Slashdot Mirror

600 light years...

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepscicon-briefing.html

Disclaimer: I do experimental searches for dark matter for a living, so I may be biased in my judgement of these types of papers that crop up so often. There was a similar paper a few weeks ago from someone claiming that quantum vacuum polarization could account for dark matter PhysOrg link.

The issue with both of these explanations, is that they only address galactic rotation curves. Those are among the first and easiest to explain indications of the need for something like dark matter, but are not the strongest by a long shot. For instance, this guy's explanation can't explain things like the famous Bullet cluster , nor can they explain the evolution of structure formation or the spectrum of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background which, in the field, are considered much stronger constraints.

The Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory of cosmology fits all of the astrophysical measurements reasonably well, and has a nice tie-in to supersymmetric particle physics, which is one of the current leading theories. No one in the field will take any new theory seriously until it can reproduce ALL the phenomena at least as well as the current model (which of course is exactly how the scientific process is supposed to work!)

Say we find only 100 "habitable" planets...

Considering how very small the patch of sky Kepler is watching actually is, if we find 100 "habitable" planets in it, and then extrapolate that across the rest of the sky, the number of potential habitable planets would be huge. Of course, right now there are only around 54 or so habitable zone candidates, out of 1000 "planet" candidates, and all of them are still waiting for confirmation. Still, if even half of those are valid, then that indicates a massive number of qualifying planets in the galaxy.

For the interested, here's a link to a NASA graphic of Kepler's search zone:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/multimedia/images/kepler-target-in-the-milkyway.html

Scientists don't yet know if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like planets.

Sure they do! Just look at the picture right next to the article! Man, who gets paid to Photoshop these spheres in front of bits of nebulae all day? That must be an interesting job.

Oh. God.

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/JLEX/program.js

My favorite part is

                eval(timeperiod+"()");

The interface is clunky and 1997ish but hey.. that's your government at work!

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/JLEX/JLEX-NA.html

As opposed to posting a URL that can't be clicked on? That's more like 1987ish.

At lest the PFD linked in the article has UT as well as a visibly map,

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/OHfigures/OH2011-Fig06.pdf

Writing -0700 (or whatever) would be better than some acronym that's more-or-less meaningless to anyone outside North America. I think New York is usually 5 hours behind here, but has different DST begin/end times, and I can never remember if "PST" is another two, three or four hours further west.

This page uses UTC: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/OH2011.html#LE2011Dec10T

Penumbral Eclipse Begins: 11:33:32 UT
Partial Eclipse Begins: 12:45:42 UT
Total Eclipse Begins: 14:06:16 UT
Greatest Eclipse: 14:31:49 UT
Total Eclipse Ends: 14:57:24 UT
Partial Eclipse Ends: 16:17:58 UT
Penumbral Eclipse Ends: 17:30:00 UT

Sunset here will be at 15:52... if it's not cloudy, it's probably worth having a look.

There is a lunar eclipse every 29.53059 days (29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, 2.8 seconds). It's just not always visible from the Earth's surface. The complete calendar for the next decade is here:
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/LEdecade/LEdecade2011.html
so you may plan ahead.

That was 25 years ago. Still hacking, and assuming NPPdoesn't fall over, will be gainfully employed for the foreseeable future (five years?).

I did have one advantage - I hacked Lisp all through school and for several years afterwards, so mainstream tools didn't really catch up until about the turn of the millennium.

This seems to be a pretty good description of the Voyager telecom system. Based on this, the X-band transmitter provides 18 watts to the high-gain antenna, which has a gain of 48 dB, for an effective radiated power of just over 18 * 10^(48/10) = 1.1 megawatts. (At least at launch; I assume the output power will have fallen somewhat over the intervening decades, as the RTG output falls and RF components age.)

This sounds like a healthy amount of power, and it is, but keep in mind that antenna gain comes easy at X-band (8 GHz), and such ERP levels are common in terrestrial point-to-point microwave links. Also keep in mind that the half-power beamwidth of the high-gain antenna is only 0.5 degrees, so any alien not in that narrow beam would hear substantially nothing.

Also, to answer your direct question, the frequencies and beam shapes are different, and one has to consider the shielding effects of the ionosphere vs. frequency, but just to compare (US regulations, YMMV): AM broadcast stations (~1 MHz) are usually limited to 10 kW with more-or-less 0 dB gain antennas, for an ERP of 10 kW; but UHF TV stations (~500 MHz) may have an ERP of up to 5 MW.

Of course, there are a zillion broadcast stations, all transmitting non-coherently (some would say incoherently), but only two Voyagers, so that would have to be taken into account, too.

The distance at which the Voyagers are still collecting and transmitting useful data back to Earth, is mind boggling.
Over a light day away!

Back in 1989, when Voyager 2 flew past Neptune, the JPL command center was probably dismantled and refitted for the next glamor project, while the long final phase of the Voyager mission was relocated to a much tinier space, probably the basement, with a couple of old-school, hardcore Voyager geeks down there, living on Doritos, pizza and Usenet, a rickety AC rattling and slowly dripping water over a puddle, unfixed for months because the Maintenance Department is constantly needed up at Voyager's old stomping ground, kept immaculate for the Galileo probe people, or Cassini, or the Mars Rovers, whatever the Flavor Of The Lustrum was / is.

Nice and quiet down there among the rusted ceiling pipes and aged Crays, though. They didn't bother nobody, nobody bothered them. Beer could be smuggled to work and no one would notice, everybody upstairs would be swooning over Neil DeGrasse Tyson filming a segment on Pluto and the Horizons mission. Only time anybody saw the strange Voyager geeks, was when they went up to the ground floor vending machines, as the supply guy always forgot to restock the one in the JPL basement, forgot there was one in the basement.

Little did anybody know (except for these guys) that the Voyagers were like an aging boxer with one good fight left in them, very low bitrate coupled with an ultra-weak signal perhaps, but with still one final, grand potential payoff - a peek at the outside, which may end up being the longest lasting legacy of all.

Look at it now bitches, it's on the other side of the heliopause!

Oh, I don't know... electrostatic ion propulsion is already proven to be more efficient than ordinary chemical propulsion (once you get out of the gravity well).

As long as you have fuel, you'll keep accelerating, albeit at a very small rate. It might take ten or twenty years, but I reckon that if an ESI probe was launched tomorrow it'd overtake Voyager and still have propellant to go faster.

The bonus is with computer technology; that while it's gotten thousands of times faster in practically every respect, it's also gotten a lot smaller - a non-hardened computer package these days weighs no more than 3lb, with terrestrial ruggedised coming in at little more. The advantage of this is obvious: with the single biggest non-fuel component of the spacecraft now the size of a paperback, you have far less mass to push.

Of course, you don't need a screen or a keyboard in deep space, so cut the weight in half and you've got something a smidge lighter than the several hundred pounds of GE custom machine that went up with Voyager, that has its own battery, that pulls about ten Watts rather than over a hundred, that uses solid state storage, and in most cases can automagically govern its own power load (this would be why the later Shuttle missions used self-contained laptops rather than a room full of mathematicians and radio that meant data moved at the speed of speech) - I've metered my netbook off the line and found it runs on between 3-35W, averaging 11, including the screen on minimum brightness.

That said, you do need to protect the computer against hard radiation. That will obviously push the weight up, but not so much as to make it unmanageable. A couple or three pounds of lead and a steel cage to protect against EMI/RFI I think is all that is needed. The major part of the probe is then going to be propulsion systems and fuel, and the science package.

The Voyager computers are awesome too. How many other 18-bit word systems are actively maintained today?

I'd love to see the source code, though I'm sure it's terribly boring.

The Voyager computers are awesome too. How many other 18-bit word systems are actively maintained today?

I'd love to see the source code, though I'm sure it's terribly boring.

Well, actually, they really can, but they better don't hold their breath!

A good point of caution, but doesn't prove anything in of itself. When you discover the atom, everything looks like its made of atoms Oh wait, most things actually are! Sometimes that happens.

Actually, virtually nothing is made of atoms. Sorry about that.

I loved hypercard, and am sad that it is gone, especially as an educator. It's sad that most student's interaction with computers these days is web surfing, word and powerpoint. Some people have mentioned the failures of hypercard like software, and I don't think that's fair. When I tried supercard it felt like it was trying to clone hypercard... just as it was years ago, not accounting for advancements in the world.

The thing that feels most like hypercard to me today is game development engines, like Unity3D. Basing navigation around hyperlinking is downplayed (as it is everywhere these days) but the idea that you can have graphic and text elements, in 2D or 3D, and then interactions facilitated through simple scripting (use javascript, C# or Boo) makes it feel like the spiritual successor to hypercard. NASA has done some awesome stuff using Unity. I think Unity might be missing out by calling it a game engine--it can do much more.

Air pollution is much better in the developed world than it was in the 50s, all paid for by the people who burn fossil fuels.

I.e., the pollution emitters used inequitable free trade to relocate to China and India. And we can't even say "Well, at least it isn't here!" 'cuz apparently the guy who was supposed to tell the wind to stop blowing got pink-slipped in the rush to offshore jobs.

Air Pollution Is Much Better in the Developed World Than It Was in the 50s", the movie.

I was going to mod you down, but I think that it is far more important to refute your stuff instead. You mention the science at the ISS. Well, you are somewhat right. It is not what we wanted. In particular, we were supposed to install CAM which the neo-cons killed (oddly, they have killed numerous useful items over and over and over). Centrifuge Accommodation module would have allowed us to study biology at various G's. In particular, it would have allowed us to understand cell sheeting, major facets of embryology, and simply find out if we CAN survive on the moon or mars. However, that does not mean that we have lost out. We have done large amounts of science and engineering from our manned space program that is translated into normal every usage. For example, the whole start on cordless tools comes from NASA. They pushed that in Apollo, but esp. pushed for the ISS. They were expensive back then. Real expensive. But due to engineering this for NASA, it was finally made to work and brought down in size. It was the push for ISS that made these truly workable. Now, we have surgical robotic arms. Who pushed this originally? NASA. These days, DARPA and other groups push this, but it was NASA that really started that. For what? ISS. Did you like the recent listeria outbreak? Well, normally, a much bigger one is salmonella. Thankfully, that is about to come to an end. A pretty wicked bug was developed at ISS to which a vaccine is forthcoming. Another is the recent Robonaut 2. It enjoys a much greater dexterity than other robots except perhaps ASIMO. And all of this is part of what goes on there. There are other things happening up there.

ISS's greatest use is what is in danger right now. That is, it creates a whole new PRIVATE industry. By having the ISS up there, and NASA helping get our private launch systems off the ground, they create a new industry. What is missing is that to pull off 2 or more human rated launch systems, we NEED a higher launch rate. To get that, we need multiple destinations. What NASA WAS trying to do, was help move Bigelow along in putting up their private space station. You know, that inflatable space station (transhab) that was designed mostly by NASA and then killed by the neo-cons. Bigelow bought it and is working to put it up, but he needs multiple cheap human launchers, ASAP. And SLS is absolutely not it. However, the house of reps, controlled by republicans (nee more neo-cons) are hard at work to destroy private space and push SLS. They have tried to shoot down private space money from 850 million to 350 million. The senate was able to restore it back to 500 million.

Now, as to He3, that is not going to do it. To go there to mine it alone is total BS. HOWEVER, multiple companies want to go to the moon WITH HUMANS TO MINE. Basically, once a small set-up is done, it is much cheaper to mine water from the moon and send it to LEO, then it is send water, H2, LOX to LEO from earth. So, anything else that we mine from there, is PURE GRAVY. And yes,at that time, it includes He3. It also includes a number of elements that would be useful for other items. Now, what will happen when we develop this mining capability? Do you really think that it will be developed for a man to use a pick axe in? Nope. We will no doubt develop new robotics to handle this. At first, it will be scraping the surface, But we will move to digging. And where will that tech go? Into use here. One that I can see is development of mining for the oceans. Both deep ocean mining and the space work will be similar.

To claim that space must be either manned or robotics is stupid and foolish. What is even worse, is the idea that we are close to being able to survive off here. Hawkins and other are correct in saying that we NEED to diversify and spread our in the solar system. Otherwise, we will end up like the dinosaurs. That is why we need to send ppl on a one-way mission to mars. The best way, to accomplish this is to lower t

And plants with outdated designs.

Bring on the new designs.

Governments that believe nuclear power plants never need to evolve will eventually pay the price.

Maybe someone should listen to the U.S. Navy:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/45608main_NNBE_Progress_Report2_7-15-03.pdf

...and then it runs over the Martian Bunny.

Having said that, although this page makes reference to "distillation", their actual description of the pee processing doesn't : "The first step is a filter that removes particles and debris. Then the water passes through the "multi-filtration beds," which contain substances that remove organic and inorganic impurities. And finally, the "catalytic oxidation reactor" removes volatile organic compounds and kills bacteria and viruses." Which sounds like activated charcoal and (probably) ozonolysis to zap all the organics. However, later the page says "the water recycling systems produce a small amount of unusable brine" ; which does sound like a reverse osmosis system.

Hmmm, not clear what they're actually doing.

"Because if what we've found so far is at least a somewhat representative sample, the overwhelming majority of planets tend to be either gas giants, frozen balls of rock and ice, or roasted balls of rock and lava. You have to be terribly imaginative to see life coming up on worlds like that."

There are plenty of life forms that live in unusual environments right here on this planet. Geothermal vent ecosystems for example:

Deep-sea bacteria form the base of a varied food chain that includes shrimp, tubeworms, clams, fish, crabs, and octopi. All of these animals must be adapted to endure the extreme environment of the vents -- complete darkness; water temperatures ranging from 2C (in ambient seawater) to about 400C (at the vent openings); pressures hundreds of times that at sea level; and high concentrations of sulfides and other noxious chemicals.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast13apr_1/
There are also bacteria that live in sulphuric acid in caves.
http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/planet-earth/guide/caves.html
It isn't unreasonable to think that life may have evolved in unusual environments elsewhere.

NASA Langley Research Center charges 2% to 8% of the profits from licensing their technology. Where do you get free? My source is NASA.

Nice job missing my point. Miami is a place that experiences relatively frequent hurricanes, but if you landed a probe there and gathered data from January 1, 1970 through January 1, 1990, I don't think, in 20 years of data collection, that you would have ever witnessed a single 80+mph wind event.

Yes, they also used data gathered from orbit and other sources, but, obviously, their methods were flawed in some way - perhaps relying too much on the only two surface probes they had was a part of the problem?

As far as not seeing any hurricanes from orbit, I seem to recall periodic planetwide dust storms on Mars - did the researchers feel that these were not enough to obscure their observations?

If anyone's actually interested in the real answer to this, the wind tunnel they used appears to be called MARSWIT and to compensate for gravitational differences they use walnut shell dust among other particles as their working soil. To fully correct for gravity all you have to do is match the ratio of the air density to the particle density. Since rock is about 5 times denser than wood but Earth air is about 20 times denser than Martian air, they don't seem to be fully compensated - but perhaps at 80 mph equivalent winds the important accelerations are all much larger than 4m/s (g on Mars) and so the difference in gravitational effects isn't that important.

If anyone's actually interested in the real answer to this, the wind tunnel they used appears to be called MARSWIT and to compensate for gravitational differences they use walnut shell dust among other particles as their working soil. To fully correct for gravity all you have to do is match the ratio of the air density to the particle density. Since rock is about 5 times denser than wood but Earth air is about 20 times denser than Martian air, they don't seem to be fully compensated - but perhaps at 80 mph equivalent winds the important accelerations are all much larger than 4m/s (g on Mars) and so the difference in gravitational effects isn't that important.

The new suits are actually already designed, or at least test models have been produced and are being tested.

They have been show on the basic science channels.

Basically the very back part can be opened up and is attached to the moon buggy, you crawl in though the back of the suit and then seal it.

http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/lunar_architecture.html

Goddamn fucking twilight, searching for new moon suit is not pulling up relevant images.

• exhibit A
• exhibit B

2004 - limited to Alaska. Now extending south.

Something else which may be of interest/

Our local astronomy club was fortunate enough to have Brian Day, Citizen Science Lead and Education/Public Outreach (E/PO) Specialist at the NASA Lunar Science Institute. First time (ever) there are 5 satellites orbiting the Moon, mapping and studying it in great detail (you can even particiapte here) - Citizen astronomers wanted!

While going to Mars may be sexy, in a sci-fi sort of inspired way, the Moon is right next door and far easier to get to and back from.

Interesting. First I've heard of this, it's called the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity Rover). Here's the official site and a nice animation.

I agree, the landing sequence looks complex, but maybe the thin atmosphere of Mars makes rockets more reliable than parachutes. Also, it carries a radioisotope power source, so hopefully the dust problem will be avoided this time.

How about NASA?

Yet, everybody agrees that earth has been cooling down since around 2000.

No, only a couple of crackpots agree on that. Here's a link of global temperature anomalies in tabular format:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.txt

Average for 2000-2009 was +0.52
Average for 1990-1999 was +0.31
Average for 1980-1989 was +0.18

Doesn't look like it's getting colder, especially if you consider that every single year since 2000 has been warmer than the 1990-1999 average.

Actually, you can get science out of making a crater. Deep Impact and LCROSS performed admirably. Of course it helped that we planned for those to impact.

Actually, you can get science out of making a crater. Deep Impact and LCROSS performed admirably. Of course it helped that we planned for those to impact.

9/10ths of the moons orbit according to this informative video from Jet Propulsion Labs

Appeal to authority works in the other direction too, you know. Especially when the source in question was just reporting on the release as published by NASA.

Yeah, whatever. NASA's just part of the leftist lamestream media, amirite?

They didn't simulate zero-g. A zero-gravity environment results in an average 1% loss of Bone Mineral Density per month (PDF) and muscle atrophy; however, these detrimental effects on the body might be countered by putting astronauts in a centrifuge for some time each day. We have seen plenty of astronauts experience extended periods of time in zero-g and in isolation though. The record for the longest space flight is held by Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days traveling 300,765,000 km orbiting the Earth on the Mir space station and who said his experience showed that “it is possible to preserve your physical and psychological health throughout a mission similar in length to a flight to Mars and back.”

Stuff that mattered last week

Well, if you are so jaded, go to the Gateway to Astronaut Photography and look at all the cool time lapse pictures of earth.

If that doesn't impress, well, sucks to be you.

I did a search for "asteroid mining" at http://www.sti.nasa.gov/ and below are couple documents. I remember seeing in a 1979 STAR abstract journal documents titled "asteriod retrieval" but when I searched for that sti site I saw a lot of non-pertaining listings. Probably a bit too late to capture this month's flyby unless the USAF has a secret spacecraft ready to fly (yeah the old plot used in movies since the 1969 "Marooned").

Extraterrestrial materials processing and construction
Online Source: Click to View PDF File [PDF Size: 14.6 MB]
http://hdl.handle.net/2060/19790021033
Author: Criswell, D. R.
Abstract: Applications of available terrestrial skills to the gathering of lunar materials and the processing
Publication Year: 1978
Report/Patent Number: NASA-CR-158870, REPT-713-488-5200

Catastrophic Events and Mass Extinctions: Impacts and Beyond
Online Source: Click to View PDF File [PDF Size: 21.2 MB]
http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20010007049
Abstract: This volume contains extended abstracts that have been accepted for presentation at the conference
Publication Year: 2000
Report/Patent Number: LPI-Contrib-1053

I have a counterpoint:

http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/J2X/posts/post_1297869180794.html

this is a duct for the J2-X rocket engine, produced using Direct Metal Laser Sintering (3D printed metal, in other words). it has to operate at insane temperatures and pressures... and it does, perfectly.

There have been several known instances of rocks of non-trivial size passing closer to the earth than the geostationary sats, and in some cases inside the GPS sat constellation.

This one missed us by 1 Earth radius.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_ca?type=NEO&hmax=all&sort=dist&sdir=ASC&tlim=past&dmax=5LD&max_rows=500&action=Display+Table&show=1

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news142.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_asteroids#Asteroids

There have been several known instances of rocks of non-trivial size passing closer to the earth than the geostationary sats, and in some cases inside the GPS sat constellation.

This one missed us by 1 Earth radius.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_ca?type=NEO&hmax=all&sort=dist&sdir=ASC&tlim=past&dmax=5LD&max_rows=500&action=Display+Table&show=1

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news142.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_asteroids#Asteroids

You seem to know the subject:

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/541440main_2005_YU55_approach.gif

Why is it perpendicular to Earth's orbit in that diagram?

Does not look this way in

http://www.vorchester.com/vnews/images/2005YU55Orbit.jpg

There was new data this year indicating subsurface water ice from two synthetic radars (SHARAD and MARSIS at different frequencies on two different landers).
They have estimates for the volume and placement of the ice as well.
http://www.jsg.utexas.edu/news/feats/2010/mars_glaciers.html

An original finding from 2002 based on a single Gamma Ray Spectrometer instrument showed excess Hydrogen...
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2002/28may_marsice/

And now even more extensive results from long term surface studies... I find the recent subsurface radar measurements most compelling.

I'm wondering what the margin of error is on this calculation?

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_ca?type=NEO&hmax=all&sort=date&sdir=ASC&tlim=recent_future&dmax=5LD&max_rows=0&action=Display+Table&show=1

The N-sigma for 2005 YU55 is 31,700, which means that the maximum error is 31,700 times smaller than the distance between the Earth and the object at its nearest point or an error so small as to be insignificant.

The JPL Small-Body Database Browser has an interactive approximation of the orbit (requires Java for the applet).

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/images/2005_YU55_approach_movie.gif