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Mars Express Begins Search for Water on Mars
H_Fisher writes "The BBC reports that the Mars Express spacecraft team is ready to deploy a radar antenna to search for traces of water and ice beneath the Martian surface. The deployment has been delayed for a year due to concerns that the unfurled antenna might damage the spaceship. Mission controllers are optimistic; perhaps the ESA will be the next to make an important discovery about the red planet?"
I'm sure Wal-Mars has some water at low low prices.
they already found water on mars!
The ESA's dog is very thirsty.
wrong article? what am I missing?!
Close but no cigar. I think you were looking for the article before this, but maybe I'm wrong.
AFAIK, all the "water" finds on Mars have been indirect - albeit very convincing - evidence of surface water in the past.
But the radars on this puppy might just punch down - maybe only a few feet - and get a hard f*ing ice reflection, which would put paid to all the surmise and deduction. Then we would know its still there.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
It won the Noble Piece Prize, not the Nobel Peace Prize.
Those damn Martians will rip you off!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The Long John Silver Restaurant chain will be willing to offer free shrimp for a second time if this finds any fresh water. Of a man's appetite can dream.
I bet we can charge twice as much as Evian gets!
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
A friend of mine is a planetary geologist that has been working with data from this probe since it reached Mars. He's reasonably convinced that Mars has had active hydrology in the recent past geologically-speaking, so from what I gather he'd be really, really surprised if they found no water at all.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"Close but no cigar. I think you were looking for the article before this, but maybe I'm wrong."
A few years ago I made a little mistake like that. I had opened a bunch of Slashdot windows to different stories and replied to the wrong one. The mods were having fun at my expense. I'd ask why I was modded down, they'd mod that off topic. Finally, somebody told me to scroll up.
Yep, it was bonehead stupidity on my end, but I really wish I hadn't been modded down 5 or 6 times before finally getting told.
"Derp de derp."
Well duh, like it is on earth: you have the surface of the ocean (where it meets the air), and most of the water is below that. Go figure (gravity and all).
I wonder how long it will take before the bacteria riding aboard the various spacecraft we send to Mars begin to spread all over the planet?
If we then "discover" bacteria on Mars, imagine the excitement, and the loss. The loss of our chance to truly know if it was there already. The loss will go unnoticed, though, as anyone broaching the question will be lumped with the Creationists, an object of scorn.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
To quote Agent Smith, "They're not out yet."
In this case, it's the antennas for the survey instrument that aren't out yet. While the engineers seem very optimistic that the antenna deployment will go well and allow the survey to begin, there also seems to be some trepidation that the deployment could seriously damage the spacecraft.
Wait another two weeks, then celebrate the start of the search.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Dude, you got the wrong article. This is about that CMU professor's rebuttal against RIAA propaganda. I think.
...the most expensive divining rod ever built...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing
Mars Express spacecraft team is ready to deploy a radar antenna to search for traces of water and ice beneath the Martian surface.
I can see the story now: Microwave beams from MARSIS radar melts ice causing chain reaction, releasing frozen atmosphere and water.
"Quaid...Quaid...Start the reactor." .
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Well, I don't know if I would mod you arrogantly misleading, but perhaps grossly simplifying.
I mean, take hydrogen, oxygen, two very abundant elements in the solar system, and bam!, you have water.
It's not this easy. As I look around the room, I see gads of oxygen and hydrogen molecules. (Yes, I have very good eyesight!) I have bammed many times tonight, and yet still no water. Okay, some sweat on my Coke can--oh, and in my Coke--but that was water already formed; it doesn't count.
It's not like water just automatically spontaneously forms from hydrogen and oxygen (that whole entropy thing), it only happens under a specific set of circumstances as a specific reaction. Most of the hydrogen and oxygen in, on, and around the Earth is not water, although a lot of it is. It's contained in other molecules such as O2 (what we breathe in), CO2 (what we breathe out, of which there is LOTS on Mars), H2 (potential fuel panacea and, oh, what also blew the Hindenburg up), SiO2 (sand, of which we have plenty), and so on.
And we're not talking about looking for just a few free-floating water molecules. It's generally accepted (okay I admit, only by everyone I've asked, which is a group composed entirely of myself currently) that when one talks about "water on Mars," he or she is referring to a rather large collection of the stuff, such as in a lake, an icecap, or even an ice cube.
So no, I don't think it's so readily apparent that there is water on Mars, otherwise I have a tough time believing that scientists are so gung ho to spend billions of dollars to prove something that everyone knows is so painfully obvious.
"There's ice on the moon you know. Yes. The Moon. The moon was part of the Earth once, so you can be pretty sure that the moon has ice on it. Maybe not a lot, but it's there."
That is rather facile logic. By the same token we should expect life on the moon shouldn't we? After all it was "part of the earth". The Moon was formed in the fiery inferno of a planetoid collision with earth, any water that didn't volatilize off and remained after coalescence couldn't be readily held by the weak gravity and intense solar irradiation at its (relatively) close orbit to the sun. Furthermore, the only place where water has been SUGGESTED to possibly occur on the moon is at the poles in permanently shaded bottoms of craters in the form of hydrated minerals and in fine and sparse ice dust among the dirt. There is nothing absolutely certain and derministic about the presence of water on any solar system body (except earth) without examining that object first. Io (right next to europa!) has no water because its a flaming hell full of superhot volcanoes produced by the tidal flexing of its mantle; an effect from the orbits of Europa and its proximity to Jupiter. This is a completely non-intuitive phenomenon and no one really suspected it was happening until we went there with the Voyagers.
"Same goes for carbon which is why if a planet's not drenched in water, ten to one it's flooded with methane or some other hydrocarbon."
I wouldn't take THAT bet! The only place we know of in the solar system which is "flooded with hydrocarbons" is Titan. An absence of water is absolutely by no means a determinant factor in whether a world has lots of hydrocarbons! (eg. Venus, the Moon, Mercury, Io, Phobos, Neptune, Jupiter...... all have no water and NO huge amounts of hydrocarbons!) The solar system seldom lends itself to easy characterization by the application of overly simple maxims of the sort you seem to have affection toward.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
The real pain was getting it to Launch Pad 9-3/4.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If they were actually intelligent, they'd construe that as an act of war!
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Your logic is flawed. We study the greenhouse effect and global warming because we're still trying to figure out all the different variables present that cause these phenomena. We know what thought and consciousness is, but we have no idea about how and why it is the way it is. We do studies to make a casual relationship between smoking and cancer, but more importantly we do these studies to find out what specific compound(s) cause cancer and why they cause cancer. We know a car will get crunched if we ram it into something, but we don't know how bad it will be or how safe the driver will be when a crumple zone is hit. Notice a pattern here? We know these things are there, but we want to know HOW and WHY. We're not trying to find out how or why water is on Mars or any other planet, we're only trying to figure out if it's there.
Nah they wouldn't. Everybody knows that TV makes you more intelligemented.
I mean, take hydrogen, oxygen, two very abundant elements in the solar system, and bam!, you have water.
Please take a chemistry course. Oxygen and hydrogen don't just spontaneously form water. You have to nudge the solution over it's activation barrier before the two will react. Of course the activation barrier depends on many variables.
Just because something can happen doesn't necessarily mean that it will happen.
I was under the impression that /. REPOSTED stories, not repoted them.
Foxed Design
As to the h2o on mars, we know its there, just like we know there's ice on/in jupiter (maybe even in liquid form - Jupiter is more of a failed brown star than a planet.
It would be impossible for the jovian planets not to have molecular water in some form.
...that the folks at ESA who operate Mars Express brace themselves for people with far-out ideas like Richard C. Hoagland, who's going to do some very strange explanations of the MARSIS radar images when we start receiving these radar images. Given Hoagland's reputation, you know it was happen literally at the drop of a hat. (rolling eyes skyward)
what shite
Believe it or not, Mars has both weather and seasons. Both affect the amount of dust in the atmosphere. If you really want to be clever, go play around a few of the 80,000 images from the mars rovers and see how much green you get by combining the red, green, and blue filtered images. You can compare images that show the color target (used specifically to make sure the color balance is right) taken on earth before launch to images taken on Mars, where the red dirt is pretty clearly visible. The color target looks the same.
More importantly though, since you've discovered this massive cover-up that none of us have been able to, you should take the next step and find out why. Does it truly benefit NASA to hide the existance of life, or at least green, on Mars?
As long as we're talking about color, I wanted to toss in a bit of little-known trivia: While on earth the sky is blue and sunsets are often red, on Mars, the sky is red and sunsets are often blue.
It's not like water just automatically spontaneously forms from hydrogen and oxygen (that whole entropy thing)
Excuse me, but you don't know what you're talking about. Entropy isn't the problem here. Entropy might not be favourable for the reaction H2 + 0.5O2 -> H2O, bit since enthalpy is very much so, the whole reaction is, at least at reasonable temperatures, very favoured.
The reason why having H2 and O2 isn't a guarantee to have water is twofold:
1) activation energy
2) existance of even more stable products
But GP is right: Water is so stable that usually you'll have at least some water when there's H2 and O2.
And what if Asteroid 2004 MN4 comes head-on towards earth?
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news146.html
We may become extinct along with the other species on earth.
May be that's paranoid. But there is a possibility. Having an extra-terrestrial colony is a safe bet in such situations.
The amount of knowledge we gain from these missions justifies the funds we put into them.
Homo Sapiens are not a perfect species. We have our problems. We always had. But that should not stop us from exploring. This exploring habit is one of the traits which makes us fit for survival.
I accept your thought that we should try to alleviate the hazards facing our planet, but that should not be at the cost of these explorations.
Really- no water and no hydrocarbons on Jupiter, huh? So what, pray tell, are these swirling bands of dark stuff that I'm seeing?
I couldn't find it. After hours of staring at the picture, I still could not find the water on Mars. Perhaps someone could help me out? I couldn't find the spam either though so maybe there isn't any and this is all a stupid joke.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The swirling clouds are mostly ammonia and the colors are thought to be caused by various phosphine and sulfur compounds. Yes there is a very tiny amount of water in Jupiter's upper atmosphere, less than 0.1%. There is an equally small amount of methane (less than a tenth of a percent I think) too. Not really what I would call "huge amounts" though. Also, the compounds are being continually created then destroyed again when they fall back down to lower altitudes and very high temperatures. Compare to Titan where organic goop coats everything, methane is several % of the atmosphere and literally flows down rivers on the surface (a surface with "water sand" and huge boulders of water ice everywhere!).
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Because there will always be people in poverty or poor. Even if you make them richer, then you just reset the amount of money at which you are considered poor. By the way, the current poverty line is pretty high - my stepdad made enough money to support a house, 4 kids, internet, cable tv, regular big dinners and a new van, but we were considered in poverty by the state, and qualified for free lunch, etc
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
Well now you've lost me. You cited thought and consciousness as an example of something we spend money on that is "painfully obvious". But wait, now you're saying it isn't obvious? Either you don't know what you're talking about or, more likely, we're in agreeance but on different pages in the same book. In either case that's not the subject of the thread so it's irrelevant.
I suppose there should be some clarification as to what constitutes a discovery of water on an extraterrestrial object. There's no doubt that water exists, to some extent, where hydrogen and oxygen are present. However, a "discovery of water" would most likely be a discovery of water capable of supporting life; a few moles of water on a planet of any decent size isn't exactly noteworthy. I'm not saying that I think there is only trace amounts of water on Mars since there is a lot of evidence that suggests otherwise. But like I said in my other post, "Just because something can happen doesn't necessarily mean it will happen."
When do they begin the search for Scotch?
The images are not recoloured. It is simply a product of swapping the red channel for an infra-red channel as NASA often does.
This graph shows the reflectance of each of the colours on the calibration target. Notice how the blue target relects infra-red light in the region of 400-500mm.
When taking most science photos, more often than not they use the infra-red filter. When putting together pictures for the press they use the infra-red channel rather than red. The upshot of this is that particular blues reflect strongly in infra-red and come out in the final picture as red.
You can see a wonderful example in this picture which shows the blue insulation tape as pink, and the usually blue NASA logo as red.
They're not modifying the images, just using the filters most useful for science applications.
Uhm, I'm not wanting to go anywhere near an uncontained mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. It's very, very unstable.
Unless the temperature is very low, the reaction will happen in an explosive manner. And even under adverse conditions, it will happen, albeit slowly.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
If you don't believe me, Google is your friend.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Given Jupiter's size, 0.1% is actually quite a lot. Indeed, 0.1% on Earth is quite a lot, there's stuff we use all the time that relies on elements and compounds far more scarce than that.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Well I wouldn't want to be around a hydrogen leak either. The two do react explosively if the proper conditions are met, a spark will certainly do it. That's why hydrogen lines have multiple shells and multiple sensor relays to report any leaks. But you have to remember that we're on Earth, conditions will vary elsewhere. Pressure, temperature, etc...
Technically oxygen and hydrogen do form water spontaneously (keep in mind spontaneous doesn't indicate a time scale). It's a very slow process though. I just didn't want to overly complicate my original post.
perhaps he was as much an arrogant fuck about it as you were in your post, and thereby managed to piss off a whole load of people who would have otherwise listened to him.
AFAIK, all the "water" finds on Mars have been indirect - albeit very convincing - evidence of surface water in the past.
Radar sounding will produce no more direct evidence of water/ice than this or this. Radar just adds another plodding data point to something that has already been established, by NASA by the way.
an ill wind that blows no good
I thought it was "generally accepted" that the Hindenburg disaster was as big as it was more the genius combination of hydrogen, gun cotton and thermite in the construction, rather than just hydrogen.
You don't get much free hydrogen in the atmosphere (except in the upper layers where there is little oxygen). The vast majority of the hydrogen on earth is tied up in water molecules. Also, it hardly takes special conditions to produce water, if free oxygen and hydrogen are present, it only takes a small energy input for them to combine.
Something can be both obvious to you and impossible to prove. For example, can you PROVE that anyone you meet is actually a conscious, thinking being? You know they are, but try proving it. All you have are their statements that they are (which doesn't constitute proof) and your observations of how they behave (which might be indicative, but isn't proof). Prove that we're not all actually a simulaton, or a dream you're having.
All that money isn't going into space, it's being spent on Earth. And the people that money is going to (albeit indirectly) are spending it on housing, food, clothing, education and so on - so it's keeping THEM off the poverty line. And also the people teaching their kids, selling them cars and houses, assembling and shipping their TV sets and so on and on. It's a trickle down effect - keep pouring money in at the top, and people will keep spending it. And for the rare breed who just stick it in the bank, the bank will turn around and lend it to someone for a house, a car, whatever.
That's not even touching on the scientific benefits, or the intangible effect of pictures from the surface of a distant planet being beamed into our lounge rooms.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
once we colonise mars, we can send the poor people there! its two birds with one stone! seriously though, poverty inspired huge numbers of people to venture to the new world 400 years ago. crossing the atlantic on a 17th Century tallship was probably a similar venture in relative terms to going to mars in about 50 to 100 years, when it becomes feasible. obviously its all completely different now, no need to stack up all the 'are you comparing yadda yadda...? replies below, however there may well be some parallels. furthermore, space travel is just as valid a use of resources as sport, or art. it doesnt feed your kids, but it does feed their spirits.
Anybody can see the Martian icecaps in a telescope. I presume the article deals with discovering liquid water or water closer to the equator.
MARSIS instrument. Will shortwave radio work for Mars colonists? Ionospheric sounding, 0.1 to 5.5 MHz, will provide some clues.
It seems to me that hey should use that costly technology here on earth to find water for those country that dont have any drinkable water.
At least the people on the bus the Daily Sport spotted on Mars won't have died of thirst.
H2 (potential fuel panacea and, oh, what also blew the Hindenburg up)
This has been known to be false for about 15 years. If you look at a videotape of the Hindenburg fire, there's a very visible flame, especially right around when the announcer says "oh, the humanity!"
Hydrogen burns invisibly.
The History Channel has an interesting special covering this. It turns out that the problem was almost certainly the aluminum powder gel in cellulose that they used to waterproof and leakproof the canvas shell. This sounds like a good idea at first - that's basically antiperspirant - until you realize that that's also primitive rocket fuel. Any large spark would have set it off, and it would have burned like that no matter what it was full of.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
That is rather facile logic.
Facile means "easily comprehended," or "presented in a pleasant form" (as opposed to a difficult form.) Exercises left to the reader are exercises for which the author could not or would not provide a facile explanation, for example.
Perhaps you meant "fallacious," given that grandparent was engaging in hasty generalization?
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Please take a chemistry course. Oxygen and hydrogen don't just spontaneously form water. You have to nudge the solution over it's activation barrier before the two will react. Of course the activation barrier depends on many variables.
Whereas you are correct, your tone is utterly unwarranted. Converting hydrogen and oxygen to water can be accomplished many ways, one of which is burning, and given that essentially any planet with an atmosphere will generate lightning, it's pretty damned difficult to imagine a situation in which no water at all would be created.
As long as grandparent takes a chemistry course, you ought to consider a course in statistics.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I said water on Mars is a virtual certainty and implied it almost certainly exists in reasonable quantities. It's unlikely to be a trace element.
Yes, steam is water. However, steam is vapour, and has a tendency to disperse in vacuums. As a result, I'm not going to turn my generalization into an absurd one and suggest that, say, water is abundant on Mercury. It probably isn't. While there most likely were the ingredients for water on Mercury, chances are the stuff has vapourised and is nowhere near the planet today in anything but trace amounts.Hence the careful phrasing: "Truth be told, we know that there's water just about everywhere where the temperature and pressure doesn't turn it to steam." which does not mean "There's no water where there's steam".
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
What if they don't find water, but instead, find out the planet is composed of Vodka? :-) Hey, it could happen...
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
Some "trolls" are designed to make you think. This one obviously got a LOT of people thinking. Or would you rather that everyone be a knee-jerk same-opinion fan-boi to whatever is currently fashionable?
But it's easier to scream "troll alert" than to think, isn't it, Mr. AC?
Facile also means : "Arrived at without due care, effort, or examination; superficial". and "Readily manifested, together with an aura of insincerity and lack of depth".
Though, fallacious also works.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
>Why is there so much water on Earth?
Because it's in the right temperature zone, and comets (made of ice) from the OORT belt have been bombarding our planet for billions of years.
Same goes for Europa, though I was under the impression they had tons of ice but the only liquid water might be deep beneath the surface.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
Point taken.
For a big group of color images and an explination of why they look the way they do, check out http://www.xpda.com/mars/
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
That's an old, very debunked myth. Propane burns faintly invisibly, and yet most campers have seen a propane lantern (hydrogen's flame, by the way, isn't invisible (even in the visible spectrum), just very faint blue - the darker it is around the flame, the easier it is to see it.). The reason that propane lanterns are so bright has nothing to do with the light from the flame - it has to do with the heat from the flame heating up a mantle and making it glow. In the case of the Hindenburg, it was one big lantern-mantle.
It's a Cyrillic alphabet. It's like all those keys you never push on a calculator.
And, in fact, it appears to be the third most common molecule in the universe, after H2 and CO. I can't name a single solid body in from Saturn and beyond that has been studied for surface composition that doesn't have large amounts of water-ice, apart from Quaoar (and our look at it has been pretty darn distant ;) ). Plus, the distant gas giants are more properly known as "ice giants", because of they are believed to have huge icy cores. Jupiter's moons tend to be quite icy as well (hence the proposed JIMO mission - "Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter")
The only reason that water is rarer in the inner solar system is evaporation and sublimation, and then erosion from the atmosphere by the solar wind. Earth was partially protected by its magnetic field.
It's a Cyrillic alphabet. It's like all those keys you never push on a calculator.
I had no malice or contempt towards my parent in my post, nor was I condescending. I just think someone should be informed before they speak about a subject. Perhaps my tone was stern, but that's about it.
I never said there wasn't any water on other planets; I was merely pointing out that it isn't impossible for a planet with oxygen and hydrogen to have no water. In fact it's very possible. The planet can contain enough thermal energy, internally and externally, and have a low enough pressure to break O-H bonds.
I'm actually about to finish my second statistics course. Not that it has any relevance to this conversation.
Now that we're (possibly) getting closer to artificial intelligence, how are we ever going to prove that a program is self-aware, and not just feeding us stuff from its' own programming?
A lot of science fiction deals with this. For example, say it becomes possible to upload ourselves into a computer one day. How will we ever know for sure that it really worked, that Joe Blow is really "in the box", and not just a program mimicking him?
I don't know where you're getting your information. We have yet to find water (or water ice) anywhere in the universe that's not on Earth.
Yes, spectrographic studies have implied that molecular water may be highly abundant in the universe, but that's obviously not the same thing.
And there's a theory that Europe might have a highly saline liquid sea beneath its surface (there's electromagnetic evidence to that effect), but it's never been observed.
There's a huge difference between thinking that water might be possible on other planets and actually finding it there. So far we have many (mutually contradictory, ill-supported) theories, but absolutely no actual observation.
There's too much science fiction in your science.
His estimate was way off. While it is believed that there's water vapor in Jupiter's atmosphere, it's a trace amount, way too small as a fraction of the total composition to be measured from a distance.
Basically there's about as much water vapor in Jupiter's atmosphere, in terms of partial pressure, as there is phosphine in ours.
Your dictionary is broken. Facile means "appearing neat and comprehensive only by ignoring the true complexities of an issue; superficial."
Er, according to some Hubble-gazing folks, Europa's crust is _made_ of frozen water. Stand corrected.
Digging up some complete assertion from Google is not the right way to persuade someone. I could find you an article stating unequivocally that the moon is made of green cheese. Doesn't make it true.
We've never been to Europa. We've never landed a robot on Europa. We've never even surveyed Europa from orbit. We don't have the foggiest idea what the surface of Europa is made of. A press release from 1995 stating without supporting evidence that Europa's got ice on it ain't gonna cut it.
Given that attitude, you have no basis to assert that we have "not found" water ice anywhere in the universe other than our own planet, either. We've seen it streaming off the ass-ends of comets for centuries, and you're doing the Clintonian "it depends on what you mean by 'found' " two-step. Got an ego problem?
We've seen it streaming off the ass-ends of comets for centuries
This is why I bemoan the current state of science education in this country.
Yes, you can see something forming the tail of a comet. Do you know what it is? The theory of comets as volatile objects goes back to the 1700s. The idea has been bounced around ever since, notably coming up short when Schiaparelli announced his hypothesis that the Perseid meteors might be fragments of a comet.
We sent probes through the coma of Halley's Comet in 1986; we learned nothing about its composition. We sent Deep Space One through the tail of a comet, but again didn't sample it in any way except photographically.
So basically we know no more about the composition of comets today than we knew three hundred years ago.
A vitally important part of the practice of science is being able to distinguish between observations and suppositions. We have observed that visible matter streams off of comets in the inner solar system. We have made suppositions about what that matter might be. But that's all.
There is water ice on the moon.... The moon is not on earth. http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/ice/ice_moon. html
No water was detected from the July 31 crash of Lunar Prospector into the Moon.
Or you could just read the actual release:Sorry, but indirect measurements of hydrogen do not add up to "there's water on the moon!" especially when the one experiment designed to actually detect water on the moon found
Learning words from dictionaries works about as often as Bullwinkle pulling rabbits from his hat.
facile
1483, from M.Fr. facile "easy," from L. facilis "easy to do" and, of persons, "pliant, courteous," from facere "to do" (see factitious). Facilitate is from 1611.
facile princeps
1834, from L., lit. "easily first." An acknowledged leader or chief.
facility
c.1425, from M.Fr. facilité, from L. facilitatem, from facilis "easy" (see facile). Its sense in Eng. moved from "genteelness" to "opportunity" (1519), to "aptitude, ease" (1532). Meaning "place for doing something," which makes the word so beloved of journalists and fuzzy writers, first recorded 1872.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I had no malice or contempt towards my parent in my post, nor was I condescending. ... Perhaps my tone was stern, but that's about it.
Something one often needs age to learn is that one's tone is frequently not what one intends for it to be. Arguing with the observer what the observed tone of one's own voice is is naïve.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I have problems with this "debunking" for many reasons. For example, one of the very first assertions it makes is that an electrical spark does not have the energy to light the paint aflame. This is borderline ridiculous: not only does the History Channel special show a tesla coil lighting a reproduction on fire while wet, but we're talking about a bolt of lighting, which is frequently in excess of fifty thousand degrees in temperature. The second thing claimed is that a spark could not jump in some arbitrary direction required by the theory, except of course that the theory does not actually demand any direction, and that sparks are not governed by directionality in any way. Besides, it's not as if this theory demands a spark at all; the most likely explanation for static ignition is the charge built up between ground and the skin's static potential moving through ionized air; the ramie cording guaranteed that that was all kept on the skin, and the frame structure was such that the charge would have been unevenly distributed towards the tail of the ship (there were in fact many eyewitness acounts of a tail glow on the ship, which many have speculated as Saint Elmo's Fire, which would be consistent with an immense ground potential charge being developed.) Whether or not the static charge caused the ignition, it's fairly transparent that the charge was there, and physical simulations suggest that the charge should have been huge.
Now, maybe it's just me, but when the History Channel has a NASA rocket fuel specialist saying that the paint is equivalent to primitive rocket fuel, and then some guy from a planetarium says "nuh-uh," I tend to believe the NASA guy. I'm not really sure where this guy gets the notion that the paint was the only fuel; it's not as if the hydrogen is expected to just sit still. The theory is not that the hydrogen didn't burn; it's just that the hydrogen wasn't the origin of the fire. When you consider that there was no oxygen in the baloon, then please explain to me how the fire started inside, without the skin burning.
I'm also interested to learn where this guy gets the 1000 times too slow number; that seems quite made up. To wit, without the cellulose base, the paint was basically a mix of iron oxide and aluminum powder in nearly equal proportions; many of us know that mix, once compressed, as thermite, and it does indeed burn very quickly when presented with a gaseous fuel source. I've seen phosphorus doped thermite burn a hundred foot line in three seconds; god only knows what it would do with hydrogen behind it, but the speeds I've seen are consistent with the thirty four second period in which the Zeppelin burned. Mind you, given the seperation between the aluminum and iron, you should be seeing about a twenty minute burn, which the paper referred to actually brings up as a point, but then dismisses, given that the hydrogen burning underneath the paint burns hot enough to ignite the paint and at a speed consistent with what's on film. Cellulose Acetate Butyrate is also quite flammable, as people which have worked in photo labs are pretty familiar with. Its ignition temperature is very low, and it will burn despite water, so the storm is effectively a non-issue.
This paper is extremely disappointing, and seems largely to be a diatribe against the other authors. It wastes huge tracts of space talking about the nature of proof, then makes a whole bunch of handwaving about rigorous analysis of the original paper's propositions. Unfortunately, that so-called rigorous analysis is anything but; you'll note that in fact none of the three principles examines are accurate, and that furthermore even were those three topics debunked the presumption of the paint as a liable source for flame is not actually damaged. Hell, one square inch of the zeppelin's skin burning would be enough to set the hydrogen off, and that's all the paper proposed; the document you've given acts as if they suggest
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Facile also means [answers.com] : "Arrived at without due care, effort, or examination; superficial". and "Readily manifested, together with an aura of insincerity and lack of depth".
This is why one shouldn't attempt to learn words from dictionaries. The tense in which you're interpreting that is incorrect. Evaluating a tic tac toe board is facile, because a decision can be arrived at without care, effort, or significant examination. One particular evaluation of a tic tac toe board, however, cannot be facile. Facile is said of abstract topics, not concrete instances.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I suppose I should be a bit more complete in my response. Another way to address the issue of direction in the word facile is to look at its synonyms. You'll notice that they tend to be listed as things like apt, felicitous or ready.
In my prior example of a tic tac toe board, then, the tense becomes obvious: to evaluate a tic tac to board is any of those three things, but the evaluation had of a particular board is else described.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
You should settle down and marry this guy. You two would get along swimmingly.
Sieg heil! :) Just kidding, you obviously are right.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
If you have an alternative explanation for the clear ice lines in spectrographic data on studies of almost every body in the outer solar system and in the universe as a whole, by all means, please state it. Otherwise, don't make claims that you can't support. All of our knowlege of reality is based on "the best evidence available" - if you have *any* alternative interpretation of the spectrographic data, show it.
Not to mention that the material behaves like ice, shines like ice, has the density of ice, and fits solar system models...
It's a Cyrillic alphabet. It's like all those keys you never push on a calculator.
You clearly haven't read the whole thing; just for starters, they actually discuss what is wrong with igniting it by a tesla coil (tesla coils channel *huge* amounts of power, and even still, they had to orient it just right, and *still* it burned itself out.). Go back, read the whole thing, then come back here. The facts are that cellulose acetate is *not* very flammable at all (search for cellulose acetate on google - check out the MSDS), and 5:1 aluminum to iron oxide, in separate layers, is distinctly *NOT* thermite (thermite burns by stealing oxygen from iron oxide for aluminum combustion). The craft was *not* coated in thermite, and *not* coated by guncotton. In short, read the whole thing, and then we can actually discuss.
It's a Cyrillic alphabet. It's like all those keys you never push on a calculator.
If you have an alternative explanation for the clear ice lines in spectrographic data on studies of almost every body in the outer solar system and in the universe as a whole, by all means, please state it.
We can start with "there's no such thing as an ice line." What you're referring to is the water absorption line, which indicates nothing more than the presence of water molecules. A million tons of ice, or just molecular water in the outer fringes of the atmospheres in question? Nobody knows. Nobody has any way of knowing.
All of our knowlege of reality is based on "the best evidence available"
No. Our hypotheses about reality are based on evidence. They don't become knowledge until they're tested. An implication drawn from an untested observation isn't knowledge. It's rumor.
Not to mention that the material behaves like ice
Just what material are you referring to here? We're talking about spectrographic analyses. All we have is light.
Aw, someone's angry that his attempt at correcting someone else failed? (sniffle)
I bet you'll be even angrier when you find out what Hesiod's name actually means.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
they actually discuss what is wrong with igniting it by a tesla coil (tesla coils channel *huge* amounts of power
Actually, I have. Did you bother to stop and think that a tesla coil's power stops seeming huge when we're talking about 1/10th of a lightning bolt's amperage, which I had previously pointed out to you?
Just because they address something doesn't mean they address it accurately.
Go back, read the whole thing, then come back here.
I could say the same to you.
The facts are that cellulose acetate is *not* very flammable at all (search for cellulose acetate on google - check out the MSDS),
When hit with lightning, some kinds of stone catch fire. Cellulose acetate can be lit with a blowtorch, which is in the neighborhood of 400 to 600 degrees fahrenheit. A lightning bolt is often two orders of magnitude hotter than that.
Look, when exposed to fourty thousand degrees of heat, granite melts. Do you really think that the cellulose acetate might not have even been melted out of the way of the canvas?
Besides, if you know what a material safety data sheet is, you should know that cellulose acetate and cellulose acetate butyrate aren't significantly related. By comparison, remember that both sodium and chlorine are lethal, but together they're not only vital to life, but to the flavor of a potato chip.
Cellulose Acetate Butyrate has a flash point of three hundred ninety five degrees celsius, meaning that without any other flame even present it will spontaneously burst into flame at that temperature. That is less than one percent the temperature of a lightning bolt, approximately the temperature of the air a foot and a half away from a lightning bolt. That means that even in the unlikely event that a lightning bolt went close to the canvas, it would burst into flame.
and 5:1 aluminum to iron oxide, in separate layers, is distinctly *NOT* thermite
5:1 aluminum to iron oxide isn't that far from thermite, which ranges from 1:1 to 4:1.
(thermite burns by stealing oxygen from iron oxide for aluminum combustion).
Which is why when you want it to burn longer you increase the amount of iron, and when you want it to burn hotter you increase the amount of aluminum. I fail to see what point you're trying to make - you could mix it 16:1 in either ratio and it'd still burn a hole through the hood of your car, or set off (even with two tiny flakes, one of which had worked its way through the canvas with its sticky gel coating) the acetate.
The craft was *not* coated in thermite
What I said was that it was coated in something similar. That remains correct, no matter how many words you want to place in capitals framed by asterisks.
and *not* coated by guncotton.
I never said anything like this.
In short, read the whole thing, and then we can actually discuss.
You've ignored nearly everything I had to say, instead focussing on a distorted version of one tiny point I made, ignorant entirely of the remainder. Even given that I've read it, something tells me from the tone of your voice that I could read it thrice more, build my own zeppelin, force a lightning fire, and you still wouldn't be willing to give any credence to anything that chafed against your precious planetarium paper.
Why, he looks at saturn through a telescope; surely he knows more about rocket fuel than a NASA rocket fuel expert.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
The Greek poet? I don't get the joke.
Actually, I have. Did you bother to stop and think that a tesla coil's power stops seeming huge when we're talking about 1/10th of a lightning bolt's amperage, which I had previously pointed out to you?
The incendiary paint theory was not due to lightning, and for good reason: craft like the Hindenburg had been struck by lightning several times previously, with no ill effects. In fact, it is a bit silly to picture such a huge craft *not* getting struck by lightning. Consequently, the theory was about an electrostatic spark between sections of the skin.
Furthermore, you completely ignored the fact that the skin *burned itself out*. Yes, a rock can catch on fire when struck by lightning, but it will *burn itself out*. A theory that the hindenburg fire was from "flammable skin" cannot be based on a skin that will burn itself out relatively quickly.
Just because they address something doesn't mean they address it accurately.
If you misrepresent it, I call it as I see it.
Cellulose Acetate Butyrate has a flash point of three hundred ninety five degrees celsius, meaning that without any other flame even present it will spontaneously burst into flame at that temperature.
Yes. Barely lower than that of paper. You don't see paper spontanously bursting into flame all of the time, do you? Not to mention that this was fabric coated in cellulose acetate butyrate. It observibly burns itself out. The Hindenburg, by contrast, had completely been engulfed in flame in 34 seconds, with a wavefront moving at 25 feet per second.
5:1 aluminum to iron oxide isn't that far from thermite, which ranges from 1:1 to 4:1.
WRONG. Thermite is 3:1 *Iron Oxide To Aluminum*. It's the other way around. The coating was 10-fold off from even the boundaries of the thermite reaction, and it wasn't a mixture at that, which is required for thermite to function. In fact, there was a binder between the aluminum and iron. Lastly, the top of the craft would have burned with different color, intensity, and rate than the bottom part, since iron oxide was only on the top; nothing like this is either visible in pictures, nor described by witnesses.
Which is why when you want it to burn longer you increase the amount of iron
This isn't even close to thermite. There's not enough oxygen that the aluminum could steal to sustain the reaction, *even if they were mixed, which they weren't*. You're an order of magnitude off, and not mixed. It's not even close to thermite, so comparisons are just ridiculous.
Why, he looks at saturn through a telescope; surely he knows more about rocket fuel than a NASA rocket fuel expert.
The NASA scientist you refer to is Addison Bain. His theory is not lightning, but electrostatic charge. So, you clearly disagree with the NASA scientist.
Just ignoring that, Dessler (who authored the refutation that I provided) has a BS in physics from Caltech, a PhD in physics from Duke, worked for 7 years on space physics research for Lockheed, worked for 26 years as a professor of space physics and astronomy at Rice, and directed the Space Science Laboratory at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center for four years. Other authors on the subject include Donald E. Oers (48 year commercial balloon pilot, 12 years working on airship construction, starting in the 40s, and 29 years in naval nuclear engineering design) and William H. Appleby (a statistical researcher, aircraft maintaenance warrant officer, and ground crew member for lighter than air craft).
If you want to debate the subject, then lets go.
1) If hydrogen airships burn invisibly, why did hydrogen airships from World War burn highly visibly and in the same manner, despite being made completely differently?
2) Why does the fire quite clearly burn along gas-sack lines, even though the skins are continuous?
3) Why did the skin burn out so easily, and why is there so much left, if it was supposedly
It's a Cyrillic alphabet. It's like all those keys you never push on a calculator.