For starters, you might want to be aware that there are several top-of-their-fields planetary scientists in Arkansas right now. So trying to blast a guy about living there, vs. in Tucson, AZ, is silly.
What's even weirder for me is that I don't see his "lack of objectivity." He made a prediction. No, he didn't give odds. You'd need hundreds of simulations to lay odds. I don't know that anyone has those simulations in place right now, let alone an observer. So he made a reasonable prediction based on physics (bigger storm should well be expected to swollow the smaller one, at least at first examination) and previous observations. That's fine science reporting by me.
Trying to tout Chaos theory as the be-all and end-all and claiming that no one should be allowed to make predictions about things because Choas theory exists is some of the worst sophistry. Chaos theory has its uses, but don't think it negates all other ways of looking at the universe.
A little background on this survey might be in order. The survey is being run by the national academy of sciences, although most of the input (from the planetary science community) was gathered by the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Science. The survey is a decadal one, meaning it'll be redone in 10 years. So if you have a strong hankering to go somewhere that can/should wait a decade, you'll get your chance to sound off in 10 years. Astrophysicists have been doing these decadal surveys for several decades now, and they've been very sucessful.
Science magazine had a news article on this in their 4 Jan. issue, if you want to see
... according to my Solar Systems Dynamics textbook, we already know the rate at which the Moon is receding from the Earth: 1 nanometer/second. Which is, of course, a better precision than this group seeks to take on. But that measurement probably used the Doppler shift. It just goes to show that it's much easier to measure radial velocities than distances!
Oddly, I was just having an argument with the head of CU's astrobiology institude about this point. Fits to surface spectra are seldom unique. It's a pain in the butt, be we can't even identify the minerals on Mars uniquely some of the time. Europa is worse. Not only do we not know the chemistry as well (rocks is rocks, and we have plenty of those on Earth), but the conditions are hard to reproduce. Temperatures of around 100 K, almost no surface pressure and a harsh radiation environment.
If you do a little digging (check back issues of Science magazine), you'll notice that there are already two theories about the mysterious absorber on Europa. There's McCord's salts theory and there's the sulfuric acid theory (put forward by Carlson). We can't distinguish between them right now. Adding another potential absorber to the fray doesn't really fundementally alter that we just can't tell right now what's down there.
Not to mention NASA's Astrobiology institute (spread across, I think, 10 institutes). A few universities are starting of offer Astrobiology certificates (not as good as a major/PhD field, but still something to wave about).
Sorry, but wrong (to quote a cartoon I recently saw). There was no molecular oxygen in our atmosphere, you're bang on. But that was GOOD for life. Oxygen is lethal to a lot of life, and was lethal to most organisms that have ever existed on Earth. The oxygen in our atmosphere only built up about 2 billion years ago. At that time, a lot of organisms would have perished. We're just decendent form the ones that adapted. But oxygen is by no means necessary for life. Lack of it is probably more helpful than harmful, since oxygen tends to react with organic molecules to their detrement.
As for water... dead wrong. You'd do well to do a bit of research on that point. The early Earth would have had to have had water. Not having molecular oxygen in our atmosphere has nothing to do with having or not having water. After all, we have all kinds of oxygen in our rocks: it's the singly most abundant element in the crust.
I think it's safe to say that if something exists as an actual object, it has mass,
Easily proved untrue: photons have no rest-mass. All tests on photons have confirmed this.
As for neutrinoes holding the fate of the universe: they don't. They can be up to something like 10% of dark matter, but not more, based on the distribution of dark matter in clusters of galaxies.
There is evidence that WIMPs are the source of the dark matter, based on the distribution of dark matter in galaxies and clusters. Also, we know of one WIMP, the neutrino. It's mass has pretty well been established as being non-zero. Unfortunately, neutrinoes can't make up more than something like 10% of dark matter.
Pluto is not an asteroid according to any planetary scientist. Asteroids are rocky or metallic and found generally within 5 AU of the Sun. Pluto is icey and averages 40 AU from the Sun. It is generally agreed to be a Kuiper Belt Object and some of us, myself included, object to its status as a major planet. But it's not really a point we argue about much, because it doesn't matter.
However, being small doesn't make it uninteresting. Witness all the missions that flew to comet Halley. Or to Borelly. And to the asteroid Eros. Pluto (and the one or two other KBOs that New Horizons will visit) are examples of a population of bodies we have not yet been able to study. They provide valuable clues about the formation of out solar system and about its overall present nature.
In short, if you do a modicum of research, you come to realize that we are not going there because it is called 'planet'. We're going there because it is an interesting object.
On the other hand, the Europa mission probably won't fly even if New Horizons does not either. The current Europa mission is just too expensive. Congress has put a price cap on total outer solar system mission expenses of $1 billion. Right now, we can't do a Europa orbiter for less than $1.22 billion (figures from Colleen Hartmann, the new director of the Office of Space Science at NASA). We can't get Europa either way, so don't make it sound like it's even a choice. Perhaps in 5 years Europa will be more feasible, but it isn't now.
You do realize that there is no 'dark side' to the Moon, right? That's been known since the Greek days of astronomy. When the Moon is new, the far side is in full daylight.
Now, the reason that the far side is more cratered is not that it was hit more, more than likely. It's that this side was resurfaced more recently than much of the cratering.
As Pluto heads away from the sun the surface temperature decreases and the atmosphere progressively condenses,
Actually, it seems that we're moving away from this prediction with more current models of Pluto's atmosphere. It does not seem likely that the atmosphere freezing out is a real concern, anymore.
I can't think of any Mars flybys on a Jupiter mission. Galileo did a flyby of Earth and Venus (there's a really nice image of the Earth and Moon from Galileo, and Sagan detected life on Earth from Galileo, much to everyone's relief). It also flew by Ida, an asteroid, and discovered its moon, Dactyl. But I can't think of any Mars passes.
It turns out that you can go to Pluto any year (or probably any month) that you like. Larry Esposito (who had the competing proposal, which was regarded as extremely good, too) shared this with me a few months ago. Apparently, a Venus assist can get you to Pluto, and are availible a lot. But New Horizons is using a Jupiter assist that won't happen nearly as often. I'd guess that the next chance would be roughly 12 years later, when we're more or less aligned the same way again.
I said Alan was an expert, not an authority. He knows quite a lot about Pluto. And there is a lot we can learn from Earth: we know it's mass (pretty well, to within around 5% or so), we know it has a large moon. We know it spins on its size, and that it has an atmosphere. We know it's orbit and we know that this orbit is in a 3:2 mean motion reasonance with Neptune. That's a fair number of facts right there (there are more). At that point, you can start to say a lot about Pluto and where it might or might not have come from.
But Alan Stern's word is not the final word on anything Pluto related. He, and any of us, is capable of being wrong. But he's known as more knowledgable than almost anyone else, making him an expert.
As much as I want to agree with you, getting my grant money from NASA science and not from the ISS for STS, I can't completely agree. NASA's mission isn't simply space exploration. Look at the name: National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They gave a range of duties, from helping push technology in aviation, communications and related fields. I'll grant you that the STS and ISS are sucking money something awful, but they are part of NASA's mission.
I opened up our observatory at CU for my lab section (and any others who came by). I was worried that they'd be disappointed after the hype, but everyone who came seem truly glad to have gotten/stayed up for the event. Either I have a particularly good group this term (which is at least partially true) or it was a pretty impressive even.
I can't begin to estimate the peak rate, as I was jumping between staring at the sky and moving telescopes to various planets and nebulae. But when I had time to look east at Leo, I could see at least one meteor ever few seconds (which correspords to at least 1000/hour). Oddly, while the number of meteors/per time was highest to the east, near the radiant, the quality of the meteors was best looking near zeinth or even westward. Many of the meteors in that section of the sky were brighter, bigger and left trails that persisted for tens of seconds. That, and the mountains made a splendid background.
I had one vistor claim to have seen color in a particularly bright meteor, but I was looking in the opposite direction at the time. Which brings up the old lightening-spotting effect: whenever someone says, "Oooh, pretty one!" everyone else looks in that direction, despite it being too late. There is some sort of poor conditioning going on there, but I'll leave that to psychologists.
In any event, if you didn't see these you either were unlucky or you should have gotten up for this. Either way, be ready for next time!
Everyone called him "Chandra" which is much easier to work out (soft "ch", the rest is self-explanitory). And hence the name of the X-ray observatory, of course.
Actually, it is all probably in vapor form. It's hard to make ices in most of space, since it is rare that molecules come together to make a crystall.
Water will not exist as a liquid in space, basically for the reasons you cite (plus, with effectively zero pressure, the water will just evaporte pretty quickly). But water vapor can exist inside the clouds of other gases, particular atomic hydrogen. Water, being such a great absorber and emitter of radiation, is really easy to spot, so we talk about it a lot.
In all seriousness, why were these boxes subjected to the punishments you name? How responsible is that? Does this not just support the claims of abuse of parcels by UPS?
It's good that Dell and Gateway pack things well, but they make a business out of shipping computers. I don't. When I ship my machine, I don't have access to custom made boxes and packing forms for my equipment. And I don't plan on hanging on to my computer boxes for 3 years on the off chance I might want to ship it one day.
"Bastard stepchild..." The PKE was much too expensive. But, then, it was JPL's project, so no one was shocked at that. NASA was wise to have farmed it out for competing bids from other groups. And, in fact, the other groups are able to do at least as much (probably more) for less than JPL could. So calling it a 'bastard stepchild' seems unnecessarily derisive to me.
The 2006 launch date is not critical. One of the two competing team leaders has worked out that with Venus gravity assists, we could send a probe to Pluto in any given year. Furthermore, in reviewing the recent papers on the topic, he's determined that it is quite unlikely that the atmosphere will freeze out as was predicted a decade or two ago.
Finally, NASA wants this mission. The Bush administration does not, but congress does. And remember who controls the money: congress.
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For starters, you might want to be aware that there are several top-of-their-fields planetary scientists in Arkansas right now. So trying to blast a guy about living there, vs. in Tucson, AZ, is silly.
What's even weirder for me is that I don't see his "lack of objectivity." He made a prediction. No, he didn't give odds. You'd need hundreds of simulations to lay odds. I don't know that anyone has those simulations in place right now, let alone an observer. So he made a reasonable prediction based on physics (bigger storm should well be expected to swollow the smaller one, at least at first examination) and previous observations. That's fine science reporting by me.
Trying to tout Chaos theory as the be-all and end-all and claiming that no one should be allowed to make predictions about things because Choas theory exists is some of the worst sophistry. Chaos theory has its uses, but don't think it negates all other ways of looking at the universe.
You are correct, sir. (I understood the statment clearly, but, then, I knew above Jovian storms before I read that article.)
http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/ will get you to the New Horizons mission website.
Science magazine had a news article on this in their 4 Jan. issue, if you want to see
Same way we ever check, have another group do an indepenent measurment or make them show their data and analysis?
... according to my Solar Systems Dynamics textbook, we already know the rate at which the Moon is receding from the Earth: 1 nanometer/second. Which is, of course, a better precision than this group seeks to take on. But that measurement probably used the Doppler shift. It just goes to show that it's much easier to measure radial velocities than distances!
Oddly, I was just having an argument with the head of CU's astrobiology institude about this point. Fits to surface spectra are seldom unique. It's a pain in the butt, be we can't even identify the minerals on Mars uniquely some of the time. Europa is worse. Not only do we not know the chemistry as well (rocks is rocks, and we have plenty of those on Earth), but the conditions are hard to reproduce. Temperatures of around 100 K, almost no surface pressure and a harsh radiation environment.
If you do a little digging (check back issues of Science magazine), you'll notice that there are already two theories about the mysterious absorber on Europa. There's McCord's salts theory and there's the sulfuric acid theory (put forward by Carlson). We can't distinguish between them right now. Adding another potential absorber to the fray doesn't really fundementally alter that we just can't tell right now what's down there.
Not to mention NASA's Astrobiology institute (spread across, I think, 10 institutes). A few universities are starting of offer Astrobiology certificates (not as good as a major/PhD field, but still something to wave about).
Sorry, but wrong (to quote a cartoon I recently saw). There was no molecular oxygen in our atmosphere, you're bang on. But that was GOOD for life. Oxygen is lethal to a lot of life, and was lethal to most organisms that have ever existed on Earth. The oxygen in our atmosphere only built up about 2 billion years ago. At that time, a lot of organisms would have perished. We're just decendent form the ones that adapted. But oxygen is by no means necessary for life. Lack of it is probably more helpful than harmful, since oxygen tends to react with organic molecules to their detrement.
As for water... dead wrong. You'd do well to do a bit of research on that point. The early Earth would have had to have had water. Not having molecular oxygen in our atmosphere has nothing to do with having or not having water. After all, we have all kinds of oxygen in our rocks: it's the singly most abundant element in the crust.
Yeah, I know it's sort of egocentric for we Americans, but you can visit http://www.lightningstorm.com/ls2/gpg/lex1/mapdisp lay_free.jsp?jrunsessionid=1007697160371304360 to see recent lightening activity in the continental US. When things are lively, you can see a lot of really nifty patterns with the fronts.
Easily proved untrue: photons have no rest-mass. All tests on photons have confirmed this.
As for neutrinoes holding the fate of the universe: they don't. They can be up to something like 10% of dark matter, but not more, based on the distribution of dark matter in clusters of galaxies.
There is evidence that WIMPs are the source of the dark matter, based on the distribution of dark matter in galaxies and clusters. Also, we know of one WIMP, the neutrino. It's mass has pretty well been established as being non-zero. Unfortunately, neutrinoes can't make up more than something like 10% of dark matter.
Pluto is not an asteroid according to any planetary scientist. Asteroids are rocky or metallic and found generally within 5 AU of the Sun. Pluto is icey and averages 40 AU from the Sun. It is generally agreed to be a Kuiper Belt Object and some of us, myself included, object to its status as a major planet. But it's not really a point we argue about much, because it doesn't matter.
However, being small doesn't make it uninteresting. Witness all the missions that flew to comet Halley. Or to Borelly. And to the asteroid Eros. Pluto (and the one or two other KBOs that New Horizons will visit) are examples of a population of bodies we have not yet been able to study. They provide valuable clues about the formation of out solar system and about its overall present nature.
In short, if you do a modicum of research, you come to realize that we are not going there because it is called 'planet'. We're going there because it is an interesting object.
On the other hand, the Europa mission probably won't fly even if New Horizons does not either. The current Europa mission is just too expensive. Congress has put a price cap on total outer solar system mission expenses of $1 billion. Right now, we can't do a Europa orbiter for less than $1.22 billion (figures from Colleen Hartmann, the new director of the Office of Space Science at NASA). We can't get Europa either way, so don't make it sound like it's even a choice. Perhaps in 5 years Europa will be more feasible, but it isn't now.
A web site now exists at http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/
You do realize that there is no 'dark side' to the Moon, right? That's been known since the Greek days of astronomy. When the Moon is new, the far side is in full daylight.
Now, the reason that the far side is more cratered is not that it was hit more, more than likely. It's that this side was resurfaced more recently than much of the cratering.
Actually, it seems that we're moving away from this prediction with more current models of Pluto's atmosphere. It does not seem likely that the atmosphere freezing out is a real concern, anymore.
I can't think of any Mars flybys on a Jupiter mission. Galileo did a flyby of Earth and Venus (there's a really nice image of the Earth and Moon from Galileo, and Sagan detected life on Earth from Galileo, much to everyone's relief). It also flew by Ida, an asteroid, and discovered its moon, Dactyl. But I can't think of any Mars passes.
It turns out that you can go to Pluto any year (or probably any month) that you like. Larry Esposito (who had the competing proposal, which was regarded as extremely good, too) shared this with me a few months ago. Apparently, a Venus assist can get you to Pluto, and are availible a lot. But New Horizons is using a Jupiter assist that won't happen nearly as often. I'd guess that the next chance would be roughly 12 years later, when we're more or less aligned the same way again.
I said Alan was an expert, not an authority. He knows quite a lot about Pluto. And there is a lot we can learn from Earth: we know it's mass (pretty well, to within around 5% or so), we know it has a large moon. We know it spins on its size, and that it has an atmosphere. We know it's orbit and we know that this orbit is in a 3:2 mean motion reasonance with Neptune. That's a fair number of facts right there (there are more). At that point, you can start to say a lot about Pluto and where it might or might not have come from.
But Alan Stern's word is not the final word on anything Pluto related. He, and any of us, is capable of being wrong. But he's known as more knowledgable than almost anyone else, making him an expert.
As much as I want to agree with you, getting my grant money from NASA science and not from the ISS for STS, I can't completely agree. NASA's mission isn't simply space exploration. Look at the name: National Aeronautics and Space Administration. They gave a range of duties, from helping push technology in aviation, communications and related fields. I'll grant you that the STS and ISS are sucking money something awful, but they are part of NASA's mission.
Like crack, but digital. But so gooooood.
You do realize that they released these precisely to eat up my disposable income, right?
I opened up our observatory at CU for my lab section (and any others who came by). I was worried that they'd be disappointed after the hype, but everyone who came seem truly glad to have gotten/stayed up for the event. Either I have a particularly good group this term (which is at least partially true) or it was a pretty impressive even.
I can't begin to estimate the peak rate, as I was jumping between staring at the sky and moving telescopes to various planets and nebulae. But when I had time to look east at Leo, I could see at least one meteor ever few seconds (which correspords to at least 1000/hour). Oddly, while the number of meteors/per time was highest to the east, near the radiant, the quality of the meteors was best looking near zeinth or even westward. Many of the meteors in that section of the sky were brighter, bigger and left trails that persisted for tens of seconds. That, and the mountains made a splendid background.
I had one vistor claim to have seen color in a particularly bright meteor, but I was looking in the opposite direction at the time. Which brings up the old lightening-spotting effect: whenever someone says, "Oooh, pretty one!" everyone else looks in that direction, despite it being too late. There is some sort of poor conditioning going on there, but I'll leave that to psychologists.
In any event, if you didn't see these you either were unlucky or you should have gotten up for this. Either way, be ready for next time!
Everyone called him "Chandra" which is much easier to work out (soft "ch", the rest is self-explanitory). And hence the name of the X-ray observatory, of course.
Actually, it is all probably in vapor form. It's hard to make ices in most of space, since it is rare that molecules come together to make a crystall.
Water will not exist as a liquid in space, basically for the reasons you cite (plus, with effectively zero pressure, the water will just evaporte pretty quickly). But water vapor can exist inside the clouds of other gases, particular atomic hydrogen. Water, being such a great absorber and emitter of radiation, is really easy to spot, so we talk about it a lot.
In all seriousness, why were these boxes subjected to the punishments you name? How responsible is that? Does this not just support the claims of abuse of parcels by UPS?
It's good that Dell and Gateway pack things well, but they make a business out of shipping computers. I don't. When I ship my machine, I don't have access to custom made boxes and packing forms for my equipment. And I don't plan on hanging on to my computer boxes for 3 years on the off chance I might want to ship it one day.
"Bastard stepchild..." The PKE was much too expensive. But, then, it was JPL's project, so no one was shocked at that. NASA was wise to have farmed it out for competing bids from other groups. And, in fact, the other groups are able to do at least as much (probably more) for less than JPL could. So calling it a 'bastard stepchild' seems unnecessarily derisive to me.
The 2006 launch date is not critical. One of the two competing team leaders has worked out that with Venus gravity assists, we could send a probe to Pluto in any given year. Furthermore, in reviewing the recent papers on the topic, he's determined that it is quite unlikely that the atmosphere will freeze out as was predicted a decade or two ago.
Finally, NASA wants this mission. The Bush administration does not, but congress does. And remember who controls the money: congress.