Landing at such a high latitude will be harder. The Apollo missions were limited to landing within a broad band of +/- 40 degrees of the Lunar equator - the Saturn 5 just didn't have the payload to allow the Lunar Modules to carry enough propellent to land at higher latitudes. Future missions are also going to have similar weight constraints which will keep mission planners awake at night.
This site isn't perfect. It still has minus's that must be weighted against the plus's
The author, Dwayne Day, is a highly recpected historian of space exploration. He concludes that Beagle 2 was a excellent example of how not to manage a space project. He appears to think that Professor Colin Pillinger should never again be put in charge of large amounts of tax-payers money.
1)They're dirt cheap - no big loss if stolen. Get two in fact, one as a backup.
2)They run for weeks on 2 AAA batteries, no need for a recharger or access to a power supply.
3)They take MMC cards. If you use Weasel reader and the ztxt fomat for compressing books, you can get an average Guttenberg text down to about 250K. So that's about 1000 books on a 256M card. More MMC cards can be posted out from home, as an when required.
I'd like to see the micro-organisms that can survive a year or more in space. The probes are as sterile as they can possibly be, by the time they get there. That big yellow thing up there in the sky is a nuclear reaction...
Sorry, but no. In November 1969, Apollo 12 landed with walking distance of the long-dead, unmanned Surveyor 3, which had touchded down three and a half years earlier. One of the objectives of Apollo 12 was to recover parts of the Surveyor to examine the effects of long term exposure to the Lunar surface; this, they did (Surveyor's camera is now in the Air and Space Museum).
Small amounuts of living bacteria (Streptococcus mitis) were found in the camera's foam insulation upon its return to earth. Now this is slightly contentious as it is possible the camera could have been contaminated after its return. But most current scientific opinion is that the bacteria were there all along and survived three years on the Lunar surface.
In the case of a spacecraft on the seven month cruise to Mars, it is certain that the outside would be quite well steralized - solar UV would do that. But remember, the lander spends the trip cocconed inside a nice protective aero-entry shell and heatshield. Anything on the surface of the lander must only endure seven months of hard vacuum and mild temperatures in order to make it to the Martian surface. Many common bacteria would shrug that off.
As others have said, self heating coffee has been available in the UK for 3-4 years. But using the Calcium Oxide/water reaction to heat food goes back at least 20 years. When I was a kid, self-heating cans of food were available for a while in camping shops.
There is a theory the lunch failure was intentional.
Gorbachev had just come to power and wanted to make peace overtures to the West. A giant space battle station was not going to help this endeavour so a deliberate "launch failure" would be the simplest and easiest way of getting rid of the darn thing and shutting down the program.
As I said, it's nothing more than a theory I've heard articulated. I've no idea how much credability or plausibility it has.
I noticed that although the review site survived the Slashdot effect intact. The link to the low-bandwidth Geocities site about the breed that eat's small dogs is deader than a dead thing.
Sputnik made no scientific discoveries, it was pretty much just a simple relay, a propaganda machine.
This is untrue. Sputnik was mainly a propaganda machine - it let the world know the Soviets had a rocket that could carry a 100kg satellite into orbit and therefore a 1000kg warhead to Washington. However the tracking of its orbit and decay did privide a lot of data on atmospheric density at orbital altitudes - something almost unknown at the time. This was intentional and the reason Sputnik was spherical.
Note that even the Soviets didn't initially know how much of a propaganda effect Sputnik would have. On the day after launch, Pravda had only a small article mentioning it. It was only the next day - after they had seen the world wide reaction - that Pravda had banner headlines.
It it actually works - for example, how do you go about seperating the oxygen from the water and making sure there's no hydrogen in it in zero-G. I've no idea. But I'm willing to bet it's neither easy nor inexpensive.
and the engineer who almost single-handedly made the final adjustments of flight units died several years ago. Reportedly he retained some 'trade secret' about the final adjustments of the devices -- and it died with him. But NASA is not alarmed.
Reportedly, this is quite common. NASA people working with their Russian counterparts have discovered that, from institutions down to individuals, they hand over technical information about as readily as a tiger hands over its teeth.
It's just a simple way for them to gurantee job security but it does make life complicated when you're building a space station out of components constructed in both countries.
To find out more about the whole mess, I recommend
Star-crossed Orbits: Inside the U.S.-Russian Space Alliance by James Oberg
I seem to remember that an old Mercury/Redstone got blown over last time a big hurricane hit the cape (three - four years ago?). They're not having much luck with them, perhaps it was the same one?
UMMV, but I had one for about 6 months before the USB connection to a PC became unreliable, then non-functional.
I suspect corrosion in the USB Cable as I can see green gunk under the transparent cable sleeve.
They say the watch is water resistant but I think the USB connection doesn't like repested dunkings. Anyway, it's on my to-do list to replace the USB plug and wire with a plug and wire cut off the end of a USB extenstion cable. At least it's straightforward to solder the thing onto the flash circuit board inside the watch.
I suspect a little thing called Winter will have an effect.
I'm annoyed by all this hysterical nonsense over environmental effects on the lake. Apart from the fact that the heat input is trivial given the size of the lake (do you know what the heat capacity of 393 cubic miles of water is?) People think the lake is not some finite reservoir of coolness - no, it's a heat store, it cools down in the winter people! Consider the hitorical effect of tens of thouands of summers if that were not true.
In all this ranting, the very real envirnoemental benfits of reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions get lost in the noise. I'd have expected better from the so-called technically literate.
The Japanese Fugo balloons are indeed widely known. However what is little known is the use of balloons in WW2 by the British.
In 1940, an anti-aircraft barrage balloon was ripped loose by a storm and drifted to Sweeden. The drifting steel wire caught on a power cable and shut down most of Stockholm's metro system. From this came the idea for Project Outward.
The balloons were much smalled than the Japanese Fugos as they only needed to cross the North Sea. Each carried an incendary bomb intended to start forrest fires or a trailing steel wire intended to short-out and destroy power grids. Several tens of thousand were launched from Harwich in eastern England from 1941 to 1944. AFIK, no serious fires were ever started but at least one German power station was overloaded and destroyed.
Full details are in The Moby Dick Project: Reconnaissance Balloons over Russia by Curtis Peebles. This book mainly deals with the Cold-War American Genetrix spy balloons but has a chapter on the Fugos and Project Outward.
Yes but... I was under the impression that up until now, phase three hadn'd really happened much in any of MS's excursions away from their core OS business.
According to this. The US deployed nuclear landmines (the MADM system) from 1962 until 1986.
The page also shows a SADM - the nuclear demolition charge intended for use by parachute dropped saboteurs. The SADM's W54 warhead was the smallest and lightest developed by the US and was also used in theDavey Crockett 'nuclear bazooka' and the AIM 26-A nuclear air-to-air missile.
I'm not sure if it's the case with this satellite, but the early UoSats formatted the data for the downlink in a way similar to the casette tape format for the BBC computer. The result was that if you had a receiver that could tune into the right frequency, you could plug it into the approproate oriface on a BBC, load up the right software (from tape, nach) and bingo!You're getting the satellite's telemetry.
I wonder if it's still worth trying... probably need to find a BBC on eBay first.
An engineer, a mathematician and a phycist where each acked to fint the volume of a small, rubber ball. The mathematician measured the diameter at several points, calculated a mean then evaluated the triple integral.
The phycist half-filled a graduated beaker with water. Dropped the ball in and measured the displacement.
The engineer made a note of the part number, then looked up the specs in his Red Rubber Ball reference book.
Columbia Loss FAQ ... Much Better
on
Columbia Coverage
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The regulars at sci.space.history have put up a Columbia Loss FAQ. It's being continuously updated as new facts emege.
In patrol mode, the bipedal robot acts as a
home security system, scoping out your house for intruders. If the robot's thermal sensors detect a human in the house, the robot can e-mail to the owner or call them on their cell phone.
As the robots cost $3K, I imagine their cell phone
alert would go something like
Warning, intruder! Warning, intruder!......... Help! Help! I've been stolen!
Fill paper cup with water, place on bunsen burner.
Because the paper is thin, the cup is a fairly good thermal conductor. The paper never get's hot enough to catch fire as all the heat from the burner is conducted into the water.
I bet battery companies going to love this. A laptop battey may not have much of a runtime but the actual cost of running it is minimal. A fraction of a penny is all it costs to recharge the thing.
In this scenario, a fuel cell powered laptop would need a reactant cartridge that the user must throw away and replace periodically. I'd be willing to bet they'll use some sort of propriatory interface so you're stuck with buying cartridges from the same company for the whole lifetime of the laptop. Aside from an improved runtime, it's really no different to running your equipment from throw-away batteries.
Rechargable batteries suck but I think I'd prefer to stick with them.
I wonder if anybody's tried RC sailing ship combat. It would be more realistic as sailing ships often battled at point blank range. Even a
one-against-one battle in a smallish pond could be
quite intense, the winning captain would need a lot of skill to make best use of the wind to manover into the best firing position for the killing shot.
Slashdot Mirror
Landing at such a high latitude will be harder. The Apollo missions were limited to landing within a broad band of +/- 40 degrees of the Lunar equator - the Saturn 5 just didn't have the payload to allow the Lunar Modules to carry enough propellent to land at higher latitudes. Future missions are also going to have similar weight constraints which will keep mission planners awake at night.
This site isn't perfect. It still has minus's that must be weighted against the plus's
link
The author, Dwayne Day, is a highly recpected historian of space exploration. He concludes that Beagle 2 was a excellent example of how not to manage a space project. He appears to think that Professor Colin Pillinger should never again be put in charge of large amounts of tax-payers money.
Get a Palm M125 from eBay.
1)They're dirt cheap - no big loss if stolen. Get two in fact, one as a backup.
2)They run for weeks on 2 AAA batteries, no need for a recharger or access to a power supply.
3)They take MMC cards. If you use Weasel reader and the ztxt fomat for compressing books, you can get an average Guttenberg text down to about 250K. So that's about 1000 books on a 256M card. More MMC cards can be posted out from home, as an when required.
Sorry, but no. In November 1969, Apollo 12 landed with walking distance of the long-dead, unmanned Surveyor 3, which had touchded down three and a half years earlier. One of the objectives of Apollo 12 was to recover parts of the Surveyor to examine the effects of long term exposure to the Lunar surface; this, they did (Surveyor's camera is now in the Air and Space Museum).
Small amounuts of living bacteria (Streptococcus mitis) were found in the camera's foam insulation upon its return to earth. Now this is slightly contentious as it is possible the camera could have been contaminated after its return. But most current scientific opinion is that the bacteria were there all along and survived three years on the Lunar surface.
In the case of a spacecraft on the seven month cruise to Mars, it is certain that the outside would be quite well steralized - solar UV would do that. But remember, the lander spends the trip cocconed inside a nice protective aero-entry shell and heatshield. Anything on the surface of the lander must only endure seven months of hard vacuum and mild temperatures in order to make it to the Martian surface. Many common bacteria would shrug that off.
BBC
As others have said, self heating coffee has been available in the UK for 3-4 years. But using the Calcium Oxide/water reaction to heat food goes back at least 20 years. When I was a kid, self-heating cans of food were available for a while in camping shops.
There is a theory the lunch failure was intentional.
Gorbachev had just come to power and wanted to make peace overtures to the West. A giant space battle station was not going to help this endeavour so a deliberate "launch failure" would be the simplest and easiest way of getting rid of the darn thing and shutting down the program.
As I said, it's nothing more than a theory I've heard articulated. I've no idea how much credability or plausibility it has.
I noticed that although the review site survived the Slashdot effect intact. The link to the low-bandwidth Geocities site about the breed that eat's small dogs is deader than a dead thing.
This is untrue. Sputnik was mainly a propaganda machine - it let the world know the Soviets had a rocket that could carry a 100kg satellite into orbit and therefore a 1000kg warhead to Washington. However the tracking of its orbit and decay did privide a lot of data on atmospheric density at orbital altitudes - something almost unknown at the time. This was intentional and the reason Sputnik was spherical.
Note that even the Soviets didn't initially know how much of a propaganda effect Sputnik would have. On the day after launch, Pravda had only a small article mentioning it. It was only the next day - after they had seen the world wide reaction - that Pravda had banner headlines.
It it actually works - for example, how do you go about seperating the oxygen from the water and making sure there's no hydrogen in it in zero-G. I've no idea. But I'm willing to bet it's neither easy nor inexpensive.
Reportedly, this is quite common. NASA people working with their Russian counterparts have discovered that, from institutions down to individuals, they hand over technical information about as readily as a tiger hands over its teeth. It's just a simple way for them to gurantee job security but it does make life complicated when you're building a space station out of components constructed in both countries.
To find out more about the whole mess, I recommend Star-crossed Orbits: Inside the U.S.-Russian Space Alliance by James Oberg
I seem to remember that an old Mercury/Redstone got blown over last time a big hurricane hit the cape (three - four years ago?). They're not having much luck with them, perhaps it was the same one?
A word of warning about the USB watches
UMMV, but I had one for about 6 months before the USB connection to a PC became unreliable, then non-functional.
I suspect corrosion in the USB Cable as I can see green gunk under the transparent cable sleeve.
They say the watch is water resistant but I think the USB connection doesn't like repested dunkings. Anyway, it's on my to-do list to replace the USB plug and wire with a plug and wire cut off the end of a USB extenstion cable. At least it's straightforward to solder the thing onto the flash circuit board inside the watch.
I'm annoyed by all this hysterical nonsense over environmental effects on the lake. Apart from the fact that the heat input is trivial given the size of the lake (do you know what the heat capacity of 393 cubic miles of water is?) People think the lake is not some finite reservoir of coolness - no, it's a heat store, it cools down in the winter people! Consider the hitorical effect of tens of thouands of summers if that were not true.
In all this ranting, the very real envirnoemental benfits of reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions get lost in the noise. I'd have expected better from the so-called technically literate.
In 1940, an anti-aircraft barrage balloon was ripped loose by a storm and drifted to Sweeden. The drifting steel wire caught on a power cable and shut down most of Stockholm's metro system. From this came the idea for Project Outward.
The balloons were much smalled than the Japanese Fugos as they only needed to cross the North Sea. Each carried an incendary bomb intended to start forrest fires or a trailing steel wire intended to short-out and destroy power grids. Several tens of thousand were launched from Harwich in eastern England from 1941 to 1944. AFIK, no serious fires were ever started but at least one German power station was overloaded and destroyed.
Full details are in The Moby Dick Project: Reconnaissance Balloons over Russia by Curtis Peebles. This book mainly deals with the Cold-War American Genetrix spy balloons but has a chapter on the Fugos and Project Outward.
Yes but... I was under the impression that up until now, phase three hadn'd really happened much in any of MS's excursions away from their core OS business.
The page also shows a SADM - the nuclear demolition charge intended for use by parachute dropped saboteurs. The SADM's W54 warhead was the smallest and lightest developed by the US and was also used in theDavey Crockett 'nuclear bazooka' and the AIM 26-A nuclear air-to-air missile.
I'm not sure if it's the case with this satellite, but the early UoSats formatted the data for the downlink in a way similar to the casette tape format for the BBC computer. The result was that if you had a receiver that could tune into the right frequency, you could plug it into the approproate oriface on a BBC, load up the right software (from tape, nach) and bingo!You're getting the satellite's telemetry.
I wonder if it's still worth trying... probably need to find a BBC on eBay first.
Terry Pratchett.
FAQ Version 1.4
Link to low-bandwidth version to minimise slashdoting.
As the robots cost $3K, I imagine their cell phone alert would go something like
Warning, intruder! Warning, intruder!......... Help! Help! I've been stolen!
Fill paper cup with water, place on bunsen burner. Because the paper is thin, the cup is a fairly good thermal conductor. The paper never get's hot enough to catch fire as all the heat from the burner is conducted into the water.
In this scenario, a fuel cell powered laptop would need a reactant cartridge that the user must throw away and replace periodically. I'd be willing to bet they'll use some sort of propriatory interface so you're stuck with buying cartridges from the same company for the whole lifetime of the laptop. Aside from an improved runtime, it's really no different to running your equipment from throw-away batteries.
Rechargable batteries suck but I think I'd prefer to stick with them.
I wonder if anybody's tried RC sailing ship combat. It would be more realistic as sailing ships often battled at point blank range. Even a one-against-one battle in a smallish pond could be quite intense, the winning captain would need a lot of skill to make best use of the wind to manover into the best firing position for the killing shot.