Slashdot Mirror

check out: http://www.space.com/news/a11_plaque.html

doesn't fully answer your question, but indicates someone back then had a wider view of the world.

Actually there is something valuable.. helium-3


Moon's Helium-3 Could Power Earth

If this guy has anything to do with it

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscien ce/laser_moon_010810-1.html

shame physics always gets in the way of great ideas

A great link on Jedi arrogance in this same series of articles can be found at this link.

This article reminds me of a series of articles found on Space.com called The Phantom Heresies, a collection of speculation on why things were in Star Wars. (Because these links are fairly old, you may have to scrounge around--use Google.)

The link above discusses the powers and the arrogance of the Jedi, and why they had it coming. The cool part for me about these articles was that they reflected my views after watching The Phantom Menace after watching how mortibund both Jedi Council and Senate were in comparison to the efficient manipulations of Darth Sidious in TFM.

Was the Empire a better system? I think that a gilded cage is a cage, no matter how informative or high-class the reading material is that covers the bottom of my cage. I would side with the Rebels, lightsaber in hand if I were a Jedi.

The story on space.com has more details on this.
Also see the offical offical press release from University of Hawaii.

What's more plausable is that these moons are remnants of impacts on other moons. Read the Space.com article on the moons.

I absolutely agree. Here is an article from Space.com about nuclear propulsion.

I just googled and found this article
Way offtopic and last year's news but it seems to address the thoughts of the parent post and the children...

Hrmm...looking at the URL, it could easily be this.

Sorry, I couldn't resist (:

NASA doesn't make mistakes?

Their most relevant mistake in this case is "cost-plus" contracts, where they pay "however much it costs our contractors, plus a guaranteed profit". This thoroughly discourages any but the most bloated proposals from contractors. Under these circumstances, a contractor's engineer can be fired for suggesting how to save money, because that will cost the contractor the amount saved plus the lost profit on that amount.

This one is endemic to NASA, and is perhaps the primary reason why they are incapable of low-cost space flight. This, alone, could explain why private enterprise could suceed where NASA has utterly failed.

This article keeps talking about space flight as if it were something that should be cheap, that brilliance is the only thing keeping us out of orbit.

We wish.

Space flight isn't like air flight, where a couple of bicycle repairmen from Ohio could study the basic principles and build a device on their own. Air flight can be done with an ordinary gasoline engine and the right kits. Goddard developed the first successful rockets with a combination of basic physics and lots of chemistry, but those weren't manned or orbital.

On the other hand, sending a man into space for the first time took the combined financial and intellectual resources of an entire superpower. It still does, not because the principles are too advanced but because the raw materials are hideously expensive and because the margin for error is enormous. If you're trying to fly yourself into orbit, you damned well better have your engineering right because after a certain point, even parachutes won't save you from a miscalculation.

About the only thing that could make orbital commutes cost-effective would be a successful space elevator, a tether between a geosynchronous station and the ground along which cargo and people could climb and descend. High-tech planes won't do it, rockets won't do it, all of those take too much money and have too much risk. An elevator would have an initial cost and then be relatively cheap to run and re-run. And once you had one, you could send up parts for a second one again and again.

But I'm not holding out hope for a $200 ticket on a space shuttle anytime soon.

From the article: This looks a bit too dangerous. Although the guy strapped into it looks to be having a jolly time.

No, seriously. As far as I can tell, Jar-jar's only REAL crime was being the only character in the first movie with a personality of any sort (the fact that the personality in question was that of an annoying muppet only made this fact more painful, as it meant HE was the only character a semi-sane human being could relate to...which of course, nobody wanted to do...).

His speech and voice aren't really much sillier than Yoda's (and Yoda didn't even have the gee-whiz CGI effects to to keep him from being such an obvious puppet). His slapstick antics weren't really any more annoying than R2D2/C3P0's (heck, the "how rude!" schtick just REEKS of C3P0) were in the original movies...but in the original movies, the main characters HAD personalities that outshone the 'droids, so they weren't so "glaring". In TPM, it just made Jar-jar stand out way more than he would have if the other characters weren't acting like emotionless drones most of the time...

From the brief blurb in the review, it sounds like Lucas is still keeping Jar-jar in the "annoying comic relief" category (though for only a very brief appearance this time)...but I'd much rather they actually let Jar-jar develop beyond that. Seriously - if they let him hang around the other characters long enough, they can have him lose the more outrageous aspects of his speech, get a grip on his tendency to comically panic everytime something happens, and accomplish something once in a while. Or, perhaps he'll just get fed up with the abuse he gets from the alleged "good guys" and give in to the Dark Side - perhaps Lucas' "Big Plans" involve Jar-jar coming back as a vengeful Sith to kick everyone's butts for tormenting him in the first two movies while letting R2D2 and C3P0 do their thing without comment (evidently, they're back in this movie as well).

(If Jar-jar using Magic Force Powers(tm) seems improbable to you, take a look at this article. It may just be that Lucas overdid Jar-jar's "fool" act as much as he overdid the Jedi's "calm and cool" act in the first movie...)

Now if only someone will found the Association for Prevention of Cruelty to Comedy Sidekicks, we'll be in business...

Why does the Northrup Grumman design feature a Boeing Logo? you can just make it out on the top!

- This article from space.com about the flu virus is brought into the environment via space debris, space dust, etc.

- According to this story germs can survive and even thrive and mutate in outer space.

I'd say that someone should be concerned....

Is it just me, or does this design look a little too similar to the Y-Wing". Would NASA have to pay Lucas for the copyright? Is this a conspiracy by NASA to cash in on the Episode II hype? I think so!

How long until American consumer trappings infect Mars?

This will get us by until the Hubble Heritage Site gets ahold of them or the main site becomes un-/.ed.

Unfortunately space.com's "universal viewer" didn't work too well with Konqueror (javascript problems?) - but that tadpole galaxy picture is amazing! And 10 times
faster than the old camera, so they can do one of these every day?!

My only question is whether the "kick rocket" will enter orbit with the spacecraft.

There's a lot of theories about alternatives to the big bang besides the one mentioned in the Yahoo article. The main one that is getting a lot of interest in scientific circles isn't this new one in the Yahoo article. Instead, it's the so called Ekpyrotic theory, with the name coming for the Greek word for fire. It is so intresting because it brings together two disparate areas of physics: inflation and M branes. Inflation is a weird concept that says the universe expanded from the diameter or an atom to the size of a grapefruit almost instantly - required to explain the way galaxies are clumped and clustered in the sky we see today and first postulated by a guy named Alan Guth. M branes are an offshoot of string theory postulated by Ed Whitten. There's tons of stuff on these topics on the web; all of it is facinating, enter any of these terms in a search engine and keep reading. Next stop, Google...

It'd help the Russians pay their way

Public opinion liked the idea of him going

Lies! All of it lies! Saying that that much of the impacting debris is manmade is as silly as saying some global warming is caused by humans! Or even that global warming exists! Or that the Earth is not flat, or that Darwin knows better than God!

I am Jack's outrage!
--
Thermonuclear weapons don't kill people, people do!

The recent space.com article says,

NASA estimates there are 4 million pounds of junk orbiting Earth. More than half the impacting debris is manmade

This implies that 40% or so of the debris in orbit is of natural origin.

Which would mean that Earth has hundreds or thousands of tiny natural satellites (moons) that they never taught me about in school.

Is this just simple misreporting? Or does Earth have little moons that went undiscovered until NASA started tracking space debris?

There are also a number of reports of the shuttle having to maneuver away from debris, such as here, its worth noting that the warning came from "U.S. Space Command", i.e. NORAD, not NASA's orbital debris office.

So some NASA PHB may think that NORAD's tracking is sufficient, and the money is better spent keeping the billion dollar dinosaur shuttle program flying...

I saw this Here yesterday it seems like an interesting theory.. it gives a whole new point of view to blackholes.

I think they got that backwards...

Isn't beige the new black ??

...and a complete scam. It was about an alleged anti-gravity disc, made from a 12" superconducting ring that looked not unlike a brake pad.

This is far from being consigned to the scam basket (although it may end up there). The easiest way to demonstrate this is to note that NASA has invested in research to try to replicate Podkletnov's results.

The interesting thing about gravity is that it isn't well understood by modern physics. We know how it behaves (we think) but we don't know what causes it really. This makes it equally ripe for psuedo-science as for breakthrough science. In any case, an April Fool's day scam it isn't.

There are a bunch of other links here and a good overview here.

Here is a link with a little more info, I personally don't think cabbage flavored ramen and weightlessness would really go together, but I am not Japanese. http://www.space.com/news/space_ram_020415.html

A lot of the conjecture I have been reading on this thread seems to support the assumption that life BEGAN on Earth. The problem is that we don't precisely know what conditions necessitated the emergence of life. The logic: life exists on Earth, therefore, life began on Earth, is fundamentally flawed. We are, in effect, presupposing that the conditions required to support the plethora of life on this planet are the same as those required for life to begin. Whilst, this may seem like a baseless and wholly irrelevant observation the Theory of Panspermia is slowly gaining credibility due to recent findings. While I think it is wise to view these finding with guarded skepticism it is worth a look: Panspermia

If even a tiny percentage of stars have planets capable of growing intelligent life, and a tinier fraction of those manage to avoid blowing themselves up long enough to perfect intersteller travel, you should have a galaxy positively swarming with Bug Eyed Monsters. They've had billions of years to cross the interstellar vastness and do the exponential growth thing. So WTF are they? Except for the ravings of that guy in the FBI basement, there's no sign of them.

Unfortunately, the periodic elements usually cite as contributing to an Ice Age usually vary over tens of thousands of years, not Millions. Check out thies graphs on Orbital eccentricity, Axis Tilt, and Precession of the Equinoxes. There is a Composite Graph as well.

End result is that we do knot know what actually causes the Ice Ages; these variations seem to be operating at the wrong time scale. More realistic factors include Plate tectonics (the forming of Panama as a link block off the Pacific from the Atlantic) - Solar activity also indicates global warming on Mars, which would indicate that the sun is slowly warming up.

All of which puts the nature and duration of the current "warm period" into confusion.

But then, I find pictures like this of Mars fascinating, since it looks so much like standing water, when this is of course impossible. I don't know what to make of it. Damn good illusion, if nothing else

Recent edition of Space News has a cover story about how, after DoD bought exclusive rights to high res commercial imagery of Afghanistan, for a while, Pentagon folks had drive across DC (lame summary only), burn the data to CD's and then fly the CD's out the theater for regional use. Kudos for getting the job done, but ouch!

Recent edition of Space News has a cover story about how, after DoD bought exclusive rights to high res commercial imagery of Afghanistan, for a while, Pentagon folks had drive across DC (lame summary only), burn the data to CD's and then fly the CD's out the theater for regional use. Kudos for getting the job done, but ouch!

"Stoker has said they did not find evidence of chlorophyll or any evidence of life on Mars," the spokesperson said. "There's really nothing to report. I think they [the BBC] read more into the abstract than is really there."

"Stoker has said they did not find evidence of chlorophyll or any evidence of life on Mars," the spokesperson said. "There's really nothing to report. I think they [the BBC] read more into the abstract than is really there."

HETE coming down, Bass going up.
All your Bass are belong to us!

Mod me up, baby!

Echostar hasn't got spot beams. And they are subject to must carry too. So they're getting screwed right now.

Echostar has been fighting this since 1996 when Primetime 24 got sued, way before anyone came up with spotbeams. To them it is a matter of free speech and choice, not a problem with spotbeams.

Unless they can get some spot beams up real fast. And they can't, for at least a year.

Sorry, they just launched one and another one is going up is a couple of months.

And here's the story from when it was news, last year.

Solar sail, Microbots stuffed into a small capsule, and you could get to Europa at very fast speeds.

Solar Sails at 150,000 mph, which is far faster than nuclear
Nuclear also has heat problems, and sure it can
Solar Sail
See how it works http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/prop19au g99_1.htm

Also we could use Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion

Plasma or ionized gas is trapped on the magnetic field lines generated onboard, and this plasma inflates the magnetic field much like hot air in a balloon.

See prototype

First - from space.com, an article stating why we think that there's an ocean underneath the ice. Ocean on Europa.

Second - from the article. I'm not sure where they got this, but I didn't dig very deep to find out.

Europa has what appears to be an ice-covered, saline ocean that is 30 miles deep. There are holes in the ice created by undersea volcanic activity.

Better?

Hale-Bopp was awesome and it had the added advantage of culling the low end of the gene pool.

There's a viewers guide to the comet that might come in handy at Space.com

My recommendation is: those who are uncertain of their HTML coding abiliities should stick to plain-text and simply give the URLs:

• NASA BPP, proposal summaries (not sure if that was the intended link -- but you can search NASA yourself I suppose>)
• LLNL: Condensed Matter, abstract
• AntiGravity Research Conference
• Ning Lees Research (actually "Skeggs & Ning Li on Gravitational Modification")
• Nasa pumps 600k into research and has had tests
• AEI: John Hutchinson's Theories
• Japanese Anti-Gravity Experiment

That's all I have to contribute. Despite all the debate, "build your own UFO" looks like a fun thing to distract myself with some weekend.

We do have anti gravity.Scientists call it super conductivity. Super Conductivity
A technology NASA has right now which is called gravity shield. NASA only spent 600k on research, but the military could have spent hundreds of millions researching this.

QuoteIn response to the propulsion challenges specified by NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics (BPP) program, the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center proposes to empirically explore the possibility of iinducing gravity modification through Josephson junction effects in magnetized, high-Tc superconducting oxides. Our technical goal is to critically test emerging physical concepts and provide rigorous empirical confirmation (or refutation) of anomalous effects related to the manipulation of gravity by magnetized type-II superconductors. Because the current empirical evidence for gravity modification is anecdotal, we propose, as a first step, to design, construct, and meticulously carry out a discriminating experiment. Our approach is unique in that we will construct an extremely sensitive torsional gravity balance to measure gravity modification effects by radio-frequency-pumped type-II superconductor test masses. Analysis indicates that an effective change in mass of less than 1 percent would be readily detectable by state-of-the-art differential capacitance transducers. The entire project is to be completed in 12 months. If uncontested positive effects can be detected, it would seem to imply a fundamentally new method for creating motion without propellant. This goes directly to the heart of BPP goal 1 which has the stated aim of reducing or eliminating the need for mass ejection from spacecraft propulsion systems."

This was in 1999. Its 2002. That was NASA, a government entity, so if NASA has anti gravity, the military has it too.

Gravity can be manipulated provided you have enough energy to do so, in lab experiments we've shown anti gravity works

Examples
Nasa



Ning Lees Research
Nasa pumps 600k into research and has had tests
Theories

http://www.totse.com/en/fringe/gravity_anti_grav it y/antigrv1.html

As you see, theres many anti gravity experiments which have been done in labs, its its done in a lab, chances are the military has prototype aircraft based on it. With so many theories of how it can be done, do you actually think none of these theories were successful? If any of them were our government would classify it.

Um.

Well, i'd say that as long as george w. bush doesn't blow up the moon, that isn't going to happen...

Don't forget Laika, 1st dog in space. I guess that would be an orbital 'Rover' :-)

Sadly, Laika, aka "Muttnik" either died when life support gave out, or as was reported later, burned up on reentry. Sputnik 2 was quick-and-dirty followup to Sputnik 1, and was designed as a one-way trip from the start.

In short, it was a tortoise and hare race. In terms of the space race, the US took a nap after WWII and the USSR got to work. Once the hare woke up it was just a question of how much of a head start the hare had. For the moon race, it wasn't enough of a head start.

Still, don't think I'm disrepecting the USSR space effort. They did great things and I hope Russians today are proud when they think of the Soviet space program.

-Miko

I prefer this link.