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little info about planetary society :)

"The Planetary Society was founded in 1980 by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman to encourage the exploration of our solar system and the search for extraterrestrial life.

The Society is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, funded by dues and donations from individuals around the world. With more than 100,000 members from over 140 countries, we are the largest space interest group on Earth. Membership is open to all people interested in our mission."

so go to their site and apply for a membership. it costs only 40$ (30$ for students) for us in europe. its even cheaper for north americans. most of the money goes to various space related projects. as a member you will also recieve their magazine planetary report which is really educational and entertaining to read.

Although photons do carry the electropmagnetic force, light is made up of randomly polarized photons and therefore cannot provide propulsive force. Also, since photons have no mass, they cannot have momentum, because momentum=mass*velocity^2 Only particles with mass can propel a solar sail.

Hmmm...you might want to explain that to the folks over at the Interplanetary Society before they send up another one of these things, as they seem to have different ideas:

3. How does a solar sail work?
When the light from the Sun hits the surface of the solar sail, the energy, or momentum, of photons (light particles) is transferred to the sail - as the light is reflected away, it gives the sail a slight "push." The force is controlled by the angle of the sail with respect to the Sun, adding to or subtracting from the orbital velocity.

Although photons do carry the electropmagnetic force, light is made up of randomly polarized photons and therefore cannot provide propulsive force. Also, since photons have no mass, they cannot have momentum, because momentum=mass*velocity^2 Only particles with mass can propel a solar sail.

Hmmm...you might want to explain that to the folks over at the Interplanetary Society before they send up another one of these things, as they seem to have different ideas:

3. How does a solar sail work?
When the light from the Sun hits the surface of the solar sail, the energy, or momentum, of photons (light particles) is transferred to the sail - as the light is reflected away, it gives the sail a slight "push." The force is controlled by the angle of the sail with respect to the Sun, adding to or subtracting from the orbital velocity.

Cost of Solar Sails - $4,000,000;
Cost of clean up mission - $never revealed;
Trusting Russian Space Technology - WTF?

The Planetary Society Page
More info on Solar Sails

It's not hard to find a proffesor who will whore himself to get some headlines, and subsequently grant money. Keep in mind that the reactor on cassinni is nothing like a land borne reactor. Check out this description and defense of the device: Hot topics: Cassini Power

Don Negro

And - most of these folks aren't even paying the death tax. They can afford a $1M/y accountant to structure their affairs so that they don't pay a cent.

If Warren Buffett and the other signatories believe it's moral to pay half their net worth to Uncle Sam when they die, they will retain every right to do so whether the death tax is repealed or not -- the IRS will be happy to accept a check from their estates.

As for me and my house, we'd prefer to keep what we managed to purchase (with after-tax dollars, no less!) during our lives, and pass those assets down to our heirs.

For those who don't have kids and don't want any - given the probability that you'll outlive your parents... have you considered naming the EFF or FSF as beneficiaries?

Or to get us back on topic -- how about The Planetary Society?

People always forget about those other two guys... kinda like Apollo 11. Everyone remembers Neil Armstrong, some people remember Buzz Aldrin (probably because he has a cool name), but who remembers Michael Collins?

It had to be redesigned and sent up with the antenna folded up so they could fit it in the space shuttle cargo bay. The reason it had to go up in the space shuttle even after Challenger was because of political interference where people wanted the shuttle to be used for some high profile missions to revive it a bit from the Challenger blowing up in 1986.

Ummmm... I think you've gotten confused, somehow. Galileo was always intended to be launched by Shuttle. The launch, originally intended for 1982, slipped gradually to May of 1986 through a combination of problems, some of which were Shuttle's own delays (remember how late the first Shuttle actually flew?); the mission was supposed to be orbited with a Shuttle-specific version of the LOX/LH Centaur transstage (the Shuttle-Centaur's funding problems caused some of the delay, too). Of course, in late January 1986 Challenger exploded, so Galileo was temporarily grounded for lack of a launch vehicle.

The only real redesign that happened was when Shuttle-Centaur was finally cancelled, as being too dangerous to launch with Shuttle (liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen in your payload bay is apparently more dangerous than in your fuel tanks... :p ). The transstage was replaced with the much-smaller Inertial Upper Stage, so the flight plan was changed to a six-year multiple-gravity-whip trajectory through the inner solar system, instead of the orignal two-year direct flight. And during the three-year layoff waiting for Shuttle to fly again, Galileo was shipped from Cape Canaveral to JPL in California and back again, spending some time in storage in the interim. It's believed that the main antenna lost some critical lubricant during this unplanned shipping and storage, and this loss caused etching of the standoff pins and sockets, so the the antenna failed to completely unfurl.

So the mission was always intended to fly on Shuttle -- and Shuttle's problems indirectly precipitated the antenna failure. You're correct in that political interference was the reason the mission was to fly on Shuttle -- but it was NASA who interferred, because they wanted Shuttle to carry all the payloads, instead of using expendable launchers (even when they'd have been more suitable). And once designed and built, it would have been very hard to convert Galileo for a Titan IV launch (for example) -- it was built to interface with the Shuttle payload bay, not a Titan payload fairing.

Unfortunately, it was NASA's fault, pretty much entirely... even though the failure was incidental to everything else which went on. Sad, but true. (I regularly work with some of these guys, and believe me, they feel as bad about it as anyone else -- it's the upper management that's cross-threaded in that org.)

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canadian space agency

isnt canadian space agency member of esa ?
on esa's jobs page it says Please note that applications are only considered from nationals of one of the following States: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Canada.



btw if you want to support space exploration go and register yourself at planetary.org. here is the list of the projects their are supporting right now:
Mars Exploration - the Mars Microphone
Rover Technology
A 2001 Mars Odyssey: The Student NanoExperiment Challenge
Planetfest[tm]
Red Rover, Red Rover[tm] & Red Rover Goes to Mars[tm]
The Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Near-Earth Objects Research and Missions

Here are more Internet resources on this topic:

Check out NASA's webpage about the mission:
Pluto-Kuiper Express Homepage

The Planetary Society is organizing a campaign to make sure the mission doesn't get cancelled:
Planeta ry Society News Release

Here are other news sites covering the story:
CNN Space
MSNBC
SpaceViews

And, of course, my own coverage at Universe Today.

Fraser Cain

1)transmitted beams of visible light (ie. lasers) can be finer than beams of radio waves due to the higher gain of optical telescopes. I suppose this means that the signal can be more concentrated and thus brighter and more easily detected.

2)visible light doesn't disperse as much as radio waves. This also increases the intensity of the signal.

3)the capabilities of radio transmitters has hit a brick wall while optical lasers continue to increase in power. This is assuming that an alien race is similarly limited as to the power of their radio transmitters. All this leads us onto the question of how effective signals sent with visible light are. The answer is very. The article says that with our current technology, we can send laser transmitions that would outshine the background light from our sun by 5000 times. So assuming that an alien civilisation has more powerful lasers than us, we should easily be able to detect any signals they send in our direction.

Also, the equipment needed for an optical SETI search is very simple. All it involves is a pair of photon-detectors. Current optical SETI equipment works on the premise that any optical signals from alien civilisations will be sent in pulses. I haven't had time to purse the explanation on how the detector works so I can't tell you yet. Perhaps someone else with access to the latest Planetary Report could help out here.

The first option is public funding. This can take several forms, all of which have one thing in common: no one reaps profit from the research, except the beneficiaries of its application. When you sit at home and write freeware or participate in an open-source project, you are publicly funding research in a sense. The project you are participating in costs money, even if you don't shell out a dime, because you are spending time that you could instead be spending holding down a second (or first) job.

A second type of public funding is charitable funding, from nonprofit foundations. Often, however, this money comes with strings attached. Researchers looking at aging might get gobs of cash from nonprofit foundations funded by the geriatric, but with the understanding that the conclusions will help improve some condition or point in a certain direction. In fact, many foundations that fund research select who to fund based on each project's previous results. That means a researcher trying to prove the mental inferiority of blacks (I'm thinking of J. Philippe Rushton here) is likely to get funding from a foundation with a history of racism (as he did). Researchers trying to prove that there is a genetic cause for homosexuality will get funded by those with a vested interest in that debate. An organization trying to get funding to search for life beyond Earth will get funding from a group that belives life is out there. But some dude who wants to figure out what makes a dead frog's legs twitch will probably never find a Deceased Paroxysm Society to fund his work. (This thought consciously echoes jd's thoughtful post.)

That second type of public funding is, as you might imagine, a little tainted; you are expected to show results for your money. Occasionally, there are some foundations that will fund research without considering results necessary, but these organizations are rare - and for an understandable reason: It is not natural for people to give without expecting something in return. A few very altruistic groups will do so, but it is an unusual trait. Even the patrons and sponsors of history's greatest scientists, like the Medicis who poured rivers of cash into the coffers of Florentine researchers and artists, got paid back in a currency they highly valued: social prestige. What could be snazzier than letting the world know that you've got crazy ol' Leonardo downstairs writing backwards and drawing flying machines?

Our natural reticence for giving without expecting to receive is the reason for the third type of public funding: taxes. Taxes are a form of coercion, but often a forgiveable one. We all pay for things that will benefit all of us, or at least many of us. The mail and the military and Medicare.

But government - this should surprise no one - is not constituted of impartial wise men who are unfallible judges of the public good. Funding for research projects is the result of a treacherous process of application, rejection and (frankly) supplication. (Some of us have to use a similar process to get a date.)

The scientific projects that government chooses to fund are very selectively chosen, since government has limited funds. (It is good that government has limited funds, since that means we have kept more of our own money.) So the government will fund research that improves our collective national security - the Manhattan Project, the current missile defense projects, and even DARPANET all come to mind. The government will also fund research that improves the general welfare of the population - hence, the Genome Project and the work of the CDC. Some projects have switched between those two categories: the race to space was well-funded at first because it served national security interests; today, it only gets money because NASA points out the many mundane benefits of our space endeavors.

Do we really want government to do much more than that? Is is wise for us to allow government the power to fund whichever projects it wishes? Hasn't the long and sorry history of government abuse shown us that we should remove power from the hands of government whenever possible? And isn't this especially true in the arena of science and technology, because progress in those fields yield inordinate power - which government cannot be trusted to safeguard? Government's history of using new technologies to preserve and entrench its own power has led James Burke (among others) to describe the Internet's creation as fortuitous and accidental.

Government's appropriate role is to perform those tasks that we cannot perform ourselves. And as the innovations of private industry in the last century have shown, each day there are fewer things we cannot do ourselves; in many regards our need for government is diminishing.

And indeed, none of the three types of public funding I described above work well. Personal, sacrificial public funding leaves you with no food on your table. (Hence the completely understandable buyouts of Slashdot and l0pht.) Funding from foundations is too rare, and often tainted by bias. And government funding - which has admittedly led to many of our greatest scientific and technological triumphs - lends itself to abuse, so it should be spared as often as possible.

What about private funding, then? Strident private corporations often have the courage to tread where public foundations cannot - and for an obvious reason: while a foundation cannot hope to make serious profit from the research it funds, privately funded research can make some moolah. An side benefit of private research, then, is that it acts as a creator of wealth. If you need evidence of the positive effects of privately-funded research, all you need do is look around you. For that matter, look right in front of you: affordable and usable computers are preponderant today only because of the competition fostered by private innovation.

The last line of the article above clucks that we should despair if "science, and if biology in particular, became a victim of new monopolies." Quite right: but corporations are not all monopolies . That's one place where government's rod should not be spared; it should aggressively act to increase competition by refusing to suffer a monopolized marketplace.

We needn't sob when some inventor or innovator "caves in" to the "profit motive." We should cheer him on, since it means he has developed an idea which intrigues people enough that they are willing to pay for it. (And more importantly, he can afford to feed himself.)

I'd like to respond to a few arguments made by others in previous postings. First, Idrach wrote that "We know that proper scientific research can be done with free software - Seti At Home." Well that's simply not true; while the software is free on our end, it was created by the hard work of programmers who got paid, and their paychecks came from somewhere. (I already wrote about Seti above.)

zyqqh wrote that he would like to see "the free-market philosophy be limited when it comes to pursuit of knowledge. As long as universities prosper, we will see good research, which doesn't get hogged by some corporation, and which remains in the public domain for the good of mankind." Well, you have very little to worry about, because most universities are corporations and businesses funded by the cash flow of undergrad tuition and endowments paid for by benefactors. But even so, is it better to keep knowledge hermetically sealed in institutions of higher learning? Isn't it better to release that knowledge into the frothy and unpredictable arena of profiteering savages - who will fight over it and make it useful? Imagine if Google (or any of the other Internet start-ups that began in schools) had remained the profitless property of the universities that birthed them. What reason would Stanford have to continue operating Google after the first few years? But transition it into the marketplace, and it will be available for longer, and will be forced to improve.

I've already responded to a number of the assertions in vlax's well-considered post, I'd just like to say a little more. First, it is false that science can't function in secret. Why do you say that? Even publicly funded research can happen in secret, like the Manhattan Project and any number of government endeavors of which we only hear snippets. As for the dig at Hawking, Gould and others getting rich from their research (or rather, its popularization), so what? Good for them. I don't see how their money decreases the legitimacy of their work. I may have missed your point.

Finally, I'd like to back-track a little bit. Despite everything I said, there are still instances where public funding is wholly appropriate. I strongly believe government funding should continue to go to projects which we cannot ourselves do - which is why I am disturbed by the current lack of interest in the space program. What's more, I believe that a mix of private and public funding has great potential, especially in the spectacular race to complete mapping the three billion human gene sequences.

And I am also extremely disturbed by the ability of companies to turn bits and pieces of nature into proprietary information. Not just Celera (as was mentioned in the parent article), but Human Genome Sciences, Incyte and others are applying for patents on genes.

This is an echo of the same problem facing those involved in the copyright debate today: we have to strike a balance between protecting the public's right to have innovation and competition, and protecting the companies' right to make a buck off their work. There are no easy solutions here, except perhaps offering a special class of short-term patents that expire after a set number of years, allowing companies to deservedly profit from their work and investment.

The reckless granting of patents and copyrights, and the occasional monopolistic corporation, must not mislead us into believing corporate science is evil. Public funding is sparse, and occasionally dangerous. Far better to get our money from the deep pockets of investors willing to take a risk than to suckle at the teat of a possibly pernicious government.

I am interested in hearing your thoughts.

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

In my disgustingly selfish opinion, the flag looks horrible. The Planetary Society had a design for a Martian flag many years ago and it looked really great. (I don't know if it's somewhere around their pages) It was reddish-ocra coloured and had a symbolic planet from which an arrow darted into upper right. It had mucho symbolism: a stepping board for future exploration (the arrow), the colourings and also the arrow-thing reminds one of the ancient symbol of Mars as a deity of war (due to the red colour - blood) etc.

The RGB-mockup is ugly, why couldn't they go with the TPS version instead, or at least some sort of more intelligent colouring than three colours which are complement to each other. Well... it's my subjective opinion.

If they can deliver the flag there along with humans in my lifetime then maybe I'll change my mind. But we should really go to the Moon first... oh hell, I won't get started about THAT.

Hey guys!!

Check out the Planetary Society's website. They have tons of info on the Mars Polar Lander and other revelant topics. They also have their Planetfest convention today and tommorow and there are lots of interesting video streams and pages.

Okay Slashdotters:

vote for the name Xut (Pronounced Zoot or whatever)

Subject has to be: "Name the Penguin Contest"

Lets see the power of slashdot work for something this time!

I can see the bumperstickers now:
"I voted Xut!" ;-)

I'm sorry to dissappoint all you /.ers, but there is really no chance the penguin is gonna be named Xut or tux or anything of that sort. I suppose that you could blame it on some of us "computer people" over here (we put Tux on a few pages... "they" didn't like that too much). He's still on the search page though.. http://planetary.org/search/ Anyway, I'll keep you guys informed and let you know as soon as the name is chosen

> Which brings me back to my original point...since when does someone coming up with a new theory about a rock 30 gazillion miles away have ANYTHING at all to do with my fairly diverse nerd life?

Well I happen to be a nerd, and I, for one, am certainly interested in planetary science! In addition, a large organization of space nerds, The Planetary Society, has a big SETI@Home team and helped get the project funded, so planetary nerds can certainly perticipate in general computer nerd society!