Seriously, not only is this not news, or even new news... TFA gets the sequence of events all wrong. Ballard had already been hunting Titanic with side scan sonar and photo sleds (which is even harder than finding a needle in a haystack) when the Navy approached him to map the wreckage of Thresher and Scorpion. Not find, but map (the locations were already known to the Navy). This was done as part of a Navy project to examine reactors known to be on the bottom of the ocean to determine if reactors could be disposed of by ocean dumping. They also dove on both wrecks using the Alvin (Oxford University Press, 1990) to take samples of the seabed and wreckage and to take radiation readings (photographs from this expedition can be seen at the Naval Historical Center page on Scorpion).
When the Navy hired him to perform those surveys, he examined the earlier ones (there have been several), and realized that debris trails were the key to locating deep water wrecks. The Scorpion wreck site is compact as she broke up on impact with the bottom. Thresher's wreck on the other hand is scattered across a considerable area as she broke up (relatively) shallow. The Navy however refused to pay for a search for Titanic to prove the theory and to further test Dr. Ballard's new mapping sled. Instead the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution funded a search for Titanic as an extension of the expedition to map the Scorpion's wreckage. (Though all WHOI knew was that it was a classified USN expedition.)
I didn't say I expected him to hit the books and learn it himself. I said I expected something that someone is passionate about to educate himself - by learning it himself, by finding a mentor, by taking a class as an adult, etc... Blaming lack of knowledge on the father is a cop out.
Homo Sapiens is, for the most part, a selfish, greedy species. To ascribe our ancestors with cuddly, noble airs of spirituality, science and mysticism is the stuff of fairy tales, not science. Take a look at your neighborhood; minus the styles, the cars, and the pointless obsession with worthless things like social networking sites, the species is today just and evolved and spiritual as it has ever been.
I can't say much in reply other than your position is utterly at odds with all known existing archaeological, literary, sociological, etc... etc... evidence.
When looking at it on that massive scale, you really get the idea of just how fragile a hard drive really is.
Less than you might think from the summary, reading further down the article you find "The company has a small number of server configurations, some with a lot of hard drives and some with few".
The camera has already seen what may be ice, which was exposed when the soil was disturbed by the landing.
I have been wondering about this. I'm sure NASA would have taken into consideration that the retro rockets firing as it landed might melt ice and/or destroy signs of life. Right?
Yes. The retrorockets are designed to produce minimal contamination and/or disturbance. (And they shut off a couple of meters above the ground to further reduce the effects.) The arm is designed to dig down well below the expected penetration level of any contamination or disturbance.
Lets face it, odds are if we DO find life, it's going to be fundamentally different than what we're expecting it to be.
You state that as if it were a fact, rather than the opinion it actually is.
Saying conditions aren't good for life anywhere based on what we consider habitable is silly.
They aren't saying conditions are good for life based on what we consider habitable. They saying conditions are good for life based on the laws of physics and chemistry and reasonable extrapolations from the same.
Don't complain about false statistics then use your own. The Shuttle has flown 830 people and lost 14. Soyuz has launched 242 people and lost 4. The shuttle fatality rate is by a very tiny fraction higher than the Soyuz one. The Soyuz LOCV is either 1% or 2% (the vehicle did land fine that one time, granted the crew didn't) while the shuttle is 1.67%.
It doesn't much matter which one is fractionally higher or lower - my basic point remains true, the difference in safety between the two vehicles is so small as to be meaningless.
For example: Soyuz has, four times in it's history, failed to properly jettision it's Service Module - including both of the last two flights!. (Which means they start reentry nose first - leading to significant damage to the Reentry Module. This hasn't killed anyone - yet.)
It's probably been put into the design and over engineered for a lot by this point so it's unlikely to ever kill anyone
That's the emotional argument. Rational engineering analysis suggests otherwise.
It's actually frightening that despite how much effort and money goes into the Shuttles (and their safety) they're not at all safer than the Soyuz flown by the Russians.
I would have phrased it somewhat differently, but on this point we are in violent agreement. It also has some potentially disheartening implications for the 'cheaper' commercial transports everyone keeps insisting that NASA should replace the Shuttle with.
Limiting it to the same time frame for both isn't exactly arbitrary
Yes it is, as it ground rules out a significant number of Soyuz flights without any rational justification for doing so. (Rational from an engineering point of view.)
and we can include the Apollo missions for NASA if we want to for the other route.
Why? There isn't any comparison between Shuttle and Apollo. Again, you indulge in emotional discourse rather than engineering discourse.
I imagine the British, like the US and everyone else I am aware of, have replaced the older system (were the toilet flushed directly to sea) with the a newer system (where the toilet is flushed to tank that is later pumper to sea). The newer system is orders of magnitude safer.
For decades growing up, all any of us heard about was the great Apollo program. No one heard about the Russian space stations, the Russian probe to Mars, etc. In fact, the first time American media reported at any length on the MIR was when it started to have problems (well after it was beyond its projected lifespan).
Well, there's your problem - you depended on the mass media to spoon feed you information rather than going out and getting it yourself. Also keep in mind that the same media, when it did report on the Russians (specifically Soyuz), only reported the successes.
Who has a MUCH lower fatality rate and a MUCH higher rocket success rate?
Nobody. As a percentage of passengers, Shuttle is actually lower than Soyuz. As a percentage of flights, the difference is statistically insensible. Something like.3% separates the Shuttle LOCV (Loss of Crew and Vehicle) rate from the Soyuz LOCV rate.
But really, that adds up to 'lying with statistics' as it dismisses the two LOV (Loss of Vehicle) accidents and multiple LOM (Loss of Mission) incidents suffered by Soyuz. (The Shuttle, to date, has one partial LOM incident and no LOV accidents.) It also dismisses the numerous significant incidents and accidents suffered by Soyuz that didn't lead to LOM or LOV. For example: Soyuz has, four times in it's history, failed to properly jettision it's Service Module - including both of the last two flights!. (Which means they start reentry nose first - leading to significant damage to the Reentry Module. This hasn't killed anyone - yet.)
Now, I know someone will bring up the old saw "but the Soyuz hasn't killed anyone in decades". So what? No matter where you arbitrarily set the line between what flights you will and won't count - you run into the same problem, an ongoing series of significant accidents and incidents. If you claim "but those were different spacecraft due to all the modifications"[1], then you limit yourself to the current Soyuz TMA series... Which in 12 completed flights to date has suffered two computer failures during reentry and two failures to separate the Service Module - very serious incidents all.
[1] The same is true of the Shuttle incidentally - it has been modified and upgraded extensively across its lifetime.
Landers such as the Phoenix use thrusters to come to a safe, soft landing. Don't these thrusters blow away a lot of the useful sand and soil they are trying to collect?
In the case of Phoenix, no - as the stuff NASA is interested in is a couple of inches down. At any rate, they use multiple small thrusters to minimize the amount of disturbance and contamination.
That is the true advantage of Spirit and Opportunity, not only did they use airbags instead of rockets, they could drive away from the disturbed landing site.
That advantage comes with a pair of powerful disadvantages: First, the airbag systems sharply limit the size of the probe - both in dimensions and in weight. Secondly, the airbag systems are heavy - they take up a higher percentage of the possible landed weight.
If Moscow, Washington DC, Beijing or London were wiped out in a meteorite strike that was not detected before the destruction. Do you think that missile forces would not be put on high alert?
Sure, they'd be put on 'high alert'. But 'high alert' isn't 'launching'. (And there really isn't such a thing as 'high alert' anyhow, either you are on alert or you are not.)
Unfortunately we are still living in a world where submarines, bombers and missiles are pointed from country to country like loaded shotguns on a hair trigger.
Not in the case of the US, UK, Russia, or France. Maybe the Chinese are on hair trigger?
My fear is that someone would mis-interpret an incoming meteor as a nuclear weapon and initiate a launch on their perceived threats.
Given that a) an incoming meteor is trivially distinguishable from an incoming warhead and b) very few people are looking anyhow... That's a fear not based on reality.
Strewth! I use Dreamhost for my hosting, and their uptime is a bit pants. (There's many websites dedicated to how terrible DH is. Many, many websites.)
So what? 99.99% of the comments/reviews on the 'net are about how horrible the subject of the comment/review is.
They [Dreamhost] obviously don't have the kind of professionalism that it takes to run a web hosting company (as further evidenced by making glib comments referring to "studly CEO's" in an official blog).
(Chuckle.) I love it when a Slashdot stereotype shatters... I mean, usually the complaint is that most companies are bland and sterile soul sucking Dilbertesque hells... And here we have a complaint because a company isn't!
Now, obviously not everyone is going to be happy with a given company - someones always going to be upset. (And here in the 'net age the squeaky wheels of course get all the attention.) But I've been a Dreamhost customer for over eight years - and I've had nothing but good experiences.
When you intentionally drop a payload in a safe but really boring terrain like the one where Phoenix is, mobility to find interesting places really does count for a lot.
If the landing site wasn't interesting - they wouldn't have sent the lander there in the first place. You seem to confuse photogenic with scientifically interesting.
Years ago, we put vikings up on mars. The more amazing in that they were nuke powered. Now, we fight about it all the time.
So sayeth the urban legends. In reality, opposition toward nuclear powered space probes has decayed sharply over time and has now essentially vanished. For the nuclear powered Mars Science Laboratory, opposition to it's nuclear packages has been all but absent. The cynic in me wonders sometimes if that's because the Usual Suspect demographic has so much else on it's trust funded platter right now.
In reality usage of radioisotope generators has declined primarily because they are extremely expensive, and secondarily because we have a vastly reduced capability to manufacture them. For years NASA piggybacked on DOE production for the DOD. With the demand for them dropping after the end of the Cold War, the capability to manufacture them has similarly declined.
Re:Doesn't even have to be live life...
on
The Phoenix Has Landed
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· Score: 3, Informative
What are the chances of puttering around for a few hundred meters on earth and randomly finding a human skeleton?..
I was surprised when I found that Phoenix has no mobility. But then, I have thought about it for all of 5 minutes, while the NASA engineers have thought about it for 5 years, so there must have been a good reason to leave that feature out.
Two reasons: The first is weight - mobility systems cost a great of it, and every gram alloted to them is a gram that can't be spent on science. Which also means that had it wheels, Phoenix would be limited to same modest science package the rovers have. The second is mission life time - unlike the rovers, the odds of Phoenix dying once winter comes are near unity. Which means that a notional wheeled Phoenix with it's much more modest science package won't cover much ground before freezing to death.
What J&J have done here that is so reprehensible is attempted to dilute that already prolific sign of medical care and hope, to commercialise what others already had a far better claim to.
Ah yes... the kneejerk "the $BIG_CORP must be the one at fault" reaction. Meanwhile, the $CHARITY who is seeking (against the agreement they made with $BIG_CORP) to commercialize the "already prolific sign of medical care and hope" goes scot free...
Or, to put it in much simpler terms - you pretty much have the situation entirely reversed and then misunderstood. J&J did not try to take anything away from the Red Cross - they tried to prevent the Red Cross from using the trademark in question in a commercial fashion rather than a charity fashion.
The bad guys in this situation, the guys crossing the line, the guys violating their agreements... is the Red Cross.
When I first came across it, I thought that it was an idea that needs some serious development. Plastics take up a huge amount of landfill space worldwide, and this is of use in the future.
The problem is - it's not clear where the components of the plastic are going after being 'eaten'. (There should be more coming out of the system than 'water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide'.) Nor did he measure the volume of the plastic remaining after being 'eaten', only it's weight and gross mechanical properties - the latter being meaningless. Etc... Etc...
Slashdot Mirror
You and your newfangled shiny TV stuff... Back in my day we had books...
"Explorations: my quest for adventure and discovery under the sea." (Hyperion, 1995)
Seriously, not only is this not news, or even new news... TFA gets the sequence of events all wrong. Ballard had already been hunting Titanic with side scan sonar and photo sleds (which is even harder than finding a needle in a haystack) when the Navy approached him to map the wreckage of Thresher and Scorpion. Not find, but map (the locations were already known to the Navy). This was done as part of a Navy project to examine reactors known to be on the bottom of the ocean to determine if reactors could be disposed of by ocean dumping. They also dove on both wrecks using the Alvin (Oxford University Press, 1990) to take samples of the seabed and wreckage and to take radiation readings (photographs from this expedition can be seen at the Naval Historical Center page on Scorpion ).
When the Navy hired him to perform those surveys, he examined the earlier ones (there have been several), and realized that debris trails were the key to locating deep water wrecks. The Scorpion wreck site is compact as she broke up on impact with the bottom. Thresher's wreck on the other hand is scattered across a considerable area as she broke up (relatively) shallow. The Navy however refused to pay for a search for Titanic to prove the theory and to further test Dr. Ballard's new mapping sled. Instead the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution funded a search for Titanic as an extension of the expedition to map the Scorpion's wreckage. (Though all WHOI knew was that it was a classified USN expedition.)
I didn't say I expected him to hit the books and learn it himself. I said I expected something that someone is passionate about to educate himself - by learning it himself, by finding a mentor, by taking a class as an adult, etc... Blaming lack of knowledge on the father is a cop out.
Not to study the gross effects of turbulent conductive metal. Simple experiments first, complex experiments later.
It can hardly be described as a passion if it lacks the strength to motivate you to educate yourself.
I can't say much in reply other than your position is utterly at odds with all known existing archaeological, literary, sociological, etc... etc... evidence.
Less than you might think from the summary, reading further down the article you find "The company has a small number of server configurations, some with a lot of hard drives and some with few".
Yes. The retrorockets are designed to produce minimal contamination and/or disturbance. (And they shut off a couple of meters above the ground to further reduce the effects.) The arm is designed to dig down well below the expected penetration level of any contamination or disturbance.
You state that as if it were a fact, rather than the opinion it actually is.
They aren't saying conditions are good for life based on what we consider habitable. They saying conditions are good for life based on the laws of physics and chemistry and reasonable extrapolations from the same.
It doesn't much matter which one is fractionally higher or lower - my basic point remains true, the difference in safety between the two vehicles is so small as to be meaningless.
That's the emotional argument. Rational engineering analysis suggests otherwise.
I would have phrased it somewhat differently, but on this point we are in violent agreement. It also has some potentially disheartening implications for the 'cheaper' commercial transports everyone keeps insisting that NASA should replace the Shuttle with.
Yes it is, as it ground rules out a significant number of Soyuz flights without any rational justification for doing so. (Rational from an engineering point of view.)
Why? There isn't any comparison between Shuttle and Apollo. Again, you indulge in emotional discourse rather than engineering discourse.
Trash is handled this way - not bodily waste.
There isn't going to be any floaters - pumps make very efficient grinders.
Nope - it's a hierarchy not a Venn diagram. Not to mention that even if you do treat it as Venn diagram, Soyuz still comes off worse.
I imagine the British, like the US and everyone else I am aware of, have replaced the older system (were the toilet flushed directly to sea) with the a newer system (where the toilet is flushed to tank that is later pumper to sea). The newer system is orders of magnitude safer.
Well, there's your problem - you depended on the mass media to spoon feed you information rather than going out and getting it yourself. Also keep in mind that the same media, when it did report on the Russians (specifically Soyuz), only reported the successes.
Nobody. As a percentage of passengers, Shuttle is actually lower than Soyuz. As a percentage of flights, the difference is statistically insensible. Something like
But really, that adds up to 'lying with statistics' as it dismisses the two LOV (Loss of Vehicle) accidents and multiple LOM (Loss of Mission) incidents suffered by Soyuz. (The Shuttle, to date, has one partial LOM incident and no LOV accidents.) It also dismisses the numerous significant incidents and accidents suffered by Soyuz that didn't lead to LOM or LOV. For example: Soyuz has, four times in it's history, failed to properly jettision it's Service Module - including both of the last two flights!. (Which means they start reentry nose first - leading to significant damage to the Reentry Module. This hasn't killed anyone - yet.)
Now, I know someone will bring up the old saw "but the Soyuz hasn't killed anyone in decades". So what? No matter where you arbitrarily set the line between what flights you will and won't count - you run into the same problem, an ongoing series of significant accidents and incidents. If you claim "but those were different spacecraft due to all the modifications"[1], then you limit yourself to the current Soyuz TMA series... Which in 12 completed flights to date has suffered two computer failures during reentry and two failures to separate the Service Module - very serious incidents all.
[1] The same is true of the Shuttle incidentally - it has been modified and upgraded extensively across its lifetime.
In the case of Phoenix, no - as the stuff NASA is interested in is a couple of inches down. At any rate, they use multiple small thrusters to minimize the amount of disturbance and contamination.
That advantage comes with a pair of powerful disadvantages: First, the airbag systems sharply limit the size of the probe - both in dimensions and in weight. Secondly, the airbag systems are heavy - they take up a higher percentage of the possible landed weight.
Sure, they'd be put on 'high alert'. But 'high alert' isn't 'launching'. (And there really isn't such a thing as 'high alert' anyhow, either you are on alert or you are not.)
Not in the case of the US, UK, Russia, or France. Maybe the Chinese are on hair trigger?
Given that a) an incoming meteor is trivially distinguishable from an incoming warhead and b) very few people are looking anyhow... That's a fear not based on reality.
Because a sonic sonic anemometer requires power, calibration, and computer cycles. A windsock doesn't.
So what? 99.99% of the comments/reviews on the 'net are about how horrible the subject of the comment/review is.
(Chuckle.) I love it when a Slashdot stereotype shatters... I mean, usually the complaint is that most companies are bland and sterile soul sucking Dilbertesque hells... And here we have a complaint because a company isn't!
Now, obviously not everyone is going to be happy with a given company - someones always going to be upset. (And here in the 'net age the squeaky wheels of course get all the attention.) But I've been a Dreamhost customer for over eight years - and I've had nothing but good experiences.
For some things of interest, yes. As a universal rule, no.
Wrong. The safest thing to do is to send it to the flattest available scientifically interesting area.
If the landing site wasn't interesting - they wouldn't have sent the lander there in the first place. You seem to confuse photogenic with scientifically interesting.
So sayeth the urban legends. In reality, opposition toward nuclear powered space probes has decayed sharply over time and has now essentially vanished. For the nuclear powered Mars Science Laboratory, opposition to it's nuclear packages has been all but absent. The cynic in me wonders sometimes if that's because the Usual Suspect demographic has so much else on it's trust funded platter right now.
In reality usage of radioisotope generators has declined primarily because they are extremely expensive, and secondarily because we have a vastly reduced capability to manufacture them. For years NASA piggybacked on DOE production for the DOD. With the demand for them dropping after the end of the Cold War, the capability to manufacture them has similarly declined.
Two reasons: The first is weight - mobility systems cost a great of it, and every gram alloted to them is a gram that can't be spent on science. Which also means that had it wheels, Phoenix would be limited to same modest science package the rovers have. The second is mission life time - unlike the rovers, the odds of Phoenix dying once winter comes are near unity. Which means that a notional wheeled Phoenix with it's much more modest science package won't cover much ground before freezing to death.
Ah yes... the kneejerk "the $BIG_CORP must be the one at fault" reaction. Meanwhile, the $CHARITY who is seeking (against the agreement they made with $BIG_CORP) to commercialize the "already prolific sign of medical care and hope" goes scot free...
Or, to put it in much simpler terms - you pretty much have the situation entirely reversed and then misunderstood. J&J did not try to take anything away from the Red Cross - they tried to prevent the Red Cross from using the trademark in question in a commercial fashion rather than a charity fashion.
The bad guys in this situation, the guys crossing the line, the guys violating their agreements... is the Red Cross.
No, that's "Sophomoric Semantic Debate 101".
The problem is - it's not clear where the components of the plastic are going after being 'eaten'. (There should be more coming out of the system than 'water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide'.) Nor did he measure the volume of the plastic remaining after being 'eaten', only it's weight and gross mechanical properties - the latter being meaningless. Etc... Etc...