While I agree with some of the sentiments, that astrobiologists tend to get excited too easily, you are missing quite a few key points here.
First, Europa vs. Venus or Jupiter: Jupiter lacks liquid water (thought necessary for life) and a reasonable chance for biotic elements to come together (there is a lot of space, there, and not much carbon, nitrogen and oxygen). Venus is much too hot. Neither planet has any serious proponents for (present day?) life. Neither does the Moon, Mercury, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus or Pluto. Titan and Mars are the two other possibilities, as generally held by the planetary community. Oh, add to that Callisto and Ganymede, which also have liquid water. (Note that Juptier has icey moons, plural, not just Europa.)
We know that there is more than ice on Europa. We know that there are surface contaminents (either salts or hydrogen sulfide from the magnetosphere). We also are pretty sure, based on mangetometer readings, that there is liquid water under the ice. And under the icey shell, there has to be rock, based on the density and the moment of intertia results.
Jupiter's radiation belts are irrelevent. No one is forgetting them, they don't matter a whit to Europa's ocean. Radiation only pentrates about 10 cm of ice. It is not going to penetrate 1-10 km of ice. And you can't make the radiation strong, it's charged particles. Their energy is set by the pickup speed at Io (57 km/sec). You'd have to spin Jupiter up to increase the energy. That gives you the insane problem of how to strip off that angular momentum and how to keep a ball of gas from breaking up at that rotation speed (Jovian planets are already visibly oblate from their rotations.)
My last thought is a matter of personal opinion, but I wanted to voice it: I find your preferences for colonization and extra-solar exploration over astrobiology naive. Getting outside the solar system or sending people to other planets is orders of magnitude more expensive and difficult than sending a simple probe to Europa (which is already $1 billion). I mean, I'd love for NASA to develop faster than light drives, but it isn't realistic to expect them to focus on that over exploration of our system.
I'm trying to figure out why CNN ran that article. I don't mean to be cranky, but there was no news there. Everything has been reported before (Yes, there is almost certainly water under Europa's ice. Every time Galileo has made a pass over Europa the evidence gets stronger for that, but Galileo hasn't made any passes in the past month or two.) Worse, the research was really poor. It isn't hard to get the basic facts straight. I mean, Galileo went into orbit in 1995, not 1997 (hence the 1996 reference they gave which mentioned Galileo already in orbit by then). The book was 2010 (also made into a movie), not the dreadful 3001. As for melting at the surface... not likely. Most researchers seem to think that the melting is occuring farther down, and some of it may rise up to the surface occasionally. (Others think its just warm ice convecting, for the most part.) Admittedly, I'm probably biased by my officemate's research on this topic, but still. They could at least give the alternate view. They also don't note that Europa might or might not have two of the three ingredients thought necessary for life: readily availible biogenic elements and a source or energy suitable for life (tidal heat doesn't really serve that end directly). All it has is water. Water is an important start, but it isn't all and that bears keeping in mind.
I'm really confused and miffed by this article. It really shouldn't have been published, especially not as news. (This is not meant as an attack on the/.er who relayed this news story, but CNN.com, who should have known better.) I'm thinking it was a really slow news day.
how close this thing would be to becoming a black hole?
Not very, I would guess. Neutron stars tend to have masses just at or near the Chandrasaker limit (actually, sometimes a bit lower, even). That's 1.4 solar masses. A neutron star becomes a black hole at between 2 and 3 solar masses (number uncertain). So that's a fair margin, particularly if you take the 3 solar mass limit.
Now, how much matter is transfered? If the neutron star is 1.4 solar masses, if it is typical size (10 km radius) and if the companion is 1 AU from the neutron star, you'd have to transfer about 2.5 X 10-5 solar masses to make a millsecond pulsar, I'm figuring. That's a tiny amount. The mass tranfer required goes like 1/r2 (until the mass transfered is a large fraction of the pulsar's inital mass, anyway). So even at 0.1 AU, it's still only 1/1000 of a solar mass. (0.1 AU = 10 solar radii, roughly) They'd almost have to be in physical contact to require enough mass transfer to push the neutron star over the black hole limit.
While I'm pretty sure that was a joke, I feel obligated to point out (since there is often confusion on this point) that HST cannot look at the Earth's surface. First of all, it isn't designed to handle looking through an atmosphere. Secondly, and more importantly, the brightness of the Earth would send it into safe mode instantly. As it is, HST can't look at the Sun or Moon, and Earth is much more reflective than the Moon.
Actually, no. Hubble only has 5-10 years left to it. The NGST (Next Generation Space Telescope) is already being planned to replace it. They plan to bring HST down in the shuttle for eventual installation in the Smithsonian. (At least, this is what I last heard.) I happen to know that the final instrument that will go into HST is being built right now, so it won't be long before HST gets its last upgrade.
This is getting silly, so this will be my last response. However:
You are still ignoring the point. Bacteria carried by humans to other populations is still bacteria adapted to humans. To compare it to potential Mars life is silly.
No one is saying that we should take any precautions. That's what this NASA facility is all about. But there are precations and there are undo, overly expensive precautions that cut the amount of viable science dramatically. I am of the opinion that putting the facility on the Space Station is in the latter category.
I think I see our problem. You're basing your fears on Hollywood horror/SciFi movies.
I'm basing mine on biology. If life on Mars evolved independently of Earth, odds are that it won't infect humans or any other terrestrial species. If you want to see why this is likely, just look at all of the bacteria and virii on Earth today. Only a small fraction of these can infect a human. Now imagine that the bacteria had never as much as seen a human before. What are the odds that it can even live in our systems, let alone thrive and infect?
Organisms that have evolved on Earth are far more likely to be dangerous than Mars rocks (which probably don't even have life to begin with, based on Viking findings). And organism like e. coli which has been SHOWN to infect humans is much scarier than some phantom boogieman from Mars you may have once seen in a movie.
As for the space station: it already gets the lion's share of the NASA budget.
It's very hard to get these parameters for planets and moons. Earth's is pretty well quantified and the Moon's was actually not bad before this (my Solar System Dynamics text has 0.03, which is close to the value in the article).
We also are reasonably confidence in the other planets' Love numbers. But we are just guessing on, say, Io and Europa. And those are cases where it'd be truely nice to know what the Love numbers are, since that helps determine the heating rates.
In as much as NASA has set up this facility for studing potential alien lifeforms on Earth, not in zero-G, I'd have to call your assertion into question. It's pretty sweeping statment, given the evidence against it.
And if you do your research, you'll learn that most marine biologist spend most of their time on shore. Particularly when they're trying to do lab work. There is no reason for an astrobiologist to go into space, given the costs and the fact that any organisms on the space station would already be out of their habitat (which is why a marine biologist goes into the water, to study critters in their native environments).
And, no, no robot is as good as having a human in there. Ask any lab scientist you know, and they'll confirm: there is no substitute for having a person running the experiments. Machines don't have all of our sense. Half of good science is serendipity, often resulting from someone noticing something really subtle. Machines don't notice things, and by design, have restricted senses.
And it isn't like Mars rocks are more scary than, say, smallpox or e. coli. We let biologists work with known hazardous organisms (under careful conditions, much like NASA astrobiology lab) here on Earth. And we know for a fact that they are dangerous. Odds are highly weighted against there being any danger in Mars rocks.
You missed the news that NASA is planning a sample return mission to Mars within the decade. Actually, they've been planning it for quite a while now, at least 10 years. It has been delayed by several years by the Polar Lander and Climate Orbiter debacles, but it is still on.
This is a job for a full-blown lab with actual human involvment. If the Viking landers taught us anything, it's that we cannot anticipate all of the kinds of tests we might need and results (false and real) that we will see. There is no way you'll launch a full-sized, fully equiped biological lab into orbit, espeically not one where humans can really work (gravity is pretty popular amoung biologists, silly people).
The whole point of bringing these samples back is to bring the full arsenal of our scientific abilities against them. You can't do that via remotely controlled robots, either on Mars or in the next room of the space station.
Well, yes, lunar occulatations are not rare, per se. They should be about as common as eclipses, over all (to within a factor of 10). But the Moon's orbit is inclined 15 degrees to the ecliptic (note: not to Earth's equator, but the ecliptic). That takes it substantially out of the plane of the solar system as seen from Earth. Occultations can only occur when the Moon is at its nodes (cross the ecliptic). That happens twice a month, but then you have to have a planet in the right 1/2 degree of sky at that time.
So they don't happen quite as often as all that. Plus, it you want to see the planet do cool things, you want a Moon around new. Otherwise, the Moon's light washes out your ability to see much of the planet.
We have data: lots of pictures of pretty spiral galaxies. You yourself point out the problem: we can't explain those data.
Shameless plug for my own work: maybe Saturn's rings will provide a suffient analog to further our understanding. Cassini arrives in 2 years for some up-close views of what's happening.
You're right up until you state that the core must rotate more quickly. Dark matter has nothing to do with the core of the galaxy or its rotation. And even if the core did rotate rapidly, a la stars about a black hole, so what? There wouldn't be any radial mixing from that, as long as the orbits were Keplerian and nearly circular (which they are, as far as I've heard).
I also fail to see why this result indicates the presence of dark matter. The direction of rotation should not depend on the dark matter content. This is about how the galaxy formed and how the spiral arms were generated, not about what the galaxy is made of.
There is a legitimate question here, and it's the subject of some tricky observing and analysis. You can get the Doppler map of the galaxy, by you need to work out which it is tipping towards you in order to work out if it is a leading or trailing arm spiral. It's hard to say if the "top" of the galaxy is nearer or us or the "bottom" is. If you can't tell that, you can't tell which way it is spinning.
The usual way of guessing at this it to look for globular clusters. The side that is nearer us will have fewer gobulars in front of it than the farther side. But this is a guess, of course. With a nearly face-on galaxy, this difference is harder to pick out.
The 3-Body problem cannot, in general, be tackle analytically (Poincare showed this). So I am hesitant to believe that we will ever have an analtical technique to directly handle a billion-body problem, like galaxies.
That said, we *do* have analtic techniques to examine galactic dynamics. Lots of 'em, ranging from fluid discriptions to wave approximations. But stunning coinidence, I was just reading Binney and Tremaine, a whole text on galactic dynamics. (The physics is pretty much the same as in planetary rings.) So lots of math exists to tackle these problems. As a math major in astro. grad school, I am pretty confident when I say that the mathematicians won't need to cook up new tools as much as we need to figure out how to apply the existing ones.
The other approach is, of course, various simulation techniques, mainly N-body codes. For that we need
a) Faster computers. We always want faster computers.
b) Better algorithms. This is a place with the Applied Math folks would be really helpful.
I'm a bit confused at why anyone this that this is so bizzaire. Sure, most galaxies are trailing spirals, but there are enough leading spirals to make them not freakish. I'd suspect that it is the spin put on the story by the media, but one astronomer is quoted calling leading-arm spirals extremely rare.
My take on this is that the real news is the evidence of disruption/interaction. We've seen that before (M51, the Whirlpool, is a good example), but it's still a damned cool thing to see.
The petition was not flawed, and you just said why: it kept the representatives in office by voting for Pluto. Now if you want to argue that our system of GOVERNMENT is flawed, you'd have a case. But within the current system, the Pluto proposal was just as valid as, say, allocating billions to fight terrorism (because it's popular right now).
The PKE was cancelled more than a year ago. It's New Horizons, now. Unfortunately, I've deleted the emails I've recieved with details of the NASA budget (from NASA, my research institute, and the Division for Planetary Science), but I'm pretty sure the New Horizons is on, not off. When I read the first email, I turned to an officemate and commented that they'd cut Europa for Pluto. Given the budget cap they already expected and the fact that Europa was going to be over that cap anyway, it was an expected and logical move to make.
There is competition. There has been for some time, really. NASA is generally bigger and better than other agencies, but Japan and the ESA have been doing some very good work for quite a while. And you'll notice how the armada of Halley-visiting spacecraft from other nations prompted the US to send out own... oh, wait, no we didn't.
If you want an example of direct "competition" between a NASA mission and an ESA one, check out NASA's MESSANGER and ESA's Beppe-Columbo. Both are heading to Mercury, yet I dont' see either mission being driven to outstrip the other.
You were asked to vote on what mission you want funded: you, I hope, voted for your senators and representatives. Your post seems to indicate, although I trust this isn't so, that you miss the point of a represenatative democracy: the people don't vote on individual issues, the select leaders who are (supposed) to become informed and vote in their interest. Thus, congress generally does what people want them to do. Whether we individually agree or whether we want to admit it or not, they do because it keeps them in office.
I'd propose a somewhat more straightforeward explaination: the SN is bright. It probably represents more light per pixel than anywhere else in the host galaxy. So the after-image was scaled differently in brightness to allow the SN to show up, making the galaxy appear dimmer. Even if they'd used all the same equipment, this effect would kick in.
You owe your life to supernovae, since that's the only way (known) to enrich the interstellar medium with heavy elements, like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. It's hard to imagine anything affecting your life more than that which made you possible.
Let's see... The antecedent to "those" is pretty clearly "simulations of Jovian storms." Earth-based predictions are not directly applicable to Jupiter: the whole atmospheric structure is different, as is the heating, the rotation, the cloud chemistry... so can you find a case of someone having really good simulations of specific features of Jupiter interacting? Last time I attended a Jupiter meeting (June, 2001), they didn't seem to be able to explain the Great Red Spot infull.
Earth models don't cut it for predicting Jovian storms.
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While I agree with some of the sentiments, that astrobiologists tend to get excited too easily, you are missing quite a few key points here.
First, Europa vs. Venus or Jupiter: Jupiter lacks liquid water (thought necessary for life) and a reasonable chance for biotic elements to come together (there is a lot of space, there, and not much carbon, nitrogen and oxygen). Venus is much too hot. Neither planet has any serious proponents for (present day?) life. Neither does the Moon, Mercury, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus or Pluto. Titan and Mars are the two other possibilities, as generally held by the planetary community. Oh, add to that Callisto and Ganymede, which also have liquid water. (Note that Juptier has icey moons, plural, not just Europa.)
We know that there is more than ice on Europa. We know that there are surface contaminents (either salts or hydrogen sulfide from the magnetosphere). We also are pretty sure, based on mangetometer readings, that there is liquid water under the ice. And under the icey shell, there has to be rock, based on the density and the moment of intertia results.
Jupiter's radiation belts are irrelevent. No one is forgetting them, they don't matter a whit to Europa's ocean. Radiation only pentrates about 10 cm of ice. It is not going to penetrate 1-10 km of ice. And you can't make the radiation strong, it's charged particles. Their energy is set by the pickup speed at Io (57 km/sec). You'd have to spin Jupiter up to increase the energy. That gives you the insane problem of how to strip off that angular momentum and how to keep a ball of gas from breaking up at that rotation speed (Jovian planets are already visibly oblate from their rotations.)
My last thought is a matter of personal opinion, but I wanted to voice it: I find your preferences for colonization and extra-solar exploration over astrobiology naive. Getting outside the solar system or sending people to other planets is orders of magnitude more expensive and difficult than sending a simple probe to Europa (which is already $1 billion). I mean, I'd love for NASA to develop faster than light drives, but it isn't realistic to expect them to focus on that over exploration of our system.
Like having heard of the results from the Voyager flybys and knowing about the tidal heating (predicted and verified for Io in the late 70's)?
I'm trying to figure out why CNN ran that article. I don't mean to be cranky, but there was no news there. Everything has been reported before (Yes, there is almost certainly water under Europa's ice. Every time Galileo has made a pass over Europa the evidence gets stronger for that, but Galileo hasn't made any passes in the past month or two.)
/.er who relayed this news story, but CNN.com, who should have known better.) I'm thinking it was a really slow news day.
Worse, the research was really poor. It isn't hard to get the basic facts straight. I mean, Galileo went into orbit in 1995, not 1997 (hence the 1996 reference they gave which mentioned Galileo already in orbit by then). The book was 2010 (also made into a movie), not the dreadful 3001.
As for melting at the surface... not likely. Most researchers seem to think that the melting is occuring farther down, and some of it may rise up to the surface occasionally. (Others think its just warm ice convecting, for the most part.) Admittedly, I'm probably biased by my officemate's research on this topic, but still. They could at least give the alternate view.
They also don't note that Europa might or might not have two of the three ingredients thought necessary for life: readily availible biogenic elements and a source or energy suitable for life (tidal heat doesn't really serve that end directly). All it has is water. Water is an important start, but it isn't all and that bears keeping in mind.
I'm really confused and miffed by this article. It really shouldn't have been published, especially not as news. (This is not meant as an attack on the
Not very, I would guess. Neutron stars tend to have masses just at or near the Chandrasaker limit (actually, sometimes a bit lower, even). That's 1.4 solar masses. A neutron star becomes a black hole at between 2 and 3 solar masses (number uncertain). So that's a fair margin, particularly if you take the 3 solar mass limit.
Now, how much matter is transfered? If the neutron star is 1.4 solar masses, if it is typical size (10 km radius) and if the companion is 1 AU from the neutron star, you'd have to transfer about 2.5 X 10-5 solar masses to make a millsecond pulsar, I'm figuring. That's a tiny amount. The mass tranfer required goes like 1/r2 (until the mass transfered is a large fraction of the pulsar's inital mass, anyway). So even at 0.1 AU, it's still only 1/1000 of a solar mass. (0.1 AU = 10 solar radii, roughly) They'd almost have to be in physical contact to require enough mass transfer to push the neutron star over the black hole limit.
While I'm pretty sure that was a joke, I feel obligated to point out (since there is often confusion on this point) that HST cannot look at the Earth's surface. First of all, it isn't designed to handle looking through an atmosphere. Secondly, and more importantly, the brightness of the Earth would send it into safe mode instantly. As it is, HST can't look at the Sun or Moon, and Earth is much more reflective than the Moon.
Actually, no. Hubble only has 5-10 years left to it. The NGST (Next Generation Space Telescope) is already being planned to replace it. They plan to bring HST down in the shuttle for eventual installation in the Smithsonian. (At least, this is what I last heard.) I happen to know that the final instrument that will go into HST is being built right now, so it won't be long before HST gets its last upgrade.
This is getting silly, so this will be my last response. However:
You are still ignoring the point. Bacteria carried by humans to other populations is still bacteria adapted to humans. To compare it to potential Mars life is silly.
No one is saying that we should take any precautions. That's what this NASA facility is all about. But there are precations and there are undo, overly expensive precautions that cut the amount of viable science dramatically. I am of the opinion that putting the facility on the Space Station is in the latter category.
I think I see our problem. You're basing your fears on Hollywood horror/SciFi movies.
I'm basing mine on biology. If life on Mars evolved independently of Earth, odds are that it won't infect humans or any other terrestrial species. If you want to see why this is likely, just look at all of the bacteria and virii on Earth today. Only a small fraction of these can infect a human. Now imagine that the bacteria had never as much as seen a human before. What are the odds that it can even live in our systems, let alone thrive and infect?
Organisms that have evolved on Earth are far more likely to be dangerous than Mars rocks (which probably don't even have life to begin with, based on Viking findings). And organism like e. coli which has been SHOWN to infect humans is much scarier than some phantom boogieman from Mars you may have once seen in a movie.
As for the space station: it already gets the lion's share of the NASA budget.
It's very hard to get these parameters for planets and moons. Earth's is pretty well quantified and the Moon's was actually not bad before this (my Solar System Dynamics text has 0.03, which is close to the value in the article).
We also are reasonably confidence in the other planets' Love numbers. But we are just guessing on, say, Io and Europa. And those are cases where it'd be truely nice to know what the Love numbers are, since that helps determine the heating rates.
In as much as NASA has set up this facility for studing potential alien lifeforms on Earth, not in zero-G, I'd have to call your assertion into question. It's pretty sweeping statment, given the evidence against it.
And if you do your research, you'll learn that most marine biologist spend most of their time on shore. Particularly when they're trying to do lab work. There is no reason for an astrobiologist to go into space, given the costs and the fact that any organisms on the space station would already be out of their habitat (which is why a marine biologist goes into the water, to study critters in their native environments).
And, no, no robot is as good as having a human in there. Ask any lab scientist you know, and they'll confirm: there is no substitute for having a person running the experiments. Machines don't have all of our sense. Half of good science is serendipity, often resulting from someone noticing something really subtle. Machines don't notice things, and by design, have restricted senses.
And it isn't like Mars rocks are more scary than, say, smallpox or e. coli. We let biologists work with known hazardous organisms (under careful conditions, much like NASA astrobiology lab) here on Earth. And we know for a fact that they are dangerous. Odds are highly weighted against there being any danger in Mars rocks.
You missed the news that NASA is planning a sample return mission to Mars within the decade. Actually, they've been planning it for quite a while now, at least 10 years. It has been delayed by several years by the Polar Lander and Climate Orbiter debacles, but it is still on.
This is a job for a full-blown lab with actual human involvment. If the Viking landers taught us anything, it's that we cannot anticipate all of the kinds of tests we might need and results (false and real) that we will see. There is no way you'll launch a full-sized, fully equiped biological lab into orbit, espeically not one where humans can really work (gravity is pretty popular amoung biologists, silly people).
The whole point of bringing these samples back is to bring the full arsenal of our scientific abilities against them. You can't do that via remotely controlled robots, either on Mars or in the next room of the space station.
Well, yes, lunar occulatations are not rare, per se. They should be about as common as eclipses, over all (to within a factor of 10). But the Moon's orbit is inclined 15 degrees to the ecliptic (note: not to Earth's equator, but the ecliptic). That takes it substantially out of the plane of the solar system as seen from Earth. Occultations can only occur when the Moon is at its nodes (cross the ecliptic). That happens twice a month, but then you have to have a planet in the right 1/2 degree of sky at that time.
So they don't happen quite as often as all that. Plus, it you want to see the planet do cool things, you want a Moon around new. Otherwise, the Moon's light washes out your ability to see much of the planet.
We have data: lots of pictures of pretty spiral galaxies. You yourself point out the problem: we can't explain those data.
Shameless plug for my own work: maybe Saturn's rings will provide a suffient analog to further our understanding. Cassini arrives in 2 years for some up-close views of what's happening.
You're right up until you state that the core must rotate more quickly. Dark matter has nothing to do with the core of the galaxy or its rotation. And even if the core did rotate rapidly, a la stars about a black hole, so what? There wouldn't be any radial mixing from that, as long as the orbits were Keplerian and nearly circular (which they are, as far as I've heard).
I also fail to see why this result indicates the presence of dark matter. The direction of rotation should not depend on the dark matter content. This is about how the galaxy formed and how the spiral arms were generated, not about what the galaxy is made of.
There is a legitimate question here, and it's the subject of some tricky observing and analysis. You can get the Doppler map of the galaxy, by you need to work out which it is tipping towards you in order to work out if it is a leading or trailing arm spiral. It's hard to say if the "top" of the galaxy is nearer or us or the "bottom" is. If you can't tell that, you can't tell which way it is spinning.
The usual way of guessing at this it to look for globular clusters. The side that is nearer us will have fewer gobulars in front of it than the farther side. But this is a guess, of course. With a nearly face-on galaxy, this difference is harder to pick out.
The 3-Body problem cannot, in general, be tackle analytically (Poincare showed this). So I am hesitant to believe that we will ever have an analtical technique to directly handle a billion-body problem, like galaxies.
That said, we *do* have analtic techniques to examine galactic dynamics. Lots of 'em, ranging from fluid discriptions to wave approximations. But stunning coinidence, I was just reading Binney and Tremaine, a whole text on galactic dynamics. (The physics is pretty much the same as in planetary rings.) So lots of math exists to tackle these problems. As a math major in astro. grad school, I am pretty confident when I say that the mathematicians won't need to cook up new tools as much as we need to figure out how to apply the existing ones.
The other approach is, of course, various simulation techniques, mainly N-body codes. For that we need
a) Faster computers. We always want faster computers.
b) Better algorithms. This is a place with the Applied Math folks would be really helpful.
I'm a bit confused at why anyone this that this is so bizzaire. Sure, most galaxies are trailing spirals, but there are enough leading spirals to make them not freakish. I'd suspect that it is the spin put on the story by the media, but one astronomer is quoted calling leading-arm spirals extremely rare.
My take on this is that the real news is the evidence of disruption/interaction. We've seen that before (M51, the Whirlpool, is a good example), but it's still a damned cool thing to see.
The petition was not flawed, and you just said why: it kept the representatives in office by voting for Pluto. Now if you want to argue that our system of GOVERNMENT is flawed, you'd have a case. But within the current system, the Pluto proposal was just as valid as, say, allocating billions to fight terrorism (because it's popular right now).
The PKE was cancelled more than a year ago. It's New Horizons, now. Unfortunately, I've deleted the emails I've recieved with details of the NASA budget (from NASA, my research institute, and the Division for Planetary Science), but I'm pretty sure the New Horizons is on, not off. When I read the first email, I turned to an officemate and commented that they'd cut Europa for Pluto. Given the budget cap they already expected and the fact that Europa was going to be over that cap anyway, it was an expected and logical move to make.
There is competition. There has been for some time, really. NASA is generally bigger and better than other agencies, but Japan and the ESA have been doing some very good work for quite a while. And you'll notice how the armada of Halley-visiting spacecraft from other nations prompted the US to send out own... oh, wait, no we didn't.
If you want an example of direct "competition" between a NASA mission and an ESA one, check out NASA's MESSANGER and ESA's Beppe-Columbo. Both are heading to Mercury, yet I dont' see either mission being driven to outstrip the other.
You were asked to vote on what mission you want funded: you, I hope, voted for your senators and representatives. Your post seems to indicate, although I trust this isn't so, that you miss the point of a represenatative democracy: the people don't vote on individual issues, the select leaders who are (supposed) to become informed and vote in their interest. Thus, congress generally does what people want them to do. Whether we individually agree or whether we want to admit it or not, they do because it keeps them in office.
I'd propose a somewhat more straightforeward explaination: the SN is bright. It probably represents more light per pixel than anywhere else in the host galaxy. So the after-image was scaled differently in brightness to allow the SN to show up, making the galaxy appear dimmer. Even if they'd used all the same equipment, this effect would kick in.
You owe your life to supernovae, since that's the only way (known) to enrich the interstellar medium with heavy elements, like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. It's hard to imagine anything affecting your life more than that which made you possible.
Let's see... The antecedent to "those" is pretty clearly "simulations of Jovian storms." Earth-based predictions are not directly applicable to Jupiter: the whole atmospheric structure is different, as is the heating, the rotation, the cloud chemistry... so can you find a case of someone having really good simulations of specific features of Jupiter interacting? Last time I attended a Jupiter meeting (June, 2001), they didn't seem to be able to explain the Great Red Spot infull.
Earth models don't cut it for predicting Jovian storms.