There are some more details in the BBC article here. Apparently the radio is working fine but it seems to be transmitting random data. Anyone know where the 'reset' button is?
Pasadena:(
This appears to be a serious problem, but the team will be sure to have a book several inches thick of things to try.
Let's wish them luck, loosing Beagle 2 was bad as we'd just lost the Nozumi probe, Spirit was proving to be a brilliant success in an otherwise gloomy period of exploration.
I was pissed enough that so many people on/. did laugh when Beagle disappeared; let's hope the same doesn't happen in the other direction.
They haven't quite given up on Beagle 2 yet. For the last few days its controllers have not sent any communications to Mars. Assuming that the lander is in one piece, it should now have switched to a beacon mode which will transmit throughout the Martian day.
ESA will begin listening for Beagle 2 again over the weekend, but this is very much a last-ditch attempt.
IIRC, there was a similar battle between supermarkets and the music industry here in the UK a few years ago. They used to import CDs from European distributers and sell them in the UK for a cheaper price. The industry tried to combat this in two ways. First, they added "bonus" tracks to the UK one to make the versions they are selling different to the usual UK release. Japan seems to do this as well.
They also tried to stop them in the courts. IIRC, they lost. Other industries have done the same thing; some clothes companies went ballistic when they thought they might lose their rip-of-Britain sales.
The company that tried it with clothes was Tesco sourcing Levis outside the UK and they lost the case.
(I don't think that should be possible, though... how can CD Wow be infringing copyright if they have nothing to do with the copying process used to make the CDs, but just buy and resell them?)
I think it is because copyright law gives the holder final say over how their work may be distributed. For the first (and possibly last) time in my life - is there a lawyer in the house?
Auburn University scientists 'realized there is already a lot of hydrogen in hydrocarbon fuel'
Kind of implied in the word 'hydrocarbon' isn't it?
Besides, the novelty kind of wore off about 50 years ago when the vast majority of global hydrogen production switched from reacting iron with steam to the catalytic conversion of methane and petroleum gases in oil refineries.
And catalytic production of hydrogen from heavy hydrocarbons goes way back to the Fischer-Tropsch process for making synthetic fuels from coal, originally developed in the 1920s, perfected in the 1930s under the Nazis and used until relatively recently in South Africa.
The article doesn't really make clear what is new here - perhaps the team have perfected a table-top system???
Olivine is relatively rare on the Earth's surface and is largely restricted to volcanoes sourcing very deep magmas which are deficient in aluminium and the alkali metals such as sodium and potassium which are abundant in the Crust. So you find olivine lavas coming out of hot-spot volcanoes such as the ones in Hawaii.
Olivine is not found in magmas that are forming at shallow depths which tend to be rich in silica. Moreover, olivine rich magma intruding into the Crust will react with aluminium, silica and alkali metals and change their composition.
So if you find olivine you know the originating magma is coming from deep down and hasn't hung around in the Crust for very long.
Olivine is not terribly stable under wet conditions. Olivine reacts with water to form clays and iron oxide. The results also imply that the olivine bearing rocks have not been heated in the presence of water (such as you would find in the formation of a mountain range), since olivine reacts at high temperatures in the presence of water to form serpentinite and magnetite.
Therefore in the time since rocks were crystallised they haven't been in the presence of water.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:Spirit not that impressive...?
on
News from Mars
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The Russians sent, what, 9 probes to Mars in the 70s as well -- only one survived. And only for a few seconds at that.
I make it seven.
Kosmos 419 (May 1971). Mars orbiter intended to beat Mariner 8 to the planet. It reached Earth orbit but the booster failed to restart, it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere a few days later. The only positive point is that it did get further than Mariner 8 which ended up in the Atlantic.
Mars 2 (May 1971) . Mars orbiter and lander. Reached Mars and deployed lander which entered the Martian atmosphere at the wrong angle and crashed. The orbiter successfully returned data for three months.
Mars 3 (May 1971). The twin of Mars 2. The probe succesfully deployed the lander which touched down on Mars - the first craft to do so. Data was returned from the surface for 20 seconds - the reason for the failure is unknown - either the probe was toppled by a raging storm or there was a failure with the uplink to the orbiter. (The same storm delayed the return of images from the US's Mariner 9 orbiter). The Mars 3 orbiter failed to enter the correct Martian orbit and was put into a highly elliptical orbit. It returned data for almost three months.
Mars 4 (July 1973). A Mars orbiter intended to serve as part of a fleet of four ships. It was damaged by radiation on the voyage to Mars and failed to fire its retro engine. The orbiter passed by Mars, taking some pictures of an astonishingly high quality (better than those obtained by the US to the time) and performed some work on the Martian atmosphere.
Mars 5 (July 1973). The twin of Mars 4, but this one entered an orbit around the planet. It returned surface images before after less than a month. Again the images were superb.
Mars 6
(August 1973). A heavy lander intended to use Mars 4 and 5 as relays to Earth. It entered the Martian atmosphere and relayed data to Earth during the descent. It is believed the retro rockets failed to fire and it smashed into the surface at high speed. Nevertheless, the Soviets were the first to make measurements of the Martian atmosphere, sadly much of the data was badly mangled during transmission.
Mars 7 (August 1973)
The twin of Mars 6, but this one didn't even land on Mars. For some reason the lander was ejected from the bus stage far too early and it missed the planet. Both stages went into solar orbit, neither returned any data.
So a pretty depressing story for the Soviets (especially compared to their successes on Venus), it has been suggested that a good number of the failures were caused by solar radiation eating away the microchips in the probes causing them to die or malfunction. Certainly when you think of the longer flight times to Mars than to Venus it appears to suggest that it was something going on in-flight that caused the failures.
Having said that, they did achieve some successes and I can only imagine the elation of Mars 3's controllers when they started getting that first grainy image of the Martian surface - only for it to suddenly stop.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:Spirit not that impressive...?
on
News from Mars
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I think another major difference, was that Lunokhod was nuclear powered as opposed to solar/battery.
Solar powered, there were solar cells under the lid. It used a polonium 210 source to keep it warm during the 14 (Earth) day long lunar night.
Since at least one Lunokhod failed to make Earth orbit (February 1969) that means a lot of one of the nastiest radioisotopes known to man came raining back to Earth.
Well that's funny. Months ago, the ESA led people to believe that Beagle 2 was the whole point of the mission (they sure hammered that point home at the ESA exibition in Helsinki, in September).
Beagle 2 was certainly the most media friendly part of the mission, but ESA has always stressed that it was a bolt-on to the main mission. Mars Express had been approved long before Beagle 2 was added to the payload and would have proceeded even if Beagle 2 had not made the pre-flight checks.
Your suggestion fixes one problem with security, but it doesn't resolve others - how about buffer overflows where data from your application spills across into another application's memory?
Again, easy to fix - but when you have hundreds of them, difficult to check them all.
Hundreds of years ago the Chinese sent a huge fleet to colonize the world. It went entirely around the world leaving historical evidence everywhere and bring home innformation. The Mandarins then dismantled the entire fleet, forbid exploration and became a closed society until Admiral Perry forcibly opened them up to the world.
As a piece of porcelain in any antique shop will show you, China was never an entirely closed country, it continued to trade with the West through to the modern era.
Admiral Perry opened up Japan, another country entirely.
So we're NOT taking casualties in Iraq? Tell that to the families of the soldiers who are coming home for Christmas... in a box. Do you honestly think that if we were to invade Cuba, that Cuba could win?
Of course the Coalition is taking casualties in Iraq, but compare it to the rate dead men were returning from Vietnam and you will see that the armed forces of the Allies have got off remarkably lightly. At its peak, Vietnam was killing over 500 GIs a week, no wonder Johnson was finished.
Nowhere did I say that America couldn't win against Cuba, but the Cubans would almost certainly make it a bloody affair, so much so that I doubt any President could survive. Some wars aren't worth winning, a war against Cuba would be one of them.
actually, if you would take a few minutes to look at david kay's report, you'd see that he had extensive programs in development.
Which one of David Kay's reports? Kay's most recent report conceded that there were NO production plants manufacturing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Some work had been done in the lab on bacteria, but they had not been weaponised.
Kay's belief on Iraq trying to manufacture centrifuges to make enriched uranium is not supported by the IAEA or the American Department of Energy.
whether he actually had them or not, and that was never in dispute among any intel agency, even the french, russians, and germans, what we DO KNOW, is that he did have them, did use them, did have extensive programs,
All of which were destroyed by the UN after the first Gulf War. Even the supposed 10 000 litres of anthrax is nothing more than the maximum amount of liquid growth medium that could have been created from the missing stocks - all of which would have expired now.
The only thing that brought those inspections to an end was that the very same David Kay had allowed his inspection teams to become covers for British and American intelligence. The Iraqis objected to spies wondering around their country under UN cover (and can you name another country that refused to allow intrusive inspections? Here's a clue)
Kay's spent much of the last few years saying what a great idea it would be to attack Iraq (here and here and here and here and here and here) to get rid of weapons of mass destruction. So if they aren't found, it's David Kay who is going to look stupid. He's already had to do some serious back-pedalling on the nuclear programme, centrifuges, those trucks that were supposedly mobile labs
The BBC's 'Panorama' got some good quotes out of Kay. I recommend a read of the transcript.
But why blame David Kay, here is an assessment of Saddam Hussein's capabilities straight from the top:
'He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction, he
is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.'
Colin Powell. (24th February 2001)
I personally like the "Alantropia Plan" discussed in that same book. The plan involves damming up the whole Mediterranean Sea, allowing evaporation to lwoer the sea level, creating many hundreds of thousands of kilowatts of energy a day (this takes into account rainfall, etc).
Sounds like an environmental nightmare. Less water in the Mediterranean basin would raise temperatures in the region - which are already terrible in summer. You would have saline dust blowing on to productive agricultural land, carrying with it industrial residues with who-knows-what health consequences. Productive fisheries would collapse, tourist resorts be left stranded and shipping would be made more complex.
It sounds terrible, one of those ideas we associate with the Soviet Union's attempts to manage Nature on a biblical scale. Perhaps the people who proposed this should go and look at the Aral Sea?
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:Don't worry, long flights will be around a whil
on
The Future of Flight
·
· Score: 1
So it was a purely technical reason that made it possible for a concorde to land and take off from JFK if the other airport was Heathrow or Charles De Gaulle, but impossible if that other airport was LAX???
IIRC it used to be the case that non-US airlines could fly to one city inside the US, but not offer onward legs or connecting flights within the US. I believe this has been relaxed somewhat in recent years, but foreign airlines are not able to compete properly in the US domestic market, nor are they able to buy controlling interests in American airlines.
When it comes to flight generating water in the atmosphere, that is really beyond my knowledge. However, hydrogen gas contains more energy (per molecule and per mass) than kerosene, and both produce water when burned. My qualified guess is that less water is produced if you get the same amount of energy from burning hydrogen than from kerosene.
Unfortunately the equivalent mass of hydrogen takes up a far greater volume than that of kerosene.
Making cryogenic tanks would be tricky. Long, thin tanks that fitted into the wings would offer large surface area to volume ratios and would warm up quickly, boiling off their contents and causing pressure build up.
Not just that, but the extreme chill coming off the liquid hydrogen would make them extremely prone to icing (look at the ice that comes off cryogenically cooled rockets when they blast off) - which could make the plane uncontrollable at low speed.
The alternative is to put the tank into the fuselage. Obviously that would eat into the passenger space or require much larger planes. But I don't think any regulatory agency will permit hundreds of tonnes of liquid hydrogen and people to be in close proximity.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:Don't worry, long flights will be around a whil
on
The Future of Flight
·
· Score: 1
Concorde does not make a sonic boom.
As someone who lived in Cornwall under the French Concorde's flight path I can assure you that it does make a sizeable sonic boom.
On many nights Concorde would try to shave a few minutes off her flight by decelerating as late as possible to sub-sonic flight. Sometimes she would not decelerate until after flying over Cornwall.
It was a very noticeable double boom, sometimes the windows would shake, but nothing more.
but the main reason it was never deployed over the US was at first politics (it's not american) and later cost.
There were also regulatory issues which prevented British Airways and Air France from offering internal flights within the US.
A plane that skips over the atmosphere "like a rock skipping across a pond" is equally batty
Actually not so far-fetched. It was originally proposed by the German, Eugene Sanger as a global bomber capable of striking anywhere in the World within 45 minutes.
A 1/20 model was built in 1939 under government funding and pre-dated all of NASA's work on lifting body designs.
Had Sanger been able to construct his design it would have been launched from a trolley running along a 3km monorail ramp (if you've ever seen the 1951 movie 'When Worlds Collide' you'll get the idea). The trolley would have been powered by a liquid fuel rocket generating over six-hundred tonnes of thrust - an incredible amount for such an early date.
At launch the spaceplane would been travelling at over 1,800 kmh and would have blasted free of the trolley using a single one-hundred tonne liquid fuel rocket which would burn for 8 minutes carrying the plane to about 140km.
There it would have gradually descended to 40 km before skipping off the denser atmosphere - rebounding, skipping, rebounding...
It would have eventually returned to Earth and landed on a belly-mounted skid, somewhat like the cancelled American DynaSoar of the 1960s.
It's highly unlikely that Germany of the 1940s could have manufactured such a craft - its engine was a magnitude larger than that of the V2, none of the high-tech alloys we use in modern spacecraft were known, there were no equivalents of the Space Shuttle's tiles and perhaps most importantly, there was no labour to build the enormous launch facilities.
Even had they been built, they would have formed the best target imaginable for Allied bombers.
Slashdot Mirror
Pasadena :(
This appears to be a serious problem, but the team will be sure to have a book several inches thick of things to try.
Let's wish them luck, loosing Beagle 2 was bad as we'd just lost the Nozumi probe, Spirit was proving to be a brilliant success in an otherwise gloomy period of exploration.
Best wishes,
Mike.
They haven't quite given up on Beagle 2 yet. For the last few days its controllers have not sent any communications to Mars. Assuming that the lander is in one piece, it should now have switched to a beacon mode which will transmit throughout the Martian day.
ESA will begin listening for Beagle 2 again over the weekend, but this is very much a last-ditch attempt.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I don't think that's a wise thing for a Brit to comment on, but compared to our very own Dear Leader the Democrats are political giants.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Perhaps they employ the same security consultants as Valve software?
Best wishes,
Mike.
They also tried to stop them in the courts. IIRC, they lost. Other industries have done the same thing; some clothes companies went ballistic when they thought they might lose their rip-of-Britain sales.
The company that tried it with clothes was Tesco sourcing Levis outside the UK and they lost the case.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I think it is because copyright law gives the holder final say over how their work may be distributed. For the first (and possibly last) time in my life - is there a lawyer in the house?
Best wishes,
Mike.
Kind of implied in the word 'hydrocarbon' isn't it?
Besides, the novelty kind of wore off about 50 years ago when the vast majority of global hydrogen production switched from reacting iron with steam to the catalytic conversion of methane and petroleum gases in oil refineries.
And catalytic production of hydrogen from heavy hydrocarbons goes way back to the Fischer-Tropsch process for making synthetic fuels from coal, originally developed in the 1920s, perfected in the 1930s under the Nazis and used until relatively recently in South Africa.
The article doesn't really make clear what is new here - perhaps the team have perfected a table-top system???
Best wishes,
Mike.
Olivine is not found in magmas that are forming at shallow depths which tend to be rich in silica. Moreover, olivine rich magma intruding into the Crust will react with aluminium, silica and alkali metals and change their composition.
So if you find olivine you know the originating magma is coming from deep down and hasn't hung around in the Crust for very long.
Olivine is not terribly stable under wet conditions. Olivine reacts with water to form clays and iron oxide. The results also imply that the olivine bearing rocks have not been heated in the presence of water (such as you would find in the formation of a mountain range), since olivine reacts at high temperatures in the presence of water to form serpentinite and magnetite.
Therefore in the time since rocks were crystallised they haven't been in the presence of water.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I make it seven.
So a pretty depressing story for the Soviets (especially compared to their successes on Venus), it has been suggested that a good number of the failures were caused by solar radiation eating away the microchips in the probes causing them to die or malfunction. Certainly when you think of the longer flight times to Mars than to Venus it appears to suggest that it was something going on in-flight that caused the failures.
Having said that, they did achieve some successes and I can only imagine the elation of Mars 3's controllers when they started getting that first grainy image of the Martian surface - only for it to suddenly stop.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Solar powered, there were solar cells under the lid. It used a polonium 210 source to keep it warm during the 14 (Earth) day long lunar night.
Since at least one Lunokhod failed to make Earth orbit (February 1969) that means a lot of one of the nastiest radioisotopes known to man came raining back to Earth.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I'm holding out for the Leather Goddesses myself...
Best wishes,
Mike.
Beagle 2 was certainly the most media friendly part of the mission, but ESA has always stressed that it was a bolt-on to the main mission. Mars Express had been approved long before Beagle 2 was added to the payload and would have proceeded even if Beagle 2 had not made the pre-flight checks.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Which is of course why the Slammer worm is completely impossible.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Again, easy to fix - but when you have hundreds of them, difficult to check them all.
Best wishes,
Mike.
As a piece of porcelain in any antique shop will show you, China was never an entirely closed country, it continued to trade with the West through to the modern era.
Admiral Perry opened up Japan, another country entirely.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Actually I'd rather we didn't go round picking fights at all. But then I'm old-fashioned like that when it comes to sending people off to die.
Fighting when you're threatened is different from 'pre-emptive defence' against countries that can't harm you.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Of course the Coalition is taking casualties in Iraq, but compare it to the rate dead men were returning from Vietnam and you will see that the armed forces of the Allies have got off remarkably lightly. At its peak, Vietnam was killing over 500 GIs a week, no wonder Johnson was finished.
Nowhere did I say that America couldn't win against Cuba, but the Cubans would almost certainly make it a bloody affair, so much so that I doubt any President could survive. Some wars aren't worth winning, a war against Cuba would be one of them.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Which one of David Kay's reports? Kay's most recent report conceded that there were NO production plants manufacturing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Some work had been done in the lab on bacteria, but they had not been weaponised.
Kay's belief on Iraq trying to manufacture centrifuges to make enriched uranium is not supported by the IAEA or the American Department of Energy.
whether he actually had them or not, and that was never in dispute among any intel agency, even the french, russians, and germans, what we DO KNOW, is that he did have them, did use them, did have extensive programs,
All of which were destroyed by the UN after the first Gulf War. Even the supposed 10 000 litres of anthrax is nothing more than the maximum amount of liquid growth medium that could have been created from the missing stocks - all of which would have expired now.
The only thing that brought those inspections to an end was that the very same David Kay had allowed his inspection teams to become covers for British and American intelligence. The Iraqis objected to spies wondering around their country under UN cover (and can you name another country that refused to allow intrusive inspections? Here's a clue)
Kay's spent much of the last few years saying what a great idea it would be to attack Iraq (here and here and here and here and here and here) to get rid of weapons of mass destruction. So if they aren't found, it's David Kay who is going to look stupid. He's already had to do some serious back-pedalling on the nuclear programme, centrifuges, those trucks that were supposedly mobile labs
The BBC's 'Panorama' got some good quotes out of Kay. I recommend a read of the transcript.
But why blame David Kay, here is an assessment of Saddam Hussein's capabilities straight from the top:
'He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction, he is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.'
Colin Powell. (24th February 2001)
Best wishes,
Mike.
There were other reasons for the invasion.
Because we knew that Iraq couldn't put up a decent fight?
If the UK and US were to try the same with Cuba they might have to put up with taking casualties.
Which would look lousy in the re-election videos.
Best wishes,
Mike.
It was a reference strain of botulinum at that, not the form used in bioweapons.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Sounds like an environmental nightmare. Less water in the Mediterranean basin would raise temperatures in the region - which are already terrible in summer. You would have saline dust blowing on to productive agricultural land, carrying with it industrial residues with who-knows-what health consequences. Productive fisheries would collapse, tourist resorts be left stranded and shipping would be made more complex.
It sounds terrible, one of those ideas we associate with the Soviet Union's attempts to manage Nature on a biblical scale. Perhaps the people who proposed this should go and look at the Aral Sea?
Best wishes,
Mike.
IIRC it used to be the case that non-US airlines could fly to one city inside the US, but not offer onward legs or connecting flights within the US. I believe this has been relaxed somewhat in recent years, but foreign airlines are not able to compete properly in the US domestic market, nor are they able to buy controlling interests in American airlines.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Unfortunately the equivalent mass of hydrogen takes up a far greater volume than that of kerosene.
Making cryogenic tanks would be tricky. Long, thin tanks that fitted into the wings would offer large surface area to volume ratios and would warm up quickly, boiling off their contents and causing pressure build up.
Not just that, but the extreme chill coming off the liquid hydrogen would make them extremely prone to icing (look at the ice that comes off cryogenically cooled rockets when they blast off) - which could make the plane uncontrollable at low speed.
The alternative is to put the tank into the fuselage. Obviously that would eat into the passenger space or require much larger planes. But I don't think any regulatory agency will permit hundreds of tonnes of liquid hydrogen and people to be in close proximity.
Best wishes,
Mike.
As someone who lived in Cornwall under the French Concorde's flight path I can assure you that it does make a sizeable sonic boom.
On many nights Concorde would try to shave a few minutes off her flight by decelerating as late as possible to sub-sonic flight. Sometimes she would not decelerate until after flying over Cornwall.
It was a very noticeable double boom, sometimes the windows would shake, but nothing more.
but the main reason it was never deployed over the US was at first politics (it's not american) and later cost.
There were also regulatory issues which prevented British Airways and Air France from offering internal flights within the US.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Actually not so far-fetched. It was originally proposed by the German, Eugene Sanger as a global bomber capable of striking anywhere in the World within 45 minutes.
A 1/20 model was built in 1939 under government funding and pre-dated all of NASA's work on lifting body designs.
Had Sanger been able to construct his design it would have been launched from a trolley running along a 3km monorail ramp (if you've ever seen the 1951 movie 'When Worlds Collide' you'll get the idea). The trolley would have been powered by a liquid fuel rocket generating over six-hundred tonnes of thrust - an incredible amount for such an early date.
At launch the spaceplane would been travelling at over 1,800 kmh and would have blasted free of the trolley using a single one-hundred tonne liquid fuel rocket which would burn for 8 minutes carrying the plane to about 140km.
There it would have gradually descended to 40 km before skipping off the denser atmosphere - rebounding, skipping, rebounding...
It would have eventually returned to Earth and landed on a belly-mounted skid, somewhat like the cancelled American DynaSoar of the 1960s.
It's highly unlikely that Germany of the 1940s could have manufactured such a craft - its engine was a magnitude larger than that of the V2, none of the high-tech alloys we use in modern spacecraft were known, there were no equivalents of the Space Shuttle's tiles and perhaps most importantly, there was no labour to build the enormous launch facilities.
Even had they been built, they would have formed the best target imaginable for Allied bombers.
But a fascinating idea none the less.
Best wishes,
Mike.