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http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/htmltest/rjn_bht.html

good stuff

watch out for the time dialation.

From the description of the chemical reactions in the NASA press release, it appears to me that the levels of deuterium (for nuclear fusion) should be the same as seawater (currently the intended source of fuel for fusion). It'll be interesting to see which is more viable to extract.

That last link should be here, and it was yesterday's picture.

Is this the right link?

... http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020414.html

That's: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020414.html.

Wired had an article about a year or so ago . . .

Here's a link to the WIRED Article. The experiment you're talking about was called the Southern Ocean iron release experiment [SOIREE].

Some additional information on this strategy can be found here and here.

The problem behind any algae based solution is A) get enough nutrients to algae (thus the iron), and B) get the algae to sink to sea bottom where the CO2 won't just be released back into the atmosphere when the algae decomposes. The problem with this experiment was that A) worked, but B) wasn't addressed.

Here's the original release from NASA, which goes into some of the science behind this:

HYDROGEN-FED BACTERIA MAY EXIST BEYOND EARTH

It appears that Freund only casually mentioned the potential for extracting this hydrogen for energy, but the Vancouver Sun reporter decided to grab onto that for the headline value...

As noted in this press release, similar hydrogen-consuming microbes may some day be discovered on Mars.

And if we ever did figure out a way of "mining" this trapped hydrogen, there would be a way to fill up your tank if you went planet hopping :)

Or an in-browser app that automatically Google-linked everything in a page? Like M$'s proposed auto-linking, but populist. True hypertext.

Good luck! Don't count on feeling lucky d;-)

Either way, like the old margarine commercial said, It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!

Either way, like the old margarine commercial said, It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!

You are correct -- it was a fire aboard AS-204 (later renamed to Apollo 1) that resulted in the deaths of Grissom, White, and Chaffee.

Coincidence? Probably.

Mapping Gravity
Posted by michael on Thursday November 22, @01:22AM
from the slim-fast dept.
overThruster writes: "No, you don't need to drink the water... Gravity is less strong in India--enough so that you weigh almost 1% less there. See BBC story about NASA's gravity map." Here's another story about the mission, and the GRACE home page (or NASA's less-informative page).


But this did make me wonder if there is any connection to what I posted back then:

Back in 1978, Arthur C. Clarke ended his book The View from Serendip by writing about a gravitational anomaly which was found off the coast of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) -- the small island near India where he lives.

I am able to visit my favorite spot (Chapter 13) for only a few days a year. But now, quite unexpectedly -- and literally since I wrote the preceding paragraph! -- Serendipity has struck again. While researching a totally different subject, I've discovered a good reason for spending more time on the south coast.

It concerns the greak Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana. In this 2,200-year-old poem, the demon-king Ravanna kidnaps Sita, wife of Rama, and takes her to his island stronghold of Ceylon. Needless to say, she is ultimately released, after aerial battles involving what look suspiciously like atomic weapons and laser beams.

To heal the wounded, the heroic monkey-general Hanuman is later sent back to India to fetch a medicinal herb found only in the Himalayas. Unfortunately, when he gets to the right mountain he is unable to identify the herb. No problem; he brings the whole mountain back! However, one piece drops off, on the southern tip of Ceylon. The locals believe this fragment is in fact my favourite bay, for its name in Sinhalese means "there it fell down" (onna watuna).

There it fell down. Place names usually have a meaning, though it is often lost in the mists of time. Did something really fall down, centuries or millennia ago, at Unawatuna Bay? A meteorite would be the obvious explanation; it must have been a big one for the legend to have lasted down the ages.

And here's another weird coincidence. Little Unawatuna, believe it or not, is the closest point on dry land to the world's greatest gravitational anomaly, a few hundred kilometres out in the Indian Ocean. On the Goddard Space Flight Center's 3-D map of the Earth's Gravimetric Geoid, that strange phenomenon looks liek a deep pit [1] into which the whole island of Sri Lanka is about to slide.

Let's put two and two together. A few thousand years ago, a huge object of peculiar density plunged into the Indian Ocean, creating a tradition that is remembered to this day. And it's still there, distorting the earth's gravitational field -- Terran Gravitational Anomaly I.

That might make an opening for a pretty good science-fiction movie . . . and an even better ending for this book.

Ayu Bowan.

1. One hundred and ten metres below zero reference on the Goddard model (March & Vincent, 1974).


Of course, the Ramayana is "only" 2,200 years old, compared to an estimated age of 5,000 years for this discover. Since I don't have a map of the locations of either TGA-1, or the sunken city, I don't know how close they are.

Coincidence? Probably.

Mapping Gravity
Posted by michael on Thursday November 22, @01:22AM
from the slim-fast dept.
overThruster writes: "No, you don't need to drink the water... Gravity is less strong in India--enough so that you weigh almost 1% less there. See BBC story about NASA's gravity map." Here's another story about the mission, and the GRACE home page (or NASA's less-informative page).


But this did make me wonder if there is any connection to what I posted back then:

Back in 1978, Arthur C. Clarke ended his book The View from Serendip by writing about a gravitational anomaly which was found off the coast of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) -- the small island near India where he lives.

I am able to visit my favorite spot (Chapter 13) for only a few days a year. But now, quite unexpectedly -- and literally since I wrote the preceding paragraph! -- Serendipity has struck again. While researching a totally different subject, I've discovered a good reason for spending more time on the south coast.

It concerns the greak Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana. In this 2,200-year-old poem, the demon-king Ravanna kidnaps Sita, wife of Rama, and takes her to his island stronghold of Ceylon. Needless to say, she is ultimately released, after aerial battles involving what look suspiciously like atomic weapons and laser beams.

To heal the wounded, the heroic monkey-general Hanuman is later sent back to India to fetch a medicinal herb found only in the Himalayas. Unfortunately, when he gets to the right mountain he is unable to identify the herb. No problem; he brings the whole mountain back! However, one piece drops off, on the southern tip of Ceylon. The locals believe this fragment is in fact my favourite bay, for its name in Sinhalese means "there it fell down" (onna watuna).

There it fell down. Place names usually have a meaning, though it is often lost in the mists of time. Did something really fall down, centuries or millennia ago, at Unawatuna Bay? A meteorite would be the obvious explanation; it must have been a big one for the legend to have lasted down the ages.

And here's another weird coincidence. Little Unawatuna, believe it or not, is the closest point on dry land to the world's greatest gravitational anomaly, a few hundred kilometres out in the Indian Ocean. On the Goddard Space Flight Center's 3-D map of the Earth's Gravimetric Geoid, that strange phenomenon looks liek a deep pit [1] into which the whole island of Sri Lanka is about to slide.

Let's put two and two together. A few thousand years ago, a huge object of peculiar density plunged into the Indian Ocean, creating a tradition that is remembered to this day. And it's still there, distorting the earth's gravitational field -- Terran Gravitational Anomaly I.

That might make an opening for a pretty good science-fiction movie . . . and an even better ending for this book.

Ayu Bowan.

1. One hundred and ten metres below zero reference on the Goddard model (March & Vincent, 1974).


Of course, the Ramayana is "only" 2,200 years old, compared to an estimated age of 5,000 years for this discover. Since I don't have a map of the locations of either TGA-1, or the sunken city, I don't know how close they are.

Don't believe everything you read - even if it comes from a textbook. Check out the link for an interesting JavaApplet!!! Pretty neat.

Good point though. I'm sure attack angle would be even more prominent with water. I was just curious if non-compressable fluids do the same as compressable with a wing-type configuration (as far as the pressure differential goes).

It wasn't mentioned in the Chandra release or the CNN spot, but RX J1856.5-3754 is apparently the closest known neutron star. The Chandra site states it's distance at ~400 lyr and the APOD site cites 180 lyr, practically in our back yard!(in cosmological distances anyway)

Did you know that Huntsville, Alabama (where UAH is located) is also the home of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center? It seems to me that an interest in rocketry at this university would be a given - either naturally-occurring or sponsored by NASA.

Here's a link to some pictures of the mission and one of the train car.

We know there is water on a couple moons, which would get significantly less exposure to the sun. I am really just curious.

Basically this is to allow automated construction of the IIS as it grows in size. That site also mentions they are installing a new expansion hub,to which new modules are attached (maybe by the robotic arm)

Here are a few more links that provide greater detail.

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/spacenews/releases/200 2/02-58.html

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/iss-02c.html?astron omylinks

'Stainless steel batteries? ' I think not. More likely that they are plutonium or some other nuclear material, and the reason that no predictions are being made about where they will land is because NASA doesn't want to start a panic. As I understand it they are designed to burn up on re-entry to avoid ground level contamination (that says nothing of atmospheric contamination along the flight path). If they survive all the way to the ground and they are radiological....

Space Nuclear Power Systems

Space Nuclear Power System Accidents

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: How many nuclear devices are there in space?

Link to CNN story.

Reminds me of when Skylab fell to earth, dumping pieces of itself over Western Australia. The local president of the town council, Mervin Andre, gave the Director of NASA a littering ticket when chunks of the disintegrating space station dropped over the area southeast of Perth. The ticket remains unpaid to this day, although the council later waived the fine anyway.

Does anyone know how to bring this up with NASA's tracking program?

Same theory, more active approach and to paint it would still require a launch, intercept, and application of device, be it paint or a giant magnetic field. The best part is a system like this could be used to steer an earth crosser into earth orbit, providing plenty of zero G raw materials for future missions.

Photoshop 6 opens 21600x21600 tiffs in about 2-3 minutes on my athlon 1.3 w/384megs DDR. Once you get it loaded, you can zoom all the way in and out at will with very little lag.

Check out the Blue Marble satellite images from NASA! They're huge and really sweet. You can see individual sand dunes on the Sahara!

And while you are there, don't forget to print out a copy of http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ to put on your wall, preferably next to the ship date or schedule for your latest project. Makes an excellent background for your desktop also

Make note of 2000 SG344, which has a cumulative 1 in 1300 chance of hitting us in the period of 2068-2101 also.

Or go to the Java Orbital Diagram and check out August 2049 for Asteroid 2002 CU11

When was the last time you bought a lottery ticket ? What are the odds on that-life changing event, vs the odds on that page ?

Here ends my happy thoughts for the day

And while you are there, don't forget to print out a copy of http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ to put on your wall, preferably next to the ship date or schedule for your latest project. Makes an excellent background for your desktop also

Make note of 2000 SG344, which has a cumulative 1 in 1300 chance of hitting us in the period of 2068-2101 also.

Or go to the Java Orbital Diagram and check out August 2049 for Asteroid 2002 CU11

When was the last time you bought a lottery ticket ? What are the odds on that-life changing event, vs the odds on that page ?

Here ends my happy thoughts for the day

And while you are there, don't forget to print out a copy of http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ to put on your wall, preferably next to the ship date or schedule for your latest project. Makes an excellent background for your desktop also

Make note of 2000 SG344, which has a cumulative 1 in 1300 chance of hitting us in the period of 2068-2101 also.

Or go to the Java Orbital Diagram and check out August 2049 for Asteroid 2002 CU11

When was the last time you bought a lottery ticket ? What are the odds on that-life changing event, vs the odds on that page ?

Here ends my happy thoughts for the day

And while you are there, don't forget to print out a copy of http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ to put on your wall, preferably next to the ship date or schedule for your latest project. Makes an excellent background for your desktop also

Make note of 2000 SG344, which has a cumulative 1 in 1300 chance of hitting us in the period of 2068-2101 also.

Or go to the Java Orbital Diagram and check out August 2049 for Asteroid 2002 CU11

When was the last time you bought a lottery ticket ? What are the odds on that-life changing event, vs the odds on that page ?

Here ends my happy thoughts for the day

Ok, so I've gotten into this geocaching thing lately, and while working on a cache to be hidden in about 60 feet of water off the coast, it occured to me that a blinking LED might make it easier for divers to spot. No problem, whip up a blinker circuit with an LM3909 and a super-bright green LED and we're set. But what about power? Sure, four D-cells would let it run for close to a decade, but where's the fun in that? The undersea environment is quite dynamic, and there's got to be some power down there that can be harnessed. What I need are some ideas on how to do that.

We keep seeing stories here about tidal power, and that's cool, but I don't see how it can be done without a column rising all the way to the surface. So here are the ideas I've got right now. Keep in mind that the device will probably be housed in a length of 4-inch PVC or ABS pipe, and it needs about 0.5 ma at 1.5 volts:

• Surge power. Put a couple of funnels back-to-back with a CPU cooling fan-sized turbine and generator in the middle, and run the output through a rectifier and capacitor. But how reliable will those moving parts be after years underwater?
• Self-winding watch concept. Float the thing tethered to the bottom and install some sort of pendulum inside with a magnet on it, moving through a coil. The moving parts are protected, but will it be enough power?
• Yank the chain. Again, tether it, but use the varying tension on the tether to drive a dynamo of some sort.
• Nukes. Anyone got a spare radioisotope thermoelectric generator? Any idea how many smoke detectors I'd need to cannibalize to get enough Americium-241?
• Magnetohydrodynamic generator. Like the surge power thing, but using the flow of cunductive seawater through a magnetic field to generate a current. I have no idea how much power this would generate, if any, or how to deal with ion accumulation at the electrodes.

The generator need not fit inside the 4-inch cache tube, but it shouldn't be huge, either. It needs to be practical to build, and not terribly expensive. Above all it's got to be reliable and enduring. Any ideas?

We've got a Metallica copy in-progess. Mobilize SWAT Unit Charlie Omega Papa Yankee

That would be Charlie OSCAR Papa Yankee. You need to brush up on your phonetic alphabet .

Actually there are several satellites (COROT from France, Kepler from NASA) which will measure the variations brightness of stars. They will be able to look at several stars at once, and will be sensitive enough to detect an earth size planet moving in front of the star. Of course this requires systems where earth size planets appear to move infront of the star. These missions will not be able to directly detect earths (as Darwin and TPF) will, but they will let us know they are there and they will be launching in the 2005 timeframe rather thans 2010 or beyond.

Actually there are several satellites (COROT from France, Kepler from NASA) which will measure the variations brightness of stars. They will be able to look at several stars at once, and will be sensitive enough to detect an earth size planet moving in front of the star. Of course this requires systems where earth size planets appear to move infront of the star. These missions will not be able to directly detect earths (as Darwin and TPF) will, but they will let us know they are there and they will be launching in the 2005 timeframe rather thans 2010 or beyond.

Yes, the rumors are true...

The moon has apparently expired.

Well, since you're apparently too lazy to use Google, I found this one from NASA for you.

In it you'll see that they mentioned the greatest affect on temperature changes seem to have been El Niño.

Anyway, read, learn, enjoy.

Depends on what you mean by proof, but the magnetometer evidence is pretty strong.

We need a Europa orbiter to take gravity measurements to look for tides and other evidence that'll tell us how thick the crust is. With that, we can design the submersible and crust-penetrator, and select an appropriate landing site for the probe.

> The ethical question (with the assumption)... should we crack open the ice sheet to get to the sea? This is a sea that hasn't been exposed to anything above the ice for a looong time.

Actually, the sea won't be exposed with the probe either - like the probes at Lake Vostok (a subsurface lake in Antarctica), the Europa submersible will probably melt its way through the crust, and the "hole" through which it descends will freeze over it.

Also, there are cracks in the surface that appear to indicate upwelling of material from below. Could be water from the seas, could be slush from below the ice, but above the water. Hard to tell.

It's also possible that the peaked craters described in the first press release I cited were from impacts in thicker portions of the crust.

An orbiter should be able to show us areas where the crust is thinnest.

Meantime, the folks at planetary protection will be making damn sure that any Europa probe is sterile before landing.

IMNSHO, despite not getting a full sterilization treatment (that is, what we'll be doing to any Europa orbiter or probe) on Earth, Galileo is completely sterile after having been fried in Jovian radiation for the past several years and poses no threat to whatever it smashes into.

That opinion aside, the fact that the planetary protection folks at NASA still said "chuck Galileo into Jupiter when you're done with it, just to be on the safe side" should give you some idea of just how damn sure we'll be of a future probe's sterility before we attempt landing on Europa. (Insert obligatory Arthur C. Clarke joke here :-)

Depends on what you mean by proof, but the magnetometer evidence is pretty strong.

We need a Europa orbiter to take gravity measurements to look for tides and other evidence that'll tell us how thick the crust is. With that, we can design the submersible and crust-penetrator, and select an appropriate landing site for the probe.

> The ethical question (with the assumption)... should we crack open the ice sheet to get to the sea? This is a sea that hasn't been exposed to anything above the ice for a looong time.

Actually, the sea won't be exposed with the probe either - like the probes at Lake Vostok (a subsurface lake in Antarctica), the Europa submersible will probably melt its way through the crust, and the "hole" through which it descends will freeze over it.

Also, there are cracks in the surface that appear to indicate upwelling of material from below. Could be water from the seas, could be slush from below the ice, but above the water. Hard to tell.

It's also possible that the peaked craters described in the first press release I cited were from impacts in thicker portions of the crust.

An orbiter should be able to show us areas where the crust is thinnest.

Meantime, the folks at planetary protection will be making damn sure that any Europa probe is sterile before landing.

IMNSHO, despite not getting a full sterilization treatment (that is, what we'll be doing to any Europa orbiter or probe) on Earth, Galileo is completely sterile after having been fried in Jovian radiation for the past several years and poses no threat to whatever it smashes into.

That opinion aside, the fact that the planetary protection folks at NASA still said "chuck Galileo into Jupiter when you're done with it, just to be on the safe side" should give you some idea of just how damn sure we'll be of a future probe's sterility before we attempt landing on Europa. (Insert obligatory Arthur C. Clarke joke here :-)

Maybe here?:

Europa Orbiter

We are assuming that there is a sea under Europa's Ice Sheet, aren't we? Do we have any proof that there is a sea underneith?

They have also set a lower limit on the ice thickness, giving scientists an idea of the minimum depth such robots would have to dig.

Solar sail, Microbots stuffed into a small capsule, and you could get to Europa at very fast speeds.

Solar Sails at 150,000 mph, which is far faster than nuclear
Nuclear also has heat problems, and sure it can
Solar Sail
See how it works http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/prop19au g99_1.htm

Also we could use Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion

Plasma or ionized gas is trapped on the magnetic field lines generated onboard, and this plasma inflates the magnetic field much like hot air in a balloon.

See prototype

Did you read the link about chirality? They address this very issue off the "more questions" page. Here is the link.

It was released on the 33rd of February (RELEASE: 02-33)

Only if you like left-handed hotties.

> When was the last time you saw a frail, withering and feeble astronaut?

a couple years ago

True, for a stationary black hole. But a rotating black hole is a lot more complicated; if it's rotating fast enough, the singularity (if there is one) can actually be exposed.

(Yeah, yeah, how can a point rotate? Well, angular momentum is assumed to be conserved. Indeed, recently NASA discovered good evidence that at least some black holes do, in fact, spin.)

Anyway, this "gravastar" model would presumably show markedly different results in the rotating case.

A black hole is a term for a mass that is compact enough that it lies within an event horizon. Heuristically speaking, light cannot escape because the escape velocity from the object is faster than the speed of light, so it appears dark.

In General Relativity, given a sufficiently large mass (say, a 10 solar mass star), there is no source of rigidity strong enough to withstand gravitational collapse, so black holes will eventually form.

Big stars exist, so avoiding black holes requires either a new theory of space time (or gravitation), or a new type of matter.

These guys have opted for a new type of matter,_analogous_ to a Bose-Einstein condensate. The existance of Bose-Einstein condensates in the lab for regular matter (routine, now), says nothing about whether this exotic matter exists out there.

This is still pretty wide open from a theory vs experiment sense. Most claims for black holes are really observations of dense collections of matter. Some would be black holes for sure in General Relativity, but this is no proof.

The best source of proof for black holes will probably come from detection of Gravitational waves from their formation, which should come in the next few years from experiments such as LIGO or LISA .

a signal will only propagate outwards until the total mass behind it exceeds a critical value (the location of this is called the "event horizon" in an analogy to black holes). At that point its deflection will equal more than 90 degrees...i.e. it will not go any farther from its point of origin.

Sending signals outward is useless unless we expect to find intelligence within the tiny (universally speaking) sphere defined by this event horizon.

In which direction would the signal be deflected? The "mass behind it" will in most cases be roughly equally distributed in all directions. Therefore, the net deflection is negligible.

Furthermore, you're just plain wrong. The Hubble telescope has imaged galaxies more than 12 billion light years away. So we know that the radius of your "tiny sphere" is at least 12 billion light years. That's probably a significant fraction of the entire universe, and plenty of territory for hunting for extraterrestrial signals.

If you read this you'll understand why NASA is spending money on this kind of science. If we're going anywhere farther than the planets then we need a breakthrough. They are not ready to ignore the possibility that this guy might be right, even though he's acting like a crackpot.

And really, $600k -- or even $6M -- isn't that much money from the NASA budget, especially when spread over several years. I work on NASA projects and they spend hundreds of thousands per researcher per year to build and test prototypes of scientific instruments, rocket motors, what have you, just to incubate technologies that NASA thinks will be useful in the future. And it keeps industry and its talent ready and able to perform on future contracts.