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Yes John Young is some old retired *guy*. But he's a reminder of a generation of real acheivers. Forget the awards and look at what he has actually done:

Born in depression era America he graduated from Georgia Tech in Aero class of '52, (for all you pre college persons - it's one of the harder enginering courses), while his armed service combat record only mentions service in Korea on DD-558, Young flew Crusader and Phantom test pilot missions evaluating weapons systems, breaking speed records at 3000 and 25,000 ft. He retired as a Caption after 25 yrs Navy service in '76.

Youngs Nasa career started in '62, flying Gemini 3 missions in '65 with Gus Grissom (remember Grissom, Commander of Apollo 1 which tragically burnt on the PAD), Gemini 10 in '66, CMMP on Apollo 10 in '69 (test run for Apollo 11 in - so thats around the Moon), Apollo 16 in '72 (with Ken Mattingly who missed his ride with Apollo 13 - so he has worked on the lunar surface for his day job), Commander of STS-1 (that the first shuttle flight) in '81, Commander of STS-9 Spacelab in '83. Was backup in Gemini 6, Apollo1, Apollo 7, 13, 17.

In summary 15,000 hrs training, 15100 hrs in flight hours and 835 hrs in 6 space flights.

He's some *retired guy* all right. He is one of only 12 people who have walked, worked and lived on the moon. That give him a unique insight into this area. He has seen how puny Earth is from space and realises how human existance is not something to be taken for granted. You can read more about his bio here.

Yes John Young is some old retired *guy*. But he's a reminder of a generation of real acheivers. Forget the awards and look at what he has actually done:

Born in depression era America he graduated from Georgia Tech in Aero class of '52, (for all you pre college persons - it's one of the harder enginering courses), while his armed service combat record only mentions service in Korea on DD-558, Young flew Crusader and Phantom test pilot missions evaluating weapons systems, breaking speed records at 3000 and 25,000 ft. He retired as a Caption after 25 yrs Navy service in '76.

Youngs Nasa career started in '62, flying Gemini 3 missions in '65 with Gus Grissom (remember Grissom, Commander of Apollo 1 which tragically burnt on the PAD), Gemini 10 in '66, CMMP on Apollo 10 in '69 (test run for Apollo 11 in - so thats around the Moon), Apollo 16 in '72 (with Ken Mattingly who missed his ride with Apollo 13 - so he has worked on the lunar surface for his day job), Commander of STS-1 (that the first shuttle flight) in '81, Commander of STS-9 Spacelab in '83. Was backup in Gemini 6, Apollo1, Apollo 7, 13, 17.

In summary 15,000 hrs training, 15100 hrs in flight hours and 835 hrs in 6 space flights.

He's some *retired guy* all right. He is one of only 12 people who have walked, worked and lived on the moon. That give him a unique insight into this area. He has seen how puny Earth is from space and realises how human existance is not something to be taken for granted. You can read more about his bio here.

Clickable link

from the Lunar Prospector team. They flew a robotic craft around the moon for 19 months and collected detailed surface data all for a cost of only $65 million. Some say this was NASA's most cost effective mission ever. It originally met opposition because no one believed it could be done that cheap. But despite the low price tag, the data it produced was 10 times better than expected.

Good to see someone else interested in the details of the instrument packages, the SSP in particular :o). I'm consistently amazed at the beautifully elegant design of the onboard experiments and the sheer number of them they were able to cram into such a tiny package! Check out this paper on an idea to use the penetrator along with the onboard microphone in effort to determine the makeup of the surface material by listening to the "crunch" it makes at the instant of touchdown. Astounding....can't wait to Jan.14!

Interesting since they seem to lack alot of technology up there. Have you seen satellite pictures? Seoul looks like L.A. while North Korea is pitch black. A very poor and low tech country last I heard.

Here it is. The night life in Pyongyang must be nothing to brag about.

Not only that, but according to space.com, the mission is an orbiter, not a lander. The US sent Clementine to the moon for $75 million dollars ten years ago. Chandrayan will be more capable, and I'm all for it, but this isn't exactly a revolution in lunar exploration.

pictures speak a 1000 words

ex 1

ex 2

you can find 100's of recountings of forest fires that have mushroom clouds

check this or pdf version out.

Mars does experience much greater obliquity variations. The values usually cited are an oscillation between 15 and about 35 degrees, over a cycle of about 124,000 years.

Recent speculations have led to suspicions that on longer time scales, there may be even greater swings in obliquity, ranging from zero right up to 60 degrees. Jeffrey Kargel has speculated about what a Mars under these conditions would be like. Linked is a PDF of a brief paper on Mars' climate during periods of high obliquity.

Neat stuff. My apologies to the grandparent poster for unnecessary flamage.

"...please read this overview."

TRANSLATION:

...please support and increase Roland Piquepaille spam and advertising clickthrough rates.

If you really want more details and pictures about the Mars Underground Mole then you can

• read this SpaceDaily four-part article on Mars Drillers
• read the Mars Underground Mole PDF with diagrams, photos and tables
• look at a whole range of Mars-related projects from the 2003 Sixth International Conference on Mars
• read a Deutsche Welle interview with German Aerospace Center Chairman Sigmar Wittig - DLR developed the Mars Express mole that inspired the MUM project
• read a National Space Society two-part interview with Dr. Brian Glass, MUM co-investigator
• read about a MUM inspired student project or
• watch a NASA Mars Underground Mole Quicktime movie animation.

It's much better than supporting craven self-interested people who are just after advertising like Roland Piquepaille, blog spammer.

"...please read this overview."

TRANSLATION:

...please support and increase Roland Piquepaille spam and advertising clickthrough rates.

If you really want more details and pictures about the Mars Underground Mole then you can

• read this SpaceDaily four-part article on Mars Drillers
• read the Mars Underground Mole PDF with diagrams, photos and tables
• look at a whole range of Mars-related projects from the 2003 Sixth International Conference on Mars
• read a Deutsche Welle interview with German Aerospace Center Chairman Sigmar Wittig - DLR developed the Mars Express mole that inspired the MUM project
• read a National Space Society two-part interview with Dr. Brian Glass, MUM co-investigator
• read about a MUM inspired student project or
• watch a NASA Mars Underground Mole Quicktime movie animation.

It's much better than supporting craven self-interested people who are just after advertising like Roland Piquepaille, blog spammer.

Apollo 12 landed within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 probe, which had touched down 2.5 years earlier. this page has more details - although you are right about the bacteria not having to survive reentry.

the most intriguing launch technology was left off entirely

I'll agree that it's a neater and probably more cost effective solution (given the right conditions) -- but hardly as cool as the real elevator going to orbit from the ground...

I should have added a link to the whole site.

You shouldn't make a statement a question ...

It's not an article either -- it's a research report. The whole site is quite interesting, really. I should have given a link to it, too.

200 MPH winds at 0.01 atmosphere aren't that big a deal. There's some dust. Here are Viking lander pictures taken during a Martian dust storm in 1976.

Back when the Magellan mission was mapping the surface of Venus, I had a planetary geology friend who was involved in assigning names to features. I managed to persuade him to name a crater after my girlfriend Marianne, as a birthday present to her. At the time I thought this gift was pretty cool; unlike star names, which are meaningless, this was an official designation, and furthermore Venus was the Planet O' Love.

My mistake, however, was to forgetting that Venus is eternal, but love isn't. Every time I see Venus hanging in the evening sky, I realize I named that damn crater after the wrong woman. LOL!

I found the abstract for the paper presented by Metzger, Youngquist and Lane here.

There's no metal spheres involved, just some sort of electrostatic field:

"We have recently observed, however, that the physics and the shielding problem possess certain asymmetries which may be exploited in order to obtain the intended shells of isotropic protection without deploying radially-symmetric charge around the spacecraft. The basic concept is to leverage a multipole expansion of the fields, assigning a different function to different terms in the expansion. As shown in Fig. 1, a positively-repulsive quadrupole term may protect the region closest to the spacecraft from high-energy protons and HZE particles, whereas a weaker but slowly decaying monopole field may deflect thermal electrons away from the larger region of space. The result is that the significant fluxes of both negative and positive particles may be deflected away from the spacecraft using the same electrostatic field. This has the potential to create isotropic protection with a significant reduction in spacecraft mass."

After the slashdot story a few weeks ago on the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (sorry, I'm too lazy to go look up the original Slashdot reference, but at least I'm honest about it), I started reading a lot of their proposals and most of the ones regarding how to handle interstellar travel involved anti-matter.

I started thinking about that and the two biggest problems with that are: A> It takes a huge amount of energy to create anti-matter, a hell of a lot more goes into the production than comes from using it. B> We don't really have a system for containing significant amounts of anti-matter.

So I started thinking about alternative energy sources and one of them was fusion. Pound for pound, fusion produces about 1/27th of the energy of anti-matter (based on my naive calculations, so I may be way off) whereas other types of fuel are several orders of magnitude less efficient.

To me, that makes fusion a pretty good option. The only problems I have encountered so far with the idea are:

1: Fusion isn't quite ready for real applications, though by the time we're capable of sending an interstellar craft, I believe it will be.

2: For an interstellar journey, you'll need a power plant that can survive for no less than decades, if not centuries, without maintenance. That's a serious issue given the harsh environment it would be operating in.

I'm sure there are additional problems I haven't thought of yet, but I'm still thinking it might be a good option. Perhaps some sort of self-repairing reactor could be built to solve #2.

But another huge advantage of hydrogen is that you could collect fuel along the way using the Bussard Ramjet idea. You'd just need a way of separating out deuterium and tritium from the hydrogen that doesn't suffer from problem #2 as well, but it should be doable. As most here are probably aware, fuel mass is a serious issue for space travel.

Anyway, I think fusion has a great deal to offer in a number of ways. Maybe I ought to work on my NIAC proposal ;-)

When I skimmed the article summary I was going to write a comment complaining th at NASA should be investing in "proven technologeis". After all, it's the "proven technologeis" that help us about our daily lifes and help us fulfilll ourselves: space elevators don't enter into it, right? Besides, NASA needs to bring in some green and they can only do that by making proprietry software and crafts.

But then I realised something important; no matter how important it is for NASA to make money, we still have to spend money to make money. Even if spending money on space lifts causes taxes to get nothced up by a few dollars, it will all be worth it in a few decades because we will all benefit from the advanced cabling tech. Besides, every dollar that's spent on this is another dolll ar that isn't spent on military applications or other less savoury things.

Still, judging by their website, I'm a little suspicious of what they're up to! ;-) I guess their just busy working on something cool like transforming space suits, heh. Keep up the good articals, simoniger. (The shape-shifting space suits are almost certainly more useful than the shape-shifting trainers I saw linkked on Fark, anyway.)

.PDF format

It doesn't seem to have been insulation as foam inside a TV camera. While that is indeed sheltered somewhat, it'd be useful to know how dense and thick the foam was. A small peice of light foam isn't going to block a lot of radiation. I've certainly never heard anyone argue that it would do so, although some do claim that the bacteria contaiminated the sample after it arrived back on Earth.

Either way, while I don't think it proves that the little buggers can survive in space, it's reason to consider the possibility.

See here :Apollo 15 Passive Seismic Experiment

The simulator link is incorrect. It points to 2004 YN1. The correct link. For a good view in the simulator, tilt the 3D view to straight down, center on earth and zoom in all the way.

New Scientist has an interesting article in their latest issue.

For a more technical explanation, read the paper presented at the Lunary Planetary Science Conference last week.

The simulator link is incorrect. It points to 2004 YN1. The correct link. For a good view in the simulator, tilt the 3D view to straight down, center on earth and zoom in all the way.

New Scientist has an interesting article in their latest issue.

For a more technical explanation, read the paper presented at the Lunary Planetary Science Conference last week.

On the moon, there is plenty of room to place large arrays of solar panels.
Using a "laser", one could possibly transport the energy from the moon to earth.
How do we get the solar panels there ? Well, the moon is largely a brick of silicon, which could be very well used to produce solar panels.

Enough motivation wouldn't you think ?

The first step is to capture an asteroid

Not needed. Read the NIAC Phase I report - a space elevator could be deployed with the equivalent of 7 shuttle launches. Total cost has been estimated as low as 15B US$ - compare that to the ISS and other boondoggle programs.

The only technology required that we don't yet have is mass-production of carbon nanotube cables, and that looks like it will happen within the next couple of years.

I'd just like to step in and make a few corrections and clarifications:

"Obviously a project named after the inventors."
Judge for yourselves, The original AJC posting had a picture of us, as did the actual article. The article also included a nice illustration of the MADMEN.

"But if you ask me, the whole thing sounds like something cooked up by Hubert J. Farnsworth."
Since I designed the MADMEN nodes, does that mean I know officially qualify as a mad scientist?

"NASA really has beaten Congress in the stupid name department."
NASA did not come up with the acronym, nor did they have anything at all to do with this project. The acronym was concocted by AC (the guy on the left in the pic). I'm working on the design for the landers, but managed to write an entire paper on the system without using the acronym. We (SpaceWorks Engineering, Inc.) are not partners with NIAC. They are a group which sponsors far out research like this. We are a completely independant company from them or NASA.

NASA has done some work in asteroid detection, and has similar groups which have done some work on asteroid deflection (with giant lasers I believe) but no dedicated organization for this sort of stuff.

"In short they are paying 75k for a group of people to sit around a brainstorm ideas. Neat concept, call me when we are actually past the idea part of it."
Hopefully we'll win a NIAC phase II for this and actually build something and get more in depth with the concept.

"If some of them breaks, there's a lot more to carry on."
That's pretty much the whole point of the swarm.

"How much will these things weigh? With a nuke generator, and drilling and launching equipment to handle a pound of rock at a time over and over, say 1000 pounds max."
More like 1300 kg, but the in space transfer stage weight a lot more than that

"Asteroids ROTATE, in wildly different ways and have a miniscule amount of local gravity. "
The MADMEN would definitely have to be located around the asteroid and would obviously only fire when on one side.

And landing on an asteroid is not really that hard, its already been done by a spacecraft not even intended to land on one.

Indeed, I've found an abstract from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference on the subject.

Holy early-nineties webdesign, Batman!

As mentioned here (pdf, google-converted, orriginal pdf here) the rovers use The ICER Progressive Wavelet Image Compressor, which according to JPL (googlified de-pdfing again, original here)
Both lossless and lossy compression will be used, depending on how critical or scientific the data is.
The 2nd pdf goes into depth about how the algorthims are used and is probably an interesting read for someone who has a greater understanding of maths and compression techniques ;)

I'm not sure why this "discovery" of water by Mars Express is getting so much press.

The U.S. Viking craft saw water really clearly back in the 70s, in the form of frost.

There are a number of photos, including this one, and this one.

The Viking 2 lander site was covered with frost for about 100 days per year.

When acid-rich water comes in contact with sulfidic rock Fe bearing bodies, such as pyrites, it takes up some of the iron (leaching), which water then, being iron laden, comes into contact with a favorable deposition environment, then then iron drops out. Geochemistry is very complicated here on Earth, and I'd love to get a chance at some off-world geology.

On Earth, there is a suggested analog: THE TINTO RIVER BASIN: AN ANALOG FOR MERIDIANI HEMATITE FORMATION ON MARS? (*.PDF)

Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets

• Lunar Orbiter camera info from the Lunar Orbiter mission history
• Online Photographic Atlas of the Moon contains scans of the hand-mosaicked frames originally published in the original NASA Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon by Bowker and Hughes
• Another site with scanned Lunar Orbier frames
• Lunar Orbiter Digitization Project is a project to scan the films and digitally mosaic the frames to get rid of striping and other blemishes and create a global lunar mosaic

the skill mix we need to send to Mars has to include a couple alchemists?

You can get a PDF of some of his later results here.

The JPL news conference covered by CSPAN last night explained in serious detail why it was done the way it was done and the benefits. It is easy to tell, given the color references on the robot which filter is in use.

I, for one, am tired of conspiracy under every rock. It is time for slashdot to grow up just a tiny bit and be willing to recognize that the USA can sometimes do cool things that no one else has done. It is rocket science and the USA can sometimes do it better than anyone.

-- Multics

P.S. see here for the hardware details. It is only 2 pages for the typical /. A.D.D. reader.

Seems like they're working pretty quick over at JPL to get the colorized version of the images out to the general public, since this week, they've been releasing them less between 6 and 18 hours after receiving them. But if you're not happy with their coloration, then I invite those among the slashdot community who know such things to do it themselves.

The pan cam is black and white, and uses filters to pick out certain colors in the images it takes. If you want, you can read more about what filters are on which half of the pancam (l and r). There are 8 on a side, each with its own particular wavelength and bandpasses. The description of each as well as the numbering scheme is available from the Athena instruments website at Cornell University

The raw images are being freely distributed from the JPL MER website. You'll notice camera (l or r) and filter (1-8) used is described from the naming of the pancam files (eg. 2P126471535EDN0000P2303L6M1.JPG)

Just from this last days images, they have quite a few images in differant filters, of the color wheel itself, for calibration. For a better description of the filters themselves, and of the way they plan to (and have *BEGUN* to) calibrate the images, check out several differant publications. (thanks to JPL-Gene and doug_ellison of #maestro irc.freenode.net for the links).

I, for one, am thankful that they're releasing the raw data/images at all, considering the scale of the global-slashdotting currently going on. The speedy data turnaround, and amazing openness with which they are conducting this mission is really impressive compared to anything else of this scale. Thanks to everyone at JPL, Cornell, and NASA as a whole for all the incredible work from this meager enthusiast.

Seems like they're working pretty quick over at JPL to get the colorized version of the images out to the general public, since this week, they've been releasing them less between 6 and 18 hours after receiving them. But if you're not happy with their coloration, then I invite those among the slashdot community who know such things to do it themselves.

The pan cam is black and white, and uses filters to pick out certain colors in the images it takes. If you want, you can read more about what filters are on which half of the pancam (l and r). There are 8 on a side, each with its own particular wavelength and bandpasses. The description of each as well as the numbering scheme is available from the Athena instruments website at Cornell University

The raw images are being freely distributed from the JPL MER website. You'll notice camera (l or r) and filter (1-8) used is described from the naming of the pancam files (eg. 2P126471535EDN0000P2303L6M1.JPG)

Just from this last days images, they have quite a few images in differant filters, of the color wheel itself, for calibration. For a better description of the filters themselves, and of the way they plan to (and have *BEGUN* to) calibrate the images, check out several differant publications. (thanks to JPL-Gene and doug_ellison of #maestro irc.freenode.net for the links).

I, for one, am thankful that they're releasing the raw data/images at all, considering the scale of the global-slashdotting currently going on. The speedy data turnaround, and amazing openness with which they are conducting this mission is really impressive compared to anything else of this scale. Thanks to everyone at JPL, Cornell, and NASA as a whole for all the incredible work from this meager enthusiast.

Their bacteria Shenwala alga, reduces the iron from Fe(III) to Fe(II) ( uses the iron as oxygen in it's metabolism ) . Other bacteria ( Desulfovibrio Ferrireducens ( sp ) ) have shown to reduce uranium from U(VI) to the less soluable U(IV) and have been used to clean up mine tailing drainage by making all the uranium insoluable.

Since any chemical reaction that is not allowed to go to completion causes isotopic enrichment ( presumably the lighter isotope is the preferred reactant ) and metabolism by bacteria is really just a chemical reaction there is some enrichment there.

Other bacteria which oxidize iron like Thiobacillus Ferrooxidans have been used to leach uranium out of ores by oxidizing it to a soluable state.

Since any chemical reaction not completed results in some isotopic enrichment one might enrich U235 by, feeding the dissolved Uranium oxide produced by Thiobacillus Ferrooxidans from raw ore to the anaerobic Desulfovibrio ferrireducens where it would reprecipitate. Then feed the precipitated uranium oxide back to thiobacillus ferrooxidans to produce more uranium liquor to feed to desulfovibrio ferrireducens forming cascaded stages which would gradually enrich the U235 until it was useful for fuel rods etc.

The question is: how much energy does this take, and how efficient is the enrichment? How much sugar/light/whatever-these-bugs-eat do you need to feed them per stage and is it more economical energy-wise than other uranium enrichment methods already in use?

A home experimenter interested in developing this into a patentable process would be breaking the law by enriching uranium. After learning how to grow these beasties ( I'm sure they'd sell them to you since they are not dangerous ) you would have to measure the enrichment achieved bu sending a sample off to a mass spectometry lab. It would behove one to send the depleted uranium rather than the enriched uranium so as not to piss anyone off ( hope it wasn't the heavy isotope the bugs liked better! ). Then you could measure how much it costs you to feed the bacteria per kilo of metabolized uranium and compare it to the cost of existing enrichment methods by looking it up, and decide if you have something worth patenting. Profit.

I don't know how many are interested and yet don't know about these pages but here is some good stuff for dreamers to read...

Institute for Advanced Concepts

and here is a design study for a space elevator:

Space Elevator Phase 1
Space Elevator Phase 2

I don't know how many are interested and yet don't know about these pages but here is some good stuff for dreamers to read...

Institute for Advanced Concepts

and here is a design study for a space elevator:

Space Elevator Phase 1
Space Elevator Phase 2

I don't know how many are interested and yet don't know about these pages but here is some good stuff for dreamers to read...

Institute for Advanced Concepts

and here is a design study for a space elevator:

Space Elevator Phase 1
Space Elevator Phase 2

The martian probe success rate is so bad that maybe space agencies should launch multiple smaller ones with the expectancy that some will fail to reach their destination than put all their hopes on one larger probe.

The martian probe success rate is so bad that maybe space agencies should launch multiple smaller ones with the expectancy that some will fail to reach their destination than put all their hopes on one larger probe.

Google's HTML transcript

http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/abstract/32 0Zubrin.html

http://www.southpole.com/headlines/y2000/ast04oct_ 1.htm

http://www.itsf.org/resources/factsheet.php?fsID=7 8

We used to travel to the moon, but we don't any more.

We used to drive 400 horsepower cars, but we don't any more.

Not that I'm nostalgic, or anything...

Well the mirror up there is most certainly not a hoax.

Chandra detected magnesium, silicon, aluminum, and oxygen, but its already known that the lunar highlands are composed mostly of anorthosite, a rock which contains all of those elements but magnesium (I would like to know why magnesium and not calcium was detected). This is more of a proof-of-concept than anything. The most important information to come from these first observations is the discounting of the anomolous farside x-ray emissions.

Chandra detected magnesium, silicon, aluminum, and oxygen, but its already known that the lunar highlands are composed mostly of anorthosite, a rock which contains all of those elements but magnesium (I would like to know why magnesium and not calcium was detected). This is more of a proof-of-concept than anything. The most important information to come from these first observations is the discounting of the anomolous farside x-ray emissions.