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Perhaps we have some near the Earth's core, or maybe there is a much smaller but more accesible number
in the Lagrangian Points. IANA astrophysicist but it would seem quite likely that the moon's core would have such black holes. If so, might black holes in the lunar core be detected through perturbation of neutrino density during lunar eclipses?

On another note might microscopic black holes be able to change the ratio of neutrino flavors seen when solar neutrinos are viewed after passing through the Earth? Fascinating subject!

Can't wait to store my data in those extra dimensions.. hard disk will never get full! (not)

NASA has put some photos of the smoke plume on their website.

They can be seen at http://www.nasa.gov/newsinfo/WTCplume.html. Very interesting!

Unity folks, unity is important

Unity folks, unity is important

Check here for Nasa images of the smoke plume from MODIS.

Yes, probably not easy at all to do. It's probably good that they have the help of CASPER.

In order to communicate the probe you need to rent time on the Deep Space Network. This network is currently running at capacity, so getting time on it is rather expensive.

But an even bigger expense is the mission software. Modifications to the programming of the probe need to be codded. Then the code has to be proved to be mathematically perfect. You cannot afford to compile it, upload it, and get a message back saying "stack overflow, press any key to continue". The software must be proven to be 100% bug free before it goes up.

It takes a lot of people to manage a space mission correctly. Cut corners, and your mission fails because of something stupid (e.g. metric vs imperial).

http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds1/

Check out the monthly reports. They are quite fun to read, because they are written in a "layman" fashion. Especially the parts where they are putting together the "using science camera for navigation"-kludge. And rebooting a system half a solar system away and hoping it comes up again after an OS upgrade.

It's kinda sad that all the public focus is on the Mars missions, when there's stuff like DS1, Galileo, and NEAR that just keep on going..

Ahem - "Using a freon coolant as their liquid, they conducted a series of boiling experiments on the space shuttle during 5 missions..." [bold added by me] and the exact info on the substance in those main boiling photos (the one showing lots of bubles compared to one big one) is preciesly "Fluid: Freon R-113, Heat Flux: 8 W/cm2 , Subcooling: 5 F." As listed on POOL BOILING EXPERIMENT as linked to in the article.

It seems that parts have been produced using stereolithographic techniques for years... While using a fused resin part for investment casting is not direct fabrication, that seems close enough to me.

There is a lot cooler stuff than this going on right now.. Take a look at
this for some other cool 3-D rapid prototyping systems that are in development. The LENS system (about halfway down) is especially cool since they can form parts directly using materials that are difficult to form otherwise (strange Ti alloys), and change the composition and cooling rates along the length of the part...

Oh, and where the hell was this guy's boss when he used the quarter million dollar rapid prototyper to make a two dollar aluminum pulley for a sander... Don't even tell me that polycarbonate will be a good substitute for a pulley in a sander which was originally made from aluminum.

This does have very cool applications in fabrication of replica parts for antique cars and the like... It would be cool to go down to NAPA in 10 years and have them print out brake pad rubber for my subaru...

Evolution is not unbounded. An organism can only evolve as much as its environment will allow. This is why there is less 'intelligence' in the water. Water is a relatively unvaried environment. A lack of varied environment leads to less variety in the organism. Look at fish. They're all pretty much the same. Basically. Look at Mammals. VERY different within the Kingdom. What Kingdom has been around longer? The fish. Why aren't they more 'advanced' than mammals? Less variance in environment. More variance means more opportunity for evolutionary advancement through mutations. From what I recall, Mars' environment isn't too varied.

The temperature varies, but it seldom, if ever, gets above the freezing point of water. (NASA says the high is 59 with a low of about -184) Let's not forget that the presence of liquid water is VERY important to life as we know it. Not too many organisms can survive in low water conditions. Note though that there is life everywhere on Earth, even in the ice of the arctic and antartic.

If there was photosynthesis there should be measurable amounts of oxygen. However, the fact is that the Martian atmosphere contains about 95.3% carbon dioxide and 2.7% nitrogen, with the remainder a mixture of trace gases.

Even if the life processes were quite different from those on earth, you would expect a different mix of gasses than this one.

ARexx is a scripting language on the Amiga that allows a GUI program to be controlled entirely using a script. Legend has it that NASA uses - or used - ARexx to automate the downloading of images from satellites.

Output from one program could also be piped to another program or a virtual device - say, straight from a text program to the printer or modem port, or to/from a file on disk...

Not to mention that the Amiga's CLI was so groin-grabbingly kick-assingly good that most GUI software could be run just as easily via command-line. Wanna use GUI? Fine, load up the program by double-clicking on the icon and using the menus, newbie style. Wanna use CLI? Bring up a CLI window, enter your command (more s:startup-sequence, for example, displayed the PC's eqivalent of autoexec.bat).

Compared to the Amiga, even Windows scripting sucks.

I don't think that's a fatal flaw

Well, it is, assuming you're trying to make the kind of generalization that the original paper was trying to make. The original author took a randomly selected bunch of programmers who claimed to know either Java, C, or C++ and assigned them the task. In comparison, Mr. Gat's paper was based on a call to a bunch of dedicated LISPers. whose expertise one could reasonably expect to be much higher than someone who might have taken a LISP programming class N years ago.

You really can't compare the two papers. Either you get "experts" on both sides, or you get randomly chosen programmers on both sides, but not a mix.

btw, the larger picture has some astounding detail: don't miss it.

If you follow a couple of links at the bottom of the page, you'll find this, which is an archive of most of the files direrctly associated with the apollo program (and includes, as you would assume, lots of pretty pictures). I highly reccomend it, if only for the desktop images it provides.

This link should help.

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Groups/Networks/Projects/W ireless/index.html

It's a heck of a lot easier to look at a needle and say, "oooh, that one's getting close to the red part," than to look at an LCD and say, "73. what does 73 mean?

The cool thing though is: much more flexibility. Instead of a needle showing you deviations from your course, they can depict a "highway in the sky" on top of the artificial horizon. Instead of a horrendously expensive mechanical HSI (Horizontal Situation Indicator, a moving compass rose that has superimposed navigation needles) an electronic HSI can show you a compass rose with nav. moving map, and overlay weather radar, terrain, traffic and lightning strike data.

And those LCD glass cockpits are much more reliable than the good ol' steam gauges. Don't get me wrong, I don't feel that my life is being placed in jeopardy because the airplanes I fly have steam gauges; but man alive, I drool over what those colour displays can do. (The FAA is a lot more conservative now, and these systems are much more reliable, accurate and readable than mechanical instruments.)

(For an example of glass cockpits for [almost] normal people, check out the UPS Aviation Technologies MX-20, part of the AGATE project.

Not that this directly relates to "length" but there are other games you can play. Check out ...

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Pubs/TechSums/9293/10.html #HDT%2021

I wish I had a link to the full paper. What they were trying to show (I think) was that by necking down the fuselage at just the right place, the expansion fan from the fuselage mixes with the wing's leading edge compression wave and to a small extent cancel each other out. The goal was to try to reduce some of the peaks in the N wave, and thus reduce the perceived sonic boom. In other words, try to turn a bang (or two) into a rumble so to speak.

- Ordinarius

I'm peripherally aware of Nasa's work, (the Nasa Office of the Inspector General, to be exact) and know they have used Linux in their analysis. They have even been involved in developing Linux software and have released their enhancements under the GPL, one example being the enhanced loopback driver they developed.

They're some of the best in the business when it comes to computer forensics, and their feedback has been invaluable in the design of my current project.

We have a site for the project, but I'm not really interested in getting slashdotted this early in our development process. I'll probably post something about it when we're ready for our first code drop, and of course if you want to know when we get there just drop me a line. I have a list of interested parties (primarily Law Enforcement personnel) that I'm going to notify when we take the project public and the site goes live.

but have you ever seen one? Check out this image I found a little while back.
(http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010221.html for the concerned web surfer)

When I read stuff like this, I can't help but wonder how long it's going to be before we'll all travel at super-sonic speeds for our presonal excursions, not just the ultra-rich.

Nice post, but the high-res image is a modest .jpg. Here's a link to JPL, where you can download the 2MB .tif: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/wfpc/index.html

Yeah, and if you follow the link in the referenced article that gives details on the implementation, you'll see that they are dynamically adding ipf rules based on their Apache/PHP/SSL app. So they're letting anyone within range of the wireless AP play with an app that can potentialy open that gateway up to all kinds of traffic. The box has three interfaces, one each on the wireless, internal and "commodity internet". Thus the PHP app could potentially be subverted to open access to the internal net from the Internet.

I'm implementing a hardware based VPN for our WLAN. As others have noted, that makes it hard to support multiple OS, though not impossible. I have Free S/WAN interoperation with the VPN using IKE preshared secrets, so that gives me Linux support. Now what we need is integrated IPSEC support from the WLAN vendors.

Here's a technical description on how they did it: http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Groups/Networks/Projects/W ireless/index.html

It's pretty neat:
You get your networking infos via DHCP. This gives you access restricted to public data.
If you connect to their HTTPS web site and authentificate, this pokes a hole in the firewall and you get access to secured/private servers.

A lightning discharge is perhaps 500,000,000 volts at 10,000 amps.

Interesting references:

Great Lightning Photos -- West Virginia Lightning

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about Lightning

Human Voltage -- What happens when people and lightning converge

Lightning Concepts

You can find some of the images and movies here, or do a bit of googling.

• http://sprite.gi.alaska.edu/html/sprites.htm
  
• http://thunder.msfc.nasa.gov/primer/primer3.html
  
• http://geology.about.com/library/weekly/aa020198.h tm?rnk=r7&terms=lightning
  
• http://ibis.nmt.edu/sprites/sprites.html

Reminds me of when the Apollo 12 mission to the moon was struck by lightning shortly after liftoff. Here's an article including pictures. Pretty amazing that the spacecraft's electronics survived this and they still managed to go to the moon after rebooting everything. Here's an item from the RISKS digest about one of the reasons why that worked.

Really big sheets of metal? No, we can't make that now.

According to this site we throw away 350000 tons of aluminum foil every year. That's a lot of foil. Check out what the area of one roll is compared to how much it weighs. Now tell me that we cannot weld smaller, easier produced pieces together. Tell me that we cannot have thousands of robots doing this welding at inexpensive prices in a hundred years (they can already do this now, but they are not super cheap, they aren't mass produced).

So we can make really big sheets of metal now with existing technology. It's just rather expensive, that's all.

Try to get permission to use them, even on Venus.

I intentionally ignored this aspect. My fundamental assumption was that humankind would have to actually *WANT* to do this and focus on it somewhat to be able to accomplish this. This is merely a political problem. Also, china wants to use nuclear devices to help build a dam to generate hydroelectic power. If they can do it, we can do it on another planet.

We can poke around genetically, but we have very little control. You're proposing totally reworking an organism on a scale that's totally beyond what we can reasonably envision today.

True, our current biotech is *NOT* very good, however it's the fastest growing field of science and technology, and developments in nanofabrication, femtosecond pulse lasers, atomic force microscopes, and nanotubules has been giving us a much finer control in the realms of biomolecules and DNA. Biotech will most likely be the science where all the action is in the next century, as bioinformatics is slowly coming into the light, and our manipulation technology is growing by leaps and bounds (they are working on ways of reading the entire genetic code of a cell from a single copy of the DNA). What I proposed to do with the microorganisms may actually mostly be a "simple" matter of combining traits from different microrganisms, with the modifications necessary to make the genes compatable. This is very different from designing the organism from scratch, and I can forsee this within the next 100 years (we can already cross-transplant genes between species, look at the mouse that grew a human ear).

Where are you finding this "nuclear drive"? In as much as treaties ban nukes in space, I have to say that this surprises me.

I'm not sure where you have been, but NASA had developed this stuff in the 60s and early 70s. I believe they had some working prototypes even, however they were not allowed to fly these for political reasons (*sigh*). Also, NASA has been renewing its work in nuclear propulsion. A friend of mine received two PhDs from MIT, and one of his graduate thesises was on Nuclear Propulsion Using Magnetohydrodynamic Vorteces for Containment and Propulsion. So there's plenty of work going on with nulcear drives, in fact had we not stopped in the 70s, we could be using them for all sorts of things right now.

Also one other idea being pursued is the idea of an antimatter-fusion hybrid drive, using antiprotons to spark fusion reactions. This is being developed currently at Penn State University, and was the subject of my younger brother's science project a few years ago. NASA moved the site about it, so I couldn't find it for you.

We also have chemical rockets. Neither will be enough to move an asteroid from 3 AU to 0.7 AU with anything like a reasonable cost.

Chemical rockets are not worth mentioning here, as they lack the necessary specific impulse. Ion engines could do this, but they would take a very very long time. The actual moving process could take 30 years, in which case things like solar sails and nuclear propulsion become rather viable. Also, if we use a near-earth asteroid, it would only be 1 AU to .7 AU, a much smaller distance, and we may even be able to bring it close enough to earth to give it a "reverse gravitational slingshot" in which kinetic energy is transferred to EARTH rather than to the asteroid, thus saving us most of the work with our rockets. It's okay if moving the asteroid has a very high cost ($1 Trillon) in that if you can get 1 billion people to eventually live on Venus, that's only $1000 per person. Not too bad...

Grounded loosely in today's science, yes. But so is Star Trek.

Are you KIDDING?!?!?! Star Trek blatantly violates both relativity and quantum theory (warp drive and transporters, respectively) not to mention constantly gets their technobabble wrong (no, you cannot use ejected antimatter to create an electrolytic reaction to cause a space monster that ate your ship to throw up, like that one episode of voyager). Anything remotely scientific in Star Trek is nothing more than a plot device (I used to be and still am a big fan of TNG, but the more physics I take, the more I see is wrong with it, especially any time they do time travel). *ONCE* in a while they get something right.

What I am saying is *NOT* loosely based on science, it's actually possible today (granted current technology would require an amount of time and energy that would make it nonfeasible, and yes the biotech part isn't yet possible). Going to the moon was once science fiction, and there was nothing in the laws of physics to say it couldn't be done, but the physics said that the amount of energy required to do it was enormous. So it took a while until we learned to do it. It's the same way with this. It's just a matter of time/energy put into it. Eventually construction techniques, energy sources, robotics and biotechnology should be able to tackle all of these problems, as solutions can already be envisioned and planned today.

I'm not talking about doing this in 50 years. I'm talking about starting it in 100, and it possibly taking several hundred to finish. Few can argue that it's impossible, though. Politically infeasible? Maybe. Expensive? Perhaps, depends on whether or not we have self-replicating robotics and inexpensive intra-system travel. Those last two, may for now be science fiction, true. For now.

While I'm dismayed that the government sees virtually no value in funding any space missions beyond the slow-moving International Space Station [http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/], I'm even more frightened when I consider that future space exploration may be limited to Individuals and Private Corporations, whose main concern is their own pocketbooks, and not the benefit of humanity. I would gladly welcome a global space organization that could put aside the petty world of greed & politics.

Finally, how are you going to get the plants down there so that they can survive long enough to make a shred of difference?

That's why I suggested *FLOATING* plants, as in plants that ride up in the UPPER atmosphere which is by far much much cooler (like the earth's stratusphere). I'm talking about tiny monocellular organisms, basically a specially engineered type of extremophiles.

I am not suggesting doing *ANYTHING* signifigant to the surface until we have the atmosphere under control.

You do have a point with the water. It's been a while since I took Solar System Astronomy, so I had forgotten that there was little water left in the atmosphere (So much of what I hear about venus was about it's runaway greenhouse effect, etc, which talked about PAST water). I managed to find a very interesting comparison between two theories that explain the dissapearance of water.

I'm not suggesting we can turn Venus into a completely terran-like world in the next few hundred years, however it should be quite possible with a mixture of bio- and nano-technology to reduce the surface temperatures to a level where building large domed structures and underground settlements becomes feasable and even inexpensive when mass produced. There's still plenty of metals and carbon and oxygen, etc, around for biomass, even if it's rather short on hydrogen. At very least, we should be able to remove the carbon mostly from the atmosphere, leaving an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere that can help make Venus more like earth.

To make matters worse, Venus is still too close to the Sun to be habitable without artifical tending of the climate (something I don't know how to do, do you?).

I may not be a planetary engineer, however it's very simple to see that blocking out the sun is a very practical solution, and is constantly used in science-fiction novels because it's very believable. Take an asteroid, roughly spherical, about 10 km in radius. Now lets say this asteroid is one of the iron-rich asteroids which is a minor, but signifigant portion of the asteroid population. Because the volume of this asteroid is roughly 4X10^15 km^3, a sheet of iron could be made at a thickness of 1 mm to be 64 MILLION km X 64 MILLION km in size. That's half of it's orbital radius! This is by far overkill, when all one really needs is a set of orbital night-day strips around venus, and a set of much smaller "obscuring" strips that cast vertical bars over the sun so as to dampen it's overall luminousity as measured by the venusian surface. Would this be a big project? Sure! But there's nothing in the laws of physics that says it couldn't be done, and the materials for it are already in space (large nuclear propulsion would be necessary to position them, or perhaps large solar sails). Of course one could always detonate nuclear devices inside the venusian surface to kick up enough dust to cool the planet rapidly as well, allowing a hundred years or so for it to settle.

These ideas are very far out. But the whole idea of reshaping another planet is far out too. So is the idea of going to another planet! But if it's one thing that mankind has learned, often it's physics and human imagination that are the limit. Physics says yes, and human imagination has already gone there.

But I'm still just a student, what do I know? :)

Post Comment Lameness filter encountered. Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted

Why??

A friend of a friend of mine reported that this has actually been accomplished before. Apparently, he knows a guy who actually bought a scramjet which was accidentally sold at a NASA surplus auction. To test it, he tied it to the roof of his car! Don't believe me? Search the following site for "69 Chevy": Scramjet Car

um, NASA uses metric. [...] most US science classes teach in metric

Then how do you explain this nifty page at NASA that was linked to in the story, where NASA teaches kids?

can you say tank busting weapon? remember this is a projectile we're talking about, one thats only 4" in diameter. however the 130' cannon might be a liability on the battlefield.

<ramble>
on the aviation side, there have been rumors of hypersonic vehicles being tested at Area 51 for ten years now. as far as flying in one, i don't think acceleration to mach9 in less than a few mintues would be enjoyable to your average business passeneger.
</ramble>

this article at NASA gives a better explanation and has some QuickTime movies of the X43A.

I hope you can turn off the 20 minute delay feature.

1: "We don't want a lot of toothless astronauts returning to Earth," said periodontist William Stenberg, a commander in the U.S. Public Health Service.

2: It's long been known that astronauts and cosmonauts who spend weeks and months in the microgravity of orbit rapidly lose bone density and mass.

All that sounds like a conspiracy. I think what they're really saying is we should pack granma's stuff. I repeat: we should pack granma.

1: "We don't want a lot of toothless astronauts returning to Earth," said periodontist William Stenberg, a commander in the U.S. Public Health Service.

2: It's long been known that astronauts and cosmonauts who spend weeks and months in the microgravity of orbit rapidly lose bone density and mass.

All that sounds like a conspiracy. I think what they're really saying is we should pack granma's stuff. I repeat: we should pack granma.

Here is the Mars Fact Sheet from NASA. The surface gravity on Mars is 0.377 times that of Earth, which I would expect to cause at least some bone loss, but of course IANAD.

Incidently the year in space, 6 months each way, seems somewhat short to me. I thought they generally planned for closer to a 9 month journey when sending things over there. Of course the really important point is whether we can make more fuel once we get there. Carrying all the fuel for a return trip with you would make for a lot heavier and slower trip.

In any case men won't be going there soon. We haven't even been to the moon in ages, and we might as well test whatever technology we plan on using on some long duration lunar missions.

Here is the Mars Fact Sheet from NASA. The surface gravity on Mars is 0.377 times that of Earth, which I would expect to cause at least some bone loss, but of course IANAD.

Incidently the year in space, 6 months each way, seems somewhat short to me. I thought they generally planned for closer to a 9 month journey when sending things over there. Of course the really important point is whether we can make more fuel once we get there. Carrying all the fuel for a return trip with you would make for a lot heavier and slower trip.

In any case men won't be going there soon. We haven't even been to the moon in ages, and we might as well test whatever technology we plan on using on some long duration lunar missions.

It doesn't cost too much to get into space, if you've got something small. For cost a US "educational facility" $1500. under the Get Away Special (GAS-CAN) program. But that's not what those people are doing...

Instead, they are on the Athena 1 rocket... I used to work for Defense Systems (bought by CTA, bought by Orbital... you know the drill), and my satellite -- GemStar -- was the first to go on this model rocket. The price of the rocket was many times more than our vehicle, and we played the usual space chicken game (where they threaten to launch a slab of concrete and then when we're ready, all of the sudden they weren't really ready). Finally, launch day, and we're watching the video and it goes up and and up... and after about a minute it's going at an amazing speed, and then all of the sudden makes a 90 degree turn. The thing is going so fast that the thrust of the rocket doesn't even affect its direction. The range officer blew it up. Oh well. When I was with DSI we also made bouys -- the joke was that we should just upload the bouy software to the satellites because they always seem to end up in the ocean anyway.

The reason for the failure was that the guidance control loop had some undamped and unintended oscillations.. and there was only a limitied amount of hydrolic fluid on board to control the position of the thrusters. Once the fluid was expended (it was just squirted out after being used), there was no more directional control.

After our flight, they changed the name of the rocket from the LMLV-1 to the Athena to distance the second rocket from this first failure. Ironically, the second one failed too.

It doesn't cost too much to get into space, if you've got something small. For cost a US "educational facility" $1500. under the Get Away Special (GAS-CAN) program. But that's not what those people are doing...

Instead, they are on the Athena 1 rocket... I used to work for Defense Systems (bought by CTA, bought by Orbital... you know the drill), and my satellite -- GemStar -- was the first to go on this model rocket. The price of the rocket was many times more than our vehicle, and we played the usual space chicken game (where they threaten to launch a slab of concrete and then when we're ready, all of the sudden they weren't really ready). Finally, launch day, and we're watching the video and it goes up and and up... and after about a minute it's going at an amazing speed, and then all of the sudden makes a 90 degree turn. The thing is going so fast that the thrust of the rocket doesn't even affect its direction. The range officer blew it up. Oh well. When I was with DSI we also made bouys -- the joke was that we should just upload the bouy software to the satellites because they always seem to end up in the ocean anyway.

The reason for the failure was that the guidance control loop had some undamped and unintended oscillations.. and there was only a limitied amount of hydrolic fluid on board to control the position of the thrusters. Once the fluid was expended (it was just squirted out after being used), there was no more directional control.

After our flight, they changed the name of the rocket from the LMLV-1 to the Athena to distance the second rocket from this first failure. Ironically, the second one failed too.

And I don't see you coming up with a better method for propagating life.

In fact there is a vast human enterprise devoted to correcting and improving on the incompetent design of life. It is called Medical Science.

As for computer scientists, no programmer who wrote a program with the failure rate of child birth would pass his first programming course. Until about 100 years ago, 1 per cent of mothers and over 10 per cent of children died in child birth or soon after. Morton Thiokol Inc. faced an official investigation for a substantially better performance.

they may have had no idea that something sentient would eventually evolve from the whole thing

Maybe they did and maybe they didn't. It's interesting that even with our meagre intelligence you feel the need to cover for them. The main question in your escatogy is whether life has been botched up by malice or incompetence. In either case, they would have flunked any genetic engineering class in the 21st century.

Why Apple for it's FireWire and not IEEE for it's same 1394-1995 spec or Sony for it's i.Link (again the same)? Because Apple is the one that did the development and the popularizing of the technology thus their holding the majority of the patents & controlling the licensing.)

One of his major theories was that complex organic matter drifted through and evolved in interstellar space. It's long been seen that organic matter could form huge clouds, but it was always an open question as to how it could possibly "evolve".

But the recent discovery of exotic forms of ice that possess many of the properties of liquid water rather than the usual, crystalline solid properties of earth-bound ice make this possible. Evolution happens *much* more slowly in interstellar space and within comet cores, but now the discovery of this new ice makes it probably, even likely, that exotic forms of space-bound life exist and thrive.

http://ccf.arc.nasa.gov/dx/archives/planets/comets /comets3.html

http://www-space.arc.nasa.gov/~leonid/ice/strong.h tml

High-density amorphous ice,the frost on interstellar grains. Jenniskens, P.; Blake, D.F.; Wilson, M.A.; Pohorille, A. Astrophysical Journal vol.455, no.1, pt.1 p.389-401. Dec.

High-Density Amorphous Ice, the Frost on Interstellar Grains. Jenniskens, P.; Blake,D.F.; Wilson,M.A.; Pohorille,A. NASA/TM-95-207251. 21 January 1995.

Liquid Water in the domain of cubic ice Ic P.Jenniskens, S.Banham, D.F.Blake, and M.R.S.McCoustra, Journal of Chemical Physics 1997, 107 1232-1241

As a side note, he was originally a campaigner against the singularity theory of universal origins (which he derisively coined the "Big Bang Theory"). It was the "all or nothing" part of it that most offended him. And the insistence on bounded, finite time.

He was more all about a continuous and random creation of matter in what he termed "interstitial spaces".

Nowadays, the hottest theories of cosmology involve quantum foam expansion, oscillations, and string loops spitting off random particles. Kind of a weird synthesis of the two. I guess we're in the middle of a paradigm shift.

In another generation, the debate about Bing Bang versus Steady State will seem as quaint and alien as the argument over which theory could best explain diseases: Humoral, Miasmatic, Contagia, or Germ.

One of his major theories was that complex organic matter drifted through and evolved in interstellar space. It's long been seen that organic matter could form huge clouds, but it was always an open question as to how it could possibly "evolve".

But the recent discovery of exotic forms of ice that possess many of the properties of liquid water rather than the usual, crystalline solid properties of earth-bound ice make this possible. Evolution happens *much* more slowly in interstellar space and within comet cores, but now the discovery of this new ice makes it probably, even likely, that exotic forms of space-bound life exist and thrive.

http://ccf.arc.nasa.gov/dx/archives/planets/comets /comets3.html

http://www-space.arc.nasa.gov/~leonid/ice/strong.h tml

High-density amorphous ice,the frost on interstellar grains. Jenniskens, P.; Blake, D.F.; Wilson, M.A.; Pohorille, A. Astrophysical Journal vol.455, no.1, pt.1 p.389-401. Dec.

High-Density Amorphous Ice, the Frost on Interstellar Grains. Jenniskens, P.; Blake,D.F.; Wilson,M.A.; Pohorille,A. NASA/TM-95-207251. 21 January 1995.

Liquid Water in the domain of cubic ice Ic P.Jenniskens, S.Banham, D.F.Blake, and M.R.S.McCoustra, Journal of Chemical Physics 1997, 107 1232-1241

As a side note, he was originally a campaigner against the singularity theory of universal origins (which he derisively coined the "Big Bang Theory"). It was the "all or nothing" part of it that most offended him. And the insistence on bounded, finite time.

He was more all about a continuous and random creation of matter in what he termed "interstitial spaces".

Nowadays, the hottest theories of cosmology involve quantum foam expansion, oscillations, and string loops spitting off random particles. Kind of a weird synthesis of the two. I guess we're in the middle of a paradigm shift.

In another generation, the debate about Bing Bang versus Steady State will seem as quaint and alien as the argument over which theory could best explain diseases: Humoral, Miasmatic, Contagia, or Germ.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/technology/tumblewe ed_rovers.html

http://www.retroweb.com/prisoner.html

What do you want?
Information!
You won't get it!
By hook or by crook, we will!

Alright, here is a link with a little more info and a couple more pictures:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/behind/tumblewee d1.html

And here is a place with a video of a test(Realplayer):
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/technology/tumblewe ed_rovers.html

Alright, here is a link with a little more info and a couple more pictures:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/behind/tumblewee d1.html

And here is a place with a video of a test(Realplayer):
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/technology/tumblewe ed_rovers.html

Check out Big Wheels too, that also seems like a neat little rover.