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This page shows that Jupiter's moon Amalthea is tidally locked.

This page discusses the case of Mercury, which as I said isn't yet tidally locked but does have a day tidally related to its year. "Although Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun, its rotational period is tidally coupled to its orbital period. Mercury rotates one and a half times during each orbit."

This page states that all four of Jupiter's Galilean moons are tidally locked.

That took about 5 minutes. Altavista found a total of 499 pages containing the phrase "tidally locked."

Considering the amount of misinformation about the Soviet moonn landings in reposnse to your post, here's an overview of the Soview moon program from NASA's own web site:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarus sr.html

Notable points include the Soviets crashing Luna-2 into the moon as early as 1959, their unmanned retrival of lunar rocks from missions such as Luna 16 in 1970, and their series of unmanned lunar rovers ("Lunokhods") starting with the Luna 17 mission in 1970.

Yes, I'm trying the Bruce Perens trick of writing something completely mistaken, getting modded up, and then earning more points for responding to the person who corrects me. ;-)

I found this paper (awarded the Driver Award for the Best Paper Presented to the 26th Meeting of the North American Vexillological Association!) which has more information about the moon flag than anyone could possibly want. It's actually very interesting.

Bottom line: you're right but the web site is still missing some information. The horizontal rod was not extended properly, wrinkling the flag and causing the appearance of waving. It looked better that way and later crews intentionally did the same thing.

I still haven't achieved Bruce's specialty of getting a false or heavily unfair story posted and then raking in karma by replying to 25 different flames correcting him. ;-)

After all, NASA spent thousands to get an ink pen to write in space. The Russians used a pencil...

[Spider Robinson story about space pen replacing switch snipped; read it at the Official Space Pen website. For the record, there's no mention of this incident in the exemplary resource Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.]

In the rest of his article, Spider uses the space pen, and other by-products of space-race research, to justify the support of basic research by government in the face of opposition from pork-barrelling politicians like Senator Socksdryer.

But the Space Pen was developed entirely by private enterprise. Fisher does claim that they spent $2 million (in 1960s dollars? doesn't say) to develop the pen, but we can assume those development costs have been repaid many times over.

Also, many Russian cosmonauts now use the Space Pen; and American astronauts have used a variety of writing implements, generally chosen by the astronauts themselves. The ALSJ does relate one mention of the Space Pen: Aldrin says he had a felt-tip pen that put out more ink than the Fisher pen.

The space pen is neither an example of government procurement gone mad, nor an example of return on investment, except for the Fisher company.

The original Spider Robinson article. Despite the attribution to Aldrin, I believe we have to take this one with a grain of salt. The Apollo 11 mission has been very closely studied for a generation.
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There has been extensive research on this:

Including, but not limited too:

1)This Article in Scientific American
2)This Reasearch Paper
3)This NASA report


Just FYI ;-)

... referring to this source.

2001-03-17 07:00:00

You can keep up-to-date with MIR's location here.

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Yep...When the Lunar Prospector finished its mission they crashed it into the Moon's south pole in an attempt to kick up water vapor that could be observed from earth...They didn't find any, but the chance of finding any was given at about 10%, assuming that there was some there to find. But it was a good try...

From this last picture taken before landing, you can see that some sentient being intentionally commandeered the spacecraft's controls.

This is probably to blind us from realizing that it's re-launching to invade packed with micro-organisms intent on feasting on human flesh

Mars Global Surveyor

Stardust comet sample-return mission

Mars Pathfinder (the rover)

They're also talking about a sample-return mission from Mars (in about ten years), missions to Europa, and setting up a sort of GPS/communications network around Mars to coordinate movements of and data return by various Mars rovers. They're not exactly lying down on the job.

Disclaimer: I don't work for JPL...But I want to.

Mars Global Surveyor

Stardust comet sample-return mission

Mars Pathfinder (the rover)

They're also talking about a sample-return mission from Mars (in about ten years), missions to Europa, and setting up a sort of GPS/communications network around Mars to coordinate movements of and data return by various Mars rovers. They're not exactly lying down on the job.

Disclaimer: I don't work for JPL...But I want to.

Mars Global Surveyor

Stardust comet sample-return mission

Mars Pathfinder (the rover)

They're also talking about a sample-return mission from Mars (in about ten years), missions to Europa, and setting up a sort of GPS/communications network around Mars to coordinate movements of and data return by various Mars rovers. They're not exactly lying down on the job.

Disclaimer: I don't work for JPL...But I want to.

I don't know if this was posted before, but I assume that the pictures they take when this lifts off will look much the same as the ones that were taken on the landing as can be seen in this link: Landing Photos

You can pack alot of communications gear into a 10cm cube. Provide propulsion with ion engines. With ~16 of these cubes, you could cover most of earth. Run your own spy network. Put harddisks on them and run GNUtella over the amature satellite band. With 64+ you can be a force in the satellite communications industry (beware the FCC). Cost: 64*50K = $3,200,000. Add 10 million more for R & D and ground stations. Everyone else in satellite communications paid billions and must charge high prices to get any ROI.

Those persons afraid of 'space junk' give Nerds a bad name. People on the ground are more likely to be hit by a meteor than by space junk. The dangerous (to spacecraft) junk is the stuff too small to detect on radar. Larger objects (such as the cube) can be detected and either avoided, deflected or destroyed as needed. See http://www.spaceviews.com/2000/08/20a.html for NASA's answer to space junk. I'm sure you can come up with something better, and mount it in a 10cm cube.

After building your cube empire in space, send up a 2 KW laser and carve your initials on the ISS!

During the successful December assembly of the International Space Station Zarya and Unity modules by the crew of STS-88, three EVAs were required to connect cables, install and deploy antennas, and various other chores. During these EVAs at least five objects were released, either intentionally or accidentally. However, like virtually all debris generated during human space flights, the orbital lifetimes are estimated to be very short, a few months or less. In fact, one of the debris had already decayed by 14 December.

EVAs have long been a source of short-lived orbital debris, including the discarded airlock of Voskhod 2, Ed White's thermal glove during Gemini 4, a screwdriver from STS-51 I, and literally hundreds of debris which originated during EVAs from the Salyut and Mir space stations. Mir alone has generated over 300 debris objects during its 13-year flight, the majority appearing after EVAs. However, only one of all these debris was still in orbit at the end of the year.

So, yes, there is, or at least was, a glove in orbit. (I remember reading about it the first time I read about the space junk problem -- there was a poster in my classroom about the time around 1980).

Also, these small pieces of debris in LEO don't cause a long-term problem -- there's enough atmosphere that far out to make the orbits decay. Even something as big as the ISS needs to burn fuel to maintain its orbit. Space junk in geosynchronous orbit lasts a lot longer.

ivi asks:
So, who's laws apply in Space?

(Whose.)

Legally, under Article VIII of the 1967 UN Space Treaty, the laws of the owner of the vehicle. Outer space itself is subject to international law and may not be claimed. On the Space Shuttle, US law applies. On Soyuz, Russian law. On the ISS, sovereignty still rests with the owner of a particular vehicle: Zarya and Zvezda are Russian, Node 1 and Destiny are American. In theory, Russia could remove its equipment and give us the hand-in-elbow gesture, or we could remove ours and give them the finger. In practice, most of this stuff is decided on the ground beforehand (as with the recent ESA announcement against permitting the Russians to bring Dennis Tito to ISS). In practice, there's a complicated usage formula based on assumptions about how much various groups (NASA, NASDA, ESA, CSA, RSA) contributed to the station.

If one astronaut were to murder another there might be some trouble deciding who had criminal jurisdiction. This has been studied for some time but won't be completely sorted out until we have more experience.
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evilone wrote:
I am aware that CDs and DVDs have very little mass compared with the rest of the station, but what effect would these discs have on the station when they start and stop spinning? Could the usage of discs onboard the station require thrusters to compensate for them?

Good novice question. Anything spinning acts as a kind of gyroscope, but you should realize that for the most part that gyroscope works to conserve angular momentum. Pick up a spinning box fan and turn it, you'll see what I mean. There are actually many small fans aboard the ISS, not to mention computer disc drives, so that gives you an idea of how serious an issue this is.

For comparison, check out the Control Moment Gyroscopes that are installed on the ISS and used for stabilization and attitude control. They're huge and will dwarf any effects of something like a DVD player. They'll be activated after the Destiny lab goes online. In the meantime, the Zvezda and Zarya modules each have their own smaller gyroscopes.

Incidentally, the gyroscopes are more important for attitude control than thrusters. Rather than constantly firing in different directions, where you're fighting your own efforts, the gyroscope stabilizes the station and makes it harder for it to get out of control where thrusters would be required.
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This would be very inconvenient - the ISS circles the Earth in, IIRC, 90 minutes.

Thus, they are over any given continent at most maybe fifteen minutes, in the case of Asia.

If you want to get an idea how fast they're going, you can see the ISS move in realtime here.

The orbit altitude for a very recent flight to the ISS was merely 177 nautical miles (328 km). Spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit travel at an altitude of 35,785 km.

The orbit altitude for a very recent flight to the ISS was merely 177 nautical miles (328 km). Spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit travel at an altitude of 35,785 km.

Watching NASA TV (available on the Internet and...on TV), you get to hear the communications between Mission Control and the Space Shuttle. It's rather interesting. The night of the launch I was listening in - they were talking about setting up the network, the router, something about mapping drives. (I wonder what kind of bandwidth they have up there, or if I can do a traceroute an Astronaut's laptop - probably not) There's a commentator who explains things to you and throws lots of interesting trivia your way. For example, just 1.5 minutes after launch, due to fuel consumption, the shuttle/fuel tank/boosters together weigh half of what they did on the pad. The boosters consume 10 tons of fuel per second. Wow. That's just crazy. Also they have highlights of the days activities, replays of the launch, etc. I recommend it.

Here is an answer: Bill Joy's article in Wired last year on GNR. It seems that most readers here are familiar with the 'grey goo' and self-replicating robots. Well, here is the first time I saw them referenced, and it is alarming.

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us

Beowulf was developed by Goddard. Go to their Search site and take a look.

There are a lot of useful links at the bottom of the Electromagnetic Propulsion homepage about this sort of thing, but the main thing that interests me is the idea of massdrivers.

Although they're not so practical for using from the surface of the Earth to get into orbit, they'd be great for moving payloads from the surface of the Moon into Earth orbit without the use of expensive launch vehicles. Although the railgun uses an awful lot of power a variant called the coilgun uses far less power, although it costs more, and may eventually be practical for this purpose.

rjh writes:

I'm very hesitant to declare RSA to be "one of the best types around". RSA is built on several conjectures, none of which have been proven, namely:
1. The only way to make a general break of RSA is to factor large composite numbers
2. Factorization of large numbers is an NP-complete problem,
3. P != NP

#1 is incorrect, there are a few ways to break RSA, only one of which is to factor large composite numbers (another is this Leo person's method). Assuming effective key management, no method has been found which is significantly easier than the factorization problem (although some are no harder). For more detail, see http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/faq/3-1-3.html.

#2 is also incorrect. Factorization is probably not NP-Complete, but RSA never depends on it being NP-Complete, merely on it being really hard to solve. Factorization is provably NP, but has not been shown to be NP-Complete. This is potentially a good thing, if #3 ever falls through for the NP-Complete set, the fact that it isn't NP-Complete means that Factorization will probably still be hard.

#3, of course, has not been proven. It also has not been disproven, despite hundreds of mathematicians trying for decades. A good analysis of the issue is at http://ic-www.arc.nasa.gov/ic/projects/bayes-group /NP/ijcai91/paper/IJCAI91-paper.html.

Just because #3 hasn't been proven doesn't mean it's not a useful assumption. People routinely bet their lives on much flimsier ones.


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One of the requirements according to NASA is:
Height between 64 and 76 inches.

Thought I'd point out a few corrections to the thread...

1. The US has landed probes on venus. But the russians still have the best record.
2. Considering Jupiter is a Gas Giant, as you go deeper into it's atmosphere the pressure and temperature get higher and higher. Any probe you send burns up. The "solid" part of the planet is under such extreme pressure/temperature conditions that it is not yet possible to build a probe that will survive to this point.
3. The offical Near Page is http://near.jhuapl.edu/
4. The point of the landing is to get as near as possible to the Eros while still taking usefull data. They have mentioned before it's not an attempt to land, just a practice in which they are hoping to gain useful data. How many of us remember pioneer-venus's and magellan's end of life atmosphere probing? Led the way to our areo-braking efforts on Mars. Or the Lunar Prospector end of life experiment with the moon. Interesting gamble to find water...
5. Someone mentioned valentines day, I remember they had targeted Feb. 14 as the touch down date. Why it changed, I don't know. Also, for the last V day they snapped a wonderful valentines day photo of Eros, http://near.jhuapl.edu/iod/20000213b/index.html

Thought I'd point out a few corrections to the thread...

1. The US has landed probes on venus. But the russians still have the best record.
2. Considering Jupiter is a Gas Giant, as you go deeper into it's atmosphere the pressure and temperature get higher and higher. Any probe you send burns up. The "solid" part of the planet is under such extreme pressure/temperature conditions that it is not yet possible to build a probe that will survive to this point.
3. The offical Near Page is http://near.jhuapl.edu/
4. The point of the landing is to get as near as possible to the Eros while still taking usefull data. They have mentioned before it's not an attempt to land, just a practice in which they are hoping to gain useful data. How many of us remember pioneer-venus's and magellan's end of life atmosphere probing? Led the way to our areo-braking efforts on Mars. Or the Lunar Prospector end of life experiment with the moon. Interesting gamble to find water...
5. Someone mentioned valentines day, I remember they had targeted Feb. 14 as the touch down date. Why it changed, I don't know. Also, for the last V day they snapped a wonderful valentines day photo of Eros, http://near.jhuapl.edu/iod/20000213b/index.html

I've said it before, and i'll say it again. New technology goes strait to porn...
Even the pictures on the site suggest it... notice the hands... :)

Anyway, you are correct in pointing out that Stranger4U got it wrong, it should really be parabolic arcs, not loops. You can view the details here, although it should be pretty obvious for anyone who have a grasp of high-school physics.

The surface of the external tank is covered by a 2.5 cm thick coating of spray-on polyisocyanurate foam.

See NASA's external tank reference page.

here and here

TLA's are nice, but some people are confused. I knew some, and had to look the rest of them up. =)

LEO = Low Earth Orbit
APU = Auxiliary Power Unit
SRB = Solid Rocket Booster
OMS = Orbital Maneuvering System
RCS = Reaction Control System
KSC = Kennedy Space Center
SSME = Space Shuttle Main Engine

Hope this helps. (source)

Let's not forget 01-27-1967 when we lost three on the pad...

Besides, I would argue what destroyed the US space program has deeper roots than Dan Goldin, Deeper than Challenger, Deeper than the Decision not to build the F1 flyback option, Deeper than the decision to scrap the X-20, All the way back to the decision to seperate the civilian program from the military programs and have NASA place spam in a can in orbit instead of the progression from X-1 to X-15 to X-20 to a truely reusable space vehicle. Instead we wasted our money on Spam in a Can and made a partially reusable white elephant. We can thank Kennedy (oh and he's dead to).

TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken

We all know space travel is dangerous, and accidents are inevitable. How long do you think it will be before another American is lost in space?

"I drank WHAT?" -- Socrates

The URL you posted had a space in it. Here's a live link: Rogers Commission Report

I'm of two minds on this.

Technically, you're correct. The vehicle did not explode. The SRB plume burned through the strut connecting it to the External Tank, the SRB swung on the remaining strut, and the vehicle was then being pushed in different directions at once at supersonic speeds. The tank was ripped open, and the fuel inside ejected in yet a third direction, causing thrust against the orbiter that it was never designed to withstand. The vehicle broke up at that point.

I don't think Peter Jennings has been lying to us, either. Explosion is a simple way to put what happened, and those with a desire for more knowledge can easily find it. There is no conspiracy to conceal this fact.
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NASA's official transcript and a collection of non-official information.

AFAIK Ceres has never been seen clearly enough to determine whether it is a spheroidal shape or not. In fact it transitted a star a while ago and the results indicated that it was surprisingly irregular. But I wouldn't exactly cry if Ceres counted as a planet anyway.

I'm not aware of any spheroidal asteroid that is smaller than Ceres either. If you have proof to the contrary, I would like to see it.

As for all your other points about pluto- so what. Every single body in the solar system appears to be completely different to every other.

large enough to keep its own moon
But then again, so are asteroids, as the Galileo probe found out with Ida and Dactyl.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/images/ida.html

Hey, if you're going to play that game, you'll have to go back to at least 1865, if not earlier. Don't you diss on my boy Jules Verne !

ObAI: I have trouble with most AI movies. They usually start with the premise that this is the first AI ever built, that it was built in secret by a small team, and that either it's in a perfectly human body, or we're attaching a whole lot of guns to it and we're sure it won't go berserk. That does bad things to my suspension of disbelief.

NASA has an older Virtual ISS tour. I wasn't able to get the new one.. slashdotted already I guess. The old one is kind of weak.. I'm not suprised they made a new one. But its worth a look if you can't get to the new one.

-gerbik

In a smaller way, your answer is also found in the 6th of Henry Spencer's 10 Commandments for C programmers... no doubt this will spawn groans from partisans of other languages.

The Ten Commandments for C Programmers
Henry Spencer

1. Thou shalt run lint frequently and study its pronouncements with care, for verily its perception and judgement oft exceed thine.
2. Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee at its end.
3. Thou shalt cast all function arguments to the expected type if they are not of that type already, even when thou art convinced that this is unnecessary, lest they take cruel vengeance upon thee when thou least expect it.
4. If thy header files fail to declare the return types of thy library functions, thou shalt declare them thyself with the most meticulous care, lest grievous harm befall thy program.
5. Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''.
6. If a function be advertised to return an error code in the event of difficulties, thou shalt check for that code, yea, even though the checks triple the size of thy code and produce aches in thy typing fingers, for if thou thinkest ``it cannot happen to me'', the gods shall surely punish thee for thy arrogance.
7. Thou shalt study thy libraries and strive not to re- invent them without cause, that thy code may be short and readable and thy days pleasant and productive.
8. Thou shalt make thy program's purpose and structure clear to thy fellow man by using the One True Brace Style, even if thou likest it not, for thy creativity is better used in solving problems than in creating beautiful new impediments to understanding.
9. Thy external identifiers shall be unique in the first six characters, though this harsh discipline be irksome and the years of its necessity stretch before thee seemingly without end, lest thou tear thy hair out and go mad on that fateful day when thou desirest to make thy program run on an old system.
10. Thou shalt foreswear, renounce, and abjure the vile heresy which claimeth that ``All the world's a VAX'', and have no commerce with the benighted heathens who cling to this barbarous belief, that the days of thy program may be long even though the days of thy current machine be short.

"Tons" of radioactive material? Cassini carries 3 RTGs (total of 33 kg of plutonium dioxide) and several smaller radioisotope heater units (33.6 CI of fuel and 1.4 oz total weight PER unit). Ref: RTGs and heaters. So there's approximately 72 pounds (for the metric-challenged) of PU-238 onboard. A "metric ton" is 2200 pounds. Methinks you are off by a factor of at least 30. (60 if you really meant "tons")

The RTGs are *DESIGNED* to prevent releasing the fuel into the environment. You can question the adequacy of the design and invent scenarios where it fails but you CANNOT state that the engineers at JPL, NASA, and various contractors are not taking the risk seriously.

Next, we DO NOT know our solar system. The discovery of active vulcanism on Io, potenital for water ice and liquid water on Europa, and questions about the atmosphere on Titan are relatively recent and the result of sending space probes to Jupiter and Saturn. Data on *ALL* the planets remain sketchy. This same information helps us develop an understanding of planetrary geology and meterology that applies to understanding Earth's environment as well (a good theory should accomodate observations on more than just one planet).

Heck, we don't understand the planet we live on that well. Ever hear of Earth Observation System (EOS)? Where do you think data on global climate changes, upper atmosphere properties (ozone depletion at the poles), or some of the observations of the Pacific and Atlantic thermal osciliations come from? NASA operates ALL those programs.

The *only* mission categories that are economically viable today are communications satellites, earth observation, maybe remote imaging (commercial "spy sats"), maybe weather. Government (DoD, NASA, NOAA in the US) has to fund everything else and did much of the work to make the rest possible. As much as we'd like it, private industry has not raised the capital necessary to do it on its own (for many reasons, political, economic, and technical).

Finally, we don't know WHEN humanity will NEED a real space capability. We CAN afford the research now. It's foolish on several levels to not do it.

The traditional argument over the NASA budget has been about the manned spaceflight program. Which has been a political beast since its inception.

And while I am not employed as a "rocket scientist" today, I studied to be one (aero astro engineering major) and can tell you EXACTLY where I was for most of the Mercury and Gemini launches, the Apollo flights, Shuttle 1st flight, and yes, Challenger.

"Tons" of radioactive material? Cassini carries 3 RTGs (total of 33 kg of plutonium dioxide) and several smaller radioisotope heater units (33.6 CI of fuel and 1.4 oz total weight PER unit). Ref: RTGs and heaters. So there's approximately 72 pounds (for the metric-challenged) of PU-238 onboard. A "metric ton" is 2200 pounds. Methinks you are off by a factor of at least 30. (60 if you really meant "tons")

The RTGs are *DESIGNED* to prevent releasing the fuel into the environment. You can question the adequacy of the design and invent scenarios where it fails but you CANNOT state that the engineers at JPL, NASA, and various contractors are not taking the risk seriously.

Next, we DO NOT know our solar system. The discovery of active vulcanism on Io, potenital for water ice and liquid water on Europa, and questions about the atmosphere on Titan are relatively recent and the result of sending space probes to Jupiter and Saturn. Data on *ALL* the planets remain sketchy. This same information helps us develop an understanding of planetrary geology and meterology that applies to understanding Earth's environment as well (a good theory should accomodate observations on more than just one planet).

Heck, we don't understand the planet we live on that well. Ever hear of Earth Observation System (EOS)? Where do you think data on global climate changes, upper atmosphere properties (ozone depletion at the poles), or some of the observations of the Pacific and Atlantic thermal osciliations come from? NASA operates ALL those programs.

The *only* mission categories that are economically viable today are communications satellites, earth observation, maybe remote imaging (commercial "spy sats"), maybe weather. Government (DoD, NASA, NOAA in the US) has to fund everything else and did much of the work to make the rest possible. As much as we'd like it, private industry has not raised the capital necessary to do it on its own (for many reasons, political, economic, and technical).

Finally, we don't know WHEN humanity will NEED a real space capability. We CAN afford the research now. It's foolish on several levels to not do it.

The traditional argument over the NASA budget has been about the manned spaceflight program. Which has been a political beast since its inception.

And while I am not employed as a "rocket scientist" today, I studied to be one (aero astro engineering major) and can tell you EXACTLY where I was for most of the Mercury and Gemini launches, the Apollo flights, Shuttle 1st flight, and yes, Challenger.

"Tons" of radioactive material? Cassini carries 3 RTGs (total of 33 kg of plutonium dioxide) and several smaller radioisotope heater units (33.6 CI of fuel and 1.4 oz total weight PER unit). Ref: RTGs and heaters. So there's approximately 72 pounds (for the metric-challenged) of PU-238 onboard. A "metric ton" is 2200 pounds. Methinks you are off by a factor of at least 30. (60 if you really meant "tons")

The RTGs are *DESIGNED* to prevent releasing the fuel into the environment. You can question the adequacy of the design and invent scenarios where it fails but you CANNOT state that the engineers at JPL, NASA, and various contractors are not taking the risk seriously.

Next, we DO NOT know our solar system. The discovery of active vulcanism on Io, potenital for water ice and liquid water on Europa, and questions about the atmosphere on Titan are relatively recent and the result of sending space probes to Jupiter and Saturn. Data on *ALL* the planets remain sketchy. This same information helps us develop an understanding of planetrary geology and meterology that applies to understanding Earth's environment as well (a good theory should accomodate observations on more than just one planet).

Heck, we don't understand the planet we live on that well. Ever hear of Earth Observation System (EOS)? Where do you think data on global climate changes, upper atmosphere properties (ozone depletion at the poles), or some of the observations of the Pacific and Atlantic thermal osciliations come from? NASA operates ALL those programs.

The *only* mission categories that are economically viable today are communications satellites, earth observation, maybe remote imaging (commercial "spy sats"), maybe weather. Government (DoD, NASA, NOAA in the US) has to fund everything else and did much of the work to make the rest possible. As much as we'd like it, private industry has not raised the capital necessary to do it on its own (for many reasons, political, economic, and technical).

Finally, we don't know WHEN humanity will NEED a real space capability. We CAN afford the research now. It's foolish on several levels to not do it.

The traditional argument over the NASA budget has been about the manned spaceflight program. Which has been a political beast since its inception.

And while I am not employed as a "rocket scientist" today, I studied to be one (aero astro engineering major) and can tell you EXACTLY where I was for most of the Mercury and Gemini launches, the Apollo flights, Shuttle 1st flight, and yes, Challenger.

besides, we need to get into space. do you want to stick around on this rock for eternity? maybe you do. i sure don't, if only to get away from short sighted people like you.

Ok, this had to be said, so I and a few thousand others will:

This is a common misperception about the way the government spending works. It isn't as if there is a large pool of money, and the government takes a percentage of it for starving children (insert deserving cause, etc..)

The way it works, is that there are certain amounts that the US public feels is necessary to spend on certain things. These amounts are relatively independent of each other. In that, we will spend $X on starving children weather or not there is a budget surplus or not.

It is also incredibly ignorant to think NASA technology is all about "fucking up other planets." There is an incredible amount of NASA technology incorporated into everyone's daily life. In short: When engineers have to design systems for more hostile environments (space) they can incorporate that technology to make systems for less hostile environments (earth) better.

for more information from NASA, click here

or type http://www.nasa.gov/qanda/why_nasa.html#whyexplore


---Lane

Did I just fall into a trap? :)

Yes, and not necessarily for recording. In fact, I think it would lend itself more to spectroscopic analysis, especially at low light levels. Freeze light as it enters, integrating signal until you've collected enough to build up a useful signal to noise ratio. And the extremely high indices of refraction in the materials used would give you all the spectral resolution you ever need. Add a third dimension using holography and you have enough basis to do solid state hyperspectral imaging.

A big problem with spectroscopy and spectroradiometry is that when you get high spectral resolutions, you need insanely high signal to noise ratios, on the order of 10^3 or even 10^4, to do chemical analysis. This kind of phenomenon allows you to increase your signal without adding noise (well, beyond the inherent Poisson noise, N = S^0.5).

From Uni Maryland's FAQ (they're working with NASA on this project):

• Q: If the impactor split the comet, would any debris head towards earth?

• The orbit of Tempel 1 is at least 0.5 AU (about 46 million miles) from Earth's orbit at their closest points. There is absolutely no possibility of Tempel 1, the Deep Impact comet, getting near the earth. When comets fragment, the pieces also stay in orbits very similar to the orbit of the parent comet. Danger to the earth is from asteroids and comets whose orbits cross the earth's orbit. Tempel 1 never crosses the earth's orbit. The two orbits are totally separate and never cross each other. Tempel 1 can never be pulled into the earth's gravitational field at any time.

  The Deep Impact impactor will just scratch the surface of the comet making a relatively small crater compared to the size of the comet. Even if the comet were to be extremely fragile and break apart, the pieces would still be in the same orbit and would never come close to the earth's orbit.

• Wired News article, Nov 1998
• NASA Discovery Program: Deep Impact page
• UMD.edu Deep Impact page
• Spacecraft Trajectory

The copper cylinder will weigh 500kg / 1,100 pounds, and will carry a camera and an infrared spectrometer. The targetted comet is Comet 9P/Tempel 1.
--