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Galileo And Cassini Team Up
Bearpaw writes, "Trying to squeeze the last possible bit of use out of Galileo, NASA may team it up with the Saturn-bound Cassini for a joint mission. " The two will be perform some joint observations of the Jupiter system, as well as doing separate missions on the Jupiter system, including Ganymede as well. Hats off to the folks behind Galileo, whose official mission ended in 1997, but has kept on going.
I'm glad their doing this! NASA is cool even though they've had some failures lately Do you have any idea how difficult it is to send a spacecraft to something that is millions of miles away? It's a miracle that anything reaches their destination, especially with the budget cuts NASA's been suffering... some people can't even hit the toilet while peeing and that's right in front of them...
I never really guessed but I guess it could be possible considering that Jupiter is almost a star in and of itself because of the massive volume of gas the is within it.
:)
Jupiter is star-like with respect to volume of gas, but isn't the radiation associated with a star the result of the nuclear reaction(s) within? Jupiter isn't supposed to light up until 2010, right?
You'd be fine. Relativistic effects only have to do with relative velocities. As long as the acceleration is within tolerable limits, a juman would feel no effects of moving as close to the speed of light as you like. The universe around you would start to look strange at large fractions of c (more like 3/4 or 9/10 than 1/8).
"I believe that the cult of the particular brings only death - for it bases order on likeness." St.-Exupery
Hats Off To Galileo!!! Really, I Think Space....
exploration owes (IMHO) a lot to the long standing success of it. Granted, it has run its intended course..but look now. Even though NASA has toyed with crashing it into a moon, I'm glad to see my tax dollars are being put to use. Come on, do you really think that it can get more creative than using an 'expired' satellite to aid in Cassini's mission?
*couldn't even manage one spacecraft that far away, much less two in tandem.*
In the movie, yes, Big Brother was orbiting Jupiter. In the book, it was standing on Saturn's moon [JI]apetus, and Dave dropped through the roof. I never really liked the movie, though. They never had Bowman actually say "My God, it's full of stars," just a lot of trippy blinking.
I wonder what it would be like to watch that travel sequence while drunk? Has anyone here tried it?
as has been said in the earlier replies to this post, it would be possible to do such, but inefficient. the orbits these satellites trace around the planets and moons within the solar system plot the pull of gravity against relative velocity. an orbit returning probes sent to other planets would be similar in theory to the orbits that the voyager probes made when they traversed the solar system decades ago. the major difference, of course, is that it would result in the probe returning to earth. the orbits which result in a probe being flung out into the reaches of the cosmos is called a hyperbolic orbit, with the focus of the hyperbola being the center of the gravitational field it is working against. in order to maintain an orbit where the craft can go slow enough to take any worthy readings of ambient conditions, (photographs, radiation and magnetic filed readings, etc.) the craft would need to be outfitted with its own source of thrust, which alone makes it ridiculously inefficient even disregarding the fact that the technology is outdated. however, this story not only makes me feel that NASA has regained some face with Galileo's longevity, but it truly is an excellent plan to study the ionosphere of the largest planet in this solar system.
i havent seen it DRUNK, but to use ACC's words, "under the influence of certain chemicals, and they [the viewers under the influence of said chemicals] saw things that neither i nor stanley ever intended"
Due to some very smart guys (hey, they're rocket scientists, after all) and a convenient alignment of the planets, Voyager 2 was able to continue on past Saturn and go to Uranus and Neptune.
And it's still functioning (in a limited capacity), assisting in the research of the outer solar system -- solar wind, trans-Pluto objects, etc.
And so is pioneer 10.. which is even older.. tho that one is expected to run out of fuel for its small reactor soonish.
A while ago I received an e-mail from an ex nasa employee. He left NASA because he could no longer stand the ineficiency of the organisation. Actually low cost projects such as the pathfinder and the 2 clumsy projects to mars that failed will in time be just as good a way to go as the pioneer and voyagers were in their times.
The problem however is that low cost operations and big budget organisations as a combination usually work out badly, if only coz big budget organisations often have big problems taking low cost projects serious because of the simple fact that they do not require a big budget... and heh, big budget organisations only get to be big budget organisations by paying a lot of attention on spending money in order to try to get even bigger budgets.
Don't get me wrong btw, NASA does very cool things, but as long as budget is something that can make people more important then others (ie, as long as it plays an important public role) NASA will also continue to have problems which really don't do justice to all the hard work and knowlage of many of its real workers.
So what I am saying is..
1. expect high tech and frontier exploring organisations to make failures every now and then.
2. Don't ever make budget more important then research and results, if you do the thing will eventually become hugely expensive and inefficient.
(strange as it sounds, the more important budgets become, the more expensive things will be)
This all isn't any easier for NASA because they are half operating like a commercial venture, and half as a government sponsored research institute, that simply makes it impossible for them to create an organisation that matches their operations, because their operations are way to diverse and vaguely defined.
First of all, photons are gamma and electrons are beta-.
But it's the heavier particles (like iron nuclei) that do the most damage. They tend to rip up the target more as they zip through. Neutrons are interesting because they can get 'captured' by the target atom, changing it into a different (possibly radioactive) isotope. Slow alpha aren't particularly dangerous because have very little penetration. Fast alphas on the other hand are nasty. Gammas aren't particularly bad because they tend not to hit anything as they pass by.
Ryan
around trolls, not the other way around
Any suggestions for non-RTG, non-solar power sources for these things? IANAE, but for a Mars lander maybe you could use solar collectors on an areosynchronous orbiter and transmit the power to the surface via microwaves. On the other hand, RTG's are inherently hazardous, but maybe the public will eventually get over their fear of one blowing up in the atmosphere once space launces become more routine and the next-generation reusable launch vehicles are on line...
Freedom: "I won't!"
Wonder if the two spacecraft will be able to get any stero photographs. Preferably Jupiter and a moon or two.
Or will the differences in their respective distances from Juptier be too great? For good stereo, the two cameras should be "close" together w/ respect to the subject(s), and roughly the same distance away.
It is like a TV set with no screen and instead of acclerating electrons in the back that hit phosphors, you accelerate a substance that is "well-behaved" under ionization like a monatomic, heavy noble gas then neutralize its charge and let it keep going out the back of the rocket. Since the beam forming is done electrically, you don't need an exhaust nozzle on the back, either.
If your TV set didn't have a screen and you ran it in a vacuum, you would have a lame "temporary" ion drive because it would start working, then build up a really nasty static charge from shooting just electrons (negative) toward the (missing) screen instead of the ion drive's approach that combines the + and - charges at the exit to keep the spacecraft neutrally charged overall.
>Bowman is pretty much completely silent after he
>kills off HAL...he's sorta stopped being entirely
>human.
Interesting, I never thought of it that way. It seems to explain a lot of the last part of the movie, now that I think about it. I think I'm going to go watch the movie again tonight...
If you want to re-use a spacecraft, you can always use the "duplicate" that is usually built. (This was actually done for the Cluster II mission. The first Cluster mission exploded over the ESA launchpad, so the backups were brought into service!)
You also need a good power source to run the thing off of, such as a nice little nuclear reactor.
NASA, when it transitioned from it's NACA roots, inheirited a lot of baggage from the Defense Department. When NASA's budget was huge (i.e. during Apollo) this wasn't quite as bad as it is today, with a small fraction of the old budget. Quite frankly, NASA can't afford to do business like the Pentagon does. The funds just aren't there for the sort of underbid-the-proposal-then-overrun game the contractors have to play with the DoD. To wit, if Discovery-class science missions go over budget, they are simply cancelled. Examples of missions in this class are Stardust, Lunar Prospector and maybe Mars Pathfinder and NEAR (they both predate the Discovery program but were rolled into it with some differences in funding rates).
We should also pay attention to Magellan, the Venus radar mapper mission which was de-orbited under the premise of questionable scientific goals in order to keep it from extended missions. Everyone in spacecraft science has their own theories why management seems willing to spend a lot of money to build, test, and fly the spacecraft but hesitates to fund extended missions once the investment is made. Moreover, there is often little support for analyzing the data at the end of the mission; calibrating the data from all those instruments has taken a back-seat.
I've been witness to my share of proposals, and my experience has been that cost is the dominant factor. Many NASA project offices get 2-3 times as many qualified proposals for different projects, each affiliated with a different contractor, as they have funding. Because all the proposals are good, the decision-making process becomes almost arbitrary after some time. As more of the budgetary decisions move into the hands of the principal investigators, who may be at a NASA center, research lab or university, the policies of each institution can overprint NASA's own particularly about cost. Sometimes, bids are given preferentially to a contractor in that state because the mission instrument or what-have-you is being put together at a state university.
Bottom line: the lowest bid matters, but the whole process lacks sense.
Better. faster. cheaper. You get to pick two.
According to Shatner in his book 'the return' v'ger was modernized by the borg.
I'd love to see a giant space-elevator, or an asteroid mining mission, or pretty much anything else in the series :)
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
is that baked potato you put in
the microwave during lunch still radioactive and exposing your stomach right now? no, of course not. basicly, same thing.
Well, basicly wrong. In fact, as a grunt grad student in space physics at UCLA in the 1980s, I helped perform these exact calculations. My background was radiation physics and radiation saftey (having just come from the IAEC in Vienna.) The baked potato was bombarded by relatively narrow bands of microwave energy and in a very moderate magnetic field. The Galileo probe has been continuously bombarded by everything from gamma radiation on down. Since metal is a crystaline structure, the metal atoms themselves have been taking a radioactive bombardment which has (if memory serves correctly) altered nearly one out of every 100 atoms in the crystal. I forget the tensile strength depression but it does mean that a substantial portion of the metal itself is now radioactive. The magnetic fields which Galileo has encountered have a cumulative molecular shearing effect on all the components which has further polarized the entire spacecraft. The net result being further molecular instability and radioactivity. Finally, because the engineers knew that no one would be coming near the plutonium reactor at the end of a boom on the probe, they didn't really bother to shield it particularly well. The leaking radiation from that alone would make the entire probe radioactive this long after launch.
If you're going to try and take the piss outta someone, learn your facts first. Oh and put that potato in a nuclear reactor and then a plasma bath and then eat it. You won't be around to send out more inane comments.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Prior to the Voyager missions, NASA had proposed a "Grand Tour" Project that was to take advantage of the planetary alignment. However Grand Tour was scrapped, although apparantly still haunting the dreams of NASA planners. The Grand Tour option was left in for Voyager 2, but only if mission planners didn't decide that a second look at Titan would be more important. The trajectory diffences between the two really diverged at Saturn. Voyager 2 continued along the plane of the ecliptic, whereas Voyager 1 was thrown almost vertically "up". Up being defined as in the same direction as the Sun's North Pole. (The Sun, like Jupiter has very little tilt in relation to the ecliptic.)
Hey! Don't forget Pioneer 10. He just got a new lease on life. Not to bad for our oldest semi-functioning space probe.
Thanks for the replies, George.
1. I missed the note about still crashing Galileo. Thanks for pointing it out.
2. Yes, they had bigger budgets, but they were coming up with a lot of the items from scratch. The more stuff builds on what came before, the more inexpensive it should be. Also, newer tech should be cheaper, better and faster. I guess that's why I'm a retro-computer fan, it may not be pretty, but it works more reliably.
3. I really meant that more as a joke, but yes, it probably does not have CMa to allow it to slingshot. Also, yes, you can adjust orbit but you can't escape the gravity well without the DV. (I think you meant that).
So, thanks for the intelligent reply, I appreciated it.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
How easy it is for many to forget that the Gallileo probe was nearly lost as it was first heading to Jupiter when the high gain antenna failed. Credit must go to the engineers and researchers not just at JPL and NASA but around the world who helped make this mission a success.
The failure of the high gain antenna forced scientists and mathematicians to come up to better data compression and signaling techniques (Turbo Codes, etc). Some say that if it weren't for the failures of Gallileo's antenna, signal processing technology would have been held back by a decade! The insight gained from this has led to things such as smaller cell phones and improved television reception.
This about it, if we don't speak up for what we want from the government, then they'll either assume that we don't care, and they can do whatever, or worse, they'll think we actualy aprove of this crap. Speak up, you can never have to many votes in an election.
-Earthman
Earthman
Say it to me face w/ out wasting space...
Rocks?
Don't forget that Galileo was initiated under Carter and set up under Reagan, two presidents who didn't believe in the PC cr*p that runs NASA under our current clown, I mean president. Johnson and Nixon didn't really like all the people at NASA but they valued results over conformity to rules of how society was supposed to work. Carter may have wanted to be liked but eventually turned to 'just get it done', Reagan didn't care except for results, Bush knew a little more about the process but enough to stay out of it. Clinton has politicized NASA just like the INS, the FBI and nearly every other government agency. And he wonders why he'll be considered one of the worst presidents of all time.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
some people can't even hit the toilet while peeing and that's right in front of them...
Sure, that's easy for you to say. Maybe you've uncovered the reason behind those famous $750 toilet seats....
(it had to be said, honest, it did...)
Let me guess... Energizer Batteries, Right?
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
Quoting the Author's Note from Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two, "Finally, there is the strange case of the 'Eye of Japetus'- Chapter 35 of 2001. Here I describe Astronaut David Bowman's discovery on the Saturnian moon of a curious feature, '...a brilliant white oval, about four hundred miles long and two hundred wide ... perfectly symmetrical ... and so sharp-edged that it almost looked ... painted on the face of the little moon.' As he came closer, Bowman convinced himself that 'the satellite was a huge empty eye staring back at him as he approached...' Later, he noticed 'the tiny black dot at the exact center' which turns out to be the monolith (or one of its avatars.) Well, when Voyager 1 transmitted the first photographs of Iapetus they did indeed disclose a large, clear-cut white oval with a tiny black dot at the center. Carl Sagan promptly sent me a print from the JPL with the cryptic annotation 'Thinking of you...' I do not know whether to be relieved or disappointed that Voyager 2 has left the matter open." Personally, im anxious to see if this black dot is a real feature, or if its merely a few missing bits like the images of the "face" on mars is. thought fellow slashdotters might get a kick out of reading that though, especially those who havent been religious about their Clarke recently.
Van Allen belts baby! Yup, the same things that grab charged particles and create the northern lights here on Earth. Jupiter's belts are correspondingly larger and therefore grab a greater number of energetic particles and guide them into a shell around the planet. I think anywhere within the first two Galilean satellites is a pretty dangersous place.
IANAHEPP (high energy particle physicist) but...
There are a couple of kinds of radiation. Those that strike me as most damaging (forgive the pun) are the electron (gamma?) and neutron (beta?) [it's been a long time since I've learned this]...
Neutron bombardment is typically used to create new elements in a lab... Radioactive isotopes of otherwise stable elements are made this way. So is enriched uranium. Neutron radiation changes matter on the atomic level.
Electron radiation is ionizing. For some reason I seem to recall that this kind is more 'physically' damaging, while the former changes the properties of what it strikes.
Who built all that for vger? I vaguely recall something about a machine race. Could have this been the Borg?
the way they used to.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Well, not everything gose right, some times, even LINUX:-).
The success of Galeleo is more than you imagine. I worked on the targeting/mission planning software in 1989-1990. This was a couple of years after the launch. At that time, the high-gain antenna of the craft did not deploy. This means that communications with the craft are made through a secondary antenna which has some pitiful transfer rate. In addition, it was suspected that the craft would dissappear from contact once it went outside of the orbit of mars. They never figured out why the antenna did not deploy. Could have been a micrometeor, a blown motor, or a clumsy astronaut. We do know that they could not back up the deployment because some congress man decided that Video (!) was needed and the relay that would have run the reverse motor on the antenna was comandeered for this useless piece of equipment. Amidst all this diversity including: 1. The years of delay due to the Challenger disaster (was working at Rockwell Space operations at that time, hm... maybe there is a pattern here), 2. Good 'ol Jesse Helms's bill that prohibited the use of liquid fuel rockets on the shuttle. This meant that they had to use solid fuel rockets , which strangely enough were made in North Carolina.... Only the most brilliant orbital maneuver involving several planets, asteroids, etc. made the Jupiter approach possible 3. Unending buracracy in congress and JPL constantly trying to kill the project. The scientists have been amazing beyond all possible belief[
If you follow the links, you come to some pretty cool photos of Io. For some reason the URL I copied from my browser window doesn't work, so you'll have to do the work yourself.
Joe Bob says check them out (only if you have a fast connection).
haha
Ion drives still need a source of electrical power, in fact you'd need a bigger power budget because of it. Also, you'd still need chemical fuel for maneuvering and positioning thrusters, and Galileo is running low on that.
Let's be fair here. The "granola mystics" as jamesec unfairly names them, aren't afraid (at least the educated ones which are more than you think) of Cassini becoming a mini nuke. Plutonium 238, while not fissionable is just as nasty to the biosphere as 239. The watchdogs do serve a purpose, if only to keep NASA honest about such things. A few decades back, a NASA contractor got pretty sloppy about a liquid oxygen tank that was dropped in manufacture. About 2 years later, the damage would blow out the side of the Apollo 13 service module.
The space enthuisasts and the environmental groups should be allies more often then at odds. Both sides share fault in this, but in my opinion, the arrogance of the techheads has done most of the damage.
I had always heard that due to Voyager 1's trajectory and earlier launch, NASA could not achieve the same flight path that Voyager 2 took because the celestial mechanics were not right at the time.
Online gaming for motivated, sportsmanlike players: www.steelmaelstrom.org.
Online gaming for motivated, sportsmanlike players: www.steelmaelstrom.org.
Yeah, but humans didn't discover that one (unless you count the proto-ape-man with the bone).
I did forget about the Jupiter/movie vs. Saturn/book distinction. I thought the movie actually scored points on that one, since it looked forward to 2010 (the sequel) when the monoliths turned Jupiter into a baby 2nd sun (not enough mass there to do so, in reality, but Jupiter has much more than Saturn). Or was it that they went to Saturn in the 2001 book, but then to Jupiter in 2010? I'm getting confused... it's been a while since I read the books (and the movies seem to stick with me more for some reason, probably the stunning visuals). Honestly though the whole 2001/2010/2061/3001 series has pretty few internal inconsistencies like that, particularly considering the long period over which Clarke wrote them. Howabout a 3001 movie?!
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
You must not have been paying attention during the Cassini protests. Either they were repeating drivel verbatim or they were deliberately lying. I believe it was some of both. Take a look at: http://www.nonviolence.org/noflyby/intro.htm which deliberately tries to confuse a peaceful science probe powered by RTGs with space nuclear weapons. It switched from being an anti-Cassini site to a "throw the probe away -- don't flyby Earth" site. Please peruse the careful mixture of facts and, to put it kindly, non-facts. Moreover, a couple people who claimed to be members of that organization engaged in flame wars in sci.space.policy, so they can't even claim that the inaccuracies were accidental. They were pointed out during the flame war.
Actually, Pu-238 is worse in the short term than Pu-239. It's shorter half life (86.4yr vs. 24,390yr) means that a gram of 238 will emit more radiation than a gram of 239. However, its faster decay means it won't be around as long. This is an advantage. A stainless steel shell can contain 238 long enough for it to decay to harmless levels. Of course it is Pu-238 dioxide, an extremely insoluable ceramic, so there was no great danger in the first place, but every little bit helps.
Yes, watchdogs help to keep a bureaucracy on its toes, but only rational ones. Far too many of the Cassini protesters had not read the environmental impact report, nor the summary posted on the web. They hadn't bothered to familiarize themselves with the structure of the RTGs nor the precautions taken against contamination. As such, they came off as a bunch of zealots who were railing against the Eviiilll Plutonium(TM) in the probe. It literally looked like a bunch of religious fanatics spamming web news sites and Usenet.
Maybe you think this is an unfair characterization. If so, please check with Deja News and other archives. I suspect you'll be as embarrassed by these people as I was. In any case, none of them could have helped to prevent a subtle failure like Apollo 13. They simply don't operate at that level of detail and aren't interested in trying.
Now, it is entirely possible that your educated granola mystics were not deceived by the spin and were not opposed to Cassini's launch. Or, if they were opposed, then they had actual reasons for their position. If so, then I must ask: Why were they silent? Why let the yammerheads grab and hold the spotlight? How can they expect a movement to be taken seriously when all the public sees is a bunch of loony tunes?
The space enthuisasts and the environmental groups should be allies more often then at odds. Both sides share fault in this, but in my opinion, the arrogance of the techheads has done most of the damage.
I agree that this should be and again I disagree on allocating the blame. 8-) Yes, I want to move nearly all heavy industry into space. Let's start mining the asteroids for metal and close all strip mines; let's try a test-sized solar power satellite, etc. It's the people who don't work out the possible risks and rewards of a proposal but respond at a knee-jerk emotional level that are keeping us stuck in the hole we're in. And, the vast majority of those folks call themselves "environmentalists," generally without taking a single college course in biology, statistics, ecology, etc....
--
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
Amen brother. NASA needs to bring its "older crowd" up to speed on "new technology" and see what they can do. Just imagine what they could do with "todays" technology versus "yesterdays" technology!
- Love all computers...
"Because Galileo has been exposed to a plutonium reactor for the entire length of it's mission and has flown through some of the most intense radiation fields ever experienced, the entire probe is highly radioactive and would be extremely poisonous." This is a common misconception of radioactivity, the gallileo probe WAS exposed to large amounts of radiation from jupiters magnetosphere but it is not radioactive itself (except for it's RTG's of course)! is that baked potato you put in the microwave during lunch still radioactive and exposing your stomach right now? no, of course not. basicly, same thing.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
I was paying attention to the Cassini protests, and reading a couple of more serious books published on Cassini hazards as well. I'm a bit skeptical on the tests NASA's made about the RTG safety however, I'd read NASA's worse case scenario studys, the one's I read only covered launch as opposed to the Earth flyby scenario, which would have resulted in a considerably more dangerous scenario considering the high speed involved in the Earth flyby. While the Plutonium used does have a relatively short half life, we're still talking major short-term damage if enough was released over a populated area. I would have preferred the use of a larger booster, or perhaps grouped boosters put together in orbit over an Earth flyby, but we don't have the techniques down yet for that last option. Considering that NASA seems to be having major problems with the implementation of "faster, better, cheaper", I have considerably less confidence in letting them handled a nuclear powered probe than I had at the time of the Voyager program. I would certainly want adequate funding to make those quality checks that seemed to be skipped lately and hiring enough system controllers to reduce fatigue and have enough cross-checking at critical points.
Also, the radicals do sometimes serve a purpose in any movement you can think of. They keep issues live and frequently win maneuvering room that can be used my the moderates. I don't take Usenet seriously, it generally only attracts the most loud and roudy on any topic. The only environment that might be worse would be AOL chat rooms. Consider also, that we only see what the media chooses or is directed to cover. Rational scientists debating the wisdom of a Cassini flyby don't draw in the ratings the way sign-banging radicals would.
As to your other proposals. As long as a substantical population remains on Earth, you need substantial industry just for support and supply. Considering that the repair of a simple pressurised room involved lots of people over months of time, we simply don't have the technology or the capability of running huge factory style operations in space. And given the low efficiency involved, I have problems with the idea of sending gigawatts of microwaves through the atmosphere just to get megawatts on the ground. Space has an important place in mankind's future, but not the primary role that enthuiasts seem to envision.
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Can your IM do this?
I'm glad their doing this! NASA is cool even though they've had some failures lately. I can't wait until I get to visit Mars.
"Have you eaten your
this is good news for the ridiculed NASA.
this kind of joint project if sucessfull will be a note of "hey we can still do it!"
the problem with buget and popular opinion is a terable toll on NASA.
the world as a whole needs to get exited about space travel again. we sent men to the moon in a tin can and some of the items left there (ive heard) are still working.
i guess we just cant build them like we used to.
YAY NASA!
(i want to book my vacation on the moon but they will not let me yet..)
"this is my computer, there are many like it but this one is mine..." -AYP?
It's good that something is finally going right for NASA. After all the mars problems, I'm glad to see something goin good for em. They needed it.
http://www.yeraze.com http://www.vizworld.com
Is is at all possible that perhaps a space probe could be positioned in such a way that perhaps when and if the power would be lost that the vehicle could return to earth gracefully? Then all you would have to do is retool it and launch it again. That would make for an interesting concept and allow for more data to be gathered much more cheaply.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Trying to squeeze the last possible bit of use out of Galileo
My first thought when I read this? "I hope they don't expect too much, he's been dead for several hundred years..."
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
With all the media attention on the failures of NASA, it's good to see NASA's great successes: Cassini, Galileo, Voyager, Pathfinder, Viking, and most of all Apollo. When people talk about cutting the NASA budget, we can point them to these; and when they ask, "Yeah, but what did it do to save the environment," you can ask them, "How much are you willing to pay for knowledge that isn't immediately useful?"
Finding God in a Dog
With all of NASA's rotten luck lately watch 'em crash into each other. Or just disappear..._ ________
___________________________________
___
I'm an exhibit on the mounted animal nature trail.
I thought that they were thinking of crashing Galileo so it wouldn't contaminate any of the moons (esp. Europa/Io).
Yes, it's great to hear good news coming from NASA. I think that they should re-hire and un-retire the folks who churned out Voyager and Galileo for the next Mars probe. It seems the older crowd were more hands-on oriented and the newer guys more theory-oriented.
Why not slingshot Galileo back to Mars? It's old, it's not the most technologically-advanced hunk of metal floating around, but by Gawd it works!
BTW, great line from the poster about V-ger, gave me quite a chuckle.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
Next time NASA crashes a probe, or blows up a rocket on a launch pad, remember Galileo. When NASA gets bad press because it keeps throwing money away, remember Galileo. When someone wonders why the government spends money on NASA, remember Galileo. And while we may not get Tang from Galileo, I know there's a kick ass group of guys who built an unstopable, juggernaught of a probe. I think they called her Galileo.
What can I say, I have a soft spot for space exploration. Hehehe.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
So we can finally discover the 2nd monolith... (the first one's on the Moon).
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
MSNBC is reporting that Mars is made out of swiss and cottage cheese.
This one is pretty cool.
-ac
This article is wrong on some points. Galileo will actually just be utilizing certain functions on Cassini, including the Gordo Station Cancer unit and the P1(P2-P3)CC3 Probe.
There's a list of equipment on board, including the modified Linux kernel on Cassini, here at this link
The spacecraft has already endured nearly three times the radiation it was designed to withstand, but repeated exposure to Jupiter's radiation has taken its toll.
What I don't understand is - what can radiation really do to the Galileo? I know the radiation we deal with on Earth is a whole different story then open space radiation, or the radiation around Jupiter.
I could see it cause a memory fault, or cause a bad computation with the CPU/chipsets somehow. But I know Galileo has got redundant memory/CPU that would detect errors and recompute. Worse case, it would knock itself into "Safe Mode"; reseting itself to a safe status.
What kind of "real" damage could radiation do that would shorten the life of Galileo?
Jeremy
Jeremy
"Opinions are like assholes; everyone's got one..."
some positive news for NASA. I've become tired of seeing negative press about NASA, people complain about things like they could do any better. Whenever I hear someone bad-mouthing NASA I point Galileo out to them, functioning well dispite being three years past it's operational parameters, same with the Pioneers and Voyagers. I'm really hoping Cassini will be a huge success so the Pluto project will perk some eyebrows and hopefully get launched.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
being that i am too poor to get magazine subscriptions and too lazy to read alot of technical stuff on the internet, i have no clue as to what this ion drive is. call me flamebait if you will, but if someone could email me a link to a description, or a description itself, id appreciate it. i THINK i have a vague idea of what it is, but im not sure im even thinking about the right thing, and that which i am thinking about is only a vague description given to me by someone with an accent that was very thick, so i couldnt quite make out all that he was saying. beldaeron@zdnetmail.com
Well, I wasn't entirely sure myself, so I did some research. This page has a good description of the mission.
A quick summary of the points I found:
1) The Voyagers were in fact designed only for Jupiter and Saturn due to funding problems.
2) Despite this, the mission planners realized that the planetary alignments allowed for the four-planet route, and left the option open accordingly.
3) Because of (1), the engineered lifetime of the Voyagers was only five years.
4) Voyager 1 could not complete the tour of Uranus and Neptune because of its Titan flyby. However, this flyby was planned for at the beginning of the mission; Voyager 1 was never meant to visit the two outer gas giants, not even as a contingency plan.
5) Voyager 2 was actually launched first!
Hope that clears some things up. It did for me!
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Would it be possible to design radiation resistant CPU's using the internet model? A cpu that can re-route instructions from one set of transistors to another set with equivalent functions on the fly to re-create the original CPU in a virtual sense? Sure it would be slow to begin with and would get slower with increasing damage but you would still retain the function. Perhaps a chip with thousands of copies of basis transistor sets working in parallel (would need parallel code written for it). These sets can be used simultaneously to achieve reasonable speed but the chip will keep running until there's only one basis set left even if it slows to Hz speed. When this happens NASA will hire boat loads of programmers whose job it to simplify the requests made on this chip to essential functions in the least demanding way possible to extend the useful life of the chip.
I guess its a minature beowolf cluster. My main point is that with a parallel approach, the weaker and smaller the individual processor the better as far as radiation resistance is concerned.
Disclaimer: I know shit about about what I just wrote. Just a little mental masturbation.
no sig.
Due to some very smart guys (hey, they're rocket scientists, after all) and a convenient alignment of the planets, Voyager 2 was able to continue on past Saturn and go to Uranus and Neptune.
And it's still functioning (in a limited capacity), assisting in the research of the outer solar system -- solar wind, trans-Pluto objects, etc.
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Dang clever these Earthings...
I'm glad that someone at NASA thought of teaming up on observations. The results should be even more spectacular than NASA expects. When reviewing code, multiple reviewers going over the code at the same time produces an effect greater than the sum of their findings - stuff that one reviewer finds will spark a connection for another, and so on. They called it the "Phantom Reviewer" effect back when I was taught about formal reviews.
The same thing will happen for NASA - each of the probes will be gathering data in different spectrum, from different angles, at the same time. They expect to gain a lot from this, but I think it will exceed their expectations many times over. Though, the results will take a couple of years to be seen (it takes a long time to crunch a lot of data). I'm looking forward to seeing what the atrophysicists (sp?) can deduce from it all. We could be in for a few big surprises.
I've seen ppl rag on Hemos for bad spelling and grammar, but this is the worst I've seen to date. Really, dude... don't you at least scan over it to make sure it at least resembles the english language? Or does this look ok to you?
Just to be fair, I think I need to speak up.
I believe that you unjustly blame the current President for the failure of NASA. If anybody is to be blamed, it should be the American people. As a whole (not just the scientific/computer community), NASA does not have as much support as say education or National Defense. Because of this NASA has had a shrinking budget since President Johnson's term in office. This decrease in budget lasted all the way through till two years ago. Fiscal Year 1999 (which started in October 1998) is the first year in 30 years (since FY 1968) where NASA's budget has not decreased.
Also, the current administrator of NASA, Dan Goldin, has been the administrator since Spring of 1992, which was during President Bush's term in office.
I don't mean to sound like a like I am defending President Clinton, but I don't think the problem lies there. Must people in the Space Industry tend to lay blame for NASA's failures on the feet of Mr. Goldin, who invented the "Faster, Cheaper, Better" plan. All the projects in the last few months that have failed (specifically, Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander) were built under the Faster,Cheaper, Better. The first project, Mars Pathfinder, was also FBC, but it was a very successful mission. But to be fair to Mr. Goldin, FCB was invented because of the loss of the Mars Observer (which cost $900 M) which was a typical science mission (and lost in 1993).
We must use facts in defending (and sometimes blaming) NASA, not demagoguery.
if you want to crash and burn, it does seem that the old big budget projects actually exceeded and outperformed design specs by years in this case. Big budget projects are also more fun to work on from an engineering standpoint, much like having hot grits in my pants.
Very interesting, possibly water-shaped rocks.
Intolerant people should be shot.
The contrast between Galileo's success and the recent tragic failures of the Mars probes is striking, and informative. While NASA administrator Dan Goldin's "faster, cheaper, better" mantra played well for congress what it really meant was that deep space exploration was stretched even thinner than it had been. Galileo had an adequate budget, that allowed for actually checking out the spacecraft before launch. A budget big enough budget that enough quality ground control was available to make the recovery from the antenna fault possible
The recent Mars missions had a third the staff for three times the probes compared to the last series of Mars probes (the immensely popular pathfinder.) Is it any wonder that drastically understaffed and underfunded projects experienced failures? They didn't even have enough money to install equipment to transmit telemetry that would have allowed NASA to determine what caused the Polar lander's failure.
On a long duration mission millions of miles from home, redundancy is a critical issue. This takes at least a little bit of money. The only time that redundancy on individual probes can be discounted is when they are very simple and there are a lot of them. There have been proposals of this kind, largely ignored by NASA.
If you want successful space probes, give NASA the resources it needs to do the job. And don't throw billions away on the space shuttle. If we wanted a private space industry, it would take one thing: the announcement that the government was taking bids on a SSTO, in quantity, and that excess vehicles could be used by private industry.
You'd have to stand back to avoid being hit by an entire new industry. Like with aviation in the early part of this century, gov't can play a part by doing research and creating an initial need to be met by private industry. (Early military and mail service contracts.) Once its started- and the banks assured that the companies will make money- you're off and running. Airplanes were soon being produced for cargo and passengers, and now the airline industry is a multi-multi-billion/year industry.
When NASA was NACA, it did this well. Nasa should go back to its roots, do great research, but leave business to business.
Save a tree. Eat a beaver.
God knows what you'd find.....
Online gaming for motivated, sportsmanlike players: www.steelmaelstrom.org.
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