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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.
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Can your IM do this?
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
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
This one is pretty cool.
-ac
Technically the ion-drive isn't "slow" it merely has a low delta-v. Because an ion-drive can accelerate for very long periods of time the only real velocity limitation is the amount of fuel you have (which tells you how long you could run the engine). If you had an ion drive of a spacecraft and kept a constant acceleration of 9.6 m/s after a while you'd approach c. I think the approximate time is a year but I don't remember and don't feel like recalculating it. Of course once you hit about an 1/8 c you'd run into relativistic problems that would make you severely uncomfortable.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Whoa, there! Since I work for the company who's fault it would be if it wasn't nasa's, I've kind of been paying attention. I've been led to believe that both of the problem's were actually nasa's fault, not the contractors.
Poor communications both times, I think. Not that the nasa guys don't rock (smarter than me, at least), just don't run around blaming my employer for bad things it didn't do. There are enough bad things it has actually done. ;)
And about the lowest bid thing -- I'm not sure what the actual rules are, but I think to some extent you take the best bid -- i.e. cost is a factor, but not the only one. Contractors don't just submit a cost to the gov., they submit a amazingly large document (a proposal) about how they plan to do everything.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
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.
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.
Just like human systems, electronic systems have total dose limitations, too.
Imagine the actual mechanisms involved. An energetic charged particle impacts a chip like an extremely tiny bullet - it destroys things along the way. It may take a while for a radiation hardened device sustain enough damage to render it useless because of the scale. But, eventually, enough impacts will drill enough holes (as well as generate cascading particles) so as to change the structure and toast your device.
(Incidentally, the more transistors you pack into a package and the smaller the transistors get, the shorter the lifetime in a radiation hostile environment. Particle "bullets" do more damage and have a greater probability of hitting something you need.)
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
Practically, no.
It may be theoretically possible to make it so that some of these probes were on some sort of free return trajectory, but I doubt it. Especially for a totally unpowered probe. Managing that sort of thing requires constant fine adjustments in the probe's trajectory. Even if you did manage to get it back here you would still have to catch the thing as it came wizzing back past the Earth at a few miles per second. The shuttle couldn't do it, nor anything else NASA has ever built.
Trying to build a probe capable of doing that sort of thing plus the stuff needed to catch it if it did manage to come back would multiply the cost of the program by a few orders of magnitude. Cheaper just to forget about it and launch another one.