The President only requests money. Congress allocates is. They've overriden this president many times regarding NASA's budget. (The White House has tried to kill the New Horizons mission to Pluto on at least one occasion. Congress put the money back.)
This isn't the end of HST. That doesn't really depend on Bush, that depends on Congress.
Except that HST has been one of NASA's most wildly popular missions ever. Probably more popular than, say, Cassini. Or MESSANGER, Deep Impact, or Rosetta. It's only rivals from the current era are the Mars rovers.
Be careful about generalizing your likes and dislikes to the rest of the world.
Do you really think that the saved money is going to go to tsunami relief or ending world hunger? If it goes anywhere, odds are it will go into the Iraq war. Or maybe the upcoming Iranian war, even.
It's not a zero-sum game between humanitarian aid and science. Any language that supposes that it is leads you into trouble.
My understanding is that they had planned to bring it back to Earth in one of the shuttles and place the HST in the Smithsonian. But that's no longer an option, I understand.
Not really. Most of the signals are so weak that you're pretty much dependent on the Deep Space Network to pick them up. Also, I'm not sure how the signals are encoded, although that is quite probably publically availible data.
Most of the scientists at ESA and NASA involved with the mission were probably spending most of that same time just remembering that they could breath again. (That, or toasting the success.) And since they weren't exactly racing to get the images out, saying that they were "beat" is perhaps a bit misleading.
It's also worth remembering that the science teams are almost certainly sitting on quite a bit more data, so when their pictures get released, I'm sure that there will be plenty more to "oooh" and "ahhh" about.
(Not to dismiss what amateurs do. There is a lot of nice work done by non-professional astronomers, even on the image processing side of things.)
Doesn't ActiveX only run under Windows? (Or did I miss yet another meeting?) That's OS where it's all but impossible to delete IE, right? Rendering the whole point about keeping IE around kind of moot.
Just for the record, the "changes over time" thing was whoever is in charge of Georgia's education system, not Cobb County specifically. Which I think shows that the problem is worse that just one county, alas.
Are you thinking of the state of Indiana, which (through a fairly long, convoluted bill which kept defining pi in different ways) tried to pass legislation that would acknowledge some nut's theory and get the state free use of pi? See: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_341.html As for religious motivations for legislating pi, that's a legend: http://www.snopes.com/religion/pi.htm
And not everyone enforces cybersecurity and other law pertinent to computers. But I don't think I'm going out on a limb here when I suggest that people enforcing those laws should know their way around a computer pretty well.
Millennia? Unlikely. Millions of years would be more in line with the research. (Actually, the dynamical lifetimes of Saturnian rings can be upwards of 100 million years.)
Rings aren't really what I'd call "turbulent". Collisions speeds are very, very small. Eccentricities are practically non-existant by planetary standards. Things are pretty orderly, on the whole.
Worse, Larry Esposito (the real head of the UVIS team, despite what the article indicates) has floated the idea that rings might recycle themselves. It's a good idea, and his initial (crude) models indicate ring ages that are much too long. So it's not wholly clear that rings can't be primordial.
Still, the concensus remains that rings probably aren't an original feature of the solar system and that there is a source of ringy-goodness somewhere in the systems. So you're probably right overall: replenishment is likely occuring.
On an seperate note, what does the formation of icey planetesimals from the protosolar disk have to do with ring ages?
I strongly doubt that any process that replenishes the rings would be applicable to replenishing the ozone layer. For one thing, the ozone layer is chemistry in action, the rings are much more simple physics. (Blasting particles off of a moon has little to do with producing O3 molecules on Earth.)
More important, you need to point out to me where the blurb suggests that humans should replenish the rings. "Replenish" doesn't really imply that humans need to be involved. Any attempt to read that statement as saying that the means need to be artificial says more about your than about how you read things than the person who wrote it.
First of all, 100 million years is a pretty long time, even by planet standards. Second, the E-ring is easily one of the most tenuous of the rings. (You've never seen it through a telescope, for example.) The A, B, and C rings, the ones you've seen, are a lot denser. It's not clear if they're disappearing, and if so, how long they'd last. In fact, if you get past the sensational leader paragraph, you discover that it is far from clear that the oxygen even came from the E-ring.
Actually, whoever wrote that article didn't really check the facts all that well. A quick check would have shown that the E-ring only starts at 180,000 km from the planet's center (that's 120,000 km from the "surface"). It extends out another 300,000 km, so this isn't a totally trivial point. Also, the UVIS instrument, fantastic though it is, hasn't discovered all of the things that they claim it did. Most of those observations were made in the visible wavelengths. And were discovered by, er, Voyager. I mean, I hate to be nitpicky on the one hand, but is it so much to ask for people to try to keep the facts straight?
a) Having taught from that book, I can tell you right now that Hartmann is not an introductory level text. So please don't try to insult me.
b) Chiron and Wilson-Harrington are not asteroids. Both are comets. Chiron is nowhere near the main belt and is, rather, a type of object known as a Centaur. It's basically a kind of cometary body, not an asteroid.
c) While some dead comets are widely believed to be disguing themselves as asteroids, no one (except Hartmann perhaps) that I know wants to classify them in the same category. There is certainly a varaition in the makeup of comets, but comets and asteroids have very different histories and compositions. Having formed inside of the frost-line, asteroids are widely-agreed to be (pretty much by defintion) volatile-poor. Outgassing would not be expected under those conditions as a consequence.
A little research would have told you this. (Google is your friend, here.) The IAU, for example, codifies the distinction in the very handling and naming of newly discovered bodies.
In any case, all of this is a tangent. You are suggesting that Sedna could be sublimating when its maximum temperature from solar insolation would be about 50 K. That's singularly unlikely.
Yes, but why should we worry about that? Greek photometric measurements weren't all that accurate and it isn't like anyone cites them much. We don't use stads anymore to measure distance, after all.
"The rates can be calculated and one can do simulations on how the ice should look after 4 billion years."
Provided that the behavior is linear, of course. But it's great to know that the experients are happening; I know a lot of planetary geologists who are looking forward to better lab data.
Large collisions would be pretty rare in the Kuiper Belt. There just isn't enough stuff around. Worse, they occur at low speeds. So you wouldn't expect to generate a lot of melting that way. It's possible, of course. But it's an eyebrow-raiser.
"Particulate venting"? You mean volatile sublimation, like comets when they get near the Sun? I don't know of any asteroids that do that. And Quaoar is much too far from the Sun to expect that sort of behavior. (The maximum temperature you would expect is around 50 Kelvins. And that assumes an albedo of 0, which can't be the case if they can see it in the visible wavelengths.)
They also speculate that the ice would have had to formed recently, since crystalline ice is expected to have a lifetime of a few millions of years with the presence of radiation in space.
The sun's gotta be something like only -3 magnitude from out there.
Quaoar is at 43 AU from the Sun. That means the Sun's luminosity is down by a factor of 43^2, or about 1900, from what we get at Earth. That's about 8 magnitudes, so the Sun is about a -18 magnitude object. Still by far the brightest thing around.
Besides, it doesn't matter much. Volcanism is an endogenic process, so the heat source would generally be internal. Surface temperature seldom sets much to do with geological activity. (Erosion is the main exception to this.)
This has got to be really hard to verify or know much about
More, and better, spectra. You don't need to get close to something to figure out what's going on, as much as it helps. Another group reportedly already has similar spectra and sees similar features.
Also, lab work on ice at these temperatures and pressures would help a lot. Although it's hard to figure out what ice will do over the course of 4 billion years...
Come to think of it, isn't there a probe that was recently launched headed to the Kuiper belt?
No. The New Horizons mission to Pluto hasn't launched yet.
I look forward to theories as to why Quaoar rather than Pluto or Sedna would be the first signs of geo activity in the outer solar system.
It's not. Pluto has evidence for geological activity.
So do a lot of other outer solar system objects, although you seem to mean "Kuiper Belt Objects" in this case. (They're not the same thing. The "outer solar system" is usually taken to mean the giant planets and outward.) Even then, you almost have to count Neptune's giant moon Triton on the list, which almost certainly has geological activity.
Sedna is smaller than Quaoar. So it's less likely to have geological activity. Also, it's farther away thatn Quaoar, so it's really tough getting a spectrum.
I know that line well, and it was to it that I referred you. You're mis-reading it, that's all. It says that Congress can regulate interstate commerce, not that Congress can only regulate commerce between state goverments.
This interpretion is supported by every textbook I've seen, as well as legal analysts. I saw a ruling recently that hinged on this very line, as a matter of fact. What are you basing your interpretation on?
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Or, alternatively, count on Congress.
The President only requests money. Congress allocates is. They've overriden this president many times regarding NASA's budget. (The White House has tried to kill the New Horizons mission to Pluto on at least one occasion. Congress put the money back.)
This isn't the end of HST. That doesn't really depend on Bush, that depends on Congress.
They've launched the shuttles with rockets in the cargo bays lots of times. Galileo comes to mind.
Except that HST has been one of NASA's most wildly popular missions ever. Probably more popular than, say, Cassini. Or MESSANGER, Deep Impact, or Rosetta. It's only rivals from the current era are the Mars rovers.
Be careful about generalizing your likes and dislikes to the rest of the world.
Do you really think that the saved money is going to go to tsunami relief or ending world hunger? If it goes anywhere, odds are it will go into the Iraq war. Or maybe the upcoming Iranian war, even.
It's not a zero-sum game between humanitarian aid and science. Any language that supposes that it is leads you into trouble.
My understanding is that they had planned to bring it back to Earth in one of the shuttles and place the HST in the Smithsonian. But that's no longer an option, I understand.
Not really. Most of the signals are so weak that you're pretty much dependent on the Deep Space Network to pick them up. Also, I'm not sure how the signals are encoded, although that is quite probably publically availible data.
Most of the scientists at ESA and NASA involved with the mission were probably spending most of that same time just remembering that they could breath again. (That, or toasting the success.) And since they weren't exactly racing to get the images out, saying that they were "beat" is perhaps a bit misleading.
It's also worth remembering that the science teams are almost certainly sitting on quite a bit more data, so when their pictures get released, I'm sure that there will be plenty more to "oooh" and "ahhh" about.
(Not to dismiss what amateurs do. There is a lot of nice work done by non-professional astronomers, even on the image processing side of things.)
Doesn't ActiveX only run under Windows? (Or did I miss yet another meeting?) That's OS where it's all but impossible to delete IE, right? Rendering the whole point about keeping IE around kind of moot.
Just for the record, the "changes over time" thing was whoever is in charge of Georgia's education system, not Cobb County specifically. Which I think shows that the problem is worse that just one county, alas.
Are you thinking of the state of Indiana, which (through a fairly long, convoluted bill which kept defining pi in different ways) tried to pass legislation that would acknowledge some nut's theory and get the state free use of pi? See: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_341.html
As for religious motivations for legislating pi, that's a legend: http://www.snopes.com/religion/pi.htm
Wouldn't it be libel, not slander? It's written down, not spoken.
And not everyone enforces cybersecurity and other law pertinent to computers. But I don't think I'm going out on a limb here when I suggest that people enforcing those laws should know their way around a computer pretty well.
Millennia? Unlikely. Millions of years would be more in line with the research. (Actually, the dynamical lifetimes of Saturnian rings can be upwards of 100 million years.)
Rings aren't really what I'd call "turbulent". Collisions speeds are very, very small. Eccentricities are practically non-existant by planetary standards. Things are pretty orderly, on the whole.
Worse, Larry Esposito (the real head of the UVIS team, despite what the article indicates) has floated the idea that rings might recycle themselves. It's a good idea, and his initial (crude) models indicate ring ages that are much too long. So it's not wholly clear that rings can't be primordial.
Still, the concensus remains that rings probably aren't an original feature of the solar system and that there is a source of ringy-goodness somewhere in the systems. So you're probably right overall: replenishment is likely occuring.
On an seperate note, what does the formation of icey planetesimals from the protosolar disk have to do with ring ages?
I strongly doubt that any process that replenishes the rings would be applicable to replenishing the ozone layer. For one thing, the ozone layer is chemistry in action, the rings are much more simple physics. (Blasting particles off of a moon has little to do with producing O3 molecules on Earth.)
More important, you need to point out to me where the blurb suggests that humans should replenish the rings. "Replenish" doesn't really imply that humans need to be involved. Any attempt to read that statement as saying that the means need to be artificial says more about your than about how you read things than the person who wrote it.
First of all, 100 million years is a pretty long time, even by planet standards. Second, the E-ring is easily one of the most tenuous of the rings. (You've never seen it through a telescope, for example.) The A, B, and C rings, the ones you've seen, are a lot denser. It's not clear if they're disappearing, and if so, how long they'd last. In fact, if you get past the sensational leader paragraph, you discover that it is far from clear that the oxygen even came from the E-ring.
Actually, whoever wrote that article didn't really check the facts all that well. A quick check would have shown that the E-ring only starts at 180,000 km from the planet's center (that's 120,000 km from the "surface"). It extends out another 300,000 km, so this isn't a totally trivial point. Also, the UVIS instrument, fantastic though it is, hasn't discovered all of the things that they claim it did. Most of those observations were made in the visible wavelengths. And were discovered by, er, Voyager. I mean, I hate to be nitpicky on the one hand, but is it so much to ask for people to try to keep the facts straight?
The interesting thing will be that the brewery will be opened, owned, and operated by the hops itself.
a) Having taught from that book, I can tell you right now that Hartmann is not an introductory level text. So please don't try to insult me.
b) Chiron and Wilson-Harrington are not asteroids. Both are comets. Chiron is nowhere near the main belt and is, rather, a type of object known as a Centaur. It's basically a kind of cometary body, not an asteroid.
c) While some dead comets are widely believed to be disguing themselves as asteroids, no one (except Hartmann perhaps) that I know wants to classify them in the same category. There is certainly a varaition in the makeup of comets, but comets and asteroids have very different histories and compositions. Having formed inside of the frost-line, asteroids are widely-agreed to be (pretty much by defintion) volatile-poor. Outgassing would not be expected under those conditions as a consequence.
A little research would have told you this. (Google is your friend, here.) The IAU, for example, codifies the distinction in the very handling and naming of newly discovered bodies.
In any case, all of this is a tangent. You are suggesting that Sedna could be sublimating when its maximum temperature from solar insolation would be about 50 K. That's singularly unlikely.
Yes, but why should we worry about that? Greek photometric measurements weren't all that accurate and it isn't like anyone cites them much. We don't use stads anymore to measure distance, after all.
"The rates can be calculated and one can do simulations on how the ice should look after 4 billion years."
Provided that the behavior is linear, of course. But it's great to know that the experients are happening; I know a lot of planetary geologists who are looking forward to better lab data.
Or, more precisely, 5 magnitudes is a factor of 100, so each one is a factor of 10^2/5 ~ 2.51.
Why, yes. Yes, it is an idiotic system. No, I don't know why we astronomers keep using it.
Large collisions would be pretty rare in the Kuiper Belt. There just isn't enough stuff around. Worse, they occur at low speeds. So you wouldn't expect to generate a lot of melting that way. It's possible, of course. But it's an eyebrow-raiser.
"Particulate venting"? You mean volatile sublimation, like comets when they get near the Sun? I don't know of any asteroids that do that. And Quaoar is much too far from the Sun to expect that sort of behavior. (The maximum temperature you would expect is around 50 Kelvins. And that assumes an albedo of 0, which can't be the case if they can see it in the visible wavelengths.)
They also speculate that the ice would have had to formed recently, since crystalline ice is expected to have a lifetime of a few millions of years with the presence of radiation in space.
Well, it's a clue about what goes on inside KBOs. Since we can't drill into any of them right now, this is the best we can do.
The sun's gotta be something like only -3 magnitude from out there.
Quaoar is at 43 AU from the Sun. That means the Sun's luminosity is down by a factor of 43^2, or about 1900, from what we get at Earth. That's about 8 magnitudes, so the Sun is about a -18 magnitude object. Still by far the brightest thing around.
Besides, it doesn't matter much. Volcanism is an endogenic process, so the heat source would generally be internal. Surface temperature seldom sets much to do with geological activity. (Erosion is the main exception to this.)
This has got to be really hard to verify or know much about
More, and better, spectra. You don't need to get close to something to figure out what's going on, as much as it helps. Another group reportedly already has similar spectra and sees similar features.
Also, lab work on ice at these temperatures and pressures would help a lot. Although it's hard to figure out what ice will do over the course of 4 billion years...
Come to think of it, isn't there a probe that was recently launched headed to the Kuiper belt?
No. The New Horizons mission to Pluto hasn't launched yet.
I look forward to theories as to why Quaoar rather than Pluto or Sedna would be the first signs of geo activity in the outer solar system.
I know that line well, and it was to it that I referred you. You're mis-reading it, that's all. It says that Congress can regulate interstate commerce, not that Congress can only regulate commerce between state goverments.
This interpretion is supported by every textbook I've seen, as well as legal analysts. I saw a ruling recently that hinged on this very line, as a matter of fact. What are you basing your interpretation on?