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Stardust to Return January 15
accessdeniednsp writes "Seven years ago, the Stardust probe was sent to intercept Comet Wild 2, gather dust particles, and return to Earth. Stardust is scheduled to touch down in a Utah desert on January 15. From the article: 'Our mission is called Stardust, in part because we believe some of the particles in the comet will, in fact, be older than the sun,' said Don Brownlee of the University of Washington, the principal investigator of the mission."
land like the last one.
Is it fascism yet?
The only way this could be a tad bit dangerous is if you happen to be a member of the Kansas educational board.
This article to return to the front page of Slashdot in a day or two.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The radiation from this capsule will transform anything near it..to..oh god, they're already here! SPACE ROBOTS!
"GO STAND BY SOME STAIRS"
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Maybe it will touch down here:
0 +West,+Lindon,+UT
http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=355+South+52
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?num
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Stuff rains down on us from space all the time, including comets (at least where "all the time" is in geological terms). If there was something that could be alive on a comet that could harm us, something like it would have come down and killed us all by now.
My God! It's full of Mormons!
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Guess I'll have to check IMDB.com
Quickly! We may... not have... enough... time... (gasp)
(THUD)
Well, I believe his point was that it certainly can't be a virus. There's no way it could be compatible with any hosts, unless of course one subscribes to the Intelligent Design notion, in which case even though it has not evolved in this environment it could be compatible.
Comets Crashing into our small planet is one of our biggest long term threats. The samples will go a long way in being able to identify their composition and look at means to destroy them in future.
Although the likelyhood of asteroids hitting the earth are higher, comets are special in that they give very little warning before they hit. Maybe a few years, while asteroids can be predicted much earlier. A large comet hitting the earth, will likely be an ELE (Extinction Level Event), destroying most life and all humans.
To me, this is something that we doing for sustaining human life. I don't care about the money spent, or the small chance of bringing in viruses, which they may have already considered.
Life is just a conviction.
I can't believe I didn't get on either of the name list microchips on this probe. Poot!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Other than the cool factor, the article doesn't touch on what good it will do us to study particles older than the sun. Anyone in the know care to elaborate?
Two answers, depending on if you mean, "why are we spending money on this?" or "science is cool, teach me more!"
The answer to the first question is two-fold. One is you never know where the next crucial clue or insight is going to come from, but even if you discount a scientific endeavor altogether as impractical, it's the same reason we play sports, watch TV, listen to music, etc. These all serve no primary, "practical" purpose, but they are crucial to a robust culture.
The answer to the second question is it will help us (I'm speculating here) understand which of the models regarding the formation of stars and star systems best match observed reality. This leads to answering other questions, for example, which stars to look at more closely (perhaps for signs of life). If you're still at a loss to why we should do such a thing, I refer you to my first answer.
They forgot we use meters on Earth, and not Quantum Light Years... my guess? Big smash, nice crater, Nothing to see here folks, please move along.
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
NASA/JPL requirements for an earth entry vehicle thats returning any kind of sample are very strict. They require that there be less than a 10^-6 chance of a particle larger than 2 nanometers entering the earth atmosphere.
Those NASA administrators read Crichton too.
It depends greatly on a couple factors:
Coefficient of drag, surface area, mass of the object, and the density of the air it's falling in.
If you assume that the object can survive the freefall from space, then the air changes density enough that it would slow to the terminal velocity of the object at approximately sea level regardless of how fast it was going (within a reasonable orbital velocity)
So to summarize a bit, it'd be easily possible to design a rough-surfaced sphere that could slow to well under 100mph. Just think of a ping-pong ball or a beach ball!
Another variable is the entry angle. Genesis was *targeted* such that it would hit the edge of the earth's atmosphere and utilize it to bleed off almost all of its kinetic energy through friction. The parachutes were only designed to take care of braking it that last 200 mph or so.
Of course, they never deployed, so it essentially hit the ground at terminal velocity - basically the same as if you had just rolled it out of an aircraft at 50,000 feet.
Worst...sig...ever!
Also, to add more, spheres show a very interesting behavior in different fluid flows: They're almost self-parachuting.
"The drag coefficient for a sphere is given with a range of values because the drag on a sphere is highly dependent on Reynolds number. Flow past a sphere, or cylinder, goes through a number of transitions with velocity. At very low velocity, a stable pair of vortices are formed on the downwind side. As velocity increases, the vortices become unstable and are alternately shed downstream. As velocity is increased even more, the boundary layer transitions to chaotic turbulent flow with vortices of many different scales being shed in a turbulent wake from the body. Each of these flow regimes produce a different amount of drag on the sphere."
To summarize that, basically at low speed, spheres form stable airflow which reduces drag substantially, whereas at high speeds, the sphere creates an uneven "wake" (much the way you might imagine a curveball behaving)
damn, i got all excited reading the headline. i thought my fav stripclub was going to reopen. oh well. btw, no need to mark your calender, you will be reminded here in a couple days.
You're absolutely right. Your suggestion is silly.
A life form which evolved to survive on the surface of a comet has zero chance of being successful inside the human body. In order for a life form to evolve to be effective in an environment, it must have exposure to that environment. The viruses which already plague us here on Earth have spent billions of years evolving specifically to attack the other life forms already present on Earth.
Of course, this argument is strongly rooted in evolution. As some other posters have pointed out, if you believe in intelligent design, you might disagree. But then, real-life observations and evidence are overwhelmingly consistent with evolution, not intelligent design, so I think we're safe.
I was student of Don Brownlee at the University of Washington, and I think he's about the most decent and caring professor I've ever had. Even when I was an undergrad, I could go to his office and he'd just talk about his work for what seemed like hours, even to a lowly undergrad. I'm not saying this to name-drop -- I want people to know what a cool person he is. If anyone deserves success, it's Dr. Brownlee. Truly one of the good guys in science. He's one of those rare professors who managed to make himself famous (the guy has an asteroid named after him) while remaining humble and committed to helping his students learn. We need more scientists like him.
You'll pardon my ignorance, but isn't a space probe a wee bit bigger than 2 nanometers?
That's true-- and come to think of it, I'm not going to be anywhere near those lifeforms once they're taken off of the probe. Once they find out our atmosphere has been burning up their relatives, they're going to be PISSED.
I don't moderate anymore. Karma penalty for 90% fair mods? Can I mod that unfair?
You're absolutely right. Your suggestion is silly.
Perhaps, but I think this is a normal, reasonable kind of fear, and we shouldn't try to make people feel stupid for asking questions. This is the biggest problem science faces in getting the public on our side. We need to be less quick in attacking people for not knowing things, and instead show a little empathy and help them learn. There's no sin in not knowing things--the only crime is refusing to accept facts when they are demonstrated.
I want the public to better understand science. The first step in doing that, I believe, is recognizing people's concerns as understandable, if not scientifically sound. As annoying as the pridefully ignorant are, most people aren't really like that. They just have honest questions, and those questions should be answered without supercilious condescension.
"A life form which evolved to survive on the surface of a comet has zero chance of being successful inside the human body. In order for a life form to evolve to be effective in an environment, it must have exposure to that environment. The viruses which already plague us here on Earth have spent billions of years evolving specifically to attack the other life forms already present on Earth."
This is pretty much totally correct regardless of your religious or scientific leanings. "random chance" is just as likely to produce an organism that will do well in both environments as "Intelligent guidance" is.
"Of course, this argument is strongly rooted in evolution. As some other posters have pointed out, if you believe in intelligent design, you might disagree. But then, real-life observations and evidence are overwhelmingly consistent with evolution, not intelligent design, so I think we're safe."
Eh, you are supposed to be a non-biased observer taking facts into account and you say this? You don't know anything about intelligent design beyond reading those that hate/strongly dislike it.
I'm no fan of intelligent design, I see no reason for it (science and religion are asking two very different questions - nothing in "evolution" as we know it precludes an intelligent God and this is a useless mix that only serves to muddy scientific study), but what you say is complete and total ignorance or a complete falsehood (either of which I would rather not be attached too).
Intelligent design focuses on that a supreme all knowing intelligence guides creation whereas evolution is random chance. There isn't much difference between the two otherwise and both are pretty weak in the old "evidence" department on that portion of the theory.
There are people that corrupt both into All-Knowing Absolute Correct Ideas (intelligent design people who say it invalidates evolution, evolutionist who say it invalidates a god), but both are basing thier idea not on evidence (there is none either way, though from a pure scientific point Occam's razor rules and the "random chance" side wins - though that is FAR from proof) but on faith. At best the only testable and verifiable (what is needed for it to be science) is that things change based on environmental pressure due to genetics and recombination - that does not mention anything about *why* this occurs. There is no way to test random chance vs all powerful controller, thus it is not science to declare one anything other than a hypothesis (one can not make it to theory without testing).
If you think evolution precludes a bacteria growing on a comet that is also dangerous to us (but Intelligent design does not) then you are VERY mistaken, nothing in evolution precludes this. It's why NASA (and other space agencies) has such strict guidlines for bringing foreign material into our atmosphere in a protected storage space (vs a large hunk of rock - the heat is considered to kill anything, and if it doesn't I guess it deserves a little human to eat and there is nothing we can do about it anyway).
That two sides of the debate never seem to grasp this is disheartening about the level of education we recieve about scientific theories, it also shows how difficult it is to seperate "belief" from testable and verifiable science.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Oh, you mean superatomic particles. Never mind.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
As pointed out here , Stardust uses the same re-entry method and was built by the same contractor (LockMart) as the Genesis probe which cratered into the Utah desert in 2004 (Sarcastic photo caption: "Thud!"). An investigation revealed that the gravity switches (sensors which are to detect the probe's deceleration in the atmosphere and trigger parachute deployment) were the most likely installed in the "incorrect orientation," which sounds like bureacraticese for "backwards."
Bush Lies On the Record.
The problem comes when you try to actually address those fears. The general public doesn't really want our answers, scientifically sound or not.
The vast majority of people still seem to think airplanes fall out of the sky on a regular basis, and that a car is far safer to be in. They think that terrorism is an actual, credible threat to their lives. They think that stoned babysitters actually do put babies into the oven. They think that mysterious men are out there offering "free perfume samples" which are actually vials of ether.
Hell, most of them still believe in omnipotent being(s) and willfully ignore evidence to the contrary. People simply do not like to learn that what they believed for most (if not all) of their lives is in fact incorrect, and they will fight tooth and nail to avoid learning that.
That, and there's a very large motivation for many people to be able to say "Pfft! Scientists! What do they know, anyway!". The default assumption that scientists are in fact idiots, and have entirely ignored the most obvious of dangers, IS something to be scoffed at, I'm sorry.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
1) Site your source or as far as I am concerned, that is a bullshit number pulled out of your ass.
2) Anyone who makes policy based off of Sci-Fi can go smoke a fag.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Intelligent Design would be far more likely to produce bacteria/viruses harmful to us originating from a comet. An intelligent designer can design such things however they like, and could thus think "I'm going do design a life form which could live on a comet but which could also be dangerous to humans!".
You don't know anything about intelligent design beyond reading those that hate/strongly dislike it.
I have read arguments for it as presented by the Discovery Institute and others. Invariably, their supposed examples of biological systems which are too complex and "irreducible" are really not. They use obscure cases which the average person knows nothing about (microbiology and such) so that the average person is unable to understand the details of their argument. Real biologists routinely counter their examples by demonstrating how these systems might be evolved.
Evolution is extremely testable and has been tested in many different ways. This article presents 29+ extremely strong tests which evolution passes. I find prediction 1.3 to be particularly amazing.
IMO, Intelligent Design is also testable. If we were intelligently designed, we would expect not to see aspects of our design which are utterly bad or easily fixed. In reality, our bodies are full of horrible design. For instance, our pelvises are slanted forward, and the base of our spines must slant back to compensate. This leads to all manner of back pain as we get older. This design flaw makes a lot of sense in evolutionary terms -- we evolved from knuckle-dragging apes -- but no self-respecting engineer would come up with such a design.
Speaking of our spine: it is composed of a whole bunch of vertebrae, which would be great if we were walking around on four legs and didn't need to support our full weight on it vertically. The flexibility would be perfect for galloping like a horse. But, again, it mostly causes problems for us.
Oh, and we have too many teeth to fit in our mouth. What's up with that?
These are just a few small examples. Honestly, I would give God more credit than to think that he designed such poorly-engineered creatures as us.