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"Now" spreads at the speed of light so when you see something, it's happening, as far as you are concerned, right now.

Thought experiment: Camera, long exposure, fast strobing light. Shutter open, Joe fires a bullet from his gun across a range into a target. At time t(a), the trigger is fully compressed. At time t(b) the hammer has released. At time t(c) the hammer has struck. At time t(d) the powder flashes. At time t(e), the bullet leaves the barrel. At times t(f-h), we see the bullet (after printing the photo) several times in mid-air between gun and target. At time t(i), the bullet strikes the target, at time, t(j) the bullet is halfway sunk into the target, at time t(k), the bullet is flush with the target, at time t(l), the bullet has disappeared into the target.

What time did Joe shoot the target?

We define "now," practically, the instant the photons that hit our eyes are translated to chemical signals and are interpreted into our consciousness. The time it takes for the chemistry we call sight to occur takes considerably longer than the time it takes for the light from local events to strike our retinas. When "now" actually is depends, changes for every single point of space, thus the need for "spacetime." I think conceptually, even in a relativistic universe, an ideal "now" exists if you standardize on where the single point of observation is (with THE clock standardized for the observation), or if you model the vast galactic distances much shorter to represent events. I think this might be called "time slicing," but not sure.

Also, FWIW, Flamsteed probably saw something related to the supernova in 1680

cassiopia a

Solar insolation on the moon is not dramatically higher than on Earth - around 1400 W/m^2 versus around 1000 W/m^2 on Earth. Granted, a Lunar solar station wouldn't be affected by weather, but Earth based receivers will suffer from efficiency loss during bad weather.

Could they achieve the same result by building a bit larger system on earth, but without the hundreds (or thousands?) of rocket launches it would take to get the materials to the moon to get the thing started?

Besides, who wants to see a big black ribbon around the moon?

They plan to use lunar materials, so no hundresds of rocket launches to get started. I guess the point is kind of that real estate and raw materials are "free", if you get the proper manufacturing equipment up there. If that equipment is automated enough, you can build up slowly, but steadily.

That's why I started at the low end of "hundreds of launches" -- if raw materials were needed, launches would be in the many thousands or tens of thousands. Unless aliens left us a manufacturing plant on the moon when they buried the monolith, it's going to take a lot of equipment to get started.

Construction of the ISS required over 40 assembly launches.. And those launches were all to LEO which allows much bigger payloads than launching to the moon.

Perhaps the future will bring more efficient ways to get materials off the earth, but so far we're reliant on rockets.

The Russian GLONASS system has satellites in inclined orbits at 64.8 degrees...

That inclination reminded me of the strange-but-useful Molniya Orbit. At least three Amateur radio Satellites were launched into this type of orbit.

(The Glonass orbit is very nearly circular and the Molniya is very ellipitical).

Can he just delay by one week? There are only small launch windows for Cape Canaveral launches to ISS. Does somebody know the approximate window size for a Falcon 9+Dragon launch to ISS? Also from this ISS launch schedule, there is a launch of a soyuz at may 15th so if he delays too much, he will probably have to move the launch date back by at least a month.

I wonder what the requirements are at NASA versus SpaceX concerning mission failure probabilities? Reaching a 90% chance of success is probably easy but 99.99% chance of success is much harder.
And then you could ask if NASA or SpaceX has such high requirements why didn't SpaceX plan accordingly? Are they forced to promise early launch dates to keep investors?

Well, IIRC (and HPFS dirs seems to effectively confirm it), under HPFS directory entries were sorted alphabetically. So, I can imagine it's as simple as a FindNextFile() loop and very little/no buffering in the boot cycle being the culprit.

Or, for the non-geocentrists out there, may I propose a better conference to attend that very same weekend?

The Students for the Exploration and Development of Space are holding 'SpaceVision 2010' only one state over.

Hmm, clearly my html abilities are lacking, and that link didn't work. And I further, I didn't preview properly. Let's try this again: SpaceVision 2010

Or, for the non-geocentrists out there, may I propose a better conference to attend that very same weekend?

The Students for the Exploration and Development of Space are holding 'SpaceVision 2010' only one state over.

Hmm, clearly my html abilities are lacking, and that link didn't work. And I further, I didn't preview properly. Let's try this again: SpaceVision 2010

They were indeed designed to work for almost the worst conditions expected for 90 days, based on what prior landers saw. If you read Dr. Steven Squyre's book Roving Mars (which I highly recommend for any space nerd, even though he wrote it several years too early), he describes at several points how worried they were that dust accumulation was going to kill these things before 90 days were up.

After talking about wipers, blowers, vibrators, etc. they concluded the best course of action was to just size the panels to produce the minimum required amount of electricity for operations after 90 days of worst-case dust accumulation. An added bonus of this approach was plenty of power to play around with early in the mission (and part of why they've done so well now). Accomplishing this ended up being a huge problem, however, and I think the power team spent weeks trying to figure out a geometery that would provide the needed amount of surface area, but not get in the way of all the other parts while folding down small enough to fit inside the tetrahedral lander platform. They finally got a break when they figured out a set of winglet-like tabs that unfolded from the back of an already folded section of panel.

The result didn't just solve the problem, it looked freaking awesome. Earlier renders of the rovers had them being nearly square or hexagon shaped, as opposed to the swept-back fighter wing look they have as built. Heck, Steve Jobs is probably even jealous of how sexy the MER's look, and they aren't even trying.

• http://www.planetary.org/home/ The Planetary Society
  
• http://www.marssociety.org/ The Mars Society
  
• http://www.nss.org/ The National Space Society
  
• http://www.seds.org/ Students for the Exploration and Development of Space
  
• http://www.space-frontier.org/ Space Frontier Foundation
  

• The Artemis Project - The project is a private venture to establish a permanent, self-supporting community on the Moon. Brief overview of the Artemis project.
• The Mars Society - To further the goal of the exploration and settlement of the Red Planet.
• The Moon Society - An international nonprofit educational and scientific foundation formed to further the creation of communities on the Moon involving large-scale industrialization and private enterprise.
• National Space Society - grassroots organization dedicated to the creation of a spacefaring civilization. Magazine.
• Stanford on the Moon (by 2015?) And yes, Stanford as in the university.
• Space Frontier Foundation - seems to have projects for space colonization, missions to the Earth's moon, and so on. Looks like a large scale organization.
• The Space Settlement Initiative
• Space Access Society - activism for getting out of the NASA-only paradigm/reality.
• Students for the Exploration and Development of Space - `... is dedicated to expanding the role of human exploration and development of space. We also seek to educate the public in such a way as to attain this goal. `
• Space Studies Institute - `SSI's stated mission is: Opening the energy and material resources of space for human benefit by completing the missing technological links to make possible the productive use of the abundant resources in space.`
• International Space University - `The International Space University provides graduate-level training to the future leaders of the emerging global space community at its Central Campus in Strasbourg, France, and at locations around the world. ` (mentions 'systems engineering' on the About page)
• Space Settlement Institute - `The Space Settlement Institute is a non-profit association founded to help promote the human colonization and settlement of outer space. `
• Cygo's Space Initiative - plan and conduct exploration missions to minor planets, build and mass produce (while in space) a multi-purpose interconnectable module, and to offer products and services using space and the materials therefrom.
• Freeluna - `Freeluna.com is dedicated to the proposition that the colonization of outer space is critical for the long term survival of the human species, and that colonization of the moon and the exploitation of the moon's natural resources is one of the very best first steps in that incredible journey off planet.` ... and when I first visited this page, I was visitor #3371. Yikes. Contact: Bill Clawson, wclawson@freeluna.com
• Island One Society - associated with the Artemis society, seems to be mostly a resource-help site.
• The Living Universe Foundation - `The Living Universe Foundation seeks to bring the galaxy alive with life from Earth, while healing the damage that humanity has already inflicted upon the Earth. We believe that expansion into space in the immediate future is a step towards accomplishing this aim.` turmith@yahoo.com --- This organization was inspired by the publication of a certain book. This is heavily related to Project Atlantis or Oceania (artifical floatin

I was once in SEDS, I know exactly who the article is targeted towards. Why do you think it is pointless? It obviously touched a nerve with the slashdot audience, and yes, the ignorance and religious-like faith in technology evident in this thread seriously bothers me. It isn't worth my time to reason with them, so I chose to insult them by responding to the one who dismisses the author himself. And now you're defending him?

A year later, apprehension rose as the fuel tank of an abandoned American rocket engine exploded, breaking the craft into 713 detectable fragments -- until now, the record.

The NYT calls out the US but makes no mention of the the loss of the CERISE satellite by a fragment of an exploded Ariane upper stage in 1997.

This is something that I care about a lot, and all I have to say is that if it matters to you, do something about it:

http://www.seds.org/ - Students for the Exploration and Development of Space
http://www.nss.org/ - National Space Society
http://www.yurisnight.net/ - Yuri's Night, the international space party
http://www.xprize.com/ -X-Prize Foundation
just to name a few...

or of course if you're young enough and willing to work a civil servants salary:
http://www.nasa.gov/about/career/index.html

-Brian

Did you know that you can see the Saturn rings with a 4"?

Absolutely. In fact, if the seeing is good, you can even make out the Encke Gap. Not to mention detail you can make out in the atmospheres of both Saturn and Jupiter. Oh, and the phases of Venus. And a ton of deepsky objects, too (there are some lovely nebulae and globular clusters well within reach of a 4" reflector, even under light-polluted skies. Objects like the Wild Duck Cluster or Hercules Cluster are really quite breathtaking, especially after spending 20 minutes starhopping trying to track them down).

Really, a decent 4" reflector coupled with a pair of lenses, which can be had for a few hundred bucks, can withstand many many nights of observing before a larger instrument becomes necessary.

Did you know that you can see the Saturn rings with a 4"?

Absolutely. In fact, if the seeing is good, you can even make out the Encke Gap. Not to mention detail you can make out in the atmospheres of both Saturn and Jupiter. Oh, and the phases of Venus. And a ton of deepsky objects, too (there are some lovely nebulae and globular clusters well within reach of a 4" reflector, even under light-polluted skies. Objects like the Wild Duck Cluster or Hercules Cluster are really quite breathtaking, especially after spending 20 minutes starhopping trying to track them down).

Really, a decent 4" reflector coupled with a pair of lenses, which can be had for a few hundred bucks, can withstand many many nights of observing before a larger instrument becomes necessary.

The announcement of the pending announcement regarding Dark Matter

"This is the most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, which we know about," said team member Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

I guess he's never heard of Zaphod Beeblebrox.

"A universe that's dominated by dark stuff seems preposterous, so we wanted to test whether there were any basic flaws in our thinking," said Doug Clowe of the University of Arizona at Tucson, and leader of the study. "These results are direct proof that dark matter exists."

Also a bit of info on physorg

How does the Coalsack Nebula fit into this? It's dark and it's matter, right?

Ahem...I seriously thought I'd never have to explain this one on slashdot. It turns out that beyond our solar system, there is a vast amount of space and bodies that provide references against which to measure the motion of the solar system. We call that the "universe."

For further background on this concept, you may be interested to read about galaxies or Copernicus.

Great thoughts! I totally agree with you! However, the only problem is this station is huge! In fact, according to the NASA Mission Page it's 404,069 pounds with a width Across Solar Arrays of 240 feet. It's 146 feet long from Destiny Lab to Zvezda; 171 feet with a Progress docked and 90 feet high!

Whilst if you take a peek at the Shuttle info page you'll find that the cargo bay is 60 ft long, 15 ft in diameter. so there's almost no way you could get that station anywhere inside the orbiter. The only possible way to get it down, is the same way we got it up there in the first place. Which means dismantling it ! I found a nice array of photos showing the process here.

I find the station has cost billions already and is a decade behind schedule. Here's a summary:
INITIAL DESIGN PAPERWORK -- $10 billion
HARDWARE -- $25 billion
SHUTTLE SERVICING COSTS -- $20 billion
MAINTENANCE -- $41 billion
YEAR 2001 COST OVERRUN (disclosed immediately AFTER the presidential election of 2000): $5 billion.

So, multiply this by two and you get the cost of bringing it down. Are you a tax payer? If so, I'm guessing you don't want to pay that :). Hope this clears the question of why they let sattelites burn up there too ... In case it doesn't, it costs around 2000 USD per pound to send a sattelite to space. It costs twice as much to recover it (sending an empty shuttle, a space walk, operating the hand, bringing it down) and we're taking a serious risk here, I mean, sending it up requires no humans, so if something goes wrong, we just blew up a few millions, but hey, if a shuttle explodes -- all hell breaks lose. So I say, leave them to burn out!

Um, I assume that instead of 100 light years you mean something like slightly less than 10 million light years..? :) (NGC 404 is assumed to be just far enough to be not gravitationally bound to the local group, and it's about 8 million light years away.)

Hmm, I might have been off by a year or two. But the 386 certainly wasn't discontinued by 1991. Here's a list of IBM models for example:
http://www.seds.org/~spider/ps2/ps2hist.html

The center of our galaxy lies roughly in Sagittarius, which, as a Zodiacal constellation, is visible in most of the northern hemisphere. Maybe not as directly, and maybe not as often, but it's visible. See http://www.seds.org/messier/more/mw.html for more information.

Were you possibly referring to the Magellanic clouds?

In any case, there's lots & lots of Good Stuff to see in the night sky, regardless of the hemisphere in which you live. Given the choice of some super-dark area of northern Canada or Alaska or a static location in the center of downtown [pick your large, southern hemisphere city, here], I'd take the north.

Of course, an ulimited travel budget would be even better.... :-)

Surely Paint Shop Pro is beyond v2 by now?

More seriously, it is about time Sony found some original acronyms. We had enough trouble distinguishing PS2 (the Sony games console) from PS/2 (IBM's Personal System Two, a late 80's next-generation PC design, from which the well-known mouse and keyboard socket standards originated). Now the same bunch of elderly spods is going to have the same trouble with PSP, and this time there's no stroke/slash to assist.

(I wish I still had my Model 80 IBM PS/2 complete with its "Danger! Heavy! Two men required to lift!" sticker).

The pen that can write upside down (likely the Fisher Space Pen) was completely privately developed and was not funded or supported by the government or space program.

Perhaps the reason you don't see many spinoffs from the space program is that they are literally all around you. You can't see the forest for the trees, so to speak. Miniaturization is often quoted, and it is quite true. There are many other examples, many in medicine and industry.

I think there may be a few things you have overlooked but they are easy enough to find.

Jim

For a recent example, there was the Ariane 5 rocket that self-destructed soon after launch right over a populated area: http://www.seds.org/spaceviews/960615/pol.html [seds.org]

Should Russia drop out of the space station project after the election, NASA has devised a backup plan to build the key core modules Russia is providing for the station.

French administrator Pierre Dartout reported that instruments at the launch site detected no traces of hydrochloric acid after the explosion. Meanwhile, French environmental minister Corrine Lepage reported that a hydrochloric acid levels of 5 parts per million were detected. The safe limit for hydrochloric acid in the atmosphere is 80 ppm.

The thing is, a launch doesn't happen only every 3 or 4 years. Besides the space shuttle there are lots of military and commercial satellite launches courtesy of NASA, the US Air Force, the European Space Agency, the Russian Federal Space Agency and other new members of the club, like the People's Republic of China.

Tons of fumes and other chemicals are expended for successful launches but it's even worse when something goes wrong and rockets fall to the ground in pieces or are lost in the ocean. For a recent example, there was the Ariane 5 rocket that self-destructed soon after launch right over a populated area:

In the Large Magellanic Cloud, of course!

Also see http://www.seds.org/messier/xtra/ngc/etacar.html. There is a lot of weird stuff in the universe, some of it relatively close to us. Our galaxy is about 250,000 LY in diameter, the nearest neighbor galaxy about 2.5 million LY away.) Of course, with our relatively puny lifespans of 80 or so years, we miss most of what's going on around us, and don't pay enough attention to recorded astronomical and geological events to realize that our assumptions about what is normal are completely unfounded. Ignorance is bliss! Woohoo! Pass the Fritos!

Keep in mind the volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi r^3, so the volume of space that this would take up is increased by a factor of 8,000,000. I'd say, that the chance of this happening to us, therefore is increased by a factor of 8 million.

If the 6,000 LY limit is justifiable, I don't think it's quite as bad as you make out... at least not without some much more definitive research.

6,000 Light Years is practically next door on the galactic scale. It's certainly not infeasible (for someone qualified) to simply look at a survey of what's in our local space and determine immediately if we're at risk based on anything that looks unstable. (I'm not a professional astronomer, so someone's welcome to correct me if they know otherwise.)

The most obvious potential threat that's relatively close is probably Eta Carinae, which is about as massive as it's possible to get, and it's been hypothesised in the past that there's a small chance we might be at risk from a sudden gamma ray burst from it. But it's still about 8,000 light years away and there's still not enough known about it to have any accurate idea of when it's going to blow itself apart, either tommorrow or millions of years from now.

If there's still a reasonable chance that it could happen at some point in the future, this doesn't mean that there's any chance at all of it happening tommorrow. Stars orbit move a lot relative to each other sa they orbit the galactic centre. Our Sun does that in about 226 million years, but in the space of hundreds of thousands of years, galactic material barely moves relative to each other at all. It's feasible that at some time in the next few million years or more we will be close to something dangerous for some period of time. If we're not close enough to it now, though, the chance of that happening is still zero.

This is all dependent on that 6,000 Light Year limit being correct, of course. Clearly it's still all subject to change as we learn more about the Universe, which we still know next-to-nothing about. I don't think there's much point worrying about the great unknown, though, at least until we know enough to know that there's actually a risk. Otherwise it would just lead to paranoia.

"[...]Or perhaps they were just given their knowledge from another race?"

...It has already been done, time and again, here on mother earth.
First, the greek-latin culture founded the basis for the modern science; after that, the arabs copied and expanded modern science as we know it,, whilst western europe wallowed in the middle ages. after some time, the pendulum swung.
The problem is, no civilization can "teach" another one scientific progress. If a culture is interested, it will try and learn whatever others have learnt, PLUS it will eventually add some original content of its own. On the other hand, a civilization that does not want to learn most probably won't.

I always recall the story about the crab nebula. it contains a pulsar, the rotating remains of a supernova, and progressively the rotation is slowing down. it one of the basis of the discovery that you can date novas by timing the rotation of the pulsar remains. We were able to ascertain that, because we know the exact date of the explosion. records say that it could be seen clearly even by day, for days on end. Point is , these records are chinese . no records are available from western europe or arab sources.

The article appears to be speaking about diameter.

If you're keen to find out about stars with the largest mass, you could start with Eta Carinae. It's extremely massive and unstable, and came to everyone's attention when it was noticed to be rapidly fluctuating in brightness over the past hundred or so years. It's also close enough that there's arguably a theoretical possibility that we could be in danger if it decides to go any time soon, although it's probably not worth worrying about. Not from any explosion, of course, but if it were to fire gamma rays in our direction then we might have problems, for instance.

I'm not sure what the word is now, but at one point in recent history the mass of Eta Carinae had been empirically measured to be more than what had been considered theoretically possible. In any case, it's very close to the boundary of the most massive that a star could possibly be without collapsing in some way.

As a somehow related side note, eta-carinae also happens to be what I decided to name my Dell Inspiron when I set it up a few months ago.

I think her lack of knowledge would be more forgivable if she weren't on the House Science Committee's space subcommittee!

I agree with your (implied) suggestion that such ignorance is non-partisan, although I wish it were the exception instead of the rule!

Did I "get this right"?

Messier object 1 (M1), more commonly known as the Crab Nebula, is a good example of a "Long ago" supernova remnant.
Crab Nebula Info
The star went supernova almost a thousand years ago, and that is whats left.

During the actual event of a supernova, though, the star (from so far away) only seems to go from being a normal star to an amazingly bright one, and then slowly dimming down over a few months (or years). The reason is because stars are so huge they cannot simply explode like in the movies, after all they are in a constant state of nuclear fusion!!

I've been told by a reputable source that RCA was able to fully duplicate the System 360 System/360, mainframe working just a month behind IBM's own schedule by using IBM's published tech reports.

Sony tried to copy the IBM PS/2 using the same principles it just took them 14 years.

Heck of an improvement though...

I've been told by a reputable source that RCA was able to fully duplicate the System 360 System/360, mainframe working just a month behind IBM's own schedule by using IBM's published tech reports.

Sony tried to copy the IBM PS/2 using the same principles it just took them 14 years.

Heck of an improvement though...

"Commercially available infant formulas now contain a nutritional enrichment ingredient that traces its existence to NASA-sponsored research that explored the potential of algae as a recycling agent for long duration space travel." (ref)

Ski wear: "The NASA association began back in the 1970s, when Comfort Products adapted astronaut protective clothing technology to ski boot design. Specifically, the company borrowed heating element circuitry that kept Apollo astronauts warm or cool in the temperature extremes of the Moon, and used it to create built-in rechargeable footwarming devices that were supplied to leading ski boot manufacturers." (ref, emphasis added)

"In 1965, Johnson Space Center contracted with the University of Minnesota to explore the then-known but little-developed concept of impedance cardiography (ICG) as a means of astronaut monitoring. A five-year program led to the development of the Minnesota Impedance Cardiograph (MIC), an electronic system for measuring impedance changes across the thorax that would be reflective of cardiac function and blood flow from the heart's left ventricle into the aorta... the cost of the thermodilution technique [the old, invasive way] runs five to 17 times that of IQ monitoring [the new, NASA-developed way]"(ref)

"GROUND PROCESSING SCHEDULING SYSTEM - Computer-based scheduling system that uses artificial intelligence to manage thousands of overlapping activities involved in launch preparations of NASA's Space Shuttles. The NASA technology was licensed to a new company which developed commercial applications that provide real-time planning and optimization of manufacturing operations, integrated supply chains, and customer orders" (ref)

"STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS - This NASA program, originally created for spacecraft design, has been employed in a broad array of non-aerospace applications, such as the automobile industry, manufacture of machine tools, and hardware designs."(ref)

"SCRATCH-RESISTANT LENSES - A modified version of a dual ion beam bonding process developed by NASA involves coating the lenses with a film of diamond-like carbon that not only provides scratch resistance, but also decreases surface friction, reducing water spots." (ref)

"MICROSPHERES - The first commercial products manufactured in orbit are tiny microspheres whose precise dimensions permit their use as reference standards for extremely accurate calibration of instruments in research and industrial laboratories. They are sold for applications in environmental control, medical research, and manufacturing."(ref)

"SOLAR ENERGY - NASA-pioneered photovoltaic power system for spacecraft applications was applied to programs to expand terrestrial applications as a viable alternative energy source in areas where no conventional power source exists."(ref)

"DIGITAL IMAGING BREAST BIOPSY SYSTEM - The LORAD Stereo Guide Breast Biopsy system incorporates advanced Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) as part of a digital camera system. The resulting device images breast tissue more clearly and efficiently. Known as stereotactic large-core needle biopsy, this nonsurgical system developed with Space Telescope Technology is less traumatic and greatly reduces the pain, scarring, radiation exposure, time, and money associated with surgical biopsies."(

"Commercially available infant formulas now contain a nutritional enrichment ingredient that traces its existence to NASA-sponsored research that explored the potential of algae as a recycling agent for long duration space travel." (ref)

Ski wear: "The NASA association began back in the 1970s, when Comfort Products adapted astronaut protective clothing technology to ski boot design. Specifically, the company borrowed heating element circuitry that kept Apollo astronauts warm or cool in the temperature extremes of the Moon, and used it to create built-in rechargeable footwarming devices that were supplied to leading ski boot manufacturers." (ref, emphasis added)

"In 1965, Johnson Space Center contracted with the University of Minnesota to explore the then-known but little-developed concept of impedance cardiography (ICG) as a means of astronaut monitoring. A five-year program led to the development of the Minnesota Impedance Cardiograph (MIC), an electronic system for measuring impedance changes across the thorax that would be reflective of cardiac function and blood flow from the heart's left ventricle into the aorta... the cost of the thermodilution technique [the old, invasive way] runs five to 17 times that of IQ monitoring [the new, NASA-developed way]"(ref)

"GROUND PROCESSING SCHEDULING SYSTEM - Computer-based scheduling system that uses artificial intelligence to manage thousands of overlapping activities involved in launch preparations of NASA's Space Shuttles. The NASA technology was licensed to a new company which developed commercial applications that provide real-time planning and optimization of manufacturing operations, integrated supply chains, and customer orders" (ref)

"STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS - This NASA program, originally created for spacecraft design, has been employed in a broad array of non-aerospace applications, such as the automobile industry, manufacture of machine tools, and hardware designs."(ref)

"SCRATCH-RESISTANT LENSES - A modified version of a dual ion beam bonding process developed by NASA involves coating the lenses with a film of diamond-like carbon that not only provides scratch resistance, but also decreases surface friction, reducing water spots." (ref)

"MICROSPHERES - The first commercial products manufactured in orbit are tiny microspheres whose precise dimensions permit their use as reference standards for extremely accurate calibration of instruments in research and industrial laboratories. They are sold for applications in environmental control, medical research, and manufacturing."(ref)

"SOLAR ENERGY - NASA-pioneered photovoltaic power system for spacecraft applications was applied to programs to expand terrestrial applications as a viable alternative energy source in areas where no conventional power source exists."(ref)

"DIGITAL IMAGING BREAST BIOPSY SYSTEM - The LORAD Stereo Guide Breast Biopsy system incorporates advanced Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) as part of a digital camera system. The resulting device images breast tissue more clearly and efficiently. Known as stereotactic large-core needle biopsy, this nonsurgical system developed with Space Telescope Technology is less traumatic and greatly reduces the pain, scarring, radiation exposure, time, and money associated with surgical biopsies."(

"Commercially available infant formulas now contain a nutritional enrichment ingredient that traces its existence to NASA-sponsored research that explored the potential of algae as a recycling agent for long duration space travel." (ref)

Ski wear: "The NASA association began back in the 1970s, when Comfort Products adapted astronaut protective clothing technology to ski boot design. Specifically, the company borrowed heating element circuitry that kept Apollo astronauts warm or cool in the temperature extremes of the Moon, and used it to create built-in rechargeable footwarming devices that were supplied to leading ski boot manufacturers." (ref, emphasis added)

"In 1965, Johnson Space Center contracted with the University of Minnesota to explore the then-known but little-developed concept of impedance cardiography (ICG) as a means of astronaut monitoring. A five-year program led to the development of the Minnesota Impedance Cardiograph (MIC), an electronic system for measuring impedance changes across the thorax that would be reflective of cardiac function and blood flow from the heart's left ventricle into the aorta... the cost of the thermodilution technique [the old, invasive way] runs five to 17 times that of IQ monitoring [the new, NASA-developed way]"(ref)

"GROUND PROCESSING SCHEDULING SYSTEM - Computer-based scheduling system that uses artificial intelligence to manage thousands of overlapping activities involved in launch preparations of NASA's Space Shuttles. The NASA technology was licensed to a new company which developed commercial applications that provide real-time planning and optimization of manufacturing operations, integrated supply chains, and customer orders" (ref)

"STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS - This NASA program, originally created for spacecraft design, has been employed in a broad array of non-aerospace applications, such as the automobile industry, manufacture of machine tools, and hardware designs."(ref)

"SCRATCH-RESISTANT LENSES - A modified version of a dual ion beam bonding process developed by NASA involves coating the lenses with a film of diamond-like carbon that not only provides scratch resistance, but also decreases surface friction, reducing water spots." (ref)

"MICROSPHERES - The first commercial products manufactured in orbit are tiny microspheres whose precise dimensions permit their use as reference standards for extremely accurate calibration of instruments in research and industrial laboratories. They are sold for applications in environmental control, medical research, and manufacturing."(ref)

"SOLAR ENERGY - NASA-pioneered photovoltaic power system for spacecraft applications was applied to programs to expand terrestrial applications as a viable alternative energy source in areas where no conventional power source exists."(ref)

"DIGITAL IMAGING BREAST BIOPSY SYSTEM - The LORAD Stereo Guide Breast Biopsy system incorporates advanced Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) as part of a digital camera system. The resulting device images breast tissue more clearly and efficiently. Known as stereotactic large-core needle biopsy, this nonsurgical system developed with Space Telescope Technology is less traumatic and greatly reduces the pain, scarring, radiation exposure, time, and money associated with surgical biopsies."(

I am not a Pennsylvanian or an American, but a citizen of the world.

Dude, I'm so old every time I hear PS2 I still think of IBM's old PS/2. Anyone else remember those?

Well, from a quick google search, I came up with this site which gives two possible numbers for the speed of the earth, 15km/s and 30km/s

For argument's sake, i will use the slower number(which hurts my argument). So if we can delay the asteroid for 12 hours, that means that the earth has moved over 648,000 km from its original location. (this isn't quite true, since earth moves in an orbit, and there would be a straight line distance that is shorter, but the orbit of earth is pretty huge, and for such a small arc, its pretty approximate to linear)

Since the diameter of earth is ~13000km, the earth would have moved approximately 50 earth-diameters away from its original position during the 12 hour delay.

Assuming the asteroid is smaller than the earth (lets say the size of texas), it is extremetly unlikely that it would still hit earth if we could somehow induce a 12 hour delay in the asteroid reaching the oribit of earth. This is true even if the orbits were tangental. Basically the only way it would still hit us after a 12 hour delay, is if it was in an almost identical oribit to earth, the it would be just a matter of waiting until we got to the "least common multiple" of orbit times.

Since we know there are no asteroids in a conncurent orbit with earth at this time, I think it is safe to assume that if we have the ability to delay the asteroid, we can avoid it all together.

Also, if an orbit was tangental, an asteroid would tend to "bounce" off the athmosphere. Probably still mess with us a bit, but not nearly as bad as a full on impact.

I studied I.S. a little bit awhile back. Carl Sagan did some work on scintillation; the scintillation effect can pull out a distant radio signal by gathering in rays from a lot of different directions and accidentally throwing them right at you. The famous WOW signal, I believe, was investigated as an example of scintillation from a big cloud much like the ones described in the article.

It is interesting to see this technique used to do radio astronomy. Most of the times when you encounter a natural lens, it is sufficiently weird that you use the observation to analyse the lens itself, and not what it happens to be magnifying. Gravitational lenses are interesting in large part because you can try to figure out the distribution of dark matter in the lens itself -- and not because you can use it to "see into" the object being lensed. These lenses are not exactly perfect optics -- they're more like balls of glass, which distort and differentially magnify something behind.

But I'm not as familiar any more with radio astronomy. It is definitely possible that we understand enough about the properties of the ISM that the more interesting problem of figuring out the properties of the background object is open for work. Very cool!

I wasn't referring to it in terms of being black and so...
Even if you look at Hubble's images, they're no so spetacular.
Try putting in context, largest lens, images...

This is not a chunk of a planet. This is the remaining core of an old star. This is a carbon white dwarf star, which is to say that it is a star that started out at around 4-8 solar masses and is now at the end of its lifetime. Stars with less than ~8 solar masses do not become supernovae (neutron stars or black holes), they become planetary nebulae. They slough off their outer layers of gas and leave only a hot, white core (the white dwarf). The most well-known examples of these objects are the Ring Nebula (M57), Dumbbell Nebula (M27), and Owl Nebula (M97).

In the white dwarf stage, it doesn't fuse like a normal star (unless it accretes material and causes fusion on the surface as when we witness a nova), but it continues to glow like a coal that you have taken out of the fire. It will continue to glow and radiate away its energy until over time, it cools enough that its interior can crystallize. After even more time, it becomes so cool that it stops radiating altogether, a crystallized rock floating through space.

This is not a chunk of a planet. This is the remaining core of an old star. This is a carbon white dwarf star, which is to say that it is a star that started out at around 4-8 solar masses and is now at the end of its lifetime. Stars with less than ~8 solar masses do not become supernovae (neutron stars or black holes), they become planetary nebulae. They slough off their outer layers of gas and leave only a hot, white core (the white dwarf). The most well-known examples of these objects are the Ring Nebula (M57), Dumbbell Nebula (M27), and Owl Nebula (M97).

In the white dwarf stage, it doesn't fuse like a normal star (unless it accretes material and causes fusion on the surface as when we witness a nova), but it continues to glow like a coal that you have taken out of the fire. It will continue to glow and radiate away its energy until over time, it cools enough that its interior can crystallize. After even more time, it becomes so cool that it stops radiating altogether, a crystallized rock floating through space.

This is not a chunk of a planet. This is the remaining core of an old star. This is a carbon white dwarf star, which is to say that it is a star that started out at around 4-8 solar masses and is now at the end of its lifetime. Stars with less than ~8 solar masses do not become supernovae (neutron stars or black holes), they become planetary nebulae. They slough off their outer layers of gas and leave only a hot, white core (the white dwarf). The most well-known examples of these objects are the Ring Nebula (M57), Dumbbell Nebula (M27), and Owl Nebula (M97).

In the white dwarf stage, it doesn't fuse like a normal star (unless it accretes material and causes fusion on the surface as when we witness a nova), but it continues to glow like a coal that you have taken out of the fire. It will continue to glow and radiate away its energy until over time, it cools enough that its interior can crystallize. After even more time, it becomes so cool that it stops radiating altogether, a crystallized rock floating through space.

Upon RTFAing, it's not a new nebula, it's a new star which has emerged from an existing nebula: M78, a diffuse nebula in Orion. Is 8x6 arc minutes a very large dimension? Our charts are going to need updating.

This design has been around for quite some time and telescope makers have been folding light paths of reflectors since their inception. Check out these designs , which not only fold the light path but make it ubobstructed as well. HIs telescope, while nice for viewing deep sky objects, will likely produce low-contrast planetary images due to the large central obstruction. This project is really about optimizing a design around his viewing habits rather than anything revolutionary.

As mentioned, you have to be moving slower than the escape velocity to be in orbit around something. The formula is v = sqrt(2GM/r). G is 6.67x10^-11 m^3/s^2kg everywhere.

For Earth, M is 6x10^24 kg, and the highest relevent velocity as at the surface, so r = 6x10^6 m. That's 11.2 km/s. Very fast. Which is why it's hard just to get into orbit.

Now for the comet. If it's 4 km across, r = 2000 m. I can't find a value for the mass, but based on the common description of comets as dirty snowballs let's guess the density is about that of water, or 1000 kg/m^3. The volume of a sphere is 4/3 r^3 so our guess for M is 3.35x10^13 kg.

That makes the escape velocity for 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at 1.5 m/s which pretty much the same brisk walking-speed which which the lander is expected to hit the comet, especially if our guess at the density is high. Thus, the lander could easily bounce off, and a person could with some effort jump off, fast enough that the comet's gravity wouldn't bring them back. On the other hand, an rocky asteroid (denser) the size of Manhattan (bigger) would probably be hard to get away from under your own power. This comet is right on the edge.

No no no, This is obviously the dark matter we've been hearing about for years.