Slashdot Mirror

Huh? Why is better? The nuclear bomb would have no lasting impacts and be minor compared to the endless barrage of of meteors that strike the surface. Hell NASA live streamed the event happening naturally https://www.space.com/43075-bl... during the last luna eclipse. Now admittedly it was only 1/3rd of the size of Project A119 but it also didn't leave any notable mark on the moon, unlike the other many thousands of times the same thing has happened on a bigger scale.

You didn't even know this happened did you? So I ask you again, how is fucking up the sky better than something equivalent to an event that passed you by unnoticed?

would have been the first on the moon built by a private organization

Oh it's on the moon. :-(

Jokes aside I was really sad to see this fail, I tried watching the livestream a bit but was too late and didn't realize it had crashed.

I hope they do try again, and NASA gives them another reflector array to try and plant there...

They're actually fairly common, with about 20-40 air bursts occurring each year. They're pretty evenly distributed. Russia just seems to get a disproportionate number because it has the most land area of any country by almost a factor of 2. It's also got a large population spread throughout that very large land area. The country covers pretty much the same latitude as Canada (second-largest country), but Canada is mostly deserted at higher latitutdes. So that increases the chances of a meteor being seen/recorded over Russia.

It's also worth noting that the ancient Egyptians also witnessed large meteor events and used the material to create jewelry for royalty and ceremonial weapons.

No need to refer to SF or Heinlein. All I need to do is point out that as far as the Earth/Moon system is concerned, having a base on the Moon gives you control of the ultimate High Ground.

Controlling the L5 And L6 points is probably far more significant!

https://www.space.com/30302-la...

What happens when a large coronal mass ejection hits those million satellites? According to space.com, if the huge 2012 CME had hit the earth:

There would have been three waves of damage associated with the extreme solar storm. First, X-rays and ultraviolet radiation from the solar flare would have produced radio blackouts and GPS navigation errors. The second part would have seen satellites fried by energetic particles like electrons and protons, which arrived only minutes to hours later. ...

SpaceX might have a million dead satellites, which SpaceX has to either bring down manually, or leave up as space junk. I hope those satellites will be shielded.

You're going to be really sad then. Because that's not going to happen.

We can keep a half dozen people at most alive on the ISS with monthly supply runs, and we're less than a day away. It took us three years to just have the basic structures in place and hooked up.

Mars is 6-9 months away, and it takes a giant rocket to get there. That's no Soyuz or Falcon. That's BFR or Falcon Heavy, an Atlas or Ariane 5, a Delta IV Heavy. If we build structures as minimal as the ISS, which has already clocked in at $150 billion, we're committing to launching one of those very big, very expensive rockets every month. That means either the initial investment needs to be way, way higher to make it more self-sufficient, or we need to incur rather hefty ongoing support costs, with a launch a month of those monsters.

For what? (Not to mention, who's going to be willing to fund that?)

For a fraction of the cost we can keep sending rovers. InSight cost $0.8 billion. Curiosity was expensive at $2.5 billion. Even if you swear we can do a Mars outpost for the price of the ISS, which is laughable, we could send 60 Curiosities for that price. Given that we'll get years of service out of that rover, and given that we could build a bunch of them in bulk for a lot less money, that sort of investment makes sending people look silly.

What makes it even more unlikely is that we'll likely have to send those 60 robotic missions before people anyway, because we're going to need to prep the living site. We need to find and purify water, set up power infrastructure, create habitation, set up the HVAC and air handling. Any one of these things going wrong, which will at minimum take hundreds of billions of dollars, scraps the human mission before it even starts.

Claiming we could tap this water ice is a fantasy. Mars is poisonous. The dust is, and the water is. We're not going to ever be drilling 4km deep wells on Mars. The expense and engineering it would take to do that would pay for another 60 rovers.

What more is necessary to know?

I like K. It's better than C or F because it appears later in the alphabet. And you don't have to bother with those silly negative numbers -- HOW can you have a negative temperature?

0K - a bit too cold.
300K - reasonable
3000K - a bit too hot.
6000K - a bit too hot AND bright. (Link)
-1K - you divided by 0.

Interesting. That really didn't sound right to me, but research bears it out:

https://www.space.com/38319-wh...

That said, there's a lot of variance due to latitude, and "about the same time" still ranges from 20-40 minutes later each day for most of the US. But that'll be my something new learned this day.

For most of our lives the only full moon to be specially named in popular culture was the 'harvest moon' of September

Really? You never heard of a "Blue Moon"? Just because YOU never heard of the other moons doesn't mean nobody else has.
strawberry moon
hunters moon
The list goes on for every special moon if you bother to look. Also I'm guessing you never grew up around 4-H or FFA clubs. You likely would have heard of at least some of them if you had any meaningful relationship to agriculture.

Or would that make it more of a heuristic?

You obviously didn't pay attention to space news in 2017. Chinese Experiment Reaches Space Station in Historic First.

In other news ... On Dec. 22, 95 percent of NASA's scientists, technical workers and other employees were furloughed — for the third time in the past year.

The Juno mission has already reported solar storms on Jupiter in the past, in April, and images/video of them, including some earlier stuff from November of 2017.

Not to sound like I'm undermining the idea of learning more about Jupiter, but are they just going to report this every single time Juno goes by the poles?

Sir Richard is in a race with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to send the first fee-paying passengers into space.

And it's a race they have lost already. Russia sent the first tourist into space, and it was an orbital flight at that.

Given that the moon always has the same side towards Earth I assume that a Moon day will be about a month.
It would be interesting to see if there is anything that would grow under those conditions.

There are some high points near the poles that have constant sunshine. This is also close to polar ice deposits, so it is a perfect spot for a moon base.

Polar sunlight on earth is weakened by atmospheric diffusion. That is obviously not a problem on the moon, where even at the poles the sun is at full intensity, about twice as bright as on earth.

the Moon or Mars where there's effectively no surface water to take.

Not true.

So, the space.com article from June already debunked the Slashdot article from today. It's in the "further reading" section at the bottom, so there is really no excuse for this idiocy.

Or... that's what they want us to think.

(</s> if it wasn't obvious)

The suggestion is that it could be a discarded piece of an old light sail.

Or...

There are other possible explanations for this acceleration, like magnetic interaction with the solar wind, pressure from solar radiation, and forces of drag and friction. But the researchers ruled these out.

This leaves the remaining explanation that 'Oumuamua is propelled partially by gas, which would indicate that it is a comet.

So, the space.com article from June already debunked the Slashdot article from today. It's in the "further reading" section at the bottom, so there is really no excuse for this idiocy.

Hmmm... You can choose to believe theology, where there's zero evidence of a supreme being, or you can choose to believe science. But your claim isn't always true.

https://www.independent.co.uk/...
https://www.space.com/24054-ho...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...

What kind of 'definitive answer' to an incredibly stupid idea not founded in physics would you require?

According to this article, your opinion may not be the definitive answer.

In approximately 5 billion years, the sun will begin the helium-burning process, turning into a red giant star. When it expands, its outer layers will consume Mercury and Venus, and reach Earth. Scientists are still debating whether or not our planet will be engulfed, or whether it will orbit dangerously close to the dimmer star. Either way, life as we know it on Earth will cease to exist.

Well, things built for space tend to last a long time - the Voyagers are still in operation after 41 years. Hubble is 28 years old. The ISS is 20. Opportunity may have died in June but made it to 14 at least. Add the fact that a design like the JWST can take a decade or more it's quite likely there'll be 32 bit designs still active in 2038. But you would think at least somebody on the team would remember Y2K unless ageism has gone completely bonkers.

The initial mission was for two years, In practice most people expected it to last a decade or more.

Thanks for the article. It looks like a case of setting expectations very low. If it is one fifth of practice that doesn't look like a lot of confidence on the part of people running the project.

The initial mission was for two years, but that's kind of misleading because it's mostly the point at which the mission managers can write "mission successful" on their end-of-year performance reviews. In practice most people expected it to last a decade or more.

Physicists said the Em Drive was "Impossible" then NASA tested it and it worked.

https://www.cnet.com/news/theo...

https://www.space.com/40682-em...

You are using old data. Here: https://www.sciencealert.com/i...

You can read thrust in any direction you want, perhaps in two opposite directions at the same time. And the amount of energy it takes to get that omnidirectional "thrust" is pretty impressive. Personally, I think it is heating effects, and perhaps the magnetic field of the earth interfering. And that's as good a guess as QI. The EM drive will now live on as youtube videos for the perpetual motion crowd, and the people who believe that you can heat your entire house with a tea candle and a clay pot.

Physicists said the Em Drive was "Impossible" then NASA tested it and it worked.

https://www.cnet.com/news/theo...

https://www.space.com/40682-em...

I wonder how many 'dark satellites' there are in orbit that are technically functional yet have been abandoned because they're no longer able to maintain the desired orbit. I bet enthusiasts could do some interesting things if given access to those.

there are currently 1 980 active satellites in orbit. Whilst this is 13.92% increase over the number of active satellites last year, it still represents only 40% of the satellites orbiting the planet.

This means that there are 2 877 pieces of useless metal hurtling around the Earth at high speed!

Source

It's easy to find inactive satellite numbers. Active but not in use due to a specific cause would take serious research and then only supply a minimum.

Casual check for satellites in the wrong orbit but active: at least 24 satellites. [1] [2] [3] [4]

Venus is Earth's twin.

"Lead would melt on the surface of the planet [Venus], where the temperature is around 872 F (467 C)." https://www.space.com/18526-venus-temperature.html

"At the surface, the atmosphere presses down as hard as water 3,000 feet beneath Earth's ocean." https://www.space.com/18526-venus-temperature.html

Not a twin in those regards.

Venus is Earth's twin.

"Lead would melt on the surface of the planet [Venus], where the temperature is around 872 F (467 C)." https://www.space.com/18526-venus-temperature.html

"At the surface, the atmosphere presses down as hard as water 3,000 feet beneath Earth's ocean." https://www.space.com/18526-venus-temperature.html

Not a twin in those regards.

Also it has like 8X the mass of Earth and 2X as big. How would gravity be there?

"The planet is roughly twice the size of Earth". I've looked and looked, and CAN'T find anyone estimating the gravity of the planet. I presume they don't know.

My knee-jerk reaction was "twice the gravity" as well, but I think it's going to be 4x the gravity, because of radius and size and all. (inverse-square law.) In any case, here's an article about launching rockets from larger, heavier planets. Link, pretty link. It's not a happy story. At 10.4g, rocket mass is one fifth of the mass of the planet.

A modern design, larger rocket than the Saturn V, with modifications to increase the T/W ratio could probably make it to orbit on a 2x radius, 8x mass Earth.

The Massive Mars Dust Storm Is Starting to Die Down

The dust is finally beginning to clear on Mars, but it'll probably still be a while before NASA's sidelined Opportunity rover can phone home.

A global dust storm has enshrouded Mars for more than a month, plunging the planet's surface into perpetual darkness. That's complicated life significantly for the solar-powered Opportunity, which has apparently put itself into a sort of hibernation; the rover hasn't contacted its controllers since June 10.

A long-awaited dawn seems to be on the horizon, however.

"It's the beginning of the end for the planet-encircling dust storm on Mars," NASA officials wrote in an Opportunity mission update yesterday (July 26).

Scientists studying the storm "say that, as of Monday, July 23, more dust is falling out than is being raised into the planet's thin air," agency officials added. "That means the event has reached its decay phase, when dust-raising occurs in ever smaller areas, while others stop raising dust altogether."

Other data points support this conclusion. For example, measurements by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show that temperatures in the middle atmosphere have stopped rising, indicating less absorption of solar heat by dust particles.

In addition, NASA's Curiosity rover — which is nuclear-powered and can therefore work through the storm — has observed a decline in overhead dust at its location, the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater, agency officials said.

Some Martian landforms previously hidden beneath the dust can now be spotted from orbit again, they added, and may even be visible using Earth-based telescopes by early next week, when Mars will make its closest approach to our planet since 2003.

https://www.space.com/41302-ma...

A few years ago, a Japanese probe missed Venus, an however easier target, so there is some progress that's been made. Then, landing on the space rock is a hard objective, as for instance the ESA's Philae lander failed to complete the mission. Good luck with that - that'd be great if it succeeds and brings back some samples to Earth.

since its japanese it will transform in to a giant robot once it hits the solar system .-.-.##%#%"#&"#%"#% NOT-BeauHD bu7 571ll l337 p0273r &%%564%%&&%%&

A few years ago, a Japanese probe missed Venus, an however easier target...

What about the Mars orbiter that mixed up metric/imperial and thrust itself into the planet instead of going around it? How amateur was that?

(and what sort of country still uses imperial units in the 21st century?)

A few years ago, a Japanese probe missed Venus, an however easier target, so there is some progress that's been made. Then, landing on the space rock is a hard objective, as for instance the ESA's Philae lander failed to complete the mission. Good luck with that - that'd be great if it succeeds and brings back some samples to Earth.

Spacex has made getting to orbit cheaper, and it takes a decade to get a satellite in the air. why not schedule a fuel run? https://www.space.com/25259-ro...

What are you going to grow your plants in, toxic soil?

I'm not sure what you mean. The lunar temperature varies depending on whether it is directly within the sun or not to about 260 F or as low as -280 F https://www.space.com/18175-moon-temperature.html. Average isn't so useful in that context, but such as they've been estimated, the average is substantially lower than Earth https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103516304869. More to the point, Mars is farther from the Sun than the Earth is from the Sun, so even if the moon were the same temperature as Earth, that wouldn't matter much here.

The original paper in Science: http://science.sciencemag.org/...
Space.com: https://www.space.com/41272-ma...
Science News: https://www.sciencenews.org/ar...
CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/25...

There was a link to it in the story: https://www.space.com/41147-co...

This is pure politics, with ULA buying its way to the top with political "contributions".
The USAF recently completed a bid process for launching secret missions and SpaceX won the bidding.
https://www.space.com/40978-sp...

"This is the fifth competitive procurement under the current Phase 1A of the EELV program since SpaceX entered the market to challenge ULA. The $130 million award for the Falcon Heavy launch is considerably lower than the average $350 million price tag for Delta 4 launches. "

https://fee.org/articles/compe...
"One of the keys to SpaceX’s success has been its ability to substantially undercut the prices of its competitors. While SpaceX lists its Falcon 9 rocket starting at $62 million a flight, the US Air Force budgeted $422 million for a single ULA flight in 2020."

In time competition will bring the competitors together. SpaceX will raise it prices and the ULA will have to cut their to compete. The ULA will switch from using Russian RD-180 engines to the BE-4 engine Bezos is developing, but hasn't begun engine qualification testing and doesn't plant to till 2019. Meanwhile, the ULA has ordered, and Russia will supply by the end of 2018, TWO new batches of the Russian RD-180 engine.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news...
Those engines make the ULA dependent on the Russians and pose a security threat to the US.

Amazingly, NASA says the ULA is "ahead" of SpaceX! Only in NASA and the ULA's political dreams. I wonder how much money changed hands for NASA "insiders" to claim the ULA is "ahead" of SpaceX when SpaceX builds and supplies every part of their American made Falcon9 and Falcon Heavy, engines included.

"Ceres: having more water than Earth since at least 2005"

As a mass-production engineer I would be asking serious questions about the design process and quality controls.

But the charges for return shipping, or sending out a field tech, would be a real bitch.

The acceptable risk of failure was a bit lower for this hardware. You wouldn't want to be that guy.

Why is the surface of Titan covered in "fossil" fuels?
https://www.space.com/4968-tit...
Was it the ancient forests on this moon? No. It's because hydrocarbons are a natural, low energy (much energy of combustion comes from 02) form of matter, that also occur on this planet without biological origin. Consequently, there are probably wells deeper than life ever lived in the ground, that will never be tapped.

https://overpopulationisamyth....

http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...

http://www.businessinsider.com... (see: "Part Two: Advanced Economies That Will Shrivel And Die")

While the Earth may have its limits for any specific combination of human culture and technology, there is room for quadrillions of humans in self-replicating space habitats throughout the solar system. Jeff Bezos' take on that:
https://www.space.com/37572-je...

And on current USA human culture and politics and economics:
https://www.westernwatersheds....
"By far the greatest impact on the American landscape comes not from urbanization but rather from agriculture. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farming and ranching are responsible for 68 percent of all species endangerment in the United States. Agriculture is the largest consumer of water, particularly in the West. Most water developments would not exist were it not for the demand created by irrigated agriculture. If ultimate causes and not proximate causes for species extinction are considered, agricultural impacts would even be higher. Yet scant attention is paid by academicians, environmentalists, recreationists and the general public to agriculture's role in habitat fragmentation, species endangerment and declining water quality. The ironic aspect of this head-in-the sand approach to land use is that most agriculture is completely unnecessary to feed the nation. The great bulk of agricultural production goes toward forage production used primarily by livestock. A small shift in our diet away from meat could have a tremendous impact on the ground in terms of freeing up lands for restoration and wildlife habitat. It would also reduce the poisoning of our streams and groundwater with pesticides and other residue of modern agricultural practices."

Consider, "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?"
https://healthesolutions.com/s...
"Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac? In a classic case of contradictory government policy the pyramids in this graphic clearly show the inverse relationship between federal government agriculture subsidies and federal nutrition recommendations. The chart was put together by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, but its figures still, alas, look quite relevant. Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that weâ(TM)re supposed to eat less of."

I'm shocked that the issue of Global Wobbling hasn't been addressed!

"Global Wobbling" is a real. It's called precession. It's even been linked in changes from the Sahara oscillating between desert and grassland.

There are...

This study identified 675 stars on the outskirts of the Mily Way galaxy that appear to have come from the inner galaxy.

In 1997, it was found that in the Virgo cluster of galaxies, there may be over one trillion extragalactic stars, or more than 10% of the total stellar population of the whole cluster.

And finally...Half the stars in the universe may be intergalactic wanders, which might solve a large part of the dark matter problem.

The IAU isn't an official body with any authority other than what they have taken on themselves. And if they are going to let historical politics cloud scientific thinking, they certainly aren't going to speak for me. I'd like to see some textbook publishers take a stand too.

The thing is, if you don't accept the IAU's authority, then whose authority are you going to accept? Textbook publishers? They're one notch above those scammers who sell you the "right" to name a star. The IAU's membership is over 12,000 professional astronomers, which as best as I can tell is a pretty good percentage of the people with careers in astronomy. The next largest professional group is the American Astronomical Society, with about 7,000 members all in the Americas. Their stance on the issue is decidedly neutral. In the end, the definition of a planet is merely semantics. What's important is that whatever definition you decide to use is functional, allowing generalized statements to be made easily without running afoul of the terminology. In that respect, I don't have a problem with the division between "planet" and "trans-Neptunian object" and dwarf planet. They are different enough and the terms selected for them, although not perfect, are definitive enough to make statements and issue papers about them without tripping over the semantics.

And yet only 424 of them were allowed to vote on the matter, on the last day of a conference.

I can't find the source, but I read somewhere that a previous measure, agreed to by most, would have preserved Pluto as a planet. Thinking the matter settled, most of the delegation went to play golf or drink beer, and a small minority pushed their agenda through.

Also, for the record, your "weapons grade stupid" is the exact analysis that NASA uses. The requirement is a less than 1:500 chance of a fatal accident during launch, including launch escape systems. Rockets aren't required to have a "1:500 chance without the escape system firing".

And really, the above linked gif is for the worst case - pressure vessel failure (aka, instantaneous) on the upper stage. You don't get any faster "failure explosion propagating to the payload" scenario faster than that. Yet if that were a crewed Dragon 2, they would have survived..

"The escape system slated for the second version of Dragon would have — should certainly have taken the astronauts to a safe place after an anomaly like this," Shotwell said during a news conference following the accident Sunday. "In fact, it's designed to take a far more energetic event and get the astronauts safely away."

Furthermore:

Interestingly, the robotic Dragon apparently managed to survive Sunday's rocket explosion, at least initially, even though the capsule was right in the middle of the fray, SpaceX representatives said.

"We did have Dragon telemetry after the event, so Dragon was transmitting and appears to have been healthy for some period of time," Shotwell said.

The fact that the (much poorer protected) Dragon 1 survived is apparent by the fact that Amos 6's propellant didn't explode until the payload fell to the ground.

Have I missed something? Is there now no water or water ice on Mars? https://www.space.com/17048-wa... More recently: https://news.nationalgeographi... Or was that just a really poor troll that baited me to post?

They're obviously worried that a lunar mission will impact their primary focus of making Muslims feel good about their history.

You're being willfully naive here. You're basically insisting that your one quote defines an absolute NASA priority of non science stuff despite the fact that history completely refutes that. There is no history of large scale Muslim outreach. There is no history of NASA spending large amounts of resources on anything in that quote you provided from the director. Without any of that you are absolutely wrong.

Also, a little history and "how government works" lesson for you. Our rockets all went obsolete under Obama because no plans were made for new ones under Bush. Under Obama plans were drawn up to get us back into the flying into space business but it takes time for such things. Major NASA accomplishments are rarely the result of the actions of the administration they happen under.

In 2021, when it is projected Americans will be flying on American government rockets again ( https://www.space.com/35394-pr... ), it will be because of what was started under Obama. Please feel free to read the entire article that I've linked to there. It lists actual, historically verifiable, priorities for NASA under Obama.

As for the "bigot argument", I never called you a bigot nor used any suggestion of racism as a means of undermining anything else you have said. I have, however, repeatedly asked you why you bolded the single part of the quote that had to do with Muslims which anyone with a passing knowledge of history knows was not a priority of NASA. So far you've failed to explain why that part is so particularly heinous.