"This is highest building in town and in April 26-27, 1986 after reactor exploaded, people gathered on the roof of this building to watch a beautiful shining that rised above APP. They didn't know this was shining of radiation."
This makes me wonder exactly what those people saw. It obviously wouldn't be a bright flash like a nuclear bomb since it wasn't a nuclear explosion, it was a steam explosion with a tremendous amount of aerosolized radioisotope contamination. So it's a good bet that if this story is true they were actually looking at a blue glowing steam/dust cloud with the glow caused by CERENKOV RADIATION in the air!! To actually see Cerenkov radiation in the air would mean that the radiation in that initial rising cloud must have been unbelieveably intense, and they didn't even know the danger of the situation......horrifying.
"35 medals over 4 years, 3 of them at the National Level (you *have* to see the Rube Goldberg devices they have up there). Some of the best fun I ever had with school (plus, you got to go on cool trips to Chicago and DC).".........where are you from? I'm from Webster NY and we had a simillar level of sucess...
Pardon my ignorance, but how exactly to you calculate the probability of abiogenetic reactions when you don't even know what they are let alone fully understand their reaction rates?! No one knows exactly HOW precursor molecules reacted to form RNA (then DNA) so placing probabilities on their rates of formation in a prebiotic Earth is patently absurd. More likely it is that we simply haven't figured out what make these reactions stable and probable. There is progress here though, on Jan. 9th. of this year researchers at the University of Florida foud that Borate minerals completely stabilize the reaction necessary to form simple sugars like ribose(as in RIBOnucleic acid). There is no logical reason I can think of that will prevent scientists from 'cracking this nut' when it comes to figuring out how abiotic synthesis happened, and when it is figured out it will be one of the most triumphant moments of science in history.
Can you say more about why specifically the peel off transparent plastic idea was rejected(it seems to be the simplest, most effective, non-single point failure prone, most elegant solution I've seen so far)? I know all these speculative posts seem tedious and redundant, it's just that it seems like such a shame to allow the mission life of the rovers to be so severly shortened by such an apparently trivial problem.(it's just a little dust!!:o)
Re:This just in from Saturn
on
Mars Rovers Update
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Don't mod the above off-topic, it's still about space! I submitted this story yesterday and it was rejected:( so here is probably the only place you're going to see it and it's really interesting imho! Cassini is entering the final phase of its 7 year journey to saturn and starting now will be sending back images and other measurements at a "rapid and steady pace". In a few months Cassini will enter orbit around Saturn after performing what should be a spectacular ring plane crossing.
a fan would be overly complicated and would draw too much extra power at 1% of Earth's air pressure. Why not just add peel away layers (like a cleanroom tacky mat) of transparent plastic to the panels? A tiny motor would be enough to reveal a new layer now and then. It's hard to believe they didn't try to think of something like this or simply didn't care about the dust problem.
How can someone claim that the company with the largest CCD on the market
Sure the CCD is large but the image quality blows compared to any decent Digital SLR, actually all of their cameras quality blows.
uhm, no. Kodak DOES have the largest CCD available and the quality is pretty much superb, even if they do only sell 2 a year at 28,000$!
Re:If there is water on mars
on
Brine on Mars?
·
· Score: 1
Though, if this were true, all the groundwater should have all evaporated long long ago since there is no rain on Mars there is no way to replenish the water in the soil (except for the soil directly adjacent to the polar ice caps perhaps).
No need to worry, these are absolutely safe. Even if you break open the capsule containing the Tritium (3H) and ingest the whole lot, there will be no need to fill out a will. The amount of 3H in these devices is limited to less than 25 millicuries and at a committed effective dose of 64 millirem per mCi you could only possibly be exposed to a REM or 2 in the absolute worse case scenario. The yearly limit for radiation workers set by the DOE is 5 REM, so I think you will be OK!!:-)
I'm sorry but the above post is not true and is most certianly not 'informative'. The real reason the mars rovers are much slower has already been correctly addressed in several above posts and is absolutely due to the proximity of the earth and the consequent light time delay experienced when communicating with the rover (>10 minutes for mars, 3 seconds for the moon). Why the above incorrect responding post is the only one modded up when there are 3 other correct ones is left as a mystery for us to figure out I guess(is it because it's the most contrarian?). Anyone wanting to learn more about how the programming is done for the onboard autonomous navigation works should read this excellent book.
read the site, it's really quite clever how they did it. They used a large mass of Lithium Nitrate inside the lander which has a high heat of fusion(ie. it takes a large amount of heat to melt the salt per unit of mass, this absorbed heat then goes into changing the phase of the salt to a liquid and not into heating it or the instruments) it also used a lot of insulation and a pre-cooling phase while still attached to the orbiter.
Re:Americans are from Mars, Soviets are from Venus
on
Russian Rovers on the Moon
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· Score: 4, Informative
I cannot help but post a link to this site about the Soviet missions to Veus, it is absoluely amazing and the level of detail about the engineering is incredible. This guy's even gone through the trouble of reprocessing the original data sent from the cameras to produce sharper more accurate images of the surface; fantastic.
If you want to be excited by them, talk about their observable features (foliation, heterogenous grain size, polarization proerties), not about their genesis. We don't have the evidence to conclude they're sedimentary, much as we would like to do so.
Yes, because when I think excitement, I think heterogeneous grain size polarization properties.:-):)
While Spirit's drilling of an igneous rock is kindof interesting, it's (IMHO) comparatively dull when contrasted with Opportunity's microscopic images of the sedimentary rock at the Meridiani location. The layers could have been formed by sedimentation at the bottom of a lake or by volcanic ash being succesively deposited by eruptions, we should know within a day or two when the APXS and Moessbauer spectrometer reveal the chemical makeup of the rocks.
I realize the objective is to test an engine and that there's no need to put a human being in danger to achieve that anymore, but it doesn't produce heroic stories and certainly doesn't make children dream like it used to
I dissagree. Perhaps it doesn't make the uninteligent kids dream like it "used to" but that's of little consequence. I think the smart kids DO get it and are inspired to go into science by those panoramas from Mars. They're the ones who'll go on to develop the next generation of missions to the planets(stars?), which is really the way it's always been.
It's interesting that Aerogel is always mentioned as being the insulator on the mars Sojourner Rover (and current mars rovers) but it's almost never mentioned that the heat source inside the insulated electronics boxes is not merely waste resistive heating from the electronic components themselves, but from Plutonium Radioisotope Heater Units of a couple ounces each. Maybe it's a good thing they're kept low profile, the clueless luddites would have a field day.
If you have never heard of Aphex Twin I truly pity you. His music consists of some of the most brilliant works in all of the electronic genre. I suggest checking out the video to Windowlicker as done by Chris Cunningham, it is a masterwork in every sense.
Can you see in the deep 'vacuum' ultraviolet range? Cuz that's what you'd need to be able to do in order to resolve the 90 nanometer transistors in a Pentium 4!:) Though maybe you could see large scale patterns in circuts lighting up for certain tasks....that would be neat.
United Artists is probably churning out some cliche riddled piece of trash as we speak! Now, I wonder how long it will take for them to turn the Adrain character into a heterosexual with a super-hot 'hacker' girlfriend who he runs away with at the end....
Interesting, though the O2 should freeze out LONG after the CO2. In fact he shouldn't have to dig at all to reach frozen O2 since it would be the last major constituant of the atmosphere to freeze out at ~55K (N2 freezes out at ~63K) it would be right on top of everything!
Of course in the first line of my post I meant to say:
"The Standard Model of particles says there's no ANTI-graviton, that's who!:)"
-sorry 'bout that.
Re:Who says there's not an anti-graviton, anti-pho
on
Double Pulsar Discovered
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The Standard Model of particles says there's no graviton, that's who!:)
You said: "No, the graviton can very well have an anti-graviton and a photon an anti-photon. The argument against it would be that both things don't have a charge...well neutrinos don't have charges either, but they have anti-particles."
You're misunderstanding why Photons Gluons and presumably Gravitons, if they exist, do not have anti-photons, anti-gravitons etc. and are actually THEIR OWN ANTIPARTICLES. It is not because they have no charge, that's irrelevant, it's because they are Bosons which are particles with integer spin. The chargeless Neutrino and anti-Neutrino are Fermions which have non-integer spin. I would suggest a look at CERN's The Particle Adventure site if you want to learn a bit more about subatomic particles, it's a great site.
However, this being said, there is a very tiny chance you may still be partially right about gravitons (though it's not your fault:] )since we've never actually observed one and there are hints that the Standard Model may break soon (though it must be noted that it is the most sucessful theory at describing our universe ever devised). Then who knows what the superseding theory (supersymmetry? strings?) will say about quanta of gravity.
Disclaimer: IANAP but I do know a thing or two about physics (if there is a physicist here and I've made a mistake in my post please feel free to correct me, though I'm fairly certain the contents are accurate).
Slashdot Mirror
"This is highest building in town and in April 26-27, 1986 after reactor exploaded, people gathered on the roof of this building to watch a beautiful shining that rised above APP. They didn't know this was shining of radiation."
This makes me wonder exactly what those people saw. It obviously wouldn't be a bright flash like a nuclear bomb since it wasn't a nuclear explosion, it was a steam explosion with a tremendous amount of aerosolized radioisotope contamination. So it's a good bet that if this story is true they were actually looking at a blue glowing steam/dust cloud with the glow caused by CERENKOV RADIATION in the air!! To actually see Cerenkov radiation in the air would mean that the radiation in that initial rising cloud must have been unbelieveably intense, and they didn't even know the danger of the situation......horrifying.
"35 medals over 4 years, 3 of them at the National Level (you *have* to see the Rube Goldberg devices they have up there). Some of the best fun I ever had with school (plus, you got to go on cool trips to Chicago and DC)." .........where are you from? I'm from Webster NY and we had a simillar level of sucess...
Pardon my ignorance, but how exactly to you calculate the probability of abiogenetic reactions when you don't even know what they are let alone fully understand their reaction rates?! No one knows exactly HOW precursor molecules reacted to form RNA (then DNA) so placing probabilities on their rates of formation in a prebiotic Earth is patently absurd. More likely it is that we simply haven't figured out what make these reactions stable and probable. There is progress here though, on Jan. 9th. of this year researchers at the University of Florida foud that Borate minerals completely stabilize the reaction necessary to form simple sugars like ribose(as in RIBOnucleic acid). There is no logical reason I can think of that will prevent scientists from 'cracking this nut' when it comes to figuring out how abiotic synthesis happened, and when it is figured out it will be one of the most triumphant moments of science in history.
Seeing as how you're on the "inside" of this thing...care to spill on any details of what the Big Announcement will be about tomorrow?
Can you say more about why specifically the peel off transparent plastic idea was rejected(it seems to be the simplest, most effective, non-single point failure prone, most elegant solution I've seen so far)? I know all these speculative posts seem tedious and redundant, it's just that it seems like such a shame to allow the mission life of the rovers to be so severly shortened by such an apparently trivial problem.(it's just a little dust!! :o)
Don't mod the above off-topic, it's still about space! I submitted this story yesterday and it was rejected :( so here is probably the only place you're going to see it and it's really interesting imho! Cassini is entering the final phase of its 7 year journey to saturn and starting now will be sending back images and other measurements at a "rapid and steady pace". In a few months Cassini will enter orbit around Saturn after performing what should be a spectacular ring plane crossing.
a fan would be overly complicated and would draw too much extra power at 1% of Earth's air pressure. Why not just add peel away layers (like a cleanroom tacky mat) of transparent plastic to the panels? A tiny motor would be enough to reveal a new layer now and then. It's hard to believe they didn't try to think of something like this or simply didn't care about the dust problem.
How can someone claim that the company with the largest CCD on the market
Sure the CCD is large but the image quality blows compared to any decent Digital SLR, actually all of their cameras quality blows.
uhm, no. Kodak DOES have the largest CCD available and the quality is pretty much superb, even if they do only sell 2 a year at 28,000$!
Though, if this were true, all the groundwater should have all evaporated long long ago since there is no rain on Mars there is no way to replenish the water in the soil (except for the soil directly adjacent to the polar ice caps perhaps).
No need to worry, these are absolutely safe. Even if you break open the capsule containing the Tritium (3H) and ingest the whole lot, there will be no need to fill out a will. The amount of 3H in these devices is limited to less than 25 millicuries and at a committed effective dose of 64 millirem per mCi you could only possibly be exposed to a REM or 2 in the absolute worse case scenario. The yearly limit for radiation workers set by the DOE is 5 REM, so I think you will be OK!! :-)
I'm sorry but the above post is not true and is most certianly not 'informative'. The real reason the mars rovers are much slower has already been correctly addressed in several above posts and is absolutely due to the proximity of the earth and the consequent light time delay experienced when communicating with the rover (>10 minutes for mars, 3 seconds for the moon). Why the above incorrect responding post is the only one modded up when there are 3 other correct ones is left as a mystery for us to figure out I guess(is it because it's the most contrarian?). Anyone wanting to learn more about how the programming is done for the onboard autonomous navigation works should read this excellent book.
read the site, it's really quite clever how they did it. They used a large mass of Lithium Nitrate inside the lander which has a high heat of fusion(ie. it takes a large amount of heat to melt the salt per unit of mass, this absorbed heat then goes into changing the phase of the salt to a liquid and not into heating it or the instruments) it also used a lot of insulation and a pre-cooling phase while still attached to the orbiter.
I cannot help but post a link to this site about the Soviet missions to Veus, it is absoluely amazing and the level of detail about the engineering is incredible. This guy's even gone through the trouble of reprocessing the original data sent from the cameras to produce sharper more accurate images of the surface; fantastic.
If you want to be excited by them, talk about their observable features (foliation, heterogenous grain size, polarization proerties), not about their genesis. We don't have the evidence to conclude they're sedimentary, much as we would like to do so.
:-) :)
Yes, because when I think excitement, I think heterogeneous grain size polarization properties.
While Spirit's drilling of an igneous rock is kindof interesting, it's (IMHO) comparatively dull when contrasted with Opportunity's microscopic images of the sedimentary rock at the Meridiani location. The layers could have been formed by sedimentation at the bottom of a lake or by volcanic ash being succesively deposited by eruptions, we should know within a day or two when the APXS and Moessbauer spectrometer reveal the chemical makeup of the rocks.
hey, I typped it fast without checkking, doubble leters are the frst to be flubed, big deal.
I realize the objective is to test an engine and that there's no need to put a human being in danger to achieve that anymore, but it doesn't produce heroic stories and certainly doesn't make children dream like it used to
I dissagree. Perhaps it doesn't make the uninteligent kids dream like it "used to" but that's of little consequence. I think the smart kids DO get it and are inspired to go into science by those panoramas from Mars. They're the ones who'll go on to develop the next generation of missions to the planets(stars?), which is really the way it's always been.
here's one. and another :-)
It's interesting that Aerogel is always mentioned as being the insulator on the mars Sojourner Rover (and current mars rovers) but it's almost never mentioned that the heat source inside the insulated electronics boxes is not merely waste resistive heating from the electronic components themselves, but from Plutonium Radioisotope Heater Units of a couple ounces each. Maybe it's a good thing they're kept low profile, the clueless luddites would have a field day.
If you have never heard of Aphex Twin I truly pity you. His music consists of some of the most brilliant works in all of the electronic genre. I suggest checking out the video to Windowlicker as done by Chris Cunningham, it is a masterwork in every sense.
Can you see in the deep 'vacuum' ultraviolet range? Cuz that's what you'd need to be able to do in order to resolve the 90 nanometer transistors in a Pentium 4! :) Though maybe you could see large scale patterns in circuts lighting up for certain tasks....that would be neat.
United Artists is probably churning out some cliche riddled piece of trash as we speak! Now, I wonder how long it will take for them to turn the Adrain character into a heterosexual with a super-hot 'hacker' girlfriend who he runs away with at the end....
Interesting, though the O2 should freeze out LONG after the CO2. In fact he shouldn't have to dig at all to reach frozen O2 since it would be the last major constituant of the atmosphere to freeze out at ~55K (N2 freezes out at ~63K) it would be right on top of everything!
Of course in the first line of my post I meant to say:
:)"
"The Standard Model of particles says there's no ANTI-graviton, that's who!
-sorry 'bout that.
The Standard Model of particles says there's no graviton, that's who! :)
:] )since we've never actually observed one and there are hints that the Standard Model may break soon (though it must be noted that it is the most sucessful theory at describing our universe ever devised). Then who knows what the superseding theory (supersymmetry? strings?) will say about quanta of gravity.
You said:
"No, the graviton can very well have an anti-graviton and a photon an anti-photon. The argument against it would be that both things don't have a charge...well neutrinos don't have charges either, but they have anti-particles."
You're misunderstanding why Photons Gluons and presumably Gravitons, if they exist, do not have anti-photons, anti-gravitons etc. and are actually THEIR OWN ANTIPARTICLES. It is not because they have no charge, that's irrelevant, it's because they are Bosons which are particles with integer spin. The chargeless Neutrino and anti-Neutrino are Fermions which have non-integer spin. I would suggest a look at CERN's The Particle Adventure site if you want to learn a bit more about subatomic particles, it's a great site.
However, this being said, there is a very tiny chance you may still be partially right about gravitons (though it's not your fault
Disclaimer: IANAP but I do know a thing or two about physics (if there is a physicist here and I've made a mistake in my post please feel free to correct me, though I'm fairly certain the contents are accurate).