Well, depending on how long the actual lifetime will be and what the propellant storage looks like, this seems like it's just what the doctor ordered for cube sats. But beyond that, they will need a way to recharge those capillaries and they'll need to mass-produce those things to get the costs down - which is kind of hard given the limited numbers of cube sats currently being launched. (Afaik, there are still fewer cube sats being launched each year than regular ones...)
There are three factors that are important for any propulsion system: 1) Thrust - check 2) Wheight - probably very low, hopefully not too important 3) Specific impulse - how much fuel do you need to get that thrust? The higher the velocity of the exhaust, the less fuel you need for a given thrust. And that is exactly what is missing from all sources. Who knows what they had to compromise with in order to scale the whole thing down?
The point of destroying or deflecting it in space is, that the carnage is not here. And if you have any reasonable amount of time at all (which is likely the case), you would prefer to nudge it slightly rather than destroy it completely anyway.
The largest bomb was in fact carried by a plane... that just about managed to escape from the blast in time. I think it had a mass of 30 tons or so. It was supposed to be carried by what later became known as the Proton rocket. Which is why the Proton is using less efficient, more expensive and much more poisonous storeable fuels (UDMH and NTO) instead of kerosine and liquid oxygen.
While the Soyuz rocket is using kerosine and LOX, this was also the reason why it was discontinued from service as an ICBM after just 2 years. The time to fill the LOX tanks was just too long to respond. As an ICBM the R-7 had a carrying capacity of 6 tons or so. (The Soyuz is an R-7 with a third stage, instead of a nuke, put on top of it.)
Even worse: There are no asteroids with a diameter of 1000km. The largest of them, Ceres, is 950km and at a very safe distance in a very stable orbit. The second largest, Vesta, is less than 600km in diameter.
In fact, the main "danger" nowadays is seen in objects of about 0.1km in diameter, since that is the size at which asteroids are still damaging, but also escape early detection. That takes about 15 orders of magnitude off the energy requirements. But at this point, you wouldn't even need a bomb. Just shoving a few tons of stuff at a few km/s in front of the asteroid is enough to tear it apart. (The kinetic energy of 1t of material at 2.8km/s is equivalent to 1t of TNT.)
1) Global warming is not about temperature. 2) The 1930ies didn't see any kind of adverse severe weather patterns. Adverse severe weather patters are a modern phenomena. There have never been hurricans in New Orleans. There have never been Hurricans in New York. Nobody starved in the droughts of the 1930ies. It is pure coincidence an no adverse pattern, that 12 out of 51 all time temperature highs were recorded in 1936. It is random chance that 5 were created in 1930.
You can believe anything you want about the world. But that won't change history.
Before blaming paid astroturfers, remember that it takes all of 5 people to mod a comment from +5 insightful to -1 troll. That's not a lot, especially in a quasi-religious issue such as global warming.
All-time temperature records of 24 out of 51 US states (including DC) were made in the 1930ies and still stand. Colorado reached its all time high this year, but didn't surpass it.
Another 8 states have all-time temperature records dating back before the 1930ies. Oregons record dates back all the way to the 19th century - 1898.
That's 32 temperature records older than 70 years.
No record high temperatures were recorded for the 1940ies. For another 4 states record dates are in the 1950ies one more in 1961. Another 2 states set records in the 1970ies, another 2 states in the 1980ies. Out of 5 states in the table with record temperatures set in the 1990ies there were 3 states that merely repeated their old records, without setting a new one. The same is true for all 4 states listed in this table for merely repeating their old records within the last 12 years.
My suggested headline: NASA scientists turn a blind eye to reality.
Be quick with such posts, so long as the Americans are still asleep. My own post on that yesterday reached +5 Insightful by noon, dropping to 0 within another 4 hours or so as Americans went back to work err... the internet.
When somebody is screaming: Hey, look what good things I've done! He's just trying to call attention to himself.
If what you did was genuinely good, there is no need at all to point out that it was American whatever that did it. We'll see that. And not because there are thousands of American flags whereever you look, but because people just know that this is an American mission.
Just like Hayabusa and Ikaros are a Japanese missions, that the Japanese can be rightly proud of, yet have no need to scream on the top of their lungs because of it.
Or look at the Russians. They manage about half the commercial satellite launches, they supply the USA with engines for the Atlas rockets ever since Atlas III. They do all the manned missions these days. They brought all actual experience to the ISS, they supplied with their progress freighters... and people just know and the Russians are proud of it either way.
You're so full yourselves you don't notice you're making fools of yourselfs.
How about you don't project your national unconsciousness on others? It shows a provincialism and a narrowness of cultural awareness. Judging other cultures by the standards of your own - what's the word for that again?
Hope so too. But still, there is nothing more nauseating than American Nationalism oozing out of every statement on the mission success. It's worse than the Chinese - and that takes some doing.
Are you worried, right now, that a stone or other heavy item will drop on your head from 50m height? No? That's probably because there is nothing to suggest that such an item is anywhere 50m above your head.
If I go to a place a bit of a way down the road, there may actually be that possibility, but not here. Hence, I don't need to worry about this. It's the same with the earthquake. A mag 9 earthquake cannot happen in Japan for tectonic reasons.The mechanism depends on having a subduction zone in the immediate vicinity and not 100km further away. Preparing to seismically proof anything for a mag9 earthquake on mainland Japan is pointless because it's not going to happen there.
You may argue that the Tokai region in Japan is especially vulnerable to strong earthquakes, indeed it is, and the Hamaoka Nuclear Power plant has been designed to withstand a mag 8.5 earthquake (in line with historic records). However, given the way Japan has handled nuclear safety in other respects e.g. by attending international conferences and being the only country not to take any action whatsoever - as for example the Paris conference on filtered containment vents in 1988 - structural earthquake proofing is not the weak spot in Japanese nuclear power plants at all. The weak spot is disregarding a quarter century of developments, investigations and remedies after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Actually, the Gen III+ is Soviet 1980ies tech, but don't let Westinghouse hear that. The Soviet Union published its AES-88 design in 1988 and handed it over for review in Germany - after Chernobyl, this was called for. The AES-88 is a passive design and predates the AP-600 by 10 years. There were several other designs as well all designed until about the time of the break-up of the Soviet Union. (After this some 2-3 million people starved/froze to death or otherwise perished in the worst economic crisis the world has never heard of. Life expectancy in Russia dropped to levels not seen since a certain Josef Stalin. In short: They had other problems.)
More designs followed much later. The latest being the AES-2006. Which adds a core catcher and is more economical than the AES-88, without sacrifying the passive safety, as it was in the AES-92. The AES-92 had a large pool of cooling water to provide emergency cooling without electricity for 12 hours or so, but no heat removal systems to recondense and recycle the cooling water. AFAIK those that have been build were refitted since, but I might be wrong. The AES-2006 also has hydrogen catalyzers by design, I'm not sure if this was the case in the older ones.
(Please note: Russian designes distinguish between the reactor/power system and the power plant design as a whole. The AES-2006 design is implemented in all of the VVER-1200 power stations, for example.)
Better still are the breeder reactors, which are fully passive by design. The BN-600 is still operating, three BN-800 are under construction, two in China, one in Russia. The main problem is, of course, the flamable coolant (sodium). A lead cooled commercial reactor is supposed to be finished in 2017.
To make a long story short: If you're looking for the latest in nuclear power, look at Russia. (And yes, this came as a surprise to me as well.)
Sure, this is pie-in-the-sky thinking. But imagine what would happen if activists would not protest *against* the restart because of safety problems, but *for* better safety systems before the reactor is to be restarted.
They might actually end up doing something good for a change. Of course, this would require a much more cerebral process than a pavlovian reflex. You would actually have to understand what happened and understand what needs to be done about it. Finally, you'd need to protest for some specific activity - not just against a very general one - which is certainly not going to be a nice catchy phrase.
This case calls for a thorough investigation of the generator failure and review of all generators. Perhaps (actually quite likely) the addition of more emergency generators to provide for redundancy and finally the investigation of all similar reactors. (Although Kori-1 seems to be unique in Korea, while the other reactors in Kori are more advanced Westinghouse designs. So this may or may not limit the applicability.)
Obviously, not a nice catchy phrase, but much more useful.
Funny the first rating is "troll". I'm merely taking the exact same position as the article and explain what's wrong about it, but all of the sudden, I'm a troll. Maybe the article is.
Spirit and Opportunity were powered by solar panels delivering 140W.
Curiosity, 5 times heavier, has a radionuclide battery delivering 125W.
Despite being much heavier, Curiosity will be faster and more effective than either Spirit or Opportunity.
The difference, of course, is that nuclear power is being delivered constantly, while solar power needs sun shine, varies over the day and depends on weather and season.The 1GW of propaganda power is what you get under ideal conditions - in other words, never. A nuclear power plant rated at 1GW will deliver this and is capable of delivering it for months without a break. On a yearly basis, 1GW in the shape of a nuclear power plant will deliver 10 times as much energy as 1GW of solar power in Germany (about 5 times more for solar power in deserts/arid areas).
And that's without considering the need to store energy from solar power plants in order to use this power when it is needed. Both in terms of the cost in money and energy.
If you compare solar power with anything else in the way this article does, you're deliberately deceiving the readership and nothing else.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks.
Well, depending on how long the actual lifetime will be and what the propellant storage looks like, this seems like it's just what the doctor ordered for cube sats. But beyond that, they will need a way to recharge those capillaries and they'll need to mass-produce those things to get the costs down - which is kind of hard given the limited numbers of cube sats currently being launched. (Afaik, there are still fewer cube sats being launched each year than regular ones ...)
It went downhill far enough that somebody moded the "mod parent up" post up, but neglected to mod the parent up ...
Anyway ... unfortunately my questions still wants an answer.
There are three factors that are important for any propulsion system:
1) Thrust - check
2) Wheight - probably very low, hopefully not too important
3) Specific impulse - how much fuel do you need to get that thrust? The higher the velocity of the exhaust, the less fuel you need for a given thrust. And that is exactly what is missing from all sources. Who knows what they had to compromise with in order to scale the whole thing down?
Well, it would do a lot of no good at all.
The point of destroying or deflecting it in space is, that the carnage is not here. And if you have any reasonable amount of time at all (which is likely the case), you would prefer to nudge it slightly rather than destroy it completely anyway.
The largest bomb was in fact carried by a plane ... that just about managed to escape from the blast in time. I think it had a mass of 30 tons or so. It was supposed to be carried by what later became known as the Proton rocket. Which is why the Proton is using less efficient, more expensive and much more poisonous storeable fuels (UDMH and NTO) instead of kerosine and liquid oxygen.
While the Soyuz rocket is using kerosine and LOX, this was also the reason why it was discontinued from service as an ICBM after just 2 years. The time to fill the LOX tanks was just too long to respond. As an ICBM the R-7 had a carrying capacity of 6 tons or so. (The Soyuz is an R-7 with a third stage, instead of a nuke, put on top of it.)
Even worse: There are no asteroids with a diameter of 1000km. The largest of them, Ceres, is 950km and at a very safe distance in a very stable orbit. The second largest, Vesta, is less than 600km in diameter.
In fact, the main "danger" nowadays is seen in objects of about 0.1km in diameter, since that is the size at which asteroids are still damaging, but also escape early detection. That takes about 15 orders of magnitude off the energy requirements. But at this point, you wouldn't even need a bomb. Just shoving a few tons of stuff at a few km/s in front of the asteroid is enough to tear it apart. (The kinetic energy of 1t of material at 2.8km/s is equivalent to 1t of TNT.)
Lessons to draw from your posts:
1) Global warming is not about temperature.
2) The 1930ies didn't see any kind of adverse severe weather patterns. Adverse severe weather patters are a modern phenomena. There have never been hurricans in New Orleans. There have never been Hurricans in New York. Nobody starved in the droughts of the 1930ies. It is pure coincidence an no adverse pattern, that 12 out of 51 all time temperature highs were recorded in 1936. It is random chance that 5 were created in 1930.
You can believe anything you want about the world. But that won't change history.
Before blaming paid astroturfers, remember that it takes all of 5 people to mod a comment from +5 insightful to -1 troll. That's not a lot, especially in a quasi-religious issue such as global warming.
Them, pray tell, how is a heatwave in 2012 climate, but a much larger and more consequential set of heatwaves in the 1930ies is weather?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_temperature_extremes
All-time temperature records of 24 out of 51 US states (including DC) were made in the 1930ies and still stand. Colorado reached its all time high this year, but didn't surpass it.
Another 8 states have all-time temperature records dating back before the 1930ies. Oregons record dates back all the way to the 19th century - 1898.
That's 32 temperature records older than 70 years.
No record high temperatures were recorded for the 1940ies. For another 4 states record dates are in the 1950ies one more in 1961. Another 2 states set records in the 1970ies, another 2 states in the 1980ies. Out of 5 states in the table with record temperatures set in the 1990ies there were 3 states that merely repeated their old records, without setting a new one. The same is true for all 4 states listed in this table for merely repeating their old records within the last 12 years.
My suggested headline: NASA scientists turn a blind eye to reality.
Be quick with such posts, so long as the Americans are still asleep. My own post on that yesterday reached +5 Insightful by noon, dropping to 0 within another 4 hours or so as Americans went back to work err... the internet.
When somebody is screaming: Hey, look what good things I've done! He's just trying to call attention to himself.
If what you did was genuinely good, there is no need at all to point out that it was American whatever that did it. We'll see that. And not because there are thousands of American flags whereever you look, but because people just know that this is an American mission.
Just like Hayabusa and Ikaros are a Japanese missions, that the Japanese can be rightly proud of, yet have no need to scream on the top of their lungs because of it.
Or look at the Russians. They manage about half the commercial satellite launches, they supply the USA with engines for the Atlas rockets ever since Atlas III. They do all the manned missions these days. They brought all actual experience to the ISS, they supplied with their progress freighters ... and people just know and the Russians are proud of it either way.
You're so full yourselves you don't notice you're making fools of yourselfs.
How about you don't project your national unconsciousness on others? It shows a provincialism and a narrowness of cultural awareness. Judging other cultures by the standards of your own - what's the word for that again?
Germany.
Given that it is the same horn that made Americans accept the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (to mention just two) ... well, yes, I do blame them.
Hope so too. But still, there is nothing more nauseating than American Nationalism oozing out of every statement on the mission success. It's worse than the Chinese - and that takes some doing.
It is - the question remains whether intact or not. We're just waiting for the radio signals to arrive.
Speed of light can be soo damn slow ...
I didn't say solar power doesn't work. I didn't say that at all.
I just said it doesn't work anywhere near the way it is being described. Especially, it works *much* worse than what is being implied in this article.
And where is the contradiction that you are trying to imply? I wrote "months without a break" for good reasons after all.
Are you worried, right now, that a stone or other heavy item will drop on your head from 50m height? No? That's probably because there is nothing to suggest that such an item is anywhere 50m above your head.
If I go to a place a bit of a way down the road, there may actually be that possibility, but not here. Hence, I don't need to worry about this. It's the same with the earthquake. A mag 9 earthquake cannot happen in Japan for tectonic reasons.The mechanism depends on having a subduction zone in the immediate vicinity and not 100km further away. Preparing to seismically proof anything for a mag9 earthquake on mainland Japan is pointless because it's not going to happen there.
You may argue that the Tokai region in Japan is especially vulnerable to strong earthquakes, indeed it is, and the Hamaoka Nuclear Power plant has been designed to withstand a mag 8.5 earthquake (in line with historic records). However, given the way Japan has handled nuclear safety in other respects e.g. by attending international conferences and being the only country not to take any action whatsoever - as for example the Paris conference on filtered containment vents in 1988 - structural earthquake proofing is not the weak spot in Japanese nuclear power plants at all. The weak spot is disregarding a quarter century of developments, investigations and remedies after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Actually, the Gen III+ is Soviet 1980ies tech, but don't let Westinghouse hear that. The Soviet Union published its AES-88 design in 1988 and handed it over for review in Germany - after Chernobyl, this was called for. The AES-88 is a passive design and predates the AP-600 by 10 years. There were several other designs as well all designed until about the time of the break-up of the Soviet Union. (After this some 2-3 million people starved/froze to death or otherwise perished in the worst economic crisis the world has never heard of. Life expectancy in Russia dropped to levels not seen since a certain Josef Stalin. In short: They had other problems.)
More designs followed much later. The latest being the AES-2006. Which adds a core catcher and is more economical than the AES-88, without sacrifying the passive safety, as it was in the AES-92. The AES-92 had a large pool of cooling water to provide emergency cooling without electricity for 12 hours or so, but no heat removal systems to recondense and recycle the cooling water. AFAIK those that have been build were refitted since, but I might be wrong. The AES-2006 also has hydrogen catalyzers by design, I'm not sure if this was the case in the older ones.
(Please note: Russian designes distinguish between the reactor/power system and the power plant design as a whole. The AES-2006 design is implemented in all of the VVER-1200 power stations, for example.)
Better still are the breeder reactors, which are fully passive by design. The BN-600 is still operating, three BN-800 are under construction, two in China, one in Russia. The main problem is, of course, the flamable coolant (sodium). A lead cooled commercial reactor is supposed to be finished in 2017.
To make a long story short: If you're looking for the latest in nuclear power, look at Russia. (And yes, this came as a surprise to me as well.)
Sure, this is pie-in-the-sky thinking. But imagine what would happen if activists would not protest *against* the restart because of safety problems, but *for* better safety systems before the reactor is to be restarted.
They might actually end up doing something good for a change. Of course, this would require a much more cerebral process than a pavlovian reflex. You would actually have to understand what happened and understand what needs to be done about it. Finally, you'd need to protest for some specific activity - not just against a very general one - which is certainly not going to be a nice catchy phrase.
This case calls for a thorough investigation of the generator failure and review of all generators. Perhaps (actually quite likely) the addition of more emergency generators to provide for redundancy and finally the investigation of all similar reactors. (Although Kori-1 seems to be unique in Korea, while the other reactors in Kori are more advanced Westinghouse designs. So this may or may not limit the applicability.)
Obviously, not a nice catchy phrase, but much more useful.
Funny the first rating is "troll". I'm merely taking the exact same position as the article and explain what's wrong about it, but all of the sudden, I'm a troll. Maybe the article is.
Spirit and Opportunity were powered by solar panels delivering 140W.
Curiosity, 5 times heavier, has a radionuclide battery delivering 125W.
Despite being much heavier, Curiosity will be faster and more effective than either Spirit or Opportunity.
The difference, of course, is that nuclear power is being delivered constantly, while solar power needs sun shine, varies over the day and depends on weather and season.The 1GW of propaganda power is what you get under ideal conditions - in other words, never. A nuclear power plant rated at 1GW will deliver this and is capable of delivering it for months without a break. On a yearly basis, 1GW in the shape of a nuclear power plant will deliver 10 times as much energy as 1GW of solar power in Germany (about 5 times more for solar power in deserts/arid areas).
And that's without considering the need to store energy from solar power plants in order to use this power when it is needed. Both in terms of the cost in money and energy.
If you compare solar power with anything else in the way this article does, you're deliberately deceiving the readership and nothing else.
Go cull yourself first.