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NEAR Touches Down on Eros
Every once in a while NASA does something
amazing.
Today they took a probe that was just supposed to orbit
a rock the size of Manhattan,
guided it
down to the surface,
reoriented the dish, and sent back a hello from ground zero. The
NEAR Shoemaker mission site
and its
mirror
are a little busy at the moment, but
CNN's coverage
is good, with simulated video, and actual photos from two hundred million miles up. Some engineers, and the operators at
Johns Hopkins,
must be awfully proud right about now.
And what have you been doing with your life?
Have you solved the problem of AIDS, sickness in general, malnutrition and hunger, poverty and on and on?
Perhaps you should give up anything that doesn't directly lead to soving these problems.
It's not NASA's job to solve these problems. It IS their job to do nifty stuff in space.
The NEAR team has members from both NASA and Johns Hopkins. http://near.jhuapl.edu/intro/faq.html
They could land a non-lander, but they couldn't land the Mars Polar *Lander*.
First off, you will not live to see the day that nano-probes mine asteroids. Not at the rate we're going.
Secondly, the impact @5mph is enough to make it rebound off the asteroid again since its got only 1/1000G. If I had to guess I'd say it was on its way off the asteroid again fairly slowly. We'll have to see though.
We might wait for the israelis to find a salt lake in a valley and move in so we have someone to sell food to.
== Just my opinion(s)
Funny, you insult Americans for not using a logical, sensible measurement system, and then you browbeat us for not using illogical, nonsensical English spellings. Given that many (most?) words have multiple meanings, it's inane to use different spellings to try and indicate meaning in just a few cases.
Unfortunately, the Abell Spelling Reform (doubled vowel indicates the long form, x and c removed from the language, most double consonants eliminated, etc.) goes over like a lead balloon. (or perhaps I should say it "gooz oover liik a led baloon.")
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
that was tremendously funny. good post.
The words anger management float through the air...
Here in the US we spell it "gauge," but I'll assume we've screwed that up, too.
Anywhere that light and vacuum come together. Are you perhaps thinking of the kilogram, which is still based on a relic?
I take my hat off to the whole NASA crew, but I'll tell you the real hero is Robert Farquhar. He's the closest thing to as astrogater, not counting the ones on Star Trek, that we've got. He did remarkable work with ICE, the satellite which he managed to nudge at Halley's comet when the US couldn't be bothered to send up a real probe. Once more, he's managed to do the space equivalent of throwing a raw egg into the air and then catching it on an iron skillet--without breaking it. There's simply no one better at navigating in space.
Steven
Maybe there *are* some rocket scientists working at NASA :-)
Physicists get Hadrons!
It's an hour later, and I got into the site just fine. So there was a spike.
You're suggesting that Slashdot post this story when people don't want to talk about it? Like the guy looking for a quarter he dropped, only under the streetlight, "where the light's better"?
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
According to the updated CNN story, the NEAR craft is transmitting from the surface and they may even be able to get it to lift off again.
I want these guys to build my next car.
Hmm, you're a bit harsh on the Anglo Saxons, their old system was pretty good, about three centuries ago.
Funny thing is it was one of the first more-or-less standardised systems and now they have to use the METRIC system as a standard-reference since technology left the age of steam.....
It's a pitty that strange delusions keep them from embracing the I.S. as the new standard.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I'm just saying we can view the "commonplace" activity with wonder and respect. The sun rises and sets every morning, and damn if it isn't an awe-inspiring thing to watch.
They keep making these things that just last and last and last.... Outdoing the Energizer bunny even. Looks like they did a great job with Eros/NEAR. Lets hope we get some really good data to work with from all this unexpected bonanza.
-=-
Computer geek for hire. Reasonable rates. Email me.
right on mark... The ESA did send a mission to Halley, too.
CNN also has incorrect information. I have two pieces of evidence for this. First: Look at the homepage for the NEAR project. It's at Johns Hopkins University Advanced Physics Lab. Second, read this story at Channel2000.com. It also credits Johns Hopkins.
--
Matthew Walker
My DNA is Y2K compliant
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
Heh. Well, first US deep space craft to be controlled by someone other than NASA. That better?
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Matthew Walker
My DNA is Y2K compliant
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
The satelite is NOT being run by NASA, it is being run by Johns Hopkins. In fact, it is the first deep space craft to be run by someone other than NASA.
--
Matthew Walker
My DNA is Y2K compliant
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
Heee. Hello, fellow fan of Ender's Game. The Buggers didn't establish that base till the Second Invasion though, so I think we're safe for now.
--
Matthew Walker
My DNA is Y2K compliant
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
What a great reason not to report about it!
Twit.
Execute? [Y/N] _
You are so right. No more TV for you until you've cured AIDS and cooked dinner for Zaire.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
If ever there was a day to probe Eros, it would be Valentine's Day. If they'd waited two more days they would have done it.
No romantics at NASA, I guess...
Despite past screwups by NASA (which I accept as a hazzard of space exploration), this makes me proud to call myself a geek. While I have nothing in common with the individuals involved in this project, and have never participated or been involved with anything on this scale - I know that we share at least a few things, notably curiosity, the drive to hack something that wasn't suppose to work that way, and pushing the limits of the hardware (and if landing an "unlandable" probe isn't pushing limits - nothing is).
Damn proud... Kudos to those involved!
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Actually, they do not succeed at all - they are too probable. However, when you get to one in a trillion-something chance (I am not sure about the exact numbers), the improbability drives start kicking in, and everything happens to be just fine! If you disagree, reread the Hitchhiker's guide!!!- ---------
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Jobs? Which jobs?
They should head out to an Italian bistro and work up the calculations for the next asteroid landing mission.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
> even when it makes two years of mistakes up until that point. This is where the 'bunch of smart guys' quotent pays off.
Limit the money and you also limit the number of pointy-haired bosses.
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+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
According to the BBC News website, the asteroid contains minerals worth approximately £2000bn. Given that it is one of millions of asteroids, and not a particularly big one at that, it's only a question of time before robotic mining of asteroids is a fact. No more strip mining the Earth (good for our environment), and removes asteroids from potential Earth collision courses (good for our survival as a species); someone just needs to develop the tech. Of course, all those minerals being dumped onto the world metal exchanges would totally crash the market, but I'm sure someone will work a way round that.
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
Read the discworld novels. when it's "a million-to-one chance, but it might just work" it will allways work, 999,999 to 1 or 1,000,001 to one don't it has to be exactly a million to one :)
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WRT space junk and the ISS, I believe I read somewhere that NASA is working on a laser system to deflect potentially dangerous space junk away from the space station, so yes, I think they are concerned about it :-)
Screw "possible scientific research." This is awesome. The people at NASA didn't care about research, they just wanted to have some fun with their toy in its last moments, true to the hacker spirit
Nice job!
okay, he's the troll
:)
giant erotic sculpture?
why not a huge, naked, petrified Natalie Portman?
I can't think of a better testament...
you'll certainly get a lot more young boys interested in space exploration
So what's stopping people from making their own phones.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
This is one Giant Step for Man Kind...
And one Painful Setup for NEAR..
We're gonna visit three comets... (but this time we won't be trying to hit one =)
guaranteeing that I, every viewer of Slashdot, the Media, and everyone else will NOT see a thing until later tonight
Dude, go to CNN. Big fat pipes.
The movie, not a disaster. This is pretty exciting news. The scientific possibilities are endless. Too bad it takes too long to make a round trip, you can forget about mining asteroids as some space novels talk about.
--
Twivel
Three weeks ago, the answer would have been of "of course!"
--
If the blues don't kill you, brother, they'll make you a mighty, might man.
The Pjammer Chronicles --
Excellent indeed. However, the touchdown velocity was about 5mph/8kmph. I wonder if the G force involved in hitting the ground was less than that experienced while on the rocket going through the atmosphere..
I bet the scientists kept quiet about the possibility to gain bonus points in the public. Or maybe they realized that survival depended on hitting the ground in a certain way. Anyhow - whether accidental or planned - great job, guys!
Stop the brainwash
When did they change the plan? Last I heard, they were planning on crashing into Eros at very high speed. I seem to remember something about scanning the debris splashed upward by the collision with some type of spectrographic telescope so they could determine the composition of the asteroid.
Does anyone esle remember anything about this?
A little while ago, they found a bug in the sattelite programming that was going to result in a crash landing. Rather than face down another PR debacle like what happened on Mars, they decided to make it look like it was a planned event (rather like the FBI with the Carnivore namechange.).
That's right. We've all been duped!
Those that take me seriously ... deserve to.
--
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
It was a political landing, btw. We (the USA) can now lay more of a claim to it than anyone else.
Obviously there is no law governing this area properly (old exploratory laws will probably not hold sway in this case), but one can assume that with asteroids, and the mining that will eventually take place on them, whoever lands a probe first gets it.
Nasa just made a trillion dollars!
To the guys who placed bets against me, and for whoever modded me down to zero when I predicted this event in the last /. story about the Near touchdown coming up... Told you so! Easy money.
well, now we know again how to land stuff successfully, lets use this design for Mars, (make it so it wasn't supposed to land... duh)
Dada Mail - Program, Art Project or Absurdity?
Reference to a series of stories by Isaac Asimov.
--
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
We may lose some things by having cheaper probes, but with cheaper probes, we are able to explore more things. For example, hopefully we will be able to visit Pluto before its athmosphere freezes over, and they only way that would happen is if NASA continues to build cheaper probes.
Doh!
I wanted to picture just how fast the collision would be so I did a bit of dusty highschool physics:
starting principles:
G(earth) = 9.81 ms-2
Near's impact speed = 1.9m/s m/s
Some useful formulas:
(a) v = u+at
(b) d = u*t+(a*t^2)/2
solve (a) for t
t = (u-v)/a
but u = 0 so it becomes:
t = v/a
substitute into (b)
d = u*(v/a) + (a*(v/a)^2)/2
again u = 0, so:
d = (a*(v/a)^2)/2
with actual values:
d = (9.81*(1.9/9.81)^2)/2
d = 18 cm
Now take a look at it and try to imagine it being dropped from 25cm on Earth. Bear in mind that the surface of Eros is probably soft and sandy.
I've been posting on the net since 1994 and I still haven't come up with a good sig!
i know that Eros' mass is very, very large compared to the mass of NEAR. could the landing have affected the orbit Eros in a miniscule way that in a million year or so years, Eros smashes into earth? just wondering...
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
... but not that big. The photos were not taken from "200 million miles up" - that's how far Eros is from Earth:
NEAR's landing was confirmed when mission control received a beacon signal from the craft resting on the surface of Eros, some 196 million miles from Earth. (My emphasis.)
NEAR orbited Eros at a distance of less than 100 kilometers for much of the time, usually 70km or 35km depending on the stage of the mission.
I was unaware that it was a FLC probe. The addition of this fact invalidates my argument. In light of this, I would like to abandon logic and begin to beg for NASA's funding to be increased. Any objections?
Pax Digitalia
Horny engineers try harder when they're doing something even remotely related to sex, such as landing on Eros.
So what we're looking at is something that could be used for a return to the Moon, or to Mars -- lithobraking. Great way of slowing down your spacecraft.- ---
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Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
blog |
This mission wasn't looking good at first with the earlier mistakes with metric conversion for the first thruster fire but landing on the asteroid has scored John Hopkins APL some points with me. Took a whole bunch of luck though.
If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't working hard enough.
No, not miles, meters. That's the distance the cameras lose focus.
Hmm. Forget terraforming Mars or the Moon for life, how about terraforming and building your house on an asteroid!!! (Forgetting problems like low/zero gravity of course).
I'm afraid I can't remember more of the details. Has anyone else heard anything about NEAR and SDI? I haven't heard a peep out of the press. They're playing it as a miracle-of-science story rather than a demonstration-of-military-technology one.
.. which you can fix with a dpbb or a modified unlooper, check www.dssware.com for details
Matt
Don't take life so seriously; it isn't permanent.
Not only fewer 'bells and whistles', but fewer total number of craft built.
Before, there would have been at least three NEAR's built 'just in case' and they'd leave the other two in museums someplace.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
---
from the lucky-starr-and-the-dark-tumbling-rock dept.
Do you mean Starr as in Kenneth Starr, or do you mean star?
---
Check in...OK! Check out...OK!
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
You see what NASA can accomplish when they don't accidentally use the English units of measurement? :-)
Men believe what they want. - Caesar
>>Some engineers must be awfully proud right about now. If this was me, I'd be passed out on the office floor! Party on!
"And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords" - Kent Brockman
sig's not here
You should read Earth by David Brin. Small black holes are *not* toys and you don't get to play with any.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I seem to recall us dropping a probe into the atmosphere at some point. Either Gallileo or Magaellan. Don't remember which.
The hippie down on the corner has been telling us so for years..
.sig?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
The choice is not between a bunch of 'FBC' missions and a bunch of Battlestar Galactica class missions. The choice is between several FBC missions a year, vs. one Galactica per decade.
NASA would not have spent the billions of dollars a Galileo type probe costs in order to explore an insignificant asteroid. And they certainly wouldn't have been receptive to a scientist saying, "Hey! let's land this baby on an asteroid and see what happens."
Actually, I think the main benefits of mining asteroids is not for shipment of material back to earth, but to refine and manufacture parts for large spacecraft that would otherwise be to expensive to launch into space from earth.
I mean out.
Since Eros had enough gravity to let NEAR have a regular orbit in the first place, and also since NEAR landed at ~5mph, then we can assume EROS would and does have enough gravity to hold a small object. Define micro-gravity.
"This is where god would go if he wanted to get off blow!"
Now they're going to relaunch it?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
If anyone over at NASA is reading this, congratulations on a job well done. I watched the landing today and it was quite well stages -- much better than previous mishaps with Mars. Congrats, guys.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Another thing damaging the Express was the probable need for RTGs (radioisotope thermal generators). Given the brouhaha when they launched the last Saturn explorer, with its "kill-the-planet" load of plutonium (puh-leeze), NASA probably doesn't want to fight that PR campaign again.
Then again, shipping plutonium to Pluto has a certain cachet, doesn't it? (*grin*)
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
Never read it, but singularities would be harmless if you made them small enough. There should be some critical mass, dependant on the density of the surrounding medium, below which a black hole cannot survive. Below that mass, it loses energy to Hawking radiation faster than it can suck in mass to compensate, and is gone in a tiny fraction of a second. Above that mass, it sucks in matter faster than it radiates, quickly gets big enough that it hardly radiates anything at all, and proceeds to consume the experiment apparatus, the lab, the city, and most of the solar system. The first variety would be really interesting to physicists. The second would be even more interesting, but only for the few moments before they destroy Earth.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
Quite, though it can have some unpleasant side effects. I seem to remember some engineers accidentally discovering this technique when their "aerobraking" proved insufficient. I believe the lithobraking in that case did as much breaking as it did braking. Most people said that they should just be more careful with the aerobraking, but the engineers saw an opportunity. Now we see lithobraking applied in a more controlled fashion than before, under circumstances when aerobraking simply won't work.
It's sort of an obvious solution, though. We've employed lithobraking down here on the surface for many many years, to great effect. I wonder why it took so long for it to become an accepted practice in spaceflight?
I think I'll have to use that term the next time I see a car impacted on a large concrete object.
"Damn, that guy crashed good!"
"No, just a successful application of lithobraking, though possibly in excess of the structural tolerance of the vehicle."
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
And it might be kinda cool to create a micro-black hole. A sufficiently small black hole would just sort of evaporate due to Hawking radiation before it could eat much, and it'd sure be fun to watch. I wonder how small it would have to be to disappear before it could grow significantly? Too bad the RHIC's collision energies are a few orders of magnitude too small.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
That depends on the surface and the probe. If the surface is covered in a thick enough layer of dust or other small particles, that would damp the impact quite a bit. Also, how bouncy are space probes?
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
Actually, they didn't say anything at all about Eros hitting Earth, they just mentioned that it was one of a group of large asteriods in near Earth orbits, and that one of them might hit us someday. A very real possibility, take a peek at these photos of previous terrestrial impacts: http://www.pibburns.com/catastro/impactim.htm
No, the Mariners never landed on Mercury. On Venus, soviet probes of the Venera series did touch the ground. The last one transmitted data back (including pictures) for two hours only due to pressure, temperature, and sulfuric acid rain.
... is a hit, isn't it?!?! I mean, if you nearly miss something... don't you hit it?
;-)
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
The CNN site offers only a way to the movie which pretty much hides the URL. Here it is:v iew/near.mov
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/02/09/near.pre
I think it's a rather good but information free teaser well worth the 2Meg download.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Uhm... sorry, but I can't quite follow you. Are you talking about putting a big, fat rock into your trajectory? ;-)
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
I thought 1 in a million chances only work 9 times out of ten :)
A penny for my thoughts? This is my two cents. I got ripped off.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
I'd give a shot at this myself, but I'm not a game programmer. Is there support for an O.S. version of this type of project?
science is a religion
Message for you. It's from NEAR. It said "Beep." That means "It's 4:53, I'm still here. It's damn cold."
I had a feeling you were going to say that.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
YOU obviously have nothing better to do than throw this tired, pointless objection in the face of phenomenal scientific accomplishment. Why don't you leave us alone and fold some proteins or something?
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
I wish I had mod points for this!
This is a bowel disruptor, and you are just full of shit. - Spider Jerusalem
I hate it when people cant read... The article never said eros was in any danger of hitting earth. What it did say was "Learning about Eros could offer them clues to prevent such a catastrophic collision."
"it could just be the midgets. You've got to be careful with midgets in Spandex." --Jamie Richardson
On November 17, 1967, Surveyor 6, a lunar lander in a program researching possible moon landing sites, made history. The lander's rockets were fired for 2.5 seconds, lifting the lander 12 feet and sending it 8 feet west. It then soft-landed and continued to function normally. It had become the first spacecraft to lift off from the moon.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Reminds me of that line from the first "Naked Gun" movie. Well, the doctors say he's 50/50... but there's only a 10% chance of that.
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I take drugs seriously.
The CNN article has no new images, all of them, with the exception the image from much earlier today. CNN won't due.
Burn Hollywood Burn
--trb
Bruce Willis was unavailable for comment.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
That is absolutely absurd.
The term Near Earth refers to this side (inside) of the Mars orbit. There are quite a few asteroids that are considered Near Earth. There are comets too. The sun is considered Near Earth even though you don't ususally hear it referred to as that. Venus is too. You don't ever here about us having a collision with Venus or the Sun right? There is a very small possibility of deflection, but there's a lesser chance of that happening than trolls stopping their visits to slashdot.
The term Near Earth is just a term for a vague scientific concept. It has nothing to do with an object's closeness to Earth (except that Mars' orbit is never more than about 250M miles away from us). That's not very close at all.
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
Actually NASA made it so that there was a 1 in a million chance of success. As everyone on the Disc knows 1 in a million chances always succeed!
I think these scientists and engineers who came up with the idea of basically crash landing on the asteroid should be applauded. Imagine the kind of calculations needed to accurately cause a a craft to crash into an asteroid?! It simply boggles the mind does'nt it? But they did get a good amount of "bonus science" for doing it.
There is no spork.
got filth?
great comedy company.
Nasa has shown how well they can do something when luck goes there way, concidering tat there was less than 1% chance that the craft would survive, good on you nasa
same reason we went to the moon. Because we can.
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A month ago it wouldnt have landed, now would it?
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and that footstep you just took caused an earthquake in china, killing millions of people, you heartless bastard.
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Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab built it, and I belive the big thing at the time was that it was a million dollars UNDER budget. I'd look for a link, but their site is /.'ed
And unlike some other contractors they apprently don't get metric and english units confused.
Wow, hats off to everyone involved.
Perhaps we could have got more information with a crash landing and a spectroscope watching. I would still like to know more about the composition and this sat is not equipped!
See my journal, I write things there
personally, it caught my attention. Sure it is not the way it was supposed to do...thats what artists and innovators do, use things unconventionally to yield a desired effect. more power to him for challenging the status quo and trying to be (a little...a very little bit) creative here. If it pisses you off, vote it down, hell vote me down..i'm not AC..its really not that important in the grand ol' scheme now is it?
From the CNN article:
Eros became only the fifth celestial body touched by a human spacecraft, following the Moon, Mars, Venus and Jupiter.
Must we forget earth? =8-D
reech bee-yond ur clip-0n
Um, this is a no-brainer.
If we have to choose between (A) annually landing dozens of $150 million widgets on cold lumps of rock a few miles overhead, or (B) developing the technology to animate robotic daggits while we frolic in the Triad courts and sail merrily through the skies aboard our Viper craft, only the most hardcore geeks would choose the former.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
i had a near touchdown on eros about 10 minutes ago.
then she slapped me.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
My girlfriend was a research assistant for the NEAR time all summer - she put together composite images of the asteroid. All the imaging for NEAR and in fact most of the other research is actually at done Cornell (see their article here), not at Hopkins.
The orbiter was not designed as a lander at all. In fact, even the task of floating around the cylindrical rock was not a simple feat. Eros is rotating along two axes, making it very difficult to orbit close to the rock without being hit by the end-over-end rotation.
The fact that they were able to develop a surface map from the images and were able to land on this rock is a lot more impressive than it seems at first glance.
---- Just another spud server.
Not exactly harmless -- you get some gsmma rays, so you'd probably have to shield it like a nuclear reactor. But small enough singularities would be safer than what usually goes inside that shielding -- and it would eat mass and emit radiation, sounds like a power source to me. Too bad we don't have any way to make one...
No, they don't calibrate rulers by that chunk of metal any longer. The meter is now defined as so many wavelengths of the light emitted by a particular kind of laser -- that's more accurate than marks incised on a platinum beam, and the setup can be replicated in any calibration lab that wants to spend the money. The second is defined in terms of the frequency of a laser. But I think the third fundamental unit, the kilogram, is still an actual hunk of metal. You could define it as the mass of some very large number of protons, but that is too difficult to measure to the required accuracy.
About spelling, according to what I learned back in first grade, "meter" is pronounced meet-ur, while "metre" should be pronounced meet-ree, unless you are a Frenchman (who can't spell phonetically at all), or a Brit who is so convinced of French cultural superiority that he won't use his own judgement concerning French foibles... Do you spell the unit of mass "kilogramme" also?
How did we touch Jupiter? I'd think dropping a probe into the atmosphere does count, and we've done that -- and it went surprisingly deep before transmissions cut off. I don't think Jupiter exactly has "ground" to touch. The atmosphere probably goes down to well over critical pressure (where gas and liquid become indistinguishable). There must be solids of some sort far under that -- the first solid layer may be hydrogen compressed into a metallic phase! But don't expect to get probe data from there in your lifetime -- first, the probe couldn't survive, second, if it survived it would have no way to send the data back.
It's simple -- Eros is outside of the Martian space defence perimeter. 8-)
I don't know about anybody else, But this brought the biggest smile to my face. I was so happy that I hip-checked someone in the office for making a "evil" comment about NASA. I'm proud of the men and women of John H. and Nasa.
Job Well Done.
Onepoint
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please help me make it better
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Too bad they couldn't have held off for 2 days! That would have been a hell of a Valentine's present. But better pre-mature than never.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
First practice on the small stuff (Eros) and then move on to larger rocks (Mars). Only a few orders of magnitude to go ;).
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
And no, I'm not thinking of the kilogram; I'm thinking of the actual piece of metal that is exactly one metre long and by which every other metric length-measuring device is scaled.
return 0;
There's also an important thing that all those Americans out there should know. Just because you've bastardised the spelling of such things as centre, turning it into center (and let's not even go near words that should end with our) does not mean you can do the same with words like metre which actually have different meanings for different spellings (although that's never stopped you before I guess, just look at check versus cheque). A meter is a guage, a device for measuring a specific quantity of something. A metre, on the other hand, is a unit of length (which I believe resides somewhere in Europe; France?).
If you don't use the metric system, don't screw it up, and if you do use it, do it properly. I know it's vastly inferior to the oh-so-efficient and thoroughly-convenient-to-use metric system, and therefore worthy prey for illiterate American geeks (check the difference between a geek and a nerd on dictionary.com if you can work out how to use it -- this is supposed to be news for nerds), but you are not (contrary to "public" opinion) the centre of the universe, or even anywhere near it.
Is that sarcasm you detect in my voice?
Please note that I am not targeting most Americans in this rant; only the select few that splash their garbage all over slashdot. However, since the majority of slashdotters are probably American anyway, and this posting is way off-topic into the bargain, go ahead and give me a -1. Gee, I care.
Really.
return 0;
Guess they need to show what they can everynow and then, just to be sure to get their money...
Any idea why there are no stars?
Drinking dairy milk because cows won't.
From what I heard, since Eros passes close to both the Earth and Mars, either is capable of perturbing it's orbit, so it's orbit is semi-chaotic. What this means is that they can't predict the orbit too far into the future, so that in a few million years, the orbit MIGHT cross that of Earth... No, there is no danger of it hitting the Earth in our lifetimes.
Since near was NOT designed to land on the asteroid, it can only be micro-gravity holding it on the surface...
science needs to go there
now that is exciting -> touching down on an asteroid is something that really moves your imagination. at times where the most exciting news is an ammonia micro-spill in low orbit this is really it. kind makes you believe that NASA can get to the more exciting object like Europa provided in will be in and not cm.
Not only did I touch down on Eros and meet the aliens that lived there, I also visited the depths of Uranus and the far side of the moon. Spark that shit up.
Jab a needle today.
If you claim that a given probe is supposed to land on the target celestial body, and it crashes, then you look really dumb and everyone questions your ability.
But if you claim that you're trying to crash, and then you "manage" to land it perfectly, then suddenly everyone is impressed with your genuis...
How many kids in schools and libraries are going to miss out on this story because of porn filters blocking on the word "Eros".
I think that asteroids are one of the coolest things we can study: they are much more useful for raw materials than bodies like the moon, since they have the energy bonus of being out of the Earth's gravity well.
Actually, the moon's almost completely out of the Earth's gravity well. The main energy cost for exporting lunar material is getting the material out of the _moon's_ gravity well, and this is pretty low (especially since lunar vacuum lets you build mass drivers and the like easily).
It would be quite difficult to ship material from most asteriods (the ones in the belt) to Earth's location, because the great difference in GPE (Gravitational Potential Energy) from their different orbital radii about the _sun_. It could certainly be done; it's just probably more of a pain than using lunar material.
For supplying Earth's surface, we're always better mining material from the crust. No expensive shuffling about required at all.
Earth orbit is probably best supplied from the moon, though it'll be easier to ship stuff to higher orbits than lower (again, due to GPE).
Still, it's nice to have direct confirmation that some asteroids in the neighbourhood are made of mineable materials. This will make it much easier to build bases on _them_ (or to transform them into gaggles of space stations).
The term Near Earth Astroid does not mean they will impact Earth, but that the possibility is there since they come so close. In space you've got N bodies influencing eachother gravitationally. Eros orbit may appear stable, but all it would need is a random erratic body to pull it into a deadly course.
Yes kudos... Now can anyone tell me what the point was, besides taking pics on the way down? Does it serve any purpose on the surface of the asteroid?
Well... we could. Now the Chinese will.
viadd wrote:
... which may have at last gone quiet ... were kept alive because they could still do science just by reporting their position.) Last year a team studied Galileo's options, based on a collision with Jupiter or one of her four major satellites, with consideration of UN Outer Space Treaty prohibitions against accidental transfer of Earth organisms to those bodies. So far, though, they apparently haven't decided what to do.
NEAR is a 'faster better cheaper' mission. The choice is not between a bunch of 'FBC' missions and a bunch of Battlestar Galactica class missions. The choice is between several FBC missions a year, vs. one Galactica per decade. NASA would not have spent the billions of dollars a Galileo type probe costs in order to explore an insignificant asteroid.
I fully agree with this. faster-better-cheaper means more missions for the bucks. (Now, if they'd only have a little more flexibility on the budget, we could keep Pluto-Kuiper Express.)
And they certainly wouldn't have been receptive to a scientist saying, "Hey! let's land this baby on an asteroid and see what happens."
This, however, isn't true. Indeed, they'd rather do an "orderly disposal" of a probe like Galileo than just shut it off, because at least a controlled disposal allows the opportunity for some science to be done. (The solar-system-exiting vehicles like Pioneer
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Or will NEAR be loved and cherished, like an ancient Bolo tank (cf. Keith Laumer)?
I wonder how safe the ISS will be from space junk. I know it's something NASA cares a lot about. I find it very humorous that the Cold War resources for tracking nuclear weapons now do a lot of space junk tracking.
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Make mine methylphenidate.
There could be buggers there. (Or should I be PC and say Formics?)
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The Gallileo Jupiter orbiter dropped a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere when it arrived in the Jupiter system a few years back.
Every time NASA gets the shuttle up and back down is an amazing feat. Every time it trains the collective eye further out or further in is an amazing feat. It absolutely astounds me that people dismiss most of what they do as commonplace. I remember on the 20th anniversary of the moon landing I actually sat down and thought about what that meant and just about lost it. Sadly, most people seem to have been unimpressed not two years after that fact.
I hope some of you guys on the NEAR project are reading this.. I want to give you all a big *HUGGY* for your awesome work. Space travel has been a dream of mine since I was a little kid. Reading news like this makes me feel young again and fills me with hope for the future.. not mine, but humanity. Cheers and rawk on!
Speak truth to power.
If we can't find a bunch of movie stars to blow it up, maybe we can launch enough of them at it, at a high enough trajectory, that their impact can knock it back off course.
Hmmm Celebrity Assisted Rail-Gun.... interesting possibilities.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Or could someone use it as a Trans-Terra data-cache? :)
Sure latency will kill you, but I want to see the Feds/MPAA/RIAA try to raid THAT server.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Man, and think of the explosion the plasma (hot air) could produce ;)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
From the CNN Coverage:
Eros became only the fifth celestial body touched by a human spacecraft, following the Moon, Mars, Venus and Jupiter.
How did we touch Jupiter? Does atmospheric brakeing count or something?
You know some guy at nasa got to be shaking his head though....
"We try to land on Mars and ended up with the world's most expensive lawn darts.
We try to land a probe that was never suppost to land on a tiny rock and -poof- prefect landing."
AdFuel
They busted out their Apple II's and played Lunar Lander all weekend.
...and my parents thought that I was wasting time with it...
It's easy to take shots at someone else's work, but it can be damned difficult to make a complex project succeed.
Kudos to the folks at Johns Hopkins and NASA for getting the job done.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The NEAR/Shoemaker gig was built and run out of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. I think NASA gets credit for not much more than funding this project.
illegitimii non ingravare
Here's a de-spagettified link to CNN's best of EROS picture gallery with little descriptions. Some of them are very cool.
Black holes are where god divided by zero
FYI: I went back, and viewed the video today (Tuesday). I'm now getting a 34Kb stream (far better quality). I guess that the 12KB stream was because of heavy demand for the video (better a slow stream than no stream at all).
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Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
As CNN says: Spacecraft may take off after landing on asteroid.
Course, what else could it do if it stayed there? Take repeated pictures of the same spot? Makes sense.
I say they pogo stick it around for a while...
NEAR successfully landed, which is really cool, but since NASA's budget is spent on this thing, what will it be doing now that it's sitting on Eros? I'm assumming it is able to charge its batteries using its solar panels, which should allow it to keep transmitting, correct? Is there anyway that amatures could set up some device so that we can listen to what it has to say?
Doh!
Telemetry operator: "Woohoo! It LANDED! It's even transmitting!"
Systems controller: "Great! So what do we do now?"
Boss-type guy: "Uhm... er... Well, we never really expected this to work, so... I guess we just go get drunk now"
Systems controller: "What, we can't do anything with it now? Then what the hell did we spend all weekend practicing for?"
Boss-type guy: "Well, it was a really good job guys, and everybody's really impressed, but we just don't have anything to do with it."
Systems controller: "I'll be damned if I'm going home now! We've gotta find something to do with this thing!"
Telemetry operator: "You know it still has a bit of fuel left."
(Telemetry and Systems look at each other)
Systems controller: "You don't think -"
Telemetry operator: "Well why not?"
Systems controller: "But it could never..."
Telemetry operator: "It was never designed to land in the first place, but we pulled that off, didn't we?"
Systems controller: "What the hell! Hey boss! We checked out the neighborhood, and it sucks. We're leaving."
Boss-type guy: "Huh? Leaving? What the hell are you talking about?"
Systems controller: "We decided that the view on the surface isn't half as cool as the one we had before, so we're going back to orbit."
Boss-type guy: "But there's no way to do that! The odds of making it back to orbit are less tha"
Systems controller, interrupting: "Never tell me the odds!"
Boss-type guy: "Good point. You guys have fun, I'll go call CNN."
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
The power source thing is a great idea, but it would be pretty hard to make it work on Earth. Any singularity kept around for long would accelerate at the good ol' 9.8 m/s^2, straight out of its containment. In microgravity, however, you could hold a small singularity in one place by feeding it from different directions if the matter you throw in is moving fast enough. Hawking radiation is mostly electrons and positrons, not directly gamma rays (the positrons usually end up as 511 keV gamma rays after meeting up with an electron, though). If you trap some of the positrons, along with any antiprotons you get, and feed the rest back into the singularity, you might be able to accumulate macroscopic quantities of antimatter after a long enough time. Unless singularities are particular about what particles they will emit, which is one thing that could be studied from nucleus-sized versions.
So we just need to build an orbiting accelerator capable of energies several orders of magnitude greater than anything we can get on Earth, and we might be able to make lots of antimatter. No problem, right?
I think we've strayed sufficiently far from the topic of the story, so I'll stop now.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
Do not mistake "faster, lighter, cheaper" with poor engineering. The two are mutually exclusive. Any well engineered spacecraft should be able to fullfill some additional unknown criteria, despite it's cost.
Keeping
I think that asteroids are one of the coolest things we can study: they are much more useful for raw materials than bodies like the moon, since they have the energy bonus of being out of the Earth's gravity well. I can't wait for nano-robot-dispensing probes: just drop them on an asteroid and wait a few years while they sort the atoms into piles...
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
Please don't use metric measurements in this discussion. It has a tendancy to confuse NASA people.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
FULL TEXT
NEAR stayed on the asteroid for a few hours, made breakfast and idle chit-chat. But after a while, he could tell that it was his time to go. Firing its reverse-thrusters, NEAR left the surface never to return. NASA engineers excitedly noted that the landing and take-off have prepared the asteroid for future landings.
full text
satellite pr0n!
... that you can double check.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
check this out http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/02/12/near.land ing.02/index.html
it seems that their not happy with their luck on 1% odds. JHUAPL is now considering firing up the thrusters and lifting off Eros. Pretty amazing stuff. Congrats to the team who worked on this!
To give you a perspective of the situation... Consider if you will this basketball representing the earth, this grape the asteroid, and this grain of salt the represents the probe... Landing the probe on the astroid would be like trying to land this salt grain on the grape without any roll from 20 miles away with an error margin as thick as this piece of paper.
According to Fox News the NEAR was built under the 'faster, better, cheaper' philosophy. IMO, that philosophy doesn't mean that the craft are any less robust (generally, if a satellite payload survives launch, it's structurally sound enough to handle anything during spaceflight)... it just means that there are less 'bells and whistles' built in.
The computer on the NEAR runs VxWorks, from Wind River. VxWorks was also the first on another planet, controlling the Mars Pathfinder. And boy, isn't it cool that it worked?
. . . for signs of it blacking out. You never know when an insect-like race will suddenly decide to invade the solar system. What's the next step, building an orbiting schoolhouse for training soldiers?
For those of you arguing about microgravity: A tidbit from the video (I'm listening to /watching it, as I type this)
Gravity on Eros appears to be 1/1000th of earth Gravity. You might as well have some real stats.
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Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
For a craft that wasn't intended to land, or even survive for a prolonged period of time, this is incredible. It sort of makes you wonder about current NASA budget woes, though. If NASA is forced to switch to a "faster, lighter, cheaper" program, then opportunities like this will become more and more scarce. If the craft were only designed to handle the strict specs of the mission then it would be impossible for impromptu experimentation to take place. The cheap probes and landers would not be as likely to cope with a new situation should it appear. What if a once in a life time event were to occur? With cheaper probes, would it be lost to the scientific community?
Pax Digitalia
But if you think this was great, just wait till you see what other missions JHUAPL has in store.
A number of these are excellent examples of the great, focussed science experiments that can be done under the faster-better-cheaper paradigm, and they're even competing for slots in the slightly more expensive Mid-Explorer program.
*It should be noted in fairness that NEAR itself had a glitch; in December 1998 they failed to make their planned orbit insertion, and had to circle the sun 14 months before another approach could be made. (At that time I'm sure many
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
they had to be smoking something to come up with:
"Hey man, let's land this thing!"
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I wonder if people with censorware will be able to see them.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
10. Approach one stuck in the event horizon.
9. "Rocket Jump" from a near by Quake3 map.
8. Use the force to move the Asteroid under your feet.
7. Surf to "http://www.howtolandanastroid.com" and click "final stages, turn or burn"
6. Wait till one hits the earth and just jump on top of it.
5. Tuck and roll.
4. Pray that the Asteroid's gravity plane actually exists.
3. Go out to sea and find some oil workers... they have a strange 6th sense about Asteroids.
2. Review page 456b of the Star Command Manual.
1. Think, "There is no asteroid."
It's a joint operation. Lots of other folks involved, too. See their mission page.
In fact, it is the first deep space craft to be run by someone other than NASA.
How are you defining "deep space craft"? The Soviets sent missions to Mars and Venus (and the Comet Halley).
Awesome job! I wonder -- even though the satellite is officially "not designed to land", the engineers involved kept it in the back of their minds while designing and made tiny adjustments to make it at least possible. The guys at JPL did this for the Voyager missions, making the "grand tour" possible even though Congress initially only gave the go-ahead for a Jupiter/Saturn tour.
Every once in a while, NASA does something amazing.
Amazing step 1: land non-lander on Eros
Amazing step 2: use same non-lander to carve Eros into giant erotic sculpture.
Amazing result 1: Public interest in space increases by 3000%, as do NASA's budget and high-power telescope sales.
Amazing result 2: New "child safe" digital telescopes that won't point at Eros (or Venus, after the finish that project).
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There are some signs of bad science on the CNN site though. I don't believe Eros is in danger of hitting the earth because it has a stable orbit. I hate it when the news over-exagerates dangers, such as when the researcher from the RHIC said there is a small possibility of a black hole being created. Because of that, everyone was sure a giant movie-like black hole would be created at Brookhaven. Next, we'll be hearing that the NEAR landing might have pushed the rock off course, allowing it to hit the earth and destroy everything.
Just hope we can find a bunch of movie stars to quickly blow it up!
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Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Anyone who can land that satellite that well with that kind of lag, I want on my team.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples