Slashdot Mirror

Well that's just it isn't it? By 2016 the US will definitely have a new government, and they may cancel whatever plan are in place, even if they're behind.

This is why the most valuable thing which can be done at this point is what Obama is trying to do. Skip the grand plans (SLS and MPCV were pork forced on him by Congress, not his plan) and focus on changing the fundamental dynamics of the situation which have contributed to the gridlock we've been in for the last 30 years. His plan is to facilitate the maturation of commercial operators so that private industry can bring the cost of access to space down. Another year or so of effort will see that far enough along that canceling Commercial Crew won't stop it. The companies will have their capabilities mature enough that they can finish them on their own. ISS servicing is really only the initial market to prime the pump, the real future for them is non-NASA clients. It was too expensive for this to start completely on its own, but with a few years of NASA kickstarting it, we are now on the brink of getting there. Once those capabilities exist, it matters less and less what Congress and NASA do because that is not where the important things will be happening.

SpaceX and Lockheed etc. are all trying to fill requirements set out by NASA.

Yes, because it is an easy early market, but it isn't the only market or even the biggest, just a starting point. If that NASA project goes away but gets their vehicles far enough along to fly, then it isn't a catastrophe, they will simply continue with their plans to serve additional markets with those vehicles. I realize you will probably ignore this just as you ignored the presentation I linked above outlining why super heavy lift is not necessary, but on the off chance you are willing to be educated, read this:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/543572main_Section%20403(b)%20Commercial%20Market%20Assessment%20Report%20Final.pdf

If you want to send something of a reasonable size even back to the moon you need something bigger than the size of a falcon heavy.

As I've already pointed out, and provided a link to a detailed report on, this assertion is patently false. Go listen to the presentation and review the slides:
http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Akin_12-14-11/

You should also review some of the presentations linked below. All of these offer different options for getting things beyond low earth orbit which do not require heavy lift or massive government spending. Pretending that exploration depends solely on what a single rocket can throw beyond LEO on a single launch wont make reality go away no matter how many times you repeat it.

Propellent Depots
http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Adamo_10-13-10
http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Kutter_11-10-10
http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/McLean_3-2-11/

Electrodynamic Tethers
http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Pearson_8-31-11/

New developments in orbital dynamics (which offer lower propellant trajectories to the moon)
http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Belbruno_1-4-12/

Electric Propulsion
http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Casaregola_5-04-11/
http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso

I guess I'm not clear on the definition of dark matter.

We don't know what dark matter is, so there is no definition of it. Why do we think it's some exotic unknown matter and not some cold CO2 or just simple pieces of rocks invisible to us due to low temperature and long distance?

The answer lies in cosmic electro-magnetic background (CMB). By looking at the CMB we can tell the distribution and density of baryonic matter (matter made up from protons and neutrons) in the early universe (cca 300 thousands years after big bang). WMAP probe made detailed measurment of CMB and concluded that there is not enough baryonic matter to account for all the gravitational forces we can see.
See http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_matter.html for more details.

NASA should not develop a commercial rocket but do research and provide test facilities for commercial rocket companies. Like what its predecessor N.A.C.A did in the 20th century. They did not develop commercial airplanes but did research and provided test facilities for commercial (USA) airplane companies.

Useful publication for aero people is the NACA 1135 "Equations, tables, and charts for compressible flow" which was very tedious to compile from numerous flight tests and wind tunnel measurements, all done at government expense (private companies would either be too cheap to do this or keep it locked up from everyone), download the 12MB pdf here, http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/BGH/Images/naca1135.pdf

But then there ain't much money in doing research ( the kind of work where "alchemists" and other assorted mad scientists do stuff that either nobody knows what they are doing or simply lack intellect to appreciate what they are doing).

You do realise they do course corrections? Yes, the maths they do is neat, especially when they need to take relativistic effects into account. There's a limit to how accurately the spacecraft can set its course so they plan to fine-tune multiple times during a mission.

Already, NH has prompted much more thorough scrutiny of Pluto, resulting in the discovery of a new (fourth) moon;

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/20jul_p4/

And hey, the program is trying to select a member of the Kuiper Belt to visit beyond Pluto, and they're crowdsourcing the search;

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-06/22/crowd-source-new-horizons-next-destination

Also, there's a New Horizons app in the iPhone App store (don't know if there's an Android version).

A page showing New Horizons' location relative to the planets is here. Detailed ephemeris and other data on the probe can be obtained from NASA's HORIZONS system -- click on Target body "[change]", then enter "-98" in the search box.

Privatization didn't work that well when NOAA was forced to privatize the Landsat satellite data to EOSAT/Space Imaging. .

The cited page is a copy/paste of Linda Cureton's blog post. Lame and uncool to copy someone's article whole without a link, don't you think, even if they are paid with taxpayer $$? Here's the original article : http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/NASA-CIO-Blog/posts/post_1329017818806.html

For regular voice it's not really a problem, but for other things it can be, fortunately those are going away also.

The problem is digital voice. IP Voice service almost always has some compression and decompression involved which creates a delay between a word being spoken and being heard. This is why you get an echo instead of feedback when you have your buddy has his speakers up to high on a Skype call. Usually not much of an issue, but I have noticed an increase in trying to talk over the top of one another since voice has gone IP. Used to the near instantaneous transmission the older equipment had let you pick up on ques from the other side that allowed for more politeness.

This doesn't matter much to most people, but it's why NASA went with analog over fiber for the DVIS system (which I have a minor role in supporting at JSC) and why the VIS system we are slowly replacing it with also doesn't use "normal" compressed IP, we're going back to copper on VIS.

It's also going to have an affect on modems. I know most consumers don't use modems anymore and even most business uses have gone away, but there are still some uses here and there, credit card processing, backup connections etc.. The transition to IP for sound can be the work/not work on a less than stellar connection otherwise.

I personally think going to IP is great, but I felt the need to play devils advocate for just a moment.

The 2012 budget request is $5 billion for science (Earth Science, Planetary Science, Astrophysics, Heliophysics, James Webb Space Telescope) versus $9.6 billion for the manned program, which includes $3 billion for the International Space Station. That's a pretty staggering figure considering that NASA won't actually launch any manned vehicles into space in 2012.

There's your problem: everything meaningful that NASA has done in the past 20 years has come out of the science program- the Hubble, the Mars rovers, monitoring the earth from space- but we spend almost twice as much on the manned program, which has produced no meaningful science to speak of. Even from the whole inspiring-future-scientists standpoint, I would suspect that vastly more children get interested in science because of Spirit, Opportunity, and the Hubble than because of the International Space Station. At this point, the manned space program really serves no purpose, it is nothing but an entitlement program for the defense industry- welfare for aerospace corporations.

It's quite frightening how straightforward (here: old, CFC-based foam piece killed Columbia*) the facts can be, and still not work with those people... but then, myths and their collections seem to also have a much stronger grasp on them, on average.

Here, I guess also the myths of glorious-looking (kinda feels like this damn French Concorde, but better / in space!) Flash Gordon style contraptions of a spacecraft which wastes most of its LEO mass on airframe ...possibly even with its designers and decision-makers being raised on & influenced by such works of fiction (FG and so on; which mostly just naively extrapolated rapid advances in airplane tech of the ~1940s; kinda like those airplanes (Wiki Unicode URL, tends to work weird on /.) from "our" times, as imagined ~130 years ago, were undoubtedly shaped by rapid advances in marine tech - and we can even build them, basically just take a Harrier & remove wings and canopy ...it's still a horrible idea vs. "boring" reality).

The STS was simply deeply flawed, foam-shedding (another fact: most severe - but lucky to spare critical impact points - in early flights, which used only CFC-based foams) being just one aspect of it ...not even the worst (other being also with the basic concept, its premises and promises - obsolete even before the Shuttle seriously got onto drawing boards, for example with automatic rendezvous & docking done since the 60s)
Oh yeah, but it looked and felt awesome, I'd be the first to give it that (hm, yeah, "emotional" as you say)

And with the news at hand... "green" fuels are also simply much easier & safer to work with; those are things which - contrary to the suggestion of (great?)grandparent poster - tend to save time and money in the longish & up time spans (so, for once aiming at thoughtful long-term choices)

*Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Volume 2, Appendix D, Section 11.3 and figure 11-1, p222

"Before you spout off about the ET insulation foam having been reformulated without CFCs, try reading the CAIB report (volume 1, Page 51), which specifically states that the portion of the foam that broke loose was the OLD CFC-based formulation.

http://caib.nasa.gov/news/report/pdf/vol1/full/caib_report_volume1.pdf"

Before you spout off about the ET insulation foam having been reformulated without CFCs, try reading the CAIB report (volume 1, Page 51), which specifically states that the portion of the foam that broke loose was the OLD CFC-based formulation.

http://caib.nasa.gov/news/report/pdf/vol1/full/caib_report_volume1.pdf

The story about the reformulated foam causing the Columbia accident is largely the doing of Rush Limbaugh, who seized on a lie from one of his typically ill-informed listeners, and kept repeating it until it became accepted as fact by everyone on the right.

http://mediamatters.org/research/200508090007

There is extremely solid evidence that the climate has been getting steadily warmer since the industrial revolution. http://climate.nasa.gov/

The only two mentions of the industrial revolution on the page you linked to are specifically related to CO2 and ocean acidification, not temperature.

I am wondering what your problem is. Are you so addicted to exaggeration that you can't tell the truth without lying? Or maybe you are so careless in your comprehension that you really think that the page you linked to says something that it does not?

The most laughable part of this non-factual incident that you brought upon yourself is that you could have found a citation that supports something very close to what you claimed. I guess you wanted to make the industrial revolution claim, even though facts dont support it, because its so simple minded.

Lets not let the fact that since the industrial revolution, that we had a period of 40 years of cooling, distract you from your sloppy worthless ways.

There is extremely solid evidence that the climate has been getting steadily warmer since the industrial revolution. http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/. That holds true even when we take into account things such as cities radiating heat and reduce them from the gathered data. And that holds true even on years when sun activity is low. That's as established fact as anything in the science can be: You can still claim that the earth is flat and call yourself a scientist, if you want to. You won't get much attention in peer reviewed scientific journals, though.

The computer (or phone, or tablet) you're using to type that comment is a direct result of the effort to put man into space. The space program gave us the integrated circuit.

Nonsense. Even NASA's own web page on spinoff benefits doesn't go as far as to make this claim; it seems to be restricted to the fringes of the space-nutter crowd. According to Wikipedia, the antecedents of the integrated circuit date to Germany in 1949, and the first example of what we would today think of as an IC was developed by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958. (Robert Noyce was doing parallel work at Fairchild Semiconductor and had a working example a few months later than Kilby.) NASA wasn't even founded until mid-1958 so it would be difficult to claim they had anything to do with these developments. They didn't invent microprocessors either; that was Intel, which created the 4004 CPU for use in a calculator, not the space program.

While there have been some decent tech spin-offs from the space program in general, there have been very few that can be directly attributed to manned spaceflight. From a cost-benefit perspective it is very difficult to justify shooting people into space rather than spending that same amount of money on R&D back here on Earth.

"What if it was you/your family" is an appeal to emotion. I'm afraid people have berated you for suggesting gp be modded down for expressing an opinion, but no one seems to have pointed out this fallacy.

My family would have been proud to see me dedicate my life to what is essentially science and discovery for the good of all people. They wouldn't focus so much on the dead part, they would focus on the benefit to people part.

Knowing what little has been made public of the families of astronauts, I would say they are proud of their families as well, and knew there was some risk involved.

And, although in hindsight Boisjoly was correct, there was no way to know that at the time, in enough certainty to delay the launch. Previous launches with the same design and same problem had held together. This was the only real evidence they had, and no one could quantify how much colder it had to get for the blow-by to get past the second seal.

If you want to base your opinion on hindsight, I fault Boisjoly for not having experimented on the effects of different temperatures for the entire year after the previous flight. In fact, a lot of discussion and testing occurred, and it was deemed to be within safety tolerances. Against the data, he was the boy who cried wolf.

Taking emotion out of the argument, he was wrong. but in hindsight, when you investigate everything already knowing what the outcome was, he happened to be right. He very well could have ended up being that annoying guy who was wrong, based on the Rogers report. This covers items 3 and 6 mostly, of the findings, and the only thing that supports your assertion that it could have been avoided is finding 5 and part of 4. NASA were made aware and continued anyway, because everything pointed towards it not being a problem. Until you review every bit of data, again in hindsight. Finding 4, insufficient tracking, would have made this stand out as an issue to investigate, and would have supported his argument, had it been properly implemented. Not having that, he was pissing in the wind.

In other words, they did a lot to try to avoid a disaster, and like every other person on the planet, they are subject to mistakes both in individual actions and collective procedures. Assuming you can't tell the future, and can't change the past, I don't see any way this could have gone in any other direction. They made the right choices based on badly implemented procedures, and it ended badly, as expected.

http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1ch6.htm

See the Memorial Tree Grove.

Those days are over and good riddance.

These are the days to which I refer. Read that speech. Note the minimal amount of nationalistic jingoism, and the upbeat, positive view of exploration. There's only a single, passing reference to the Soviet Union. Sure, there was a space race, but nobody liked NASA because of it. People liked NASA -- and NACA before it -- because of the X-15, because of the probes to Venus and Mars, and yes, because of the trips to the moon. NASA made people feel like they were part of human progress -- doing things that no human being in the history of the species had been able to do before.

And no, before you count the items on that page and say "that's all", it's not.

I'm really curious, now. Where do you get your belief that somewhere there is this fantastic research being done on the ISS? Is it faith-based, or do you have some facts somewhere? Why wouldn't the NASA web site you cite, trumpet the big news, instead of trivialities?

While I am disappointed in your belief that papers that aren't in the fields that you've studied are inscrutable to you -- a position I urge you to reconsider, if for no other reason than it limits your enjoyment of the journals Science and Nature -- let me accept that for the moment, and instead ask a "social engineering" question of you: If the ISS were the fantastic research tool that you believe it to be, wouldn't researchers around the world be clamoring to get their experiments on the ISS? Wouldn't there be position papers from, oh, the National Academy of Sciences and other such places, advocating that a second or even third ISS be built, promoting expansions for larger groups of researchers, and other such enhancements? If it's so great, where's the "pull" from the users to get more?

Here's some more perspective: http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/astrobio_former.html

You are obviously too young to remember NASA when it actually had public support

I'm quite old enough to remember when the public supported NASA without PR experiments like this. I remember being told the big bad Soviets were going to beat us to the moon, build space based weapons and destroy us all. We were all told constantly that it was our national duty to support the space program and we did.

Those days are over and good riddance.

I mean, what else comes out of it?

It's not my fault that you're too stupid to use Google:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/coolstation.html

And no, before you count the items on that page and say "that's all", it's not. That's a short list of easily explained, easily understood advances that have come about due to the ISS.

You seem to think that the astronauts "spend most of their time doing experiments that are inscrutable to the general public," but have you actually looked for the published papers? Have you seen the research they're doing?

Yes I have looked at papers that have been published as a result of experiments performed on the ISS. Unsurprisingly, the papers that aren't in the fields that I've studied are inscrutable to me. That's how things work in the real world as opposed to your fantasy world where everyone can pick up any research paper published and instantly understand it.

Just use 5 computer and have them vote on it.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/flyfeature_shuttlecomputers.html

Space Micro doesn't list the prices of their components or systems, nor can I find any from anyone else. Honeywell don't list their prices either. Atmel seem to have dropped out of the field. Linear don't list the prices for their space-hardened stuff. Don't see any for BAE either, or Intersil. Empire Magnetics require a lot of personal data before they give you access to even the price classification information. Not the prices, just how they're classified.

You've got to allow for a year's worth of traveling outside of an atmosphere and then operating on Mars for the duration of the mission. This analysis of radiation for manned missions suggests you're looking at 3.5 mSv per day, then 20 rems per year in most of the places of interest.

Converting everything to rads, it's 0.1 rads per mSv and 1 rad per rem, so that's 12.75 rads to get to Mars if you assume a year-long trip, plus 20 rads for the mission, so anything with a rating of less than 32.75 rads is pretty much guaranteed to fail. However, over the course of a two years, the odds of there being a solar flare are not insignificant. To be safe, you want resistance to a further 400 rad. 432.75 rad is within the tolerance of most of the space-hardened components (some components can be taken up to 1000 rad, others up to 10,000). However, the cheapest space components would NOT survive. You're talking high-end on the space scale.

I'm going to figure that the top-line components will cost 100x that of their conventional counterparts, due to the higher-level of precision and QA that are required. It might well be a good deal more. In Russia, you've also got to pay for smuggling decent-grade hardware out of the US, as all of this stuff will be under massive amounts of regulation.

My guess is that the cuts would have saved enough that those doing the cost-cutting could buy second homes in Switzerland.

With all due respect Oligonicella, you are outrageously misinformed. Almost all the data is freely and publicly available, and at least for GISS even the source code is available. You can run it at home.

A shady secret conspiracy? Seems like someone has been playing you for a sucker.

Not to be nitpicky but the oceans already absorb nearly 90% of the excess energy. Here is a brief on a recent study of Earth's energy imbalance. Figure 1 shows the distribution to the various heat sinks.

NASA's budget for the current and previous years are available online. I happen to agree that manned spaceflight is (was) mostly pork, but there were only a few years in the last 25 where it ate up >50% of NASA's budget. It's not as big a part of NASA's budget as you're making it out to be. Unmanned exploration missions are the second biggest chunk (the remainder being terrestrial research and educational outreach). So it is pretty inevitable that some of them will be cut or scaled back as well.

For anybody with a real interest, here is a link to each of NASA's current missions;

http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html

Assuming there is any competency worth engaging. We have landers and rovers on mars and another one (Curiosity) enroute.

Why isn't ESA buying into our program instead of relying on us to fund theirs?

This is quite outrageous these cuts, and the mission is a good is a very good value.

The ESA mission is a largely redundant funding grab.

NASA and JPL already have a more capable lander enroute to mars.

This is quite outrageous these cuts, and the mission is a good is a very good value.

The ESA mission is a largely redundant funding grab.

NASA and JPL already have a more capable lander enroute to mars.

Not to mention the ESA project is redundant.

Its got nothing to do with taking credit.

NASA/JPL have already solved most of the problems that this project is trying to replicate, launch, descent, landing and roving.

The Curiosity Rover is already en-route to mars.

NASA and JPL will have a full plate managing this rover along with the existing rovers over the next few years. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. NASA's Launch Services Program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida managed the launch. NASA's Space Network provided space communication services for the launch vehicle, and the rover.

Dealing with yet another program would be a huge distraction, entail a large resource drain bringing ESA up to speed, and transferring a lot of technology to them in the process, and being asked to pay for the privileged of doing so.

No problem with the citation. I heard it on several shuttle documentaries, but the official source is http://history.nasa.gov/spacesuits.pdf.

Their reason is the same you give, a large number of people demands a need for flexibility.

Thousands of fourth- to eighth-grade students will select target areas on the lunar surface and send requests to the GRAIL MoonKAM Mission Operations Center in San Diego. Photos of the target areas will be sent back by the satellites for students to study. The MoonKAM program is led by Sally Ride, America's first woman in space. Her team at Sally Ride Science and undergraduate students at the University of California in San Diego will engage middle schools across the country in the GRAIL mission and lunar exploration. GRAIL is NASA's first planetary mission carrying instruments fully dedicated to education and public outreach.

"We have had great response from schools around the country; more than 2,500 signed up to participate so far," Ride said. "In mid-March, the first pictures of the moon will be taken by students using MoonKAM. I expect this will excite many students about possible careers in science and engineering."

Source

NASA's GRAIL mission has beamed back its first video of the far side of the moon. The imagery was taken on Jan. 19 by the MoonKAM aboard the mission's "Ebb" spacecraft.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/grail/news/grail20120201.html (Emphasis added)

Could everybody avoid posting links to articles on space.com? They never cite or link to sources and go overboard with interstitial, pop-up and video ads.

Links:

• NASA Grail mission page
• Article and video
• YouTube video

Could everybody avoid posting links to articles on space.com? They never cite or link to sources and go overboard with interstitial, pop-up and video ads.

Links:

• NASA Grail mission page
• Article and video
• YouTube video

This article from NASA suggests that muscle and bone loss would only really be a problem if you intend to go back into a higher gravity environment afterwards, and even then I don't see why a regime of exercise and vitamin supplements could not restore what is missing. Also, the only reason the muscles and bone are lost is that the body decides that they are not needed; I doubt that it would lead to death.

For someone pretending to have a grasp on statistics, you should be aware that confidence limits are the widest at the ends of a regression line, whether the fit is linear or not. It is completely spurious to look only at the ends of a regression line, in this case the last few years (in this case the independent variable is scaled in years) of any trend, especially one of 130 years and conclude that because the last 10 when taken alone do not show the same correlation as that of the entire sample there is no significant correlation. One thing scientist can not do that sophists like yourself can is to remove "the inconvenient truths" of data points so that "miraculously" your new analysis fits your preconceived notions.

In any event as noted by Hansen et al your preconceptions about both climate change and statistics are irrelevant for the reasons they indicate. The problem for deniers is that as the models become more and more accurate, there is less and less error the modelers have to "explain away" and more and more that the deniers have to "explain away". What is worse for deniers is that totally independent lines of evidence that comes from biology and other earth sciences are providing an ever increasing confirmation of the predictions by the climate modelers. The real question is not whether global warming due to carbon dioxide forcing is occurring or even whether that forcing is occurring within the error bounds predicted by a variety of different models, rather it is now how long will the fossil fuels industry will like the tobacco industry before it stay in denial before it is is forced to confront its reality by the res of society. The real question is whether it will be in time to save humanity.

And NASA and ESA are working on two more, but my understanding is that they won't be as coordinated like STEREO (they'll be rotating around the sun faster, so they won't necessarily get the 100% coverage that we currently get with STEREO):

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/sunearthsystem/main/solarprobeplus.html

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=45

(disclaimer: I work for the STEREO Science Center)

Even if all emissions stop today, the Earth will continue warming for another half-century, or so.

Certainly anthropogenic is not something to worry about today, much like running out of oil is not something to worry about today. But if you continue to procrastinate, it may come back and bite you in the ass in the long-term.

And anyways, humans are adaptable. I'm much more worried about ocean acidification.

Even if all emissions stop today, the Earth will continue warming for another half-century, or so.

Certainly anthropogenic is not something to worry about today, much like running out of oil is not something to worry about today. But if you continue to procrastinate, it may come back and bite you in the ass in the long-term.

And anyways, humans are adaptable. I'm much more worried about ocean acidification.

They were actually SHUTTLES; vehicles designed to SHUTTLE people en-masse to the giant space stations we were supposed to have by now before funding was cut, & simply to build them took OVER A DECADE to get from idea to reality, & by the time they finished they had no giant space stations to shuttle people to so they gutted the seats & called it a cargo hold.

This is so full of wrong, I don't know where to begin. The shuttle was never conceived as a passenger vehicle - it was always a truck. The earliest plans included a 60-by-15-foot cargo bay:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/ch5.htm

There were no plans to build a "giant space station" or a moon base, and consequently no need to ferry people "en-masse" to space. They didn't come up with a design for a passenger module until 1979, after shuttles had already been built.

Oh, one more thing - it's spelled "hypocrisy."

In reality, the arguments actually are all valid on their face. Everything there is factual, except the laissez-faire attitude. The problem comes from the writer(s) choosing to strip the context of each point.

I'm literally going to read it now (I chose not to when it popped up on a science blog recently), just to see how quick it is to correct (being written after the fact, it was about an hour):

It starts with Ivar Giaever, who, despite expert work in Quantum Physics and a solid background on Biophysics and coming from the country bordering the one where the discovery of global warming happend...a century ago, has chosen to ignore recorded, glacial, oceanic and tree records to declare, not that global warming is fictional, but his distrust of anthropogenic climate, due to the apparent popularity among physical, atmospheric, oceanic and glacial climatological scientists. Skepticism based on popularity is not uncommon, and you could likely pull up a couple more nominated Nobel Prize winners. His attack on the APS seems to ignore the difference between theoretical physics and real world macroscale examination. I believe it was Planck who said, "Science advances one funeral at a time."

Then there's the COv2 is not a pollutant, even though, as a relative output outside of the natural chemistry of the Earth (the effect of living creatures and other processes) it does count as a deposit which changes the chemistry of the surrounding environment, ergo, pollution.

The now over-used 10 year decrease/steady state analysis ignores the natural wave of environmental change. If you look at the larger source, search for "Global Temperature Anomaly 1880-2010," you would find that there is always a downward period, but taking the total effect of cycles, it average has always increased. Claiming the effect is related to changes in evaporation truly ignores that heating that much ocean to increase the level of evaporation is and incredible amount of energy...we use steam power for electricity...imagine how much electricity it would take to move the increased precipitation as just water from one side of a continent to the other.

To hit on "ClimateGate" is quite humorous within itsown context. As those who know what the supposed terrifying things said were, it's great to poke fun at those attacking it. First, it's a group of people who were amazed that faulty meta-research was actually included in the IPCC assessment; then, the, "mathematical trick," that they used was not only a justifiable, "We know the energy is there since no satellites have shown it disappearing," logic, but that mathematical trick CAME FROM THE PERSON WHO SUBMITTED THE FAULTY META-RESEARCH. It's one of those moments that only look bad out of context, and that's how denialists want the public to see it.

Also, recently explicitly justified: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-029

The IPCC's own projections were, in part, based on the larger than average spike during the 80's, possibly assuming the aforementioned wave-effect might have become reduced. Calling the first set of projections embarrassing is, to say the least, childish, and suggesting it was alarmest ignores how frightening the 80's spike was then perceived. To dismiss extreme weather's effect as a mitigator ignores the point of the previous paragraph.

While I've already covered carbon dioxide as a definition of pollution, the unique mention of a benefit to plants have ignored recent studies that plant have been decreasing their stomataphors in count and opening period in areas of higher COv2 concentrations, thus indicating and upper-bound limit to COv2's usefulness to plants.

Next, skimming past the unidentified fields of study, unidentified quantity, unconfirmable scientists, we have Dr. de Freitas, who is another well recognised name to those aware of the field. He's had some interesting logic. One: Human beings didn't use significant amounts of fossil

NASA and NOAA fly the U2 under the name of ER-2 out of Dryden and the Mojave. Oddly enough they are doing the real research that was the originally disclosed cover mission of the U2. Life imitates propaganda. More info: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-046-DFRC.html

We do. in addition to SDO, in inclined geosync orbit, we have two spacecraft in heliocentric orbits somewhat ahead of and somewhat behind the Earth. They're called STEREO.

http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/where.shtml

- Morty [Posting AC because I've spent mod points.]

Here are the Level 1 System Requirements for MER.
http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstream/2014/37720/1/05-0470.pdf

Coolest Mars Probe Ever is now enroute: Mars Space Laboratory

It has, like, lasers and neutron beams, dude!!!

http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/618483main_earth1600_946-710.jpg

Was just looking at the 'Set as Wallpaper' instructions And people say Mac's are easy to use

Huh?

MAC OS X: Right-click on the image and click 'Use image as Desktop picture'

from http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco/multimedia/wallpaper.html