NASA STEREO Spacecraft Set to Launch

An anonymous reader writes "As first reported on last year, NASA's STEREO mission is set to launch tonight at 8:38pm EST. The two near-identical spacecraft will give us unprecedented stereoscopic views of the Sun-Earth system, hopefully leading to the creation of the first 3-D movies of the Sun! Launch can be watched live on NASA TV with coverage starting at 6:30pm EST."

Comments

While it is great...

[Kazrath]

I want to qualify this first.. I am definitly not a scientist. But I am able to logically think things through.

While it is to be exploring different items in our solarsystem would it not be better to use the billions of dollars it costs to create/launch a mission such as this in researching better propulsion or life support systems for actually supporting true space stations or colonization of planets in other solarsystems. I honestly can't justify wasting my tax dollars on a simultaneous multi picture view of the sun. How could this be used to further any relivant research?

Alot of NASA's projects definitly bring "ooh's and ahh's" but are they really helping? Wasn't the last major breakthrough landing a person on the moon? Everything after it seems to be akin to how M$ keeps repackaging the NT kernal with a new interface.

Re:While it is great...

[Spiked_Three]

Some manager talked about 7-4-2 during the launch.
Let me try and remember what the numbers meant;
7 - was the tons of helium converted (burned) into hydrogen every second.
4 was the 4 reasons why we care; 1) solar winds and how it effects things/us 2) communications and how it was affected 3) was the impact on astronauts (and thus your point about colonization) 4) was the affect on airplanes in our atmosphere (apparently an issue large enough to currently cause restriction of flights near the poles)
2 was for stereo views

He said there is a need to better understand how the sun affects us currently and for future space travel and these experiments will help in that understanding.

For the paranoid types, the air force is also involved in the project - one can only guess how 'stereo' eyes in orbit can be tested and developed as new surveillance technologies.

Re:While it is great...

[rk]

For reference, the fusion works the other way: hydrogen is fused to produce helium. I'm also pretty certain that the sun fuses a LOT more than 7 tons of hydrogen every second. Wikipedia claims it's 3.6e38 protons a second, which my back of the envelope calculation (3.6e38 / 6.02e23) says is basically 6e14 grams, or six hundred million metric tonnes per second, most of which becomes helium... there's some other fusion reactions that make traces of heavier elements, and some of that mass is converted into energy.

My favorite stat is that 99% of the mass of the solar system is the Sun, with the other 1% being Jupiter. Our wonderful planet, with all it's enormity and majesty, and all most of us will ever know personally, is lost in the underflow of the total mass. :-)

Gigantic 3D glasses being erected in desert . . .

[StefanJ]

. . . for those who haven't figured out the trick of fusing images by crossing their eyes.

* * *

Funky fictional anecdote.

Olaf Stapledon's science fiction "novel" (more like a future history) Last and First Men covers the evolution of humanity from us poor demi-apes to a hyper-evolved species living on a terraformed Neptune two billion years from now.

These "last men" are not only telepathic (and have 96 genders and look like anthropomorphic animals), but they can communicate with themselves across time.

Stapledon describes the "last men" astronomers staring at the sky, sending a telepathic impression of the sight one-half of a Neptune year in the future, where their future selves integrate it with their own observation of the sky to create a wide-baseline 3D parallax image of the heavens.

No. I don't know what Stapledon smoked.

Stefan

Re:It launched, nicely

[Spiked_Three]

Not entirely hitch less, they had a delay while they moved some people out of harms way of potential poisonous chemical release upon a mishap. Also had an under temperature condition in one of the fueling components. The delay allowed them to straighten both issues out and then it was hitch less.