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They're leased from HP as part of the NASA ACES contract :
        http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/dec/HQ_C10-080_ACES.html

Prior to that, there was a contract with Lockheed Martin.

They have to put out a specification of what they want the machine configuration to look like, and then HP gives 'em a cost per month for it.

And the 'devices' lost aren't necessarily laptops ... it could be cell phones or tablets, which are also leased through ACES.

There *are* ways around this, but you have to do more paperwork, and then you can buy stuff off SEWP, and they're maintained by different groups of sysadmins (assigned to the mission, project or division).

And to make it more fun -- if you sign all of the paperwork to take a government furnished computer off site as a contractor, you're liable for the full original purchase price, no depreciation. (this might not be true for ACES) ... so I know a few people who brought their work-assigned laptops back and said they'd rather buy their own ... which means there's then *NO* control over them ... although they're not supposed to put SBU / ACI on it.

They're leased from HP as part of the NASA ACES contract :
        http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/dec/HQ_C10-080_ACES.html

Prior to that, there was a contract with Lockheed Martin.

They have to put out a specification of what they want the machine configuration to look like, and then HP gives 'em a cost per month for it.

And the 'devices' lost aren't necessarily laptops ... it could be cell phones or tablets, which are also leased through ACES.

There *are* ways around this, but you have to do more paperwork, and then you can buy stuff off SEWP, and they're maintained by different groups of sysadmins (assigned to the mission, project or division).

And to make it more fun -- if you sign all of the paperwork to take a government furnished computer off site as a contractor, you're liable for the full original purchase price, no depreciation. (this might not be true for ACES) ... so I know a few people who brought their work-assigned laptops back and said they'd rather buy their own ... which means there's then *NO* control over them ... although they're not supposed to put SBU / ACI on it.

For another set of graphics see: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/

I keep reading headlines one right after another about security hacks. And I feel like I'm getting warning fatigue*, I cannot comprehend how you IT security people are dealing with it. For me I got some computers that ***never*** connect to internet, and damned if I put critical stuff in The Cloud.

*Warning fatigue: Described in the book, "Breaking The Mishap Chain" http://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/break_mishap_chain_detail.html where authors describe when crews of a B1 flight test kept getting caution warnings that were not urgent so habitually ignored even though one of those warnings was center-of-gravity parameter. Ignoring this warning was serious as it caused aircraft to go out of control when wings were swept and aircraft not balanced.

To what purpose? Doing it just to do it serves none. Like saying frm now all Ducks shall be called Nozzes! New label, same concept, no net change.

Not when the entire populace already knows how to think in one and not the other. Ever had to retrain an enitire corporation after a fundamental software package switchover? That would be a walk in teh park compared to this. Being able to think in a system of measurements is such a low level function of the brain its nearly impossible to completely retrain it to fluency levels in the new one. And the use of language related words is intentional because it's nearly at that level of brain function.

Being from a country (Canada) that made this exact change during my lifetime I have to say you couldn't be more wrong.

There are numerous advantages to making the change:
- Labeling for exports becomes significantly easier and cheaper as you don't have to consider target market.
- Textbooks don't need to be specialized for imperial units
- Costly engineering mistakes that occur due to unit conversion wouldn't happen anymore.

Being able to think in a system of measurements is such a low level function of the brain its nearly impossible to completely retrain it to fluency levels in the new one.

Bullshit. I suppose you would also claim that people can never be as fluent in a second language as they can in their original one. Perhaps you would be unable to retrain yourself, but most people could manage quite fine if they put a little effort into it.

Just like they fail to consider that metric (or more accurately SI) has its own idiosyncracies.

I see you conveniently fail to give any example whatsoever....

where its naturally superior or advantageous to use it over metric. (hydrology is a good example; several conversions reduce to 1.0x)

Again, any examples of these "several" conversions which don't work exactly the same in metric?

It's just math, and conversion is not particularly hard anyway...

Exactly. I've given several examples where using this antiquated system costs actual time and money. You've provided some vague hand-waving for why metric shouldn't be adopted. If it's just math, and conversion is not particularly hard, why not do it. Once it's done, the entire country would be 100% converted in 100 years or so anyways.

Disclaimer:
There is one obvious advantage that imperial has over metric, as it's units of length & weight do tend to be divisible by 3. But fractions really aren't that scary, and imperial measure has the same issue when dealing with fractional inches.

:( :( :(

A couple places to start would be an explanation by NASA and the organisation for developing the protocols at the Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group.

Unfortunately the uninformed like you do not know how to read data tables. If you do the math you find that the temperature anomaly for the past 10 years has been 0.17C higher than the previous 10 years. Also I find it amusing that you use the CRU report that the vilified Phil Jones is the head of. How about a link to that report so we can evaluate it ourselves rather than depending on your interpretation. Actually I doubt you've read it but rather are depending on what some talking head said about.

The article is correct, the DSN has just a couple of letters in common with DTN, and nothing to do with the Bundle Protocol.

Delay/Disruption-Tolerant-Networks have been researched and developed by the DTN Research Group and the Bundle Protocol has been an RFC since 2007. It's possible to download an open-source reference implementation from SourceForge.

Actually NASA also use their own protocol, called ION (Interplanetary Overlay Network).

Never mind it is probably this program: Disruption Tolerant Networking for Space Operations (DTN), http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/DTN.html

http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn/

seven times more massive than Earth... so much for their early space program

Maybe, or maybe they just develop different tech, space elevator maybe?

95 percent of all the stars that this universe will ever see have already been born

And since, based on all the studies we've done, the universe is flat... and therefor infinite... 5% * infinity is what? Infinity. So perhaps star formation will be less dense going forward, but I believe back when it was a lot more active, the universe was probably a lot less hospitable to those of us that don't find gamma ray bursts good for our health.

We now know that the universe is flat with only a 0.5% margin of error. This suggests that the Universe is infinite in extent; however, since the Universe has a finite age, we can only observe a finite volume of the Universe.

Source: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_shape.html

Just pretend that your cable mess is life critical and/or supporting something that you'd need to leave the gravity well to fix. Then do it the correct way.

The suffering will make you a better person.

Take a look at the high res photo:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA16239.jpg

In front of the corner of Curiosity closest to the camera, there's a dark grey cylinder with part faded out. Beneath, and slightly lateral to this you can see a motor which has had the top left corner diagonally cut out of it.

The arm was attached to this area, and that why as it rotated the picture here changed. It's the only place there are any major artefacts in the image.

Is there a higher resolution available somewhere? I want to use it on my desktop.

Linked from the bottom of the page in TFA: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16239

Top-left here.

Thanks! Now I see that the arm has indeed been removed by using other photos. And also in this place on the stiched photo there is a small inconsitency.

You can see shadows from the turret on the end of the arm in a couple of the raw images. Whoever planned the arm manoeuvres did an incredible job - not only did the arm itself almost completely disappear in final stitched versions, the images have very little parallax despite the arm very much not being a proper panoramic camera mount.

Of note - there was a second set of images taken - very similar to the first, but with a small horizontal offset. Likely result? 3D versions of the panorama!

The only thing I want now is, perhaps in a year or so, a full 360-degrees spherical panorama of the rover parked near some interesting cliffs or other geography. Go on, NASA - do it! ;-)

You can see shadows from the turret on the end of the arm in a couple of the raw images. Whoever planned the arm manoeuvres did an incredible job - not only did the arm itself almost completely disappear in final stitched versions, the images have very little parallax despite the arm very much not being a proper panoramic camera mount.

Of note - there was a second set of images taken - very similar to the first, but with a small horizontal offset. Likely result? 3D versions of the panorama!

The only thing I want now is, perhaps in a year or so, a full 360-degrees spherical panorama of the rover parked near some interesting cliffs or other geography. Go on, NASA - do it! ;-)

Please don't don't try to 'sell' page hits. Use the source...

Top-left here.

(Of note - the raw images got released quite a few hours before the official stitched version did. So a bunch of amateurs including myself and others used various panorama-assembling software to assemble our own, unofficial stitched versions. Seeing Curiosity like this before pretty much everyone else was great...)

5463 x 7595 pixels (width x height)

Original Caption Released with Image:

        On Sol 84 (Oct. 31, 2012), NASA's Curiosity rover used the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) to capture this set of 55 high-resolution images, which were stitched together to create this full-color self-portrait.

        The mosaic shows the rover at "Rocknest," the spot in Gale Crater where the mission's first scoop sampling took place. Four scoop scars can be seen in the regolith in front of the rover.

        The base of Gale Crater's 3-mile-high (5-kilometer) sedimentary mountain, Mount Sharp, rises on the right side of the frame. Mountains in the background to the left are the northern wall of Gale Crater. The Martian landscape appears inverted within the round, reflective ChemCam instrument at the top of the rover's mast.

        Self-portraits like this one document the state of the rover and allow mission engineers to track changes over time, such as dust accumulation and wheel wear. Due to its location on the end of the robotic arm, only MAHLI (among the rover's 17 cameras) is able to image some parts of the craft, including the port-side wheels.

        This high-resolution mosaic is a more detailed version of the low-resolution version created with thumbnail images, at PIA16238.

        JPL manages the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

        For more about NASA's Curiosity mission, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl, http://www.nasa.gov/mars, and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl.
Image Credit:
        NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

Image Addition Date:
        2012-11-01

We're told it's because of the melting Greenland ice pack that caused a "block" in the Atlantic.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html
"Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time," says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data"

If it happens every 150 years it's not really unprecedented is it? Keep in mind that ice grew in there in the cooling period following the 1940s.

No, it's the alarmists who haven't read all the literature and cling to an unproven hypothesis that no government has accepted yet, that NASA proved faulty and even their own spiritual leader has backpedaled on.

NASA/NOAA to IPCC: your models are broken, you ignored the facts plants eat CO2 (2010)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/08/new_model_doubled_co2_sub_2_degrees_warming/

NASA: 150 year Greenland melt cycle right on time (2012)
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html

James "Gaia theory" Lovelock gives up (2012): "The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," he said. "The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that," he added.' Lovelock still believes the climate is changing, but at a much, much slower pace."
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/no_consensus/its_over/

A more moderate approach is articulated: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/ff_apocalypsenot/all

Global warming is so 1985. It's not like we haven't known about it since the 1940s, nobody could figure out a way to make money of it until now, so they're exploiting it for all it's worth now. And you're helping. *slow clap*

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/.images/med_greenhouse_effect.jpg (Popular mechanics, August 1953, P 119)

They're saying this happened because the storm system was blocked from going into the Atlantic because of the melting ice in Greenland.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/rights/was-sandy-caused-years-record-ice-melt

Thing is, we knew this was going to happen. NASA said so a month or so ago:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html - 07.24.12
"Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time," says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data."

Crap article, from a crap blog, copied from a press release. It's so Slashdot.

Here's the actual paper on the research. The physics is interesting. It's a way to make optical gyros better. Currently, good fiber-optic gyros have drift rates around 1 degree per hour. Ring laser gyros can do better, and mechanical gyros still beat the optical systems on long-term drift. This proposal is to develop a way to get a few more orders of magnitude less drift out of optical gyros.

Low-end MEMS gyros have drift rates of several degrees per minute, but there's steady progress, and degrees-per-hour MEMS gyros now exist.

According to NASA's site, the contract is $1.8 million - just in case you thought NASA might be able to spend $1.8 billion on something like that... http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/releases/2012/12-111.html

I think they should focus on cheaper space pens*



*(I kid, I kid!)

The problem is not "Airplanes are not solar powered!" the problem is "Moving large numbers of people and cargo around at almost Mach 1 is pretty energy intensive".

If you're seriously interested in what engineers are actually doing about this problem, start reading about NASA's SUGAR research:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/aeronautics/features/future_airplanes.html

I can't help you with your conspiracy theories. Anybody who could make such an airplane as you imagine would become instantly, vastly, wealthy.

... Your now at 202kW, or 271HP. That's probably around 10% of the cruising HP of an actual jetliner...

Looks like you're off by 2-3 orders of magnitude:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_horsepower_of_one_engine_in_a_Boeing_747
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080124191508AAxnhMi

And NASA's numbers for cruise speed:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/SP-468/ch10-2.htm

So 60K-160K HP, depending on who's counting what.

http://climate.nasa.gov/

OK, the SMART-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART-1 went from an initial orbital period of about 11 hours to 25 hours in about 147 days. This was achieved running the ion drive for 1/3 to 1/2 of the orbit, since they wanted a highly elliptical orbit. LEO for the repair/resupply satellite would start with a more circular orbit and a period of about 90 minutes. If you run the ion drive for most of the orbit, I'd guess that would roughly balance out the lower starting point. Only 22% of the weight was propellent. Of course, you'd need more propellent to drop back down to LEO afterwards. Overall, ion drives are suppose to be about 800% more efficient than chemical rockets.

Some of the new geosync satellites are using ion drives to get to synchronous orbit, and those take several months to do so. NASA has done some research on a reusable ion-drive booster: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19790009727_1979009727.pdf

One issue is that because the satellite will spend a fair amount of time in the Van Allen belt, the solar cells will be degraded over time and will need to be repaired or replaced. The ion drive itself experiences erosion of certain components that require periodic replacement.

There's a possibility *below* the surface. I know it's slim, and a little far fetched, but *if* there was going to be life, it would probably be in Martian caves etc http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/news/mro20111102.html

The particles they've found in the soil are bright -- light in colour, kind of whitish. That doesn't mean they have specular/shiny reflections like a piece of metal. The particles are something different from the majority of the particles in the martian sand, and for that reason they're going to take a closer look, but there's no sign the light-colored particles are metal. Take a look for yourself. It looks more like a crumb from some sloppy Martian eating chips than a piece of metal.

Here's a more interesting read of NASA's competition rules [DRAFT] :
http://prod.nais.nasa.gov/eps/eps_data/154025-OTHER-001-001.pdf

Actually I expect you to be fooled again. Its probably a recurring thing in your life.

Clue: NASA doesn't do the war fighting stuff. They do the civilian aviation stuff. Aviation and safety research, keeping track of accidents and incidents, etc. See: http://www.aeronautics.nasa.gov/

Clue: That in no way means any tech innovations won't be immediately adapted/adopted by the military for their use. Or by DHS for domestic civilian population monitoring/control and suppression of dissenters, for that matter. New tech/discoveries/etc have always been shared both ways between NASA and the military throughout NASA's history.

You can rest assured anything NASA and/or groups working with NASA develop that the military/DHS/TLAs think might be useful they'll use.

Besides, the government isn't the only one that can build drones. If it came down to it, drones could be built in a garage that could intercept/down things like the Predator-class drones.

Take a look at this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTHWBSluUjU

It was laser-clocked at 586KPH/366MPH.

That's not even the largest engine the maker, JetCat, produces. They've got one that's rated for 52 lbs thrust.

http://www.sitewavesstores5.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=JetCat&Product_Code=P200-SX&Category_Code=TURB

Have it power a drone carrying a pound or two of HE, and a simple guidance system tuned to the opposing drone's uplink frequency. Launch it straight up to ~60K ft altitude so it's above the opposing drone (to be in the satellite uplink signal path from the other drone) and have the guidance system kick in when it acquires the signal and guide it straight to the other drone.

No more Predator-class drone.

Of course, bringing down an autonomous drone would be more difficult and require a different type of interceptor-drone, possibly one with remote-video and a remote pilot.

Strat

Nope, not Galileo :) I meant Huygens/Cassini -- you have to be really, really stupid to throw away one-of-a-kind data on frame sync errors. That's what would have killed Huygens data return -- otherwise, even with cycle slips, the data could be reconstructed on the ground without much trouble. The SSDs are doing the same thing: sure, when wear limits are passed and there's plenty of read errors, you can't relocate failing blocks to save them, but don't pretend that you know better than the owner of the data. Effectively killing the whole drive just because write endurance is up is even worse than the frame dropping on Cassini's probe support avionics. It's like turning off the entire receiver simply because there were some errors.

Forget whether there's a planet in the habitable zone or not. Alpha Centauri is relatively close (4.37 light years - 41.3 trillion km) - use the planets for resources to engineer the first extrasolar starbase that orbits in the center of the habitable zone.

High temperatures like that may be suitable for thermopiles to run mass drivers on the surface of these planets, especially if there's no atmosphere. By the time we have the technology to do this, it may be possible to synthesize water, carbon, and nitrogen from just hydrogen by using fusion. Hydrogen fuses to Helium and Helium is the fuel for the carbon cycle. Since hydrogen is abundant, locating heavier elements like iron, sodium, potassium, silicon, uranium, etc. will be more important than finding water.

1500K is cool when compared to the melting point of tungsten (3683K). Before this is discounted as impossible due to temperature, consider that Mercury has surface ice.

At the very least, we need to send a high-speed probe using nuclear propulsion. Uranium has an energy density about 1 million times larger than hydrogen. Even if only 0.1% of the energy gets translated to motion, that would make it possible to send a probe at 17,000 km/sec (5% of c). At that speed, it would take about 80 years before data from the system got here. Hopefully, there's a way to make it more efficient so it could go 25% of c. Then the mission length would be under 20 years.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of moons. Well Jupiter has 66 moons . That's a start.

... also, that was for spirit and opportunity.

Curiousity is different:

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

"Curiosity can communicate with Earth directly at speeds up to 32 kbit/s, but the bulk of the data transfer should be relayed through the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Odyssey orbiter. Data transfer speeds between Curiosity and each orbiter may reach 2 Mbit/s and 256 kbit/s, respectively, but each orbiter is only able to communicate with Curiosity for about eight minutes per day.[32]"

and [32] is:

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/communicationwithearth/data/

"The data rate direct-to-Earth varies from about 500 bits per second to 32,000 bits per second (roughly half as fast as a standard home modem). The data rate to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is selected automatically and continuously during communications and can be as high as 2 million bits per second. The data rate to the Odyssey orbiter is a selectable 128,000 or 256,000 bits per second (4-8 times faster than a home modem)."

So the rover can communicate with MRO a lot quicker than a modem. The limit now is the uplink back through the DSN.

Really? Do you know what the uplink rate from the rover actually is? Hint. it's not 9600bps anymore.

NASA says 12Kb/s back to Earth Rover to orbiter is 128Kb/s, but that's then spooled slowly back over the long-range data link.

And 100% of that bandwidth is spoken for at any given time, and has to built to the limitations of what NASA is working with at the time. There's no point building a rover with 100 mbit transmit capacity if there's no possible way to have the infrastructure on Earth to receive it when you launch.

If we had more deep space bandwidth, then you'd probably be surprised to find that there's any number of things we could do with it.

Really? Do you know what the uplink rate from the rover actually is? Hint. it's not 9600bps anymore.

NASA says 12Kb/s back to Earth Rover to orbiter is 128Kb/s, but that's then spooled slowly back over the long-range data link.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/lunar/program_overview.html

"On average, 33 metric tons (73,000 lbs) of meteoroids hit Earth every day, the vast majority of which harmlessly ablates ("burns up") high in the atmosphere, never making it to the ground. The moon, however, has no atmosphere, so meteoroids have nothing to stop them from striking the surface. The slowest of these rocks travels at 20 km/sec (45,000 mph); the fastest travels at over 72 km/sec (160,000 mph). At such speeds even a small meteoroid has incredible energy -- one with a mass of only 5 kg (10 lbs) can excavate a crater over 9 meters (30 ft) across, hurling 75 metric tons (165,000 lbs) of lunar soil and rock on ballistic trajectories above the lunar surface. "

In addition to the things already listed, here are two more sites that give some of the technologies that were originally developed for the Space Shuttle specifically or NASA in general, and then found more widespread commercial use:

http://spinoff.nasa.gov/shuttle.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/curiosity/topics/ten-nasa-inventions.htm

A quick list of some of the interesting ones: An artificial heart, video stabilization software, material used in prosthetic limbs, the scratch-resistant coating used on eyeglasses, memory foam, and powdered lubricants.

Taken us nowhere? Here's NASA's current missions list. As for the debt even a 30 year T-bill just barely beats inflation. Shorter term and you lose money. That's right, people around the country and around the world are flocking to buy our debt and pay for the privilege.

While I applaud the engineers' achievements, I am not sure that these space shuttles' cost has been worth it. I know experiments have been done in space...but can someone really tell me what an ordinary street walking John Doe has benefited from these shuttles?

Here's an interesting one regarding software developed to determine the size of debris falling off the external tank and how it's also being used by contractors and homeowners to measure things for construction projects.

If you're looking for more, check out NASA's Spinoffs page.

While I applaud the engineers' achievements, I am not sure that these space shuttles' cost has been worth it. I know experiments have been done in space...but can someone really tell me what an ordinary street walking John Doe has benefited from these shuttles?

Here's an interesting one regarding software developed to determine the size of debris falling off the external tank and how it's also being used by contractors and homeowners to measure things for construction projects.

If you're looking for more, check out NASA's Spinoffs page.

I actually used to think like you - I thought most of the space program was wasted taxpayers money on ego until someone on /. pointed that (paraphrasing) ...

One nice benefit to the space program was essentially a big R&D. A lot of interesting tech was developed as we tried to solve new problems.

You'll want to read these links as they fully answer your question:

http://www.nasa.gov/50th/50th_magazine/benefits.html
http://www.spaceexplorationday.us/benefits/technology.html

People always trash the space program in general. "What has it ever done for me?" The number one thing the shuttle program has given us is knowledge, about many things. It's pretty hard to quantify either the amount of knowledge we've gained or the value of it, or its subsequent impact on the rest of our lives. The shuttles in particular delivered many payloads to orbit, including several satellites and great observatories including Hubble, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. They also delivered the Galileo, Magellan, and Ulysses spacecraft to orbit to begin their missions. They also delivered components for Mir and the ISS. NASA also has a list of some technologies that resulted from the shuttle program here.

As far as money goes, and spending it wisely, over its 30-year run the shuttle program ended up costing us just under $200 billion in 2011 dollars, as well as 14 lives. That sounds like a lot of money. The current estimate of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is between 3.2 and 4 trillion dollars, with over 4400 Americans killed and over 33,000 wounded in Iraq alone. Afghanistan has cost us another 2100 American lives, and those numbers don't even include non-Americans or civilians. In 2008 alone Bush proposed $190 billion for the wars, just under the total cost of the 30-year shuttle program. I'll leave it up to you to decide which is the better investment.

Interestingly they control satellites from Svalbard, not the other way around :)

Kongsberg Satellite Services operates both SvalSat in Norway's Arctic regions and TrollSat at the Norwegian Antarctic base on the opposite pole. It is the largest commercial ground station in the world. The first customer was NASA, which uses it for its EOS satellites, NEN and SLR. The European, Japanese and Indian Space Agencies also use it extensively. The business idea for Svalbard satellite station is to provide cost-effective services to polar satellite operators.

The SvalSat system is used for Near real-time (NRT) Maritime Situational Awareness services, including vessel detection and oil spill monitoring, and producing images on demand from Earth using data acquired by satellites in orbit. With stations near both poles and at mid-latitudes, KSAT can access satellites at many positions in orbit and download almost any conceivable mix of data from them.

NASA's Satellite Laser Ranging network (SLR) is a fundamental measurement technique used to support both national and international programs in Earth dynamics, ocean and ice surface altimetry, navigation, and positioning. SLR utilizes a global network of stations [including Svalbard] to measure distances by bouncing very short pulses of laser light off special reflectors installed on satellites orbiting the earth, and also left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts and Soviet rovers. By accurately timing the round-trip time of flight of these pulses, distances can be computed and precise orbits determined. This data is then used to acquire fundamental information about the geophysical processes of the Earth and the Earth-Moon system.

To supply NASA, United States Department of Defense, NOAA, ESA and others with this data they even laid a dedicated submarine cable to Svalbard from mainland Norway (1400 km).

Dear god this must be a slow news day - I have never seen such a blatant slashvertisment in all the time I have wasted here.

If you are tired of reading ads then read about the interesting stuff the mars rover found the other day, or maybe about this interesting comet

Please Slashdot - don't make me hate you!

They've been testing this for awhile. AFF (Autonomous Formation Flight) from 2001 is the first project I know about. The challenge is in the guidance and control system - it must be able to keep the trailing aircraft within inches of the desired position (12 inches for AFF) and maintain position through maneuvers and disturbances.