Close by so easier to get to (7 month trip). Good PR cos it's the most Earth-like planet, potential for lot's of cool pictures on the news from the planned rover vehicles. Possability of liquid water, perhaps even life. Lots of public interest.
Pluto
A small frozen rock that's far away it'll a spacecraft 10 years to get there. Even then it'll fly straight past with only a brief window of opportunity to study it's target. ie 10 years in the future, you get one mention on CNN.
Regardless of the scientific merits of one verses the other, it's easy to see why NASA is keen to try Mars again and is lukewarm over Pluto.
They're going back to the airbag style of landing that worked so well with Pathfinder in 97
They're thinking of sending two. In the old days, planetry missions always went in pairs, Viking 1, Viking 2, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11 etc etc. Perhaps they now view sending a single craft as excessive overconfidence. Plus you get to look at two landing sites and as you only need to do the design work once, two can fly for roughly 1.5x the cost of one.
I guess you're refeering to Apollo 12. That landed just by the Surveyor 3 probe and the astronauts brought back some components including the camera. The point of this was to demonstrate pinpoint landings so the Surveyor was just a target and the samples where pickled up so the effects of long period exposure to the Lunar environment could be studied.
Since then, theres been increasing scepticism over the bacteria. Since nobody expected to find any, no real precautions regarding sterility where taken with the handling of the camera and it's now thought the camera may have been contaminated on it's return. But nobody really knows for sure.
Yep, but Plesetck doesn't have a Proton launch pad complex. Not to mention the facilities for assembling the rocket and doing the final launch preperations for a payload the size of Zvesda.
would you erase them so you could resuse the paper?!
What you have to remember is that books of the time where written on vellum which is prepared from calf skins. Trying to compare values with 1000 years ago isn't easy but cattle where a very valuable resource. Slaughtering them when they're still juvenile just to write something down would be costly. Basically if paper was $100 a sheet, you'd be wanting to reuse it to.
Reuse of vellum was so common, (overwritten documents are called palimplests) it's probably best to think of a monastic library as the monastery's hard drive. Files that are no longer wanted are just erased to make space for new ones.
I think we have seen the birth of the new equivalent of greyhound racing for the 21st century. Satellite tracked Penguin races with real time web updates. I mean, just think of the potential when combined with online betting!
At the moment it looks like Peter's lead is unbeatable, Percy in third place is rapidly catching up on Pamela. But there's always the unexpected like a chance encounter with a leopard seal that could easily upset the form book. Cape Town is still a long way off!
Just a small point, space launchers usually _never_ have aerodynamic stability. Usually you're in what's essentially a vacuum before you're one quarter the way to orbit so as you'd need active control from then on and any aerodynamic, stabilising fins would also be dead weight it's easy to see why designers don't bother with them and just use active contol from the ground up.
OK the Saturn 5 moon rockets *did* have small fins but AFIK their job was to keep the thing stable just long enough for the escape system to trigger if there was a really bad guidence system f*** up.
This has just popped out on the NASA Press Release mailing list. It sounds more plausible then the BBC who sound like they're in the middle of one of those "The Evil Hackers are going to destroy us all" fits that journalists are often prone to:
begin-----
COMPUTER HACKER NEVER ENDANGERED SHUTTLE ASTRONAUTS
News reports that a computer hacker endangered the lives of Space Shuttle astronauts during a 1997 mission are wrong. A report from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) said a hacker compromised NASA computers, endangering the lives of American astronauts.
NASA's Inspector General's office found that during the STS-86 mission in September of 1997, the transmission of routine medical information was slightly delayed due to a computer hacker. However, the transmission was successfully completed.
At no time was communication between NASA and the astronauts compromised. The communication interruption occurred between internal ground-based computer systems.
There has never been an interruption of communication service with the Shuttle due to computer hacker attacks. The command and control communications links between Mission Control and a Space Shuttle in orbit are extremely well insulated.
The 1997 incident is currently under investigation by NASA Inspector General's office.
If you can get a spacecraft to GEO then getting one to the moon isn't that hard. If you're in low Earth orbit then the velocity kick you need to head towards the moon (space geek speak: Lunar Transfer Orbit Delta-V) is only slightly more the that required to get to you out to geostationary orbit.
Last year, a geostationary communications satellite that was in the wrong orbit due to a failure in the launch rocket was actually sent round the moon so the moons gravity could tug it into the correct orbit and so salvage it.
Anybody interested in what NASA thinks a manned flight to Mars would be like should take a look at this (warning-BIG pdf file). Heavy reliance is placed on the use of local resources, ie. the idea put forward by Bob Zubrin in "The Case for Mars". The report is fascinating but remember it's complete vapourwear. Nobody is putting up money for this, now or in the forseeable future.
I did an MSc in Spacecraft Engineering and it looks to me like they've adopted many of the protocols for ensuring the reliability of hardware in spacecraft. However the question to ask is how long would a private company stay solvent if they tried doing this. Everything has it's place, including the pizza munching Xers, if no lives are at stake.
There was actually an unmanned MOL test flight just before the project was cancelled. The Gemini capsule it carried was a refurbished one that had flown before and so was the first spacecraft to fly in space twice, about 20 years before the first shuttle flight. Here's a picture of a MOL Gemini and you can see the hatch in the heat shield that would lead back into the main part of the spaecraft. This actually isn't as dodgy as it sounds as during re-entry the heat would melt the hatch shut making it quite secure. Another interesting thing is that the Titan III rocket developed to launch MOL was eventually used to launch the Voyager probes and the Viking spacecraft to Mars. To know what they're currently doing up there, the best source is the Federation of American Scientists site, www.fas.org
The CNN report is inaccurate, the NASA cometry mission called ST-4 or Champollion has been cancelled because of budget pressure. It seem they had to choose between that and the Mars 2001 lander. They kept the Mars misson as more of the money has already been spent. Details in http://www.spaceviews.com/
PS How come this is news now? There have been details of the mission on the ESA web site for at least 2 years. Work started on it in the early 90's.
Slashdot Mirror
Mars
Close by so easier to get to (7 month trip). Good PR cos it's the most Earth-like planet, potential for lot's of cool pictures on the news from the planned rover vehicles. Possability of liquid water, perhaps even life. Lots of public interest.
Pluto
A small frozen rock that's far away it'll a spacecraft 10 years to get there. Even then it'll fly straight past with only a brief window of opportunity to study it's target. ie 10 years in the future, you get one mention on CNN.
Regardless of the scientific merits of one verses the other, it's easy to see why NASA is keen to try Mars again and is lukewarm over Pluto.
Since then, theres been increasing scepticism over the bacteria. Since nobody expected to find any, no real precautions regarding sterility where taken with the handling of the camera and it's now thought the camera may have been contaminated on it's return. But nobody really knows for sure.
Yep, but Plesetck doesn't have a Proton launch
pad complex. Not to mention the facilities for
assembling the rocket and doing the final launch
preperations for a payload the size of Zvesda.
What you have to remember is that books of the time where written on vellum which is prepared from calf skins. Trying to compare values with 1000 years ago isn't easy but cattle where a very valuable resource. Slaughtering them when they're still juvenile just to write something down would be costly. Basically if paper was $100 a sheet, you'd be wanting to reuse it to.
Reuse of vellum was so common, (overwritten documents are called palimplests) it's probably best to think of a monastic library as the monastery's hard drive. Files that are no longer wanted are just erased to make space for new ones.
At the moment it looks like Peter's lead is unbeatable, Percy in third place is rapidly catching up on Pamela. But there's always the unexpected like a chance encounter with a leopard seal that could easily upset the form book. Cape Town is still a long way off!
OK the Saturn 5 moon rockets *did* have small fins but AFIK their job was to keep the thing stable just long enough for the escape system to trigger if there was a really bad guidence system f*** up.
This has just popped out on the NASA Press Release mailing list. It sounds more plausible then the BBC who sound like they're in the middle of one of those "The Evil Hackers are going to destroy us all" fits that journalists are often prone to:
begin-----
COMPUTER HACKER NEVER ENDANGERED SHUTTLE ASTRONAUTS
News reports that a computer hacker endangered the lives of Space Shuttle
astronauts during a 1997 mission are wrong. A report from the British
Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC) said a hacker compromised NASA computers, endangering the
lives of
American astronauts.
NASA's Inspector General's office found that during the STS-86 mission in
September of 1997, the transmission of routine medical information was slightly
delayed
due to a computer hacker. However, the transmission was successfully completed.
At no time was communication between NASA and the astronauts compromised.
The communication interruption occurred between internal ground-based computer
systems.
There has never been an interruption of communication service with the
Shuttle due
to computer hacker attacks. The command and control communications links between
Mission Control and a Space Shuttle in orbit are extremely well insulated.
The 1997 incident is currently under investigation by NASA Inspector
General's
office.
end--
Last year, a geostationary communications satellite that was in the wrong orbit due to a failure in the launch rocket was actually sent round the moon so the moons gravity could tug it into the correct orbit and so salvage it.
Link to BBC story
Anybody interested in what NASA thinks a manned flight to Mars would be like should take a look at this (warning-BIG pdf file). Heavy reliance is placed on the use of local resources, ie. the idea put forward by Bob Zubrin in "The Case for Mars". The report is fascinating but remember it's complete vapourwear. Nobody is putting up money for this, now or in the forseeable future.
I did an MSc in Spacecraft Engineering and it looks to me like they've adopted many of the protocols for ensuring the reliability of hardware in spacecraft. However the question to ask is how long would a private company stay solvent if they tried doing this. Everything has it's place, including the pizza munching Xers, if no lives are at stake.
There was actually an unmanned MOL test flight just before the project was cancelled. The Gemini capsule it carried was a refurbished one that had flown before and so was the first spacecraft to fly in space twice, about 20 years before the first shuttle flight. Here's a picture of a MOL Gemini and you can see the hatch in the heat shield that would lead back into the main part of the spaecraft. This actually isn't as dodgy as it sounds as during re-entry the heat would melt the hatch shut making it quite secure. Another interesting thing is that the Titan III rocket developed to launch MOL was eventually used to launch the Voyager probes and the Viking spacecraft to Mars. To know what they're currently doing up there, the best source is the Federation of American Scientists site, www.fas.org
The CNN report is inaccurate, the NASA cometry
mission called ST-4 or Champollion has been
cancelled because of budget pressure. It seem
they had to choose between that and the Mars 2001
lander. They kept the Mars misson as more of
the money has already been spent.
Details in http://www.spaceviews.com/
PS How come this is news now? There have been
details of the mission on the ESA web site for
at least 2 years. Work started on it
in the early 90's.