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Whisper Heard From Pioneer 10
Irishman writes "NASA has heard from the Pioneer 10 spacecraft for the first time since March. Unfortunately, it is too faint to get scientific data from the craft. CNN has the story here.
Considering that the craft is twice the distance from the Sun as Pluto is and that it has spent 30 years subjected to space, this is amazing! Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy."
"Khaaaaaaaan!"
sorry, I'll quit now.
The Pioneer 10 spacecraft was heard to whisper, "I can see my house!"
~ "When I'm of that age I'm just going to live up a tree."
Too bad they couldn't decode the message:
"Hey guys, Veeger's here, and she's pissed."
Kill Trolls Dead. Here's
Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy."
They can, you just don't want to pay for it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
"Rosebud."
What could it mean? WHAT COULD IT MEAN?!
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
In space, all the craft needs to deal with is the occasional decresing chance of a cosmic or solar ray, or perhaps a micrometeorite. Earth's changing climactic conditions and microbes are far more destructive to technology than is space!
The space stuff is actually far too fragile to work on Earth, and is designed from a payload perspective to be light, not Earth-durable.
Why didn't NASA send out repeaters behind it ? I'd imagine that a series of repeaters behind it would be able to get information back to us on earth...
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
I've got a working C-64 that's been through a dozen moves, an infinite number of Jumpman inspired rages, and two boys' adolescensce. Space? Hah!
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy."
Good thing the US mint started printing those 10 million dollar bills. I'd hate to have pay for it in 10's and 20's.
BOSTON SUCKS!
...and still being productive. What is your excuse?
Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy.
Manufacturers can make equipment this sturdy today. But are you willing to use an 8088 running at 4.77 Mhz? And if not, how much will you pay to get 30 years of service out of more modern processors and peripherals. Pioneer 10 cost $200 million to build in the 1970s.
FreeSpeech.org
You raise a child, send them off, and they don't even call home that often, and when they do, they can't even understand them...
Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy.
Who says they don't? I'd say that the fact that you won't be using the same computer 30 years from now has very little to do with reliability. In which case, why bother designing for a 30 year lifespan?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
It must be a man, it waited this long to ask for directions...and then it had to whisper.
From the Pioneer Status web page:
Pioneer 10 distance from Sun : 81.86 AU Speed relative to the Sun: 12.228km/sec (27,355 mph) Distance from Earth: 12.10 billion kilometers (7.52 billion miles) Round-trip Light Time: 22 hours 25 minutes
There was one more Pioneer 10 contact on 12/5/02. The Deep Space Station (DSS) near Madrid (DSS-63) found the signal but could not lock onto the receiver, and so no telemetry was received. The signal level was just under the threshold value. The uplink from DSS-14 at Goldstone, sent 12/4/02 at a power level of 325 kw, confirmed that the spacecraft signal is still there (Round Trip Light Time = 22 hr 24 min).
Project Phoenix also picked up the signal from Pioneer 10 at Arecibo in Puerto Rico.
LARRY LASHER, PIONEER PROJECT MANAGER
(Copyright NASA)
Where exactly is the Pioneer headed to. Is it intended to eventually make a circular path and eventually head home, or will it just continue to wander out into space? If we could start planting satellites in circular synchronous orbits, perhaps we could eventually have a transmission array that could gradually extend throughout the solar system.
Sending out probes is cool when we can collect info, but it's not really useful if the data isn't able to be processed. A probe that wanders away isn't really very useful, unless perhaps somebody picks it up and sends it home or comes to visit.
"On the rare occasions when astronomers have coaxed even sparse data from Pioneer 10 in recent years, they have used the readings to investigate everything from cosmic rays to chaos theory to gravitational mechanics."
Are we getting accurate data? Do we know that the data coming back is reliable? Should we trust Pioneer 10 and the data that it is sending us? Note: I'm glad it is still operating. That really is a feat. But, we should temper our enthusiam with a heatlhy dose of skepticism.
How to Download YouTube Videos
Are you kidding me? Sure IBM and the rest of the pack can make computers this sturdy. The better question is are YOU willing to pay Millions of $$$ for it? Consider what NASA must have paid for this hardware and then adjust for inflation. I sure don't want to cough up that kind of dough for a computer that will most certainly be obsolete in 6 months.
Gatosend out another multi-million dollar spacecraft out toward Pioneer 10 that will send a signal yelling "WHAT????"
Apart from all the moronic comments about sturdy computers (Nice going Irishman, trolling in the story), Isn't this a clue about the silence in space? You know, the Drake equation? How strong must a signal be, to be heard? Pioneer is only 2x orbit of Pluto away from the Sun, and already impossible to listen to. Nearest star is 4.2 light years away, and nearest galaxy is "just" 75,000 light years away. How strong signal would be needed to communicate these distances. I know the Pioneer signal is only a few milli (micro?) watts, but still...
J.
"Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy."
It's called the Compaq Nonstop Himalaya. Each processor runs every calculation twice, in parallel, and compares the answers when done--if they do not match, it tries again. If they do not match again, the processor state is saved then restored in one of the "hotspare" processors. The memory uses a special, extra high-reliability (and extra slow) ECC algorithm. The server itself has integrated battery backup, variable speed fans which adjust for the death of other fans, and each system is immensely expandable without ever being rebooted or shut down.
An acquaintance of mine works for a company which has a Nonstop with an uptime of nearly ten years.
Remember the Tandem?
Note that the Nonstop isn't much more reliable than IBM's Z series mainframes, which basically never die either.
Ironic, isn't it, that a company famous for making desktops which are essentially crap, makes one of the most reliable servers on earth?
Er, back on topic, isn't Voyager significantly farther from the sun than Pioneer 10?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I propose that if you spent the three billion or so dollars that pioneer cost, you could in fact make a sturdy ANYTHING terrestrial.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Macs have nothing on the Apple // series. I've seen too many with broken floppy drives (the original "SuperDrive") and burned out logic boards and power supplies.
The Apple // series was the pinnacle of 'Keep It Simple Stupid' computing. Maybe if NASA kept its newer probes to the Pioneer/Voyager KISS philosophy they wouldn't be crashing into Mars or simply crashing their programs.
Simplicity = reliability
"Can you hear me now?"
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
I'm sure that you can get almost anything you like as sturdy as Pioneer 10 if you're prepared to spend $300 million on getting it built...
(Pioneer 10 cost $75 million in the 1970s - which corresponds to something like $300 million today.)
You don't pay for "quality" when you buy a Lexus. You pay for the fact that it's a dressed up Toyota. A far more meaningful comparison would be between a Toyota and a Pontiac.
That comparison would unlikely support your hyperbole quite so well.
Modern Apples are little more than white box PC's with another expensive brand name label slapped on them.
Suns aren't that expensive either unless you buy hardware that has no PC equivalent.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Well, nothing you can see. The edge of the heliosphere (where the electromagnetic influence of the sun gets overwhelemed by background radiation) has long been a holy grail for astrophysicists. Pioneer 10 has the instruments on board to sense the edge, if only we could communicate with it.
I bet if I fired up the ZX81 (1982 vintage, built as cheaply as possible) in storage at my mother's house in Britain, it'd be up and running without any problems.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
People don't buy quality, they tend to buy the cheapest they can get away with.
The Pioneer project wasn't cheap, they got what they paid for.
Computers I don't care, they're so cheap, and advancing so quickly I only need it to last 2-3 years. I would like my hard drive to last a bit longer, but the rest who cares.
(or at least they did)
They were called PDP-11's. I believe it was a story linked here of a PDP-11 that had been running a steel mill for over 20 years and was entombed in a brick room with no entryway. When the thing finally threw something they asked for replacement parts because if the thing had run that long without problems why replace it?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I don't believe that's actually always the case. I have a friend who works for the Surrey Space Centre on very small satellites - I was chatting to him down the pub about it one day and I was quite surprised to find out that it ran on an ordinary StrongArm Chip running at something like 133Mhz (Sorry - I don't recall the exact speed).
However, I suppose it's possible that the nanosatellite they built was sufficiently close to the earth to be sheilded from the radiation you speak of...
They are not stupid enough to make it, rather.
Imagine you're selling some piece of hardware, you'd rather make sure it breaks shortly after the end of its warranty, so that you can sell more of it, rather than have one that lasts so long you get out of business before selling its replacement.
Microsoft, despite working on software rather than hardware, has adopted a similar model of quick obsolescence of what it sells. It seems to work.
no kidding what is up with /. lately?
Slow
can't login half of time
500 errors
Slow
"But Pioneer 10, now more than twice the distance from the sun as Pluto, continues to serve a valuable scientific function as it approaches the edge of the solar system."
I don't understand this.
Is the solar system larger than the orbit of Pluto? If so, what defines it?
The transputer, for example, was mathematically proven correct, and cost $15 a chip. Given that a T400 was as powerful as an 80486, several years before Intel made any, it's pretty obvious cost isn't the reason.
(The transputer was a marvel, for its time - it was linearly scalable, regardless of number. 1000 of them would give you the same performance as a Cray 1, for 1% of the cost.)
The reason is complexity. Mathematical proofs aren't trivial, so few chip companies bother. It's simpler to ship defective goods, and hope nobody notices. Notice I'm saying "simpler", not "cheaper". Mathematicians aren't much more expensive than good VLSI engineers.
Why is simple important? Because of PR. If you can get a product out fast, or a new press release out fast, then that's Good Business. Taking your time to get it right doesn't fill newspaper columns. Nobody ever wrote an editorial on how so-and-so proved the ALU free of bugs. They =WILL= write plenty on Intel/whoever releasing the latest nth generation processor, even if their last release was the month before.
The cost of replacement is about the same as the cost of getting it right, but the PR life-cycle is much faster, and so gets more attention & higher stock value.
For those of you who have chosen "popular" over "quality" in any part of your life, you know the lure, even though you know the real price you'll pay in the end.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy.
I'm sure if you're willing to pay $350 million, most PC makers would be willing to work with you on that.
Considering I paid roughly 0.00000228% of that, I'm willing to deal with a reboot every month or so.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
I skimmed the article. It says that they were unable to lock on the signal using one of the largest radio antennae on the planet.
Any ideas if this was due to atmospheric distrubance (as well as distance, obviously...).
So, when are we going to see plans for building a relay on the moon? Surely NASA's got to be looking into this. I'm not an engineer, but surely they could build a permanent relay on the moon using solar panels for power. I know, I know, the moon rotates on its axis and around the earth (duh) but certainly there are ways to maintain signal between the Earth and Moon, especially with so many receivers on Earth.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Pioneer 10:
I sense a slashdot dupe.
Mods, and idiots, I know its about galileo, but if you read the actual post, it mentions (with the same link as this article): Meanwhile they also contacted pioneer 10 (64 bytes from pioneer10.nasa.gov: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=80700000 ms)" .
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
American Heritage Of Invention and Technology had terrific story on Pioneer 10 some years back. I found the text here on the personal web page of its author Mark Wolverton. Worth a read if you're interested.
C'mon, it's been out there for 30 years;
It must have bumped into the big black wall with starts painted on it by now.
I sense a disturbance in the force...millions of Slashdot "comedians" all crying out with bad jokes and ill puns and then silenced.
Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy Now if only slashdotters could decide weather or not to hate NASA. They're a dinosaur Monopoly, now they're cool. They're a dinosaur Monopoly, now they're cool. They're a dinosaur Monopoly, now they're cool.
Were there 8088 chips back in 1972? Was the 8080 even in use then?
More generally, is there a timeline on the web somewhere that shows when various chips and technologies were introduced? What search terms would you use to find it?
"Just finding it is useful information. From this, physicists can map its path and start to make observations of what space is actually like out there. They have used the some sparse readings in the past to investigate everything from cosmic rays to gravitational mechanics. "
You obviously didn't study quantum mechanics. We can either know where it is, or where it's going. We can't know both.
Indeed, even by discovering where it is, we have changed where it's going. It might even now be headed on a collision course for earth, and every measurement of its position just sends it faster and faster in the direction of Slashdot's servers...
--- My dad's political betting
It actually said: "What do you want Poindexter?"
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
True, radio communications just aren't going to cut it. We can pick up radio-type signals from stars, but these are... well, not to put too fine a point on it, fucking stars.
I seem to recall reading that Earth outshines the sun in certain radio bands. Citation lost to the mists of time.
You could beamcast signals to another star easily enough, especially with a (very large) space-based dish. The problem is aperture size, not source power per se (you want the beam to have low divergence). While optical transmission doesn't require as large a dish for a given divergence, it does require far more energy to be detectable. You have to be bright enough to put a minimum of about 10 photons per $sample_period per $detector_area at the destination star system to be detected, and visible photons are many orders of magnitude more energetic. (I'm assuming we're doing detection by correlating many samples, instead of trying to dump enough energy to outshine the Sun in one pulse).
Broadcasting instead of beamcasting, we'd need vastly more power to be detectable at all.
They say it's currently about twice the distance from the sun as Pluto. I wonder how far it will get before.... we go and retrieve it. I read a book a while back, can't remember which one, but I'm pretty sure it was an Arthur C Clarke, possibly "3001". Anyway, in the story space travel has advanced to such a stage that craft can travel many orders of magnitude faster than the likes of Pioneer and Voyager. They decided that having primitive spacecraft travelling through space forever, possibly being picked up by other civilizations, was not a good thing. So they simply sent craft out, picked up the "trash" and brought it back. I wonder if this will ever happen. Arthur C. Clarke has made some very astute observations and even predicted technological advances such as geostationary satellites, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if we did retrieve these craft one day, albeit not in our lifetimes.
Maybe because John Doe is aimed at men.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Well, here I am.
Sounds awfully Boonian to me.
Rod Taylor
Ba-dump-pish
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
"Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy."
Barring the radiation from space and other warranty-voiders, PC hardware has (except for the occasional bad capacitors) been very sturdy. My PCjr still runs, my Leading Edge XT still runs. What is so unreal that I cannot even fathom it, is that the software has run on this thing for as long as it has, without getting corrupted, always booting fine when they need to reboot, etc. Only now in this late hour are major companies starting to remember the K.I.S.S. Principle that led their forefathers, and in doing so, counting on linux. The fewer variables, the more dependable the result.
Would it be worthwhile for Nasa to put a few communications satellites capable of relaying around some of the more distant planets? Obviously the number and which ones would depend on where the planets were relative to earth and the objects you wanted to relay from.
They could be used for deep space probe communications or even for SETI-like stuff.
It shows that none of them are really suitable for a probe launched in 1972. The 4004 was only introduced in 1971, and the 8008 in 1972. The 8080 came in 1974, and the 8086 and 8088 in 1978.
is a chart of all the major families, but it doesn't go into so much detail as the Intel link.
There is an interesting (older) article linked from this one regarding the fact that both Pioneer probes (10 and 11) are closer than they should be based on the laws of gravity and Newtonian physics. JPL scientists postulate the existence of some sort of "hyper-gravity", as the effect has been shown equivalent on both probes, although each was sent in opposite directions.
//Nanoox
It would be interesting to find out whether this effect has also been observed on the Voyager probe which surpassed both Pioneer probes as the most distant man-made object in 1998.
You want to be running a 1.6 gHz computer in the year 2033? That is, you really would care if you were still able to run a computer TODAY that 1k of ram?
(yes, I do know he didn't mean it that way, but it still sounds weird the way he put it...)
If we can only pick up signals of the magnitude of stars, then how can we hope to look for other "alien" signals with the same technology. WOuldn't they have to be broadcasting with a signal that powerful?
Also, I guess the television signals we've been sending out don't go that far. That makes me sad.
I have this terrible pain in all the diodes on my left side, but no one ever listens...
A picture of DSS 62: The dish that picked up Pioneer 10d ss62.htm
p ioneer/PNStat.html
h tml
t ml
http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/div/vlbicor/pic_htm/
PIONEER 10 AT ARECIBO
http://www.seti.org/science/ao-p10.html
Pioneer Home page
http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/
Earth (the dot in the middle) as seen from 3.7 billion miles away by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, on 6/6/1990:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/pale_blue_dot.
A Ride Under the Arecibo Radio Telescope
http://www.seti-inst.edu/science/under_the_mesh.h
I guess Hemos reads /. with timothy's posts turned off too. God knows I do.
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
gorilla asks:
6 8.stm
2 5thSep02/ gravity.htm
>Why bother?
Because you never know where new knowledge may appear. Effective tools should be maintained as long as they are useful.
Specifically, it was data from the supposedly now 'retired' Pioneers 10 and 11 that alerted scientists a couple years ago that there may be some problems with our current understanding of gravity.
After tracking the faint signals from the probes, scientists were able to determine that neither probe had traveled as far as it should have by a substantial margin, and they have now been able to eliminate most proposed explanations for this sun-ward acceleration, including nearby large undetected masses (Pioneers 10 and 11 are headed out of the solar system in nearly opposite directions), unaccounted effects in the the propulsion systems, space debris, solar wind, etc etc. Recently, this same anomalous acceleration was measured for the Galileo and Ulysses probes. The ESA is designing a series of missions to look into this anomaly and others related to gravity.
Mystery force tugs distant probes
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/13323
ESA to look for the missing link in gravity
http://www.globaltechnoscan.com/19thSep-
"If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and dial again..."
If you don't understand anything I post, please accept that I ate paste as a small boy...
I don't get it.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
"Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy."
If your computer cost $200 million, I'm sure it'd be just as sturdy as Pioneer 10.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Here's a graph which includes the logarithm of the temperature Voyager's reading of the solar wind plasma which surrounds it. Converting back from the logarithm, this temperature displayed here varies from about 5000 K to about 50000K. Of course, in such high vacuums the heat transfer is minimal. Another source for more detailed data is here.
Placing most electronics in 1 atmosphere of air at those temperatures would boil them, but that's as irrelevant as the 5 K comparison as this is high vacuum.
It's very hot... in space. KHAAAAAAN!
"Ok, im not from the US, and i havent watched too much American TV lately, so my (really naive i guess) question is this:
... and.. well I don't remember the rest. All I can say is one day in the not too distant future, I'm going to stumble across old /. articles and I'm going to cringe at the bad attempts at milking humor. (In Soviet Russia, bad humor milks YOU!)
What's the deal with all these "In soviet russia" jokes? where did they all come from? is this a secret plot to bring it back? ridicule it?
Sounds like a South Park type of joke to me, but i would really like to know."
The Slashdot Community tries desperately to be funny, but few people can actually create new jokes. Occasionally, somebody resurrects something humorous from the past and places a fresh spin on it. However, much like a Hollywood movie sequal, they get milked into retardedness.
Before Mr. Smirnoff (explained in another response to this thread), it was "1.) Blah blah blah, 2.) blah blah blah, 3.)?????, 4.) Profit". Before that, it was "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!" Before that, it was "Herr herr, Windows crashes."
For a while, it was "All your base..."
From the Lucille Ball movie, the password to gain access to a speakeasy during Prohibition, 1920's US.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Lexus owner, disagree. Parts are expensive as f***, but mine's got 180,000 miles on it and the engine runs like it was new. I'm wearing out the driver's seat and the steering wheel, but besides parts that are expected to die after a certain time, it's been bulletproof. If you check out Consumer Reports' reliability ratings by manufacturer, you'll note that it rates Lexus and Toyota separately, and gives Lexus a consistently higher rating.
Lexuses(sp?) are built for comfort and reliability. Toyotas are built for economy and reliability. Those two often get in the way of one another. The concessions that Toyota makes for it's cars, Lexus often doesn't, because the Lexus owner would rather pay more than have to worry about it more.
Synergy is your friend
I used to have a Pioneer stereo receiver. It was so weak that it sounded like it was past Pluto too....from the other side of my bedroom!
I recently saw this article http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/05/21/gravity.m ystery/ from cnn on how both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 have not covered nearly the distance that conventional physics said they should have.
It seems that something is decelerating them both with equal force towards the sun.
"Something is slowing down the spacecraft. And we have not been successful in finding the source of that. There is more slowing than you would expect from Newtonian gravity," said John Anderson, a senior scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
This is somewhat of an old article, has anyone heard whether there has been an update on the cause of this?
-David
... and ...
:D
"22 hours later, from 79.4 AU, DSS 63 acquired the downlink on time at -183 dbm. After peaking the signal to -178.5 dbm, they locked the telemetry at 16 bps with SNR of -0.5 db."
Sounds JUST like my 56k modem
I have a Wang VS mini in the basement, with workstations in a few spots in the house.
That's Wang VS mini - not mini wang.
This space available.
Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy.
...
I have a Microsoft mouse that came with my new computer about two years ago. Since it's made out of nonreactive plastic it could likely survive for millions of years out in space.
Oh, whoops, I just read the article (what're the chances of that?). Although it would exist for a long time, it already lost its function a month after I bought it
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
We don't need manned flights anymore. Just send out probes. Great concept. We should build one and include it in the payload of the next shuttle.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
The greatest question of all time is: "Are we alone?"
...and yes I know the dark side of the moon isn't always dark, but we'd want to cut down on earthshine too probably... ...and imagine a beo [smack
That's really the other ultimate goal of space exploration, isn't it? (The first goal is to find us a new place to live after the earth is used up).
But there is such a simple way to answer the question: Take all the cash we are using on rediculous stuff like the ISS and:
BUILD A GIANT TELESCOPE IN SPACE OR ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON.
And I mean BIG.
One so Hugeomegagigantic that it can actually SEE the surface of extra solar earth sized planets in detail to pick out cities, roads, and lights.
And then, if we saw with our own eyes that there was another civilization -- imagine the space program we'd start to have then.
If the asteroid (or spacecraft) isn't too old, it outgasses, and the outgassing rate depends strongly on temperature, forming a weak natural rocket engine. Even for refractory materials (or old asteroids that have outgassed all that they are going to) the photon pressure from the warm side can have a significant effect over millions of years.
I haven't done the calculation myself, but I've discussed it over cocktails with Bill Bottke, a leading asteroid scientist, and he seemed to think it was a plausible explanation for the Pioneer 10 orbital drift. P10 is a spinner.
This is just plain not true. While the sun (and solar-type stars) will outshine any Earth-type civilization in the broad-band radio bandpasses, terrestrial signals can easily outshine the sun within narrow bandpasses (e.g., radio stations and radar installations). Check out the Project Phoenix webpages if you want a refresher on this topic.
We can pick up radio-type signals from stars, but these are... stars
And the fact that we can detect them proves that we have the capability to detect alien civilizations, of a technological sophistication roughly similar to our own, within a relatively small region of neaby space (about 10 parsecs, for those of you who are counting).
The Project Phoenix Parkes Observatory run of 1995 had narrow-band sensitivity down to a few tens of gigawatts (10^10 watts) for the 19 solar-type stars within that radius that they observed. There are several military-radar emplacements on Earth that exceed that threshold.
Next-generation radio antenna arrays will increase sensitivity by a factor of roughly 1000. Are you sure you still want to bet against radio-wavelength SETI?
-renard
ES300
The Lexus ES300 really was nothing more than a Toyota Camry. I have seen the engines myself, and they are totally identical. The cars even looked the same. Slightly different body, but obviously the same.
I don't know about today, as I don't own a car anymore and now despise them. But what I do know is that in the very recent past, Toyota simply rebranded the cars as being lexus when they were nothing more than regular toyotas.
Doesn't anyone remember the Acura commercial like 8 years ago showing ripping on Toyota for this?
I don't read or respond to AC posts
P10 was laggy as hell in last week's quakematch.
- undoware.ca
Find a c64 or Apple emulator for Linux, and find the Apple or c64 images.
Not sure about the c64 part, but for the Apple emulator and ROM (Or should I say image?), look here. You should be able to find the Apple II for Linux emulator if you look on Google.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Thanks, that's very useful. I might have thought about looking at Intel's site if my caffeine stream wasn't suffering from overnight ebb when I wrote my query.
An interesting quote from the site:
The first processor was the Intel 4004 with a 4 Bit data bus [introduced in 1971]. It wasn't powerful enough for a computer, but some early pocket calculators based on this chip.
So Pioneer 10 was developed before even the predecessor of the first CPU chip was available. That's something, huh? That bird is way, way out there, still trying to talk, with a CPU of discrete pieces that would maybe be a double handful of parts.
Wow. Those guys back then were smart.
I worked for 10 years in a facility that built custom ICs for NASA. Most of the ICs in almost every historic space mission was produced by this facility. When I was there we used a lot of 6805 varients. They were NOT the same parts that you could buy off the shelf. First, the die we started with was processsed specificly for the application. Second the construction techniques are far different then commercial parts. Third, we screened the *** out of them, as in start with 40 parts for a deliverable of 4 units. The StrongArm is a industrial device to begin with. It is not a commercial grade part. Industrial grade ICs are already part of the way there, to level S.
Any ways, the real killer for space craft, besides being able to survive launch, is temperature. It is not just the extreams, NASA parts work from -55c to +125c, it is the tempurature cycling. Tempurature cycling stresses wirebonds, package seals, and even the integrety of the substrate. Temp cycling can even drive out chemically bound water that can react with ionic contaminates to produce corrosives. This can degrade bond wires, the substrate metalization, and on one occasion, a resistor on the die itself.
Building a spacecraft from parts from Radio Shack is like fighting a modern navel battle with bass boats. Though a bass boat and a destroyer both float, have GPS, radios, radar, and sonar, there is a lot of differents in construction. I'd but my money on the destroyer.
In LEO, there are the remenants of the earths atmosphere (a few excited particles knocking around). Further out there is the solar wind with significant numbers of charged particles. These can and most certainly transfer som of their heat. As there are not many of them, it would take some time to heat up to 5000K, but they still have that order of temperature.
See my journal, I write things there
Imagine, please, that you have a pipe 1m in diameter stretching from just past Earth's atmosphere to the Alpha Centauri system. (Ignore the engineering difficulties, please.)
Can you guess how much all the contents of that pipe would weigh?
Less than a kilogram.
Considerably less than a kilogram.
I would tell you just how tiny, but you wouldn't believe me. I'll let you do the math: the observed density of the universe is 2.1 * 10**-29 kilograms per cubic meter. From here to Alpha Centauri is about 4.5 lightyears, and each lightyear is 9.5 * 10**15 meters.
So we're looking at a total distance of about 4*10**16m to Alpha Centauri. Multiply that by the cross-sectional area of our pipe (.6m) and you get... 2.4 * 10**16m**3 of volume.
Multiply that by the observed density of the universe and you get...
5 * 10**-13 kilograms.
Yeah. Like I said. Considerably less than a kilogram.
Your post shows a severe lack of understanding about space. One, it's freaking cold. Two, once you get past Saturn you can pretty much write off solar flares and activity. Three, sure, there are energetic cosmic rays--but they're here on Earth, too, so Earth's no better off. (No, our atmosphere doesn't protect us in any substantial way from cosmic rays.)
If you were to stand on Pluto and turn on a cell phone, the radio signal from your cell phone would be the brightest electromagnetic signal in the sky--by orders of magnitude.
Space is overwhelmingly small, dark and quiet. Yes, there is the occasional bit of matter which can be a real royal pain in the ass... but the odds of a collision are, well, astronomical.
I don't think you understand a damn word of what you just posted, and it astonishes me that you can get a +4 moderation for being totally flipping wrong.
Considering the distance this is realy good for about 10 watts of RF. I would say that the difficulty in hearing the signal is a combination of path loss (well over -130dBm), man made noise, as well as the noise generated by nearby stars and planets.
Of course, if we used computers that lasted this long we'd still be CLI only...
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Or would a return address be bad - they come and find us and destroy us or rape our planet of all our Pez despensers.
I'm assuming this isn't adjusted for inflation in today's dollars?
-ted
I imagine someone somewhere has examined whether the measured deceleration of the Pioneer probes might correspond with the predictions of MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics)? This is an ad-hoc change to Newton's second law by Mordehai Milgrom, designed to explain the observed rotational motion of stars and galaxies without having to invoke dark (non-baryonic) matter. It does this surprisingly well, and it's main flaw is lack of a theoretical basis to date. Since MOND is different from traditional Newtonian dynamics only concerning "slow-moving" matter, Pioneer 10 might be an interesting test (or, it might just be too small - I'm not physicist enough to know :).
Anyone read anything on the subject? A quick google search doesn't turn much up.
The odds of it ever being found are, well, pretty damn long, but the map is there.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The brilliance of humanity is not reflected in the distance that Pioneer 10 has traveled, despite the effort we expended to get there. Someday, however, it will be... when we go and get it back.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
"Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy."
We could all be using a 200 KHz 60,000 instruction per second, 16K of adressable memory 8008 CPU!!!
16K is enough for anyone, maybe?
I'm sorry but in 30 years when computers come with 47,906 THz processors and 1024 TB of RAM I really really don't think a P-4 3.06 GHz with 4 GB of ram is going to be satisfying.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
"but mine's got 180,000 miles on it and the engine runs like it was new."
Toyota owners say the exact SAME thing. Infact, there has been Toyota advertising to this effect. People don't get a Lexus "merely for reliability". They don't have to. Not all non-luxury cars are built like sh*t.
As far as Consumer Reports goes, I stopped trusting them a LONG time ago.
A collection of personal experiences from a rumor mill such as this one end up being more informative.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Acura's are slightly tweaked in more than just luxury features, and they are easily pointed out. This still doesn't alter the fact that it's primarily a redressed Honda. However, the substantive changes can be pointed out if they are there.
Example: The TL has improved crash safety comared to the Accord. In the age of the SUV, that can be quite handy.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.