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the ; pictures prove it is a rock.

I havn't been around /. a lot recently, but I don't remember hearing anything about this hardware problem that they recently discovered.

Apparently some nincompoop on the Cassini design team decided that it would be smart to not design the reciever on the orbiting probe to have enough bandwidth to take in all of the data that the probes in the atmosphere/on the surface could send up. Not smart.

Rami
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Oops. Try this link.

here: is an oldish image from space.com. You can find more if you look around a bit.

here: is an oldish image from space.com. You can find more if you look around a bit.

I bet the space fungus got it.

what are you smoking? The last few years of NASA have been absolutely dominated by a "faster, better, cheaper" mentality. Witness all the bragging about how cheap the last few Mars missions were. Goldin (NASA head honcho) has admitted that this policy (which he was responsible for) was the main reason we had the catastophic losses of those Mars missions [cite]. He went so far as to actually offer NASA budget cuts to Congress...

The best source of a RP stream for the NASA channel is at Space.com. (URL: http://www.space.com/n ews /spaceagencies/nasatv_sched.html ) get you most of the way there.

They've got a cheesy JavaScript interface you've got to get through the first time, but from then on you should be able to just select it from the RP history menu.

Enjoy.

All the comments about fungus from outer space attacking the Mir and possibly satellites is amusing but the fungus in the article is _inside_ the space station, not outside. It was brought up from earth and lives on normal nutrients. It only damages metal and plastic as a by-product of its metabolism. From the space.com article about this which is more informative:

"All the space microorganisms found inside spaceships originated on Earth," she said. "Most of them got into spacecraft on Earth and some of them were brought aboard with the visiting crews

...

Subsistence for the microorganisms was certainly not the metal, glass and plastic of those devices, said Natalia Novikova, a deputy chief of the Department at the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow.

"They consume organic stuff which consists of skin epithelia, lipids and other products of human activity," Novikova said. "These products get into the station atmosphere from human breath, sweat etc....and stick to the station's surfaces."

Also, for the political and Economic musings related to getting in space, check out this article, also on space.com.

-------------

...then we watched mankind set twelve human beings
on the moon for a few days at a time, come home, and stop.

We saw our space station built in Houston,
orbiting too low and too slow, at ten times the cost.

Thirtieth anniversary of the first man on the moon,
celebrated by grumbling.

My tee shirt bears an obsolete picture
of Freedom space station and the legend,
"Nine years, nine billion dollars,
and all we got was this lousy shirt,"
and it's years old and wearing out.

Now is economics interesting?

-------------

---Mike
harlock@raindrop.com

Also, for the political and Economic musings related to getting in space, check out this article, also on space.com.

-------------

...then we watched mankind set twelve human beings
on the moon for a few days at a time, come home, and stop.

We saw our space station built in Houston,
orbiting too low and too slow, at ten times the cost.

Thirtieth anniversary of the first man on the moon,
celebrated by grumbling.

My tee shirt bears an obsolete picture
of Freedom space station and the legend,
"Nine years, nine billion dollars,
and all we got was this lousy shirt,"
and it's years old and wearing out.

Now is economics interesting?

-------------

---Mike
harlock@raindrop.com

Typical, but a little on the small side, as supermassive black holes go. A black hole at the center of M87, in Virgo, might have a mass as large as three billion suns, for example. See this article at space.com for more info.

The report seems to be that this thing is eating more than a teenage BH should be. But given the way they eat (everything from light on down) wouldn't this just mean that it ran across a particularly dense "meal"?

And because it's fairly fundamental to my Theory of Everything, do BHs grow as they eat?

oh, and Space.com lost about forty points on my credibility scale with this link under the story

"Aliens Among Us -- Which celebrity is really an alien? You decide! "

They trying to muscle in on the Weekly World News?
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Apparently, there's also going to be a 'library' of world history and current events, portraits of a diverse group of people, an astronomical clock showing when it was launched, and an artificial diamond containing samples of seawater, human blood, air, and soil.

Can anyone else tell that the initiator of the project is an artist, not an engineer?

Sir Alec Guinness revealed in an interview last year that he hated the Star Wars movies (the dialogue, in particular), and actually wanted the character killed off.

Guinness did so much more than just Obi Wan. Please, let's remember him the way he deserves -- and would have wanted -- to be remembered.
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It looks like this story was leaked by Nasawatch/SpaceRef or Space.com prematurely. It was supposed to be embargoed until the International Astronomical Union actually made the announcement on Monday. Naughty naughty.

Well, I guess the cat's out of the bag now, so here's a list of all the sites covering the story in addition to Nasawatch/SpaceRef.

The news will get much better on Monday, when all us space news sites can actually post the real story and provide all the details. Stay tuned.

• BBC News
• CNN Space
• Discovery.com
• Space Chronicle

And of course, my own coverage at Universe Today:
Astronomers Discover Nearby Extrasolar Planet - August 4, 2000

Fraser Cain

This story says that Pluto might have once been bigger than it is now. They say that perhaps the old Pluto had a collision with something else, causing Charon, (much like the theories of our own moon's formation, probably most big moons are made this way) the Kuiper belt, and the odd orbit Pluto has now. Maybe Pluto did cause the eccentricity of Neptune's orbit, it just did it when it was bigger.

Bye the way here is the link to the actual Space.com story. What really intersts me is not really Pluto per se, but exploring around in the Kuiper Belt, where most of the comets are thought to be from, and just getting useful information from just beyond our solar system.

here's a pretty excellent web page which keeps track of LINEAR/has images (though it doesn't seem to have the explosion images quite yet).

http:// www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/comet_l inear_2000_sr.html

This won't markedly increase the "stuff going into space" anytime soon. For that you need a market, and right now, that market is pretty stable. From 1990 to present, there have been around 150 satellites a year launched on an average of about 70 rockets. Even the big build-up of satellite constellations in the late 90s (along with the entry of new spacefaring nations like Brazil and India) didn't change this much, although for a time, it resulted in much rocketry investment and several startups in the cheap-access-to-space field.

But make no mistake: with Iridium failing to sell at a penny on the dollar (that's right, 1% of the investment so far, and the buyer walked away), its strongest competitor Globalstar perilously close to bankruptcy, ICO just emerging from Chapter 11, Orbcomm losing money despite orders, and so on, the LEO constellation market is pretty much over and done with.

[See Lloyd's Satellite Constellations for more info.]

With the end of speculation in the LEO constellation business [as well as a tanking tech stock sector], Rotary Rocket failed to get further investment despite an operational vehicle. This pretty much put the kibosh on anyone like Kistler or Beal or energizing the Cheap Access to Space market by dramatically reducing launch costs, at least anytime soon.

It may seem counterintuitive, but there actually are only a limited number of things you can do in space. Communications satellites in GEO are one; scientific satellites in LEO are another. And there are already plenty of commercial devices selling the data they collect.

What the launch limitations did was two things. First, they were political cover for an administration burned by Loral malfeasance in assisting China with a launch. Second, they were a simple protectionist measure aimed at giving homegrown companies (Rotary, Beal, Kistler) a window in which to develop vehicles and compete for business against the established American leaders, Boeing and Lockmart.

The irony is that most post-Soviet space vendors (Khrunichev, Energiya, Ukraine's Sea Launch) have partnered with one or more of the leading American vendors, who are now able to steer customers to a "preferred" international partner, in effect recapturing lost business. There has been no new American vendor to reach maturity. Whether these quasi-monopolies constitute improved American competition for the global satellite business, which pretty much remains a zero-sum game, is an exercise for the reader.
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We do? We know that everybody who can survive astronaut-type training can handle a few months of it. We know now that more than a few months of it is bad for you; bones deteriorate. The people who flew on Skylab and Mir established that long ago. More data is nice, but not worth billions of dollars.

Incidentally, it's worth noting that the pretty color pictures of the space station with the earth in the background are fake, although they're presented as real. There's nothing up there in position to take those pictures. Those are rendered 3D models. The real pictures from the spacecraft camera used during docking don't show much, and they're black and white, so for PR purposes, fake images are used. Does this bother anybody?

Time to stop the local nutcase, steal his aluminum foil hat, and head for the hills!

RTGs, I had to laugh the first time I heard about these things in a spacecraft design course. 5% efficient.... Last I read, the conventional thinking was that they could be engineered up to 10% efficiency.... looks like they need more work. Gotta admit that they are dahm reliable though... both voyagers and galileo are still running on these things (they are still running aren't they) . Many other missions rel(y, ied) on them as well.

By the way... I think you know what happens if the rocket carrying these babies up accidentally doesn't allow the craft to reach orbit. Raining plutonium down on the earth... man does that ruin a weekend barbecue.

-- Phenym

There are a bunch of pictures on space.com:
http://ww w.space.com/missionlaunches/launches/zvezda_pictur es_000712.html

There are a bunch of pictures on space.com:
http://ww w.space.com/missionlaunches/launches/zvezda_pictur es_000712.html

True, the moon doesn't have life on it, like the Earth does. But it's still a unique environment, one unlike any other in the universe. (How many other planets can you think of with a single, large moon?)

Pluto and its moon Charon are more of a "double planet" system than the Earth and Moon.

Wow. A site that offers a range of formats and in some cases even lets the user decide what viewer to use. (Referring to the video gallery, of course.)

I wish every media provider was as flexible as this one. Someone out there likes me. :)

I'm not karma-whoring, it's just funny. Please don't moderate me up.

wish
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supernovae are not symmetrical in shape

The most sensitive measurement ever made of a star's shape shows that our sun is speckled with tiny hills and dales, much like the surface of the ocean, University of Hawaii researchers said.

Now about this stopy: I think that this is a good thing, but I sure hope that they can learn to control the robost better than they can control the mars lander. Granted they could not have a visual on the mars lander, and there were other issues there.

send flames > /dev/null

Um, not to rain on your unsupported rant, but MIR is still functioning peachy keen. Articles here and here

• UniSci
  
• Space Telescope Science Institute
  
• MSNBC
  
• BBC
  
• CNN (buggy--text at bottom)
  
• Spaceflight Now
  
• Space.com
  
• USA Today (under weather... Bah!)
  
• Fox News
  
• Science Daily
  

Except oil is from rocks not dinosaurs. It's just floating up from below and getting trapped at various depths. Not only is it not nearly as limited as previously thought, but if we run low we could go get an asteroid full of carbon and make more...

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Well, if these brown dwarfs and megaplanets ARE produced in large numbers in our galaxies stellar nurseries, and then sent wandering, I'd guess a few might end up being captured -- say, somewhere in the vicinity of the Oort cloud of a certain M-type star. And since the megaplanets, at least, would rapidly cool, such a captured planet would be dark even in IR and hard to detect, not to mention having a highly eccentric and inclined orbit that would make it hard to locate. Just like the planets speculated about in this space.com article.

I'm looking for more info from the scientists quoted in the space.com articles (Matese and Murray) - I've read the papers before, and they're pretty interesting. They both present circumstantial evidence for dark Jupiter-mass-or-higher companions to the sun disturbing comets in the Oort cloud in a telltale pattern. Not quite the old comet-flinging Nemesis, but pretty close.

At the very least, this new information could prove that such dark objects exist, and that's half the battle, right?

Though they don't know what went wrong, it seems pretty clear that it was the Russian/Ukrainian rocket, not the launch pad itself, that was problematic.

See the space.com article

Motorola's Wyman says that the company has a "very controlled process" for bringing down the satellites. "They will be brought down in stages, not all at once," he said.

It is expected to take a few years for all 66 satellites to come down.

Check out http://www.space.c om/space/business/iridium_motorola_000308.html for the full story :)

The ages of space explo{r,it}ation:
1. Cold War Toys -- will the world survive?
2. Mercury/Gemini/Apollo -- will the crew survive?
3. Shuttle -- will the mission succeed?
4. Iridium -- will it make money?
5. Space Station -- why?

Low Earth Orbit is getting easier. This is the result of learning all of the hard lessons the hard way, and not taking the risks for granted.

Mars exploration is still very difficult. Partly this is because Mars is a more difficult environment than LEO. But the constraints of BFC are leading teams to make some of the same mistakes that were made before. The MCO interim failure report seems to indicate a certain... well, lack of rigor in the development and operations.

I, too, would like to see a radical change in the NASA Mars Exploration Program / MEP. The current program seems to combine aspects of Iridium technology (commercial practices, comparatively low unit reliability) and NASA program design (one-off design, albeit with component re-use) -- but combines them in a bad way. The addition of political pressure does not help, as opined by Donna Shirley, program manager of the successful Mars Pathfinder project.

So, what's wrong with MEP? Simple: There Is Only One MEP. Apollo succeeded because the guys working on it were convinced that the Soviets could get to the Moon. They had real competition. Likewise with Iridium -- until the finances fell apart, everyone thought there would be several competitors snapping at their heels.

The competition for Mars ended when the contract was awarded to Lockheed Martin Astronautics. There was competition at the contract level, but none at the program level.

Look, I don't care if you call it 'Red' and 'Blue' but there have to be at least two competitors. Cycles of competitive innovation, followed by cooperative synthesis, will produce the best results.

OK so JPL has one team already. Hmmm... who else could do this kind of thing? CMU, JHU/APL, MIT, USU, maybe even some Big 10 schools. Start with some GFE hardware -- flight computer, telecom equipment, pyros, motors etc. Hand out $50M to each team and stand back.

Neither team could afford a flagship probe a la Mars Observer ($1B). Perhaps one team would build a single lander with lots of high-tech instruments. The other team might bang out 5 small landers at $10M a pop. In any case there would not be any single team with a 'royal warrant' to probe Mars.

Granted, this is nothing close to the technology that modern spy satellites have (probably greater than 10 centimeter resolution). Who knows, maybe much greater.

Still, it's only a matter of time before this is used in some way that endangers the national security of some country. I mean, is this company going to be informed by every country that creates a 'classified' area? Will there be formal no-spy-zones announced by every country on Earth? What happens the first time that it accidentally photographs something that gets a team of DEA agents slaughtered or worse, tips the hand of something far more serious and causes the deaths of thousands of ethnic minorities or something?

As for real-time satellite observation, the 25-year old Keyhole satellite program was able to monitor evens on the ground in near real time, I hate to think of what they are capable of doing now. I recently saw an interview with a former CIA employee who was commenting on SR-71 photographs and said something to the effect of 'The images we used to view from the Blackbird were so detailed that no only could you look down on a golf course and see who was putting, but you could tell what brand of gold ball they were using. And that was 30 years ago.'

Should this interfere with or threaten a US military (or intelligence) op, I don't doubt for one moment that this baby would somehow, uhm, vanish...we've had ASAT missiles since '85. :)

Here is the article that the Telegraph seems to have based their article off of http://www.space.c om/science/solarsystem/second_moon_991029.html More informative, and no registration necessary.

Another good story on CRUITHNE, the astronomical object formerly known as an asteroid, is at space.com.

I wonder why this is a story now?

\/0!d

space.com has an article about Cruithne as a moon, "More Moons Around Earth? It's Not So Loony", from October 29...

space.com has an article about Cruithne as a moon, "More Moons Around Earth? It's Not So Loony", from October 29...

entitled More Moons Arround Earth? It's Not So Loony

The Soyuz rocket is used for launching freight or the Soyuz capsule. CNN describes leaving Mir in Soyuz.

Several months ago, Lou Dobbs, VP of CNN and the host of the show MoneyLine, left that organization and became Chairman and CEO of space.com. He got a lot of publicity on TV and radio at that time.

A lot of people thought that the Web Site in question was not a big enough business and did not have enough potential to fully occupy a man of his talents. OTOH, some said that space.com had the potential to expand into its own cable channel, and it could become similar to CourtTV, which I guess is a successful business.

I realize Dobbs is a media darling, and that's why I'm asking the question here. A lot of people in the community just ignore media hype when it's coming from traditional media sources.

I don't care if the site is popular with the average Internet user, is the information on it accurate and useful?

--

Dave Aiello

space.com ran a series of articles about Dune some time back, including one about the mini-series. Go here for a complete list of their Dune stories.