i suppose ther is still a miniscule possibility of life but shouldn't the temperature gradient, where it would have to reside, between the roasting lava feilds and the rest of the cryogenic surface be constantly moving though? as the lava cools it approaches the frozen temperature of the rest of the planet and when a volcano erupts the frozen surface is immediately plunged into a blast furnace of heat. if there is life on the moon it will have to be *very motile, and pretty crafty i would think too.
don't be so sure yet. the volcanic vents at the ocean bottom on earth are entirely different than the volcanoes on io. Io throws out more than 100 times as much lava as all of earth's volcanoes put together. it lies smack in the center of an extremely intense(definitly deadly for life like us at least) radiation belt around jupiter. and the lava coming out of io's volcanoes is EXTREMELY hot, much more so than lava on earth which is around 1000 to 1200 degrees c. on io they can be as high as 2000 degrees!! seems like a totally inhospitable hell planet to me.
uranium 238 waste glows green? i think not. uranium oxide may FLUORESCE green after being exposed to UV or higher EM radiation but i dont think it is self luminescent(esp since its usu. not in powdered salt form). i'd guess that the whole 'green glow' misconception comes from the fact that watch hands used to be painted with a mixture of radium salts and Zinc Sulfide. and ZnS glows green when exposed to radiation. your blue glow that you were refering to comes from cherenkov radiation, which if you happen see in air, dont bother running youll be dead soon anyway.
Re:What difference does pure methane make?
on
NASA Snake-Bots
·
· Score: 1
how would it burn the methane?! if its a tiny as they say it is it could only carry about enough O2 to power the turbine for a few seconds.
why does /. love unrealistic 'science'?
on
NASA Snake-Bots
·
· Score: 1
don't get me wrong, I like to read about the latest scientific breakthroughs as much as the next guy. but why does/. love to post references to 'jee wouldn't it be cool if we could do [X]' type of science reporting? i mean it seems like some nasa scientist came up with this idea over lunch and decided to put out a press release. there is no consideration given to a possible power source if its going to operate on other planets (crucial), and little thought about how such a robot would even be designed. as usual it's chock full 'o wild speculation and thin on real science. for instance the report says: "The tiny snake, just 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) in diameter, could be used to inspect gas lines here on Earth as well. Marzwell said the snake could use the pressure of the gas within the pipeline to turn a tiny turbine to produce its own electricity." huh? and how would you power that turbine if your robot is in a pipe full of pure methane? with so much REAL scientific discovery going on (http://unisci.com/stories/20002/0504003.htm for one example) why does/. feel the need to post on the type of discovery that i can bet i'll never see another development on in the next 10 years?
I really don't see the benefit of trying to land NEAR on Eros. Is it simply for the 'jee look what complicated maneuvers it took to do THAT' satisfaction that it would provide or what? As soon as it touches (or smashes) down, assuming that it actually survives the impact, since it DEFINITLY wasn't designed to land at all in the first place, you will almost immediately lose contact with it since its high gain antenna is in a FIXED position. And since the asteroid itself is rotating in more than one direction (tumbling) you'd probably have to wait years before the HGA was pointed at earth (by chance) with sufficient accuracy to allow a short data x-fer again. maybe i'm missing something but obviously there's no atmosphere around Eros and therefore no danger of orbit decay, so why not just let it orbit forever and get as much science as we can out of it?
uhmmmmm, i don't think that's what he was talking about. he was refering to the 'X-Prize' http://www.xprize.org/ something TOTALLY unrelated to NASA's push for a single stage to orbit aerospike design type reusable spacecraft, the X-33 being developed by Lockheed Martin and NASA. And i would HARDLY refer to it as a 'piece of junk', i dont know any other projects in the works that are going to reduce the cost of lofting payload into orbit by a factor of 10, DO YOU? can you at least cite reasons why it is such a piece of junk?
"Even if Cassini had slammed into the earth, the plutonium was of insignificant quantity to do any damage, I believe." actually cassini carried quite a bit of Pu-238 (about 122 moles) DEFINITLY enough to do alot of damage since only a few micrograms is considered enough to induce cancer if inhaled. the reason the Pu in Cassini is much less harmless is because it is in the dioxide (solid ceramic) form, about 33Kg of it; which does not tend to break up into respirable particles(ie. your coffe mug won't powderize if you drop it, it tends to break into large chunks). also they're in iridum/graphite capsules in case of reentry that you mentioned.
that makes no sense, what do you think the 20th century of computing 'belonged' to? *SOMEONE* had to invent the vaccuumn tube, *SOMEONE* invented the transistor. and i dont think Lee de Forest or Shockley and his group were geologists!
"What this really points to is that Someone (be it NASA administration, Congress, or the Executive Branch) needs to get their head out of the '70s protest movement. "Make Science Not War" sounds pretty fscking stupid when it's costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in overlapping work and delays." actually genius, the ISS was originally outsourced internationally for a cost savings.
uhhhhm, no it didn't. It created the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula, not the gulf of mexico. something big enough to create the gulf of mexico slamming into the earth would've probably created another moon. oh, and the energy released in the resulting explosion that formed the Chicxulub crater was over (the eqivelent of)100 million megatons of TNT. by comparison the entire world supply of nuclear weapons detonated at once would produce about a 60,000 megaton explosion. next time get the facts, nice try tho.
this will likely be demoted to troll for criticising but eh, who cares. with that out of the way, do any of the above posters have a clue what electromagnetic radiation is? frequencies in the microwave range simply do not have the power per-photon it takes to rip electrons off of the atoms in your body. they cannot do the same harm to living biological organisms as gamma or x-rays can. as for the statement that x-rays were used to measure foot sizes in shoestores before we knew of the dangers of ionizing radiation(with the implied suggestion that we shouldnt tamper with 'nature' because its too dangerous), yeah, and then we did tests and found out that doing that sort of thing was dangerous. it didnt take much more than a decade or two before the dangers of ionizing radiation became apparent. we have been using radiowaves and the rest of the EM spectrum which is NOT ionizing for just as long and no correlation between cancer or other deleterious health effects has been proven yet. that should tell you something. also, someone above made the comment that his 'aura' is being affected by electronic devices emiting magnetic waves. ugh. what a disapointmet to see such mindless pseudoscience from fellow viewers of a site that prides itself on technology and scientific knowlege.
yeah i know half the words in here are spelled wrong, its 4am and i dont care.
"Yes. But in actuality, we are now on the night-side, and there is really nothing to see. You'll have to wait 8 hours." actually you would only have to wait 45 minutes at the most.
"I think it would be more interesting to land on Jupiter or Saturn anyway..." could you be anymore stupid? you cannot 'land' on jupiter or saturn. they are made of gas! you would just keep falling in untill you were crushed by the pressure and incenerated by the heat. "Really we learned about all there is to learn about mars" heh, yeah and everything thats going to be invented has been invented already, right? and whats with equating homosexuality with undesireable things your topic title 'mars is gay'? grow up, loser.
you already CAN see mars rocks. the ones that were blown into space by meteor impacts with mars' surface and later captured by earths' gravity. such as the famous ALH84007.
basicly you ionize Xenon gas atoms(Xenon because they are very massive per atom) then accelerate them in an electrostatic field, (usually generated by current from solar panels) and shoot them out the back of the spacecraft at a few thousand miles an hour(creates a perty blue glow too!). the amount of thrust produced is miniscule (about the same amount of force a piece of paper exerts on a table @ 1G) but you are doing it efficiently, so if you run it for a decade or two you'll be flying along at a nice clip.
"Because Galileo has been exposed to a plutonium reactor for the entire length of it's mission and has flown through some of the most intense radiation fields ever experienced, the entire probe is highly radioactive and would be extremely poisonous." This is a common misconception of radioactivity, the gallileo probe WAS exposed to large amounts of radiation from jupiters magnetosphere but it is not radioactive itself (except for it's RTG's of course)! is that baked potato you put in the microwave during lunch still radioactive and exposing your stomach right now? no, of course not. basicly, same thing.
"I prefer women who are strong and secure enough to take their assigned role in life, just as strong and secure men have always taken their assigned role. Fair's fair: Do you see me demanding to be allowed to lay around the house all day, dusting a little bit here and there and devoting a few spare minutes to the children?" yea why dont we just go back to the 'good old days' when women were expected to stay pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen without any hope of ever achieving something in life; because simpletons like yourself had their oh so precious masculinity threatened by women who can think for themselves. yeah that sounds great. guess what, the good old days never existed. If you aren't a troll you are sad little man.
the purpose of using a virus as a vector to introduce new genes in a cell is that they can change MANY cells in a short amount of time. unless you plan on inserting cells one by one into this chip.....
i doubt it. i think the objective in maglev trains is to have the highest magnetic feild flux per centemeter of magnetized material.....so you can levatate the thing with lighter magnets. embedding iron particles in plastic would have the opposite effect----very weak magnetic feilds.
"The Hindenburg fabric was found to be made of a cotton substrate with an aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate dopant." ---from the NASA study done by Addison Bain in 1997. cellulose acetate is that 'flash paper' stuff you can find in magic supply stores. it pretty much consumes itself instantly upon ignition. yay!
hmmm, NH3 as fuel? wouldn't you be producing huge amounts of NOx compounds in this reaction?(no thanx) also what about the efficency of the haber-bosch(endothermic) process to produce the NH3 in the first place. im guessing its not fantastic. but i do agree that fusion is the way to go. too bad congress killed funding for ITER, eh?
why cool the the cylinder and reduce combustion efficency? just use a rhodium catalyst(eg. catalytic converter) and you can reduce the NOx emissions by over 95%. simpler too, no complex piping for water cooling schemes.
'thermite' has an extremely high activation energy. it takes burining magnesium (read VERY VERY high temperature) just to get the reaction started. and thermite is not explosive as another poster mentioned. so chances are that anything with enough energy to start the thermite going will have MORE than enough energy to ignite the H2 long before the thermite goes.(oh yea and thermite is not aluminum powder and iron, its Al powder and iron OXIDE[Fe2O3] big difference)
Slashdot Mirror
i suppose ther is still a miniscule possibility of life but shouldn't the temperature gradient, where it would have to reside, between the roasting lava feilds and the rest of the cryogenic surface be constantly moving though? as the lava cools it approaches the frozen temperature of the rest of the planet and when a volcano erupts the frozen surface is immediately plunged into a blast furnace of heat. if there is life on the moon it will have to be *very motile, and pretty crafty i would think too.
well...hell moon then.
don't be so sure yet. the volcanic vents at the ocean bottom on earth are entirely different than the volcanoes on io. Io throws out more than 100 times as much lava as all of earth's volcanoes put together. it lies smack in the center of an extremely intense(definitly deadly for life like us at least) radiation belt around jupiter. and the lava coming out of io's volcanoes is EXTREMELY hot, much more so than lava on earth which is around 1000 to 1200 degrees c. on io they can be as high as 2000 degrees!! seems like a totally inhospitable hell planet to me.
uranium 238 waste glows green? i think not. uranium oxide may FLUORESCE green after being exposed to UV or higher EM radiation but i dont think it is self luminescent(esp since its usu. not in powdered salt form). i'd guess that the whole 'green glow' misconception comes from the fact that watch hands used to be painted with a mixture of radium salts and Zinc Sulfide. and ZnS glows green when exposed to radiation. your blue glow that you were refering to comes from cherenkov radiation, which if you happen see in air, dont bother running youll be dead soon anyway.
how would it burn the methane?! if its a tiny as they say it is it could only carry about enough O2 to power the turbine for a few seconds.
don't get me wrong, I like to read about the latest scientific breakthroughs as much as the next guy. but why does /. love to post references to 'jee wouldn't it be cool if we could do [X]' type of science reporting? i mean it seems like some nasa scientist came up with this idea over lunch and decided to put out a press release. there is no consideration given to a possible power source if its going to operate on other planets (crucial), and little thought about how such a robot would even be designed. as usual it's chock full 'o wild speculation and thin on real science. for instance the report says: /. feel the need to post on the type of discovery that i can bet i'll never see another development on in the next 10 years?
"The tiny snake, just 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) in diameter, could be used to inspect gas lines here on Earth as well. Marzwell said the snake could use the pressure of the gas within the pipeline to turn a tiny turbine to produce its own electricity."
huh? and how would you power that turbine if your robot is in a pipe full of pure methane?
with so much REAL scientific discovery going on (http://unisci.com/stories/20002/0504003.htm for one example) why does
I really don't see the benefit of trying to land NEAR on Eros. Is it simply for the 'jee look what complicated maneuvers it took to do THAT' satisfaction that it would provide or what? As soon as it touches (or smashes) down, assuming that it actually survives the impact, since it DEFINITLY wasn't designed to land at all in the first place, you will almost immediately lose contact with it since its high gain antenna is in a FIXED position. And since the asteroid itself is rotating in more than one direction (tumbling) you'd probably have to wait years before the HGA was pointed at earth (by chance) with sufficient accuracy to allow a short data x-fer again. maybe i'm missing something but obviously there's no atmosphere around Eros and therefore no danger of orbit decay, so why not just let it orbit forever and get as much science as we can out of it?
uhmmmmm, i don't think that's what he was talking about. he was refering to the 'X-Prize' http://www.xprize.org/ something TOTALLY unrelated to NASA's push for a single stage to orbit aerospike design type reusable spacecraft, the X-33 being developed by Lockheed Martin and NASA. And i would HARDLY refer to it as a 'piece of junk', i dont know any other projects in the works that are going to reduce the cost of lofting payload into orbit by a factor of 10, DO YOU? can you at least cite reasons why it is such a piece of junk?
"Even if Cassini had slammed into the earth, the plutonium was of insignificant quantity to do any damage, I believe." actually cassini carried quite a bit of Pu-238 (about 122 moles) DEFINITLY enough to do alot of damage since only a few micrograms is considered enough to induce cancer if inhaled. the reason the Pu in Cassini is much less harmless is because it is in the dioxide (solid ceramic) form, about 33Kg of it; which does not tend to break up into respirable particles(ie. your coffe mug won't powderize if you drop it, it tends to break into large chunks). also they're in iridum/graphite capsules in case of reentry that you mentioned.
that makes no sense, what do you think the 20th century of computing 'belonged' to? *SOMEONE* had to invent the vaccuumn tube, *SOMEONE* invented the transistor. and i dont think Lee de Forest or Shockley and his group were geologists!
"What this really points to is that Someone (be it NASA administration, Congress, or the Executive Branch) needs to get their head out of the '70s protest movement. "Make Science Not War" sounds pretty fscking stupid when it's costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in overlapping work and delays." actually genius, the ISS was originally outsourced internationally for a cost savings.
uhhhhm, no it didn't. It created the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula, not the gulf of mexico. something big enough to create the gulf of mexico slamming into the earth would've probably created another moon. oh, and the energy released in the resulting explosion that formed the Chicxulub crater was over (the eqivelent of)100 million megatons of TNT. by comparison the entire world supply of nuclear weapons detonated at once would produce about a 60,000 megaton explosion. next time get the facts, nice try tho.
this will likely be demoted to troll for criticising but eh, who cares. with that out of the way, do any of the above posters have a clue what electromagnetic radiation is? frequencies in the microwave range simply do not have the power per-photon it takes to rip electrons off of the atoms in your body. they cannot do the same harm to living biological organisms as gamma or x-rays can. as for the statement that x-rays were used to measure foot sizes in shoestores before we knew of the dangers of ionizing radiation(with the implied suggestion that we shouldnt tamper with 'nature' because its too dangerous), yeah, and then we did tests and found out that doing that sort of thing was dangerous. it didnt take much more than a decade or two before the dangers of ionizing radiation became apparent. we have been using radiowaves and the rest of the EM spectrum which is NOT ionizing for just as long and no correlation between cancer or other deleterious health effects has been proven yet. that should tell you something. also, someone above made the comment that his 'aura' is being affected by electronic devices emiting magnetic waves. ugh. what a disapointmet to see such mindless pseudoscience from fellow viewers of a site that prides itself on technology and scientific knowlege.
yeah i know half the words in here are spelled wrong, its 4am and i dont care.
"Yes. But in actuality, we are now on the night-side, and there is really nothing to see. You'll have to wait 8 hours." actually you would only have to wait 45 minutes at the most.
"I think it would be more interesting to land on Jupiter or Saturn anyway..." could you be anymore stupid? you cannot 'land' on jupiter or saturn. they are made of gas! you would just keep falling in untill you were crushed by the pressure and incenerated by the heat. "Really we learned about all there is to learn about mars" heh, yeah and everything thats going to be invented has been invented already, right? and whats with equating homosexuality with undesireable things your topic title 'mars is gay'? grow up, loser.
you already CAN see mars rocks. the ones that were blown into space by meteor impacts with mars' surface and later captured by earths' gravity. such as the famous ALH84007.
basicly you ionize Xenon gas atoms(Xenon because they are very massive per atom) then accelerate them in an electrostatic field, (usually generated by current from solar panels) and shoot them out the back of the spacecraft at a few thousand miles an hour(creates a perty blue glow too!). the amount of thrust produced is miniscule (about the same amount of force a piece of paper exerts on a table @ 1G) but you are doing it efficiently, so if you run it for a decade or two you'll be flying along at a nice clip.
"Because Galileo has been exposed to a plutonium reactor for the entire length of it's mission and has flown through some of the most intense radiation fields ever experienced, the entire probe is highly radioactive and would be extremely poisonous." This is a common misconception of radioactivity, the gallileo probe WAS exposed to large amounts of radiation from jupiters magnetosphere but it is not radioactive itself (except for it's RTG's of course)! is that baked potato you put in the microwave during lunch still radioactive and exposing your stomach right now? no, of course not. basicly, same thing.
"I prefer women who are strong and secure enough to take their assigned role in life, just as strong and secure men have always taken their assigned role. Fair's fair: Do you see me demanding to be allowed to lay around the house all day, dusting a little bit here and there and devoting a few spare minutes to the children?" yea why dont we just go back to the 'good old days' when women were expected to stay pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen without any hope of ever achieving something in life; because simpletons like yourself had their oh so precious masculinity threatened by women who can think for themselves. yeah that sounds great. guess what, the good old days never existed. If you aren't a troll you are sad little man.
the purpose of using a virus as a vector to introduce new genes in a cell is that they can change MANY cells in a short amount of time. unless you plan on inserting cells one by one into this chip.....
i doubt it. i think the objective in maglev trains is to have the highest magnetic feild flux per centemeter of magnetized material.....so you can levatate the thing with lighter magnets. embedding iron particles in plastic would have the opposite effect----very weak magnetic feilds.
"The Hindenburg fabric was found to be made of a cotton substrate with an aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate dopant." ---from the NASA study done by Addison Bain in 1997. cellulose acetate is that 'flash paper' stuff you can find in magic supply stores. it pretty much consumes itself instantly upon ignition. yay!
hmmm, NH3 as fuel? wouldn't you be producing huge amounts of NOx compounds in this reaction?(no thanx) also what about the efficency of the haber-bosch(endothermic) process to produce the NH3 in the first place. im guessing its not fantastic. but i do agree that fusion is the way to go. too bad congress killed funding for ITER, eh?
why cool the the cylinder and reduce combustion efficency? just use a rhodium catalyst(eg. catalytic converter) and you can reduce the NOx emissions by over 95%. simpler too, no complex piping for water cooling schemes.
'thermite' has an extremely high activation energy. it takes burining magnesium (read VERY VERY high temperature) just to get the reaction started. and thermite is not explosive as another poster mentioned. so chances are that anything with enough energy to start the thermite going will have MORE than enough energy to ignite the H2 long before the thermite goes.(oh yea and thermite is not aluminum powder and iron, its Al powder and iron OXIDE[Fe2O3] big difference)