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Stardust Apparently Successful
Naomi_the_butterfly writes "The Stardust mission, a craft launched in February 1999, just concluded its encounter with comet Wild 2 at 11:40:35 am PST. The encounter went without a hitch, with about 72 images taken and comet coma (tail) dust collected! The first images will be downloaded to JPL over between 1:30 and 2:30 pm, in time for a press conference at 3:00 pm PST. Today a comet, tomorrow Mars!" Space.com has a picture taken by the spacecraft.
Oops, I was going to use that line when we landed on Mars.
They spent HOW much to only get THAT little bit of TAIL?
Landing a probe on Mars is easy. getting it to communicate after it's done so is not so easy.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
What is innovative? They are returning samples to Earth, the first time any automated probe has done that and the only material gathered direct from the source since the Moon landings!
I think I just bit on a troll...
To protect Stardust against the blast of expected cometary particles and rocks, the spacecraft rotated so it was flying in the shadow of its "Whipple Shields"
Please don't squeeze the Charmin!
Sorry but I do think that these days, anything related to "space" and "success" is slashdot worthy ;-)
Images of the enounter may be found here along with live updated status reports here. Looking closely at the overexposed image on the bottom of the first page you can actually make out vapor jets emanating from the surface of Wild produced by the vaporizing ice and dust heated by the sun.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Hello Andromeda Strain!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
why use video when you can use......
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/040102a.gif
ANIMATED GIFS!
seriously thats like the longest one ive ever seen. i could only get as far as the guy in the blue shirt and the old people in congress.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Perhaps you are thinking of the SMART-1 mission?
Apparently? It returned pictures, but was only apparently successful?
Are we suggesting that the Stardust mission was faked, like the moon landing?
Shocking. Will the lies never stop? Even more damning evidence found here.
philcrissman.com.
It's kewl.
Have a look:
Approximated 3D stereoscopic view of the comet
The fact that the comet was photographed from two slightly different angles makes it possible to create a stereoscopic view of the object. I enhanced the left-hand image a little bit to help bring out the depth of the object. The original image is way too washed out to make it a good fit.
In order to view it, sit squarely infront of your monitor at a distance of a few feet, cross your eyes gently, and try to merge both sides of the images into a "single image" in the center. If you're having trouble, try using the two red birds as a visual guide. Once the birds overlap, the rest of the picture will as well.
Ahhhh, I love stereoscopy.
Bowie J. Poag
No sig, sorry.
It's big news because like someone else said, they're the first samples we've ever gotten that didn't come from the moon, and aren't inter-planetary dust particles. Plus, they're actually -returned- to earth, and not just measured/observed like all the other previous satelites have done. Wild 2 is presumed to be composed of the same substances that were present at the begining of the universe, and will contribute to a better understanding of how everything was back then. Since it's mostly just a dirty snowball floating in space, it's presumed to have been relatively unchanged for billions of years. The scientists will go wild over actual samples of particles that are this old.
What's also cool, is that the same stunt helicopter guys that they used in the matrix will be the ones that snag the returning samples's capsule/heatshield out of the air over utah.
My dad is the V.P. of Civil Space at lockheed martin (this project was under his management), so the family and I got to go and watch the final approach and the turning of the satelite (not that we could see anything other than people at workstations at JPL and Waterton) and see the first images. It was kinda neat to see all the scientists at JPL get excited that they were receiving data. And cooler to see the engineers here in Denver breathe a sigh of relief that it worked, and that it didn't get nailed by a rock going 36,000 miles an hour.
just wanted to say a quick congrats to all the hard working people at nasa. keep up the good work.
The linux hacker
Just for safety I hope NASA has a clean room containing an old drunk and a crying baby. They'll be our only hope if there's any space-born virus brought back!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
You question 'coma' but not the word 'comet' itself?
Comet comes from the Greek 'kometes' which means 'the hairy one' (according to Google). So naturally they used 'coma' to describe the 'hair'.
or crash 'n burn like the beagle.
Beagle burned? This is BIG. There're Oxygen in mars's atmosphere! Thoe bloody aliens have obviously been jamming our spectrometers all this time.
You're forgetting one key fact-
There are no Martians on comets, so there was no one to shoot this one down.
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
Who did space.com pay to put the caption right in the URL?!
g _d isplay.php?pic=h_wild2-comet_02.jpg&cap=Your%20Bal ls%20Are%20Filthy%20---%20Go%20Wash%20Them%20Beavi s
I like this caption to the WILD2 photo over the original:
http://space.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/im
------------------------------
Ray Raspberry
raspberry@b3l33t.org
I'm also looking forward to Deep Impact, a mission in which a NASA probe will shoot a large copper projectile into a comet, and observe the various ejecta that result.
The Russians brought back samples from the moon 3 times between 1970 and 1976 (and, um, how could it have been anything BUT automated?). The first was the Luna 16 mission: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog? sc=1970-072A
It looks surprised to see the spacecraft.
o o
O
Can anyone say Andromeda Strain?
I'm being serious. That's absolutely fucking amazing. How they know where the comet is going to be in space at a particular time and get another object going over 13,000 miles an hour to pass through its tail and snap pictures from a mere 200 miles away and all that by remote control when it takes an hour for instructions to get to the craft. Astounding. The shit we take for granted.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
for those of you who have never heard of it, google it. by far one of the more interesting things i learned from reading about this mission.
The idea that the names of those fallen soldiers are mixing with stardust today, has been giving me a warm fuzzy feeling. :)
To correctly allocate resoucres is to know with 100% confidence the outcome of every possible allocation. How many people die of starvation while we try to solve aids? How many people die in car accidents when we try top solve cancer? Only with a godlike timeless perspective can you or anyone judgbe the allocation of resources and defintly state wheather we made good choices or bad. what if our investment in space technlology pays off big as we are able to divert an extinction causing comet from smashing into the planet.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Something which, of course, would immediately stop if we'd just abandon all pretenses to advancement and go back to the trees, I suppose.
Tens of thousands died in the industrialization process that got you probably just about everything in your home right now. I don't see you whining about how that wasn't worth it.
To create the conditions that bolstered the technologies that are allowing you to post this myopic, Luddite bullshit on Slashdot right now, nearly one hundred million people died in no fewer than three major wars.
What? From that mountaintop of a moral high ground you're preaching from, you couldn't see that?
Maybe, just maybe, you should save your attempts at profundity for an occaision where they don't reek of ignorance.
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
on another note, an article of mine got posted! woohoo!
There's a nice PDF link which gives some excellent background on the Stardust mission.
/.ers:
Some points of interest for
1) They use Aerogel to collect the dust for return
2) The Dust Analyzer was based on a design used for the ESA's Giotto probe
3) The navigation camera used was left-over from the Voyager mission of 1977, combined with a left-over sensor head from the Gallileo mission launched in 1989
4) The CPU is a hardened version of the Macintosh PowerPC chip, known as the RAD6000, which runs at between 5 and 20 MHz. It has 128 Mb of RAM, and 3 Mb of PROM.
5) The operating system uses only 20% of its RAM for its own use -- the rest is dedicated to experiments, including 75 Mb for images from the navigation camera
6) The radio transponder is a relict of the Cassini mission to Saturn
Follow the first link for lots more nice tech details.
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
Because, depending on whom you ask, I'm either a genius or a troll. Or both. Or neither. Maybe I'm just crabby some days and maybe I just like stirring up the poop whenever possible.
But since you ask, I didn't particularly feel like bringing it back into the forum because, it didn't seem right. It was a dead thread, which we're apparently keeping alive past its prime.
I usually refuse to defend my arguments, period. I've found in life that it is a very rare thing for an argument/debate to actually solve anything/change any minds. It usually just serves to puff up the participants and make them feel like they have all the answers! Well, we don't. But, here we are, pretending that we do.
Hmm. My memory of the initial thread goes like this. I posted my message. You replied/attacked. When I tried to go private, you opened a new thread and attacked me again. Now, who's the non-arguing debater here?
This is some seriously tiresome rhetoric, I think. First, I don't have a kneejerk hatred of new tech. What I have is a mean streak of cynicism for said new technology. Especially the kind that goes way way way off into deep deep space to grab some dust (!) and come back. What possible good to humanity is that going to get us? How can those millions spent on something that might be beneficial fifty years from now be considered a better expense than spending on the problems we have now? Now, humanity doesn't have a one-track mind, but it sure seems that way. The only thing that we consistently do well is fight and kill each other. Wow. That's progress, well worth the money spent. As far it being a zero-sum game, I'd say that it is. The worst part is that no one, over time, wins.
Nihilism is so moving, after all. But this isn't really about that. So, yea, I'll bite: Ignorance of technology's benefits. I'll cop a plea to that. Because I can't see those benefits in the same bright and shiny way that so many others do. Sue me.
Now, the Tang and Velcro thing apparently also leads us pretty indirectly into the war dead thing later on, right? If, then, your logic says that war and suffering brings us great advances, then maybe we need more space shuttles blowing up than we do space probes gathering dust (intentional pun).
But you still haven't tied the space program directly to war initiatives. Unless you are willing to admit that the military-industrial complex was a very real and very functional part of twentieth century America. Because I'll grant you that the space program was and is nothing more
sig not found
I side with Z, except on the point of NASA's efficiency. NASA's middle name is "Efficiency", but sadly their first name is "Lacks".
Giving mankind any firm target for research is a win, because otherwise we'd never get off our collective asses to achieve anything that didn't produce an immediate profit. Welcome to Human Nature 101.
If you take an Atheistic viewpoint, that would be bad because the first sizeable rock to come and kiss us means the end of all sapient life on Earth. If you take a concensus religious point of view, that would be bad because we're failing to live up to our responsiblities (to housekeep Gaia, or manage God's little preserve for us, or whatever).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing