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Up early. We were working late last night with the PCS configuration "patches", and wrestling with the UNIX commands. Laptops were reloaded and left shut down while other files were uploaded to the MDM's. The word from Houston this a.m. is to wait another rev to connect the first laptop so that we're sure the changes to the C&C computers are complete.

They really do have system administration problems.

"Watched the 2nd CD of "Pulp Fiction" and called it a night. "

Hmm... VCDs perhaps? RM format? DivX? We need an investigation NOW!!! I recommend we send Hilary Rosen up there IMMEDIATELY.

There is a project to do just that: put one or more telecommuncations satellites in orbit around Mars, to provide 24-hour comms access from any part of the Martian surface. The Mars Telecom Network, it's called: more details here.

The video here was spectacular, except it's a proprietary RealMedia format which prevents me from saving it to disk. So if I want to watch it again, ever, I have to download it each time. Real smart. I mean, it's Nasa, what reason do they have for not letting me save it to disk? They want to use RealMedia because it's a great compression format, fine. But whey the hell is it streaming only?

On a related note, just why is it that the fidelity of the astronaut communications sound like total shit? My $10 telephone and $5 computer mic give better sound quality than what they've got. You'd think that clear communications would be some sort of safety priority or something. It's not like it requires a 10Mbit datastream!

From the Lab that prepared the craft here's the story: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2001/odysseypostl aunch.html

Unfortunately, the photo Michael likes so much is among a bunch that are only available at low resolution here at the Mars Odyssey Website. More important scientific photos and artist renderings are frequently available in high-quality tiff format at places like this. I don't know if they had a high enough resolution camera to take the sort of pictures needed for reprint.

If anyone can find a high-res version of this picture, please post it - I'd love to have Ofoto make an ultra high quality 8x10 for me (thanks for the idea, Michael).

Unfortunately, the photo Michael likes so much is among a bunch that are only available at low resolution here at the Mars Odyssey Website. More important scientific photos and artist renderings are frequently available in high-quality tiff format at places like this. I don't know if they had a high enough resolution camera to take the sort of pictures needed for reprint.

If anyone can find a high-res version of this picture, please post it - I'd love to have Ofoto make an ultra high quality 8x10 for me (thanks for the idea, Michael).

I would be interested of learning when Nasa decides to perform similar probes on our more local cellestial partners Venus and Mercury, or any other local body for that matter.

Hard to tell, given the titanic budget overruns on the space station, which are very effective at consuming other missions' credits. Well, there had been MESSENGER, which was supposed to get into orbit around Mercury, but I guess this has been cancelled at the same time as Deep Impact. I am not aware of any project for Venus, maybe all the data from Magellan hasn't been digested yet?

Aside from that, I wouldn't call Mercury "more local" than Mars; it's more difficult to get there. Maybe Venus, but then landing there without melting/crushing/falling apart is even harder...

The Rainmakers refer to this, and other modern technological disasters, in "Rockin' At The T-Dance" off their first album.

Take a trip with me in 1967
With Grissom, White, and Chaffe on a rocket ride to heaven
A dead-end date aboard AS-204
It was American made, only the best for our boys.
And we were rockin' at the T-dance

I had another date with a homecoming queen
I took her to the prom in Apollo 13
We orbit the moon, we couldn't get home,
Little Queenie's mom was pissed 'cause her baby didn't phone.
And we were rockin' at the T-dance

Take a trip with me to Kansas City, MO
To the Hyatt House, to the big dance floor,
You can still see the ghosts but you can't see the sense,
Why they let the monkey go and blamed the monkey wrench.
And we were rockin' at the T-dance

The song title of "T-dance" plays off of the tea dance that was being held at the time of the collapse.

The whole album is lyrically brilliant, and would do well in the collection of anyone into the Springsteen/Mellencamp/heartlandish sorta rock'n'roll thing.
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> jeez, what were they running? WinCE?

doubt it, i worked on a project awhile ago -- had to interface to a bunch of data from a aircraft -- it was mostly ADA structures. they claimed it was 40 millions lines of code overall.

Microsoft and NASA are working on a project to autopilot aircraft through takeoff, cruise and landing -- with minimal interaction with the pilot.

It's called Highway In The Sky

Now, one of those should really never be fired at a Blackbird, but I imagine the Bad Guys have something similar.

Somebody moderate the parent post up to 5. It's the real deal, as anyone who does x-ray dispersion will tell you. Don't believe me - believe NASA.

Astronomy Picture of the Day, yesterday, had a write up about this with great links, including (UNIX optimized) media files (AVIs) of the process (theoretical, not empirical, I'm sure). Those AVIs can be found here.

I'm still waiting for the new, better detection methods that will allow us to actually find Earth-sized planets in their normal orbits. Not only that, but future missions will be able to tell the composition of the atmosphere around these planets - and if they find an atmosphere a lot like ours, that would be the first concrete evidence towards extrasolar life.

yes encryption IS a good thing for people like NIST to put resources into. You need people at the top of the field, and it helps that the organization's interests fall right in line with having an open, secure encryption system.

Sandia researchers develop world's fastest encryptor

ORNL Helps Develop Electronic Notebooks (read article to see crypto stuff)

GRIP -- Gigabit Rate IPSec (Army)

Cancer research (I never knew cancer genes needed encryption)

WING (DARPA)

NASA (why can't they look to NIST?)

Key Agile ATM (DARPA)

And theres a slew more. I agree that government should promote better standards, but instead of spending X millions on a bunch of bs, they should look to consolidate it all, which is what my main post should've stated I guess. Some of this so called research, or development never even sees the light of day due to timing situations. One part of government may intend to develop and deploy something, but it won't always happen, meaning all that money used for those projects are now gone, and they're left to ask for more money for some new project, never using their own resources to see if another agency can assist them.

Just in case you're not reading this article on April 4th, you can access the picture at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010404.html

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/
Today's Astronomy Picture of the day is all about this, too. It's got a bunch of links at the bottom for people wanting to read more.
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Celoxia also appears to be addressing the SOFTWARE issue with links to C.

Computer Savvy /.ers like yourself may wish to explore these many links

for more detailed info than the NASA Press Release (geared for the general public) allows.

Celoxia also appears to be addressing the SOFTWARE issue with links to C.

Computer Savvy /.ers like yourself may wish to explore these many links

for more detailed info than the NASA Press Release (geared for the general public) allows.

Celoxia also appears to be addressing the SOFTWARE issue with links to C.

Computer Savvy /.ers like yourself may wish to explore these many links

for more detailed info than the NASA Press Release (geared for the general public) allows.

This question belongs in April 1, methinks.

The Moon is receding from Earth, and doing so rapidly enough that that their surfaces would have been touching about a billion years ago. The infinitesimal amount of wave and tide energy that we can extract, even if we work on every section of coastline, woun't even slow this recession down noticeably. Plain, ordinary vannilla-flavoured physics is slowing the recession several orders of magnitude faster than we eevr could.

BTW, lightning damage (like Schroter's Valley) and other more or less Transient Lunar Phenomena hint that dear old Luna isn't as inactive as has previously been thought.

Since it looks like this article is going to become the April Fools clearing house, check out the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

"Ring any bells? If I remember correctly, wasn't there something on /. about this a year ago?"

Excerpting from this NASA press release that Slashdot linked to Friday:

Via a Space Act Agreement, NASA Langley Research Center will receive a HAL (Hyper Algorithmic Logic)-15 Hypercomputer from Star Bridge Systems, Inc. of Midvale, Utah. The system is said to be faster and more versatile than any supercomputer on the market and will change the way we think about computational methods.

Representatives of Star Bridge Systems, Inc. visited Langley Research Center on March 27 to demonstrate and deliver one of its Hyper Algorithmic Logic (HAL-15) supercomputers.

Star Bridge President Brent Ward and Chief Executive Officer Kent Gilson presented the supercomputer to Doug Dwoyer, Langley's Associate Director for Research and Technology Competencies, after press and technical briefings in the Pearl Young Theater.

Strange how Slashdot was bought out, and now that our beloved editors are paid hefty sums with full editorial control, they still can't find the time to read their own site. This site was definately better back when it was Rob & Jeff posting stuff that interested them (and that they therefore actually read). It's still an amazing site, just not as amazing =(

"Ring any bells? If I remember correctly, wasn't there something on /. about this a year ago?"

Excerpting from this NASA press release that Slashdot linked to Friday:

Via a Space Act Agreement, NASA Langley Research Center will receive a HAL (Hyper Algorithmic Logic)-15 Hypercomputer from Star Bridge Systems, Inc. of Midvale, Utah. The system is said to be faster and more versatile than any supercomputer on the market and will change the way we think about computational methods.

Representatives of Star Bridge Systems, Inc. visited Langley Research Center on March 27 to demonstrate and deliver one of its Hyper Algorithmic Logic (HAL-15) supercomputers.

Star Bridge President Brent Ward and Chief Executive Officer Kent Gilson presented the supercomputer to Doug Dwoyer, Langley's Associate Director for Research and Technology Competencies, after press and technical briefings in the Pearl Young Theater.

Strange how Slashdot was bought out, and now that our beloved editors are paid hefty sums with full editorial control, they still can't find the time to read their own site. This site was definately better back when it was Rob & Jeff posting stuff that interested them (and that they therefore actually read). It's still an amazing site, just not as amazing =(

Slashdot noted the press release in this Slashdot story. I wouldn't be surprised if CNN found out about the story from Slashdot.

Look at this picture http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station /crew-1/hires/iss01e5127.jpg. The cool part is that they are also using WinAmp on board the station... I wonder what the RIAA thinks...

Tim

Another salient link ... I work with this group, which is researching adaptive computing from within NASA Goddard.

Well, that got mangled beyond all recognition.

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day

This is certainly an interesting application of cell phone technology and the existing cell phone network - NASA's page mentions savings of multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per launch.

However, it's hard to see what the significance is overall. Satellites have always been able to communicate in via "realtime telemetry", and could hardly function otherwise.

I think the big thing here is simply that it decreases the amount of special instrumentation needed - any comments from the group?

The current atmospheric model the group uses is about 20,000 lines of FORTRAN that has been hacked on and augmented willy nilly since 1978. And runs primarily on a DEC Alpha running OpenVMS There are no comments in it whatsoever. I'm trying to convince them that it should be re-written from scratch (maybe in a more modern language, for a more widely supported OS, with some comments...) But they (a couple of older professors) seem terrified of letting the code out of their hands, and are having trouble absorbing the idea of version control, among other things.

I'm very frustrated. They're about to get a herd of academics (none of whom has a CS background) working on code with no forethought, and I think I'll go nuts if I have to sit there and implement horrible things for them. Can anyone give me some eloquent ammunition to convince them this needs to be treated like a software engineering project - not atmospheric science?

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I believe that the last mig fighters were made out of steel, and ran with some transistor tubes. And they worked better than whatever NATO had to put out.

Then again, maybe I'm just a fan this kind of engineering approach. At any rate, I'm going to have to organize a wake or something for mir1. I'm kind of a fan.

All software is flawed. All hardware is flawed. If you haven't learned that yet,

If the other sites are a little um, sloooow;

liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov

This is Nasa's spacecraft tracking site, with either 2d or 3d Java-based tracking applets.

DS1 is running an RS/6000 (IBM's version of the PowerPC architecture) at something like 25 MHz. That was the fastest rad-hardened chip they could get when they started the design.

The operating system is RTWorks, a Unix-like realtime kernel. The system software is written in C and Common Lisp (for the Autonomous Remote Agent stuff).

For details, check out http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds1/

The Polar Lander MUST be somewhere on that photo. Of course it takes sharp eyes to find it, but, eeeeh, it took also more than one full year to specialized spies to spot it ! http://photojournal-b.jpl.nasa.gov/outdir/PIA02393 .22379.jpeg

Hey, you're forgiven ... as somebody else noted, there are channel and canyon features on Mars, just not the ones that Schiaparelli thought he saw (and that Percival Lowell was convinced were created by intelligent life).

See Mars in Popular Culture for the origin of the term.

To have some final fun with the idea, sf writer Kim Stanley Robinson envisioned a colonized Mars with free waters restored, creating not only oceans and crater lakes, but a system of manmade canals to connect them! See Blue Mars.
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You know, I read your post and thought "He's right, but he should be able to provide a reference...". So I went to look for one, but it seems according to the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature and NASA You're just plain wrong. The name of Earth's moon is "Moon". Luna just happens to be the Italian word for it.

And user error shouldn't cause a problem like that!

You have to constantly keep in mind the amazing - to anyone using a PC today - constraints we had to work with in programming the LGC. There were 36,864 15-bit words of what we called "Fixed" memory, which today would be called ROM, and 2048 words of "Erasable" memory or RAM.

Check out NASA's version of the story.

Gee whiz guy, it isn't about size, it's about kinetic energy. At least that's what Mister Winchester told me.

Here's NASA's real-time tracking site.

__________________

This week's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday on NPR (hosted by Ira Flatow -- does anyone else remember Ira as host of the great kid's science program Newton's Apple?) had a great retrospective on Mir in their first hour's segment. Among the guests were astronaut Norman Thagard (who did a stint aboard Mir), Russian space expert James Oberg and Brian Burrough, author of Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir.

I highly recommend listening to this program for anyone interested in Mir, it's history and contribution to space science.

RealPlayer required.
http://realserver.jpl.nasa.gov:8080/ramgen/encoder /live.rm

"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"

Russian schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) was proposing manned and unmanned spaceflight using rockets while Robert Goddard was still in diapers.

Tsiolkovsky, who was self-taught from the age of 10, was inspired by sci-fi pioneer Jules Verne. He became a writer himself but left fiction behind to work on the more theoretical problems of space exploration.

His contributions to the field are too numerous to list here, but here is his seminal "Plan of Space Exploration" of 1926:

1. Creation of rocket airplanes with wings.
2. Progressively increasing the speed and altitude of these airplanes.
3. Production of real rockets - without wings.
4. Ability to land on the surface of the sea.
5. Reaching excape velocity (about 8 Km/second), and the first flight into Earth orbit.
6. Lengthening rocket flight times in space.
7. Experimental use of plants to make an artificial atmosphere in spaceships.
8. Using pressurized space suits for activity outside of spaceships.
9. Making orbiting greenhouses for plants.
10. Constructing large orbital habitats around the Earth.
11. Using solar radiation to grow food, to heat space quarters, and for transport throughout the Solar System.
12. Colonisation of the asteroid belt.
13. Colonisation of the entire Solar System and beyond.
14. Acheivement of individual and social perfection.
15. Overcrowding of the Solar System and the colonization of the Milky Way (the Galaxy).
16. The Sun begins to die and the people remaining in the Solar System's population go to other suns.
    

Currently, we're about half way down the list.

More info on the recognised father of astronautics can be found at the Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics, which also has a more complete biography. Even NASA recognises that modern rocketry began with his endeavours in this article oriented for kids.

Goddard may have been the first to launch a rocket in modern times (as earlier posters pointed out, the Chinese were using rockets centuries earlier), but he followed and everyone else followed in Tsiolkovsky's footsteps.

Russian schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) was proposing manned and unmanned spaceflight using rockets while Robert Goddard was still in diapers.

Tsiolkovsky, who was self-taught from the age of 10, was inspired by sci-fi pioneer Jules Verne. He became a writer himself but left fiction behind to work on the more theoretical problems of space exploration.

His contributions to the field are too numerous to list here, but here is his seminal "Plan of Space Exploration" of 1926:

1. Creation of rocket airplanes with wings.
2. Progressively increasing the speed and altitude of these airplanes.
3. Production of real rockets - without wings.
4. Ability to land on the surface of the sea.
5. Reaching excape velocity (about 8 Km/second), and the first flight into Earth orbit.
6. Lengthening rocket flight times in space.
7. Experimental use of plants to make an artificial atmosphere in spaceships.
8. Using pressurized space suits for activity outside of spaceships.
9. Making orbiting greenhouses for plants.
10. Constructing large orbital habitats around the Earth.
11. Using solar radiation to grow food, to heat space quarters, and for transport throughout the Solar System.
12. Colonisation of the asteroid belt.
13. Colonisation of the entire Solar System and beyond.
14. Acheivement of individual and social perfection.
15. Overcrowding of the Solar System and the colonization of the Milky Way (the Galaxy).
16. The Sun begins to die and the people remaining in the Solar System's population go to other suns.
    

Currently, we're about half way down the list.

More info on the recognised father of astronautics can be found at the Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics, which also has a more complete biography. Even NASA recognises that modern rocketry began with his endeavours in this article oriented for kids.

Goddard may have been the first to launch a rocket in modern times (as earlier posters pointed out, the Chinese were using rockets centuries earlier), but he followed and everyone else followed in Tsiolkovsky's footsteps.

Russian schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) was proposing manned and unmanned spaceflight using rockets while Robert Goddard was still in diapers.

Tsiolkovsky, who was self-taught from the age of 10, was inspired by sci-fi pioneer Jules Verne. He became a writer himself but left fiction behind to work on the more theoretical problems of space exploration.

His contributions to the field are too numerous to list here, but here is his seminal "Plan of Space Exploration" of 1926:

1. Creation of rocket airplanes with wings.
2. Progressively increasing the speed and altitude of these airplanes.
3. Production of real rockets - without wings.
4. Ability to land on the surface of the sea.
5. Reaching excape velocity (about 8 Km/second), and the first flight into Earth orbit.
6. Lengthening rocket flight times in space.
7. Experimental use of plants to make an artificial atmosphere in spaceships.
8. Using pressurized space suits for activity outside of spaceships.
9. Making orbiting greenhouses for plants.
10. Constructing large orbital habitats around the Earth.
11. Using solar radiation to grow food, to heat space quarters, and for transport throughout the Solar System.
12. Colonisation of the asteroid belt.
13. Colonisation of the entire Solar System and beyond.
14. Acheivement of individual and social perfection.
15. Overcrowding of the Solar System and the colonization of the Milky Way (the Galaxy).
16. The Sun begins to die and the people remaining in the Solar System's population go to other suns.
    

Currently, we're about half way down the list.

More info on the recognised father of astronautics can be found at the Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics, which also has a more complete biography. Even NASA recognises that modern rocketry began with his endeavours in this article oriented for kids.

Goddard may have been the first to launch a rocket in modern times (as earlier posters pointed out, the Chinese were using rockets centuries earlier), but he followed and everyone else followed in Tsiolkovsky's footsteps.

Assuming NASA survives all the politicians padding their districts with pork while at the same time cutting valid science programs ...

which doesn't seem likely ...

the Terrestrial Planet Finder tentatively scheduled for 2011 will be the mission that actually detects, images, and analyzes light reflected by Earth-sized worlds within 50 ly of Earth.

The difference between observations made by Keck, those made by SIM, and those made by TPF will be comparable to the difference between the telescope used by Galileo, the telescope used by the average small college observatory, and the Hubble.

Just wait until they work their way up to building this. Then we'll really start seeing the good stuff.

From Nasa's page on Goddard:
Yet, several score of the 1750 copies of the 1920 Smithsonian report [by Goddard about the feasibity of sending a rocket to the moon] reached Europe. The German Rocket Society was formed in 1927, and the German Army began its rocket program in 1931.

The founder of the German Rocket Society was Hermann Oberth, who had done theoretical work on rocketry for his doctoral thesis (although it was rejected) in the early twenties. Oberth would have been one of the few people in Europe who would have been interested in Goddard's work and taken the implications of it seriously. In the early thirties Oberth took on von Braun as an assistant. It seems fairly certain that Oberth would have followed Goddard's career with interest, and that von Braun would therefore have been aware of Goddard's experiments.

That's why today's astronomy picture of the day features Robdrt Goddard and one of his funky looking rockets.

All your event are belong to us.

1. chemical propellents - 10^137kg
2. fission - 10^17kg
3. fusion (inc orion craft) 10^11kg
4. ion/antimatter rocket 10^5kg