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What saddens me is that Mars Express was sent by the ESA and is orbiting Mars as we speak carrying RADAR for just this kind of thing (MARSIS). How many times have we seen their results in the news? I expect the next time there's a good idea for a Mars mission it'll struggle for funding because non-one remembers anything good coming from Mars Express. I'm sure there's plenty of really good science going on, but we never hear about it.

The MARSIS radar is too long a wavelength to be useful. They were warned before launch it wouldn't be good for sounding, but they didn't listen. SHARAD was launched later and at a decent frequency, the results have been amazing. This isn't the best image, but it should give you an idea.

We just can't get our PR act together over here.

Both project are international. SHARAD is being run out of Italy. This isn't some kind of us vs them bias. It's just that one instrument is producing better science.

The original NASA policy document is worth looking at, especially as it collects together a lot of interesting photos: http://go.nasa.gov/JDYo9v (links to PDF)

The *really* interesting part of that PDF is Appendix B, which lists all the science that NASA would like the GLXP teams to perform for them.

The original NASA policy document is worth looking at, especially as it collects together a lot of interesting photos: http://go.nasa.gov/JDYo9v (links to PDF)

It is linked from the relevant X Prize press release: http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/media/press-releases/nasa-offers-guidelines-protect-historic-sites-moon

And if you scatter the stuff enough, it won't even hit the earth.

FTFY

And if you don't sufficiently scatter the impactor - because we do not know what the physical properties and internal construction of Joe Random Asteroid is?

If we've got the luxury of 10 or 20 years to study an incoming object, learn about it's structure, perhaps throw some fridge-sized lumps of copper at it (q.v. the Deep Impact mission) to do some asteroid-seismology ... then that's great. And in that time interval we can implement a gravity tow effort without increasing the hazard the impactor represents.

Then, if the gravity tow isn't enough, we can put up another towing vehicle (more mass ; more force). Or if we've really no other option, we might have to deploy the nukes (probably in stand-off mode, I'd suspect ; much more controllable than a contact explosion!).

What did that Greek doctor guy say a couple of thousand years ago? "First, do no harm." Less stupid than some of today's crop of Slashdolts.

If we've only got a year or two before impact ... we're probably pretty well fucked. We'd probably not see it before it was about to hit. We don't spend anything like enough on early threat detection.

We know all km-sized asteroids including their trajectories for centuries...

Really? NASA disagrees with you and I tend to take their word for it over yours. We've discovered hundreds of kilometer sized near Earth asteroids in just the last decade.

I have a question just like that pending for a JPL-maintained library, except that it will be TEN years this November. :-)

The rest of the world could have working LENR reactors [...] A real libertarian, though [...]

Unsuprisingly, someone who believes in crackpot science also believes in crackpot politics.

Since my post endorsed neither LENR nor libertarianism, I must assume you have crackpot reading skills. Very sleazy Breitbarting of my post, by the way; did you take a shower afterwards?

But if you're looking for someone to endorse LENR, you could try NASA Langley.

Oh, snap!

The current situation is that we now have over two decades of hundreds of experiments worldwide indicating heat and transmutations with minimal radiation and low energy input. By any rational measure, this evidence indicates something real is occurring. So, is LENR "Real?" Evidently, from the now long standing and diverse experimental evidence. And, yes - with effects occurring from using diverse materials, methods of energy addition etc. This is far from a "Narrow Band" set of physical phenomena. -- Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center

Two flybys of Venus and even one of Earth on the way to Saturn
Galileo flew by Venus once and Earth twice on the way to Jupiter
There are other interesting gravity assists but I'm not aware of any that flew by Venus en route to Mars.

Here-
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/b612_report.html
The report is a word doc linked at the bottom.

Just a note, the thrusters are canted somewhat offline so that the exhaust mass doesn't hit the asteroid and negate some of the gravity attraction.

That "crispy" look is just soot/ash from the heat shield. You can see several places below the channel for the drogue chute's cord (the diagonal groove) where it has been rubbed off, showing a pristine white underneath. Besides, that picture only shows the bad side of the capsule. Take a look at the capsule from a few different angles. You see, contrary to popular belief, capsules like this do not traverse through the atmosphere straight on. They "fly" in a tilted orientation. That's why the soot marks are on an angle, and one side of the capsule looks charred, while the other looks barely singed.

Not exactly, according to NASA, we've found an estimated 911 out of 981 near earth asteroid in the >1km size range. 93% is pretty good, but a long way from "all".

Glitched memory usually isn't a problem. Other spacecraft have had similar memory problems. Usually it's temporary. If it's permanent, the computers are programmed to map around the glitched memory or (back in the tape drive days) not use that segment of tape..

The real danger is that such a glitch will first manifest itself by altering control or orientation instructions, breaking the spacecraft's contact with Earth. Most spacecraft are designed with a "safe mode" when this happens. If there's been no communication with Earth for x days, the main computer switches to a rudimentary instruction set or a second computer takes over, and tries to re-establish communications.

Check out the official rover press kit for a summary of the computer design (http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/pdfs/MSLLanding.pdf) Page 42 in particular:

"Curiosity has redundant main computers, or rover compute elements. Of this “A” and “B” pair, it uses one at a time, with the spare held in cold backup. Thus, at a
given time, the rover is operating from either its “A” side or its “B” side. Most rover devices can be controlled by either side; a few components, such as the navigation camera, have side-specific redundancy themselves. The computer inside the rover — whichever side is active — also serves as the main computer for the rest of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft during the flight from Earth and arrival at Mars. In case the active computer resets for any reason during the critical minutes of entry, descent and landing, a software feature called “second chance” has been designed to enable the other side to promptly take control, and in most cases, finish the landing with a bare-bones version of entry, descent and landing instructions.

Each rover compute element contains a radiation-hardened central processor with PowerPC 750 architecture: a BAE RAD 750. This processor operates at up to 200 megahertz speed, compared with 20 megahertz speed of the single RAD6000 central processor in each of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Each of Curiosity’s redundant computers has 2 gigabytes of flash memory (about eight times as much as Spirit or Opportunity), 256 megabytes of dynamic random access memory and 256 kilobytes of electrically erasable programmable read-only memory.

The Mars Science Laboratory flight software monitors the status and health of the spacecraft during all phases of the mission, checks for the presence of commands to execute, performs communication functions and controls spacecraft activities. The spacecraft was launched with software adequate to serve for the landing and for operations on the surface of Mars, as well as during the flight from Earth to Mars. The months after launch were used, as planned, to develop and test improved flight software versions. One upgraded version was sent to the spacecraft in May 2012 and installed onto its computers in May and June. This version includes improvements for entry, descent and landing. Another was sent to the spacecraft in June and will be installed on the rover’s computers a few days after landing, with improvements for driving the rover and using its robotic arm."

And according to a release they issued after landing, both computers receive the same updates and are running the same software (not a version or 2 behind like others have suggested): http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/news/whatsnew/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=1305

Asteroids usually rotate. So the rocket (or more likely an ion thruster) would need to cycle on and off if it was on the surface of the asteroid. But it would still be far simpler and cheaper to just detonate a small fission bomb. Then instead of tons, it would just need to be a few dozen kg.

To what effect?

They take nothing more seriously than the safe being of the ISS.

NASA has a long history of obsessing over small risks while ignoring large ones. For example, the ISS is one small piece of high velocity space trash away from destruction. That didn't stop NASA from pouring a hundred billion or so dollars into the ISS. And if it does go boom, then they don't have any sort of replacement strategy in mind.

Another classic example is the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) on the ground which was until recently a vital and unique role in preparing the Shuttle for launch. NASA had no plan for replacing the building should it be leveled by a large hurricane or an errant solid rocket motor.

And there's the huge risks they took with each Apollo mission as well as the crazy estimates of risk (the profoundly unrealistic 1 in 100,000 chance of loss of crew according to Feynman) for the Shuttle prior to the first Shuttle accident (Challenger).

A final classic example was the Constellation program. They chose ATK's solid rocket motor as first stage for the Ares I while ignoring the higher risk of that motor, but while simultaneously claiming that the motor was somehow safer. Then later on, when the resulting vehicle turned out to have performance issues, they cut back on the spacecraft design (including vital systems redundancy) that was to be the core of Constellation missions in space.

One consequence is higher risks of loss of mission and/or crew. My take is that they increased significantly the risk of the riskiest parts of the mission (the stuff that's being done in space) in order to protect a political choice, all rationalized on the basis of improving launch safety (where launch is already one of the safer parts of the mission once you start no matter what vehicle choice you make of the choices they had).

My view is that if they had any sort of rational risk management process in place, a lot of things would be done differently.

If it is a govt publication, use "Space Settlements" (NASA SP-413). If it is a non-govt publication, OK to title "Space Colonies" (Stewart Brand). Colonies is a bad word for many third world countries, and in 1970s NASA didn't want to stir the pot on this.

Artwork (big Mb files, great for posters) at http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/70sArtHiRes/70sArt/art.html (including vintage 1970s rogallo hang-glider. Oops, that C word appears)

NASA SP-413 at http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19770014162_1977014162.pdf

Space Colonies (A Coevolution Book) at http://www.amazon.com/Space-Colonies-A-Coevolution-Book/dp/0140048057/

If it is a govt publication, use "Space Settlements" (NASA SP-413). If it is a non-govt publication, OK to title "Space Colonies" (Stewart Brand). Colonies is a bad word for many third world countries, and in 1970s NASA didn't want to stir the pot on this.

Artwork (big Mb files, great for posters) at http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/70sArtHiRes/70sArt/art.html (including vintage 1970s rogallo hang-glider. Oops, that C word appears)

NASA SP-413 at http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19770014162_1977014162.pdf

Space Colonies (A Coevolution Book) at http://www.amazon.com/Space-Colonies-A-Coevolution-Book/dp/0140048057/

Ah, yes, "The High Frontier". Back when NASA thought they could build a shuttle that didn't cost $600 million per flight. The plan was to set up a big moon colony first, mine the moon, build a big catapult, and launch materials from the moon to a Kevlar "catcher" in Earth orbit. (What could possibly go wrong?)

The 1952 Colliers/Von Braun space program, with its plans for a big wheel-type space station from which Moon and Mars missions would be launched, was more realistic. What killed it was the Apollo "Man/Moon/Decade" goal. That was achieved, but with technologies useful for little else.

NASA still thinks that way. Their Mars Direct program would have sent a manned mission to Mars as a one-shot mission.

Space travel with chemical rockets is just too inefficient for big projects in space. Fusion still doesn't work. Fission would work but is rather messy. None of the big fancy hypersonic space plane things really work. (Remember Reagan's hypersonic space plane scheme? Ben Rich, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works and designer of the SR-71's powerplant, refused to bid on that. "We used titanium (on the SR-71). You know of something stronger?")

sorry to burst your cum-bubble, but jizz and vag spoo and sweat dries very quickly. The answer to your bukkake question is that it will be possible at a somewhat greater distance than on earth. the only thing left for you to fantasize about it how the place will *smell* after the mission is done. I find it ridiculous that they talk of sending a middle aged couple because of radiation concerns regarding sperm and egg, plenty of young couple opt to be made sterile by one means or another, tubal ligation or vasectomy or whatever. deep space porn rights could help offset cost of mission.....

Control of biological...undesireables... is actually a bit tricky in space. Lots of problems that just solve themselves when you have an entire planetary atmosphere to work with just don't when you have a few thousands or tens of thousands of liters of atmosphere along with whatever climate control you packed with it.

Both Mir and the ISS developed moderately nasty mold problems, and Mir even had a number of horrid water globules hiding behind rarely used access panels growing various vile slime.

It isn't obvious that sexual fluids would be worse than mere sweat(might actually be less troublesome, since there is a strong evolutionary imperative in favor of mechanisms that keep other microorganisms from hijacking our gene transfer mechanism for their own ends); but we know that mere sweat and exhaled water vapor are enough to really gross up the place.

Is there any possible a close encounter to Mars that might cause C/2013A1 to act as if it were orbiting mars, (at least for half a rev duration of that single pass)?

I get goodmanj's description of the orbital mechanics. I've not used the orbital mechanics simulator that he talks about, but I've used others and the effects are counter-intuitive, but as he describes. (And yes, I do get that the whole orbit changes, but that the largest changes are at the far end of the orbit.) One thing that you don't seem to appreciate is that this comet is going to be flying past Mars very rapidly, so the time during which the gravity of Mars has a significant effect on the comet is going to be relatively short. That considerably reduces the influence that Mars can have on the orbit.

I don't have enough maths to prove that your concern is im-possible, but I'm confident that it's highly improbable.

And if so, just how much can Mars deflect the orbit of C/2013A1 from what it might have been for centuries?

The comet is on a hyperbolic orbit, as far as we can tell (eccentricity of orbit > 1). That means that it's on a one-time-only visit to the inner solar system. Wherever it has been orbiting for aeons, it probably had an encounter with some other body and acquired sufficient energy from the interaction to be put onto it's hyperbolic orbit. That also implies ... [SFX : grinding gears] that the unseen other body ... [SFX : more grinding] has lost energy in the encounter ... and has been projected outwards (conservation of momentum) from the interaction area ... and will eventually come barrelling in on a similar but elliptical orbit.

goodmanj - can you check me on that? does it make sense?

That's actually quite worrying a deduction. Of course, given 100,000 year Oort Cloud orbits, the second comet could be 50,000 years away. Or 5 years?

I note that the uncertainty on the eccentricity that the JPL database gives is large enough the eccentricities of < 1 are plausible. Need more observation arc.

Uh, gravitational pull and the warping of time-space, although have the same base cause, are different effects. Sorry if this is a hard concept for you and some of the moderators around here. Go ask an astrophysicist, they'll tell you the same thing.
 
Fuck it, you're probably not smart enough to Google this shit for yourself. I'll just point the way.
 
Was that easy enough for you to understand, fucktard?

http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_sp_gr.html

" Yes, light is affected by gravity, but not in its speed. General Relativity (our best guess as to how the Universe works) gives two effects of gravity on light. It can bend light (which includes effects such as gravitational lensing), and it can change the energy of light. But it changes the energy by shifting the frequency of the light (gravitational redshift) not by changing light speed. Gravity bends light by warping space so that what the light beam sees as "straight" is not straight to an outside observer. The speed of light is still constant."

Dr. Eric Christian

Another case against inferring rank on Senators based on Seniority: You may get somebody very qualified to lead however you may just get an old fart that has nothing better to do with his retirement.

There was a congressman from Mississippi, Jamie Whittenwho was on the house appropriations committee. Because of Seniority rank, he was the second longest serving member of the house, ever, obtained that powerful position because of those rules alone. He pumped billions into Mississippi and he along with Byrd are always named the worst in terms of pork barrel politics. Funny, they were both Democrats too.

Anyway, to make this tech news worthy, from personal experience here as well, there was a place in Iuka Mississippi that had been a weapons depot, a site for a Tennessee Valley Authority Nuclear Power Plant which construction stopped after Three Mile Island and finally the site of the now defunct NASA ASRM project. Billions have been spent in that location and it also has the distinction for being a red line district area that after the Nuke Plant construction was halted, there was a very high incidents of "lightening strikes" causing total loss house fires in the area.

Anyway through his advocacy, Whitten pushed for the ASRM (Advanced Solid Rocket Motor) plant to be at Yellow Creek, Iuka MS.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4310/ch14.htm

largely through the advocacy of U.S. Representative Jamie Whitten, chairman of the powerful and influential House Appropriations Committee, the Yellow Creek site near Iuka, Mississippi, was chosen as the ASRM manufacturing site in July 1988. The Iuka location, on Tennessee Valley Authority property, was in close proximity to the MSFC at Huntsville, Alabama. At the same time, the SSC was selected as the site for static firing and certifying the new solid rocket motors.57

This guy pumped billions into Mississippi and while he created a spur of job growth, ultimately it all fell apart without government support. The ASRM plans were abandoned in 1993 and in a deal with Thiolkol, the RSRM contractor, they were going to do Nozzle/Manufacturing Refurbishment there. This was of course to "do something" with all of the Iuka facilities that were there, lots of buildings and infrastructure. It was a make work project, more pork. It eventually fell apart though when NASA's budget was needing cuts. But it was also taking jobs from one state and putting them in another. Talk about the phrase "all politics is local."

Sad really, what a waste of money.

We've got to play the cards we're dealt

We've long since played cards we've dealt ourselves. That's why there is a vast cloud of pollution drifting out of China. We've feathered our environmental pressure group nest at home and shipped our industry and its energy demands out of "the environment."

new-mexico-utility-agrees-to-purchase-solar-power-at-a-lower-price-than-coal

Mexico doesn't have a Feinstein to wreck their solar build outs. For purposes of this discussion Mexico isn't in "the environment" either. It's just another destination for refugee industries evacuating the US.

Will we then be able to confirm water on the surface of mars?
Also the building blocks for life? http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news115.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highways_in_the_United_States

As per usual the Slashdot socialist class gets everything wrong.

Excerpts from the "commie" past of US (i.e a more sane US):

Brooklyn Bridge

Route 66

Golden Gate Bridge

Hoover dam

Moon landing

Cum hoc non propter hoc. Because of Rossi, it must be bogus... I suspect you are the one with a logical fallacy. I would refer you to the article by Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center for the rational behind studying the physics and application of the nuclear weak force.

NASA article on LENR if anyone is interested.

I think the author of the story hasn't completely understood. The phenomenon exists, that's quite clear.

Robert Duncan, Vice Chancellor for Research University of Missouri: "There have been great advances in this discipline over the last five years by research labs and private institutions around the world, and this work will be explored at ICCF-18. The Naval Research Lab (NRL), and many other excellent laboratories have confirmed that the excess heat effects reported by Fleischmann and Pons are real, and roughly one thousand times larger than can be attributed to a chemical process." http://iccf18.research.missouri.edu/welcome.php

Dennis Bushnell, NASA: "The current situation is that we now have over two decades of hundreds of experiments worldwide indicating heat and transmutations with minimal radiation and low energy input. By any rational measure, this evidence indicates something real is occurring. So, is LENR "Real?" Evidently, from the now long standing and diverse experimental evidence. And, yes - with effects occurring from using diverse materials, methods of energy addition etc. This is far from a "Narrow Band" set of physical phenomena. " http://futureinnovation.larc.nasa.gov/view/articles/futurism/bushnell/low-energy-nuclear-reactions.html

President of the Italian National Agency For Energy (ENEA): "In other words, two government programs – carried out in close interaction and with check of results – have proved the existence of this phenomenon in terms that are not ascribable to a chemical process." http://old.enea.it/produzione_scientifica/volumi/V2008_16_ColdFusion.html (foreword of the book)

What the phenomenon is, that is still unknown.

ISS has an internal pressurized volume of 32,333 cubic feet, or equal that of a Boeing 747.

Pretty small for a refinery.

Asking for a source is not needed when Google can do the job quite quickly. More than half a dozen places in the US southwest have over 80% sunshine from sunrise to sunset, and a good portion of those are cloudless days.
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/08/01/080111-news-yuma-1-5/

As for Bouvet Island (top level domain .bi), it does technically have clouds - but the temperature year-round is just above freezing, so you can't see the clouds for high fog. All you see is grey. And due to this, there are no satellite pictures actually showing the interior of the island. http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/HPDOCS/misr/misr_html/bouvet_island.html
Only a couple of lucky photos taken by plane on rare cloud/fog-less moments.

As for Beijing, surely no source is needed for the problems they've been having lately with smog?

On Wednesday Feb. 20, 150 of NASA's social media followers and their guests will have the unique opportunity to talk to three of the six crew members aboard the International Space Station, and speak with agency scientists and engineers about the ground-breaking research taking place daily on the orbiting laboratory...

http://www.nasa.gov/connect/social/social_ISSscience_feb2013.html

Like I said, I'm not a climatologist, so I can't know how "settled" the AGW question is.

It's not hard to Google for authoritative sources.
"Authoritative sources" means not blogs, not activist websites set up to propagandize one side or the other of the issue, it means any respected scientific body that existed before Climate Change ever became an issue, and which has issued an "Oh by the way here is our official statement on the subject". You'll find that most science academies on the planet have issued such a statement.

These odd surveys and polls of "scientists

You mean the supposed "scientists" at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the US National Academy of Sciences, the Joint Science Academies', the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Medical Association, the American Meteorological Society, the American Physical Society, the Geological Society of America, and on and on and on.

Here's one statement released by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and co-signed by the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and 13 others, which states in part:
Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver. These conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence, and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science.

I bolded that last part because I wanted to point out that "inconsistent with an objective assessment" and "inconsistent with... the vast body of peer-reviewed science" are overly polite phrases for "crackpot".

These odd surveys and polls of "scientists" claiming to "prove" this and that seem so artificial and so obviously manipulated.

The NASA website says "Consensus: 97% of climate scientists agree" and they provide three sources for that figure:
W. R. L. Anderegg, âoeExpert Credibility in Climate Change,â Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 107 No. 27, 12107-12109 (21 June 2010); DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1003187107.
P. T. Doran & M. K. Zimmerman, "Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," Eos Transactions American Geophysical Union Vol. 90 Issue 3 (2009), 22; DOI: 10.1029/2009EO030002.
N. Oreskes, âoeBeyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,â Science Vol. 306 no. 5702, p. 1686 (3 December 2004); DOI: 10.1126/science.1103618.
It's perfectly understandable for the general public to have the impression that there is raging scientific controversy over the issue. The TV news networks will take any issue and apply the asinine technique of grabbing one person for each side and presenting them as if they are equally credible and represent equal positions. And there's massive propaganda being funded by the fossil fuel industry. And politicians have latched onto this as a partisan issue, with almost half of them making claims for each side of the issue. There is a public controversy, and there is a wide public perception of there being a raging scientific controversy. However if you look at the statement from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and from virtually every other National Academy of Science, and dismiss them, they are heading deep into conspiracy theory territory. And if you specifically look at the NASA page and their 97% figure backed up by three sources, and if you continue to put "scientist" in quotes and continue to put "prove" in quotes and di

NASA's Pleiades is 14th in top500 (at the level of Oct 2012)... I guess it still qualifies to "plenty of computation power".

Put the laser satellite in an appropriate orbit, and the occasional course correction could be folded into the routine maintenance of the flywheel(s). Those would need to be spun down every once in a while for inspection anyway.

With a station that exists to shoot at asteroids, wouldn't you expect to have to constantly change where the laser is pointing though? At some point, that portion of the craft is going to cross the rotation plane, unless you have TWO lasers (one on each side) and even then what happens if the target happens to be in the 'dead zone' for a significant portion of time?

BTW, A quick search got me this page, so at least NASA thinks that lower energy flywheels are a great idea: http://spaceresearch.nasa.gov/general_info/flywheel.html

You've got it all backwards. You invest in *finding* the threats first; then, if you find a threat, you pay for the defense. Otherwise you've spent a lot of money on a weapon that you have no idea how to aim, that might not have any targets worth shooting at, and which might be misused in the wrong hands.

And yes, we are spending money to search for near-earth asteroids. ( http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/neowise/pia14734.html [nasa.gov] ) And as I said upthread, we've found almost all of the ones which could be species-enders and ruled them out. Now we're hunting down at the level of city-killers. There are still threats out there, but not existential ones that justify a zillion-dollar gun more likely to be abused than used.

So cut it with the hyperbole.

> But we think we've only found about half of the "annihilate a city" 300-m sized ones

Not only that, but e.g. one 400-m sized one might hit the earth in a couple of months, but we don't know for sure whether it will hit or not, because last observation for it was in year 2008. It is very unlikely that it would hit us, but still... we don't know. http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2008uv99.html

We see posts about twice a year talking about the next "near miss" we're going to have. So what happened with this one? Didn't they catch it? Or did they catch it, realize it was going to hit, and decide not to tell anybody? It

We don't spot 'em all. We've got several active asteroid search programs going, which have discovered thousands of near-earth asteroids, but there are many thousands more. One of the triumphs of 21st-century science is that we now know where almost all of the "end of the world" and "destroy a large country" km-sized near-earth asteroids are. But we think we've only found about half of the "annihilate a city" 300-m sized ones, and most of the mere "hydrogen-bomb" 100-m sized ones remain unknown. This meteor was *much* smaller than that -- I'd guess only a couple meters across. There are probably *millions* of those out there, and they're too small to see at all unless they make a close pass of the EArth.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/neowise/pia14734.html
http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/

robot that can largely think for itself

thats not correct.. all the rover does by itself is keep itself in operational condition (maintaining temp., etc), all other stuff like operating instruments, driving, etc is performed by sending commands through radio. http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/rover/brains/

Link

"Universal laws" have been broken before and they will be broken again.

If you're so sure human already knows everything then explain why this room temperature superconductor invented by another Chinese is breaking multiple laws of thermal dynamics.

Preliminary Results of an Experimental Investigation of the Qu Superconducting Heat Pipe - NASA Grant NCC 8-200

Preliminary results of Qu Tube heat pipes we are testing show high thermal conductivity, with lower bounds as determined by the fin equation of the order of 10,000 to perhaps 30,000 times that of copper (e.g., 339 wlm-K).

Qu Tubes for High Temperature Heat Rejection

In our proposed effort, we intend to perform high temperature (100-200 Deg C) characterization of an ultra-advanced heat pipe to determine feasibility of using it in high temperature space radiators. In previous work, we have shown that the so-called "Qu Tube" achieves exceptionally high thermal transport rates at lower temperatures. BENEFIT: Our innovation will significantly reduce the size of radiators used on spacecraft and satellites, thereby reducing their mass and their cost. It can also be applied in many industrial heat exachanger designs.

Super conductors/super fluids have been breaking known "universal laws" left right and center. Think outside the box.

Superconductors have been known to break "laws" and "well proven therories".

Few years back, another Chinese invented the "Qu Tube", when you heat the tube at one end, the entire tube heats up instantly, in some cases it even generated more heat than you put into it, it broke at least 3 laws of thermodynamics, it was so hardcore nasa approved the grant to do research on it, and the results supported the claim:

Preliminary Results of an Experimental Investigation of the Qu Superconducting Heat Pipe - NASA Grant NCC 8-200

Of course, all these new superconductor techs are hidden from the public as usual so you never hear about all the "laws" they have been breaking.

Exciting things have been happening behind the scenes for years, eventually laws have to be rewritten, but not today.

Superconductors have been known to break "laws".

Few years back, another Chinese invented the "Qu Tube",
when you heat the tube at one end, the entire tube will heat up in an instant,
in some cases it even generated more heat than you put into it,
it broke at least 3 laws of thermodynamics, it was so hardcore nasa approved the grant to do research on it, and the results supported the claim:

Preliminary Results of an Experimental Investigation of the Qu Superconducting Heat Pipe - NASA Grant NCC 8-200

Of course, all these new superconductor techs are hidden from the public as usual so you never hear about all the "laws" they have been breaking.

The entire point of Fortran is that it has difficult-to-deal-with aliasing rules that make the compiler more free to produce optimized code. That's why it is suitable for things that require every last bit of performance you can wring out of it. Today probably you can get the same thing with C or C++ provided you are prepared to use things like restrict, but it used to be you couldn't, so Fortran ruled certain topics.

Python is an easy-to-use system with abysmal performance - expect 10-100x slowdown for code that runs in pure Python over a similar C version. If you can get things set up so Python is only gluing other C components together and the data never has to touch native Python data structures or loops, then performance will be fine, but now you aren't really coding in Python any more.

The point is, the purpose of Fortran and the purpose of Python are entirely opposed. They are exactly the opposite of each other. So it boggles the mind how you can think that Python can be Fortran "done right". So much so that now I suspect I got trolled. Well done, sir.

Yes I understand, and many people made the same point. However Fortran was for a lot of scientists and engineers the hammer to crack any nut. It was used for simple "try outs" where performance wasn't needed, simply because it was the language that Engineers knew. I think the same thing is happening with Python now, it is the first and sometimes only language that many engineers know. Now for the performance issue, it will not give the best performance but packages like SciPy and NumPy do give very good performance (arguably by using these libraries you are just using python to string c functions together, but it is properly integrated). Tests show that you are getting about a third of the performance of Fortran, (with the exception of the Fortran DGEMM marix multiply which greatly outperforms Python and other Fortran variants). The typical engineering reaction to performance needs is to throw hardware at the problem, then optimise your algorithm, and only change language if absolutely necessary!

Wow-- I just noticed this-- I got linked!
(at the pdf report linked at the words "...The acid's no fun, but it turns out the area right above the clouds is a great environment for an airplane" in the Venus section)
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20030003716_2002108457.pdf

Curiosity has 17 cameras, not one.

I mean, if you're coing to criticize, get it right.

Devices prepped for the harsh environments will take longer to build than consumer devices, so the spec gets frozen sooner.

Plus, as long as it has enough horsepower, why mess with the design to upgrade it?

P.S. This is not really a new observation. Consider PhoneSat, the project to take an off-the-shelf Android phone and use it as the heart of a micro-satellite. Clearly the processing power is enough, plus they can use the camera, inertial sensors, and I guess even GPS. (I wonder if the GPS software can cope with orbital altitude?)

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/home/PhoneSat.html

Nitpick with the summary: the rover is not 'one eyed'. It uses a bunch: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/rover/eyesandother/ That said, it does have that one big laser on its head: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/instruments/spectrometers/chemcam/ Robots on Mars with lasers. It doesn't get much better.

Nitpick with the summary: the rover is not 'one eyed'. It uses a bunch: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/rover/eyesandother/ That said, it does have that one big laser on its head: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/instruments/spectrometers/chemcam/ Robots on Mars with lasers. It doesn't get much better.

NASA isn't so convinced; that's why they're testing an inflatable module for the ISS.

You don't need structural strength in microgravity, and Bigelow claim their inflatable modules offer more radiation and ballistic protection than rigid cans. No idea about the "more points of failure" part - I'd have thought an inflatable structure would be simpler though. Do you have citations?