Why use the word "steal" here, though? Are these organisms being smuggled out of the country, or at they being legitimately and legally removed for study? If the latter, anyone accusing them of theft (or piracy) is just rabble-rousing. There may be some legitimate cause for concern regarding local economies, here, but neither piracy nor theft is occurring. And tarring Google with this is doubly asinine.
I'd drop the "thermal" entirely. The Sun's light (which isn't usually thought of as thermal energy) is important for all kinds of reasons, including the heating it does.:-)
So you're learning physics from Wikipedia, now? The distinction about heat versus thermal energy disagrees with every undergraduate and graduate course I've taken in physics. (Not to mention the OED and Webster's.) I'm inclined to believe those.
And "linked to heat" does not mean "is heat". Infrared is associated with warm objects because that's where things in our common experience tend to emit most of their thermal energy. (Hotter objects will shift that into the visible or beyond.) In much the same way, I associate red lights with stopped cars but red lights are not stopped cars.
NASA's press office apparently likes to sensationalize everything. You should have seen the headline that went on that story: "Was Einstein Wrong about Space Travel?"
We've had all three major networks in here already. (We've been joking around the office that we might get someone from The Daily Show in to do a story, but that's mainly wishful thinking.) So keep an eye out for her on the news tonight.
And, no, I didn't expect Drudge to behave. I didn't expect him to care about this story at all, to the extent that I thought about him. (Which is "not at all.") Still, one wonders if there isn't some action that can be taken for breaking a news embargo.
That sounds like Triton, although I don't think we have any direct detections of a nitrogen ocean. There are certainly plumes erupting from the surface, though, so it's definiately possible.
There is certainly the plume above the surface, but I doubt that the pressure there is anything even remotely near Earth standards. Remember, a lot of the vapor is escaping into space freely, so it's a fair bet that the exobase is right at the surface of the moon.
Even if we did return a sample for Saturn, planetary protection protocols are (supposed to be) pretty strict. So I wouldn't lose sleep over it, especially since any organisms on Enceladus are probably not suited for life on Earth.
Bear in mind that those temperatures have low spatial resolution. We know from somewhat recent measurements with CIRES on Cassini that the "tiger stripes" are significantly warmer than the surrounding ice. We don't have a direct measurement showing *how* warm they get at the really hot parts (since even the CIRES measurements included a lot of cooler ice) until we can get a really close flyby that lets CIRES zoom way in on a stripe.
That said, if the finding here is right, the water reachs around 270 K. Which isn't fun to swim in, but it's a lot better than 100 K!
Speaking as someone who worked this: no we didn't. We knew that there was a plume earlier but as far as we knew it was warm ice that produced it. And that wasn't a year ago that we announced the discovery of the plume, either.
The new measurements suggest that there too much water vapor in the plume to be warm ice and it almost has to be liquid water.
The water thing is tired because the Mars community has over-done it pretty badly. This is a case where liquid water should not exist (based on what we know right now), so it's pretty remarkable.
I mentioned the possiblity of life only because of the detection of organic molecules. Frankly, I think that the odds of life are quite slim, but this discovery *does* add Enceladus to a rather short list of good places to look. Even if there is no life, we can learn a lot about the abiotic formation of organics and probably put some better constraints on the conditions under which life might develop. So I'm not saying that there is life or that we should expect to find any, merely that this makes Enceladus an interesting place for astrobiologists.
The editors changed my story link. My original submission had http://www.ciclops.org/ which has not only the press-release but several supporting images which might be of interested. Granted, our server is feeling the load pretty badly at the moment, but that'll probably ease up in a little while.
If you're talking about the office site at JPL, that's because it *does* mention that Cassini/Huygens is a joint venture. Quite a lot, in fact. Including at the end of the official press-release. ciclops.org isn't an offical NASA website, it's the site for one instrument on Cassini. We're funded by NASA, so we're not a joint venture. (Although there are team members who do hale from Europe.)
Well, ciclops.org is feeling the load quite badly at the moment. We're still on a single T1 and we're serving up a lot of very large images at the moment. Apologies if the site is slow or unresponsive. (And we're working on getting another line, but... bureaucracy is happening.)
That's an argument to simplify the legislation, not that Representatives shouldn't read it. And given that they aren't even having their staffs read a lot of the legislation, I'm not sure that your argument holds up all that well.
Depends on the target and the purpose. If you're hitting bin Laden, there's generally neither a state to declare war *against* nor time to go through that.
In the case of Iraq, I agree: we should have declared war first. And part of that should have been informing Congress why we should do it.
I'm not sure if I got your point, but that's rather different from not reading bills before voting on them, isn't it? A military strike is generally a closely guarded secret and there's no particular reason why Congress should know about it in advance. But how can Congressmen claim to do their jobs (approving or denying laws) if they don't actually read the laws before they vote?
We've brought down comet dust once in what was a pretty expensive mission. The other time we (NASA) tried that same trick, the probe buried itself halfway into the Nevada desert. That pretty much illustrates the problem.
Controlled, soft re-entry is not easy. If you're shipping down tons of material at a time, it'll be very expensive. Remember, all of that energy you need to lift material into orbit has to be shed to bring it back down. Parachutes would probably be unweildy (at best) for a really large shipment. Retrorockets would use just about as much fuel to break the descent as you use going up. And so forth.
That's what I meant when I said that it might be sold in orbit. But as I noted, you don't know what the economics of that will be. Depending on the supply and demand, the prices of those metals will be different from the prices down here. So fixing a value to the asteroid right now is silly if that's your plan, isn't it?
Also, the value probably doesn't take into account the cost of mining the metals and bring them to Earth. (Unless you plan to sell them to people to use in space, which presents a very different market and therefore I'd argue that the cost of the metal is currently not known.) Bringing things up to orbit or back down again is very expensive, which is bound to reduce the profit there by quite a lot. Perhaps even erase it.
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Why use the word "steal" here, though? Are these organisms being smuggled out of the country, or at they being legitimately and legally removed for study? If the latter, anyone accusing them of theft (or piracy) is just rabble-rousing. There may be some legitimate cause for concern regarding local economies, here, but neither piracy nor theft is occurring. And tarring Google with this is doubly asinine.
I'd drop the "thermal" entirely. The Sun's light (which isn't usually thought of as thermal energy) is important for all kinds of reasons, including the heating it does. :-)
So you're learning physics from Wikipedia, now? The distinction about heat versus thermal energy disagrees with every undergraduate and graduate course I've taken in physics. (Not to mention the OED and Webster's.) I'm inclined to believe those.
And "linked to heat" does not mean "is heat". Infrared is associated with warm objects because that's where things in our common experience tend to emit most of their thermal energy. (Hotter objects will shift that into the visible or beyond.) In much the same way, I associate red lights with stopped cars but red lights are not stopped cars.
NASA's press office apparently likes to sensationalize everything. You should have seen the headline that went on that story: "Was Einstein Wrong about Space Travel?"
The hell?
"Sorry to be pedantic, but radiation also keeps you alive! Afterall, what do you think heat is?"
Uh, thermal energy: random motions of molecules/atoms/whatever on a microscopic scale?
The energy I use to conduct metabolic activities and which provides that heat comes from the Sun via EM radiation. But heat? Not radiation.
That's sort of what I figured. Although I also wondered if it could be argued that the existance of the embargo serves as an implict contract.
I understood :) Still, I don't think that there's really strong evidence of that, as of yet. Clearly, we need a Neptunian orbiter.
We've had all three major networks in here already. (We've been joking around the office that we might get someone from The Daily Show in to do a story, but that's mainly wishful thinking.) So keep an eye out for her on the news tonight.
And, no, I didn't expect Drudge to behave. I didn't expect him to care about this story at all, to the extent that I thought about him. (Which is "not at all.") Still, one wonders if there isn't some action that can be taken for breaking a news embargo.
That sounds like Triton, although I don't think we have any direct detections of a nitrogen ocean. There are certainly plumes erupting from the surface, though, so it's definiately possible.
Largely because he leaked the story before the embargo (set by the journal in this case, I believe) was lifted.
But we knew that he is an asshat, so this hardly tells us anything we didn't know.
There is certainly the plume above the surface, but I doubt that the pressure there is anything even remotely near Earth standards. Remember, a lot of the vapor is escaping into space freely, so it's a fair bet that the exobase is right at the surface of the moon.
Who is planning to bring them back?
Even if we did return a sample for Saturn, planetary protection protocols are (supposed to be) pretty strict. So I wouldn't lose sleep over it, especially since any organisms on Enceladus are probably not suited for life on Earth.
Bear in mind that those temperatures have low spatial resolution. We know from somewhat recent measurements with CIRES on Cassini that the "tiger stripes" are significantly warmer than the surrounding ice. We don't have a direct measurement showing *how* warm they get at the really hot parts (since even the CIRES measurements included a lot of cooler ice) until we can get a really close flyby that lets CIRES zoom way in on a stripe.
That said, if the finding here is right, the water reachs around 270 K. Which isn't fun to swim in, but it's a lot better than 100 K!
Speaking as someone who worked this: no we didn't. We knew that there was a plume earlier but as far as we knew it was warm ice that produced it. And that wasn't a year ago that we announced the discovery of the plume, either.
The new measurements suggest that there too much water vapor in the plume to be warm ice and it almost has to be liquid water.
Also, there is no detection of ammonia so far.
They found some organics and methane. No ammonia has been detected, much to my surprise.
And I assume you're joking about the denser air? Enceladus's surface is a vacuum.
The water thing is tired because the Mars community has over-done it pretty badly. This is a case where liquid water should not exist (based on what we know right now), so it's pretty remarkable.
I mentioned the possiblity of life only because of the detection of organic molecules. Frankly, I think that the odds of life are quite slim, but this discovery *does* add Enceladus to a rather short list of good places to look. Even if there is no life, we can learn a lot about the abiotic formation of organics and probably put some better constraints on the conditions under which life might develop. So I'm not saying that there is life or that we should expect to find any, merely that this makes Enceladus an interesting place for astrobiologists.
The editors changed my story link. My original submission had http://www.ciclops.org/ which has not only the press-release but several supporting images which might be of interested. Granted, our server is feeling the load pretty badly at the moment, but that'll probably ease up in a little while.
If you're talking about the office site at JPL, that's because it *does* mention that Cassini/Huygens is a joint venture. Quite a lot, in fact. Including at the end of the official press-release. ciclops.org isn't an offical NASA website, it's the site for one instrument on Cassini. We're funded by NASA, so we're not a joint venture. (Although there are team members who do hale from Europe.)
Well, ciclops.org is feeling the load quite badly at the moment. We're still on a single T1 and we're serving up a lot of very large images at the moment. Apologies if the site is slow or unresponsive. (And we're working on getting another line, but... bureaucracy is happening.)
That's an argument to simplify the legislation, not that Representatives shouldn't read it. And given that they aren't even having their staffs read a lot of the legislation, I'm not sure that your argument holds up all that well.
Depends on the target and the purpose. If you're hitting bin Laden, there's generally neither a state to declare war *against* nor time to go through that.
In the case of Iraq, I agree: we should have declared war first. And part of that should have been informing Congress why we should do it.
I'm not sure if I got your point, but that's rather different from not reading bills before voting on them, isn't it? A military strike is generally a closely guarded secret and there's no particular reason why Congress should know about it in advance. But how can Congressmen claim to do their jobs (approving or denying laws) if they don't actually read the laws before they vote?
We've brought down comet dust once in what was a pretty expensive mission. The other time we (NASA) tried that same trick, the probe buried itself halfway into the Nevada desert. That pretty much illustrates the problem.
Controlled, soft re-entry is not easy. If you're shipping down tons of material at a time, it'll be very expensive. Remember, all of that energy you need to lift material into orbit has to be shed to bring it back down. Parachutes would probably be unweildy (at best) for a really large shipment. Retrorockets would use just about as much fuel to break the descent as you use going up. And so forth.
That's what I meant when I said that it might be sold in orbit. But as I noted, you don't know what the economics of that will be. Depending on the supply and demand, the prices of those metals will be different from the prices down here. So fixing a value to the asteroid right now is silly if that's your plan, isn't it?
Also, the value probably doesn't take into account the cost of mining the metals and bring them to Earth. (Unless you plan to sell them to people to use in space, which presents a very different market and therefore I'd argue that the cost of the metal is currently not known.) Bringing things up to orbit or back down again is very expensive, which is bound to reduce the profit there by quite a lot. Perhaps even erase it.