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Funding Approved for Pluto/Kuiper Probe
azpenguin writes "While we discuss the acheivements of the now-silent Pioneer 10, Congress has apporved funding for the "New Horizons" mission to send a probe to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Space.com has the story here. NASA had actually fought the idea, but Congress approved the money anyway. Wonder if in 12 years (when the probe is supposed to reach Pluto) the public will be as fascinated with the pictures coming back as much as with the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft."
In related news, dalewj writes "Seems the team at JPL will
discontinue operations on
the Galileo Space probe to Jupiter after
extended the mission
three times. Galileo has been in space since 1989 and has some amazing
findings and pictures available on the
JPL website. Truly NASA and JPL's best effort to date."
Because we're not running a nuclear reactor, we don't need any fancy machinery around the radioactive core, and so it can be embedded in extremely tough materials. This stuff makes a black-box recorder look flimsy. The worst damage the plutonium core could do to someone if the rocket exploded on launch would be to land on their head.
Furthermore, plutonium is not the deadliest substance known. While a dangerous alpha-emitter if ingested, and an undeniably toxic heavy-metal, there are far more lethal substances. That honour AFAIK goes to VX nerve gas.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
If you study the engineering behind the radiation sources that the spacecraft use you would see that the darkest of scenarios have been accounted for. Even if the launch vehicle were to explode high in the atmosphere, nothing would happen to the power supply.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
This mission should be shut down through peaceful protests before we all end up glowing green.
This concern is understandable, but uninformed. Refer to this page for a technical explanation of the problem and its solution. There is also a wealth of information here.
I, personally, am more concerned about nuclear-powered Cold War-era spy satellites still orbiting Earth than I am about a 21th-century-technology vehicle to be launched far, far away.
Hello , troll :-)
I was going to go into a long-winded rebuttal of your arguments, but then just did a quick search and copied and pasted the results here.
(And I would have thought that a "CHERNOBYL in space!" would have been the best place to have one, seeing as there's nobody there.)
Seeya!
"The ceramic-form plutonium fuel is heat resistant, thus making it more difficult to be vaporized in case of fire or reentry environmental exposure. The fuel is also very insoluble. It has a low chemical reactivity and breaks in large pieces, not small parts that can be inhaled or ingested. Unlike in nuclear accidents, RTGs cannot explode because no fusion or fission processes are occurring. Hence, the acute radiation sickness associated with nuclear explosions wont be witnessed in an RTG accident."
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
What do politicians care about exploring Pluto? This is just another superiority assertion by the US government.
Maybe. But it makes sense scientifically (look at the story for the why of it), and what is life but a series of contests? If not for the ideological dick-waving contest in the 60s, there would have been no Apollo.
How about that moon that may have a liquid ocean beneath it's surface?
You are correct that landing a probe on Europa (insert ominous Kubrick film warning) would be desirable. However, that's several more levels of technical complexity. You need to deploy a lander on the surface (no atmosphere = reaction engines = fuel = heavy = cost), then penetrating a kilometer-thick ice crust (power = radiothermic generator = heavy, also evil), then deploy an autonomous (the comm delay is measured in hours) microsubmarine equipped with all the instruments usually found in an entire university laboratory. Which in turn require bandwidth. And more power. And very good control software.
In short, it's probably doable (what isn't?), but it would cost orders of magnitude more than the Pluto/Kuiper probe.
Apparently the idea of the mission is not just ot go where no man has gone before , but
1) Find out about the planet since telescopic pictures are not good enuff..
2)Look out from the near-zero atmosphere of pluto out into space, unhindered but particles of the solar system
Some links here and here about these..... (Rudimentary googling, I am no expert)
It seems is not to go where no man has gone before but
....
1) To get proper pictures of pluto (it seems telescopes are not good enuff
and 2) to get a view of outer space unhindered by the space dust of the solar system
Some links
here and here
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Besides the funding issue, the other main problem with New Horizons is the fact that neither of the two launch platforms (Titan 4, Atlas 5) have been certified. They both, however, did launch successfully last fall.
The space ladder is an engaging idea, but it really is a pipe dream, almost in the Ringworld class. When it's still a massive struggle to build a 400 ft weightless framework, how can you seriously consider building something whose length is three times the diameter of the Earth itself? Not to mention that while we can understand how a space ladder will keep itself aloft, we haven't the beginnings of an idea to fulfill these two big blocks.
1, Grounding the ladder in the first place.
2. What kind of material we can use that can hold the thing together.
Space Ladders today are almost as much of the product of fiction as Ringworld. Maybe, someday, our distant ancestors will figure out ways we can't even think of right now. But that is far enough into the future that a Kuiper Express project isn't going to put a significant delay on it. Spending such money on space ladder research will do nothing but throw money down an unproductive hole.
500 million sure isn't much.. over here in Southern California, USA, it is not surprising to see something like a high class home go for something like that.
I just wanted to point out that figure is HIGHLY innacurate. I seriously doubt there are any private homes in the entire state of California which go for 10% of that value. $500 million is a lot of money.
As an example, AOL Time Warner are building a fairly large mixed use development by Columbus Circle in Manhattan. This is a HIGHLY desirable area. The complex has two 55 story towers. As you can see from this story, the entire cost of this building is $1.7 billion, a little more than 3 times the value of this house of which you speak.
Even in Manhattan, the most expensive real estate market in the nation, I have never seen any residential property close to $500 million, unless you are referring to a while high rise. A full floor, 20,000 square foot condo on 5th avenue accross from central park might cost $50 million, maybe more. But not much.
Some oversized mansions from another age might fetch $100 million, but they are rarely on the market.
Anyway, just wanted to make that correction while the coffee has me spirited.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
When the system is found succesful NASA plans to use it in future probes, like the Interstellar Probe. That thing would travel 200 AU (Astronomical Units) in 15 year. Much faster than the Voyager and Pioneer crafts.
Another, more controversial, propulsion system is Nuclear propulsion. Technical information can be found here
There needs to be a mod for nonexpert-blowing-posteriorized-smoke!
Having seen the goop that was modded way up as I scanned this, I feel compelled to reply to several messages at once:
Change that to "we suspect..." and please read/internalize a quote from Werner Von Braun: "Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." Go grab a copy of Heinlein's remarks on receiving heart surgery that was a byproduct of the space age. Research incidental discoveries of every planetary fly-by we've done (every one taught us something noteworthy). Try to find the tenuous links between exploration and discoveries. And stop spouting off opinions with the wrong verb. (I deleted an extensive flame, questioning westyvw's parentage and marvelling at his ability to exist without the brains normally needed for autonomic activity)If I'm not mistaken, there aren't a lot of Al Qaeda space launches. In fact, I see a pretty strong link between hateful regimes and the utter lack of money spent on basic research in any humanitarian or scientific field. A lot has been learned in pursuit of warlike activities, admittedly, but just because we can't bend these backwaters' worldthink to our enlightened ways, doesn't mean we should sit around and wait for them to agree with us before we continue advancing.
Still, by your logic, I'd at least prioritize. TV, Brittney Spears, novels, the arts, all sports, all cuisine and restaurants, and a few dozen other pursuits are a greater waste of time than scientific research. Live an ascetic life and then come back telling me that the money can be better spent elsewhere. Oh, and your 'net connection... no, make that anything electronic you own... are all forfeit unless needed in a specific mission to combat death and despotism worldwide.
I hope the above paragraph is the stupidest, scariest thing you've ever read. Your belief has an underlying kernel of truth that can best be laid bare by just thinking of the absurdity of self-denial until everyone else in the world stops being so wrong-headed. Like communism, it's a nobel (a freudian typo?... I meant noble) idea that so far fails in every implementation.
Developing the 'tech to do it right' without practice is impossible and absurd. Heck, even in modern times, new boat designs have sunk fresh out of the drydock. We explore, we learn, and we stretch into the most unfamiliar areas first because they sometimes reveal deeper questions we didn't even know we should ask. Also we spend years dissecting the failures for lessons and improvements.
Who the FSCK modded this up (as insightful) to a 5??
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In a followup, thasmudyan suggests we skip the unmanned cheap exploration and instead set up a mars colony, then contradicts him/herself by suggesting that the space station is worthless in paragraph one and then suggesting that we set up a probe assembly and launch point on the moon. The space station has a shallower gravity well and a more forgiving landing/linkup point than the moon. In other words, it is an attempt to build a staging point for space research. That having been said, if it costs thousands per pound just for fuel to get away from the earth (and about half as much for fuel to land on the moon and relaunch it), how inexpensive will it be to build a semiconductor fab, ship pig-iron, build a machinist shop, have a full suite of materials testing and QA devices, etc etc etc lofted into space? For a long time to come, the most we can hope for is reusability and assembling things prebuilt and tested down here where everything's available and shipping costs are 1e5 cheaper.
As for thasmudyan's belief that there's potentially a conspiracy to keep space travel expensive, I find all the kennedy-assassination theories more plausible. The cost of escaping earth's gravity is so high, you can pay an engineer for ten years and spend less than lofting him into space. There isn't a techie alive that wouldn't love to see those numbers brought down to a level that makes a week in space affordable. It matters to most of us much more than mere money ever could. Getting thousands of geeks to remain silent about ways to drop those costs would be impossible. Space travel remains expensive not out of a conspiracy, but simply because it is that hard, that iffy, that expensive.
If you don't believe me, you don't understand the technical extremes we're talking about here. Check again the ongoing postmortem of Columbia's failed reentry, and imagine building any device (no matter how simple) that performs well under these extremes of heat and cold. If it seemed easy, find any 1 thing that performs well both immersed in liquid nitrogen and exposed to a blowtorch. Last of all, imagine building something complex enough to support life for days and still withstand those two thermal extremes, plus a thousand other issues like extreme acceleration forces, radiation, hard vacuum, repeated hot/cold cycling for anything going in/out of unfiltered sunlight, etc., etc., etc. This complexity is why we have the phrase "It isn't rocket science."
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Thankfully, the anti-nuke protest was modded down low enough I only saw responses. Hospitals and highway departments have nastier stuff than the 'nuclear batteries' used to power probes. If I were Roblimo, anyone saying 'chernyobl in space' without a new argument would immediately have all karma stripped. If I were king, they'd get flogged.
I think ion propulsion may also be a good choice for a long-range mission such as this. I don't know if NASA has enough confidence in it yet to stake a mission of this magnidute on it, but the Deep Space 1 project was very successful despite some early glitches.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Even so, the chances of the generator vaporizing over a city are zero.
1. Launch vehicles are destroyed by remote control if they stray outside of a mathematically-defined "cone" around their planned flight-path. This is always going to be at least several hundred miles away from any sizable population.
2. There's no launch vehicle destruction scenario that is anywhere near violent enough to damage an RTG casing enough to release radioactivity. Possibly striking the ground at thousands of miles per hour would do it - but no launch vehicle travels at that speed at any altitude anywhere near the ground. They get up pretty high before they accellerate to that speed, and if they turn around and point the wrong direction (down) for any reason, they're destroyed - no rocket=no thrust, no thrust=no high velocity impact. The casings for these things are tested in impact tests with rocket sleds slamming into concrete walls at hundreds, even thousands of miles per hour, and they survive intact.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.