It will merely be a customer of DigitalGlobe - one of many, including the US government.
Not that the US goverment needs DigitalGlobe's images. After all, the NSA has a fleet of its own satellites with far better image resolution capability than the DigitalGlobe effort.
In fact, the US Government relies heavily on DigitalGlobe imagery. After the optical component of the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA) program that should have replaced the aging KH-11 Keyhole/CRYSTAL satelites was scrapped, it left the NRO (the NSA has nothing to do with optical reconaissance) with limited high-res imaging capabilities. For a while they had only 3 operational KH-11 optical reconnaissance satellites left in orbit: two new recent launches have expanded this to 5 recently but one of these is over 17 years old and will likely soon be deorbitted, bringing it down to 4: hardly a "fleet". Lawmakers have been holding off NRO requests for more optical satellites with the argument that it is better to buy time on DigitalGlobe satellites.
Just a single example of European knowledge in the Americas that predated Columbus.
Irrelevant. The pictures in the Voynich manuscript are clearly not 11th century Norse but depict 16th century west European clothing and equipment and classic constellations.
The radiocarbon date of 516 +/- 18 yrs bp only dates the time of life of the goats who's skin was used for the parchment. It does not date the construction of the book persé. It was not unusual at that time to use old parchment.
The manuscript contains several depictions that are clearly European: figures in European clothing, European equipment (e.g. a cross-bow) and some pages with Western (not indigenous American) constellations (e.g. Capricorn, the Balance).
So it is very clear, if it indeed shows American plants, that it must be post-Colombian and old parchment was used.
What was the point of examining this individual animal?
It was part of research into climate change over the past 1000 years. The oxygen isotopes in carbonates in clam shells provide information about climate at the time the shell layer was formed. See: http://www.bangor.ac.uk/news/full.php.en?nid=16781&tnid=0
It's worth keeping in mind, though, that you don't publish CalTech papers and get time on the Palomar 200" by being a dim-witted slacker.
True. I think their presentation of things is more the result of current publishing demands: useful or even innovative is not good enough anymore to get your paper through, it needs to be "new" and "never done before" instead of an innovation on an existing technique.
Still, I find the complete lack of any reference to even the words "track & stack" weird, given that tracking & stacking is common practise in imaging faint asteroids. Maybe not when you use a 5-meter telescope, but with with smaller instruments it is often done. I have used the technique myself o faint asteroids and much-used astrometry packages like Astrometrica have a standard option for it.
The more sensitive camera and the algorithm to empirically find the correct direction and speed of movement of a not-known asteroid are new.
The method of overlaying multiple short images so that the asteroid is a pinpoint additive composite of multiple images and the stars become trails is not new.
The latter technique is called "stacking" (a word existing for quite a long time and meaning the same as their "synthetic tracking"). It is regularly done to image and get astrometry on faint objects, when speed and direction of movement are already known (e.g. in follow-up observations on a Near earth Asteroid that already has some observations over the previous hours/days and hence a preliminary orbit). That part is really not new, and there is no need to invent new terminology ("synthetic tracking") for it.
Frankly, it is weird that the authors nowhere mention "stacking" as an existing technique that is often used in imaging faint asteroids. It suggests they did not investigate whether their "new" technique is really that new. Yes, they innovate on it, but they did not invent a completely novel technique.
The Plio-Pleistocene boundary is at 2.6 million years ago. With 700 000 yrs, this Horse is Middle Pleistocene (the Lower-Middle Pleistocene boundar is at 780 000 yrs ago).
The general consensus is that Homo sapiens neanderthalis did not use throwing spears and it was the Homo sapiens sapiens who did this innovation.
There is no such consensus at all.
For the bow and arrow: yes. For throwing spears: no.
The 350 000 yrs old Schöningen (Germany) wooden spears, which predate Homo sapiens, are finally balanced with the center of balance at 1/3rd of their length. They have the balance and shape of an Olympic throwing javelin. Experiments with replica's show they are indeed quite suited as throwing spears.
The weak point of this new study is that it actually does not differentiate impact marks from thrusting from impact marks from throwing. It merely assumes that traces of a stone tip equate a throwing spear. And in placing the earliest evidence in an early H. sapiens context in S-Africa, it overlooks evidence elsewhere in a non-sapiens context.
Neandertals in Eurasia for example did haft stone points to pieces of wood: we know this because stone points with remnants of birch tar have been found (e.g. at Campanello, Italy). There is also the find of a wild ass vertebra from Um el Tlel in Syria with a Levallois stone point deeply embedded in it. In addition: a throwing spear does not have to be stone-tipped.
(I don't know where the 5200 number in the summary comes from but IAU's Minor Planet Center knows of only 4803).
There is a disparity between their summary table (which lists 4803) and the full table of orbital elements of all Apollo's they (the MPC) provide. The latter counts 5203 objects
Yay, what a surprise: "likely an Apollo"...[sarcasm] gosh, that is unexpected! [/sarcasm]
Given that the vast majority of objects in earth-crossing orbits are Apollos, that is hardly a surprising conclusion. It would have been much more interesting if it was an Aten - much less of those around. Or a comet fragment
87% of asteroids in earth-crossing orbits are Apollos. 13% are Atens. Then there is a n unknown quantity of cometary objects
That SNC meteorites are from Mars was a main stream notion in meteoritics already well before the ALH 84001 "fossil" announcement. It was NOT with the ALH 84001 announcement that that link was first made. The first suggestions date from 1979. For ALH 84001 it is somewhat different: it initially had been misidentified as a diogenite (because its composition is mostly low-Ca pyroxene) and was found to be a SNC-related meteorite in 1994 (two years before the ALH 84001 "fossil" announcement). Its oxygen isotope fractionation is very similar to SNC's.
True, there are a few scientific dissenters about a Martian origin for SNC meteorites but they are few. Their main problem is to explain what the parent body of these meteorites is if it is not Mars. It needs to be a large differentiated body with active volcanism in the past, volcanism still active less than 1 billion yrs ago (which points to a body of planetary size). It needs to have posessed an atmosphere quite similar in noble gas composition as that measured on Mars by the Viking probes, and another clue is the similar chemical composition of the Mars surface and these meteorites. The Oxygen Isotopes moreover show that this parent body cannot be the earth-moon system, and they also differ in this from HED meteorites (linked to Vesta), as do their "young" crystalization ages.
The idea that scientists worldwide would engage in a 'conspiracy' just to save the face of a US President is ridiculous by the way. Many scientists studying ALH 84001 and other Martian meteorites are not even American - we foreign scientists don't give a rats arse about the reputation of your former President!
The controversy about ALH 84001 was not that it is from Mars (that is pretty much agreed upon): the controversy was about nanofossils purportedly discovered in this meteorite.
The problem is to recognize them: Mars and Moon meteorites stand out in the lab by their composition. Earth meteorites just look like, well, any common stone on the earth surface. So an analysis will say: "nope, it is just a terrestrial rock, not a meteorite".
A fresh fallen one will have a fusion crust, but it might be dismissed a a weathering crust.
The OTP ought to cut severely in the hyperbole. There is very little (read: no) "bad news" in all of this. Most of what is brought up is FUD aimed at fooling people to think the North Koreans "failed" again (as crazy commies should). Truth is: this time they didn't.
1) Tumbling does not increase the changes of a collision at all. It is completely irrelevant for the collision danger whether a satellite tumbles or not;
2) Tumbling does not really influence the orbit (only in the final stages of decay it does). Indeed, it is completely unclear what is meant by a "stable orbit" here. ALL satellite orbits decay over time, so NONE of them is "stable". Probably, it is meant to imply that the Korean satellite has no reboosting capability. That is probably part of the design (many simpler satellites have no reboosting capability).
Yes, maybe the Koreans have no control over the attitude of the object. But that doesn't matter much: nothwithstanding Korean claims of it being a "weather satellite" this was probably never meant to be a truely functioning satellite.
The fact is that the North Koreans managed to successfully bring an object into earth orbit this time, and that in itself is an achievement. Whether you like them or not (and I don't like the North Koreans), those are the facts. No amount of spin and hyperbole about "danger" and "bad news" can take away that fact. This is all simply FUD.
The problem is simply that Amazon and Google servers in the US fall under the US Patriot Act. This means that the US Government ALWAYS has access to the hosted files, if it wants. It is not possible for a company and foreign government to negotiate on this: Amazon and Google are bound by US law.
Of course, as a government you don't want another other government to have complete access to anything you put in the cloud. And in some countries (e.g. the Netherlands where I live) it is explicitly forbidden to host privacy sensitive information (e.g. medic records) on systems that have servers outside of the country in question for exactly this reason.
The telescopes in question are not "surplus": it consists of never finished hardware from the aborted optical component of FIA (Future Imagery Architecture). This optical FIA component, intended to replace the Keyhole system, was scrapped because of massive budget overruns. Part of the hardware was already built by that time, and that is what now has been donated to NASA. It never were complete telescopes, let alone "surplus"telescopes.
Creating bicycle lanes is a much better way to safety for bicylers, than helmet laws. The Netherlands where I live, one of the most bicycle-intense countries in the world, started to create bicycle lanes in the early '70-ies in order to reduce the number of bicycle casualties. And it worked. And we don't wear helmets here (if you see bicyclers with helmets in the Netherlands, it are either racing bicyclers, or foreigners, seldom average cyclers).
I don't think that it is "pretty obvious it is a crater". Prime evidence is missing or not well enough illustrated.
First:
1) as others here remark too, a circular feature does not equal an impact crater. Karst depressions are circular too and a strong candidate in this area;
2) magnetic particles can be found in any soil. They do not point to impact as such. Show us geochemical tests that show they are of meteoritic composition, and show us that they have an abundance well over the natural accretion rate of cosmic dust for this sedimentary regime
What is needed is:
a) a clear record of a breccia fill;
b) a clear record of overturned rim strata;
c) a clear record of shock-deformed quartz;
d) more convincing examples of shatter cones;
e) more convincing examples of impact melt breccia, including identification of the mineral phases that associate with such rock.
The presence of clear meteoritic components (geochemically shown to be extraterrestrial in composition) in the crater sediments would be a good argument as well, but they are not always preserved in genuine meteor craters. The magnetic particles you present do not count as such, as I already pointed out.
Regarding (d) and (e): the photographs of purported specimens provided are far from convincing. The "shatter cone" actually looks like a shard of rock with a conchoidal fracture on the ventral face, not a 3D shatter cone. And the "melt glass"? Not clear enough from the pictures: it could be anything. The "tortured rock" (purported impact melt) actually looks like a porous carbonate such as you can find in karst features, not like a vesiculated impact melt.
Early studies into Neandertal genetics concerned MtDNA: but the latest studies concern nuclear DNA. By now, there is a complete Neandertal genome (pieced together from genomic fragments of various Neandertals).
Slashdot Mirror
It will merely be a customer of DigitalGlobe - one of many, including the US government.
Not that the US goverment needs DigitalGlobe's images. After all, the NSA has a fleet of its own satellites with far better image resolution capability than the DigitalGlobe effort.
In fact, the US Government relies heavily on DigitalGlobe imagery. After the optical component of the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA) program that should have replaced the aging KH-11 Keyhole/CRYSTAL satelites was scrapped, it left the NRO (the NSA has nothing to do with optical reconaissance) with limited high-res imaging capabilities. For a while they had only 3 operational KH-11 optical reconnaissance satellites left in orbit: two new recent launches have expanded this to 5 recently but one of these is over 17 years old and will likely soon be deorbitted, bringing it down to 4: hardly a "fleet". Lawmakers have been holding off NRO requests for more optical satellites with the argument that it is better to buy time on DigitalGlobe satellites.
L'Anse aux Meadows.
Just a single example of European knowledge in the Americas that predated Columbus.
Irrelevant. The pictures in the Voynich manuscript are clearly not 11th century Norse but depict 16th century west European clothing and equipment and classic constellations.
Everything points to it being post-Columbian.
The radiocarbon date of 516 +/- 18 yrs bp only dates the time of life of the goats who's skin was used for the parchment. It does not date the construction of the book persé. It was not unusual at that time to use old parchment.
The manuscript contains several depictions that are clearly European: figures in European clothing, European equipment (e.g. a cross-bow) and some pages with Western (not indigenous American) constellations (e.g. Capricorn, the Balance).
So it is very clear, if it indeed shows American plants, that it must be post-Colombian and old parchment was used.
What was the point of examining this individual animal?
It was part of research into climate change over the past 1000 years. The oxygen isotopes in carbonates in clam shells provide information about climate at the time the shell layer was formed. See: http://www.bangor.ac.uk/news/full.php.en?nid=16781&tnid=0
It's worth keeping in mind, though, that you don't publish CalTech papers and get time on the Palomar 200" by being a dim-witted slacker.
True. I think their presentation of things is more the result of current publishing demands: useful or even innovative is not good enough anymore to get your paper through, it needs to be "new" and "never done before" instead of an innovation on an existing technique.
Still, I find the complete lack of any reference to even the words "track & stack" weird, given that tracking & stacking is common practise in imaging faint asteroids. Maybe not when you use a 5-meter telescope, but with with smaller instruments it is often done. I have used the technique myself o faint asteroids and much-used astrometry packages like Astrometrica have a standard option for it.
Small addition: the technique is called "track & stack" when employed on moving objects. Most existing astrometric software can do it.
The more sensitive camera and the algorithm to empirically find the correct direction and speed of movement of a not-known asteroid are new.
The method of overlaying multiple short images so that the asteroid is a pinpoint additive composite of multiple images and the stars become trails is not new.
The latter technique is called "stacking" (a word existing for quite a long time and meaning the same as their "synthetic tracking"). It is regularly done to image and get astrometry on faint objects, when speed and direction of movement are already known (e.g. in follow-up observations on a Near earth Asteroid that already has some observations over the previous hours/days and hence a preliminary orbit). That part is really not new, and there is no need to invent new terminology ("synthetic tracking") for it.
Frankly, it is weird that the authors nowhere mention "stacking" as an existing technique that is often used in imaging faint asteroids. It suggests they did not investigate whether their "new" technique is really that new. Yes, they innovate on it, but they did not invent a completely novel technique.
A number of asteroids have moons (most well known pair: (243) Ida and Dactyl). So moons are clearly not restricted to planets.
Pleistocene Park, not Pliocene Park.
The Plio-Pleistocene boundary is at 2.6 million years ago. With 700 000 yrs, this Horse is Middle Pleistocene (the Lower-Middle Pleistocene boundar is at 780 000 yrs ago).
The general consensus is that Homo sapiens neanderthalis did not use throwing spears and it was the Homo sapiens sapiens who did this innovation.
There is no such consensus at all.
For the bow and arrow: yes. For throwing spears: no.
The 350 000 yrs old Schöningen (Germany) wooden spears, which predate Homo sapiens, are finally balanced with the center of balance at 1/3rd of their length. They have the balance and shape of an Olympic throwing javelin. Experiments with replica's show they are indeed quite suited as throwing spears.
The weak point of this new study is that it actually does not differentiate impact marks from thrusting from impact marks from throwing. It merely assumes that traces of a stone tip equate a throwing spear. And in placing the earliest evidence in an early H. sapiens context in S-Africa, it overlooks evidence elsewhere in a non-sapiens context.
Neandertals in Eurasia for example did haft stone points to pieces of wood: we know this because stone points with remnants of birch tar have been found (e.g. at Campanello, Italy). There is also the find of a wild ass vertebra from Um el Tlel in Syria with a Levallois stone point deeply embedded in it. In addition: a throwing spear does not have to be stone-tipped.
(I don't know where the 5200 number in the summary comes from but IAU's Minor Planet Center knows of only 4803) .
There is a disparity between their summary table (which lists 4803) and the full table of orbital elements of all Apollo's they (the MPC) provide. The latter counts 5203 objects
Yay, what a surprise: "likely an Apollo"...[sarcasm] gosh, that is unexpected! [/sarcasm]
Given that the vast majority of objects in earth-crossing orbits are Apollos, that is hardly a surprising conclusion. It would have been much more interesting if it was an Aten - much less of those around. Or a comet fragment
87% of asteroids in earth-crossing orbits are Apollos. 13% are Atens. Then there is a n unknown quantity of cometary objects
That SNC meteorites are from Mars was a main stream notion in meteoritics already well before the ALH 84001 "fossil" announcement. It was NOT with the ALH 84001 announcement that that link was first made. The first suggestions date from 1979. For ALH 84001 it is somewhat different: it initially had been misidentified as a diogenite (because its composition is mostly low-Ca pyroxene) and was found to be a SNC-related meteorite in 1994 (two years before the ALH 84001 "fossil" announcement). Its oxygen isotope fractionation is very similar to SNC's.
True, there are a few scientific dissenters about a Martian origin for SNC meteorites but they are few. Their main problem is to explain what the parent body of these meteorites is if it is not Mars. It needs to be a large differentiated body with active volcanism in the past, volcanism still active less than 1 billion yrs ago (which points to a body of planetary size). It needs to have posessed an atmosphere quite similar in noble gas composition as that measured on Mars by the Viking probes, and another clue is the similar chemical composition of the Mars surface and these meteorites. The Oxygen Isotopes moreover show that this parent body cannot be the earth-moon system, and they also differ in this from HED meteorites (linked to Vesta), as do their "young" crystalization ages.
The idea that scientists worldwide would engage in a 'conspiracy' just to save the face of a US President is ridiculous by the way. Many scientists studying ALH 84001 and other Martian meteorites are not even American - we foreign scientists don't give a rats arse about the reputation of your former President!
The controversy about ALH 84001 was not that it is from Mars (that is pretty much agreed upon): the controversy was about nanofossils purportedly discovered in this meteorite.
The problem is to recognize them: Mars and Moon meteorites stand out in the lab by their composition. Earth meteorites just look like, well, any common stone on the earth surface. So an analysis will say: "nope, it is just a terrestrial rock, not a meteorite".
A fresh fallen one will have a fusion crust, but it might be dismissed a a weathering crust.
The OTP ought to cut severely in the hyperbole. There is very little (read: no) "bad news" in all of this. Most of what is brought up is FUD aimed at fooling people to think the North Koreans "failed" again (as crazy commies should). Truth is: this time they didn't.
1) Tumbling does not increase the changes of a collision at all. It is completely irrelevant for the collision danger whether a satellite tumbles or not;
2) Tumbling does not really influence the orbit (only in the final stages of decay it does). Indeed, it is completely unclear what is meant by a "stable orbit" here. ALL satellite orbits decay over time, so NONE of them is "stable". Probably, it is meant to imply that the Korean satellite has no reboosting capability. That is probably part of the design (many simpler satellites have no reboosting capability).
Yes, maybe the Koreans have no control over the attitude of the object. But that doesn't matter much: nothwithstanding Korean claims of it being a "weather satellite" this was probably never meant to be a truely functioning satellite.
The fact is that the North Koreans managed to successfully bring an object into earth orbit this time, and that in itself is an achievement. Whether you like them or not (and I don't like the North Koreans), those are the facts. No amount of spin and hyperbole about "danger" and "bad news" can take away that fact. This is all simply FUD.
With the current rate of decay and solar flux, the A & B object will decay about 2-3 months from now.
They are in completely different orbits: so no.
I don't think this this Korean stuff is much more stupid than 1/3rd of Texans believing Dino's and humans walked this planet together:
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-education/public-education/texans-dinosaurs-humans-walked-the-earth-at-same/
The problem is simply that Amazon and Google servers in the US fall under the US Patriot Act. This means that the US Government ALWAYS has access to the hosted files, if it wants. It is not possible for a company and foreign government to negotiate on this: Amazon and Google are bound by US law.
Of course, as a government you don't want another other government to have complete access to anything you put in the cloud. And in some countries (e.g. the Netherlands where I live) it is explicitly forbidden to host privacy sensitive information (e.g. medic records) on systems that have servers outside of the country in question for exactly this reason.
The telescopes in question are not "surplus": it consists of never finished hardware from the aborted optical component of FIA (Future Imagery Architecture). This optical FIA component, intended to replace the Keyhole system, was scrapped because of massive budget overruns. Part of the hardware was already built by that time, and that is what now has been donated to NASA. It never were complete telescopes, let alone "surplus"telescopes.
The British experimented and used this method already during WWII, to retrieve spies from occupied Europe.
Creating bicycle lanes is a much better way to safety for bicylers, than helmet laws. The Netherlands where I live, one of the most bicycle-intense countries in the world, started to create bicycle lanes in the early '70-ies in order to reduce the number of bicycle casualties. And it worked. And we don't wear helmets here (if you see bicyclers with helmets in the Netherlands, it are either racing bicyclers, or foreigners, seldom average cyclers).
I don't think that it is "pretty obvious it is a crater". Prime evidence is missing or not well enough illustrated.
First:
1) as others here remark too, a circular feature does not equal an impact crater. Karst depressions are circular too and a strong candidate in this area;
2) magnetic particles can be found in any soil. They do not point to impact as such. Show us geochemical tests that show they are of meteoritic composition, and show us that they have an abundance well over the natural accretion rate of cosmic dust for this sedimentary regime
What is needed is:
a) a clear record of a breccia fill;
b) a clear record of overturned rim strata;
c) a clear record of shock-deformed quartz;
d) more convincing examples of shatter cones;
e) more convincing examples of impact melt breccia, including identification of the mineral phases that associate with such rock.
The presence of clear meteoritic components (geochemically shown to be extraterrestrial in composition) in the crater sediments would be a good argument as well, but they are not always preserved in genuine meteor craters. The magnetic particles you present do not count as such, as I already pointed out.
Regarding (d) and (e): the photographs of purported specimens provided are far from convincing. The "shatter cone" actually looks like a shard of rock with a conchoidal fracture on the ventral face, not a 3D shatter cone. And the "melt glass"? Not clear enough from the pictures: it could be anything. The "tortured rock" (purported impact melt) actually looks like a porous carbonate such as you can find in karst features, not like a vesiculated impact melt.
Early studies into Neandertal genetics concerned MtDNA: but the latest studies concern nuclear DNA. By now, there is a complete Neandertal genome (pieced together from genomic fragments of various Neandertals).