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you can find a number of really cool (and large!) animations of the Aqua launch and deployment on the Aqua visualizations page. continuing coverage can also be found on Earth Observatory

LINK

Ugh. Following up to myself twice...

That address should work better. Had to put it into a real link.

There are several good reasons to study Pluto ASAP, not the least of which is the changing of the seasons. It's not really a Pluto mission as much as it's a Kuiper Belt mission. Among other things:

• The Kuiper Belt is believed to be very representative of where comets come from, so studying Kuiper objects will give a much better insight into comets and what they are. This could also help with plans for any opssible doomsday-avoiding strategy. (I'll leave it up to you whether you consider that important or not.)
• Pluto isn't just a Kuiper Belt object, it's also the one that we know most about having tracked and studied it from Earth since it was discovered in 1930. Any information returned can be correlated with existing information.
• The plan isn't just to study Pluto. It also includes flying past several other Kuiper Belt objects.
• JPL's had some high profile failures lately, and maybe that's why you think there's a lot that can go wrong. But New Horizons is a flyby mission, and by JPL standards it's easy, and it's been done heaps of times before 100% successfully. There's probably a much better chance today of this thing working than there is in the next Mars rovers working.

And anyway, how much would scuttling this mission help to explore Mars, which compared to this tiny mission already has a massive armada of effort and funding going into it? Maybe we'd get there a couple of months faster.. except we wouldn't anyway because the optimal launch window would stay where it was.

Try reading just a bit to inform yourself about the technology first. Betavoltaic technology was first developed by NASA. NASA file about betavoltaic technology Most recently it has been advanced by Sandia National Laboratories. Read DARPA-betavoltaic Learn your subject. Then you wont seem quite so ignorant. Betavoltaic will start to replace chemical batteries in the next few years.

Is this really new? I don't know where I first heard it, but I know that a "big crunch" has certainly been theorized. I've always thought that it seems likely that a big crunch might cause a big bang to follow. I don't know, maybe I was assuming something.
You're right, the "big crunch" is not new. However, this way of explaining its cause is. From the article I posted earlier, The idea of a cyclic universe has been around ever since the Big Bang was first proposed in the 1930s. But no one could find a way to make the "big crunch" that ends one cycle of the universe "bounce" to become the big bang of the next.
I guffawed at first, too, until I read this better writeup.

If you look at the complexity of human beings, it's just crazy how many things have to go right to get intelligence. I mean, it took 2-3 BILLION years just to get us, and no other animal form is even close to us.
According to that logic, it took me 4 years to finish the final assignment of my final course in univeristy. What if there was a lot of time where things were happening, but not towards our development as human beings? I'm not saying that you're incorrect, but for the purposes of your final conclusion, I don't think it's valid.

When you combine that with the fact that it only takes 2-3 million years to fill a galaxy once you have intelligent life even at sub-light speeds, that means it's probably never happened before in this galaxy.
Well, our galaxy is about 150,000 light years across. It also has about 400 billion stars. Even if we had the capability to transport lots of people at the speed of light, we could only send 1 person to every ~40 stars! So it's likely that we wouldn't make physical contact with a civilization, but perhaps radio contact. Depending on how long intelligent, radio-capable civilizations last (self annihalation? extinction?) our intelligent, radio-capable years may never overlap with those of other civilizations. Perhaps many intelligent species have evolved and died in this expansion?

So given that intelligence almost never happens, and it took about 1/7th - 1/4th the age of universe for it to happen here, I think that gives evidence that we needed a hell of a lot of universe cycles to get it to happen.
Well, scientists still have no idea if (and definately no idea when) the universe will coalesce. If the cycle takes 1000 billion years, our civilization took only 1% of its lifetime to evolve to this point.

Anyways, it's a lot easier to pick apart a theory than it is to make one :) Your idea is interesting, but I just think that some of the facts aren't sound.

Actually, the track experiments you mention were done by Galileo.

U'd have to do *alot* to disperse this plutonium in any signifigant manner
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page 'bout Galileo RTG

This is actually a very interesting detail, the 1700s amongst other things had "the small ice-age" where temperatures in europe were significantly lower than normal.

Considered together with the traditional wisdom of "hot tempers" in southern climates, (the middle east being the poster boy), this points to the obvious solution to world peace: Move everybody to Mars where the temperature is lower than on this war-ridden planet.

The advantages are there, but the contention was that Hydrogen is not a fuel *source*. The question no one seems to bring up is: Where is all this Hydrogen going to come from? There is no such thing as "Hydrogen deposits" that can be mined in any conventional sense. Right now, the only way to get Hyrdogen is to make it.

Yes you can mine it. There is even a large deposit of trapped H2 gas. Obviously you have not read about this or this. The article linked has been moved, but if you will read my post I quote the article as saying, "One of these natural hydrogen fields is already known to exist in North America, and extends from Canada to Kansas."

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If it is the case, contamination on mars has already begin, remember the PathFinder ?

Because if you have 520 ms latency which is the standard for SAT you cannot get more than this speed. TCP window cannot grow more. It is inherent feature of the protocol.

Ah, grasshopper, satellite services may tweak TCP protocol to achieve better throughput, see RFC 1106, RFC 2488, RFC 2760, and there are also proprietary solutions as well.

Because if you have 520 ms latency which is the standard for SAT you cannot get more than this speed. TCP window cannot grow more. It is inherent feature of the protocol.

Ah, grasshopper, satellite services may tweak TCP protocol to achieve better throughput, see RFC 1106, RFC 2488, RFC 2760, and there are also proprietary solutions as well.

It's already been done, and has been used successfully. some details can be found here.

Good thing it's intended for astronauts. I'd imagine it's hard to get volunteers to drink the results.

One of the main reasons that the project was abandoned was that development was far from complete and it would a lot more cash to "Man-rate" it.

One thing that the Russians are very good at is metallurgy, particularly with respect to titanium alloys. The US could equal this, but at a substantially greater cost of production.

Re: during the first 2.5 minutes of every shuttle launch, there are NO abort modes that are survivable

Respectfully, it is my opinion that the facts do not support your conclusion. The Challenger crew very likely survived the initial explosion and died when the crew compartment hit the Atlantic Ocean, 2:45 minutes later. You can, and should read the Kerwin Report here.

A few juicy bits from the report:
Four PEAP's were recovered, and there is evidence that three had been activated...
The estimated breakup forces would not in themselves have broken the windows...

My take is that had there been a big ass parachute which somehow survived Challenger's energetic disassembly and rapid oxidation, that they might all be alive today, major downrange malfunction notwithstanding.

According to NASA, there's no way that meteorite could have any bacteria from humans.

Hmm, that puts it around 11,000 BC. Maybe it was taken back to Mars by The Great Gazoo from The Flintstones. It could have been off Fred's loincloth. I bet it was a strepto-rock-us bacterium.

i thought that is how it's done. They outsource a lot of the stuff to other companies. The Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) is at the California Institute of Technology. I'm assuming others are involved also, I'd suspect, Boeing too.

Oxygen (the gas we use when we breathe) is actually a posionous gas that life on earth has evolved to reley on. If oxygen is breathed at very low pressure it can kill you.

Yes - this is called suffocation. What (I think) you are trying to say is that oxygen can cause central nervous system toxicity at high pressures.

Life on this planet has evolved to the appropiate temperature, which ranges from penguins and polar bears is constant freezing conditions, to certain lizards and scorpions who survive in boiling dessert conditions.

I've never had a lizard or a scorpion in any dessert I've ever eaten. Oh - you mean desert...

I still don't know what the point of this fact is.

The building blocks of life on this planet are Amino Acids and proteins. These can be created from methane(Carbon and Hydrogeon), Hydrogeon-Cyanide(Carbon, Hyrdrogeon and Nitrogeon), Ammonia(Nitrogeon and Hydrogeon) and Water (Hydrogeon and oxygeon) which can be found on many planets.

Proteins are built of amino-acids, so proteins aren't really a building block per se. Amino Acids are one of the building blocks of life on this planet, and the constituents of amino acids are certainly ubiquitious. Nucleic acids are another key building block. But why do you assume that other life elsewhere uses proteins and amino-acids? I'd expect other life to be based on carbon chemistry (being the only element that forms chains with itself) but there is a huge range of chemistry available it would be extraordinary if it was DNA and amino-acid based. (Extraordinary for one of two reason: either life can only follow the DNA path, which would be very interesting; or it can follow other paths, but hasn't, which implies some common origin - possibly some panspermia type mechanism, or some sort of catalytic prelife process that tilts the odds vastly in favour of amino-acid/DNA organisms).

So what a lot of astornomers are looking for at the monent is planets, so at alter point that they can study these to see if they have the required elements to create/support any life, the chances of finding another planet with the same temperature range and air composition of earth is highly improbable.

Indeed, the presence of an oxygen containing atmosphere is a very strong indicator or life (the converse is not true - life existed on earth for millions of years before blue-green algae started starting polluting the place with nasty oxygen).

The temperature range is not that important - have a look at extremophiles in general and (my favourites) tardigrades in particular to have some idea of the flexibility of life. Remember these are organisms which developed on one planet.

This NASA story, Hubble's New Camera Delivers Breathtaking Views Of The Universe, has links to the photos. One of the linked sites, Hubblesite.org has stories such as Hubble's Advanced Camera Unveils a Panoramic New View of the Universe, which has thumbnail photos.

If all continues to go well, the camera will also spend some time on an improbable quest to take the first picture of a planet outside our solar system.

I don't think that HST is going to be the first telescope to successfully image an extrasolar planet. It's magnification and capabilities are just barely at the point where it would be able to spot one. I think the first telescope to image an extrasolar planet will be SIM (Space Interferometry Mission), which is currently slated to go up some time around 2009. It uses optical interferometry to gain tremendous increase in magnification and precision. It will be ~100,000x more precise than HST with an accuracy of 1-4 Microarcseconds. Of course, it is made to have a very small field of view so it won't make HST or other medium to wide field of view scopes obsolete. But I can't wait to find some of the results that come out of that project.

Neat! Also noteworthy is apod, Astronomy Picture of the Day, which also has a brief explanation of all the stuff they post. Of course, most of those pictures are as much a work of human art as photos, since few of the pictures are made of stuff in the visible spectrum, so all those vibrant colours are quite fake. Still looks nice, though. :)

Why not just use Common Lisp? It has a lot of users, and it has garbage collection, and macros (like templates done right). It's object oriented, too.

Only? Them's mighty strong words, bubba!

You might want to check out Common Lisp. See these links before you make a fool of yourself.

You could also qualify the statement to be something like: `` ... only buzzword-compliant language ... ''

p.s. Notice that I've accepted the proposition that c++ is a high-level language. I probably should have pointed out that that's a questionable assertion. Roll-your-own garbage collection is not high-level!

... you're closer to the truth than you probably realize. The budget on Brian de Palma's awful Mission to Mars was US $90 million... more than 75% of the budget of an equally-flawed but substantially better-intended real-life mission.

When Hollywood drops a bomb, nobody cares. When NASA loses a similar amount of money trying to advance human knowledge, it's practically the end of the world. Congressional inquiries are launched, indignant editorials are published, and modern-day Great Society pundits bemoan the tragic waste of funding that could have gone to their own pet causes.

This is the unfortunate reality of publicly-funded space exploration. It's perhaps the ultimate embodiment of the "bread and circuses" social phenomenon that attended the fall of Rome. Never mind the urban myths -- think of the money NASA could have saved if they actually had hired Stanley Kubrick to stage the Apollo missions in the Nevada desert. Apparently, that would have been good enough for us.

I think you've really hit the nail on the head here. We're still looking for that 'killer app' or that field in which using a 3D interface increases productivity 300%, or whatever.

Anyone remember all those cool 3D images the Pathfinder/Sojourner robots returned from Mars? My lab participated in a NASA field test for future Mars robotic explorers, trying to decide what tools should be included on the robot, command structures, how to do distributed science with a 24 hour turn around time, things like that. Turns out the geologists were MUCH more interested in the high-res, 2D pictures than in the interactive-immersive-photorealistic-insert buzzword VR environment created from the robot.

The technology was awesome. The computer churns for a couple hours, you put on your 3D goggles, or step into the Cave, and you can look around and see the remote environment from the vantage of the camera (in the field test, the camera was placed about average human eye height). I think distances/measurements were accurate to 5mm at 5m.

But the geologists only used the technology like 0.5% of the time. When the data first came back, they'd look at the VR and say, "whoa...cool!" but then go to do their 'real work' from the 2d images. The people who really did use it were the people that planned the path of the robot (how deep is that ridge? how far to that rock?).

I think there were a lot of factors that contributed to that. First, the resolution wasn't that great, or more accurately still light years from the resolution of the eye. We're a LONG way from telepresence, so the geologists weren't motivated to act like it was available. Second, there was a high learning curve to the user interface. Not to someone w/VR experience, but if you've never put on 3D goggles, or used a Magellan device, or thought about how to 'rotate the world' so you can see what you want, its hard. So they had to find someone to 'drive' the interface for them, and they weren't motivated to do that either.

If I had moderator points that would definitely have got an "informative" but I guess there are a couple of points I can add to justify a response.

Firstly, it is rather sad that such a basic yet interesting fact as this angular momentum transfer seems to be completely missing from the standard education curriculum.

Secondly, I've been trying to get to first base in compiling some data on the energy storage and rate of use in major planet-wide systems (down to, say, the gravitational potential of elevated water and ice stores) but am stuggling to find clear data.

Even in such an obvious area as total solar radiation the ratio between what the Sun is claimed to radiate (386 billion billion megawatts) and what the Earth is claimed to receive (4.4 x 1016 watts) seems to fly in the face of simple geometry which seems to me should have the earth intercepting one part in 1.1 billion of the Sun's radiation.

Digging for data on other energy systems, there is a total mess of approaches and even units used by different specialties that are going to make even a basic comparison table hard work to draw together, unless of course I am willing to become a "Creation Scientist".

Actually, about 10% is the number you're looking for. A quick, back of the envelope-type calculation shows that the figure for the moon can be roughly obtained by integrating the Solar constant for the Earth(after all, the moon spends half its time on one side of the Earth's orbit, averaging out any variation) of the surface area of the disk of the moon. Performing the same calculation for the Earth shows that the Earth recieves 12-13 times as much power(above the atmosphere) as the moon. So, if we can extract 10% of this, we can get as much power as we could get from the entire surface of the moon. Sources for my figure are at NASA JPL.

Depends exactly where in LEO it is, and the size of the object. The higher you are in the exosphere, the lower the drag. The larger shape you present, the higher the drag. If you have a very large piece in a relativly low orbit, the answer seems to be about 5 years. For smaller objects, in higher orbits, it will probably be decades or centuries.

No water on the moon, huh? Read this!

Well, either you are wrong, or NASA is. They seem to think the moon is receding at 3.8 cm per year. Look here if you're interested.

In fact, after a little searching I found this at NASA:

How did the Moon come to be? The leading theory is that a Mars-sized body once hit Earth and the resulting debris (from both Earth and the impacting body) accumulated to form the Moon. Scientists believe that the Moon was formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago (the age of the oldest collected lunar rocks). When the Moon formed, its outer layers melted under very high temperatures, forming the lunar crust, probably from a global "magma ocean."

In fact, after a little searching I found this at NASA:

How did the Moon come to be? The leading theory is that a Mars-sized body once hit Earth and the resulting debris (from both Earth and the impacting body) accumulated to form the Moon. Scientists believe that the Moon was formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago (the age of the oldest collected lunar rocks). When the Moon formed, its outer layers melted under very high temperatures, forming the lunar crust, probably from a global "magma ocean."

It sounds as fanciful as "zooming" across the sky in "flying machines", "flying" to the moon in a "rocketship" or sending live music thousands of miles over the "airwaves" into "radio receivers".

The point is: you can't tell if something works or not by arriving an uninformed opinion about it (I reads /. - ain't I smart!), an opinion that can basically stated as: "No one has done it until now, so therefore it can't be done, else it would have been done by now." It'll take some real experimentation to see if it works. Plus, projects of this magnitude almost always generate a great deal of unforseen economic and technical benefits.

Just for kicks and giggles, I thought I'd try to figure out how much area you'd need to cover to pick up that 1% of energy hitting the moon.

Radius of the moon: 6378.1 km

So the area of a disc of that radius is 1.278e8 km^2.

One percent of that is of course 1.278e6 km^2.

Lets construct our solar panels in a band around the equator, so that at any given time, 1% of the sunlight is being collected.

Treating the band as approximately a rectanle, so I don't have to think too hard, 1.278e6/6378.1 = 100.18 km

Now this stripe on a flat disc needs to be translated back to a band on the surface of a shpere. Approximating that band as a cylender, with hight 100.18km, and radius as that of the moon, we get approximately 4.0e6 km^2. For reference, thats tad less than half the size of the United States (9.629e6 km^2).

You don't take photovoltaic cells to the moon, you build a factory on the moon and make the cells there. Just about everything you need is there: water, minerals and even some things that you don't find that often on Earth.

This is probably as far beyond our immediate capability as getting to the moon was to people of the 1940's - just a matter of time, money and will. The latter seems to be the most lacking.

>They're causing a global climate change and are worried about old PC's??

Bull shit.

I believe nasa scientists over a bunch of misinformed barely-graduated-college hippies anyday.

Global warming is a pile of crap, and only exists as a figment of the imagination of people willing to delude themselves to the hard facts, and those with anti-corporate fascist agendas.

>They're causing a global climate change and are worried about old PC's??

Bull shit.

I believe nasa scientists over a bunch of misinformed barely-graduated-college hippies anyday.

Global warming is a pile of crap, and only exists as a figment of the imagination of people willing to delude themselves to the hard facts, and those with anti-corporate fascist agendas.

Software liability, in the same sense as liability for a "standard" engineering product (electrical appliances, cars, buildings, etc.) is, like you say, ludicrous. That's because companies can employ underwriting laboratories to do testing that would exceed the cost of an in-house testing matrix. Engineering is governed by the laws of physics, which generally can tell you a lot about how resistant a building is to heat, wind, rain, etc. In general, software is just plain not tested enough. This is the biggest problem to the formulation of software engineering as a respectable discipline on par with civil or mechanical engineering.

1. Businesses can crumble because of security assured to them by their software vendor that doesn't exist. People lose houses, jobs, and families because of this kind of thing. Security is dependent on more than just each component of a solution being appropriately secure - it needs the combination of each individual piece to be secure. This task is, in general, too difficult for the average tech lead at a small business, college, or school, who will have enough problems with basic functionality. To some extent, the burden needs to be shifted to software providers- I don't think this is a point of contention.

2. It is easy to purchase the software you need, with a guarantee of security and reliability, and at a reasonable price, only if you are involved with the government of a large country, and even then you don't always get it right.

3. IIS on its own may be secure enough for a company intranet, but if the intranet's firewall and proxy servers are compromised, then it has become not secure enough. Schneier wants insurance companies to take the brunt of deciding how effective security solutions are - not the US government.

4. Schneier's main goal in instituting software liability is the management of security risk by lowering insurance premiums for people with more secure software. People who want to develop software without liability protection can count on an according security check level - if a system was in place that made security important for everybody, and not just these guys, the world might be a better place.

5. There are enough larger players within the software world that I don't think this would happen - specifically, IBM wants to protect AIX, Apple wants to protect OS X, and Sun wants to protect Solaris. And if IBM and the NSA want to continue to promote Linux, they WILL make it secure

6. OpenBSD has had four years without a remote hole in the default install configuration - it has also had several local holes, and this is entirely discounting the problem of people who configure the software the wrong way. People are choosing to do this, and the market is sorting it out, but not to the extent that's necessary to prevent another Nimda, Code Red, or Iloveyou virus - the cost in lost productivity alone is earth-shattering. And people don't need to get hacked for terrible things to happen to them- in fact, if they never figure it out, all the better for the attacker. No, for the most part, people don't care- and they should. Most people don't want to get vaccinated, but we make them- because the cost to not get vaccinated for society as a whole is that much greater.

Aren't the machines on the ISS Solaris boxes? I think I remember reading some of the logs where Commander Shephard (first expedition) complained about fighting with Sun boxes. Appearantly, astronauts aren't the greatest Solaris administrators (which is fine IMHO).

Nasa Voyager 1 page Look at the power supply. Don't assume anything when making a statement on slashdot. It could get you into a lot of trouble.

NASA already uses nuclear power for their long range probes. For example, Galileo at Jupiter and Cassini-Huygens going to Saturn are all nuclear power.

Do note that the nuclear power is for the electronics. Both probes carry propellent for orbital maneuvering, etc.

NASA already uses nuclear power for their long range probes. For example, Galileo at Jupiter and Cassini-Huygens going to Saturn are all nuclear power.

Do note that the nuclear power is for the electronics. Both probes carry propellent for orbital maneuvering, etc.

As for the fastest man-made object, Deep Space 1 would have it I believe with its ion drive (53,100 kilometers per hour): http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ deepspace_propulsion_000816.html

That was just an estimate of capability. For actual speeds, check the official website out here. Also look at the log archives of the different staff members. Here you will see that as of July 29, 2001 it was travelling at 16.5 km/s! That's 16,500 m/s or 0.055C. So you are correct, it is the fastest man-made object so far.

As for the fastest man-made object, Deep Space 1 would have it I believe with its ion drive (53,100 kilometers per hour): http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ deepspace_propulsion_000816.html

That was just an estimate of capability. For actual speeds, check the official website out here. Also look at the log archives of the different staff members. Here you will see that as of July 29, 2001 it was travelling at 16.5 km/s! That's 16,500 m/s or 0.055C. So you are correct, it is the fastest man-made object so far.

AVIRIS generates about 140MB per frame, which takes about 15 minutes to collect. In comparison, our instrument generates 6MB per frame, but collects 7 frames per second. We throw about half of this away. At this rate, it would take our instrument only about a month to fill a 120TB volume with raw, level 0 data. Fortunately, specific missions will not require the full FOV or spectral range of our laboratory model, so the cost of the downlinks and data systems can be mitigated somewhat.