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Well, since the colour of Iapetus' dark hemisphere is a different hue than Phoebe's, that theory is in question. See Space.com's page on Iapetus.

Shutter control restrictions on the space photography of Israel were inserted into a Senate bill in 1997. Drafted by Rep. John Kyle (R-Arizona) and Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-New Mexico), the law imposes restrictions on imaging Israeli territory during certain periods invoked by the Israel government.

I have more confidence in Jerry Doyle, the Republican candidate for the San Fernando Valley congressional seat, who is better known to the science fiction crowd as the actor who played irascible security chief "Michael Garibaldi" on the legendary television space opera Babylon 5 . . than I have in Bush himself!
Space Powers Babylon 5 Star's Congressional Bid
So, what happened? Did Jerry Doyle win office?
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Because "Gravastars" are still very much a new and thus fringe theory.

"The Commission believes that commercialization of space should become the primary focus of the vision, and that the creation of a space-based industry will be one of the principal benefits of this journey...."

This one point seems so obvious. It has been said many, many times. Yet it's so hard for "The Powers That Be" to implement.

When the history of the airplane is considered, one has to be thankful that the Wrights did not work for the National Aeronautic Administration in 1904.

I am grateful for all that NASA has given us. But if we are to truly make the next step, the financial incentives for space must be given a chance to exercise their power.

It's hard to allow a child to move out on it's own, but for the good of both the child and the parent, it must be done. Yes, there will be mistakes and risk and danger. But the alternative is a stunted, deformed life that is nothing but tragedy.

Something like this from this article at Space.com.

Something like this from this article at Space.com.

Something like this from this article at Space.com.

An article in Space.com back in 2000 describes the ISS Crew as having email, but no Internet access. Email is pretty easy to spool up and delivered when the ISS is in communication range. Web access is another matter entirely. (Remember, it's traveling around the world every 90 minutes. It's constantly hopping between ground relay stations.)

Even if they do have internet access today, they probably have to spool up the sites they want to see and cache them through a proxy/radio relay/whathaveyou.

also being covered at some sites.

More information is available here and here.

Kind of weird that they don't play up the fact it runs linux more.

Any launch of a spacecraft that uses any sort of nuclear power requires a sign-off from the president, which is not assured, and will of course result in the massive protests that heralded Galileo and Cassini. Plus, the only RTGs that exist now are earmarked for the forthcoming Pluto mission. New ones need to be designed and built.

Fortunately, plans are in the works for the next-generation Mars rovers to use nuclear power and therefore to be able to last for a Martian year or two.

Read the Space.com article about wintering over the rovers. They are preparing for it:

Staying alive is tougher for Spirit than it is for Opportunity. That's due to Spirit's higher latitude exploration zone on the red planet, Squyres reported. "We're already looking at maps of the Columbia Hills and trying to pick a good spot to winter over," he said.

Part of the wintering over strategy will involve positioning the rovers to soak up as much continuous sunlight, even as the Sun moves low in the martian sky, Bell said. Secondly, the robots are to be oriented so that communications links with orbiters zipping overhead is maximized, he pointed out.

Space.com has an article on it. The next time is in 2012. "The next transit is on June 6, 2012 and will be visible from northwestern North America, northern Asia, Japan, Korea, eastern China, Philippines, eastern Australia, and New Zealand, according to NASA. Portions of the 2012 event will be visible in parts of North America, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa."

Some scientists think the Earth's magnetic field is preparing to flip again, which it does every so often. Apparently when this occurs, it is preceded by a period of local variations - mini-poles showing up all over the planet. This system could be invaluable in tracking this process.

Also, according to this article and others, the field has decreased 10% over the last 150 years. This has left some satellites vulnerable to damaging radiation.

Other links:
Sun's rays to roast Earth as poles flip"
The Sun Does a Flip
Quick flip of Earth's magnetic field revealed

Can't wait for the Cassini-like protesters... oh, joy.

From this Space.com article about the data from the May 13th flight, "During a portion of SpaceShipOne's boost, the flight director display did not function properly. Pilot Mike Melvill, however, continued the planned trajectory referencing the external horizon through cockpit windows."

Forget an artificial horizon, good thing SpaceshipOne had a window! If the cockpit had been purely computer generated (e.g. "viewscreen on"), the pilot wouldn't have had a clue where he was going.

It's important to remember that going into space and being weightless are separate things. Weightlessness is the effect of free fall; not some magic thing that happens once you reach space. You're only weightless in orbit because orbit, by definition, means that you're in a continuous free fall. Since this flight won't go into orbit (or anywhere close to far enough from Earth to ignore it's gravity), the weightlessness effect is simply a result of the flight trajectory including free-fall on re-entry

Actually, weightlessness is simply the result of your velocity being the same as that of your surroundings. If you and your surroundings (i.e. Space Ship) are traveling at approximately the same velocity (speed & direction), you experience weightlessness. Free fall is an example of this effect, not the rule. This is precisely how the NASA Vomit Comet works.

If your comment were correct, the Apollo astronauts would not have experienced weightlessness on their way to / from the moon.

Well, in terms of commercial viability, there were reports back in 2000 such as this one which stated that France declined to participate in Vega because of concerns about its commercial viability (although they did fund the P80 advanced solid propulsion stage).

The Soyuz design is a good one because it is proven, and very very simple. No fiddly bits. You could probably launch in a hurricane if you absolutely had to: little short of a thunderstorm over the pad will stop the launch. This is no space shuttle, and weather-related scrubs are almost unheard of here.

On the other hand, the Arianes have fiddly bits and can't launch in bad weather. So where does this thing fall, somewhere in between? Even more fiddly than Ariane? Less complex than Soyuz?

As much as everyone's chuckled at it, myself included, it's worth clearing up the Gore thing, especially in light of who made it to the White House instead.

He pitched in, and was one of the proponents of making what was once the rather 'closed' (or at least, nonprofit save for the likes of BBN) ARPANet a full public resource. What we can gather from the sweep of history is that he probably believed that, as such a resource (even one used for commerce), it should be policed to the same extent as the public airwaves (note amateur radio's longstanding restrictions against 'profanity' and the use of cryptography), and, er, the media at large -- gotta protect those kids. That was, of course, his mistake; "the Internet" of today doesn't run on limited public spectrum so much as a theoretically 'unlimited' set of private wires, and while it couldn't have been built in the form we know it without the ARPANet, the First Amendment and property rights rather, erm, 'rightly' intervened, to a greater extent than they were previously able to in the limited broadcast-media bandwidth.

If you look at his other 'initiatives,' it's obvious he's a futurist of sorts, albeit one who might not realize his 'great ideas' have often already been implemented to degrees. Of course, he was proposing more of a national art project than anything else (follow the reference chain from here, if you wish),
but his 'backing' attracted funding for a technically useful climate-monitoring mission that's now complete and awaiting a slot for launch.

[No, don't look at me... I voted Libertarian.]

Phoebe best image so far, from Voyager2 in 1981

"My God! It's full of pixels!"

IIRC most scientist believe it moves with the speed of light. but it's not proven yet. Ah, jsut googled this

Then read the abstract at least. It's free.

It was already pointed out that seeds probably survived even if the parent plants didn't. Have a look at an area where there's been a forest fire to see how this works.

Many species survived, yes. It's impossible for use to determine how many individuals survived though, and I see no claims here one way or another.

The impact did metamorph rocks in the area, but worldwide there was nowhere near enough heat. It takes far more heat than a large forest fire, or even a broiler, to cause that kind of change in rocks. You normally need lots of pressure too.

As far as "reacting the atmosphere," that's part of the theory as first suggested several years ago. This isn't a new theory, but a study bringing out more evidence for it.

We humans are capable of creating a much larger catastrophe than our often theoretical cousins in space; and it's saddening.

This claim simply is not true.

In the following article you can read that 1 mile-asteroid impacts happen about 5 times every million years. Each such impact has the energy of several million megatons. I think that the world's nuclear aresnal sums up to several thousand megatons (most nukes around a megaton or less, times 10,000).

In any case, this is for the "five times per million years" size rock. The rock that hit the dinosaurs was much much bigger (but such big rocks only fall down once per a hundred million years).

Tor

There are several bases from which the Aurora is flown, for example.

I've been all over the Internet looking for information on the Aurora. The consensus at this point is that it doesn't exist. Or if it *did* exist, it was canceled and doesn't exist any more.

OTOH, there's evidence to suggest that the US has a secret stealth blimp for heavy lifting of various military cargos. The evidence tends to suggest that the blimp is what most of the delta wing sightings are, and that stories of "it zipping off in seconds" are fabricated information plants intended to confuse the public.

But it's not smart to play with these people. You could disappear and no one would ever see you again, alive or dead. Trust me, I know what I am speaking of.

Men in black helicopters and all of that? A "smoking man" maybe? Come on. The military is staffed by human beings. They might have some difficulty in deciding what to do with you, but they hardly make people "disappear". I'd be willing to bet that many of the super-curious have ended up being drafted as CIA or military intelligence agents.

Do NOT fuck with these people, if you care about your future.

Sage advice no matter *who* you're talking about. If you do something that pisses off someone powerful, they can derail your future in a hurry. Don't screw around unless you're willing to accept the consequences.

Mayeb a bit off topic, but maybe we should ask a little help from the Russians. They seem to have been using charged gas engines for quite a while. Maybe a hall effect thruster? They use more power, but seem to generate more thrust as well.

It may be 10,000 miles to space, but only the first 250 or so is what matters

So, according to the article, it would cost $250 to send a tonn of stuff to the space station.

Dude, seriously, I saw this image in the story and thought the exact same thing.

Next time, don't program it to land in a crater. NASA was lucky that their similarly boneheaded failure to include filesystem cleanup code in their Mars landers was repairable.

sometimes it is hard to tell the serious inquiries / responses from the jokes, but here is my attempt at a serious response. You may also be thinking of the "Wow" signal that was detected at Ohio State in the 70's. It is one of the most interesting signals detected by a radio SETI search so far, but it was never confirmed even after intensive efforts.

A good summary by Seth Shostak (a SETI pioneer and really funny guy) is here.

(But I'm biased, since I was lucky enough to be present at that launch.)

What body decides what marks the boundary of space? I see all sorts of references to "officially defined" but no one says by whom.

I'm not a that great with science, but isn't the speed of light not actually a constant but changing with the expansion of the universe (only page I could find).
I know many people here are better at science (not to mention spelling, grammer, coding, e.t.c), than I am, so i ask does this not make a lot of these predications less accurate than they might think?

To anyone who is still complaining about how much the prequels are sucking:

Remember that they are coming from the guy who wasted his fortune on Howard the Duck.

After seeing that movie, it should have become obvious what was in store once he announced work on the Star Wars prequels.

An interesting article at www.space.com suggests that the problem might actually be that there is so much oil in the Earth that we could destroy our environment burning it all. Since we all know that there should be vast amounts of various hydrocarbons available in the asteroids, it's somewhat believable.

Do you have a source that suggests the moon is getting closer? According to this article, (and many others) it's been moving further away. The water levels will rise drastically in the next few years probably but it will be due to global warming, not the moon.

With the same amount of energy that you send equipment to a nearby meteor, you could have simply extracted these resources from the earth itself.
Yes, but what about the energy needed to reclaim the land where you took the resources for human habitation? And what about the increasing energy that is being used to extract ever more rare material? Is it more efficient to dig two miles into the earth to get at gold ore than to launch a robotic spacecraft toward a gold-bearing asteroid and send some home? And what about cleaning up the mercury that's used in processing gold ore? Or reclaiming the mines once they are out of easily-retrievable ore? And protecting the environment around the mines?

Not pursuing space resources is very short-sighted. Why wait until resources are nigh-exhausted on Earth (which they one day will be) to develop the technologies to mine asteroids and planets?

This simply demonstrated that light behaves as a wave, by bending the light the resulting beams are out of phase, which will cause interference. This can be reproduces with light and sound. Such Interferense was demostrated in 1850 by Tomas Young in his Double-slit experiment. The reverse effect is that when the beams are combined in phase we get interferometry a.k.a Keck.

google it. You "must work for NASA" (make that Lockheed Martin) if you get your units wrong.

...it's only 4 pixels!

Or even more?

This could get to be a mildly dangerous thread..

Don't you just love how you can change the captions on these images? :)

Looks like it could be a job for the "Boys from the Dwarf" and the Jupiter Mining Corporation...

It also gives the size and range in a more universally palpable fashion:

The EADS Phoenix, a prototype of the future European Shuttle, will be carried to an altitude of 2,400 meters (7,900 feet) by a heavy-duty helicopter and then dropped so it can glide to earth for a landing. ...

The ship is just under seven meters (23 feet) long, weighs 1,200 kilograms (2,640 pounds) and has a wingspan of 3.9 meters (13 feet). It's one-sixth the size of the actual planned vehicle.

The test range has been the site of European Space Agency tests because of its remote location and its vast uninhabited areas.

The area has two restricted air spaces, Esrange and Vidsel, each measuring approximately 5,000 square kilometers (6,000 square yards *), available for the tests.

When combined with a temporary air corridor, test vehicles can fly as far as 350 kilometers (217 miles) over land.

* Well, that should be 6000 million sq. ft, but they probably should've said 2000 square miles.

It also gives the size and range in a more universally palpable fashion:

The EADS Phoenix, a prototype of the future European Shuttle, will be carried to an altitude of 2,400 meters (7,900 feet) by a heavy-duty helicopter and then dropped so it can glide to earth for a landing. ...

The ship is just under seven meters (23 feet) long, weighs 1,200 kilograms (2,640 pounds) and has a wingspan of 3.9 meters (13 feet). It's one-sixth the size of the actual planned vehicle.

The test range has been the site of European Space Agency tests because of its remote location and its vast uninhabited areas.

The area has two restricted air spaces, Esrange and Vidsel, each measuring approximately 5,000 square kilometers (6,000 square yards *), available for the tests.

When combined with a temporary air corridor, test vehicles can fly as far as 350 kilometers (217 miles) over land.

* Well, that should be 6000 million sq. ft, but they probably should've said 2000 square miles.

oops, I copied the wrong word, that's what they use in the article, AstroNote instead of Tricoder, if you look at the linked article

my spelling is not so good, therfore when I look for the word astronauts in the article, I found the wrong word. lol, lucky I didn't get any AstroNut instead. :)

"Wallace said it's hard to predict how the rovers will eventually be silenced."

Pure Silence: "A gentle, loving, inner peace and silence is here and now in this moment. It has always been this way. It is always here. It is right here within you and all around you, a stillness, an apparent void, a seeming nothingness out of which everything arises, exists, and eventually returns. "

OMG! The rovers are going to get sucked into a black hole! WATCH OUT!!

This might have worked before the internet, but when somebody thinks there's a possible strike, the news gets out within hours. This is due in large part to the huge numbers of amateur astronomers who are often relied upon to do follow-up observations.

shouldn't the focus be on propulsion methods first. is the traditional rocket engine efficent enough to make such frequent trips. ion drive is looking to be a promising concept