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Five New Neptunian moons
cyclop writes "It's a new time of discoveries in the Solar System. Just when Cassini discovered two news moons on Saturn, old Earth-based astronomy strikes back by revealing five small bodies around Neptune. The faint moons seem to have eccentric and inclined orbits, and to have been captured by Neptune."
Planetary scientists would LOVE a galileo/cassini type mission to neptune. The planet and its moons are just bizarre. It has normal looking full sized moons in retrograde orbit - which normally implies captured bodies...but they are usually irregularly shaped. It has goofy looking moons in normal orbits, which would normally imply a body formed with the planet...but those aren't usually irregularly shaped. And the big moon, Triton, is amazing...huge geyser/volcanic-like plumes of frozen black-stuff. There's theories as to what it is, but the underlying mechanisms aren't well understood. An amazing outer planet.
Moo.
Ground based astronomy isn't as sexy as space based astronomy, but has one big advantage -- light gathering power. We can build 8-meter (SUBARU and GEMINI), 10-meter (KECK), and in the near future 30 to 50-meter telescopes. The JWST, by comparison, is only 6.5 meters, and that's still 7 years away (at least). It's expensive to get telescopes into orbit, first off, and to send a probe up, well, you only get one look at the system with that! Additionally, launching anything drives the cost up by tens of millions of dollars. Ground based telescopes are easier to service, last virtually forever, and only have the disadvantage of having the atmosphere to fight with. Adaptive optics, and camera technology have significantly advanced in recent years, so that ground based telescopes with adaptive optics have huge advantages over those without it. They haven't caught the space telescopes yet, but the gap is closing. I'm a huge advocate of hubble, chandra and other space-based missions, but what can be accomplished on the ground (such as this) should NOT be overlooked!
well thats a valid argument, but it has a flaw. the money spent on science is unlikely, if pulled, to feed and clothe the poor. its more likely to be funneled into defense projects.
the other problem with the "money better spent" on feeding the hungry and clothing the poor argument is that its simply impossible to practically do that. there are too many hands the money and food must cross, and corruption is a given. Sure, we must try, but not at the expense of that which furthers other industries. And science isn't the biggest waste of money. What about the millions paid to sports stars? that should be given to the poor. How about the millions you spend on entertainment? surely you could sacrafice a little fun for someone to eat. maybe you should sacrafice all your fun. work hard and only keep what you need to live. not live comfortably, or happily, just live -- donate the rest to the unfortunate. It's a slippery slope. Sadly, feeding and clothing the poor is simply not an easy problem to fix -- diverting funds from science research is surely not the answer.
Moo.
I just hate that kind of reasoning.
Money spent on science is not wasted. And the less practical is the science, the more I'm sure that money is not wasted.
I work in science (molecular biology), and I don't do it to help people (although I love if my research can help,of course). I do it primarily because I want to understand the Universe. I do it primarily because I think one of the most important, amazing and noble things humankind can do is trying to understand the universe we have the luck to live within. It is at least as noble as helping the poorest. If not noblest, because we will all die (poor or not poor). But knowledge will last.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
So what exactly do you do to help the world's hungry?
Well, yes, Cassini had nothing to do with it. The five newly discovered moons of Neptune are larger than Mars' moons, which were known before space flight. The Galileo probe to Jupiter discovered numerous moons about the size of the ones recently found by the Cassini probe. The moons are being publicly reported now, but they were observed in 2001 to 2003, before Cassini got to Saturn.
Research always pays off. Always. Sometimes it just adds to the amazing amount of negative knowledged we have (i.e. well THAT doesn't work...) but more often than not even failed experiments pay big dividends (both financialy and scientifically) in the long run. Did you know that nylon was a failed experiment? It was poured down the drain 3 times before someone realized what they had. The adhesive on the back of Post-It notes is another failed experiment (i.e. an adhesive that didn't stick permenently), but with this one 3M kept the the info on the books and when somebody had the bright idea for the post it note that adhesive didn't have to be re-invented. I'm sure other examples abound.
Besides, charity is best left in the private sector. I prefer to see charities that are not administered with the compassion of the IRS or the Post Office.
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
Money is not the solution to feeding starving peoples. They don't need money, they need food. And there's already more than enough of that to go around. The reason why they don't have that food has very little to do with them not being able to afford it, and very much to do with their own leaders deciding that guns and palaces are a greater priority than food, roads, supplies. Look at China. It went from having some of the worst famines in history to being a net food exporter in just one generation. How? Not by handouts from the West, but by deciding it could no longer allow political ideology to rigidly get in the way commonsense economic policies.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.