If I recall correctly, the moon doesn't rotate on it's axis, therefore, a lunar day is forever. That's why the moon has a dark side and a light side.
It's a common misconception. The Moon does rotate on its axis - but one rotation takes exactly the same time as it takes for the Moon to orbit the Earth.
Still don't believe me? Put a chair in the middle of the room (that will be the Earth). Now (slowly) walk in a circle around the chair always facing the chair. When you've completed the circle you will have faced every wall in the room - but anyone sitting in the chair will only have seen your face.
What this means for the Moon is that every part of the surface experiences a continuous day 14 Earth days long, followed by an equally long, chilly, night.
Instead of speaking of a permanent light side and a permanent dark side, it is correct to speak of a near side (the bit seen from Earth) and a far side (which is never seen from Earth).
How about the state not spend so much fucking money? Is it really that hard?
Fortunately democracy allows you to remedy such matters by voting the higher taxing party out of government.
So either the people of Massechusetts are negligent and are forgetting to use their constitutional rights, or they are reasonably happy with their tax levels.
I remember seeing a picture of the Lunokhod rover back when I was in school.
Yeh, I remember first seeing it in the mid-1970s and thinking how cute it looked.
Articles on the net mention tens of thousands of pics taken by these rovers but I can't seem to find any examples. Have the Russians not made them public? An
Here are some, the Soviets did not tend to release all of their images to the wider World. It's good question though - I wonder who is looking after the gigabytes of data returned by the old Soviet missions? NASA has trouble with its vast funding, who knows what the Russians are doing?
Yea, but clouds? I know it not hot and gassy enough to have gas clouds. And if it had water clouds that would have made the news a long time ago.
Mars has some temporary cloud cover around mountains where air is forced up into cooler regions of the atmosphere. There are also some fogs and clouds around the polar caps where water vapour and carbon dioxide condense out of the atmosphere, but that's about it.
antibiotics in food all the time, to reduce infection.
They're actually in there to reduce costs. Antibiotics change the bacterial makeup of the animal's digestive tract so it processes food more efficiently. The animal puts on more weight for a given amount of food.
If anything they make animals more susceptible to infection since the presence of low-levels of antibiotics encourage bacteria to evolve antibiotic-resistance. This is the reason the EU is in the process of removing antibiotics from animal feed.
Didn't the Soviet built lunar rovers go much further in a single day back in the early 70's?
Lunokhod could manage between 0.8 and 2 kilometres per hour depending on soil conditions and slope. Lunokhod 1 survived for 10 months and covered 10.54 km, Lunokhod 2 lasted only 3 months but did 37 km. I'm not sure how much of that time was 'active' since the rovers were shut down during the 14 day Lunar night.
However neither vehicle was autonomous, they were remote controlled from Earth. This is possible with a 2 second lag to the Moon, but unfeasible on Mars.
True, but they're both in active service. It'll be interesting to see if they are preserved at the end of their lives.
My guess is this cloying sentimentality that we have in Britain is a reaction to the post-war clearances and modernisation. When Britain redeveloped its cities after World War II entire areas were levelled and many fine buildings and historical sites were trashed. Now we're terrified to change anything and are busy embedding the whole country in aspic.
When you have the Prince of Wales who thinks that there is Romano-Greek revival and Georgian styles of architecture and nothing else owning half of the country and the National Trust owning the rest there is precious little opportunity for Britain to rebuild and develop a modern style. No wonder so many of our architects and designers work abroad.
If it holds such important why was it sold for scrap?
The Victorian British were not a sentimental bunch about preserving their past. It was a time of enormous technological progress - much more akin to the US of today. Precious few of their technological triumphs still survive.
To give just one example, take the three ocean liners built by Brunel. Great Western, the first successful ocean-going steamship was broken up for scrap in 1856.
Her massive sister ship, Great Britain, the first entirely iron-built ship and the first to be powered by a screw was turned into a hulk for servicing whaling ships in 1886. She was allowed to rot until 1968 - when she was brought back to Bristol where she is being restored.
Brunel's utterly vast Great Eastern was quietly broken up in 1888, despite being by far the largest ship in the World and having laid the first global network of telegraph cables. No one mourned.
Best wishes,
Mike.
PS. Having thought about it - liners are a very good example of the British unsentimentality towards technology. The only surviving British ocean liner is Queen Mary (and then it was the Americans who wanted it, Cunard wanted to scrap her), all the other great liners such as Mauretania, Queen Elizabeth and Canberra all went to the breakers yards.
As a Christian, I am a fan of the theory of evolution. I find that, in general, the history of the world that scientists are uncovering supports the general theme of the book of Genisis, if not the detail. (First light, then atmosphere, then land then aquatic life, then land life, then humans etc.)
I think you've misread Genesis.
Genesis I (v.11-24) states quite clearly that God created plants on the land on the third day, didn't get round to doing the Sun until the fourth day, created the swimming and flying creatures on the fifth and left the land animals (including Man) until the sixth.
Which is nothing like the order science has determined. So you have to say that Genesis managed neither the precise order nor the general themes correctly.
Of course that's just one of the Creation stories in Genesis. There is another in Genesis 2 which places Man as the first living thing followed by plants, animals and finally Woman.
'job eliminations', 'may be impacted'... these are people we're talking about - people who've worked hard and poured their talent into something - now they're being 'impacted'.
Disgraceful, they could at least publicise redundancies in a sensitive manner. Have we really sunk so low?
I would think that the success of this would depend on our knowledge of the density of the Martian atmosphere. Do we know much about this?
We know quite a lot.
The Soviet Mars 6 probe recorded atmospheric measurements all the way to the surface, as did the two Viking probes.
And it is routine to use measurements of the strength of signals from orbiters to measure atmospheric density. As the probe slips behind the planet, any atmosphere will interfere with the signal strength. Measure it finely enough and you can plot the varying density with altitude.
This isn't the first proposed balloon on Mars. the Soviet Union and France planned a mission for 1992, which was then slipped to 1994 then to 1996 and finally cancelled. The mission would have comprised of a heavy orbiter which would have acted as a communications relay and survey craft, a number of very small landers and/or penetrators and a pair of balloons.
The balloons would have used a combination of helium and solar heating to gain lift. The helium would provide most of the lift, the warmth of the Sun would give it bouyancy during the day. As it warmed, it would rise and drift along providing an almost constant aerial survey.
In the evening, as it cooled, the balloon would sink back to the surface - the helium would prevent the balloon snagging on the surface and keep the antennae upright. Meanwhile, instruments loaded into a long 'snake' slung below the balloon would be making surface measurements and inspecting the geology.
The balloon was tested on Earth and proved to be highly successful, it's a tragedy that the collapse of the Soviet Union prevented it flying.
Your best source for all things space is Astronautix.com. The page on the N1 is here.
There used to be an excellent book 'Red Star in Orbit' by James Oberg which contained a lot of information about the Soviet Moon program, but that is now out of print.
It was adapted into a 3-part 'Horizon' by the BBC (I think this is rebadged as 'Nova' by WGBH for the American market).
More recently, I can recommend the superb book 'Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat the Americans to the Moon' by J. Harford, ISBN: 0471327212. It's a history of the Soviet programme up until the end of the N1 and utterly fascinating. Korolev was incredible, not only was he a genius, but he was once a prisoner in the gulag - that he then turned his talents to beat the rest of the World in the name of the system that imprisoned him is almost unthinkable.
And finally, Channel 4 here in the UK had a one part documentary called 'The rocket that came in from the cold' as part of their Equinox strand. It was about the N1's engines which are still the most advanced engines ever built and are now used by the Atlas V. It's most significant because it has movie footage of the N1 test launches - this was a MASSIVE rocket.
It's believed (according to a mid-90s NOVA program on the Soviet manned lunar effort, and other sources) that the sheer complexity of the N-1 was largely to blame for the failures.
That was part of the problem, Korolev who designed the N1 died before the it could be test fired and Mishin who followed him was not in the same league.
N1 was only one of three designs of heavy launch rockets designed by the Soviets (they never designed a specific Moon rocket). It was chosen in preference to a design known as UR700 which would have been far simpler to construct and more reliable. The UR700's smaller brother became the highly successful Proton rocket which is still used and was at one point planned to launch a lunar manned orbiter.
But perhaps the most serious set-back that the Soviets had to face was that they never built a test stand for the N1 (Apollo built one in Mississippi), so the only way of determining its performance was to stack the rocket on the pad and fire the engines.
Four attempts, four different reasons for failure, but by then the N1 was so late that the propaganda advantage of manned missions to the Moon had been lost. The Politburo cancelled the programme just before the fifth launch attempt which the engineers believed would have succeeded.
To play devil's advocate here, please demonstrate this. Please demonstrate one species evolving from another. I don't want you showing fossils or intra-specie variations, but an actual demonstration an one species deriving from another.
Well, the previous Iraqi Information Minister seems even more creepy to me. And Director of Homeland Security would be too, had they used a word other than "director." The way it is now, it just sounds like he doesn't do anything (imagine that).
:)
But do you want to go back to the old times when days weren't colour-coded?
After all someone has to move the knob on the Threatometer from cerise to sunset-blush. Thank-you Governor Ridge - you perform a hard task with true skill.
I would like to point out Europe: there are privacy laws that basically say the following:
...
...
...
what you left out was the clause 'except by the state'
Come to the UK and look at David Blunkett's ideas - somehow I don't think he's cottoned on that the World described in '1984' was a bad thing. Only this week he proposed mining private and corporate databases of personal information so that he can build his ID card database. Breaks every part of the Data Protection Act (1998) - illegal? In his case - no.
Does any other country have a govenment position as creepy sounding as 'The Information Commissioner'? In case you're wondering, they're the unelected member of the government machine that determines if you should be allowed to see any piece of information that might upset the government.
Of course there are a few things NOT covered by the UK's FoI Act... deep breath now... ready? Pay attention there might be questions at the end.
Information accessible to applicant by other means, information intended for future publication, information supplied by, or relating to, bodies dealing with security matters, national security, defence, international relations, relations within the United Kingdom, the economy, investigations and proceedings conducted by public authorities, law enforcement, court records etc., audit functions, Parliamentary privilege, formulation of government policy etc, prejudice to effective conduct of public affairs, communications with Her Majesty the Queen etc. and honours, health and safety, environmental information, personal information, information provided in confidence and (finally) commercial interests.
Which leaves pretty much - well nothing. Britain - a land where your secrets are safe - provided you're in government, a spy or a member of an obscure part of the German aristocracy.
Good thing it would be instantly wiped out by the inhospitable Earth conditions.
A Nasa scientist once sneezed on a mirror on some LEO bound device. When it came back the same bacteria was found on the mirror. I'm hoping someone here can verify that. Bacteria is pretty adaptable.
You're thinking of Surveyor 3 launched in April 1967. The probe was not fully sterilised since it was known that the Moon was biologically dead.
Surveyor 3 performed perfectly on the Moon, working for about a month, taking thousands of images of its surroundings and examining the lunar surface's physical and chemical make up.
It sat on the lunar surface for 31 months before Apollo 12 touched down nearby. The astronauts removed components from the dead probe to return to Earth where they could be examined to see how they had faired when exposed to the high vacuum, high radiation, extreme temperatures and micro meteorite bombardment. (At the time no craft had returned to Earth after such a duration in space)
When the samples were returned to the lab, one sample out of 33 (a piece of plastic foam) revealed traces of Streptococcus mitis. On explanation is that the sample had been contaminated during assembly and that the bacteria had survived their journey to the Moon and back. However, since all the other samples turned up blank, it is equally possible that the sample had been contaminated since its return from the Moon.
Much as I would like to, even I can't actually find any way to blame SCO for this font change. I can't blame Sir Bill either. But, I think it is stupid, because 14 point is a bit too big and so wastes paper, not that the US government ever cared about waste.....
And just think of the endless committees, sub-committees, working groups, focus groups, font lobbyists, R and D, marketing and strategising people that were involved. There were probably millions spent on deciding whether they should go for the relaxed 12 point, or the more dynamic and assertive 'hell we're a superpower' 14 point approach.
I hear they're working on rebranding the bald eagle for the 21st Century, apparently the existing bird just isn't - well - [makes feeble hand gestures] swooping enough for today's time-poor, internet-rich, xboxed, click-to-continue, frappacino generation.
england (ok, UK) continues to outperform europe in just about every field measureable, EU is a joke.
You mean we outperform the remainder of the EU - apart from measures such as productivity, standard of living, quality of life, healthcare, transport, education and life-expectancy - yes?
Slight correction: The current British Government wants to Knight him.
And deservedly so; it was for services to British industry.
And without Microsoft Britain's IT consultant industry would be a mere shadow of its present glorious self. There are literally tens of thousands of highly trained professionals scattered across the country poised to save poor innocents from the consequences of Microsoft's overly-complicated, bug-ridden, security-holed applications.
Speaking personally, without Microsoft there is absolutely no way I would have been able to afford my Powerbook.
Er, this is ESA. Anyway, the reports I heard on radio had people saying (more or less): "This isn't surprising, just confirmation of expectation". Still cool though.
Agreed, this is more of a calibration of the instrumentation which will allow them to search for water at lower latitudes on Mars where it might be found as permafrost, frozen pools or bound between mineral grains.
BTW, does anyone know how they identified the North/South poles? Was a compass sent there in a previous mission, or was it an arbitrary decision?
Mars' magnetic field is only a tiny fraction of that of Earth's and is actually dominated by regional poles rather than the strong magnetic poles on Earth. Mars does not appear to have a dynamic Core so its magnetic field is actually the one frozen into the planet when its hot interior solidified.
So a compass wouldn't be much help.
The answer is that the North Martian Pole is the one pointing in much the same way as the Earth's North Pole.
Look at photos of the Spirit, what with it's flat platform on top..... They landed this thing in an area known to have alot of wind (and in their words, has alot of "dust devils" and little twisters).
Easy, Martian atmosphere pressure is only 1% that of Earth's. So whilst the winds on Mars can reach enormous speeds, they actually exert very little force.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a common misconception. The Moon does rotate on its axis - but one rotation takes exactly the same time as it takes for the Moon to orbit the Earth.
Still don't believe me? Put a chair in the middle of the room (that will be the Earth). Now (slowly) walk in a circle around the chair always facing the chair. When you've completed the circle you will have faced every wall in the room - but anyone sitting in the chair will only have seen your face.
What this means for the Moon is that every part of the surface experiences a continuous day 14 Earth days long, followed by an equally long, chilly, night.
Instead of speaking of a permanent light side and a permanent dark side, it is correct to speak of a near side (the bit seen from Earth) and a far side (which is never seen from Earth).
Best wishes,
Mike.
Fortunately democracy allows you to remedy such matters by voting the higher taxing party out of government.
So either the people of Massechusetts are negligent and are forgetting to use their constitutional rights, or they are reasonably happy with their tax levels.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Yeh, I remember first seeing it in the mid-1970s and thinking how cute it looked.
Articles on the net mention tens of thousands of pics taken by these rovers but I can't seem to find any examples. Have the Russians not made them public? An
Here are some, the Soviets did not tend to release all of their images to the wider World. It's good question though - I wonder who is looking after the gigabytes of data returned by the old Soviet missions? NASA has trouble with its vast funding, who knows what the Russians are doing?
Best wishes
Mike.
Mars has some temporary cloud cover around mountains where air is forced up into cooler regions of the atmosphere. There are also some fogs and clouds around the polar caps where water vapour and carbon dioxide condense out of the atmosphere, but that's about it.
There are some beautiful images here.
Best wishes,
Mike.
They're actually in there to reduce costs. Antibiotics change the bacterial makeup of the animal's digestive tract so it processes food more efficiently. The animal puts on more weight for a given amount of food.
If anything they make animals more susceptible to infection since the presence of low-levels of antibiotics encourage bacteria to evolve antibiotic-resistance. This is the reason the EU is in the process of removing antibiotics from animal feed.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Lunokhod could manage between 0.8 and 2 kilometres per hour depending on soil conditions and slope. Lunokhod 1 survived for 10 months and covered 10.54 km, Lunokhod 2 lasted only 3 months but did 37 km. I'm not sure how much of that time was 'active' since the rovers were shut down during the 14 day Lunar night.
However neither vehicle was autonomous, they were remote controlled from Earth. This is possible with a 2 second lag to the Moon, but unfeasible on Mars.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Not to mention the QE2
True, but they're both in active service. It'll be interesting to see if they are preserved at the end of their lives.
My guess is this cloying sentimentality that we have in Britain is a reaction to the post-war clearances and modernisation. When Britain redeveloped its cities after World War II entire areas were levelled and many fine buildings and historical sites were trashed. Now we're terrified to change anything and are busy embedding the whole country in aspic.
When you have the Prince of Wales who thinks that there is Romano-Greek revival and Georgian styles of architecture and nothing else owning half of the country and the National Trust owning the rest there is precious little opportunity for Britain to rebuild and develop a modern style. No wonder so many of our architects and designers work abroad.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The Victorian British were not a sentimental bunch about preserving their past. It was a time of enormous technological progress - much more akin to the US of today. Precious few of their technological triumphs still survive.
To give just one example, take the three ocean liners built by Brunel. Great Western, the first successful ocean-going steamship was broken up for scrap in 1856.
Her massive sister ship, Great Britain, the first entirely iron-built ship and the first to be powered by a screw was turned into a hulk for servicing whaling ships in 1886. She was allowed to rot until 1968 - when she was brought back to Bristol where she is being restored.
Brunel's utterly vast Great Eastern was quietly broken up in 1888, despite being by far the largest ship in the World and having laid the first global network of telegraph cables. No one mourned.
Best wishes,
Mike.
PS. Having thought about it - liners are a very good example of the British unsentimentality towards technology. The only surviving British ocean liner is Queen Mary (and then it was the Americans who wanted it, Cunard wanted to scrap her), all the other great liners such as Mauretania, Queen Elizabeth and Canberra all went to the breakers yards.
I think you've misread Genesis.
Genesis I (v.11-24) states quite clearly that God created plants on the land on the third day, didn't get round to doing the Sun until the fourth day, created the swimming and flying creatures on the fifth and left the land animals (including Man) until the sixth.
Which is nothing like the order science has determined. So you have to say that Genesis managed neither the precise order nor the general themes correctly.
Of course that's just one of the Creation stories in Genesis. There is another in Genesis 2 which places Man as the first living thing followed by plants, animals and finally Woman.
At least one of the stories has to be wrong.
Best wishes,
Mike.
'job eliminations', 'may be impacted'... these are people we're talking about - people who've worked hard and poured their talent into something - now they're being 'impacted'.
Disgraceful, they could at least publicise redundancies in a sensitive manner. Have we really sunk so low?
Best wishes,
Mike.
We know quite a lot.
The Soviet Mars 6 probe recorded atmospheric measurements all the way to the surface, as did the two Viking probes.
And it is routine to use measurements of the strength of signals from orbiters to measure atmospheric density. As the probe slips behind the planet, any atmosphere will interfere with the signal strength. Measure it finely enough and you can plot the varying density with altitude.
This isn't the first proposed balloon on Mars. the Soviet Union and France planned a mission for 1992, which was then slipped to 1994 then to 1996 and finally cancelled. The mission would have comprised of a heavy orbiter which would have acted as a communications relay and survey craft, a number of very small landers and/or penetrators and a pair of balloons.
The balloons would have used a combination of helium and solar heating to gain lift. The helium would provide most of the lift, the warmth of the Sun would give it bouyancy during the day. As it warmed, it would rise and drift along providing an almost constant aerial survey.
In the evening, as it cooled, the balloon would sink back to the surface - the helium would prevent the balloon snagging on the surface and keep the antennae upright. Meanwhile, instruments loaded into a long 'snake' slung below the balloon would be making surface measurements and inspecting the geology.
The balloon was tested on Earth and proved to be highly successful, it's a tragedy that the collapse of the Soviet Union prevented it flying.
Best wishes,
Mike.
That whirring noise you can hear is Wehner von Braun doing 4000 rpm.
Best wishes,
Mike.
There used to be an excellent book 'Red Star in Orbit' by James Oberg which contained a lot of information about the Soviet Moon program, but that is now out of print.
It was adapted into a 3-part 'Horizon' by the BBC (I think this is rebadged as 'Nova' by WGBH for the American market).
More recently, I can recommend the superb book 'Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat the Americans to the Moon' by J. Harford, ISBN: 0471327212. It's a history of the Soviet programme up until the end of the N1 and utterly fascinating. Korolev was incredible, not only was he a genius, but he was once a prisoner in the gulag - that he then turned his talents to beat the rest of the World in the name of the system that imprisoned him is almost unthinkable.
And finally, Channel 4 here in the UK had a one part documentary called 'The rocket that came in from the cold' as part of their Equinox strand. It was about the N1's engines which are still the most advanced engines ever built and are now used by the Atlas V. It's most significant because it has movie footage of the N1 test launches - this was a MASSIVE rocket.
Hope that helps.
Mike.
That was part of the problem, Korolev who designed the N1 died before the it could be test fired and Mishin who followed him was not in the same league.
N1 was only one of three designs of heavy launch rockets designed by the Soviets (they never designed a specific Moon rocket). It was chosen in preference to a design known as UR700 which would have been far simpler to construct and more reliable. The UR700's smaller brother became the highly successful Proton rocket which is still used and was at one point planned to launch a lunar manned orbiter.
But perhaps the most serious set-back that the Soviets had to face was that they never built a test stand for the N1 (Apollo built one in Mississippi), so the only way of determining its performance was to stack the rocket on the pad and fire the engines.
Four attempts, four different reasons for failure, but by then the N1 was so late that the propaganda advantage of manned missions to the Moon had been lost. The Politburo cancelled the programme just before the fifth launch attempt which the engineers believed would have succeeded.
Best wishes,
Mike.
By all means.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
But do you want to go back to the old times when days weren't colour-coded?
After all someone has to move the knob on the Threatometer from cerise to sunset-blush. Thank-you Governor Ridge - you perform a hard task with true skill.
Best wishes,
Mike.
what you left out was the clause 'except by the state'
Come to the UK and look at David Blunkett's ideas - somehow I don't think he's cottoned on that the World described in '1984' was a bad thing. Only this week he proposed mining private and corporate databases of personal information so that he can build his ID card database. Breaks every part of the Data Protection Act (1998) - illegal? In his case - no.
Does any other country have a govenment position as creepy sounding as 'The Information Commissioner'? In case you're wondering, they're the unelected member of the government machine that determines if you should be allowed to see any piece of information that might upset the government.
Of course there are a few things NOT covered by the UK's FoI Act... deep breath now... ready? Pay attention there might be questions at the end.
Information accessible to applicant by other means, information intended for future publication, information supplied by, or relating to, bodies dealing with security matters, national security, defence, international relations, relations within the United Kingdom, the economy, investigations and proceedings conducted by public authorities, law enforcement, court records etc., audit functions, Parliamentary privilege, formulation of government policy etc, prejudice to effective conduct of public affairs, communications with Her Majesty the Queen etc. and honours, health and safety, environmental information, personal information, information provided in confidence and (finally) commercial interests.
Which leaves pretty much - well nothing. Britain - a land where your secrets are safe - provided you're in government, a spy or a member of an obscure part of the German aristocracy.
Best wishes,
Mike.
- Good thing it would be instantly wiped out by the inhospitable Earth conditions.
A Nasa scientist once sneezed on a mirror on some LEO bound device. When it came back the same bacteria was found on the mirror. I'm hoping someone here can verify that. Bacteria is pretty adaptable.You're thinking of Surveyor 3 launched in April 1967. The probe was not fully sterilised since it was known that the Moon was biologically dead.
Surveyor 3 performed perfectly on the Moon, working for about a month, taking thousands of images of its surroundings and examining the lunar surface's physical and chemical make up.
It sat on the lunar surface for 31 months before Apollo 12 touched down nearby. The astronauts removed components from the dead probe to return to Earth where they could be examined to see how they had faired when exposed to the high vacuum, high radiation, extreme temperatures and micro meteorite bombardment. (At the time no craft had returned to Earth after such a duration in space)
When the samples were returned to the lab, one sample out of 33 (a piece of plastic foam) revealed traces of Streptococcus mitis. On explanation is that the sample had been contaminated during assembly and that the bacteria had survived their journey to the Moon and back. However, since all the other samples turned up blank, it is equally possible that the sample had been contaminated since its return from the Moon.
Best wishes,
Mike.
And just think of the endless committees, sub-committees, working groups, focus groups, font lobbyists, R and D, marketing and strategising people that were involved. There were probably millions spent on deciding whether they should go for the relaxed 12 point, or the more dynamic and assertive 'hell we're a superpower' 14 point approach.
I hear they're working on rebranding the bald eagle for the 21st Century, apparently the existing bird just isn't - well - [makes feeble hand gestures] swooping enough for today's time-poor, internet-rich, xboxed, click-to-continue, frappacino generation.
Best wishes,
Mike.
You mean we outperform the remainder of the EU - apart from measures such as productivity, standard of living, quality of life, healthcare, transport, education and life-expectancy - yes?
Best wishes,
Mike.
And deservedly so; it was for services to British industry.
And without Microsoft Britain's IT consultant industry would be a mere shadow of its present glorious self. There are literally tens of thousands of highly trained professionals scattered across the country poised to save poor innocents from the consequences of Microsoft's overly-complicated, bug-ridden, security-holed applications.
Speaking personally, without Microsoft there is absolutely no way I would have been able to afford my Powerbook.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Agreed, this is more of a calibration of the instrumentation which will allow them to search for water at lower latitudes on Mars where it might be found as permafrost, frozen pools or bound between mineral grains.
But the images are certainly very pretty.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Mars' magnetic field is only a tiny fraction of that of Earth's and is actually dominated by regional poles rather than the strong magnetic poles on Earth. Mars does not appear to have a dynamic Core so its magnetic field is actually the one frozen into the planet when its hot interior solidified.
So a compass wouldn't be much help.
The answer is that the North Martian Pole is the one pointing in much the same way as the Earth's North Pole.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Easy, Martian atmosphere pressure is only 1% that of Earth's. So whilst the winds on Mars can reach enormous speeds, they actually exert very little force.
Best wishes,
Mike.