Agreed. The article is a whole load of nothing. "We can't save the Hubble. But we could get the money to do what we can't do". I'd rate it lower than the average slashdot comment (reading at -1). The submitter was smart to stay anonymous...
For once I'll say: don't RTFA! Oh well, you weren't going to anyway, right?:)
In case you're not trying to be funny and really don't know: it's the "farthest/oldest galaxy known" (emphasis mine), as in we have seen no galaxy older than this one...
How is this insightful? If the Hubble maintenance mission is too dangerous because the Shuttle can't reach the ISS from Hubble's orbit, then how could it work the other way around?
Maybe there is a solution, but then that might just as well be applied to the original Hubble mission, so that the Shuttle could reach the ISS.
NASA has also stated that for doing two simultaneous missions (or one on standby on the launchpad) they would need two mission control centers as well. I have no idea if that's true or not, just stating what NASA replied to the two mysterious reports from anymous NASA employees.
If there is one place that will be the turning point for OSS and Linux, it will be Europe. And Asia. If there are two places that will be the turning point for OSS and Linux, it will be Europe and Asia. And Africa. If there are three places that will be the turning point for OSS and Linux, it will be Europe, Asia and Africa. And South America. If there are FOUR......no... *Amongst* the countries...no... *amongst* the countries are countries such as... I'll come in again.
This one is really exciting because it's a discovery in a category where amateur discoveries are very rare.
I'm not even sure that a professional astronomer has seen this before. Granted, I'm not an astronomer myself, just an enthousiast, but I've never heard of someone actually detecting a new star at its moment of birth... Has this ever been seen before? Or am I overestimating the significance of this?
From that Yahoo article: "Thor Larholm, senior security researcher at Newport Beach, Calif.-based PivX Solutions, said the Windows source code file being traded on the Internet appears to be roughly 660 megabytes in size, about the size of one CD-ROM's worth of data. That is far short of the estimated 40 gigabytes of data that makes up the entire 40 million lines of code in the Windows operating system."
I hate those languages where an average line of code has one thousand characters...
Not to be nagging, but you forgot to mention the launch. The spacecraft suffers a lot of shaking and vibrating through launch. Not just the acceleration caused by the rocket, but also (and maybe even worse) the vibrations caused by the noise of the rocket engines. Part of the testing is actually done with huge loudspeakers
That pretty much sums it up nicely. You can't. Noone can force you to believe anything except by having the same thing repeated to you time and time again by someone you trust, from a very young age. If you're lucky enough to be brought up in an environment that did not force any belief on you, you grow up to learn about the world, science, the universe and religions, and you can draw your own conclusions, and believe in those based on what you've learned.
It sounds like you think that ESA has trouble putting together a succesful mission based on the fact that Beagle2 seems to have failed (maybe I'm wrong, but that's the impression that I got from your post)...
First, Beagle2 was not an ESA project, but that's nitpicking... Second, the "main" part of the European Mars mission, the Mars Express, is working flawlessly thusfar, with spectacular imagery sent back already.
And, there have been many more succesful ESA missions. There have been many more ESA missions (click the Science Missions dropdown box). Remember the Giotto mission to the comet Halley, Smart-1 now flying to the Moon using an ion engine, Cluster examining the solar wind, Integral doing X-ray research, Ulysses examining the solar system from outside the ecliptic, and the commercially succesful Ariane launcher.
I'm in no way trying to start a flame war on who has the best space agency judging on missions (IMHO NASA would win that one hands down anytime), it just irks me that one probably failed mission-part affects the public opinion about the European space efforts so much.
More specifically, they could only get it to stop rebooting itself continuously by telling it not to mount the flash memory. And from that moment on it seems to be working correctly. That was said one of the briefings, IIRC.
While JPL scientists have expressed confidence they can overcome the problem, possibly in a matter of weeks, the hardware and software manufactures behind the computer system are more than ready to help.
"If they ask, we come," Blackman said, echoing the enthusiasm of BAE officials. "I think when something like this happens, the whole community responds to it."
Maybe they should put up an image of the data, the diagrams of the systemboard, and descriptions of the symptoms, and submit it to Ask Slashdot. I'm sure there are a couple of VxWorks experts here who'd love to take a crack at this:)
That way of thinking would make the cost of robotic space exploration approach that of human space exploration. Plus, the rover will not crash with loss of life in case of a minor computer failure. There is a much bigger margin for troubleshooting "in the field" than with aircraft or manned spacecraft.
Ofcourse NASA did implement a measure of redundancy by sending two rovers instead of just one.
Opportunity and Spirit are mainly set up to find out about the mineralogy, and their task is to try to establish once and for all that liquid water was once abundant on Mars.
Almost every space mission has brought back spectacular new findings, complete surprises and incredible images... Think of Voyager, the amazing pictures of the big planets, Apollo bringing back samples to determine the origin of the Moon, Giotto looking at Halley, Venera bringing back pictures from Venus, and so on...
Still, the MER's are a tremendous achievement, and it is incredible that these days we can see the pictures coming in to a computer in mission control, LIVE on the internet! Woops, gotta go, next briefing is about to start:)
You could send a message to the team requesting a long exposure navcam or pancam image taken during Martian nighttime. Maybe they'll even do it too.. "NASA Shows First Night Image From Mars"..
Slashdot Mirror
For once I'll say: don't RTFA! Oh well, you weren't going to anyway, right? :)
Clippy!
In case you're not trying to be funny and really don't know: it's the "farthest/oldest galaxy known" (emphasis mine), as in we have seen no galaxy older than this one...
Maybe there is a solution, but then that might just as well be applied to the original Hubble mission, so that the Shuttle could reach the ISS.
NASA has also stated that for doing two simultaneous missions (or one on standby on the launchpad) they would need two mission control centers as well. I have no idea if that's true or not, just stating what NASA replied to the two mysterious reports from anymous NASA employees.
(with apologies to Monty Python)
Name: Duane O'Brien
Haiku:
$my_args = shift;
system("gcc $my_args");
print "I prefer C\n";
Oops.. thanks :)
I'm not even sure that a professional astronomer has seen this before. Granted, I'm not an astronomer myself, just an enthousiast, but I've never heard of someone actually detecting a new star at its moment of birth... Has this ever been seen before? Or am I overestimating the significance of this?
That's the most disgusting form of "clubbing one another over the head" I've ever heard... I love it :)
If you have some time to kill read these three articles. A very nice write-up of a lot of Mars science and theories.
"Thor Larholm, senior security researcher at Newport Beach, Calif.-based PivX Solutions, said the Windows source code file being traded on the Internet appears to be roughly 660 megabytes in size, about the size of one CD-ROM's worth of data. That is far short of the estimated 40 gigabytes of data that makes up the entire 40 million lines of code in the Windows operating system."
I hate those languages where an average line of code has one thousand characters...
Not to be nagging, but you forgot to mention the launch. The spacecraft suffers a lot of shaking and vibrating through launch. Not just the acceleration caused by the rocket, but also (and maybe even worse) the vibrations caused by the noise of the rocket engines. Part of the testing is actually done with huge loudspeakers
That pretty much sums it up nicely. You can't. Noone can force you to believe anything except by having the same thing repeated to you time and time again by someone you trust, from a very young age. If you're lucky enough to be brought up in an environment that did not force any belief on you, you grow up to learn about the world, science, the universe and religions, and you can draw your own conclusions, and believe in those based on what you've learned.
Somehow you've made me think of the Beagle2...
First, Beagle2 was not an ESA project, but that's nitpicking... Second, the "main" part of the European Mars mission, the Mars Express, is working flawlessly thusfar, with spectacular imagery sent back already.
And, there have been many more succesful ESA missions. There have been many more ESA missions (click the Science Missions dropdown box). Remember the Giotto mission to the comet Halley, Smart-1 now flying to the Moon using an ion engine, Cluster examining the solar wind, Integral doing X-ray research, Ulysses examining the solar system from outside the ecliptic, and the commercially succesful Ariane launcher.
I'm in no way trying to start a flame war on who has the best space agency judging on missions (IMHO NASA would win that one hands down anytime), it just irks me that one probably failed mission-part affects the public opinion about the European space efforts so much.
More specifically, they could only get it to stop rebooting itself continuously by telling it not to mount the flash memory. And from that moment on it seems to be working correctly. That was said one of the briefings, IIRC.
"If they ask, we come," Blackman said, echoing the enthusiasm of BAE officials. "I think when something like this happens, the whole community responds to it."
Maybe they should put up an image of the data, the diagrams of the systemboard, and descriptions of the symptoms, and submit it to Ask Slashdot. I'm sure there are a couple of VxWorks experts here who'd love to take a crack at this :)
Ofcourse NASA did implement a measure of redundancy by sending two rovers instead of just one.
Man.. I wish I had 128mb of ram in my 1mhz CBM-64!
Opportunity and Spirit are mainly set up to find out about the mineralogy, and their task is to try to establish once and for all that liquid water was once abundant on Mars.
So the pornsite sets the limit to 25 seconds...
Still, the MER's are a tremendous achievement, and it is incredible that these days we can see the pictures coming in to a computer in mission control, LIVE on the internet! Woops, gotta go, next briefing is about to start :)
You could send a message to the team requesting a long exposure navcam or pancam image taken during Martian nighttime. Maybe they'll even do it too.. "NASA Shows First Night Image From Mars"..
Umm... it's an orbiter. Maybe it could drop some propellant.
Why?