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The Best Of Planetary Explorers
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's timeline is published today on the top seventy five events in recent planetary explorations. Since June and July inaugurates three new landers going to Mars, it is curious to see their selected images: Venusian crust hot enough to melt lead, comets colliding with Jupiter, Europa's frozen ocean. But the most precious discoveries may be those chalked up as nearly free riders: the fifteen Mars rocks that annually are found among Antarctic meteors [100 grams total] and all those four and half million personal computers doing SETI@home CPU cycles."
Teaching everybody the metric system and getting them all to USE IT AT THE SAME TIME!
Please note the 'in the future' timeline at the bottom of the page.
It depends how big the chunk is. Basically, the impact needs to accelerate the "chunk" form zero to escape velocity. Escape velocity is the same for everything (it only depends on the earth's mass and the distance from the centre of mass) but varies very very very slightly with height. How much of a push your chunk needs depends on its mass.
Stick Men
I love Discovery Science Channel ;)
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
The hang up is that there is no formal definition for what constitutes "a planet" There are groups of astronomers working on this now (and this has been a subject of prior discussion on /.)
Because it's cheaper to send a multi-million dollar "paperweight" than a man. It costs multi-billions of dollars (10's or even 100's) to do this. Until Congress admits to itself that (a) it wants to send men to Mars, etc. and (b) it's going to COST; then, I don't suspect it's going to happen.
Distributed.net was around years before SETI@Home.
As if the universe had something bad to eat the night before, we get a moon named PUCK circling Uranus.
I suspect that the 'funny' mods are not so much laughing with you as at you. Puck, like many of Uranus's satellites, is named after a Shakespearean character. Specifically, Puck is a character from A Midsummer Night's Dream.
So Puck rhymes with f*ck. Though its etymological root would have been pronounced "as if the universe had [had] something bad to eat the night before."
In the next decade we will see the first of a totally new class of orbiting space telescopes - large arrays of sensors spanning many tens of miles across. These will be true orbiting interferometers which will bring amazing optical resolution to "near-earth" explorers.
The ramifications for earth-based planetary exploration are huge. Currently, work is being performed on how to keep such a satellite array in perfect alignment. Low-thrust ion engines and tide-stabilizing configurations are flying as we speak.
NASA has plans to launch the first Space-Based Interferometer in 2009. Taking into account the inevitable schedule slide, we should start seeing some really cool pictures in about 2012. AND, since the array will live relatively close to our "Big Blue Marble," it might also be a reason to keep the ISS and the manned space program in general running for another decade. All it takes is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
This is so far out in the weeds it reminds me of that quote from Pauli - "This is not right. It's not even wrong."
Let's see:
1. Unless you're going to dip into the sun or one of the gas giants, water is going to be a lot easier to find than hydrogen.
2. Oxygen is easy to find on the moon, albeit tied up as aluminosilicates. Energy is cheap on the moon (lots of sunlight) so getting O2 out would be relatively simple.
3. Making oxygen molecules from carbon would either involve alchemy (doesn't work) or particle physics (works, but you have to do it one atom at a time, and trust me, it'd be significantly simpler and cheaper to get it on the moon (see 2) or boost it up using disposable launch vehicles.)
The best strategy is probably to get your oxygen on the moon, and send up hydrogen by rocket.
... read this:
... I think ... one of the elements we'll find on Mars, but not on the Moon (or maybe it's Helium-3, I forget).
... and interested in your reasoning.
http://www.nw.net/mars/
What you don't seem to realize is that building a base on moon capable of producing inter-planetary vehicles is just as difficult as building a base on mars, producing inter-planetary vehicles. The *only* difference is the distances involved - in terms of energy/resources, we may as well just go straight to Mars and do it, and skip the moon entirely.
In fact, its easier for us to get to Mars than the moon, and back again. Why? Because Mars has an atmosphere - we can use it for breaking, we can use it for producing fuel, we can use it for living on. The Moon has none of that, and in fact the Moon lacks a lot of the resources we need to build a workable space program - Hydrogen, for example, is
Anyway, Zubrin and co. have already figured out how we can get to Mars and back for about $5billion, using existing technology and very smart administration of that technology.
If you still think we should do the Moon first after reading "The Case for Mars", I'd be very surprised
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The planetoid's name follows International Astronomical Union rules by naming all planetoids after creation deities (see planetary nomenclature). "Quaoar" is the name of a creation deity of the Native American Tongva people, native to the area around Los Angeles, where the discovery was named (see Quaoar (deity)). ---www.wikipedia.org