpic recordings. Makes me wonder, will extraterrestrials be sued under DMCA?

I noticed that a drawing of a circle is copyrighted. It's a the top of the list on NASA's webpage on the Voyager photograpic recordings. Makes me wonder, will extraterrestrials be sued under DMCA?

There's an info page on the message to the universe here.

Bach has 3 pieces on the record, compared to 2 by Beethoven and 1 each by Mozart, Stravinsky, Chuck Berry, and Blind Willie Johnson. I'd say the selectors did a pretty good job as far as the classical western genres are concerned.

(2 by Beethoven is over-representation? Possibly, but one is from one of the sublime late string quartets.)

It's unlikely they could clone one of us from THAT level of detail.

[see http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/glossary/au.html, http://physics.ucsd.edu/students/courses/spring200 2/physics5/notes/lecture2/tsld018.htm]

the Astronomical unit is a standard measure for distance to objects within the solar system, being the mean orbital displacement of the Earth relative to the sun.

makes perfect sense, and is no less arbitrary than assigning the distance 100 million km, which is merely the distance light travels in approximately 333.56 seconds, or the definition of the Parsec [1 Parsec (Parallax arc-sec) is defined as the distance to a star which exhibits a parallax angle of 1 arc-second]

these units make perfect sense to the people who use them.

Ok, I got off (actually, stayed on) my butt and found this:

Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG's)
Three RTG's provide electric power to Voyager. The generators produce about 1800 watts of heat by the radioactive decay of plutonium. The heat is then converted to about 400 watts of electric power by thermocouplers. The RTG's are mounted on a boom to protect the scientific instruments from excess heat and radioactivity.

and this, which discusses RTGs in the context of Cassini and safety.

Here's the original press release from NASA. The actual journal article, in Geophysical Research Letters, is not available on the Web to nonsubscribers.

Note, though, an important sentence in the NASA release that is missing from the CNN account:

"Also, summer plankton concentrations rose by over 50 percent in both the Northern Indian and the Equatorial Atlantic Oceans since the mid-80s. Large areas of the Indian Ocean showed substantial increases during all four seasons."

There's still a net loss, but the real phenomenon appears to be a shifting of phytoplankton from north to south.

Additional information on the spacecraft that made these observation is available on the SeaWiFS site.

When the first V-2 hit London von Braun remarked to his colleagues, "The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.

There are some other interesting Mars mission links. There is a planned British mission here. The 2001 odyssey mission to mars is here. And info about the NASA missions here..

once you get above the jetstream and any mountain waves, it's smooth sailing up there.

Besides, this thing has no wings and a very high mass. But of course, the HALE aircraft don't look like the studiest things

There are lots of examples of Open Source sw being used in the government. It's already used by NASA on the International Space Station and on various SpaceFlight experiments such as Flight Linux . The NERSC also works with Linux and provides M-VIA which is an implementation of Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) for Linux. The above are but just a few places in government where Open Source sw is already being used.

The government, as explained in Micheal's text, needs to account for its spending and show transparency...it cannot favor *anybody* or any *product* without justification. Therefore, it is only logical that at this time we find Open Source being used in the Research and Development areas of the government where the flexibility and COST of Open Sw gives it an undeniable advantage.

Actually, I've seen many shuttle landings, and it doesn't come in anywhere near Mach 1.

From
NASA

"The orbiter differs in at least one major aspect from conventional aircraft; it is unpowered during re-entry and landing so its high-speed glide must be perfectly executed the first time -- there is no go-around capability. The orbiter touchdown speed is 213 to 226 miles (343 to 364 kilometers) per hour."

"The thing I don't like about Mach numbers is it's not consistent. Reason being, the speed of sound changes based on your altitude. Higher, where the air is thinner, sound travels slower."

Untrue. Sound travels slower because the air is colder, not thinner. The speed of sound in the Earth's atmosphere is proportional to the square root of the temperature, nothing else. http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/aero/mach.htm

Here's an atmosphere simulator where you can pick an altitude and see the speed of sound. As it says, "the speed of sound depends on the temperature and the gas," not on pressure.

Probably a CIA plot to make the Chinese, Brazilians, and Sub-Saharan Africans look bad, right?

It has been calculated that the normal human houses about a trillion bacteria on the skin, 10 billion in the mouth, and 100 trillion in the gastrointestinal tract. The latter number is far in excess of the number of eukaryotic cells in all organs which comprise the human host. It is sometimes said quite simply that there is more of "them" than "you'' in you

http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/images/large/02 pd1167.jpg [nasa.gov]

And can you beleive how BIG those pics are! Jesus!

And if you're also interested, here is a picture of the mysterious cracks that grounded the shuttles initially (Found on Discovery first).

KSC-02PD-1057

NASA's websites have a wealth of information -- far more than I have ever seen on a government website. All the pictures alone stored in the KSC Multimedia Archive show one just about every aspect possible of all the shuttle stuff, space stuff, and even their wildlife programs.

--Kumba

Imagine something along the lines of a hundred-ton bulldozer with a rocket sitting on top of it.

After getting to walk around under one aftera visit a few years ago to KSC I can attest to the fact that they're massive vehicles. The treads alone tower over a grown man's head. Imagine something like Sealand on tracks (well, a little smaller). The roadbed consists of Alabama river rock several feet deep that supposedly causes less friction for the treads and gets crushed into dust as the crawler runs over it. It was pretty awkward to walk on the rocks since they're very loosely packed. All-in-all the crawler is quite a site to see up close and an amazing engineering marvel.

Anyway, it looks like the enormous weight was causing issues with early bearings even when they were designing it in the 1960's. This explains a bit about that as well.

Imagine something along the lines of a hundred-ton bulldozer with a rocket sitting on top of it.

After getting to walk around under one aftera visit a few years ago to KSC I can attest to the fact that they're massive vehicles. The treads alone tower over a grown man's head. Imagine something like Sealand on tracks (well, a little smaller). The roadbed consists of Alabama river rock several feet deep that supposedly causes less friction for the treads and gets crushed into dust as the crawler runs over it. It was pretty awkward to walk on the rocks since they're very loosely packed. All-in-all the crawler is quite a site to see up close and an amazing engineering marvel.

Anyway, it looks like the enormous weight was causing issues with early bearings even when they were designing it in the 1960's. This explains a bit about that as well.

http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/images/large/02 pd1167.jpg

And can you beleive how BIG those pics are! Jesus!

The right tool for the job

Online Cost Models

The International Space Station represents a global partnership of 16 nations. The goal of the Operations phase of the ISS program is to perform world-class research that benefits the citizens and develops the economies of the member countries. The research includes living in space.

ISS Experiments
Less than 1 percent of the federal budget goes to NASA

IMAX ISS Site

---

Hiten (a.k.a. Muses-A)
Lunar Orbiter and Lander
Launch Period: 1980
Agency: ISAS - Japan

Hiten (originally called Muses-A) was an ISAS (Japanese Space Agency) Earth orbiting satellite designed primarily to test and verify technologies for future lunar and planetary missions. The spacecraft carried a small satellite named Hagoromo which was released into orbit around the Moon. Hiten itself was put into a highly elliptical Earth orbit which passed by the Moon ten times during the mission, which ended when Hiten was intentionally crashed into the Moon on 10 April 1993. The primary objectives of the mission were to: 1) test trajectory control utilizing gravity assist double lunar swingbys; 2) insert a sub-satellite into lunar orbit; 3) conduct optical navigation experiments on a spin-stabilized spacecraft; 4) test fault tolerant onboard computer and packet telemetry; 5) conduct cis-lunar aerobraking experiments; and 6) detect and measure mass and velocity of micro-meteorite particles. Three follow-on objectives were also added: excursion to the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points of the Earth-Moon system, orbit of the Hiten spacecraft around the Moon, and hard landing on the lunar surface. Hiten was named after a flying, music-playing Buddhist angel. Hagoromo was named for the veil worn by Hiten. This mission included Japan's first-ever lunar flyby, lunar orbiter, and lunar surface impact.

Selene (SELenological and ENgineering Explorer)
Lunar Orbiter and Lander
Launch Period: 2005
Agency: ISAS, NASDA - Japan

Selene will carry 13 instruments including imagers, a radar sounder, laser altimeter, X-ray fluorescence spectrometer and gamma-ray spectrometer to study the origin, evolution, and tectonics of the Moon from orbit. The 2000 kg launch-mass spacecraft will be carried by an H-2A rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center. The spacecraft consists of three separate units: the main orbiter, a small relay satellite, and a small VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) satellite. The orbiter is a rectangular box carrying the scientific instrumentation, measures about 2.1 m by 4.2 m, and has a mass of roughly 1600 kg. The relay satellite is an octagonal prism and will be used to transmit communications from the orbiter to Earth. The VLBI satellite is the same shape as the relay satellite and will be used to conduct precise investigations on the position and precession of the Moon.

Selene will take 5 days to reach the Moon, where it will be put into an initial 120 x 13000 km orbit at an inclination of 95 degrees. The relay satellite will be released into a 100 x 2400 km orbit and then the VLBI satellite will be released into a 100 x 800 km orbit. The orbiter will then be lowered to its nominal 100 km circular orbit. Selene will carry out observations for approximately one year.

---

The Japanese plan many more planetary missions, including a 2007 Venus orbiter called Planet-C. This will be extremely valuable to planetary scientists, providing the international community with a huge amount of novel data, including optical observations of the surface through the narrow 1 micron NIR window in the atmosphere. This should allow unambiguous identification of active volcanism, unlike all previous USSR/US attempts.

-Karl

NASA has to be one of the few agencies to take pictures of most of their activities. They added Pictures of the cracked bearings today to the KSC Media Archive, and they are some ugly cracks.

Links can be found here:
KSC-02PD-1166
KSC-02PD-1167
KSC-02PD-1168
KSC-02PD-1169
KSC-02PD-1170
KSC-02PD-1171

--Kumba

NASA has to be one of the few agencies to take pictures of most of their activities. They added Pictures of the cracked bearings today to the KSC Media Archive, and they are some ugly cracks.

Links can be found here:
KSC-02PD-1166
KSC-02PD-1167
KSC-02PD-1168
KSC-02PD-1169
KSC-02PD-1170
KSC-02PD-1171

--Kumba

NASA has to be one of the few agencies to take pictures of most of their activities. They added Pictures of the cracked bearings today to the KSC Media Archive, and they are some ugly cracks.

Links can be found here:
KSC-02PD-1166
KSC-02PD-1167
KSC-02PD-1168
KSC-02PD-1169
KSC-02PD-1170
KSC-02PD-1171

--Kumba

NASA has to be one of the few agencies to take pictures of most of their activities. They added Pictures of the cracked bearings today to the KSC Media Archive, and they are some ugly cracks.

Links can be found here:
KSC-02PD-1166
KSC-02PD-1167
KSC-02PD-1168
KSC-02PD-1169
KSC-02PD-1170
KSC-02PD-1171

--Kumba

NASA has to be one of the few agencies to take pictures of most of their activities. They added Pictures of the cracked bearings today to the KSC Media Archive, and they are some ugly cracks.

Links can be found here:
KSC-02PD-1166
KSC-02PD-1167
KSC-02PD-1168
KSC-02PD-1169
KSC-02PD-1170
KSC-02PD-1171

--Kumba

NASA has to be one of the few agencies to take pictures of most of their activities. They added Pictures of the cracked bearings today to the KSC Media Archive, and they are some ugly cracks.

Links can be found here:
KSC-02PD-1166
KSC-02PD-1167
KSC-02PD-1168
KSC-02PD-1169
KSC-02PD-1170
KSC-02PD-1171

--Kumba

I agree completely. Once someone builds a warp drive and the Vulcans notice the warp signature, it will all be uphill from there.

- A Dedicated Trekker

NASA's been talking about this for over a year now, here and later here. The second article includes a reference to the NASA report about the space elevator. Additionally, it, also, includes details on other propulsion technologies that can come out of this study.

I don't understand these people who think you can build an elevator into space. Can't anybody understand that you cannot just "tie" a cable from Earth to something in orbit in space?

I really hope you're deliberately trolling, but just in case...

The only possibility of maintaining an actual elevator cable is if it is hooked onto something in geosyncronous orbit with the Earth. The only problem there is that the object would have to be 40,000 miles away from the Earth to maintain constant orbit with a fixed position on Earth. Good luck.

Err, yes? Thats exactly what people are proposing, in fact people have been proposing this for many years. See this NASA Summary for details for the current ideas. You'll notice that they specifically say that the elevator will be to geo-stationary Earth orbit (GEO) in the first sentence.

The space elevator has been featured in a lot of books, most recently David Gerrold's "Jumping off the Planet".

This is a great idea, but it has one big problem. It isn't energy - The idea of generating energy by dangling something into the atmosphere from space has been explored and proven that it will work.

The problem is this: With every gram of matter you chuck into space (or even lift from the surface), the rotation of the Earth slows in direct proportion to the cargo's mass relative to the mass of the Earth. In other words, every time we throw something in to space,the Earth will slow down just a bit, no matter how small the load. Proving yet again that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Fine, you say. It'll take a TREMENDOUS amount of mass to be lifted into space to stop the rotation of the Earth. I completely agree. However, if the Earth slows .000001%, (about 9 hundredths of a second, enough to win/lose a car race) then the days will get measurably longer unless we bring an equal amount of mass down.

Just to sate your curiosity, the earth weighs about 5.98 X 10^24 kilograms (or, 5,980,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons, metric, roughly speaking. Source.). That said, it would just take us lifting 59,800,000,000,000 trillion tons into space to affect the aforementioned change. Again, a tremendous amount, right?

Consider this: New York city alone produces 13,000 tons of residential waste a DAY, and they've run out of places to put it (Again, Source). That's 4.7 Million tons a year. And they're currently paying PA to dump is for them. There are other cities with the same problem. Exactly how long do you think it will take for someone to decide to move the waste even farther away? Like Space? And that's just residential.

That's only one example. Let's add Yucca Mountain's 77,000 Metric tons of waste and 100,000,000 gallons of high level radioactive waste water (Call Claire at the Yucca Mountain Project (dept. of civilian radioactive waste mgmt. for more info -Link or 1-(800) 225-6972). Okay, lets add the "extra" garbage of all of the other states, countries, provinces etc who have run out of places to put their waste. It adds up REALLY quickly.

And that's not including the actual mass of the elevator itself, including it's anchor.

Mind you, I still think we should build it, I just don't think we should use it as a tool to get rid of our problems that's we're too stupid to fix, but smart enough to move out of sight.

oooh! maybe we could use nasa's new crew return vehicle
how cool would that be?

At least one of these technical objections is pretty much dead wrong. Kinetic energy at the bottom of Earth's gravity well is not equal to the potential energy achieved when a rocket reaches orbit; much energy has been lost to drag by the atmosphere on the way up. (Space elevator sled moves in the hundreds of kilometers/hour, rocket at thousands, drag grows as square of velocity, etc...)

Much bigger problem with the argument that energy required is equal: the rocket carries its fuel all the way up, whereas the sled's fuel lives at the bottom of the cable in a nuclear reactor or other electrical power plant, then is transmitted up via laser beam (according to the article) or maybe through the cable. Given how much of the Shuttle's mass is fuel at takeoff (I don't feel like getting great stats, but to give you an idea, the SRBs burn 5 tons of fuel per second), this gives us huge energy savings on lifting payloads with the elevator.

The other technical concerns are engineering problems, and I'm going to throw in with the optimists on those. (What's more wild-eyed...putting a big, strong rack in orbit, or negating gravity?) And as far as the political concerns go, I guess that's why there aren't any multinational manufacturing concerns in those poor equitorial countries, right?

I can't seem to find it now, but I've seen a NASA picture (super high res color) of the Eastern Seaboard that was just COVERED with contrails.

Here's everything that I can find in 5 minutes, it comes close to showing what I saw once. (I swear it was from the Terra satelite, but I can't find it right now)

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/Flagstaff/science/contrail .htm

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?28 69

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/Flagstaff/science/contrail s040595a.gif

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?53 46

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?47 43

Ships put out an amazing amount of water vapour, and photos of the Western Seaboard have shown huge numbers of ship generated cloud banks off of San Francisco. Here's one example:

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?11 335

I can't seem to find it now, but I've seen a NASA picture (super high res color) of the Eastern Seaboard that was just COVERED with contrails.

Here's everything that I can find in 5 minutes, it comes close to showing what I saw once. (I swear it was from the Terra satelite, but I can't find it right now)

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/Flagstaff/science/contrail .htm

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?28 69

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/Flagstaff/science/contrail s040595a.gif

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?53 46

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?47 43

Ships put out an amazing amount of water vapour, and photos of the Western Seaboard have shown huge numbers of ship generated cloud banks off of San Francisco. Here's one example:

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?11 335

I can't seem to find it now, but I've seen a NASA picture (super high res color) of the Eastern Seaboard that was just COVERED with contrails.

Here's everything that I can find in 5 minutes, it comes close to showing what I saw once. (I swear it was from the Terra satelite, but I can't find it right now)

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/Flagstaff/science/contrail .htm

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?28 69

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/Flagstaff/science/contrail s040595a.gif

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?53 46

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?47 43

Ships put out an amazing amount of water vapour, and photos of the Western Seaboard have shown huge numbers of ship generated cloud banks off of San Francisco. Here's one example:

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?11 335

I can't seem to find it now, but I've seen a NASA picture (super high res color) of the Eastern Seaboard that was just COVERED with contrails.

Here's everything that I can find in 5 minutes, it comes close to showing what I saw once. (I swear it was from the Terra satelite, but I can't find it right now)

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/Flagstaff/science/contrail .htm

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?28 69

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/Flagstaff/science/contrail s040595a.gif

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?53 46

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?47 43

Ships put out an amazing amount of water vapour, and photos of the Western Seaboard have shown huge numbers of ship generated cloud banks off of San Francisco. Here's one example:

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?11 335