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Deep Impact Comet-Smashing Video
DynaSoar writes "Dan Maas is the animation expert who produced NASA's Mars Rover animation which was subsequently used in the PBS Nova episodes 'Mars, Dead or Alive' and 'Welcome to Mars,' the majority of which was done while he was a Cornell student on a summer internship at NASA. His most recent release is NASA's best 'artist's conception' of the Tempel 1 Deep Impact mission. Nobody knows what will happen when 820 pounds of metal slams into the comet with 5 kilotons of force, but whatever happens, Maas's digital precreation is probably way more entertaining than NASA's imagery is likely to be. Two versions of the Deep Impact QuickTime video are available. A couple notes of interest: the original Mars video was produced as a music video, using Lenny Kravitz and Holst as soundtracks. This is available only to K-12 educators. Also, in the interview in the first link, when asked for an inspirational quote, he quotes John Carmack."
Then NASA can make a TV show. It'd increase funding, at least. Heck, make a reality show. Send people to Venus and see how long it takes them to realize they're going to die.
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
You guys are pathetic.
That's cool. Now you can't just vote nags in or out, you can even vote them on the venus.
Is if running this damn thing into the comet puts it on a trajectory to hit Earth down the line...
Talk about one of the biggest "oops" of all time...
PS top floor of the NASA building was ranked as one of the top ten places to have sex in public on Cornell campus. Not that I'd know or anything.
"However, a JPL spokesperson reminded reporters, the mission itself achieved complete success in meeting its own objectives and, quote, 'That's what the taxpayers should keep in mind.'"
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we're wasting our taxpayers money on a comet that's not even going to hit on Earth? I find that incredibly silly.
Why else would we fund billions of dollars to build a spaceship designed to hit a comet that's not going to hit us?
...Ron Jeremy or Peter North.
Site was sluggish and can't remember if we've ever slashdotted NASA before :)
Long
Short
and what the hell Torrent Too
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
We are now so used to manipulated or visualized eye candy of space and planets, that when the real images etc. are released (as with Titan) its very anticlimactic and boring.
I'm just glad that NASA is finally blowing something up. Enough of these silly robots and picutres, send in some TNT! (I think they call this "active science")
Blowing things up is always more interesting to the public than plain science missions. Perhaps next we can send some of those old ICMS to the moon. That would be a good show.
Seriously, NASA has been politicized so much over its entire history. Perhaps publicity impact should be a key factor in planning missions. It certainly couldn't hurt, and it could lead to a lot more funding for them
...Largely due to the fact that nobody knows what the hell the phrase "5 kilotons of force" means in an impact situation, even if we forgive the use of tons as a force unit.
Or are we talking about an amount of energy equivalent to that released by 5 kilotons of TNT (probable)? Then say so. This is bad science, people. The kind that gets Ariane rockets blown up.
It would be really cool if at least the submitters of new stories read their linked articles; the page clearly states that there won't be 5 kilotons, but the equivalent of 5 tons of TNT.
Article Submission: 5 tons of TNT, not 5 *kilo*tons. Considering the scale this is a relatively minor affair.
We hope the mission is a Smashing success.
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The impactor will hit the comet with a force equivalent to five tons of tnt. It will probably produce a crater anywhere from a few yards across to the size of a football stadium.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
More worthless missions with computer generated video animations as the resulting product. It would be totally cool. They could have people and aliens that could battle with futuristic swords made of light. There could be moon sized space stations and bases on different planets and stuff. There could be robots and hookers and robot-hookers!
Seriously, why does anyone give a hoot about NASA's CG work. Lucas does a much better job. NASA needs to start producing REAL pictures with real quality. These crap black and whites that they release and supplement with CG animations are lame and absolutely NOT worth the billions of dollars that are being shot into space. NASA's CG work is so 1970's and lame that I can't help but think of Capricorn One.
Who's got a remix of all the amazing CG from movies like _Deep Impact_, _Independence Day_, _Godzilla 2000_, _The Day After Tomorrow_, and every other blockbuster wherein huge landmark cities are convincingly destroyed? I'd love to see a clever montage of all the "money shots". That would beat all the original movies, even if just by editing out the dialog, characters and plots.
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make install -not war
can we keep javascript off gov sites.
What they need is to put up a mission with an ordinary guy on board, someone the people can relate to. Just send up plenty of carbon rods and they'll be perfectly safe.
Impact video mostly fragments, looking kinda dated now. Of course I must include my essential link to the most complete map of the inner solar system.
And I recently re-did some density visualizations, a lot. more abstract, but cool in a trippy visuals kinda way.
And finally - the most relevant - is an old movie I made to visualize a comet diverting mission, it's about 10 minutes and if shows a spacecraft flying through space with a nuke intended to give a nidge to an incoming comet. It's not great resolution, but I can't find the high definition versions that were used in a couple of TV shows. There are some ultra high definition stills in a book by Duncan Steel.
What the hell man there's no sound in that video! What a cheap production. I mean come on, do they think there's no sound in space or something???
.....wait a minute...
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
...when Lenny Kravitz was asked in person, backstage after one of his concerts in L.A. in 2003, by a JPL representive for permission to use his music in the public release, he declined.
BTW-The Kravitz song in the non-public release was I Gotta Get Away and the Holst song was from the American Beauty Soundtrack.
At first I though that they were about to blown this thing into pieces. Now, after seeing the video, I know that they are only going to crate a small crater at one side. Why not use 5 megatons instead of just 5 tons while you're at it? I mean, it's one of the very few space missions that something interesting actually happens. Why not make it more spectacular then?
Just my website.
I really liked the way Bruce Willis gave up his life so his daughters boyfriend could live (and to save the planet). Personally I would have insisted Ben Aflek do the job. I mean, he DID draw the short straw.
BTW.. How come the explosion dont sound like no xploshun? If y' could hear that guy breathin in his helmet when he wuz shutin down thet cumputer with the red eye, then sherly you could hear the spaceship blowin up?!
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@ ?--NASA ?
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"Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
Consider the adjacent Slashdot article about Lucas's new studio,
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/26/13321
- Would you pay $10 to see it once?
- Do you expect NASA to produce it for "free"?
- Do you expect NASA to subcontract the video to a "real" CG house?
The box office from the Star Wars movies, and related paraphernalia licensing, sufficed to pay for several Shuttle missions, or perhaps ten major satellite programs, or a century's worth of space science at NSF. It may be that these films have inspired a few people to go into science and engineering, But these films are, of course, pure fantasy in their depiction of space and space travel. I don't mean to diminish the splendid entertainment that Lucas offers, but I can't help the following comparison:Items 2 and 3 above will strongly impact NASA's budget; high quality CG added to a documentary structure could easily run in the mid seven figures for a single film. For a tenth that amount you can get Pretty Good results, and keep a hundred grad students in beer and chips for a year.
Those hundred grad students will get you to Mars in twenty years. Or, you could help George Lucas buy a spare yacht today.
That we can maneuver two vehicles far from earth, coordinated and with precision, shows how far mankind has advanced...
(Of course, this assumes that it all actually works.)
Keep in mind that the whole impactor crash plus spacecraft flyby will only require a small fraction of a second.
Quoting Rick Grammier, a mission project manager from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena: "If I ran this clip at the speed of the actual encounter, you wouldn't have seen anything. It would have been all over in the blink of an eye."
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
You miss the point, Slashdaughter.
It doesn't matter what you think: It doesn't matter what I think. It matters what a million pissed-off voters think.
Any schmuck can get elected with this. It's a free pass to Congress. Campaigning against the nerds is a cheap and easy way to get elected, especially when the housing bubble starts to deflate and foreign governments start buying Eurobonds instead of US treasury bills.
All they have to do is stand up and start yapping about 'Welfare for the nerds' and 'millions of dollars of your money for comet smashing'. They don't have to talk about any real issues or piss anyone off like big corporate campaign contributors or psycho-moron bible thumpers.
Then science budgets will be slashed big time and the only place that legitimate scientific research will be done is under secret 'national security' budget covers.
Supporting insanity like comet-smashing guarantees more money going to military secret projects. More money to recruiting videos of yahoos riding tanks over Ali Babas.
The press release is a masterpiece of indirection. It takes them 5 paragraphs to admit they have a problem and then this little gem:
Although they may be "very excited and looking forward to the encounter", they won't be able to see the results very well.shows up because we are now threatening not only our own safety but the rest of the galaxy as well. Chances are, somebody is out there, and chances are this would probably cause them to go 'oh sh!$'.
These science missions, and US space and military research, can be traced to almost all of the great technological advancements of our time. Spending money on these costs less than the worldwide blockbuster movie budget and greatly increases our technological prowess.
Hell, if it wasn't for DARPA, we wouldn't even be posting here.
Those million pissed off voters need to start understanding where their standard of living comes from.
In a way though, it's a bit annoying that NASA won't come up with a solid prediction that could falsify the 'dirty snowball' model, but Van Flandern has made a prediction that would support this 'satellite model' for comets. I'm not sure that he's correct, especially with his starting premise, but at least he's making a prediction, and lots of the options (such as the probe just blowing right through it) would falsify his model, which is the way science should work.
Okay, the animation is cool, but I feel badly for whatever sorry bastard alien life form happens to live on that comet. So much for "We come in peace."
HULK SMASH PUNY COMET
A number of the observatories on Mauna Kea are planning on turning their telescopes to watch and record the event. I'm fairly sure that Keck, Gemini and Subaru domes will be observing and recording the event (The Subaru primary mirror is 27 feet in diameter, should make for a good view :).
So it won't only be NASA footage we will see - hopefully some of the scopes will capture spectacular images of the impact.
I'm sure all of the insensitive clods out there have Quicktime installed, but for the rest of us who don't want bloatware, can somebody please convert it to some other format and post a link?
.mov codec and winamp plugin? That'd be great, thanks.
And can someone please write a
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Weight, bandwidth, power density, latency and distance all combine to make the beaming back of HDTV over huge distances a difficult problem. If you have a solution, please post it here.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Long version (.mov) Long version (divx)
Short version (.mov) Short version (divx)
CRTC allows my cable company to broadcast the golf channel, the gay channel, the porn channel, the home shopping network, but not the NASA channel. And the government wonders why the brain drain to the States. Sheesh.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Radiothermal Generators will solve the power problem. You don't need to worry about latency, because that's only an issue in two way communication. Distance is only an issue due to power limitations (which we've already dealt with). That only leaves weight and bandwidth. Bandwidth issues can be eliminated by running multiple transmitters (you've got the power). Weight isn't an issue either. It's space. Things are weightless in space.
So basically, it all boils down to a question of power, the answer to which is RTGs.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I believe that the impactor will awaken some long-dormant horror, entombed in the icy heart of the comet.
The science returns will be cold comfort when our skies are blackened by chill wings of He Who Slumbers.
Not wanting to become His breakfast, I, for one, will welcome our new alien overlord.
Oh! The lidless eyes! Ia! Ia! Where is your God now?
Hah pretty funny to wake up and see myself on the front page :).
Three other artists and I are currently working on an IMAX film about the Mars Rover mission, to be released sometime next year. The image quality will be much better than my old NASA animation. We are re-creating the Rovers' actual environments on Mars using returned images and terrain data.
The latency issue comes into play in a low power environment because you have to drive enough computing power so the probe can make it's own decisions.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Your post indicates you know nothing about what happens in space. Before you get self rightous and start firing people, take a little time to learn something and pull your head out of your a$$.
The MRI and HRI systems were built here on earth, and as such, are built in human compatible atmospheres, temperatures, and gravity.
Once the system is launched into space, the temperature and vaccuum cause changes in focus and outgassing that change and distort the lenses and mirrors in the various optics. Hence the 'bake out' that commenced after initial ATLO (on orbit) operations and checkout.
So here on earth, engineers have to predict how the outgassing, temperatures, and other forces will bend/clean/pollute/distort each mechanical telescope component, each optic, and each CCD, and then design each one to either distort into a correct plane, or allow for some adjustment on orbit. The temperatures involved in deep space missions is a huge driver in these designs.
Deep impact, being a discovery class mission (READ: Cheap NASA mission, faster,cheaper,better, whatnot) did not have the budget to send a complex focus adjustment mechanism with the mission, hence the extra analysis, and unfortunatly, slight out of focus after in flight bakeout.
Nevertheless, even without the numerical correction that has been determined to work to correct the optics, the HRI is higher resolution than ANY other space based telescope up there, even with the focus defect.
So pull your head out, learn something, and get ready to watch some carnage.
Weight isn't an issue once you have the thing in space, but weight is an enormous issue in getting the thing up into space.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
I believe that in "Red Mars" Book (from the Mars Trilogy) one of the ways of getting funds to send all the people they send to mars is a sort of reality show. And I wonder WHY the NASA doesnt make it with - for example - the in day life inside the shuttle. Im sure a lot of advertisers would love their "product placement" in the ISS.
The alien overlords are going to be upset.
Here they disguise all their spacecraft as asteroids or comets, and you go and damage them!
Sheesh, humans, didn't you know that this one was their external swimming pool?
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
The fact that your business is 100 years old indicates it's not making those kind of errors - at least not on a regular basis.
http://dazza101.blogspot.com/2005/07/deep-impact-h its-comet.html
No the original post is absolutely correct.
We know nothing about the interior of the comet.
If there is a high-pressure gas in the interior, or an ignitable chemical, then even a very small impact could create a jet-like opening in the comet.
The resulting ejecta could take many, many years to complete.
And, if so, then the comet would significantly alter its trajectory.
This sort of mission is extremely prone to chaotic/compounded influences.