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Not if the water were frozen... I'll get back to that, in a couple of sentences.

The article actually says, "Water flowing on the surface or underground in channels and later buried by sediments could explain the appearance of the features." So it's not necessarily that the channel was underground when the water flowed, it's just underground now, having been buried. The story on the NASA site appears to say exactly that, with liquid migration through cracks in the rock as the source of the water. There are several things I can't figure out in the CNN article, and I suspect that it's another case of poor science reporting.

It may also be that the channels were the source of the water -- as in ice deposits, or permafrost with a high water content. This fits with the comment that there was a rapid cooling, after which the floods occurred. With geological heating (or should I say "areological?"), the ice would have melted and flowed out of the deposits, which then collapsed; as the water flowed away, it would cut further channels; then all the channels filled with sediment as the flow abated. Matter of fact, the original ice deposits may well have been part of the drainage system (a much slower drainage), frozen in place.

I know that's reading a lot in, but I'm trying to make it consistent with other knowledge of Mars.

That is, unless one wants to theorize that the water pressure was constant and was helping to support the cavity...

If your point is that Bernouli's Law is fighting us, I'll grant that; but lava is also a fluid, and the same would apply to it. Unless you're saying that the overburden would be floating on the lava?

Where I have my problems with 200-km lava channel widths is the width: here on earth, lava tubes form when the surface of a flow solidifies, leaving the still-molten center to flow away. But lava tubes are nowhere near this size -- as I said elsewhere, tens of feet is about it.

The only other subterranean lava flows I'm familiar with are the ones which feed volcanic vents, and even these aren't nearly that large. What mechanism exists on Mars, to melt rock in swaths hundreds of kilometers wide -- and underground, at that? I just can't see it...

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Everybody loves APOD.

That's an interesting concept, but you're still fighting the low solar constant at Mars' orbital distance. Also, you're requiring two spacecraft where one will really do, with the second carrying a large solar array, plus the added microwave power transfer hardware on both ends -- or three of them, if you've got a rover on the mission. And the lander would still have to use batteries for heating during the very cold martian nights (the thermal cycles alone caused much of the wear on Pathfinder, and rechargeable batteries wear out). I think it's probably doable, but not on a faster-cheaper (I still won't say "better") program.

On the other hand, RTG's are inherently hazardous

That's the issue that really bugs me -- RTG's aren't necessarily "inherently hazardous!" The Soviets have had a bad time with them, but the US hasn't. We did have one release its radioactives on a failed launch back in '64, but it was designed that way -- the RTG burned up in the upper atmosphere, as intended (IIRC, the idea was to keep the radioactives from reaching the surface... disperse them up high, and they tend to stay there). Subsequently we've changed philosophies on this, and all RTG's are designed to survive reentry and still retain all radioactives.

We know this works, matter of fact; there've been two "tests" in real life since the new "total containment" policy went into effect. Apollo 13's Lunar Module (the one the crew lived in and used for the critical trajectory corrections, following the explosion in the Apollo Service Module) carried an RTG which powered one of the scientific packages they were going to leave on the moon; the LM reentered the atmosphere at something like 7 miles a second, but the RTG remained intact -- we've monitored the air and water around the Tonga Trench in the South Pacific, where it landed, and there has been no release of radioactives. Even more illustrative of the safety of good RTG's: in 1968, a meteorological satellite booster went bad and was destroyed by Range Safety. The two RTG's on the satellite spent five months on the ocean floor in the Santa Barbara Channel (it was a launch from Vandenberg, into polar orbit); they were recovered intact, and were recycled into other spacecraft!

but maybe the public will eventually get over their fear of one blowing up in the atmosphere once space launces become more routine and the next-generation reusable launch vehicles are on line...

They can't "blow up," so that fear is totally groundless. Nevertheless, I doubt the public will get over it: we used to use RTG's routinely, but don't anymore, because of the very vocal opposition of a few groups whose "science" is definitely questionable. Anti-"nuclear" sentiment is becoming so widespread that truly idiotic things happen -- like the medical use of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance imaging (where "nuclear" refers to the atomic nucleus; the technique uses spin coupling between the nucleus and the orbiting electron in hydrogen, and has absolutely nothing to do with radioactivity) being renamed "Magnetic Resonance Imaging," simply because people were frightened of a word. I don't know what these fears feed on -- maybe guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- but I do know that people are being deliberated manipulated. But I won't get into that rant... ;>

I hope people do get over this: it's hard to do science in the outer solar system without nuclear power of some sort. Hell, it's hard enough to do it with nuclear power! Past Mars, solar is totally impractical; carrying fuel for things like fuel cells is impossible, given the limits of spacecraft weight and the very long mission times (many years just to get there... and I hope the spacecraft keep their habit of working long past the nominal end-of-mission).

The Russians still use them, of course -- but they appear to care nothing about public opinion... say, maybe this was all a commie plot! =8-0

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Then in 1991, following on my legislative successes in space commercialization I went to work with E'Prime Aerospace as Vice President of Public Affairs. I took on that job because they had a potential customer (Norris Satellite Communications -- run by a Dutch Amish expatriate from my ancestral county of Lancaster Pennsylvania) who wanted to launch a geostationary Ka Band satellite called "Norstar", but he couldn't get the license thorugh the FCC. There had never been a Ka Band satellite licensed and there was a lot of conflict over letting this Amish character have the first crack at commercializing the Milstar technology (NASA likes people to think ACTS was the pioneer in Ka band, but even thought ACTS was launched first, the Harris ECL satellite switching guys Norris used did their pioneering work with Milstar, not ACTS). Anyway, to make a long story short, we managed to get the FCC licensing dislodged and the first Ka band satellite license was awarded to Norris, the Amish dude. The satellite specifications called for multiple geostationary Ka band satellites with onboard switching of time division multiplexed spot beams that would allow you to adaptively switch the power (both informational and energetic) to various geographic hotspots as needed. This was getting close to what I had predicted as a geostationary computer network, because the ECL switches were systems that Seymour Cray himself would have respected, and the spot beams made it feasible to load-level much more effectively to stationary ground dishes only inches in diameter. If Cray's gallium arsenide switches, developed for the Cray-4, had made it into production, I think the systems could have been a lot high capacity at lower power while retaining their radiation hard characteristics.

Unfortunately, Norris's satellite system was to go the way of another Norris's (William) Plato system -- to the "before its time" scrap heap of history. The Calling Communications Corporation guys who were cursing me at the 1993 Small Satellite Conference in Logan, UT for grabbing their coveted Ka band first eventually, along with Iridium, got it reallocated. Calling Communications Corporation eventually went away from voice communications to computer networking and changed their name to Teledesic. Everyone seemed to forget about geostationary Ka band computer networking.

Even so, I still think there is enormous opportunity for a geostationary orbital computation satellite network based on phased-array spot beam switching and intersatellite optical links.

Well, I wasn't entirely sure myself, so I did some research. This page has a good description of the mission.

A quick summary of the points I found:

1) The Voyagers were in fact designed only for Jupiter and Saturn due to funding problems.

2) Despite this, the mission planners realized that the planetary alignments allowed for the four-planet route, and left the option open accordingly.

3) Because of (1), the engineered lifetime of the Voyagers was only five years.

4) Voyager 1 could not complete the tour of Uranus and Neptune because of its Titan flyby. However, this flyby was planned for at the beginning of the mission; Voyager 1 was never meant to visit the two outer gas giants, not even as a contingency plan.

5) Voyager 2 was actually launched first!

Hope that clears some things up. It did for me!

If you enjoy pulp science fiction, try Ben Bova's _MARS_. It's an easy breezy read.

If you want a 3-book-long lovemaking session to the planet Mars, I highly suggest Kim Stanley Robinson's _RED MARS_, _GREEN MARS_, and _BLUE MARS_. They get progressively more boring and uninspired as the series progresses through more and more abstract characters, but they are still extremely decent reads that make a slight effort to represent Mars in all it's beauty. The franchise milker _THE MARTIANS_ is also out as of a few months ago. Haven't checked it out, but I expect it to be just as fatally flawed as the others. Oh well.

Oh yeah, and there is now an official Mars Flag or something. It's three vertical stripes going [RED] [GREEN] [BLUE}. Quite cool.

Mars is vastly more interesting than you might expect. Read up on it if you like.

http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/billa/t np/mars.html is an EXCELLENT start if you want to learn more about the planet at a glance.

http://www.marssociety.org links you to the Mars Society, a delusional group of Mars Freaks who want to settle the planet or something. But they're still cool.

http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/ has a very supercool solar system simulator that can show you what the planets look like from almost anywhere at almost any time. It's quite accurate and cool. Not open source yet, but i'm sure with some coaxing and good project management, they might be willing to release it. It's written in C and shit, so it'd port pretty easy i'd imagine. The data sets might not be public domain though. Oh well. Go see it anyway.

Enjoy.

NASA's great successes: Cassini, Galileo, Voyager, Pathfinder, Viking, and most of all Apollo.

These are the things that occasionally make me proud to be human.

The other is pretty interesting. We know there is a large magnetic field associated with the Galaxy (we can detect it from the polarization of light passing through the field), so it has been suggested that we use that field to turn the spacecraft! We'd first accelerate the starship away from Sol on a trajectory that takes it past the target star, at a considerable distance and with the proper angle relative to the galactic magnetic field; well past the target star, we'd charge the starship electrically, to a huge potential, and use the Lorentz force (the force that bends the path of a charged particle travelling through a magnetic field) to travel in a semi-circle, until it is aimed more-or-less back toward Sol, but on the other side of the target star.

Now it's headed back into the lasers, and it can decelerate into the destination system from the far side.

Admittedly, it makes the journey quite a bit longer (talk about "going 'round Robin Hood's barn!"), but at least you can use the existing laser power to slow down. I think the bigger issues have to do with the configuration of the galactic magnetic field (I don't think it's extremely well-mapped), and with getting the whole "train" of lightsail, spacecraft and Fresnel lens (see the post below) all turned around and properly lined up. But it's probably closer to reality than things like the Bussard Interstellar Ramjet. Coming back... that would still be a problem with this scheme (although the below discussion covers one method of doing that, without the magnetic turn trick). Larry Niven wrote a short story (was it The Oldest Profession?) in which aliens arrived in a lightsail vehicle, and expected us to build them a laser system so they could continue their trip -- and if we didn't, they'd just make the sun go nova and use that light instead.

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The folks thinking up the laser-propelled systems have gotten into some pretty sophisticated concepts: for example, they've proposed using a gigantic Fresnel lens, free-flying between the starship and the laser battery, to focus the laser beam onto the lightsail once the starship has gotten far enough that the sail is smaller than the beam diameter. The lens flies toward the target star, too, but much slower than the starship...

They even propose multi-stage systems for deceleration at the far end -- you use concentric rings of sail, and let the outermost of them keep going... but you deform it so it reflects the light back at you, so you can decelerate... and even come back!. (Although it might be easier to do with yet another ring of lightsail.)

Needless to say, it makes control very interesting, when the object you're aiming at is lightyears away, and you wait years to see the effects of your corrections; some say it's impossible, but then so was heavier-than-air flight, a century ago. ;>

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While it's true that we've known about the carbon cycle and nucleogenesis of heavier elements for quite a while, we still haven't developed a very clear understanding of the details of the whole process by which those elements are formed and then returned to the interstellar medium. For an example, just look at this planetary nebula: the structure is extremely difficult to understand, but it's clearly the result of the changing behavior of the parent star's stellar winds and their interaction with the local ISM. We used to just say that elderly stars "shed a lot of gas and dust" to form planetary nebulae -- a simple, first-order concept that obviously can't survive pictures like this!

Similarly, we've only recently begun to run more sophisticated numerical models of the interior of stars, in which we actually account in detail for things like convection -- and we're finding that the interior of a star is probably as complex (and unexpected) as these planetary nebulae. The models also help us understand why material which should remain deep inside the star is expelled as efficiently as it is (the parent star doesn't explode, but sheds the material in some less-violent fashion... so how does the inside get outside?) -- we just don't have the simple "spherical symmetry" that the first-order concepts posited.

This sample of planetary nebulae from the Large Magellanic Cloud should help the astrophysicists make the next step up in theoretical complexity... and I think that concept is actually found in the BBC article, as simplistic as it is. (Because it's so basic, the article just can't spend much time on that level -- I suspect that's what grates on the more-educated here.)

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"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

How exactly would a large satellite "clean up the junk?" Would it eat the dead satellites? You can't just clean them up. They have mass, they take up space. The only way you can get rid of them is to push them into the atmosphere. However, do you want to be the president of a company that starts pushing 17-ton satellites into the atmosphere hoping that they burn up on reentry or land in an ocean?

Why does everyone insist that Nature exists only on Earth? Does it not bother anyone that the 10,000 pieces of man-made debris surrounding the earth looks like this? That the University of Chicago and NASA launched a satellite in January 1999 to monitor the debris? That an international committee(the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, of which NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Chinese Space Agency are a part) has been formed in order to manage the garbage? That each piece of debris, moving at tens of thousands of km/h, poses a threat to future satellites? I'm sure people would care if we started trashing the moon, but that's even farther away. Just because it's vacuum doesn't mean it's not worth taking care of.

enmity.

A heavy-lift booster in this class could throw a pretty good-sized payload to Mars for a "Mars Direct" type of manned mission.

One such technology being worked on right now is plasma engines. A proposed 2002 mission that would test this type of engine is mentioned at http://www.qu est.arc.nasa.gov/space/team/journals/petro/01-29-9 9.html. Also mentioned is an ion engine. A bit more about the plasma (or RF) engine can be found at http://www.ornl.gov/orcmt/success/rf- eng.html.

I've heard engineers at NASA refer to the plasma engine as the engine that'll take us to Mars.

There is even more detail on the X-33 RLV at this NASA site.

Jesus may love you, but I think you're garbage wrapped in skin.

This is a very kewl idea. Some references to other site about this and other satelite issues are here

...saying that Galileo had not been [decontaminated], is not equivalent to saying that other probes had.

True -- NASA only decontaminates probes which go places they might plausibly expect life to exist, and not many people really thought that Europa would turn out to be one of those places (Arthur C. Clarke aside...). Now we know better. So far, not many probes have been decontaminated.

Does NASA know why the high gain antenna did not deploy? If so, why?

The reason for the failure isn't truly known -- Galileo was 37 million miles away when it occurred, a bit far to eyeball it -- but the best guess is that three of the 18 ribs of the antenna (it's an umbrella-like configuration) failed to deploy. They think that the standoff pins in the middle of the ribs became cocked, and locked in their sockets. I've heard speculation that it had to do with loss of dry lubricant due to vibration, since the spacecraft was transported around much more than was intended (Galileo was originally going to be launched shortly after the ill-fated Challenger mission, but was warehoused for years before Shuttle flew again; it also had a different transstage fitted, since part of the fallout from Challenger was that the original liquid-fuel rocket which would have injected Galileo into the transfer trajectory was redefined as too dangerous to fly on Shuttle, and they substituted a solid rocket system which delivered a smaller impulse; Galileo had to make multiple gravitational-whip maneuvers and take years longer to get to Jupiter).

See the High Gain Antenna FAQ for some info on this; there are good links for more detail within the FAQ.

I earlier read an article saying that even though the data stream would be slow, information could still be derived while Galileo was plummeting to it's death.

True; the real-time data rate now is three orders of magnitude lower than the high-gain antenna would have delivered (160 bps vs. 134.4 Kbps max rates), but at least some data might come back. The problem is, JPL did a hack where they now use the onboard processors to compress much of the science data before sending it through the low-gain antenna, and this takes time (the computers are old -- early 80's tech -- and can't do the compression real-time; it was never planned for the high-gain antenna transmission). Actual (uncompressed) data rates are probably more like 80 bps at this point, which means the data would be very sparse. I don't know what format the science data comes in, but I'll bet it's in at least 16-bit words, maybe 32-bit...

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Recently I set out to finally install RedHat. However, I could not get the Cogent eMaster 110 tx nic to work. The installer correctly identified it as tulip compliant, but something was wrong with autosensing between 10 and 100. I read the relevant ethernet howtos, but there was no clue. Then I discovered the tulip driver page with a grid of options to try, but none worked. Finally, I found posts on tux.org and beowulf.org from people who were having the same problem, but there weren't any follow-up posts from the Linux community. I tried asking for some advice on #linuxhelp and #redhat, but people mostly ignored me. This is the crux of the problem; how does the Linux community expect their OS to be widely adopted by consumers when hardware drivers are still so buggy, no one will help you diagnose or solve the problem even when you say pretty-please, and you're forced to buy a new nic out of desperation? I'm a reasonably skilled computer nerd, so I didn't panic when the install repeatedly didn't work. However, I can easily imagine a less skilled person encountering this aggravating problem and just giving up. It's time for the Linux community to stop ignoring and antagonizing potential "newbies" or else your OS will fade into sysadmin oblivion once again.

I wish more people on /. went around the site and tried to put up "last posts" instead of "firsts." How fun would that be?!

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

It really depends what kind of accuracy you are looking for. You can write an engineering level code that solves basic equations for aerodynamic forces, and get first-order accuracy in predicting steady, inviscid, incompressible flow over a two dimensional airfoil at a small angle of attack on a standard pc; you can even get results within seconds if you make enough broad assumptions. However, this will give you very simplified results that are only valid inside the range of the assumptions used. If, for instance, you wanted to solve an off-design screech problem in a modern fighter engine combustor or afterburner, at temperatures outside the range of constant air properties, you would need to solve the full Navier-Stokes equations, probably including unsteady terms, turbulence terms, vitiates, gas chemistry anomalies, airfoil expansion due to temperature gradients (which in turn require complex grid generation/regeneration) etc. Try to do this on even the fastest PC and you will be waiting for years.

Quick example: to complete a full analysis of an 11.5 stage high pressure compressor on a 48 processor HP workstation (180 mhz) takes 50 days! of wall clock time. This isn't even a full engine, just one component. While obviously an extreme, since the code makes literally no assumptions (within the limits of human understanding of the physics involved in the problem), it comes to mind immediately as an example of the level of complexity involved in calculating any problem, whether it be molecules of air or sub-atomic particles, to the degree of accuracy required by modern scientists/engineers. Disclaimer: I am not completely familiar with the specifics of this code because it is/was a NASA Glenn project. I saw the tail end of a paper presented for it back when it was still Nasa Lewis... I have a copy of the paper, somewhere, but it escapes me. If I find it I will post the TR# and you can look it up at a tech library somewhere.

I have never used the x-planes program you mentioned, but from looking at it I believe they can probably do what they claim. They aren't really claiming a lot, however; the real applications for high performance computing are in high order engineering and design for detailed performance analysis. Engineering level analysis is pretty simple and their level of detail could probably even be accomplished with table look-ups.

Rev Neh

Did you know the main antenna on Galileo is screwed? Did you know they were once trying to fix it?

"...just about every idea suggested below--no matter how unusual--was included on a long list of proposed solutions. That doesn't mean that everything is tried, because the Galileo engineers working on the antenna anomaly are guided by two basic principles:

• The Health and Safety of the Spacecraft Must Be Safeguarded
• Nothing Shall Be Done That May Seriously Threaten Probe Relay, Jupiter Orbit Insertion (JOI), or the Orbital Tour"

Did you know the main antenna on Galileo is screwed? Did you know they were once trying to fix it?

"...just about every idea suggested below--no matter how unusual--was included on a long list of proposed solutions. That doesn't mean that everything is tried, because the Galileo engineers working on the antenna anomaly are guided by two basic principles:

• The Health and Safety of the Spacecraft Must Be Safeguarded
• Nothing Shall Be Done That May Seriously Threaten Probe Relay, Jupiter Orbit Insertion (JOI), or the Orbital Tour"

"...just about every idea suggested below--no matter how unusual--was included on a long list of proposed solutions. That doesn't mean that everything is tried, because the Galileo engineers working on the antenna anomaly are guided by two basic principles:

• The Health and Safety of the Spacecraft Must Be Safeguarded
• Nothing Shall Be Done That May Seriously Threaten Probe Relay, Jupiter Orbit Insertion (JOI), or the Orbital Tour

Well, surely now is the time to go wild! Let's try some aerobraking, spin that sucka, bash it about, kick it a few times, see what happens!

"...just about every idea suggested below--no matter how unusual--was included on a long list of proposed solutions. That doesn't mean that everything is tried, because the Galileo engineers working on the antenna anomaly are guided by two basic principles:

• The Health and Safety of the Spacecraft Must Be Safeguarded
• Nothing Shall Be Done That May Seriously Threaten Probe Relay, Jupiter Orbit Insertion (JOI), or the Orbital Tour

Well, surely now is the time to go wild! Let's try some aerobraking, spin that sucka, bash it about, kick it a few times, see what happens!

At the upper atmosphere, it's more than a thousand degrees celcius, and it's all whipping about rather harshly

Anyway, all this talk of contaminating the planet Jupiter is academic (we've already sent a probe into the atmosphere) it's the moons that we're worried about.

At the upper atmosphere, it's more than a thousand degrees celcius, and it's all whipping about rather harshly

Anyway, all this talk of contaminating the planet Jupiter is academic (we've already sent a probe into the atmosphere) it's the moons that we're worried about.

..why not a few good orbits around Jupiter to build up momentum?

• It doesn't work like that.
• Momentum is conserved, it has to come from somewhere, and there's no available source other than the on-board rocket motors. "Winding up" won't boost anything any more than Earth will fling itself into interstellar space as a result of 4.3 billion circles around Sol.
• The kind of celestial billiard shots which got Galileo to Jupiter in the first place (first Venus, then Earth, then Earth again; the so-called VEEGA) require massive bodies to apply the kicks (gravity is the mediating force). This also requires being in roughly the same orbital plane... I think. The moons of Jupiter are too small to apply big enough kicks, and Galileo is in a nearly-polar orbit which cannot take good advantage of them anyway.

This sort of project (even if unsuccessful) would teach NASA how to use unfueled satellites efficiently.

..why not a few good orbits around Jupiter to build up momentum?

• It doesn't work like that.
• Momentum is conserved, it has to come from somewhere, and there's no available source other than the on-board rocket motors. "Winding up" won't boost anything any more than Earth will fling itself into interstellar space as a result of 4.3 billion circles around Sol.
• The kind of celestial billiard shots which got Galileo to Jupiter in the first place (first Venus, then Earth, then Earth again; the so-called VEEGA) require massive bodies to apply the kicks (gravity is the mediating force). This also requires being in roughly the same orbital plane... I think. The moons of Jupiter are too small to apply big enough kicks, and Galileo is in a nearly-polar orbit which cannot take good advantage of them anyway.

This sort of project (even if unsuccessful) would teach NASA how to use unfueled satellites efficiently.

..why not a few good orbits around Jupiter to build up momentum?

• It doesn't work like that.
• Momentum is conserved, it has to come from somewhere, and there's no available source other than the on-board rocket motors. "Winding up" won't boost anything any more than Earth will fling itself into interstellar space as a result of 4.3 billion circles around Sol.
• The kind of celestial billiard shots which got Galileo to Jupiter in the first place (first Venus, then Earth, then Earth again; the so-called VEEGA) require massive bodies to apply the kicks (gravity is the mediating force). This also requires being in roughly the same orbital plane... I think. The moons of Jupiter are too small to apply big enough kicks, and Galileo is in a nearly-polar orbit which cannot take good advantage of them anyway.

This sort of project (even if unsuccessful) would teach NASA how to use unfueled satellites efficiently.

If your post was meant to be funny, it didn't contain enough hyperbole to be blatently tongue-in-cheek. So I'll just treat it as ignorance.

You know what Jupiter's made of, right? 92% hydrogen, 7% helium, mostly methane for the rest, those sorts of things. At the upper atmosphere, it's more than a thousand degrees celcius, and it's all whipping about rather harshly. And oh yeah, no water. If there is life there, it doesn't resemble anything we have on earth, and whatever we bring from earth wouldn't be able to survive if it got there. And then there's the little problem about how the spacecraft will burn up once it enters the planet's atmosphere, which is after all, all of it (except perhaps for the metalic hydrogen core, which if it exists wouldn't make a lick of difference here). This is in stark contrast to Europa, which doesn't have an appreciable atmosphere and so if we lob something at it, it'll remain intact until it hits the surface.

Soooooo.....What happens if the crash site is currently occupied with Life Forms that we DON'T suspect, hmm? So in an ironic ending to the life of Galileo, it crashes into a planet with life forms and introduces extra-Jupiterian life to divide and conquer.

Yes, it'd be perfeclty ironic, since it'd crap all over lots of our biological and astronomical theories, but that doesn't mean it's possible. You're also forgetting the little bit about how there is no "landing site" per se -- just a spot floating in the outer atmosphere.

Or, we could send it off into deep space, and discover it 300 years from now as a tremendous space probe named G'leo.

Except the whole problem in the first place is that this thing doesn't have any extra fuel lying around for such a purpose. If we could just go ahead and send it off into deep space, it'd still be useful and we'd use it for that. Heck, the Voyager 2 is still sending back data from outside the solar system, and we're praying it'll last another twenty years and make it to measure the helioshock out there. But escaping the gravity of Jupiter is not a simple thing to do without any propulsion. Have you stopped to wonder why Jupiter has so many moons and trojan asteroids in the first place?

If your post was meant to be funny, it didn't contain enough hyperbole to be blatently tongue-in-cheek. So I'll just treat it as ignorance.

You know what Jupiter's made of, right? 92% hydrogen, 7% helium, mostly methane for the rest, those sorts of things. At the upper atmosphere, it's more than a thousand degrees celcius, and it's all whipping about rather harshly. And oh yeah, no water. If there is life there, it doesn't resemble anything we have on earth, and whatever we bring from earth wouldn't be able to survive if it got there. And then there's the little problem about how the spacecraft will burn up once it enters the planet's atmosphere, which is after all, all of it (except perhaps for the metalic hydrogen core, which if it exists wouldn't make a lick of difference here). This is in stark contrast to Europa, which doesn't have an appreciable atmosphere and so if we lob something at it, it'll remain intact until it hits the surface.

Soooooo.....What happens if the crash site is currently occupied with Life Forms that we DON'T suspect, hmm? So in an ironic ending to the life of Galileo, it crashes into a planet with life forms and introduces extra-Jupiterian life to divide and conquer.

Yes, it'd be perfeclty ironic, since it'd crap all over lots of our biological and astronomical theories, but that doesn't mean it's possible. You're also forgetting the little bit about how there is no "landing site" per se -- just a spot floating in the outer atmosphere.

Or, we could send it off into deep space, and discover it 300 years from now as a tremendous space probe named G'leo.

Except the whole problem in the first place is that this thing doesn't have any extra fuel lying around for such a purpose. If we could just go ahead and send it off into deep space, it'd still be useful and we'd use it for that. Heck, the Voyager 2 is still sending back data from outside the solar system, and we're praying it'll last another twenty years and make it to measure the helioshock out there. But escaping the gravity of Jupiter is not a simple thing to do without any propulsion. Have you stopped to wonder why Jupiter has so many moons and trojan asteroids in the first place?

Question is then can Galileo properly do those missions?

I don't really want a bacteria which survives that environment back on Earth, but it does not matter much. Earth bacteria get blown off the top of the atmosphere all the time. Gravity pulls some to the Moon or Sun, while the solar wind tends to push them away from the Sun. Some will hit rocks and get carried in random directions, including back to Earth.

It doesn't matter how small the probabilities. Some bacteria has probably already survived a round trip back to us. And if Galileo is ever recovered, it will be in a society with so much space travel taking place that we'll have a lot of life wandering in and out of space.

Yeah...that probably IS the reason NASA doesn't want to crash Galileo on Europa...they fear retribution! I did a research paper on Europa not too long ago and I have some links about Europa if anyone is interested.

here
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and here!
sorry if this drags on...some links may not be that great.

Yeah...that probably IS the reason NASA doesn't want to crash Galileo on Europa...they fear retribution! I did a research paper on Europa not too long ago and I have some links about Europa if anyone is interested.

here
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and here!
sorry if this drags on...some links may not be that great.

Yeah...that probably IS the reason NASA doesn't want to crash Galileo on Europa...they fear retribution! I did a research paper on Europa not too long ago and I have some links about Europa if anyone is interested.

here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
and here!
sorry if this drags on...some links may not be that great.

Yeah...that probably IS the reason NASA doesn't want to crash Galileo on Europa...they fear retribution! I did a research paper on Europa not too long ago and I have some links about Europa if anyone is interested.

here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
and here!
sorry if this drags on...some links may not be that great.

Yeah...that probably IS the reason NASA doesn't want to crash Galileo on Europa...they fear retribution! I did a research paper on Europa not too long ago and I have some links about Europa if anyone is interested.

here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
and here!
sorry if this drags on...some links may not be that great.

Yeah...that probably IS the reason NASA doesn't want to crash Galileo on Europa...they fear retribution! I did a research paper on Europa not too long ago and I have some links about Europa if anyone is interested.

here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
and here!
sorry if this drags on...some links may not be that great.

Yeah...that probably IS the reason NASA doesn't want to crash Galileo on Europa...they fear retribution! I did a research paper on Europa not too long ago and I have some links about Europa if anyone is interested.

here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
and here!
sorry if this drags on...some links may not be that great.

Yeah...that probably IS the reason NASA doesn't want to crash Galileo on Europa...they fear retribution! I did a research paper on Europa not too long ago and I have some links about Europa if anyone is interested.

here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
and here!
sorry if this drags on...some links may not be that great.

Yeah...that probably IS the reason NASA doesn't want to crash Galileo on Europa...they fear retribution! I did a research paper on Europa not too long ago and I have some links about Europa if anyone is interested.

here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
and here!
sorry if this drags on...some links may not be that great.

Yeah...that probably IS the reason NASA doesn't want to crash Galileo on Europa...they fear retribution! I did a research paper on Europa not too long ago and I have some links about Europa if anyone is interested.

here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
and here!
sorry if this drags on...some links may not be that great.

Yeah...that probably IS the reason NASA doesn't want to crash Galileo on Europa...they fear retribution! I did a research paper on Europa not too long ago and I have some links about Europa if anyone is interested.

here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here
and here!
sorry if this drags on...some links may not be that great.

http://spacepr ojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/pioneer/PNStat. html
--
BeDevId 15453
Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

NSF = The National Science Foundation.

Noel

RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix

I like pictures as well. Since my children tend to hang around this computer almost as much as I do, babes won't do it, so I use heavenly bodies from APOD.

There are some shots here that absolutely take your breath away. The universe is a beautiful and wonderful place...

Z

First, photographs taken by astronauts are not classified. Second, NASA is trying to make it easier for the public to get copies of their photographs. If you want to find a photograph of something, this would be a good place to start

Um.. Rockwell builds the Shuttle engines; Morton Thiokol builds the solid rocket boosters.

OK, I`ll bite. The Big Bang theory is the widely-accepted theory amongst scientists of how the universe came into being. There`s basic information at this NASA site.

The theory of evolution by natural selection is the widely-accepted theory amonst scientists of how life developed and is still developing. Here`s a good introduction taken from the extensive talk.origins FAQ.

The two theories are complementary, not conflicting.

The ages of space explo{r,it}ation:
1. Cold War Toys -- will the world survive?
2. Mercury/Gemini/Apollo -- will the crew survive?
3. Shuttle -- will the mission succeed?
4. Iridium -- will it make money?
5. Space Station -- why?

Low Earth Orbit is getting easier. This is the result of learning all of the hard lessons the hard way, and not taking the risks for granted.

Mars exploration is still very difficult. Partly this is because Mars is a more difficult environment than LEO. But the constraints of BFC are leading teams to make some of the same mistakes that were made before. The MCO interim failure report seems to indicate a certain... well, lack of rigor in the development and operations.

I, too, would like to see a radical change in the NASA Mars Exploration Program / MEP. The current program seems to combine aspects of Iridium technology (commercial practices, comparatively low unit reliability) and NASA program design (one-off design, albeit with component re-use) -- but combines them in a bad way. The addition of political pressure does not help, as opined by Donna Shirley, program manager of the successful Mars Pathfinder project.

So, what's wrong with MEP? Simple: There Is Only One MEP. Apollo succeeded because the guys working on it were convinced that the Soviets could get to the Moon. They had real competition. Likewise with Iridium -- until the finances fell apart, everyone thought there would be several competitors snapping at their heels.

The competition for Mars ended when the contract was awarded to Lockheed Martin Astronautics. There was competition at the contract level, but none at the program level.

Look, I don't care if you call it 'Red' and 'Blue' but there have to be at least two competitors. Cycles of competitive innovation, followed by cooperative synthesis, will produce the best results.

OK so JPL has one team already. Hmmm... who else could do this kind of thing? CMU, JHU/APL, MIT, USU, maybe even some Big 10 schools. Start with some GFE hardware -- flight computer, telecom equipment, pyros, motors etc. Hand out $50M to each team and stand back.

Neither team could afford a flagship probe a la Mars Observer ($1B). Perhaps one team would build a single lander with lots of high-tech instruments. The other team might bang out 5 small landers at $10M a pop. In any case there would not be any single team with a 'royal warrant' to probe Mars.