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Deep Space 1 Completes Comet Fly-by
Saint Aardvark writes: "All right...Space.com is reporting here that NASA's Deep Space 1 probe successfully made it through Comet Borrelly -- pretty good for a spacecraft using up the last of its fuel, 'way past its expected lifetime, doing something it wasn't designed to do'. About 30 pix are being downloaded right now, and there's a press conference planned for Tuesday. In the meantime, read NASA's press release here. Way to go, DS-1 and NASA!"
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... improved forms of space-coctail drinks. The water up there would have some pretty funky additives :)
It should be called: "Deep Ass"
ISAAC ASIMOV
Gold, The Final Science Fiction Collection
Part One - The Final Stories
Left To Right
Typed by Bateau
Robert L. Forward, a plump, cherubic physicist of Hughes Research Laboratories at Malibu, and occasional science fiction writer, was demonstrating the mechanism in his usual bright and articulate manner.
"As you see," he said, "we have here a large spinning ring, or doughnut, of particles compressed by an appropriate magnetic field. The particles are moving at 0.95 times the speed of light under conditions which, if I am correct, a change in parity can be induced in some object that passes through the hole of the doughnut."
"A change in parity?" I said. "You mean left and right will interchange?"
"_Something_ will interchange. I'm not sure what. My own belief is that eventually, something like this will change particles into antiparticles and vice versa. This will be the way to obtain an indefinitely large supply of antimatter which can then by used to power the kind of ships that would make interstellar travel possible."
"Why not try it out?" I said. "Send a beam of protons through the hole."
"I've done that. Nothing happens. The doughnut is not powerful enough. But my mathematics tells me that the more organized the sample of matter, the more likely it is that an interchange, such as left to right, will take place. If I can show that such a change will take place on highly organized matter, I can obtain a grant that will enable me to greatly strengthen this device."
"Do you have something in mind as a test?"
"Absolutely," said Bob. "I have calculated that a human being is just sufficiently highly organized to undergo the transformation, so I'm going to pass though the doughnut hole myself."
"You can't do that, Bob," I said in alarm. "You might kill yourself."
"I can't ask anyone else to take the chance. It's _my_ device."
"But even if it succeeds, the apex of your heart will be pointed to the right, your liver will be on the left. Worse, all your amino acids will shift from L to D, and all your sugars from D to L. You will no longer be able to eat and digest."
"Nonsense," said Bob. "I'll just pass through a second time and then I'll be exactly as I was before."
And without further ado, he climbed a small ladder, balanced himself over the hole, and dropped through. He landed on a rubber mattress, and then crawled out from under the doughnut.
"How do you feel?" I asked anxiously.
"Obviously, I'm alive," he said.
"Yes, but how do you _feel?_"
"Perfectly normal," said Bob, seeming rather dissapointed. "I feel exactly as I did before I jumped through."
"Well, of course you would, but where is your heart?"
Bob placed his hand on his chest, felt around, then shook his head. "The heartbeat is on the left side, as usual--Wait, let's check my appendicitis scar."
He did, then looked up savagely at me. "Right where it's supposed to be. Nothing happened. There goes all my chance at a grant."
I said hopefully, "Perhaps some other change took place."
"No." Bob's mercurial temperament had descended into gloom. "Nothing has changed. Nothing at all. I'm as sure of that as I'm sure that my name is Robert L. Backward."
IASF 1/87
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I wonder how close they were planning on getting to the comet?
It would be sweet for the group if the pictures of the comet were more impresive than the asteroid ds1 was supposed to fly by for the original mission.
anyways, right on nasa!
"Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Ferris Bueller
I must finish with a shameless plug for the exciting computer animation I created to illustrate CONTOUR's mission, available at the CONTOUR website
9PP! Get your rocks off!
After arresting Abdul Hakim Murad, Phillipine intelligence agents did what was neccesary to get pertinent information from him...
"For weeks, agents hit him with a chair and a long piece of wood, forced water into his mouth, and crushed lighted cigarettes into his private parts," wrote journalists Marites Vitug and Glenda Gloria in "Under the Crescent Moon," an acclaimed book on Abu Sayyaf. "His ribs were almost totally broken and his captors were surprised he survived."
He broke and revealed the plot to assasinate the Pope during a visit to Manila and bomb 11 US airliners simultaneously.
Here's an interesting thought..
Maybe the comet is giving off truckloads of Xenon gas..the ion engine aboard this spacecraft (or any spacecraft with a similar ion engine) could "draft" the comet, conserve its own fuel, and ride along with the comet to a particular destination before pulling off and resuming its travel... Sorta like gravitational assist without the gravity part.
Cheers, and yes, we're open for business,
Bowie J. Poag
"As expected, there were lots of surprises."
(Donald Yeomans, a comet expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
So if there wouldn't have been any surprises, would that have been a surprise?
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
The is fscking ace. Real science is waaaay better than sci-fi. Check out yesterday's astro pic of the day for a sexy photo of deep space 1 at
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010922.html.
The bit I like about this mission is that they didn't really expect success, but decided to go the whole hog anyway as ds1 is almost dead.
Earlier this year, I was somehow under the impression that this space vehicle was out of our solar system. I was wrong.
Here is a nice view of where DS9 actually is in relation to our solar system planets.
Every story on Slashdot deserves a goatse.cx ascii art.
I am very concerned about these developments. Now that DS1 has completed its missions, I am suspicious that it will be sold on the black market where it will become...
...A TOOL OF TERROR!
(don don don DON.....)
From the article:
Does all this work and they just abandon it ;-)
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Geez after this beer-brewing article I thought NASA had lost all the people who had some sense in them (no not technical). But I was wrong. Woohoo.. Rock on NASA
Democratic USA - Government of the corporations, by the Corporations, for the corporations.
This is great for NASA and science in general! Its good to see probes being tested beyond their design goals; Space is full of risks and perils and it is good we are pushing the envelope. Hopefully they'll keep DS-1 around a while because just because its old, doesn't mean you throw it away.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
So, Nasa manages to do one thing right, and it just happens to involve doing the same thing they've done on every mission as of late - which is crash into something.
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
Well, since we can't attack Afghanistan in through normal methods (http://slashdot.org/articles/01/09/22/228250.shtm l), I bet NASA's trying to use Deep Space 1 to direct the comet towards Afghanistan! Think about it...it would take out all those pesky caves....
...the countries of the Middle East continue to do nothing in the way of advancing science. However, the are still sucking money out of the ground in the form of a thick, black sludge.
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
It cracks me up the way that whenever NASA is running out of funding for a mission, they come up with some daring plunge which is supposed to lead to the death of the spacecraft. Remember Galileo, which took a pass at Io and was supposed to be killed by the radiation? Well, it has been damaged by the radiation, but it keeps on ticking (and keeps on spending money :-)). Not that NASA is wrong to do this - you need to move on to the next mission some time, and trying a riskier mission to get some last data is a way to go out with a bang, but the part which is amusing is when they talk all about their gutsy move without saying that the probe would have been turned off anyway due to lack of money.
I just had an out-of-body experience, during which I saw the disgusting end of Anonymous Coward, who choke himself to death by trying to give oral sex to an octopus. I then took the opportunity to post from his account.
While we in the technology industry have never really doubted NASA's ability, this shines good on NASA in the public forum. To me, many in the general public view NASA as something that once had a purpose, but now is struggling to get their missions to work right, etc. (which is far from the truth). But something like this tells the world "Hey, so we forgot to convert back to metric... everyone makes mistakes... look at this!". NASA is still very much an important entity. Look at all of the advances made because of the space program. If anything, hopefully this will serve to deter (if only a little bit) the budget cuts NASA has been facing as of late.
Just a thought...
NASA now have a policy of destroying their equipment at the end of missions. Otherwise they find that the budget for the mission gets extended and takes away from the other missions they want to fund. I got the impression that this was another 'let's see if we can kill this thing' mission.
Of course the operators usually try to arrange it that the thing makes it through somehow...
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"What I thought was interesting when I saw the great episode on DS1 on "The Discovery Channel" was the navigation system. Aparently DS1 does most of the decision processes by iteself, and I might add that is quite a task when you think about it. After all there are no real landmarks or other solid navigational aids in space so it uses picture comparision on where it is and where to go next. This AI allows minimal amounts of people required to keep her running and if I remember right they only had about 7-10 guys in this room watching and codeing on Sun workstations. Sun?! No wonder all the manuvers they made were "risky" and no wonder they ran out of funds to keep her going. I wonder why they didn't use linux, or if they plan to in the future.
NASA has a few bits of eye candy detailing the position of DSA relative to Borrley, the position of DS1 relative to the sun, and two viwes of the position of Borrlley (1, 2). The image page is here; the DS1 page is here.
This is about the 3rd or 4th mission I've now heard of that goes off and does something beyond its "expected mission" or "expected lifetime". Remember the landing on Eros? The probe that rammed the moon? Sure they have screw-ups like the Martian lander, but you got to give them credit for all these extra missions they are accomplishing, especially considering their ever decreasing budget.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
What were the management and group/responsibility structure changes that were implemented to make this project succeed in such a wildly unpredictable way.
[o]_O
With the International Space Station (ISS) running continiously over budget, NASA is more or less forced to shut down a lot of science missions. In other words, saving 5-10 mil on science data analysis in order to raise the 5 billion a year they need to build, launch and maintain the orbital tin cans that is the ISS. The ironry is that there will be insuficient money or crew in the ISS in order to do much significant science there anyway for the next five years, at least. But, those congrisional districts and big comapanies that make and launch the stuff will be happy. Those have a bigger lobby group than 20 or 30 scientists who dedicate their life to analysisng the data.
NASA has already pushed out the Mars exploration program by another two years this week. The trouble is, they do that every two years.
In fairness though, saying goodby to DS9 in these circumstances is acceptable. Running out of funding may be sad, but running out of fuel, which it has, is not something you can fix. Only for the fact that they overfilled it at launce got it this far.
-- We don't understand software, and sometimes we don't understand hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights
And sensors that monitor the ion propulsion were reprogrammed to listen for magnetic fields and plasma waves in and around the comet.
OK, that part is definitely cool. Whoever came up with that one deserves some credit.
sig fault
So the obvious conclusion is, stop paying NASA to do stuff! Things clearly work better when they're retasking existing equipment to do something else, preferably involving a crash landing. From now on, we should forbid NASA to build anything other than Earth-orbit satellites.
But once the satellites are in orbit, heck, anything goes! Put people on 'em and send 'em to Mars! Or maybe skim the solar atmosphere! How about sending them to the nearest star at 0.9c? Or why not the galactic nucleus? There may be no limits to the potential of this new "non-funding" technology!!
I know a few people with connections to JPL and IIRC this project was planned for failure--delays, cheap material, constant "redesigns", etc. But the engineers who worked on it were very resourceful and somehow managed to get the thing up (think Macguyver and crazy workarounds). Now NASA is exploiting DS1.
Kudos to the engineers who fought the good fight.
Jinushaun