Yes but the additional facilities are listed in the article, and they are not that difficult. If you have problems a second shuttle which is ready to go the station and has docking facilities onboard will be able to go up and get the crew. As for inspection, for an HST servicing mission you go outside in many EVAs. Columbia did not have that capability which somewhat sealed their fate. At best, during an HST mission nothing unexpected happens. At worst we have to learn how to do a space rescue outside of the single orbit that includes the ISS (which if we plan to go to the Moon or Mars with any regularity we are going to need anyway).
And if you read the article, the Columbia report does say they need this ability to fix problems for the return to orbit as there may be a problem even getting to the ISS. The ISS is only a refuge if you can get to it. If there is a problem at launch and the orbiter doesn't make its intended orbit, you have to have a way to fix things then without ISS.
Lets not confuse space engineering with space science. Hubble is the only platform that can do many of the things it does. Ultra-violet astronomy cannot be done from the ground. And wide field high resolution imaging cannot be done with modern adaptive optics. This combined with its spatial resolution and technical advancements have lead to many of the largest astronomical advancements in past 50 years. No other observatory could have found Dark Energy. No others could have observed the deep feelds HST has and reshaped the entire theory of how the universe aged. And if it were not for the missions to service Hubble, ISS would never have happened. We learn more and more about construction in space with each mission to ISS and HST. So in that sence what we know about practical space engineering comes from HST as well.
Don't get me wrong, new platforms would be nice. Its just we don't have any, and if HST is allowed to die there will be no true replacement. The Web Space Telescope is a successor not a replacement. And the moon base on is so far off that it really isn't a viable option, given the ebb and flow of plans in Washington (Clinton basically killed Bush's original lets go to the moon plan).
Going to the Moon, to Mars, and establishing permenant bases is great engineering. Velcro and Tang for everyone. But pocket calcuators, while essential to doing science in the '70s are not the science. If you look at the proposed plan, science is out the door at NASA. They did this once, flags and footsteps of the Apollo missions. They almost didn't take a geologist to the moon to look directly at it. Lets make sure they don't lose sight of the science and just go for the engineering glory.
Thats a two edged sword. If it wern't for the Russians we wouldn't have built the thing in the first place. No need for US funded unemployment for Russian engineers. Hence no real driver to keep the shuttle fleet flying and more money for real development of the Shuttle replacement. Who knows, by now we might be out of low earth orbit. Maybe even a space elevator.
Epomethian crystal balls rarely show you anything but what you want to see.
Say you came across the SCO internal documents about their lawsuits that were inadvertenly put on their web site (no links to it...you just happened to "find it").
How long would it take you to go to slashdot with the links...
Strange that a science fiction author seems to understand the scientific method better than most scientists. Michael Crichton's lecture Aliens Cause Global Warming shows the potenital source of all these massive death and doom predictions, historically. Like Mr Crichton, I do not claim to say that man has no impact on the environment. But rushing to fix a problem that may only be caused by numerical modeling and financial politics is something we should think twice about.
I really like this telecomuting gig. I do three weeks here in Colorado and one week back in Baltimore. I keep east coast time so I am done early enough to go enjoy hiking or other things around here. But there are some keys.
Make a work space very separate from the rest of your life. Mine is in the basement of the house in a room that you have to go to. Make it a spare bedroom or something and have nothing in there but work.
Commute to your work space. This is important as it does separate your work from home and the callings of "just 10 minutes more" are easier to avoid.
Go wireless from time to time. I have a great coffee shop I frequent to go see other humans from time to time. Free (as in beer) wireless and good coffee. Perfection.
Get out at night. I go to Boulder and meet my wife a couple of times a week for dinner and drinks. I hang out with some of her officemates. It takes some work but keeping a social life is paramount.
Keep regular work hours as often as you can. You have to "go home" and "stay home".
Take water cooler breaks. Even if its just you alone, get up and walk around and do something else from time to time. Your work will improve as will your mood.
Get some face time with the people you work for. Email and telecons do not make up for sitting in a room and seeing what people are saying (facial expressions are key to understanding and even video conferensing puts people off).
Overall I love the extra hour I dont spend on the road. My 1600 mile once a month commute is a bit of a pain but it works.
Does anyone think Lucas will put a digitally enhanced version of the 1977 holiday special, AKA A very Wookie Christmas? Now that would be as good as the extended LOTR disks!!!
It's not quite as you would think. Keck has two telescopes to do interferometry. That gives it one axis to resolve. So really all you get from Keck is an interferogram showing how resolved an object is in one dimension, as interferometry is really just measuring the spatial forier transform of the wavefront you are sampling with the two telescopes. And the spatial frequency you are most sensitive to is that right around the sampling limit of the interferometer (with the width of your sensitivity range having something to do with how large the different telescopes are doing the sampling).
What you need is something more like the VLA in the optical, where you have multiple axis you resolve and multiple baseline widths to incresase your spatial sensitivity. But even then there is the spatial frequency problem. As interferometry is good at resolving objects right around its resolution limim, Larger structure is lost in the forier transform. So to improve that you need more elements packed closer together. This, in the limit of maximizing the image quality, is a single mirror.
So in reality, if you want a good image its best to launch a BIG single mirror telescope than a bunch of smaller ones and do interferometry. Its just much cheeper to do the later.
Re:Help the RIAA - Not a Troll
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember not so long ago you would pull up into a gas station and an eager person would spring forth at the sound of a bell, fill your car, wash the windows, check the tires, and wish you a good day. Then one day someone saw that they could get people to pump their own gas as the pumps were so simple to operate anyone could do it...cutting out the middle man. For a while there we had both kinds of service, but now outside of a few places in the US, the middle man has been removed. Both sides were happer. The supplier and demander both had more change in their pockets. And gas pumps got easier and easier to use (and someone is making money there). Now all some of us do is wave our keys at the pump and fill-er up.
So now we have artists who want to get their song to market, and consumers who want to get them. And as Napster and others have proven, the pump has gotten easy and fast enough we no longer NEED a CD or other middle media here. What we will need is a system that connects artists to consumers. The middle man who does that the way that keeps consumers happy and artists paid will be rich while the rest will be wondering why no one brings there car to the man who where the Texaco Star.
Well the cooling of the cameras are to make the readout noise lower and to remove the ambient infrared radiation all warm things give off. Much of the instruments optics need to be cooled more than any laser cooling of individual atoms can accomplish (just a thermal mass problem). Hence the refrigeration system.
And as for the ability to hold it still, the Hubble has a near infrared camera, NICMOS, that is cooled the same way. It has both gyros and optical instraments watch for drift and large momentum wheels and motors to remove any measured drift. In space this is not to difficult. The real trick was/is to keep a telescope pointed at an object aboard an airplane at 41,000 feet. Have a look at the SOFIA project to put a 2.7 meter telescope in a 747 and its predisesor the KAO.
Reminds me of the perfect martini I got used to in Grad School.
2 oz Bombay Safire (or Beefeater) mist of Vermouth 2 oz LN2
Pour in coctail shaker. Shake using skiing glove. Pour into glass with 3 olives (no need to chill glass...honest). Drink once LN2 stops dancing on the surface.
I remember it well to. So 1999 back then. There was the underground subway stop, the ice rink (in Texas thats a big deal) where I "learned" to skate, and then a short hop over to the Water Garden...so Logans Run.
Cisco plans to introduce their new "evil router". This new fiber channel router will give special priority to packets known to be truely evil. Special discounts for those installing new networks for thier "death star" or "hollowed out volcanos".
The fourth amendment has so many bootprints on it its not even funny. And they have both Liberal and Conservatives tread.
Assemble, pray, and say what you want are all good boy scout oaths but try going to a Texas highschool football game and say a benediction before the game. You cant. Separation of Church and State trumps 4th there in our time.
Look at Article I section 8
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
which is followed by
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
People love the bill of rights as it is simple to see and make do what you want it to. Its fitting it into the structure that was setout in the rest of the constitution that is hard. And to do that...we have Article III.
Give the courts time. In the end, things return to the middle.
Lincoln dismissed the writ of habeus corpus during the Cival War. That makes the patriot act look like a walk in the park.
These are times of war folks...remember that. We got the writ back. We'll get rid of the parts of the Patriot Act that have no place in a peace time society (its not a tax...now taxes are different as we have a tax on phones that dates back to the Spanish American war).
For extra credit go look at the protesters in London with "Peace in our times" signs and tell me whats ironic here.
The sloan is a major part of the VO as will be the 2-Mass allsky Near Infrared survey and many other surveys to come. This is not something that will be limited to a particular mission or archive, but infrastructure to allow interaction between these data and service sources.
Just as an example...each data set from HST gets downloaded and used more than 5 times by different projects. Much of this is to suppliment other observations or to plan for future observations. And with the growth of imaging CCDs on HST, the number of objects in a single frame grows as well, leading to a lot of parallel usage of a single image. In the end, I doubt that every use for every frame within a 7+ terabyte archive gets used. The VO will help with this.
As another example, people still use the plate archives at Harvard. Many of these plates are over 100 years old. Astronomical data gets reused.
Slashdot Mirror
Um...actually it did. Or I should say Adam Riess used HST data to demonstrate it existed originally.
Yes but the additional facilities are listed in the article, and they are not that difficult. If you have problems a second shuttle which is ready to go the station and has docking facilities onboard will be able to go up and get the crew. As for inspection, for an HST servicing mission you go outside in many EVAs. Columbia did not have that capability which somewhat sealed their fate. At best, during an HST mission nothing unexpected happens. At worst we have to learn how to do a space rescue outside of the single orbit that includes the ISS (which if we plan to go to the Moon or Mars with any regularity we are going to need anyway).
And if you read the article, the Columbia report does say they need this ability to fix problems for the return to orbit as there may be a problem even getting to the ISS. The ISS is only a refuge if you can get to it. If there is a problem at launch and the orbiter doesn't make its intended orbit, you have to have a way to fix things then without ISS.
Lets not confuse space engineering with space science. Hubble is the only platform that can do many of the things it does. Ultra-violet astronomy cannot be done from the ground. And wide field high resolution imaging cannot be done with modern adaptive optics. This combined with its spatial resolution and technical advancements have lead to many of the largest astronomical advancements in past 50 years. No other observatory could have found Dark Energy. No others could have observed the deep feelds HST has and reshaped the entire theory of how the universe aged. And if it were not for the missions to service Hubble, ISS would never have happened. We learn more and more about construction in space with each mission to ISS and HST. So in that sence what we know about practical space engineering comes from HST as well.
Don't get me wrong, new platforms would be nice. Its just we don't have any, and if HST is allowed to die there will be no true replacement. The Web Space Telescope is a successor not a replacement. And the moon base on is so far off that it really isn't a viable option, given the ebb and flow of plans in Washington (Clinton basically killed Bush's original lets go to the moon plan).
Going to the Moon, to Mars, and establishing permenant bases is great engineering. Velcro and Tang for everyone. But pocket calcuators, while essential to doing science in the '70s are not the science. If you look at the proposed plan, science is out the door at NASA. They did this once, flags and footsteps of the Apollo missions. They almost didn't take a geologist to the moon to look directly at it. Lets make sure they don't lose sight of the science and just go for the engineering glory.
Thats a two edged sword. If it wern't for the Russians we wouldn't have built the thing in the first place. No need for US funded unemployment for Russian engineers. Hence no real driver to keep the shuttle fleet flying and more money for real development of the Shuttle replacement. Who knows, by now we might be out of low earth orbit. Maybe even a space elevator.
Epomethian crystal balls rarely show you anything but what you want to see.
Say you came across the SCO internal documents about their lawsuits that were inadvertenly put on their web site (no links to it...you just happened to "find it").
How long would it take you to go to slashdot with the links...
Strange that a science fiction author seems to understand the scientific method better than most scientists. Michael Crichton's lecture Aliens Cause Global Warming shows the potenital source of all these massive death and doom predictions, historically. Like Mr Crichton, I do not claim to say that man has no impact on the environment. But rushing to fix a problem that may only be caused by numerical modeling and financial politics is something we should think twice about.
While your at it, giving the gift of Snopes can't hurt either.
When asked what the company thought of freedom on the internet a Verizon spokseperson responded:
"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force."
Apple is going out of business
Computers will make our lives simpler and easier
We have reached the end of Moores Law.
And in Business news...we will need a quarter million more managers in 10 years to verify that offshore programming is going as planned.
Any other crystal balls at CNN?
- Make a work space very separate from the rest of your life. Mine is in the basement of the house in a room that you have to go to. Make it a spare bedroom or something and have nothing in there but work.
- Commute to your work space. This is important as it does separate your work from home and the callings of "just 10 minutes more" are easier to avoid.
- Go wireless from time to time. I have a great coffee shop I frequent to go see other humans from time to time. Free (as in beer) wireless and good coffee. Perfection.
- Get out at night. I go to Boulder and meet my wife a couple of times a week for dinner and drinks. I hang out with some of her officemates. It takes some work but keeping a social life is paramount.
- Keep regular work hours as often as you can. You have to "go home" and "stay home".
- Take water cooler breaks. Even if its just you alone, get up and walk around and do something else from time to time. Your work will improve as will your mood.
- Get some face time with the people you work for. Email and telecons do not make up for sitting in a room and seeing what people are saying (facial expressions are key to understanding and even video conferensing puts people off).
Overall I love the extra hour I dont spend on the road. My 1600 mile once a month commute is a bit of a pain but it works.Does anyone think Lucas will put a digitally enhanced version of the 1977 holiday special, AKA A very Wookie Christmas? Now that would be as good as the extended LOTR disks!!!
What a brilliant free advertizing scheme if rather than "This ATM is out of service" message you get the BSOD that we all know so well.
And someday I will learn to spell fourier. No its not the english spelling either.
What you need is something more like the VLA in the optical, where you have multiple axis you resolve and multiple baseline widths to incresase your spatial sensitivity. But even then there is the spatial frequency problem. As interferometry is good at resolving objects right around its resolution limim, Larger structure is lost in the forier transform. So to improve that you need more elements packed closer together. This, in the limit of maximizing the image quality, is a single mirror.
So in reality, if you want a good image its best to launch a BIG single mirror telescope than a bunch of smaller ones and do interferometry. Its just much cheeper to do the later.
So now we have artists who want to get their song to market, and consumers who want to get them. And as Napster and others have proven, the pump has gotten easy and fast enough we no longer NEED a CD or other middle media here. What we will need is a system that connects artists to consumers. The middle man who does that the way that keeps consumers happy and artists paid will be rich while the rest will be wondering why no one brings there car to the man who where the Texaco Star.
And as for the ability to hold it still, the Hubble has a near infrared camera, NICMOS, that is cooled the same way. It has both gyros and optical instraments watch for drift and large momentum wheels and motors to remove any measured drift. In space this is not to difficult. The real trick was/is to keep a telescope pointed at an object aboard an airplane at 41,000 feet. Have a look at the SOFIA project to put a 2.7 meter telescope in a 747 and its predisesor the KAO.
Reminds me of the perfect martini I got used to in Grad School.
2 oz Bombay Safire (or Beefeater)
mist of Vermouth
2 oz LN2
Pour in coctail shaker. Shake using skiing glove. Pour into glass with 3 olives (no need to chill glass...honest). Drink once LN2 stops dancing on the surface.
Never tried it to make margaritas...
I remember it well to. So 1999 back then. There was the underground subway stop, the ice rink (in Texas thats a big deal) where I "learned" to skate, and then a short hop over to the Water Garden...so Logans Run.
Carosel tonight.
Cisco plans to introduce their new "evil router". This new fiber channel router will give special priority to packets known to be truely evil. Special discounts for those installing new networks for thier "death star" or "hollowed out volcanos".
Didn't you see what happened to Moon Base Alpha back in 1999?
When will we ever learn.
The fourth amendment has so many bootprints on it its not even funny. And they have both Liberal and Conservatives tread.
Assemble, pray, and say what you want are all good boy scout oaths but try going to a Texas highschool football game and say a benediction before the game. You cant. Separation of Church and State trumps 4th there in our time.
Look at Article I section 8
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
which is followed by
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
People love the bill of rights as it is simple to see and make do what you want it to. Its fitting it into the structure that was setout in the rest of the constitution that is hard. And to do that...we have Article III.
Give the courts time. In the end, things return to the middle.
Does no one know history.
Lincoln dismissed the writ of habeus corpus during the Cival War. That makes the patriot act look like a walk in the park.
These are times of war folks...remember that. We got the writ back. We'll get rid of the parts of the Patriot Act that have no place in a peace time society (its not a tax...now taxes are different as we have a tax on phones that dates back to the Spanish American war).
For extra credit go look at the protesters in London with "Peace in our times" signs and tell me whats ironic here.
Thats the real question...
The sloan is a major part of the VO as will be the 2-Mass allsky Near Infrared survey and many other surveys to come. This is not something that will be limited to a particular mission or archive, but infrastructure to allow interaction between these data and service sources.
Just as an example...each data set from HST gets downloaded and used more than 5 times by different projects. Much of this is to suppliment other observations or to plan for future observations. And with the growth of imaging CCDs on HST, the number of objects in a single frame grows as well, leading to a lot of parallel usage of a single image. In the end, I doubt that every use for every frame within a 7+ terabyte archive gets used. The VO will help with this.
As another example, people still use the plate archives at Harvard. Many of these plates are over 100 years old. Astronomical data gets reused.