Slashdot Mirror
Burn, Mir, Burn (Do You Like To Watch?)
Michael Stricklen writes: "The company I work for, NaviSite, Inc. is going to stream the Mir re-entry at http://www.mirreentry.com. I'm not sure what kind of view you'll have of it, but I figure with as many stories as /. has had on Mir, one more marking it's death couldn't hurt." And Kevin points to an article on Yahoo! which says that the mirreentry.com video will not be a live broadcast, "since 'the aircraft which will track the spacecraft's final descent will not have enough bandwidth to stream the footage as it occurs.' The film will be supposedly available on the Internet within two hours of reentry. The site currently target's Mir's 'latest probable deorbit date' as March 22." I wish I saw a link to other than "Windows Media Format" on that page, though.
Any bets on whether the RIAA's trying to arrange for it to land on Sealand?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Most of us will probably just see it as a shooting star, if even that. Mir is quite small, and depending on its re-entry speed, I don't think we'll see a whole lot.
1) Mir was built, maintained and repaired by a much poorer space agency than the US's, and they kept a functional station in space for over twice its projected lifespan.
2) Over the years cosmonauts at Mir have gathered much unglamorous data about the most efficient and comfortable ways to live in space station conditions for an extended period of time. The physiology and psychology of this is not dramatic or technical but it is crucial.
3) There are many groups trying to profit off of the station's demise, which i think is a bit callous. Is it thrillseeking or morbid interest? At least they could donate money to the Russian space program from these commercial ventures, without some funds the Russian ISS-Alpha committment may not be passed over by the budget-makers axe next time around.
Goat sex free since 2001
What media format does Linux use and why can't it play all media formats? I'm a Windows user (yes, I admit it) and I've been considering running linux, but I have no compelling reason yet. I wouldn't want to be able to do _fewer_ things tho, so I hope this is either a non-issue or gets resolved in Linux before I take the dive.
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
"No, we aren't going to deorbit it"
(repeat 12x)
I'll believe that Mir is being deorbited when I see it. Oh, wait...
(end comment) */ }
(end comment) */ }
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
You were the cockroach of Space Stations. Ugly as hell, had it's major problems, and now is going to be watched burned for the enjoyment of Pre and Post adolescent american males.
What a shame.
blah
Hey folks - why not aggregate some bandwith from Iridium for applications like this one? Surely you could get some bandwidth from them for cheap with a little cross-promotion marketing deal.
I know its getting old, and it costs a ton of money, but it just seems like it could still be usefull to us.
Somehow...
--Joe Nerd
--Joe Nerd
I hate sigs, and suggest we all stop using them.
The video will be broadcast four hours after re-entry, not two. "The film will be broadcast within about two hours of the plane's landing and the landing will be about two hours after Mir's fall to earth."
If there were no laziness in the US, several industries would collapse overnight.
So being non-lazy is un-American!
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
"The latest information on the location of the center of the debris impact area is approximately 2,000 nm south of Tahiti and 2,400 nm east of New Zealand in an area that is completely free of islands and any human habitation."
;-)
Wow, 2,000 nm, they're cutting it pretty close
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Actually the site says "March 22st", so they will be correct for both March 21st and March 22nd, by claiming the appropriate typo. That's quite clever.
This week's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday on NPR (hosted by Ira Flatow -- does anyone else remember Ira as host of the great kid's science program Newton's Apple?) had a great retrospective on Mir in their first hour's segment. Among the guests were astronaut Norman Thagard (who did a stint aboard Mir), Russian space expert James Oberg and Brian Burrough, author of Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir.
I highly recommend listening to this program for anyone interested in Mir, it's history and contribution to space science.
I wonder what are the odds of a radio from mir falling in my backyard, intact!! :)
"Why can't we ever attempt to solve a problem in this country without having a 'war' on it?"
-- Rich Thomson, talk.politics.misc
Their site is Slashdotted right now, and Mir isn't even falling yet! They're not even delivering serious video bandwidth, and they're already crippled. Methinks I'll wait a couple of days after the Mir flameout before I try to pull up this site again.
Then again, maybe this is their devious way of testing whether their server equipment is up to delivering the Mir reentry video. Note to Navisite: beef it up, baby.
What's your damage, Heather?
the mir, the mir, the mir is on fire, we don't need no water let the mother *er burn
Considering the site has already been slashdotted into oblivion, and presumably they aren't even streaming any video yet, I wouldn't count on this working within hours of MIR's re-entry.
If I were AOL, Radio Shack, or another of mirrentry.com's sponsors, I'd be a little uneasy with this.
Oy, vey is Mir!
I'd better go to Yahoo and buy hundreds of pillows to cover up my trailer home, otherwise I'm fucked!
Got Purple?
I was sure it wouldn't, and I just checked to prove it to myself, but shockingly. It worked.
Now, it's clearly not the best solution, I'd like to see platform independent players for all the media formats, and lacking that I'd like to see people stop using formats that are platform specific.
Also, My system is dual-boot, not sure how well it would work on a system where wine doesn't have a real c:\windows directory to call out to.
When I discover stuff like this, I find myself having to reboot less and less......
My get rich quick scheme for Mir.
FACT: The Russian Government has taken out a $200 Million insurance
policy in case Mir comes down on somebody.
CONCLUSION: Its up to us to be clever enough to win that policy.
PLAN:
1.) Buy, Rent, Charter or otherwise take posession of a small
ocean-going cargo vessel in New Zealand. Hire your friends/relatives
to be your crew/employees.
2.) Conspicuously leave harbor w/ crew and "valuable cargo" of
diamonds, etc.
3.) A mile or two out to sea, put the ship on autopilot in the right
direction, and jump ship, swim back or use zodiacs.
4.) Using timer/remote control set off a distress beacon just after
Mir re-enters, preferrably with a tape recording saying "help me!"
Then set off an explosion in the fuel tank which will sink the ship.
Be sure to leave lots of life jackets & other flotsam on the deck for
the coast guard to find afterwards.
5.) Now, as the president of the company that lost the ship,
simply sue Russia for:
---$100 Million in lost diamonds
---$50 Million per lost crew/family member.
Sure your buddies will have to hide out for a while (like the
Great Train robbery guys) But is this foolproof or what?
I haven't found much material on people being so hopped up to watch Skylab take it's swan dive into the pacific 20 or so years ago. How should this be different?
blah
The US spent $2 million designing a pen that will write in space, the russains used a pencil.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I caught a small news bit on the radio a couple days ago about a charter jet that will fly people out to the area where it is expected to land in the ocean.
Better have some bucks though.
It's gonna cost like $5000 per ticket.
For that price, you can be damn sure that I'd be requesting a window seat!
What we need is for some brilliant and enterprising Open Source type geek with connections at JPL to arrange for the fall to drop on a large corporate campus in a suburb of Seattle... you know, since the earthquake failed.
Any takers?
Zaphod B
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
Instead of taking digs at Windows Media Player when posting articles, why doesn't the Unix community come up with something that is even half as useful for streaming video? True, realplayer is on Unix, but it's just not the best solution.
Gee whiz guy, it isn't about size, it's about kinetic energy. At least that's what Mister Winchester told me.
Here's NASA's real-time tracking site.
__________________
I can just see the news stories now... MIr completed it's decent into the atmosphere today in a flaming ball of fire. Before starting it's deorbit, however, Mir accidently hit the newly constructed International Space Station, destroying everything. There was only one surviving module: the Russian module. We can't win!!
According to this article, mutant fungi has developed on Mir that is highly toxic and corrosive. You heard me, mutant fungi. Is it right for us to destroy Mir? By destroying Mir we are destroying a new life form. We are playing fungi-god.
There may be uses for this fungi. The next big pizza topping? It may have good hallucinogenic properties? (i.e. mutant "shrooms"). Good in a chef salad?
On a serious note, we should preserve some of it before it is burned up in reentry. It would allow us to study how organisms evolve in a completely isolated environment, and one that is free of predators. Apparently the fungi was really wreaking havoc on the station, destroying hosing and electrical components.
We're going to be spending a lot of time in space from now on, we need to know about this sort of phenomenon so we can take steps to stop it. The only way man will be able to economically live in space for long periods of time is in a symbiotic relationship with oxygen producing plant life. If that plant life mutates out of control we have a big problem.
Execute? [Y/N] _
I've never seen any answer to why the Mir space station hasn't been included in space station alpha instead of jetisonned. It would probably be cheaper to upgrade Mir and attach it to the new space station than it would be to build all kinds of new components that do what it does anyway. Does someone have an answer?
(And what would a hybrid be called? Mir++?)
OFTC: By the community, for the community
> when posting articles, why doesn't the Unix
>community come up with something that is even
>half as useful for streaming video? True, realplayer
>is on Unix, but it's just not the best solution.
Forgive me for feeding the troll, but actually... it's worse (and funnier) than just being a Microsoft-only format. It's a 'Win2000/98/ME-only' format. Microsoft have *deliberately* refused to port the latest version. of MediaPlayer to NT4 (which I'm lazy enough still to be using at home, (alongside BSD, Solaris & Linux). The file format for what might be a cool animation of the MIR re-entry (simulated) is .wmv, which doesn't play on
the latest NT4-supported Media Player.
#INCLUDE obvious comments about Free software being more useful / not driven by marketing or the need to grow sales and thus the stock price of proprietary ISVs...
--
If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles
Actutally im glad that they turned into some minor competitor. The "think different!" campaign is the ultimate irony. It should read "Our way is right!", like in Eastgermany before reunion ;-)
Lispy
..to me why they still have their website advertising a service they cant no longer provide?? Isnt Iridium dead? Or is some madman planning on relaunching the idea? Yuk! Lispy
Good morning this is your captain speaking. At this time we would now request that all hitchhikers on board the Mir please evacuate or suffer the consequences. Thank you and enjoy your flight!
Buzz Off
from the flies-through-the-air-with-the-greatest-disease dept.
That is the funniest thing I've read in a good long while... Great job guys!
JDW
In the article "chronology" it is mentioned that lightweight trash and foam are among the items expected to survive. They quickly lose their momentum because they don't have much mass and flutter down like snow.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Throughout history we are quick to destroy anything that is obsolete, without thinking that within a short period of time the offending object will become historic and priceless. "Colossus" the first computer, "Rocket" the first locomotive and all the great airships are just some examples of things that were destroyed without a thought to posterity.
--
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Visible passes are always in the couple of hours after sunset or before sunrise, when the sky is black but Mir is still in sunlight. Pass predictions are usually spot-on, except when the satellite in question has just changed its orbit. It sounds like Mir's orbit isn't gonna change until they go for the big burn on Thursday. When you spot it, it'll look like a red (how appropriate) star, moving though the sky. It'll cover half the sky or so in just five minutes or so.
Approximate time to reentry while posting this message:
4 Days 02 Hours 26 Minutes
Wanda Says:
"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in the times of moral crisis, preserved their neutrality."
-- Dante
Another place to watch Mir falling in realtime is this VRML model. The company itself makes Cortona VRML plugin for Windows-based browsers; can't say if this can be vieweed by any of Linux viewers, but one surely can give it a try.
Hint: The Earth is curved....
Why, because Encarta says so? It also says that the NASA landed on the Moon in 1969.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/realtime/JTrack/Space craft.html
Really, really, cool stuff.
--
I read an interview with a cosmonaut that spent more than 2 years there. He said that Mir's time was past. Some of the components were more expensive to repair than starting again. Though, he didn't understand why some of the equipment wasn't salvaged. It was very costly.
He also missed some of his personal things (books, a computer) that he had to leave in the station. So if you are in the Pacific and want a Russian laptop, one could fall onto your hands.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
after lookin at the fairly extensive list of burn in push backs, i had to wonder, is this thing ever going to come down?
I think that we should just destroy mir while still in orbit. AND LET THE RUSSIANS HAVE NO HAND IN SO IT GET'S DONE RIGHT!
Ice age cometh...