This sort of person will rationalize their behaviour (much like the cable modem user who rationalizes saturating their connection 24 hours a day) under the guise of "if they let me, let them suck it!"
Wow and to think I was under the impression that paying for a good or service meant you could actually use it as you wished. How patently silly of me!
They do know something, but not much. Take a look a the first synthetic aperture radar image and first altimetry scan of Titan's surface (there's only a variation of like 50 meters!) and compare this to the synthetic aperture radar from Magellan at Venus . For one thing there are practically no craters on the Titan radar image!!! Its a "new" surface!
I can see how you might fit the images, spectra and other data in 500MB of storage but how do they fit the synthetic aperture radar data in there? It must be huge!.....anyone know?
Good to see someone else interested in the details of the instrument packages, the SSP in particular:o). I'm consistently amazed at the beautifully elegant design of the onboard experiments and the sheer number of them they were able to cram into such a tiny package! Check out this paper on an idea to use the penetrator along with the onboard microphone in effort to determine the makeup of the surface material by listening to the "crunch" it makes at the instant of touchdown. Astounding....can't wait to Jan.14!
??? You seem to be under the impression that Cassini missed its launch window and had to take an alternate cicuitous route to Saturn (like simillar cases with the NEAR mission and nozomi to Mars from Japan). This is simply false, Cassini missed its original launch date by a mere 2 days and it followed its original VVEJ (Venus Venus Earth Jupiter) gravity assist perfectly to arrive at Saturn right on time.
The zombified mantra chanting of "faster better cheaper" is naive at best. It just isn't always properly suited to all missions. All outer planet and beyond missions to this point have NOT been faster better cheaper, their's probably a reason for that....
Re:I dont want to steal their thunder..
on
Titan's Alien Thunder
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Simply put, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Have you taken a look at the number of instrument packages on Cassini and Huygens? It's HUGE. You get what you pay for. Especially in terms of reliability, if you're sending a probe on an 8 year journey you kinda want to be absolutely certain it works when you get there. Double redundancy on everything and money for insane amounts of testing does that for you. As for the one megapixel thing. This misconception has been debunked many times before. Imaging spacecraft don't keep up with the latest best buy "5 megapixels for under 300$!!" race because it's irrelevant. It's the optics that matter and the more pixels you have the more data you have to transmit back to Earth per image, therefore the higher the bandwidth and the bigger the radio transmitting dish (higher gain) has to be, increasing weight and onbaord propellant requirments...see where I'm going with this? That's right, nuclear propulsion. Because if you want to do these things you need POWER to do them and an onboard nuclear reactor does that for you.
Yes they're still sold under the name "eco-sphere". The company's put up a classic excerpt from Carl Sagan's book "Billions and Billions" where he ponders the workings of the ecosystem in one of the "worlds" (world #4210) he bought.
Jim you're on my slashdot friends list but I'm afraid I must completely disagree with you here.:o)
Tokamaks have problems, yes, but I don't think it's known weather these problems will prohibit their utilization as a fusion power source. For instance if a plasma instability forms in a tokamak while running (happens all the time) and the plasma bumps the divertor or the inside of the chamber it most certainly will not be bomb like and won't "result in burn-through" either. The introduction of (relatively) high Z material (carbon from graphite, iron, or aluminum from chamber walls) will result in INSTANT plasma quenching via the plasma radiating a huge portion of its energy through bremsstrahlung. This causes burn marks and other dust problems in the chamber but can't cause burn through of the thick metal vacuum chamber walls. And if there is a catastrophic breach of the plasma vessel it definitely, DEFINITELY will never be anything even close to a "chernobyl-style quarantine". At most, a couple grams of radioactive tritium (3-hydrogen) are contained in the vessel while "burning", even considering a total failure of containment and burnoff (a small explosion, to be sure) of all the hydrogen to form tritiated water (forming molecules of TOH or TOT rather than HOH) the amount of radioisotope release will be in the tens of KiloCurie range. Tritium is the least dangerous radioactive isotope that exists (I work with it daily), with a ~12 year half life and an average beta particle emission energy in the 5KeV range to a max of 18KeV, barely enough to go a few mm in air before being blocked; and owing to the fact that both hydrogen and water are volatile, it will be VERY quickly be evenly dispersed and diluted in the atmosphere and oceans. I doubt anyone working in the plant would die if assuming sufficient containment were used.
Tokamaks do have the issue of neutron activation to worry about among other things but I think these are at least workable problems. Remember, Tokamaks have held the world record for plasma temperatures and containment times for a very long time.
But ultimately you may be right, the Tokamak may prove unworkable from an economic energy generation standpoint. I think the project at MIT using a levatated dipole for more "natural" quiescent plasma containment looks very interesting (promising? maybe), for instance.
All of this said, BIG congratulations to the Sandia Z-machine people!! They deserve it. The energies and powers (~300 Twatts!) they've achieved are barely a factor away from those expected on the finished National Ignition Facility. The lab where I work supplied the parts for the laser called the Z-Beamlet they use to "backlight" targets so they can be viewed in X-rays as they're being imploded on Z. Looks like they've put it to good use. As new technologies like these (and others achieving PETAwatt powers) come online they will open completely new doors to fusion research This is an exciting time for very high energy experimental plasma physics.
Metals, traditionally, are opaque and highly reflective, yes? Take a piece of glass and coat it with a few nanometers of metal (tens of atoms thick) and you'll see that you can still see through it! For instance mylar balloons which have a metal coated plastic of up to a couple microns (if I remember right) thick are still slightly translucent (hold it up to a bright light).
A solar sail one atom thick wouldn't work I don't think. Photons would tunnel through a barrier so thin with such ease I suspect it would be largely transparent.
They're not really using it for "binocular vision", they're using it to do "aperture synthesis" or optical interferometry where the separation of two telescopes whose optical paths are combined (with sub wavelength (like 550nanometers for green) precision maintenance of the optical path) effectively allows it to have the resolution of one humongous telescope whose mirror is as big as the separation between the two smaller telescopes or "baseline". Radio telescopes are combined in the VLBA or very long baseline array like this, except that they are not connected to eachother as they make observations (at least not until recently) so they record the phase of the radio waves as correlated to a high precision atomic clock standard, then combine the (usually terabytes of) data from each dish later on supercomputers. None of this comes across terribly clearly in the article because the journalist who wrote it is an idiot("SPIRIT telescope since it will be detecting infrared light, which is a light form of heat." uhhhh yeah.).
Missing choice (you insensitive clods)! I only use microVNC! You know, for those times when you simply MUST remotely connect to the 8-bit microcontroller in your toaster when you're at work.
"The satellite landed in our home. Maybe this means we'll have good luck this year"....."oh look! the excess hydrazine is spilling from the ruptured fuel tanks! What gloriousness, the great revolution truly has delivered blessings from heaven upon us! A thousand thanks to you Wen Jiabao!"....."my family's belongings are pulverized and burning with such splendid red flame! such must be divine providence showing we have truly reaped the benefits of the Great Leap Forward! We are so thankful for all the wonderfull fortune bestowed upon us from the eternally benevolent Great Government! I only wish I could have been present in the house at the time this wonderful sanctification occured!!!"
It is not science and knowledge specifically which constitute a "threat to those in power". Bush et al. or whoever happens to be in power at the time are not likely to be dethroned by a sudden widespread and detailed comprehension of nuclear fusion for instance. No, it is the powerful incisive, rational, analytical and logical thought processes which a scientifically trained mind must posess that are truly disruptive to the "status quo" (if I may use such a loaded term).
Cool! And thanks for underscoring just one more reason why Japan is the probably the most technologically advanced society on Earth while the general public in the US consistently scores dead last in surveys of scientific literacy.
95% of the population is of (counts on fingers for a bit...) below-average intelligence......Oh...I don't really have a response to this, I'll just leave it at that so we can all enjoy the hilarious irony of this post.
What's even more amazing, I think, is that all the science and remote sensing instruments are still working fine!! The stuck heater glitch in Opportunity forced engineers to put it into "deep sleep" during winter months to prevent completely draining the batteries overnight but this has the unwanted consequence of also turning off all heaters in the warm electronics box. And the box, which also contains optics for the Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer was long ago expected to fall to >-60C overnight, shrinking an aluminum housing holding a crystal optic of potassium bromide (transparent to all IR light) enough to crack and destroy it...never happened though! Also, the microgrinding tool used to make boreholes in rock has worn much less than expected and the moessbauer spectrometers and microscopic cameras are still working perfectly after some concerns that one of thier plastic ribbon data cables might have been cracked while flexing during movement due to the extreme cold of martian winter. Amazing.
Now, in order to read the article text in the proceedings of the national academies of science you'll apparently have to clink on a link with the name "WANG_PNAS.pdf" and I'm just not feeling that daring while I'm still at work on a Friday afternoon:)
Re:Redundant Systems and Fluid Dynamics
on
Fluid Logic Chips
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why would deep space probes use microfluidic logic processors? They may, on the other hand, be very useful for carrying out microchemical analytical techniques with a limited amount of reagent for things like life detection and geochemistry experiments on future planetary(Mars probably) rovers though.
IANAP but I just can't see how this will work. Imagine a hubble size telescope (still relatively tiny in the scheme of things here) staring at the "pinhole", a couple hundred foot wide hole TEN THOUSAND miles away....What's it going to get, like 10 photons a second or something ridiculous?? Therefore, I would tend to think the exposure times required to create any kind of meaningful image using this scheme would be insanely long....like...weeks. How can you possibly image a planet like earth orbiting its star like that? It's just going to look like a smear due to movement in its orbit and rotation during such a long period.
Think back to the high school elective photography class you probably didn't take. The first thing we did was to make positive images on photo paper with pinhole cameras, I remember distinctly that the exposure times, where you had to sit perfectly still with your little cardboard box, were agonizingly long!!
when I was employed (oh so long ago...) I biked to work 2-3 times a week, about 12 miles each way.
Hmmm.... biking 12 miles to work on a hot summer morning.... Now, I'm not a rocket surgeon, but is there a teeny possibility that this could somehow be related to being employed "oh so long ago"?:o)
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of person will rationalize their behaviour (much like the cable modem user who rationalizes saturating their connection 24 hours a day) under the guise of "if they let me, let them suck it!"
Wow and to think I was under the impression that paying for a good or service meant you could actually use it as you wished. How patently silly of me!
They do know something, but not much. Take a look a the first synthetic aperture radar image and first altimetry scan of Titan's surface (there's only a variation of like 50 meters!) and compare this to the synthetic aperture radar from Magellan at Venus . For one thing there are practically no craters on the Titan radar image!!! Its a "new" surface!
I can see how you might fit the images, spectra and other data in 500MB of storage but how do they fit the synthetic aperture radar data in there? It must be huge!.....anyone know?
Good to see someone else interested in the details of the instrument packages, the SSP in particular :o). I'm consistently amazed at the beautifully elegant design of the onboard experiments and the sheer number of them they were able to cram into such a tiny package! Check out this paper on an idea to use the penetrator along with the onboard microphone in effort to determine the makeup of the surface material by listening to the "crunch" it makes at the instant of touchdown. Astounding....can't wait to Jan.14!
??? You seem to be under the impression that Cassini missed its launch window and had to take an alternate cicuitous route to Saturn (like simillar cases with the NEAR mission and nozomi to Mars from Japan). This is simply false, Cassini missed its original launch date by a mere 2 days and it followed its original VVEJ (Venus Venus Earth Jupiter) gravity assist perfectly to arrive at Saturn right on time.
The zombified mantra chanting of "faster better cheaper" is naive at best. It just isn't always properly suited to all missions. All outer planet and beyond missions to this point have NOT been faster better cheaper, their's probably a reason for that....
Simply put, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Have you taken a look at the number of instrument packages on Cassini and Huygens? It's HUGE. You get what you pay for. Especially in terms of reliability, if you're sending a probe on an 8 year journey you kinda want to be absolutely certain it works when you get there. Double redundancy on everything and money for insane amounts of testing does that for you. As for the one megapixel thing. This misconception has been debunked many times before. Imaging spacecraft don't keep up with the latest best buy "5 megapixels for under 300$!!" race because it's irrelevant. It's the optics that matter and the more pixels you have the more data you have to transmit back to Earth per image, therefore the higher the bandwidth and the bigger the radio transmitting dish (higher gain) has to be, increasing weight and onbaord propellant requirments...see where I'm going with this? That's right, nuclear propulsion. Because if you want to do these things you need POWER to do them and an onboard nuclear reactor does that for you.
Yes they're still sold under the name "eco-sphere". The company's put up a classic excerpt from Carl Sagan's book "Billions and Billions" where he ponders the workings of the ecosystem in one of the "worlds" (world #4210) he bought.
lander door opens and astronaut steps out....faint sounds of Bob Marley playing....
"that's one small ste...oh dude it's like so RED out here!! And the sky.. is like... totally pink man! Houston, I'm like, so tripping right now!"
Jim you're on my slashdot friends list but I'm afraid I must completely disagree with you here. :o)
Tokamaks have problems, yes, but I don't think it's known weather these problems will prohibit their utilization as a fusion power source. For instance if a plasma instability forms in a tokamak while running (happens all the time) and the plasma bumps the divertor or the inside of the chamber it most certainly will not be bomb like and won't "result in burn-through" either. The introduction of (relatively) high Z material (carbon from graphite, iron, or aluminum from chamber walls) will result in INSTANT plasma quenching via the plasma radiating a huge portion of its energy through bremsstrahlung. This causes burn marks and other dust problems in the chamber but can't cause burn through of the thick metal vacuum chamber walls. And if there is a catastrophic breach of the plasma vessel it definitely, DEFINITELY will never be anything even close to a "chernobyl-style quarantine". At most, a couple grams of radioactive tritium (3-hydrogen) are contained in the vessel while "burning", even considering a total failure of containment and burnoff (a small explosion, to be sure) of all the hydrogen to form tritiated water (forming molecules of TOH or TOT rather than HOH) the amount of radioisotope release will be in the tens of KiloCurie range. Tritium is the least dangerous radioactive isotope that exists (I work with it daily), with a ~12 year half life and an average beta particle emission energy in the 5KeV range to a max of 18KeV, barely enough to go a few mm in air before being blocked; and owing to the fact that both hydrogen and water are volatile, it will be VERY quickly be evenly dispersed and diluted in the atmosphere and oceans. I doubt anyone working in the plant would die if assuming sufficient containment were used.
Tokamaks do have the issue of neutron activation to worry about among other things but I think these are at least workable problems. Remember, Tokamaks have held the world record for plasma temperatures and containment times for a very long time.
But ultimately you may be right, the Tokamak may prove unworkable from an economic energy generation standpoint. I think the project at MIT using a levatated dipole for more "natural" quiescent plasma containment looks very interesting (promising? maybe), for instance.
All of this said, BIG congratulations to the Sandia Z-machine people!! They deserve it. The energies and powers (~300 Twatts!) they've achieved are barely a factor away from those expected on the finished National Ignition Facility. The lab where I work supplied the parts for the laser called the Z-Beamlet they use to "backlight" targets so they can be viewed in X-rays as they're being imploded on Z. Looks like they've put it to good use. As new technologies like these (and others achieving PETAwatt powers) come online they will open completely new doors to fusion research This is an exciting time for very high energy experimental plasma physics.
very very interesting thoughts, you are now on my friends list :)
Metals, traditionally, are opaque and highly reflective, yes? Take a piece of glass and coat it with a few nanometers of metal (tens of atoms thick) and you'll see that you can still see through it! For instance mylar balloons which have a metal coated plastic of up to a couple microns (if I remember right) thick are still slightly translucent (hold it up to a bright light).
A solar sail one atom thick wouldn't work I don't think. Photons would tunnel through a barrier so thin with such ease I suspect it would be largely transparent.
They're not really using it for "binocular vision", they're using it to do "aperture synthesis" or optical interferometry where the separation of two telescopes whose optical paths are combined (with sub wavelength (like 550nanometers for green) precision maintenance of the optical path) effectively allows it to have the resolution of one humongous telescope whose mirror is as big as the separation between the two smaller telescopes or "baseline". Radio telescopes are combined in the VLBA or very long baseline array like this, except that they are not connected to eachother as they make observations (at least not until recently) so they record the phase of the radio waves as correlated to a high precision atomic clock standard, then combine the (usually terabytes of) data from each dish later on supercomputers. None of this comes across terribly clearly in the article because the journalist who wrote it is an idiot("SPIRIT telescope since it will be detecting infrared light, which is a light form of heat." uhhhh yeah.).
Missing choice (you insensitive clods)! I only use microVNC! You know, for those times when you simply MUST remotely connect to the 8-bit microcontroller in your toaster when you're at work.
Or said it at all, for that matter.
"The satellite landed in our home. Maybe this means we'll have good luck this year"....."oh look! the excess hydrazine is spilling from the ruptured fuel tanks! What gloriousness, the great revolution truly has delivered blessings from heaven upon us! A thousand thanks to you Wen Jiabao!"....."my family's belongings are pulverized and burning with such splendid red flame! such must be divine providence showing we have truly reaped the benefits of the Great Leap Forward! We are so thankful for all the wonderfull fortune bestowed upon us from the eternally benevolent Great Government! I only wish I could have been present in the house at the time this wonderful sanctification occured!!!"
It is not science and knowledge specifically which constitute a "threat to those in power". Bush et al. or whoever happens to be in power at the time are not likely to be dethroned by a sudden widespread and detailed comprehension of nuclear fusion for instance. No, it is the powerful incisive, rational, analytical and logical thought processes which a scientifically trained mind must posess that are truly disruptive to the "status quo" (if I may use such a loaded term).
Cool! And thanks for underscoring just one more reason why Japan is the probably the most technologically advanced society on Earth while the general public in the US consistently scores dead last in surveys of scientific literacy.
95% of the population is of (counts on fingers for a bit...) below-average intelligence. .....Oh...I don't really have a response to this, I'll just leave it at that so we can all enjoy the hilarious irony of this post.
Why is this story under the Digital Equipment Corporation category? Does the submitter not know of the once great now dead company?
What's even more amazing, I think, is that all the science and remote sensing instruments are still working fine!! The stuck heater glitch in Opportunity forced engineers to put it into "deep sleep" during winter months to prevent completely draining the batteries overnight but this has the unwanted consequence of also turning off all heaters in the warm electronics box. And the box, which also contains optics for the Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer was long ago expected to fall to >-60C overnight, shrinking an aluminum housing holding a crystal optic of potassium bromide (transparent to all IR light) enough to crack and destroy it...never happened though! Also, the microgrinding tool used to make boreholes in rock has worn much less than expected and the moessbauer spectrometers and microscopic cameras are still working perfectly after some concerns that one of thier plastic ribbon data cables might have been cracked while flexing during movement due to the extreme cold of martian winter. Amazing.
That's why he made it a link.
:)
Now, in order to read the article text in the proceedings of the national academies of science you'll apparently have to clink on a link with the name "WANG_PNAS.pdf" and I'm just not feeling that daring while I'm still at work on a Friday afternoon
Why would deep space probes use microfluidic logic processors? They may, on the other hand, be very useful for carrying out microchemical analytical techniques with a limited amount of reagent for things like life detection and geochemistry experiments on future planetary(Mars probably) rovers though.
IANAP but I just can't see how this will work. Imagine a hubble size telescope (still relatively tiny in the scheme of things here) staring at the "pinhole", a couple hundred foot wide hole TEN THOUSAND miles away....What's it going to get, like 10 photons a second or something ridiculous?? Therefore, I would tend to think the exposure times required to create any kind of meaningful image using this scheme would be insanely long....like...weeks. How can you possibly image a planet like earth orbiting its star like that? It's just going to look like a smear due to movement in its orbit and rotation during such a long period.
Think back to the high school elective photography class you probably didn't take. The first thing we did was to make positive images on photo paper with pinhole cameras, I remember distinctly that the exposure times, where you had to sit perfectly still with your little cardboard box, were agonizingly long!!
when I was employed (oh so long ago...) I biked to work 2-3 times a week, about 12 miles each way.
:o)
Hmmm.... biking 12 miles to work on a hot summer morning.... Now, I'm not a rocket surgeon, but is there a teeny possibility that this could somehow be related to being employed "oh so long ago"?
sorry here's the links