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What with the floating debris, gases from leaks and thrusters, vibrations (from astronauts, equipment, and unknown sources), and the high albedo of that bright shiny albatross, the ISS is the last place I'd put a telescope.

What with the floating debris, gases from leaks and thrusters, vibrations (from astronauts, equipment, and unknown sources), and the high albedo of that bright shiny albatross, the ISS is the last place I'd put a telescope.

What with the floating debris, gases from leaks and thrusters, vibrations (from astronauts, equipment, and unknown sources), and the high albedo of that bright shiny albatross, the ISS is the last place I'd put a telescope.

You're referring to the infamous "martian crab" which NASA claims is just a lump of debris, but the tinfoil-hat crowd has made a big deal out of. This is the image Mr. Clarke was mentioning.

Very, very interesting. This is the picture that he claims looks like "Banyan trees."

Article+pics
more pics.

Amen to that.

> He has some fascinating opinions on Martian life, for example.

From the article: "Well, I think they've already found life. There's some pictures from the laboratories which seem to me to be unmistakably vegetation-leaves and stems and things. I don't see what else it could possibly be."

But with all due respect, Sir Clarke, what pictures are these again? Fark photoshops don't count.

His Dark Dune Spots look a lot more like some sort of outgassing (well, out-watering or out-CO2ing, which would in itself be interesting, but isn't proof of life) or wind-related phenomenon than trees.

With the new orbiter, we should get some new data that could resolve this question.

Mars is the Dalmation Planet!

These are probably the images he's referring to.

I think he's talking about these images.

Full article text can be found here

WHY are we just letting the Hubble die again?
We have 2 space shuttles. We've lost two recently. If we lose one more, that's effectively the end of the shuttle program. We need the shuttles for (1) contingency, (2) the ISS, and (3) future satellite/instrument launches. It is risky to send up 50% of the fleet for a single mission.

On top of that, a replacement will be ready sometime in 2007. The replacement will need a shuttle to launch. Now, if we send up a mission to repair Hubble, and buy it another 3-4 years, what good does that do if we can't launch the sucessor because the shuttle exploded on return to Earth?

Guess we better junk it because it seems we aren't getting any good science out of it.
They never said. You made it up. It's a tough choice, which the NASA administrator admits.

Until then, I think its worth perhaps *outsourcing* a maintinence mission to another country (or private company) who thinks they can get the job done.
No country would be able to fill that contract without spending billions more than a replacement would cost. Dozens of billions probably. The Hubble is big. Real big. It weighs 11,000kb. The Russian rocket classes can handle somewhere between 550 kg to 950 kg, with proposed models that could have handled 4000 kg (into LEO only) scrapped for financial reasons. A repair payload for Hubble would likely run at least 5000 kg, maybe more.

Other nations are equipped for satellite launching, and most barely at that.


Once again, I think NASA really needs to learn a very old saying that you don't junk something until you have a replacement.
A replacement is on the way. However, this is not "NASA junking" something. That implies active plan to junk something. The Hubble is failing, and requires massive, extraordinary measures to save it. It will in all likelyhood require an EVA to repair. It will require a full manned shuttle mission.

Another failed shuttle with a dead crew would likely lead to a dramatic toll being taken on NASA. Or possibly the end of NASA as it is known. It is too risky to rest that all on a single mission with dubious outcomes.

I think you are ignorant and mal-informed as to what the real reasons behind the NASA decision is.

Hubble needs this sort of thing to keep it serviced. This is very interesting and in my mind at least partially justifies Hubble.

A better space telescope is in the works, and it is scheduled for launch as early as 2007.

Why risk 50% of our remaining space shuttle fleet, another human crew, and untold billions to repair Hubble at this point?

A few years gap won't kill science or the stars. I mean... for all of human history except for the 14 years that Hubble has been in service we had no equivalent of Hubble. What's another 3-4 years when we've already missed 11.2 billion years?

I was very let down that there was no mention of the Lunar Solar Power / LSP project, proposed by David Criswell (and I think recently reviewed by NASA). This project could not only "lift our national spirit", but prove the best long-term investment our or any country could make for global stability and prosperity. The Mars mission sends the wrong (militaristic) message to the world when too many nations hasten to blame others for their problems (which is what causes wars). The prospect of being able to power the world's population affordably, sustainably and extensibly by 2050, or even 2100, could carry a profound message of hope. Why not actually solve a real long term problem rather than leaving it to our grandchildren?

Kill the mars program and fix the Hubble. We will go more places this way.

Are you kidding? First of all, science is about a diversity of observations. Space based optical wavelength, small telescope astronomy is nice, however it provides only a tiny portion of the measurements needed to understand the universe. The observations that we are making on Mars could seal the case that life is probable to exist elsewhere in the universe, perhaps even nearby! The Hubble, currently, can do little in the way of the search for life or habitable planets. Secondly, the hubble is an ancient piece of technology. The money used to run the program is better spent on new, much more powerful types of observatories, for instance Gossamer Telescopes, next generation x-ray observatories, or the Terrestrial Planet Finder. For exploring the furthest reaches of the universe, you must use infrared telescopes like the James Webb Telescope due to the massive redshift. Also it is important to set up a method of making groundbreaking observations of gravitional waves using something like LISA is essential to furthering our understanding of general relativity and cosmology. Also planetary exploration helps us develop propulsion systems that will eventually be used to launch interstellar probes.

There's so much to explore, and we're never going to make progress by continuously dumping money into a dying technology... Hubble's service record has been amazing, especially considering its flaws, however it is time to move on, to discover new and different things that Hubble cannot see.

Eliminating planetary science in order to take more pretty pictures, IMHO, is unacceptable. I'm glad to see that NASA agrees with this.

Disclaimer: I work on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission, so I'm a little biased :)

Cheers,
Justin Wick

It's not quite a space elevator, but it looks like the next Mars rover planned is going to be lowered down to the surface by a tether attached to a "Skycrane" craft hovering 5 meters in the air. This is to prevent the potential problem of a rover getting stuck in a landing platform. After lowering the rover the Skycrane will fly off to another area.

It's not quite a space elevator, but it looks like the next Mars rover planned is going to be lowered down to the surface by a tether attached to a "Skycrane" craft hovering 5 meters in the air. This is to prevent the potential problem of a rover getting stuck in a landing platform. After lowering the rover the Skycrane will fly off to another area.

I was wondering if NASA has actually disclosed the details of what they believe was the malfunction of the Spirit rover?

Space.com quoting Glenn Reeves, the JPL Flight Software Architect for the project, on Feb. 6:

"The first problem is that we ran out of memory. A subsequent problem after that is we managed to corrupt the file system."

My understanding is that the memory problem occurred because they were trying to load the FAT into memory, and it had grown too large from files accumulated during the flight to Mars.

Click here to find out the true story of Russia's first space "rover", almost 50 years ago.

I was searching for some papers on the Keck Observatory, and unfortunately I can't find many free ones online. However, here is an interesting story on how the Keck system outperforms Hubble in the infrared (and a few others are mentioned). An interesting point it makes is that Hubble is actually best in for visible light, which isn't opaque in the atmosphere. There's also this story, but it's a lot less informative.

I can still remember using a NewTek DigiView digitizer with a b/w video camera and filters so I guess the Alzheimer hasn't gotten to me yet. :-)

The main thing I'm thinking is that you need to be able to send lots of people at once. What's the crew capabilities on the Seawolf? I didn't check.

(I'm quoting this fact file.)

The Seawolf has a crew complement of 12 officers and 121 enlisted personnel for a total of 133 crew members. She's certainly no slouch. :-)

I suppose if we're just talking about a passenger shuttle craft, it doesn't have to be as big as all that in order to carry lots of people. The reason the shuttle has to carry so much 'dead weight' is because it has to support the crew for awhile when it gets up there, but if it could just go straight to orbit and dump its payload of passengers, it can probably be a bit smaller and still carry plenty of people.

Actually, a large portion of the shuttle's weight is allocated to its cargo. I've been in one of the shuttle mock ups and they have MASSIVE cargo bays (about the size of a school bus). According to one source they can carry up to 8,605 kg (18,970 pounds) of mass to the space station when the bay is pressurized. Assuming an average weight of 200 lbs. per person, plus another 3 tons for a special passenger module for the cargo bay, you could carry about 64 people per flight. Throw in a little extra weight for various incidentals and you could probably arrive at a reasonable figure of 50 passengers per flight.

The Seawolf is actually pretty small compared to a deep-space vehicle, I think, because of that one small thing. Sure, you could stick some ion drive units on there powered by the nuclear plant, but how fast would it go, then? How long would it take to accelerate? That's the real question. :)

Small? At 353x35x40 feet, she'd be plenty large for a space born vehicle. In comparison, a two bedroom camper with kitchen and toliet is 40 feet long and about the width of a conversion van. Since a peaceful space vehicle wouldn't need so many crew (no battlestations), it would be as good as a luxury liner.

As for thrust, the Prometheus for the JIMO mission thrusts about 1 newton per second (one kilogram of acceleration per second) on a 10 megawatt reactor. According to the navy's specs the PWR/S6W reactor on the Seawolf can put out 220 megawatts of power. Assuming a linear increase in power, that would give our fictional Spacewolf a thrust of 22 Newtons.

Of course, I doubt that the military would be happy with 22 newtons of thrust. They'd probably want a more powerful fission drive. Options include NERVA, GCNR (Gas Core Nuclear), Nuclear Salt Water, and Orion drives. All of those have a very high thrust in exchange for a lower Isp than Ion drives. However, their Isp is still significantly higher than today's chemical rockets, and yet they can produce comperable thrust.

I'm curious enough about this that I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown of how much each component and system of the Seawolf-class sub weighs. I don't want anything classified, of course, but if someone can give this information I'd really be interested in seeing it.

I seriously doubt you'd get anywhere near those specs. However, if you strip out the weapons, the ballast tanks, the screws, the reactor rotors, the sonar and reduce the crew, you'll probably be able to save yourself a good fraction of the weight. Space versions of some of the above would have to be installed in orbit, but you're probably still saving yourself a bundle.

Of course, all of this is just facts and figures. None of this means that launching a Seawolf into orbit is a good idea, bu

aw, jeez. forget that kid stuff. what I want to know is what happened to the the Uranus Project nomination ????

...make sure that SCO goes down in a ball of fire that can be seen around the world.

What? You mean like this? :)

Vellmont wrote:
[You're out to lunch]

You're right, of course. The change discussed in the article was on the order of millimeters. The .3 percent came from this link off the article, and talks about how earth is .3 percent fatter round the equator than a sphere.

A 24 mile increase in diameter would indeed be both frightening and alarming, were we not drowned at that point :)

As it is, I stand corrected as to the numbers, but still maintain that a few millimeters increase in diameter is not very frightening or alarming. Yet. As you say, we have no idea if there's been any more research on this since the article was posted in 2002.

Thank you for the sanity-check.

"You can sterilize a robot. But you cannot do the same to an astronaut. Inevitably a human will introduce microbes to the planet ... and contaminate it."

By the time anybody gets there the Mars may be contaminated by this broken Mars probe, which wasn't meant to land on Mars (therefore wasn't sterilized) but chances are high that it will hit Mars nonetheless.

By joint mission, you are perhaps refering to the fact that the US shoulders ~85% of the cost compared to the European 8.3. Interestingly, the GDP of the US is 10.45 trillioncompared to a European 11.52 trillion (this is a bit of overestimate for member space nations, but not 80% off). So, yes, in some bizzare way the American media has come to conclusion that the ISS is mostly a NASA success.

Living in the US and talking to many people, I can tell you that few take complete credit for winning WWII. The general opinion is that it was the US, Russia, and England were the important players. If you believe resisting invasion for ~14 days should mean getting credit, then we will have to just agree to disagree. Victory in the war in the Pacific was pretty much a United States effort. In Europe, Russia and England showed amazing heroics holding out, but were in little danger of ultimately overrunning Germany by itself. (Keep in mind that although Russia did stage an impressive counter attack after stalingrad, this was possible in large part because a two (3) front war existed. Take away the US/British fronts and...) However, it was the massive influx of men and material from the US that in the end saved the day. So, yes we somehow believe that the US deserves a great deal of credit for the war. To me, this is not too far off base.

Sorry, try again. You forgot the weight of the mountings, suspension, deployment units, etc. There's more to the solar panels than just the panelling itself. Weight adds up quickly when talking about structure support and reinforcement. (The entire rover weighs 174 Kg.) Motors to deploy the panels are no slouches either, although NASA is probably using a small motor similar to those on an RC car.

BTW, the Rover has a maximum power generating capability of 140 Watts. It takes two batteries to keep the rover running when there isn't enough sunlight. NASA doesn't say what kind of batteries they are (their "specs" on the rover are kind of useless), but external sources claim that they are Lithium Ion batteries with a weight of 7.15Kg a piece (8.77 Kg with the support struts). That same article claims that the rover needs a constant 100 Watts to operate.

Let's do some math shall we?

Design 1: We ditch the batteries all together, and use a 150 Watt RTG. We'll estimate it's weight is ~2Kg of plutonium, plus another 2 Kg of material for the rest of the device and the mountings. The net weight increase is (2 + 2) - (8.77 * 2) = -13.54 Kg.

Design 2: We use a 150 Watt RTG, but keep one battery for high draw situations. The net weight increase is (2 + 2) - 8.77 = -4.77 Kg.

One way or another, it's a win-win situation. Sorry, we're back to the "tree huggers" stopping RTG missions.

It's still in the budget the white house just released. Of course he still has most of the cost increases planned for after he leaves office.

It's a good point (and was a concern on the first Moon missions).

But, did you have to use one of the worst movies ever made as your evidence?

Online at Space.Com

The Online Columbia Loss Faq, compiled through March 2003 much of which might be outdated, but good for lots of small details, and a sense of the history as it happened.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board Website, due to become inactive on February 1st, 2004 (!)

People might want to download the final report while they can, dated October 2003, although It is also available on the Nasa Website here

You're correct: NEAR

Brazil's NGP is about 8% that of US but I guess we could spare some. Nasa has one Brazilian astronaut who, I bet, will go up anytime - as will any american. Last year 21 Brazilian technicians died in an explosion while working on our rocket. The program is still on.

Wow, this topic really got me thinking. All that time I spend every day deleting spam, driking coffee, having toilet breaks. It all adds up. It's amazing I every get time do any work.

In fact, I've just figured out that if we can shut down slashdot - maybe feature it on a front page article and get it slashdotted - we could scape together enough coin to fulfill George Bush Juniors plan of putting a person on Mars.

Do the math:

800,000 Readers a day
30 Minutes a day to scan the front page and browse at level 5
$30 Per hour wage, these are _mostly_ employed geeks after all
$24,000,000,000 Annual lost time cost, assuming a 40 hour week, 50 weeks of the year.

There was an interesting article talking about options for a rescue on space.com. Sounds like there wouldn't have been much we could do even if they had detected the problem.

Google's attempt at showing the above Excel as HMTL

PLASMA: What is it?

[IMPORTANT NOTE: Officials now say that the hot gas that surrounded Columbia and appeared to breach the craft had probably not yet reached the plasma state.]

Plasma is sometimes called a fourth state of matter (in addition to solid, liquid, gas). It's created when gas is superheated and electrons are stripped out, leaving electrically charged particles.

Case in point.

Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets

More information on BBC and Space.com.

NASA TV is also broadcasting the Opportunity briefing with NASA officers as well as EDL Developers. A must see for interesting facts on what happened during entry.

To the people responsible for this great achievment once again, great work guys and thank you.

This story is a duplicate of one you had (or should have had) almost a year ago

I didn't read the article, but I am sure the ESA scientists are reporting that their observations confirm those made by Mars Odyssey over a year ago.

So what if Mars Express wasn't the first instrument to discover martian water? It is important to independently verify observations, and ESA did so. An independent organization with a completely different kind of instrument reporting the same findings pretty much nails down the fact that the water is there.

Actually, no, it was a beep five minutes long. The rover's still quite alive, but is unable to send scientific data for an undetermined reason. However, before anyone comes to any conclusions, the beep was in response to a command, not an error, indicating that they can still contact the lander. Now they just gotta figure out what's causing the transmission problem. Full story here.

Jennifer Trosper, Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover project ... "The rover remains in excellent shape for trundling over to the nearby crater," Trosper said. "The spacecraft continues to amaze me. There's nothing to make me think that this vehicle isn't going to last a long time," she concluded.

Oops.

Here

But I like my writeup better :P

"ghettoboy22 writes "Multiple news services are reporting the Martian Interplanetary Defence Force (MIDF) has successfully captured an extraterrestial craft codenamed "Spirit" on the outskirts of a small village in Lower Gusev province two days ago, coming on the heals of the successful downing of another invasion craft last month. Speculation has insued from Spirit's handlers on Earth who are suggesting the craft was hit with the much feared Martian "Cosmic Ray" computer viri, causing it to speak nothing but jibberish. No worries though - our buddies will have their work cut out for them when Spirit's sister-ship "Opportunity" makes it's decent from Martian orbit in T minus 58 hours!""

Wow. Here's a space.com article from three and a half years ago on the same subject.

The Water's been found - it's most likely in the form of ice, and it's all over the planet. The question Spirit is trying to answer is was there once a lot of LIQUID water on Mars, and if so how long ago, and for how long a duration? Gusev Crater was almost certainly a lake once.

In a related article also on space.com it is mentioned that mice embroyes low gravity conditions develop normally, thanks to some pioneering work by Japanese scientists. It seems to me that mice get to do all the fun things.

Animals in space remind me of Laika, The Space Dog