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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."
. . . 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
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.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
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.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
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. :-)