In a perfect world, of course. The reality is that this is not a perfect world. Huge amounts of data contain personally identifiable data, or are only available from private sources that consider their dataset to be of value and thus don't allow it to be publicly released. I wish this wasn't the way it is, but it is reality. I've worked in medical research before (hence the reason I brought up HIPAA). The concept that all work that can't have the dataset publicly released and anyone and their cousin can view is simply unthinkable. That would have been first off illegal, and second, highly immoral. And have a chilling effect on all research. We were working on schizophrenia research. Want to find something to blackmail a person with to their employer or in a court proceeding? Digging up that they're diagnosed with schizophrenia would probably be a good start.
Again: I wish that the reality was different, that all datasets contained no harmless information, and were all from publicly releasable sources. But it's just not the case. It's not such a perfect world. I fully, 100% support policies that mandate the release of all information that doesn't contain personal information and doesn't come from restrictive sources. And policies that mandate the choice of using open data vs. closed wherever there's something remotely equivalent as an option. But a lot of times there really is no open equivalent. Even with things that you'd think should be open data. To pick a random example, aircraft collect weather data as they fly (ACARS), which becomes the property of the airlines. Some of these airlines are under US jurisdiction, but most aren't, and thus bill doesn't mandate anything of private entities anyway, so it's irrelevant - the data is theirs, it's proprietary, and they see value in owning it. So it's generally made available only under proprietary licenses. It's stupid, and it absolutely shouldn't be like that, but what are you going to do - just omit a huge amount of data? How does that help anyone? There are whole countries who consider their met service data to be proprietary. Do you omit entire countries from your analysis? Electric utilities data on power usage, data from ships at sea, countless reems of internal data from industrial facilities.... do you just ignore all of it because you're not free ? You're ruining scientific accuracy if you do so. Anyone can contact the data owners and request permission to use it (generally under the same conditions / fee schedule as the original study got it), so it is reproducible, but not publicly releasable.
Sounds like, just like the above poster, you missed the "...and allow anyone who signs a confidentiality agreement to view redacted personal or trade information in data." in the summary.
HIPAA provides for anonymizing records for research
Perhaps you missed the "...and allow anyone who signs a confidentiality agreement to view redacted personal or trade information in data." in the summary?
I disagree. Given a mould that can be heated to high temperatures, you can cast regolith into whatever form you want (we do this sort of thing all the time on Earth, it's not complicated). Even large random natural asteroids can survive entry and landing with minimal erosion if they enter on a good trajectory (see the Hoba meteorite for an example); if you're customizing the trajectory and casting to a perfect entry shape, you have a natural ablator; whatever doesn't ablate is your recovery.
As for getting it to Earth, you need a launch system - but this doesn't mean propellant. Asteroid material contains iron, so you can accelerate it with a coilgun. The biggest challenge is the length of the coilgun needed. However, collapsible and rollable booms have been advancing very well; you can pack very long objects into very small spaces nowadays. Check out Roccor's rollable trusses - they're my favorites. It's like a composite truss appearing out of nowhere. And electronics can be embedded into them.
You have several systems that need to be developed. First, reconnaissance satellites - a couple hundred million a pop in small quantities, a couple dozen million a pop in large quantities (or less if launch costs go down). The mining system, power system, sintering system and launch systems are each probably in the $750M-2B range for design/development/testing/launch costs. Maybe $5B total just for starters. But you have no overburden to to remove and ore concentrations matching the best mines on Earth. As for entry sites and recoveries, there's different strategies. You can eject to direct aerocapture-to-entry, but you'll have a pretty large landing ellipse (whether you go for a shallow water or desert/wasteland recovery environment), since we're talking something that's unguided - the ellipse would be in the rough ballpark of tens of thousands of square kilometers. The area of course doesn't need to be empty all of the time, only during brief windows each synodic period when returns will be arriving; it can be fine for fishing, grazing, agriculture, etc during the mean time. If you want to shrink the landing ellipse, you can have them aerocapture to orbit. From there you can have a "space tug" of any sort inject them into a precise entry trajectory, with a landing ellipse of just a couple to a couple dozen square kilometers. Alternatively you should ship small, reusable guidance stages (just a couple dozen m/s dV) to be attached to each sintered return to ensure that they arrive on a precise trajectory to land in a narrow ellipse; this would require periodic resupply of such stages to the mine. Of course, no mine can operate indefinitely without any kind of resupply regardless; things wear and break down.
Each new mine gets a lot cheaper than the last, of course, as you're building it on what you've learned from the last attempt.
Sounds like a bill based on an understanding of science from people who've never worked in a scientific field. All research affected by HIPAA would be banned by this bill. Which is the majority of medical research. All research involving external sources of proprietary data - which no researchers like using, but sometimes you have no choice - would also be banned.
And furthermore, not all research is reproducible. "Hey, I just detected the highest energy cosmic ray collision ever in my detector, here's my paper showing proof of the detection!" "Sorry, unless some other team can reproduce the same cosmic ray event in their own detector.... " Most research is reproducible, of course, but the need for things that can be reproduced to be able to be reproduced is such a given in the peer-review process that it goes without saying. Of course, some things make it through peer review that are later shown not to be reproducible - or put more simply, wrong. This is not a fault of people not caring whether or not research is reproducible, but simply of errors (something that's unavoidable when humans are involved). The fact that someone would assume that reviewers are indifferent to whether research is reproducible or not boggles the mind. On the other hand, if their goal is to require that all results actually be reproduced before publication... hey, if they're going to at least double the total funding for science in the US to pay for it, then sure, go right ahead! Want independent reproduction of the results of the LHC running at high energies, from a different team using their own equipment? Step one: Build another LHC....
The real scientific issue that congress could actually do something about the exploitive stranglehold of publishers. Most commonly charging researchers for the review, not paying the reviewers anything, charging readers to read it, and charging other people to reproduce figures from the research, even if not-for-profit usage. And what great service do they provide for this? Typesetting? Nowadays researchers even have to do most of that work for them as well. But you have to publish. And in as high ranked of a journal as you can.
A federal regulation banning publication in non-open-access journals and journals with exploitive fee schedules would force publishers hands by taking away the vast majority of their content.
See above. The SRBs didn't so much land as hit the ocean at highway speeds, bob around in corrosive saltwater, have to be fished out, taken back, fully disassembled, recast, fully assembled, with a large fraction of the parts replaced.
If you want the airplane equivalent, it would be as if every plane flight, instead of landing, crashed into a mucky swamp and banged the plane up badly, ruining half the parts, and the whole airplane had to be broken down, large chunks of the plane replaced, and oh, instead of using jet fuel you have to open up the fuel tank, break it into pieces, and mould a non-extinguishable propellant into place before reassembling it.
This is, needless to say, not the model SpaceX is going for.
In addition to the corrections to your post concerning the tiles, the Shuttle orbiter was basically a second stage (at best, a 1.5 stage). A significant minority of the dry mass of the system. The SRBs were also "recovered", but A) they landed in saltwater, B) "landing" is being generous, they hit *hard*, C) solid rockets aren't just a "refill and reuse", you have to disassemble and recast. The net result is that reuse didn't really save any money on the SRBs.
The Shuttle's TPS was a big maintenance problem (not an issue for Falcon). The SSMEs were also pretty high maintenance. Shuttle had to build a whole huge ET each launch. And NASA has such huge amount of heavy infrastructure overhead.
It's hard to say how well reuse of Falcons will go at this point. But it should at the very least fare far better than the Shuttle system.
It's also worth noting that Falcon is only the start of SpaceX's plans. While they've learned what to do and what not to do from the Shuttle program, they want their experience with F9 and FH to influence their design of ITS and its support infrastructure.
I find that whenever I try to set a hard, fast programming rule, I find side cases where I honestly probably should break it. It doesn't matter what the rule is about - spacing, line wrapping, what belongs in a class vs. a standalone function, what files to put various pieces of code... whatever rule I make, I find cases where it probably would be better for me not to follow it.
The same happens with comments. I'm very much in the school of long, descriptive function names and variables that are self-commenting. I hate coming across old, outdated comments that no longer apply to the code; with long, descriptive variable and function names, you can read what's happening and it's always up to date. And often that's enough. The code says what it's doing, it's straightforward... job done.
But that's not always enough. Because it's one thing to say what's happening. But it's another thing to say "why". When was the last time you put the word "because" in a variable or function name? That's what comments should be for. Not what you're doing, but why you're doing it. Sometimes code just needs descriptive variable and function names. But sometimes you really need the "why" explained.
/* IF a is greater than 5 THEN*/
if (a > 5)
{ /* Loop 10 times */
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{ /* Call fn828 with arguments a and i */
fn828(a, i);
} /* end IF statement */
} /* end FOR loop */
...
/* END FUNCTION */ }
.... without ever having mentioned why they're doing any of it. Yes, someone who used to work here actually programmed like that. A comment on almost every line, and none of them at all useful.:P
They did sometimes have function headers. Unfortunately they were mostly cargo-cult style copies, full of meaningless cruft and long-outdated information, and... it almost hurts me to say this... doublespaced.;)
You said both the Moon and Mars. Can you not even read your own posts?
FYI, there are not "millions of people" who would like to sit around staring at a picture that only very slowly changes. And there's no point to live video anyway because there's no action; you can just broadcast stills and interpolate between them if that's what you want. All stills that NASA captures are released publicly for people like you to oggle at.
Lastly, in case you're actually curious, there are four missions active at the moon right now: ARTEMIS P1, ARTEMIS P2, LRO, and Chang'e 5-T1. The former two don't have cameras; they're simple satellites for studying radiation and magnetic fields. Chang'e 5-T1 is just a test mission for China to advance its technology for future moon missions. LRO is the only one that takes pictures. You can see them here. Unlike Mars, a well designed spacecraft like LRO (although not a cheap spacecraft) could have enough bandwidth for streaming live HD video. But LRMO is quite reasonably designed for science, not screensavers. It has three cameras. Two are black and white cameras which are more like a telescope (as with most spacecraft cameras) - black and white for maximum resolution (every pixel measuring brightness rather than every several combined pixels). I don't know if you've ever tried to capture video through a telescope while moving relative to the object you're trying to capture, but as a general rule it doesn't work very well, and there is nothing about the hardware that's setup for video processing. The third is a wide angle colour camera... "wide angle" in that the camera images are many times wider than they are tall, designed for capturing (nonaligned) strips of the surface in seven spectral bands (which do not correspond directly to what the human eye sees, but are most useful for determining the composition of the surface)
Not that they would ever waste such an expensive instrument's time on capturing a glorified screensaver for Slashdot ACs.
If you want a screensaver satellite, find someone who's willing to pay many tens to several hundred million of dollars to make a fancy screensaver.
LM doesn't mean Lunar Lander, it means Lunar Module. I don't know why you expect NASA's search engine to find things when you call them by the wrong name. Do you expect it to turn up pictures of the space shuttle if you type in "Space Bus"?
As for your other stuff, you're clearly trolling, and I don't feed trolls.
What are you talking about? We''ve been sending some damned impressive cameras out into space of late. Heck, even not just "of late". Have you seen the HiRISE images of Mars? Forget 4k, you can download those in 8k.
Now, if you're talking constant live 4K video footage, the problem isn't the cameras, it's the bandwidth over such huge distances.
The timing on this is perfect. A group I'm in is working on a book and right now going through trying to get copyright permission on all of the images we want to use (and sometimes you can't get it without paying fees, or can't get in touch with the author). Having such a huge wealth of public domain images all together on one seemingly well-designed search engine will be great for finding substitutions.
Too bad there's no ready substitution for figures from papers, however:P For a nonprofit book a lot of the big servers charge around $50 per image. Which for a full length book (dozens of figures) is thousands of dollars. Most authors are very nice about granting permission, but the journals are all about cash.
Not just been photos, there's been some reported video as well (also Queensland). I did check the gait of the animal in the video, and it matches a diagram of the thylacine's gait. But that's hardly unique to them, it just narrows down the range of possible species. There's old zoo footage here.
I doubt it's actually a thylacine, but who knows, weirder things have been discovered.
I once worked at Rockwell-Collins, which had been a supplier for the Space Shuttle programme. When I arrived, they were very stringent about how we handled our time reporting and billing. Why? Because apparently before I got there they had just gotten heavy slapped down for exploiting cost-plus Shuttle contracts. Whenever any project went over budget, they just had employees credit their time to the Shuttle programme.
And before you go and say Blue Origin and SpaceX are doing it so much cheaper, yes, but that is because they are standing on a mountain of research & technology courtesy NASA.
Something both of them readily admit. SpaceX in particular has continually expressed their gratitude for all of the support they've gotten from NASA over the years. And they have an interesting cooperative model in place now for Red Dragon - no money exchanged, but they get access to NASA facilities and time working with NASA researchers, and in turn NASA gets all of the data they acquire from their missions.
I'm anyone but someone to defend SLS, but this report seems rather flimsy. It seems that they're calling anything that NASA does in-house "overhead". That's not really a fair measure. A rocket is not just its physical construction; there's a huge amount of cost in research, design, testing, and support infrastructure - in the case of SLS, particularly the Exploration Ground Systems (EGS). Part of the problem however is that every time NASA builds something new, they're rarely allowed to shut it down. Including major projects with contractors. Congress keeps mandating this inefficiency, when what NASA really needs is the freedom to put large amounts of infrastructure to the axe when it can't contribute toward competitive costs, and reallocate the funds as is needed. So long as they face mandates to keep everything open (both internal, and with specific production lines run by particular suppliers), they shouldn't be criticized for their high costs - congress should.
I really think NASA would fare better if it went back more to the NACA model - a research and support organization for other players, maintaining the common infrastructure and R&D used by others - with the addition of a scientific exploration program. NASA shouldn't be making anything that a private business case can be built for (for example, rockets reaching LEO / GEO), but they should be running the DSN, range support, creating a market for private industry to continually expand/improve its capabilities, nurturing startups to increase competition, and extensively working to bring more advanced technologies (that the market couldn't afford to sink money into due to the risk) from theory into real world - not trying to make "workhorses", but proof-of-concept systems that others will run with if merit and maturity can be demonstrated.
In short: If there's a business model for it: private industry If it's too risky or long-term for business: NASA proof-of-concept If its a common need for multiple businesses in the field: NASA permanent infrastructure
Forget Makerbot - did you warn them about the Paris attacks? The Ankara bombings? The Metrojet bombing? Did you tell them to have Robin Williams visit a psychiatrist? Did you tell them to have Carrie Fisher visit a cardiologist? Did you have them warn Ukraine not to underestimate Russia in Donbass? Did you tell Germanwings to up their game on psych evals? Did you tell them to teach Podesta basic email security? Did you tell about Brexit? Did you warn them about Trump? Did you have anyone tell Clinton that she'll be best known for email servers and a conspiracy theory about a pizza parlor's occult child pornography dungeon? Did you warn Bowling Green about the horrific terror attack, and the cruel irony that people will forget about it?
Slashdot Mirror
In a perfect world, of course. The reality is that this is not a perfect world. Huge amounts of data contain personally identifiable data, or are only available from private sources that consider their dataset to be of value and thus don't allow it to be publicly released. I wish this wasn't the way it is, but it is reality. I've worked in medical research before (hence the reason I brought up HIPAA). The concept that all work that can't have the dataset publicly released and anyone and their cousin can view is simply unthinkable. That would have been first off illegal, and second, highly immoral. And have a chilling effect on all research. We were working on schizophrenia research. Want to find something to blackmail a person with to their employer or in a court proceeding? Digging up that they're diagnosed with schizophrenia would probably be a good start.
Again: I wish that the reality was different, that all datasets contained no harmless information, and were all from publicly releasable sources. But it's just not the case. It's not such a perfect world. I fully, 100% support policies that mandate the release of all information that doesn't contain personal information and doesn't come from restrictive sources. And policies that mandate the choice of using open data vs. closed wherever there's something remotely equivalent as an option. But a lot of times there really is no open equivalent. Even with things that you'd think should be open data. To pick a random example, aircraft collect weather data as they fly (ACARS), which becomes the property of the airlines. Some of these airlines are under US jurisdiction, but most aren't, and thus bill doesn't mandate anything of private entities anyway, so it's irrelevant - the data is theirs, it's proprietary, and they see value in owning it. So it's generally made available only under proprietary licenses. It's stupid, and it absolutely shouldn't be like that, but what are you going to do - just omit a huge amount of data? How does that help anyone? There are whole countries who consider their met service data to be proprietary. Do you omit entire countries from your analysis? Electric utilities data on power usage, data from ships at sea, countless reems of internal data from industrial facilities.... do you just ignore all of it because you're not free ? You're ruining scientific accuracy if you do so. Anyone can contact the data owners and request permission to use it (generally under the same conditions / fee schedule as the original study got it), so it is reproducible, but not publicly releasable.
Sounds like, just like the above poster, you missed the "...and allow anyone who signs a confidentiality agreement to view redacted personal or trade information in data." in the summary.
Perhaps you missed the "...and allow anyone who signs a confidentiality agreement to view redacted personal or trade information in data." in the summary?
** "could", not "should"
I disagree. Given a mould that can be heated to high temperatures, you can cast regolith into whatever form you want (we do this sort of thing all the time on Earth, it's not complicated). Even large random natural asteroids can survive entry and landing with minimal erosion if they enter on a good trajectory (see the Hoba meteorite for an example); if you're customizing the trajectory and casting to a perfect entry shape, you have a natural ablator; whatever doesn't ablate is your recovery.
As for getting it to Earth, you need a launch system - but this doesn't mean propellant. Asteroid material contains iron, so you can accelerate it with a coilgun. The biggest challenge is the length of the coilgun needed. However, collapsible and rollable booms have been advancing very well; you can pack very long objects into very small spaces nowadays. Check out Roccor's rollable trusses - they're my favorites. It's like a composite truss appearing out of nowhere. And electronics can be embedded into them.
You have several systems that need to be developed. First, reconnaissance satellites - a couple hundred million a pop in small quantities, a couple dozen million a pop in large quantities (or less if launch costs go down). The mining system, power system, sintering system and launch systems are each probably in the $750M-2B range for design/development/testing/launch costs. Maybe $5B total just for starters. But you have no overburden to to remove and ore concentrations matching the best mines on Earth. As for entry sites and recoveries, there's different strategies. You can eject to direct aerocapture-to-entry, but you'll have a pretty large landing ellipse (whether you go for a shallow water or desert/wasteland recovery environment), since we're talking something that's unguided - the ellipse would be in the rough ballpark of tens of thousands of square kilometers. The area of course doesn't need to be empty all of the time, only during brief windows each synodic period when returns will be arriving; it can be fine for fishing, grazing, agriculture, etc during the mean time. If you want to shrink the landing ellipse, you can have them aerocapture to orbit. From there you can have a "space tug" of any sort inject them into a precise entry trajectory, with a landing ellipse of just a couple to a couple dozen square kilometers. Alternatively you should ship small, reusable guidance stages (just a couple dozen m/s dV) to be attached to each sintered return to ensure that they arrive on a precise trajectory to land in a narrow ellipse; this would require periodic resupply of such stages to the mine. Of course, no mine can operate indefinitely without any kind of resupply regardless; things wear and break down.
Each new mine gets a lot cheaper than the last, of course, as you're building it on what you've learned from the last attempt.
Sounds like a bill based on an understanding of science from people who've never worked in a scientific field. All research affected by HIPAA would be banned by this bill. Which is the majority of medical research. All research involving external sources of proprietary data - which no researchers like using, but sometimes you have no choice - would also be banned.
And furthermore, not all research is reproducible. "Hey, I just detected the highest energy cosmic ray collision ever in my detector, here's my paper showing proof of the detection!" "Sorry, unless some other team can reproduce the same cosmic ray event in their own detector.... " Most research is reproducible, of course, but the need for things that can be reproduced to be able to be reproduced is such a given in the peer-review process that it goes without saying. Of course, some things make it through peer review that are later shown not to be reproducible - or put more simply, wrong. This is not a fault of people not caring whether or not research is reproducible, but simply of errors (something that's unavoidable when humans are involved). The fact that someone would assume that reviewers are indifferent to whether research is reproducible or not boggles the mind. On the other hand, if their goal is to require that all results actually be reproduced before publication... hey, if they're going to at least double the total funding for science in the US to pay for it, then sure, go right ahead! Want independent reproduction of the results of the LHC running at high energies, from a different team using their own equipment? Step one: Build another LHC....
The real scientific issue that congress could actually do something about the exploitive stranglehold of publishers. Most commonly charging researchers for the review, not paying the reviewers anything, charging readers to read it, and charging other people to reproduce figures from the research, even if not-for-profit usage. And what great service do they provide for this? Typesetting? Nowadays researchers even have to do most of that work for them as well. But you have to publish. And in as high ranked of a journal as you can.
A federal regulation banning publication in non-open-access journals and journals with exploitive fee schedules would force publishers hands by taking away the vast majority of their content.
See above. The SRBs didn't so much land as hit the ocean at highway speeds, bob around in corrosive saltwater, have to be fished out, taken back, fully disassembled, recast, fully assembled, with a large fraction of the parts replaced.
If you want the airplane equivalent, it would be as if every plane flight, instead of landing, crashed into a mucky swamp and banged the plane up badly, ruining half the parts, and the whole airplane had to be broken down, large chunks of the plane replaced, and oh, instead of using jet fuel you have to open up the fuel tank, break it into pieces, and mould a non-extinguishable propellant into place before reassembling it.
This is, needless to say, not the model SpaceX is going for.
Did have some quite close calls, mind you.
In addition to the corrections to your post concerning the tiles, the Shuttle orbiter was basically a second stage (at best, a 1.5 stage). A significant minority of the dry mass of the system. The SRBs were also "recovered", but A) they landed in saltwater, B) "landing" is being generous, they hit *hard*, C) solid rockets aren't just a "refill and reuse", you have to disassemble and recast. The net result is that reuse didn't really save any money on the SRBs.
The Shuttle's TPS was a big maintenance problem (not an issue for Falcon). The SSMEs were also pretty high maintenance. Shuttle had to build a whole huge ET each launch. And NASA has such huge amount of heavy infrastructure overhead.
It's hard to say how well reuse of Falcons will go at this point. But it should at the very least fare far better than the Shuttle system.
It's also worth noting that Falcon is only the start of SpaceX's plans. While they've learned what to do and what not to do from the Shuttle program, they want their experience with F9 and FH to influence their design of ITS and its support infrastructure.
Actually, the next milestone is rapid reuse :) Tweet from Musk this evening:
SpaceX has a backlog. It'll be nice to see if they can really up their launch rate and clear it all out.
I find that whenever I try to set a hard, fast programming rule, I find side cases where I honestly probably should break it. It doesn't matter what the rule is about - spacing, line wrapping, what belongs in a class vs. a standalone function, what files to put various pieces of code... whatever rule I make, I find cases where it probably would be better for me not to follow it.
The same happens with comments. I'm very much in the school of long, descriptive function names and variables that are self-commenting. I hate coming across old, outdated comments that no longer apply to the code; with long, descriptive variable and function names, you can read what's happening and it's always up to date. And often that's enough. The code says what it's doing, it's straightforward... job done.
But that's not always enough. Because it's one thing to say what's happening. But it's another thing to say "why". When was the last time you put the word "because" in a variable or function name? That's what comments should be for. Not what you're doing, but why you're doing it. Sometimes code just needs descriptive variable and function names. But sometimes you really need the "why" explained.
Or the more annoying:
void fn193(dt_1011 a)
{
if (a > 5)
{
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
fn828(a, i);
}
}
}
They did sometimes have function headers. Unfortunately they were mostly cargo-cult style copies, full of meaningless cruft and long-outdated information, and... it almost hurts me to say this... doublespaced. ;)
You said both the Moon and Mars. Can you not even read your own posts?
FYI, there are not "millions of people" who would like to sit around staring at a picture that only very slowly changes. And there's no point to live video anyway because there's no action; you can just broadcast stills and interpolate between them if that's what you want. All stills that NASA captures are released publicly for people like you to oggle at.
Lastly, in case you're actually curious, there are four missions active at the moon right now: ARTEMIS P1, ARTEMIS P2, LRO, and Chang'e 5-T1. The former two don't have cameras; they're simple satellites for studying radiation and magnetic fields. Chang'e 5-T1 is just a test mission for China to advance its technology for future moon missions. LRO is the only one that takes pictures. You can see them here. Unlike Mars, a well designed spacecraft like LRO (although not a cheap spacecraft) could have enough bandwidth for streaming live HD video. But LRMO is quite reasonably designed for science, not screensavers. It has three cameras. Two are black and white cameras which are more like a telescope (as with most spacecraft cameras) - black and white for maximum resolution (every pixel measuring brightness rather than every several combined pixels). I don't know if you've ever tried to capture video through a telescope while moving relative to the object you're trying to capture, but as a general rule it doesn't work very well, and there is nothing about the hardware that's setup for video processing. The third is a wide angle colour camera... "wide angle" in that the camera images are many times wider than they are tall, designed for capturing (nonaligned) strips of the surface in seven spectral bands (which do not correspond directly to what the human eye sees, but are most useful for determining the composition of the surface)
Not that they would ever waste such an expensive instrument's time on capturing a glorified screensaver for Slashdot ACs.
If you want a screensaver satellite, find someone who's willing to pay many tens to several hundred million of dollars to make a fancy screensaver.
LM doesn't mean Lunar Lander, it means Lunar Module. I don't know why you expect NASA's search engine to find things when you call them by the wrong name. Do you expect it to turn up pictures of the space shuttle if you type in "Space Bus"?
As for your other stuff, you're clearly trolling, and I don't feed trolls.
Thankfully the URL is easy to remember... just like images.google.com.
It's kind of amusing searching for keywords that you wouldn't expect to show up on a NASA image search. For example, I found a Native-American juggling hoops, old ladies line dancing at a farmers' market, kids dressed as Men in Black dancing underneath the Shuttle Endeavour, people using the primary mirror of James Webb to take selfies, actress Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) singing, NASA's hip-hop dance team Forces In Motion (travels around middle schools teaching Newton's laws), James Ingram singing "I believe I can fly" in front of Bill Nye, NASA administrator Dan Goldin laughing with (hopefully not at) a "bubble boy" in a protective suit, enough frames of someone testing out a spacesuit to make a stop-motion dance video, and a bunch of other unexpected weirdness.
Because the name of it isn't "Lunar Lander", it's called the LM.
What are you talking about? We''ve been sending some damned impressive cameras out into space of late. Heck, even not just "of late". Have you seen the HiRISE images of Mars? Forget 4k, you can download those in 8k.
Now, if you're talking constant live 4K video footage, the problem isn't the cameras, it's the bandwidth over such huge distances.
The timing on this is perfect. A group I'm in is working on a book and right now going through trying to get copyright permission on all of the images we want to use (and sometimes you can't get it without paying fees, or can't get in touch with the author). Having such a huge wealth of public domain images all together on one seemingly well-designed search engine will be great for finding substitutions.
Too bad there's no ready substitution for figures from papers, however :P For a nonprofit book a lot of the big servers charge around $50 per image. Which for a full length book (dozens of figures) is thousands of dollars. Most authors are very nice about granting permission, but the journals are all about cash.
Not just been photos, there's been some reported video as well (also Queensland). I did check the gait of the animal in the video, and it matches a diagram of the thylacine's gait. But that's hardly unique to them, it just narrows down the range of possible species. There's old zoo footage here.
I doubt it's actually a thylacine, but who knows, weirder things have been discovered.
No question. But, mandates are mandates.
Using what inflation index? Remember, NASA's costs are adjusted by the NNSI.
I once worked at Rockwell-Collins, which had been a supplier for the Space Shuttle programme. When I arrived, they were very stringent about how we handled our time reporting and billing. Why? Because apparently before I got there they had just gotten heavy slapped down for exploiting cost-plus Shuttle contracts. Whenever any project went over budget, they just had employees credit their time to the Shuttle programme.
Something both of them readily admit. SpaceX in particular has continually expressed their gratitude for all of the support they've gotten from NASA over the years. And they have an interesting cooperative model in place now for Red Dragon - no money exchanged, but they get access to NASA facilities and time working with NASA researchers, and in turn NASA gets all of the data they acquire from their missions.
I'm anyone but someone to defend SLS, but this report seems rather flimsy. It seems that they're calling anything that NASA does in-house "overhead". That's not really a fair measure. A rocket is not just its physical construction; there's a huge amount of cost in research, design, testing, and support infrastructure - in the case of SLS, particularly the Exploration Ground Systems (EGS). Part of the problem however is that every time NASA builds something new, they're rarely allowed to shut it down. Including major projects with contractors. Congress keeps mandating this inefficiency, when what NASA really needs is the freedom to put large amounts of infrastructure to the axe when it can't contribute toward competitive costs, and reallocate the funds as is needed. So long as they face mandates to keep everything open (both internal, and with specific production lines run by particular suppliers), they shouldn't be criticized for their high costs - congress should.
I really think NASA would fare better if it went back more to the NACA model - a research and support organization for other players, maintaining the common infrastructure and R&D used by others - with the addition of a scientific exploration program. NASA shouldn't be making anything that a private business case can be built for (for example, rockets reaching LEO / GEO), but they should be running the DSN, range support, creating a market for private industry to continually expand/improve its capabilities, nurturing startups to increase competition, and extensively working to bring more advanced technologies (that the market couldn't afford to sink money into due to the risk) from theory into real world - not trying to make "workhorses", but proof-of-concept systems that others will run with if merit and maturity can be demonstrated.
In short:
If there's a business model for it: private industry
If it's too risky or long-term for business: NASA proof-of-concept
If its a common need for multiple businesses in the field: NASA permanent infrastructure
Forget Makerbot - did you warn them about the Paris attacks? The Ankara bombings? The Metrojet bombing? Did you tell them to have Robin Williams visit a psychiatrist? Did you tell them to have Carrie Fisher visit a cardiologist? Did you have them warn Ukraine not to underestimate Russia in Donbass? Did you tell Germanwings to up their game on psych evals? Did you tell them to teach Podesta basic email security? Did you tell about Brexit? Did you warn them about Trump? Did you have anyone tell Clinton that she'll be best known for email servers and a conspiracy theory about a pizza parlor's occult child pornography dungeon? Did you warn Bowling Green about the horrific terror attack, and the cruel irony that people will forget about it?