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NEAR Lives On; Balloon Doesn't
Rix writes "CNN has another story about NEAR. Apparently, they've extended the mission again - until Feb 28th - to gather even more data. They also have a simulation of NEAR's descent. Unfortunately in QT, so I can't comment on it." And a short update to the balloon story posted just few hours ago: it popped.
The balloon developed a leak not long after launch and fell slowly back to Earth near its launch site in Alice Springs in central Australia's remote and inhospitable outback, Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio said.
Sounds (or rather, doesn't sound) like it didnt 'pop', but deflated.
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There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Already Japanese companies are interested, and many have asteroid mining as part of their 100 plans (Japanese companies plan far into the future, unlike western capaitalist companies). Here in the west our companies do not plan beyond the next shareholder AGM, generally speaking, and so our government has to take the lead in making long term plans for our society.
I congratulate NASA and the government for the foresight they are showing here. It is vital that the USA get a good place in the biggest resource bonanza of the 21st century. Vital for our future.
My only quibble is with them making the results of this mission public, and the data available to all. Would the Chinese do it? No. The Japanese? No. Only the idealistic Americans. We need to close the lid on this, for it is needed for our future in the face of our competitors.
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Clarity does not require the absence of impurities,
/* And you'll never guess what the dog had */
/* in its mouth... */
--Larry Wall in stab.c from perl
Big as a football field, it would have been... gee... how metaphorical of the XFL
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I am not a physicist, but it seems pretty obvious to me that landing a craft on an asteroid could have a serious impact on its orbit.
How do US scientists and NASA employees know that they have not inadvertantly set this asteroid on a collision course with another inhabited planet somewhere else in our galaxy ? Or even worse Earth itself ?
How do they know they are not sending Earth diseases out into space to decimate the population of any extra-terrestrial civilization which is unlucky enough to encounter it ?
NASA is just boys and their toys. It is time we taxpayers took those toys away. Sure they will squeal like pigs at the idea, but the will of the people must prevail. At a time where poverty in the USA is at an all time high, the money could be better spent here on Earth, in the so-called land of the free.
Would you rather a billion dollar satellite blew up?
"It's not yet known what caused the leak.." - My guess... Hummingbird.
<parent>aww, never mind dear, we'll get you another one. comforts small child At least it didn't go floating off, eh? What one would you like this time? Winnie the Pooh?
<child>sobbing I wanted that one
<parent>It was a complete rip off. It said it was "ultra long duration". And it was far too big. I don't know how we were meant to take it on the bus home being the size of a football field. Jolly impracticle altogether if you ask me...
<child>still sobbing Its not fair...
<parent>I'm sorry dear, I don't know what NASA were thinking by making it. How about a normal size one next time eh?
"Would you rather a billion dollar satellite blew up?"
Actually, I wouldn't mind it. The money spent on satellites in R&D and pre/post production is money put back into our fumbling economy. It's an investment in companies employing many thousands of people.
So, you didn't get to see an uninhabited Galaxy billions of light years away. Who cares, it's not like viewing it would cure real problems we face in this world(poverty, education, etc, etc, etc)
Since when did the US government ever do anything useful with money anyway?
I sense a -1: Troll / Flamebait here, so better tick that box...I think most posters so far have been overly harsh; this isn't a catastrophic failure on the level of the Mars projects. There's nothing in the article that says the balloon can't be patched, reinforced, and reinflated. If it had popped into a million pieces, that would be something else (Tripping the Rift comes to mind).
+1 bonus to whoever identifies the subject first. (Just kidding about the +1 part.)
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"Since when did the US government ever do anything useful with money anyway?"
Who's fault is that? It's OURS....the American peoples fault. That's the beauty of the American Democracy. If you don't appreciate the current policies our government has in place, we have the power(as an overwhelming majority) to change it. By voting in policy makers that are in agreement with your own philosophies/ideologies we can make a difference.
Power to the people could never be more true with our form of government, it's just ashame we choose not to take advantage of it.
As a balloon rises in the atmosphere, more and more pressure is placed on it. Does anyone know if NASA considered this? I'd like to think that they spent years carefully planning for the increasing pressure as the balloon rose, but I'm led to believe otherwise. (Or did they make another metric/standard conversion error?)
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suwain_2
Okay. How about a version that's in AVI format (2.4 Megs). Or maybe just the raw images (24 Megs) directly.
-Sean
No you didn't. The Russians did. Concorde was the first commercial success--a joint venture with the French.
television and radio,
Marconi was British? Armstrong? DeForest? Edison? Fleming I'll grant--just one piece of the puzzle, though.
computers,
Information theory, sure. Turing was a genius. But computers? Zuse, Atanasoff, Berry--a German and two Americans. And don't forget John vonNeuman
cryptography
See note about Turing. But claiming crypto as a strictly British invention--pft!
and many more firsts which my English manners prevent me from boasting about here in this forum.
They don't seem to be terribly effective.
You are forgetting one rather incredible British scientist/engineer--Alan Bond, the developer of the world's first hypersonic jet engine. The government bought the patents, classified them, and they've been sitting in a vault for fifteen years. The British government doesn't want to use them, and if they can't have them, nobody else can either.
It turns out that a pumpkin-shaped balloon, with strong cords in the seams of the pumpkin, does a much better job of resisting pressure for a given overall weight of balloon. Each gore between the ribs sees only the stress for a spherical balloon more or less the diameter of the space between the ribs, not the diameter of the whole big balloon.
What struck me was how the Greeks still influenced me thousands of years later with their ideas of 'perfect' shapes.
And, of course, this balloon didn't 'pop', it leaked...I'm sure that they'll get that fixed and try again; it's too good an idea to abandon.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
In case you want another source and forget about space.com Here is their coverage.
Heidi Wall wrote:
This is the kind of spasce mission that NASA should do more of. This mission was essentially all about prospecting - going out to check out the asteroids and see what resources they have for us to rape and use for our own ends. [...] it is clear that the only possible reason anyone other than a scientist could be interested in an asteroid is for the resources that it contains.
Well, I agree there should be more exploration of the asteroids. Prospecting, however, is just a very-long-term (very very long term) upside from a mission such as NEAR. The mission objective has much more to do with planetology and cosmology -- the origins of the solar system -- than it does with asteroid mining. (For one thing, we don't really need to send a vehicle to a body to find out whether it has metal or not.)
Already Japanese companies are interested, and many have asteroid mining as part of their 100 plans (Japanese companies plan far into the future, unlike western capaitalist companies). Here in the west our companies do not plan beyond the next shareholder AGM, generally speaking, and so our government has to take the lead in making long term plans for our society.
Not even the government, really. Although this mission is not, as I noted above, an example with much relevance to commercial exploitation, the planning that you speak of does take place in academia and in many R&D think tanks that are collaborations between industry and academia. NASA has been singularly unsuccessful in helping "commercialize" space, and most experts today would prefer that they stick to science and long-term R&D.
I congratulate NASA and the government for the foresight they are showing here. It is vital that the USA get a good place in the biggest resource bonanza of the 21st century. Vital for our future.
Again, you don't seem to have a grasp of the relevance of this mission. We don't need a probe to tell us there are resources out there. What we do need is cheap access to space, and the right economic conditions. For instance, resource substitution remains a much more economical approach than asteroid mining for the forseeable future.
My only quibble is with them making the results of this mission public, and the data available to all. Would the Chinese do it? No. The Japanese? No. Only the idealistic Americans. We need to close the lid on this, for it is needed for our future in the face of our competitors.
Ridiculous. YOu don't have the slightest understanding of how the scientific community works, which casts into doubt everythign else you've said. Japanese research by their space agency is made public. A lot of Chinese research is made public as well. We have an excellent history of scientific cooperation with the Japanese; your xenophobia seems to have bounced through a time warp from 1979 or something, and is very prejudiced as well. Do Americans have a monopoly on idealism? Do the Chinese have a monopoly on secrecy? Good grief.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Balloon crashed on Australia. Skylab did also. Maybe I should move countries before something hits me on the head.
That has to be the one thing I hate the most about proof-of-concept flights being extremely publicized - after all, this is the flight that we want to fail, if any of them, so that we can figure out exactly how the failure happened and correct it with no major science loss.
Granted, it was probably just balloon failure, and those you expect to happen a few percent of the time (or less, probably). All this basically has done is probably lowered spirits on the ULDB team- that's why I find it really harsh that we criticize NASA for the idea. They're feeling bad enough already, even though it was completely out of their hands.
It does kindof make you yearn for the days when proof-of-concept ideas were done in secret in military bases, and when things blew up, no one cared. You really look perfect when no one sees your mistakes.
These trolls just seem to be getting dumber and dumber. A bit of advice for the original poster: "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt." It's a widely used quote, and has been attributed to many different people. There's even something similar to it in the book of Proverbs. Still, it seems that the above troll has not yet figured out its meaning.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
Dead wrong.
Pressure = height of fluid above x its density x acceleration due to gravity. As a balloon rises, the pressure outside decreases. Most balloons expand as they rise, so that they stay at the same pressure as the outside air. (Because remember, PV/T = constant.)
Its no fun responding to trolls in the hope of giving them some education, maybe...
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
As a balloon rises in the atmosphere, more and more pressure is placed on it.
>Dead wrong.
As the outside pressure drops, the balloon will expand, due to constant internal pressure not being conterbalanced by external pressure. Try putting a balloon in a vacuum chamber (it'll pop). So don't browbeat the kid.
Now, that said, I highly doubt that's what actually happened - the story said that the balloon was designed to inflate to its full size when it reached its destination altitude.
I wish people would stop being so critical when NASA doesn't succeed. They're trying things that've never been done before, of course things are going to break some of the time.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland