And not that far from the truth. The USSR had the largest land army in the world in 1945 and America could not sustain (internally) not to start sending troops back to the US after ther germans surrendered. Therefore, without the atom bomb, the USSR would likely have invaded Western Europe by 1946/47 and there would have been nothing the europeans or the americans could have done to stop them from taking the continental part of Europe. England would likely have been spared, as the soviets did not have great emphasis or experience in naval operations / amphibious landings on a scale like D-Day.
Therefore the demonstration of the atom bomb and it's effects for the USSR was also a part of the desission for Truman when he ordered the use of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In an ideal worl you would likely be right, but in the real world people have been quite proficient in killing / mutilating one another with or without nukes (think european part of WW I + II).
The exiistance of nukes likely prevented WWIII from breaking out globally as both sides knew that a global WWIII would be lost by both sides (due to MAD). We only saw local 'hot zones' in the form of Korea several african south american nations and to a lesser exstent Vietnam. In the final analysis i think that nyklear weapons have resulted in fewer deaths during the last 60 years than we would have seen without them.
That said, i still do not like such weapons, as they guarentee sivilian casualties in the extreme, but radiation is desipte the 'bad press' an easy poison to detect (anyone with a $50 geigercounter can do his own 'threat analysis' in any given area) as opposed to biological / chemical poisons which requires sophisticated equipment to detect.
Which makes sense as the bomb was a small one (for a nuke) with a yield of approx 15 kiloton and was detonated at an altitude of 500 meters. This would have prevented the fireball from actually touching the ground and contaminate the ground. Thus only neutron activation would have created any lasting radioactivity on the ground below the bomb, and that was also reduced due to the distance. The only permanent radioactivity would be trapped in the fireball and would have been deposited downwind by the 'black rain' (which would be dangerous).
I'm sure they did, but as another has already said, it's not a single man job. Besides, not very command to a spacecraft can be simulated and tested in advance. Some commands have to be sent at the exact right moment, not before, in order to make something as comples as the Heugens project work.
It's a pity that the comand to activate channel A on the Cassini spacecraft was not sent as data was lost, but one can only hope that future missions do not make the same mistake.
Incidently this event demonstrate why complex interplanatory / interstellar missions can likely not be sucesfully made without eiter a vastly more advanced artificial inteligence in the on-board compter or a human crew able to make on the spot decisions in order to correct mistakes and / or unanticipated events / discoveries.
The problem with hydrogen generation from anything other than either renewables and/or nuclear sources is that the net polution (radioactive waste set aside, see below) to the environment is larger than that caused by normal internal combustion engines. One reason is that converting hydrocarbons to clean hydrogen (without carbon dioxide/monoxide) is not easy and costs energy. An other reason is that hydrogen is not easy to store as many others have said. It is bulky and has hte ugly habit of leaking through almost anything (creating a hydrogen tight valve is not trivial (contact NASA if in doubt)). Furthermore, the cost in materials and energy to create hydrogen storage tanks for vhicles also create pollution whereas normal gas tanks are cheap to produce both in energy and materials.
Granted in the case of busses and lorries hydrogen fuel may be a viable option, but in the case of private cars it is not! (economically and environmentally that is, Politics is another matter entirely).
The only thing hydrogen fuel does is it mooves the pollution somewhere else.
In the case of hydrogen production through electrolysis, the process is ineffective and unless there is a source of cheap energy handy (in the case of Iceland, geothermal and hydroelectric) it would be economically impossible as noone would like to pay twice the cost for hydrogen fuel instad of normal gas added to the fact that a hydrogen powered car would cost more than a normal car.
In the case of nuclear energy, this is also a viable soruce. The problem with waste can be properly managed if the waste is deposited in underground caves drilled in stable precambiran shield areas like Eastern Canada, South Africa, Vestern Australia or north east Scandinavia These areas has been geologically stable for the last 500 Million years. I this is not enough, deposit the waste in an area of the Mariana trench and let natural subduction processes carry the waste underground into the earth's mantle.
Not to mention Huge amounts of hydroelectric power of which they only utilize a small amount of already (there is approx 50K people on Iceland and they canntuse more electricity).
There is actually some investigations going on about the feasibility of constructing an under-sea high tension power cable from Iceland to Europe to allow larger use of the power avaliable on Iceland.
Wow. Is that true? I find it interesting that U235 is 6 magnitudes beyond chemical fuels, while Antimater is only 3 orders of magnitude beyond that.
Well not exactly surprising. The fission of one U235 atom liberates approx 200 MeV which corresponds to roughly the mass of 1/5'th of a proton so the anihilation of one U235 Atom to pure energy would liberate roughly 1000 times more energy than fission..
The worst hit will be the ones we never hear about because their whole island has been sweapt clean and noone even knows how many villages was on said islands
Besides Tourists have F*** airplanes comming to evac them out...
yes not to forget a more reliable communications link to Earth.
As long as the astronauts stay on the 'Earth side' og the Moon there is no problems, but if manned explorations / bases are to be on the far side of the Moon, then a few orpiting comm-sats would be extremely practical (not to say nescesarry).
The best way to do this would be to orbit one or two comm sats arround the 'Liberation Point (L5)' behind the moon as described in Buzz Aldrins 'Encounter with Tiber'.
Actually as i recall, the plutonium thermal generators (or was there only one i dont remember) was designed to withstand a large degree of abuse. Remember that when a launch vhiacle 'explodes' it realy is 'just' a fast combustion and not a detonation.
The net effect of this is that well shielded (in a mechnical sense) components survive such explosions (as dramatically observed in the challenger disaster, where the crew cabin survived almost intact untill it hit the water some 5 mins later, possibly with survived crewmembers up to that point).
The plutonium thermal generators on Cassini would have survived such a disaster and likely landed intact. Although you would likely need special cleanup crews in case the containers had fractured on hitting the earth the plutonium would not be dispersed in small breathable particles.
Well I'll bet the French are not going to find the idea amusing (unless the government of said system were forced to talk and write all law's in french:-))
That is, in fact, faster than the fastest speeding bullet (how fast is a speeding bullet?) So what could you do with a vehicle that fast?
Actually it's not. There is a special projectile/gun type which can reach hypersonic speeds and that is the railgun (no joke). The difference is that the rail gun accelerates in vaccum by electormagnetic means and can easialy reach 5000+ MPh. The US army is experimenting with the thing (which is Huge if large speeds is to be attained) and are planning to build some sort of tank killer using just the kinetic kill principle.
AN interesting question those articles do pose, though, is - if Mars was so wet for so long (wet enough to make this sedimentary rock) why is there so much Olivine up there? Olivine breaks down when exposed to water - even frozen water.
Yep on earth olivine breaks down in the pressence of water but on earth there is also oxygen (dissolved in the water).
Granted under metamorphic conditions (where there usually is reducing conditions) olivine does also break down to iron oxides and serpentine minerals, but in that case, high temperatures allows the minerals to change. On earth, fresh Olivine can be found at surface level as long as they have not been exposed to water with dissolved oxygen (For instance olivine can be found in Norway in precambrian rocks which has been near sea level for the last 600 milion years but not exposed to water containing oxygen).
It's named after the Nile island where the Rosetta stone was discovered.
Sorry to correct, but Philae is not the location where the Rosetta stone was found by the french ingeneers under Napoleon. The Rosetta stone was found in the Nile delta whereas the iland of Philae is in southern Egypt near the border to Sudan.
Philae was! the island where the Isis temple once stood (was moved to a nearby island in the 1960's by UNESCO when the new Aswan dam was build). This temple was the Eyptian temple which survived the longest after christianity's introduction to Egypt. The temple was ordred closed in 500 something by a Roman emperor (in Constantinople, pressent Istanbul).
Crossbreeding happens in this way: a animal s infected with more than one influenza virus. So its cells create "virus particle". The virus particle combine to virus, just like Drexlers nanotech dream. They self assemble. During assembly all particles which are "compatible" combine, regardless of the source they sprang from. A lot dont 'work' as virus after wards, but some become completely new virus, often VERY dangerous.
Yep. As far as i remember, this is how the 'spanish influenza', which killed litterally millions of yong fit adults just after the first world war (1918 or thereabouts), got started. It is believed that it came from birds (more specifically chickens).
The energy from the impact is not the problem. I was not assuming that the energy from the meteor strike formed the volcanic eruptions in India, but only that the seismic vibrations influenced the upper mantle causing more extensive melting than is usually the case (the asthenosphere is partially molten, or at least very close to the solidus as P and S wave velocities are lower in this part of the mantle). It is therefore possible that a large vibration could influence this part of the mantle.
I agree that P and S waves will be largely unfloused, but the surface waves would be focused to some degree even accounting for the unhomogenity of the crust. Although they are damped by the earth, the low frequency wawes (which would be the ones which could influence the upper mantle) would have so long wawelength, that they would not be that much attenuated. Granted, for formation of relally long wewelength surface wawes to form you need a large impact, but the one in Yucatan is at least 300 km in diameter, which is propably large enough.
(Still a lot of rocks left over to crash and burn, though. Take a look at all those craters on the Moon. Earth would look the same, if not for erosion.)
Actually it is not erosion which has destroyed all the craters left ower from the formation of the earth but plate tectonics instead. If you take a look at Mars, the souther hemisphere still has a lot of the original craters left over even though there is wind erosion on Mars. Granted the erosion on Mars is not so severe as the combined erosion of wind and water is here on Earth, but still, erosion can only level a surface, not erase the subteranean features of a impact (magmatic activity, high pressure polymorphs of normal minerals etc.).
Something to note is that both cases here involves a meteor impact on the opposite side of the earth from the eruptions. Coincidence?
Coincidence? Nope. When a spherical body like the earth or any other of the terrestrial planets is hit by a suficiently large meteor the shockwave is focused by the spherical shape and arrive at the exact opposite side of the planet resulting in a massive earthquake (actually 3, one from each of the three types of vibrations (sound) that travel through the earth with different speeds). The large one would be the surface vibrations as they would be completely focused whereas the P and S vibations which trave through the planet would be less vell focused. The P and S vibrations however vould interfere with the mantle and lower crust on the far side which is the origin of most magmas.
One spectacular evidence of this is found on Mercury where a large crater (The caloris basin) has an area on the directly opposite side which was named 'wierd terrain' by the people analysing the Mariner 10 images of Mercury.
For practical use, we could use it's quirkyness to see earth sized planets orbiting stars without building monsterous interferometers.
Sorry nope. This would do us no good in detecting planets at interstellar distances. First of all, you still need large interferometers (or mirrors) to resolve small angular distances (read planetary orbits at interstellar distances). Secondly, ordinary light (from stars and planets etc. is randomly polarised and the orbital angular momentum would be distributed randumly according to some statistical energy distribution function (there are several and i don't know enough quantum physics to tell which one). Therefore the orbital angular mmentum would not carry any information. You need lasers or similar stuff to encode the angular momentum with information, natural light does not work.
An other problem is that we don't know what we are looking for. On earth, microbes can be extremly small (vira as an example) requiring an electron microscope. As anyone who has ever operated an electron microscope knows, sample preparation and microscope maintainance is time consuming and requires a lot of intervention by the user. Although an optical microscope may in principle survive the trip to Mars intact, an electron microscope is almost certain to be unusable after the trip as electron microscopes do not handle vibrations well. During reentry (and launch) the spacrcraft has to endure extended periods of time with a lot of vibrations and high accelerations.
The best thing to do is to send a probe which would pick up a sample and send it back to Earth in a sealed container (with Mars atmosphere and pressure) where geologists / biologists then could take it apart and study it.
Of course the realy best thing to do is send the scientist and their lab gear to Mars instead and do the exploration / analysis on Mars.
P.S. To those who asked about the using the remaining on-board fuel to lower the bottom of the orbit to a shuttle serviceable level. The remaining on-board fuel is insufficient to do that... a rough calculation shows that it is 1-2 orders of magnitude too small.
Yep. The only fuel left on the spacecraft is the manoeuvring fuel (most likely compressed nitrogen) that is only used for orientation control and extremely minor orbit alterations. The only other option would be to reignite the booster stage, which put the spacecraft in the current orbit. This can only be done if the stage is still there (and not jettisoned for safety reasons) and if there is any fuel left in the stage. Assuming that these criterions are met, reigniting a booster stage (with chemical fuel) is not something you really want to do for a number of reasons. First of all, some control valves may be frozen; secondly earlier missions have had problems with reigniting already used booster stages.
I think there were some problems during one of the early Apollo-missions where an Apollo module (with astronauts) connected with a spent Agena module and using the rest of the Agena's fuel to reach a higher orbit to test if this was possible and a viable option for the rest of the Apollo programme. The stage did not go boom, but it did have a delayed ignition, which was not good!
To conclude: Realtering the Chandra's orbit down to something suitable for a shuttle mission is not an option!
Can't recall off the top of my head if it was the preasure/temp or both that changed.. but the environment in the experiment was not that of mars surface which caused the problem.
Well thay definitly had to change the temperature. If i recall correctly, the average summer temperature on Mars is somewhere arround -20 degree celcius, and at that temperature it would be hard to add nutrients (and especially liquid water) to the soil.
Few microbes can thrive at sub zero temperatures (or more correctly in solid water), they can survive in a sort of hibernation state but not live normally. If you have a sample of frozen dirt with / without microbes you would normally thaw the dirt and see if the microbes starts to grow and multiply (and produce waste chemicals like CO2).
I think this was how the Viking lander experiments was designed, however i have not checked the specifics.
Anyway, science and religion don't have to be at odds. In fact, they shouldn't be at odds -- religion and technology may often have a beef with each other, but science should just be seen as exploring God's creation.
I agree completely.
Science tells us how life and the universe was created, and religion tells us why the universe was created.
Of course this point of view is lost on those that still think the earth and univese was created in 7 days at arround 5000 BC (or whenever the Irish monk in the 17'th century calculated it to be).
And another problem: Sonar work so well in water because water is an almost continuos medium (no cracks or air bubbles). Cracks and other changes in medium density interfeers with sonar performance, and in fact air bubbles are used in countermeasures fired by submarines to fool incomming homing torpedoes. A pyramid consists of huge blocks with cracks and small amount of air between the blocks. Although the pyramids are very well engineered, there will always be small amount of air between two piees of stone. This renders sonar useless below the first layer of stone. One can measure the depth of the first stone layer with soner (assuming that the outer stones do not have too many cracks), but beyond that, no information wuld be obtained.
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And not that far from the truth. The USSR had the largest land army in the world in 1945 and America could not sustain (internally) not to start sending troops back to the US after ther germans surrendered. Therefore, without the atom bomb, the USSR would likely have invaded Western Europe by 1946/47 and there would have been nothing the europeans or the americans could have done to stop them from taking the continental part of Europe. England would likely have been spared, as the soviets did not have great emphasis or experience in naval operations / amphibious landings on a scale like D-Day.
Therefore the demonstration of the atom bomb and it's effects for the USSR was also a part of the desission for Truman when he ordered the use of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Yours yazeran
Plan: to go to Mars one day with a hammer.
In an ideal worl you would likely be right, but in the real world people have been quite proficient in killing / mutilating one another with or without nukes (think european part of WW I + II).
The exiistance of nukes likely prevented WWIII from breaking out globally as both sides knew that a global WWIII would be lost by both sides (due to MAD). We only saw local 'hot zones' in the form of Korea several african south american nations and to a lesser exstent Vietnam. In the final analysis i think that nyklear weapons have resulted in fewer deaths during the last 60 years than we would have seen without them.
That said, i still do not like such weapons, as they guarentee sivilian casualties in the extreme, but radiation is desipte the 'bad press' an easy poison to detect (anyone with a $50 geigercounter can do his own 'threat analysis' in any given area) as opposed to biological / chemical poisons which requires sophisticated equipment to detect.
Yours yazeran
Plan: to go to Mars one day with a hammer.
Which makes sense as the bomb was a small one (for a nuke) with a yield of approx 15 kiloton and was detonated at an altitude of 500 meters. This would have prevented the fireball from actually touching the ground and contaminate the ground. Thus only neutron activation would have created any lasting radioactivity on the ground below the bomb, and that was also reduced due to the distance.
The only permanent radioactivity would be trapped in the fireball and would have been deposited downwind by the 'black rain' (which would be dangerous).
Yours Yazeran
Plan: to go to Mars one day with a hammer.
I'm sure they did, but as another has already said, it's not a single man job. Besides, not very command to a spacecraft can be simulated and tested in advance. Some commands have to be sent at the exact right moment, not before, in order to make something as comples as the Heugens project work.
It's a pity that the comand to activate channel A on the Cassini spacecraft was not sent as data was lost, but one can only hope that future missions do not make the same mistake.
Incidently this event demonstrate why complex interplanatory / interstellar missions can likely not be sucesfully made without eiter a vastly more advanced artificial inteligence in the on-board compter or a human crew able to make on the spot decisions in order to correct mistakes and / or unanticipated events / discoveries.
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
Wrong!
The problem with hydrogen generation from anything other than either renewables and/or nuclear sources is that the net polution (radioactive waste set aside, see below) to the environment is larger than that caused by normal internal combustion engines. One reason is that converting hydrocarbons to clean hydrogen (without carbon dioxide/monoxide) is not easy and costs energy.
An other reason is that hydrogen is not easy to store as many others have said. It is bulky and has hte ugly habit of leaking through almost anything (creating a hydrogen tight valve is not trivial (contact NASA if in doubt)). Furthermore, the cost in materials and energy to create hydrogen storage tanks for vhicles also create pollution whereas normal gas tanks are cheap to produce both in energy and materials.
Granted in the case of busses and lorries hydrogen fuel may be a viable option, but in the case of private cars it is not! (economically and environmentally that is, Politics is another matter entirely).
The only thing hydrogen fuel does is it mooves the pollution somewhere else.
In the case of hydrogen production through electrolysis, the process is ineffective and unless there is a source of cheap energy handy (in the case of Iceland, geothermal and hydroelectric) it would be economically impossible as noone would like to pay twice the cost for hydrogen fuel instad of normal gas added to the fact that a hydrogen powered car would cost more than a normal car.
In the case of nuclear energy, this is also a viable soruce. The problem with waste can be properly managed if the waste is deposited in underground caves drilled in stable precambiran shield areas like Eastern Canada, South Africa, Vestern Australia or north east Scandinavia
These areas has been geologically stable for the last 500 Million years. I this is not enough, deposit the waste in an area of the Mariana trench and let natural subduction processes carry the waste underground into the earth's mantle.
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to mars one day with a hammer.
Not to mention Huge amounts of hydroelectric power of which they only utilize a small amount of already (there is approx 50K people on Iceland and they canntuse more electricity).
There is actually some investigations going on about the feasibility of constructing an under-sea high tension power cable from Iceland to Europe to allow larger use of the power avaliable on Iceland.
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
Wow. Is that true? I find it interesting that U235 is 6 magnitudes beyond chemical fuels, while Antimater is only 3 orders of magnitude beyond that.
Well not exactly surprising. The fission of one U235 atom liberates approx 200 MeV which corresponds to roughly the mass of 1/5'th of a proton so the anihilation of one U235 Atom to pure energy would liberate roughly 1000 times more energy than fission..
Yours Yazeran
Plan: to go to Mars one day with a hammer.
WRONG!!!
The worst hit will be the ones we never hear about because their whole island has been sweapt clean and noone even knows how many villages was on said islands
Besides Tourists have F*** airplanes comming to evac them out...
Yazeran
Plan: to go to Mars one day with a hammer
yes not to forget a more reliable communications link to Earth.
As long as the astronauts stay on the 'Earth side' og the Moon there is no problems, but if manned explorations / bases are to be on the far side of the Moon, then a few orpiting comm-sats would be extremely practical (not to say nescesarry).
The best way to do this would be to orbit one or two comm sats arround the 'Liberation Point (L5)' behind the moon as described in Buzz Aldrins 'Encounter with Tiber'.
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
Actually as i recall, the plutonium thermal generators (or was there only one i dont remember) was designed to withstand a large degree of abuse. Remember that when a launch vhiacle 'explodes' it realy is 'just' a fast combustion and not a detonation.
The net effect of this is that well shielded (in a mechnical sense) components survive such explosions (as dramatically observed in the challenger disaster, where the crew cabin survived almost intact untill it hit the water some 5 mins later, possibly with survived crewmembers up to that point).
The plutonium thermal generators on Cassini would have survived such a disaster and likely landed intact. Although you would likely need special cleanup crews in case the containers had fractured on hitting the earth the plutonium would not be dispersed in small breathable particles.
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
Well I'll bet the French are not going to find the idea amusing (unless the government of said system were forced to talk and write all law's in french :-))
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer
That is, in fact, faster than the fastest speeding bullet (how fast is a speeding bullet?) So what could you do with a vehicle that fast?
Actually it's not. There is a special projectile/gun type which can reach hypersonic speeds and that is the railgun (no joke). The difference is that the rail gun accelerates in vaccum by electormagnetic means and can easialy reach 5000+ MPh. The US army is experimenting with the thing (which is Huge if large speeds is to be attained) and are planning to build some sort of tank killer using just the kinetic kill principle.
For reference look Here or here
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
Maybe a geologist could tell me whether there are any igneous rock formations that might look sedimentary & they therefore had to do further analysis.
Tectonic deformation along shear-zones can easialy create laminated rocks (in the extreme case called mylonites).
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hamer.
AN interesting question those articles do pose, though, is - if Mars was so wet for so long (wet enough to make this sedimentary rock) why is there so much Olivine up there? Olivine breaks down when exposed to water - even frozen water.
Yep on earth olivine breaks down in the pressence of water but on earth there is also oxygen (dissolved in the water).
Granted under metamorphic conditions (where there usually is reducing conditions) olivine does also break down to iron oxides and serpentine minerals, but in that case, high temperatures allows the minerals to change. On earth, fresh Olivine can be found at surface level as long as they have not been exposed to water with dissolved oxygen
(For instance olivine can be found in Norway in precambrian rocks which has been near sea level for the last 600 milion years but not exposed to water containing oxygen).
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
It's named after the Nile island where the Rosetta stone was discovered.
Sorry to correct, but Philae is not the location where the Rosetta stone was found by the french ingeneers under Napoleon. The Rosetta stone was found in the Nile delta whereas the iland of Philae is in southern Egypt near the border to Sudan.
Philae was! the island where the Isis temple once stood (was moved to a nearby island in the 1960's by UNESCO when the new Aswan dam was build). This temple was the Eyptian temple which survived the longest after christianity's introduction to Egypt. The temple was ordred closed in 500 something by a Roman emperor (in Constantinople, pressent Istanbul).
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
Crossbreeding happens in this way: a animal s infected with more than one influenza virus. So its cells create "virus particle". The virus particle combine to virus, just like Drexlers nanotech dream. They self assemble. During assembly all particles which are "compatible" combine, regardless of the source they sprang from. A lot dont 'work' as virus after wards, but some become completely new virus, often VERY dangerous.
Yep. As far as i remember, this is how the 'spanish influenza', which killed litterally millions of yong fit adults just after the first world war (1918 or thereabouts), got started. It is believed that it came from birds (more specifically chickens).
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
The energy from the impact is not the problem. I was not assuming that the energy from the meteor strike formed the volcanic eruptions in India, but only that the seismic vibrations influenced the upper mantle causing more extensive melting than is usually the case (the asthenosphere is partially molten, or at least very close to the solidus as P and S wave velocities are lower in this part of the mantle). It is therefore possible that a large vibration could influence this part of the mantle.
I agree that P and S waves will be largely unfloused, but the surface waves would be focused to some degree even accounting for the unhomogenity of the crust. Although they are damped by the earth, the low frequency wawes (which would be the ones which could influence the upper mantle) would have so long wawelength, that they would not be that much attenuated. Granted, for formation of relally long wewelength surface wawes to form you need a large impact, but the one in Yucatan is at least 300 km in diameter, which is propably large enough.
Yours Yazeran
Plan to go to Mars one day with a hammer.
(Still a lot of rocks left over to crash and burn, though. Take a look at all those craters on the Moon. Earth would look the same, if not for erosion.)
Actually it is not erosion which has destroyed all the craters left ower from the formation of the earth but plate tectonics instead. If you take a look at Mars, the souther hemisphere still has a lot of the original craters left over even though there is wind erosion on Mars. Granted the erosion on Mars is not so severe as the combined erosion of wind and water is here on Earth, but still, erosion can only level a surface, not erase the subteranean features of a impact (magmatic activity, high pressure polymorphs of normal minerals etc.).
Yours Yazeran
Plan to go to Mars one day with a hammer.
Something to note is that both cases here involves a meteor impact on the opposite side of the earth from the eruptions. Coincidence?
Coincidence? Nope. When a spherical body like the earth or any other of the terrestrial planets is hit by a suficiently large meteor the shockwave is focused by the spherical shape and arrive at the exact opposite side of the planet resulting in a massive earthquake (actually 3, one from each of the three types of vibrations (sound) that travel through the earth with different speeds). The large one would be the surface vibrations as they would be completely focused whereas the P and S vibations which trave through the planet would be less vell focused. The P and S vibrations however vould interfere with the mantle and lower crust on the far side which is the origin of most magmas.
One spectacular evidence of this is found on Mercury where a large crater (The caloris basin) has an area on the directly opposite side which was named 'wierd terrain' by the people analysing the Mariner 10 images of Mercury.
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
For practical use, we could use it's quirkyness to see earth sized planets orbiting stars without building monsterous interferometers.
Sorry nope. This would do us no good in detecting planets at interstellar distances. First of all, you still need large interferometers (or mirrors) to resolve small angular distances (read planetary orbits at interstellar distances). Secondly, ordinary light (from stars and planets etc. is randomly polarised and the orbital angular momentum would be distributed randumly according to some statistical energy distribution function (there are several and i don't know enough quantum physics to tell which one). Therefore the orbital angular mmentum would not carry any information. You need lasers or similar stuff to encode the angular momentum with information, natural light does not work.
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to mars one day with a hammer.
An other problem is that we don't know what we are looking for. On earth, microbes can be extremly small (vira as an example) requiring an electron microscope. As anyone who has ever operated an electron microscope knows, sample preparation and microscope maintainance is time consuming and requires a lot of intervention by the user. Although an optical microscope may in principle survive the trip to Mars intact, an electron microscope is almost certain to be unusable after the trip as electron microscopes do not handle vibrations well. During reentry (and launch) the spacrcraft has to endure extended periods of time with a lot of vibrations and high accelerations.
The best thing to do is to send a probe which would pick up a sample and send it back to Earth in a sealed container (with Mars atmosphere and pressure) where geologists / biologists then could take it apart and study it.
Of course the realy best thing to do is send the scientist and their lab gear to Mars instead and do the exploration / analysis on Mars.
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
P.S. To those who asked about the using the remaining on-board fuel to lower the bottom of the orbit to a shuttle serviceable level. The remaining on-board fuel is insufficient to do that ... a rough calculation shows that it is 1-2 orders of magnitude too small.
Yep. The only fuel left on the spacecraft is the manoeuvring fuel (most likely compressed nitrogen) that is only used for orientation control and extremely minor orbit alterations. The only other option would be to reignite the booster stage, which put the spacecraft in the current orbit. This can only be done if the stage is still there (and not jettisoned for safety reasons) and if there is any fuel left in the stage. Assuming that these criterions are met, reigniting a booster stage (with chemical fuel) is not something you really want to do for a number of reasons. First of all, some control valves may be frozen; secondly earlier missions have had problems with reigniting already used booster stages.
I think there were some problems during one of the early Apollo-missions where an Apollo module (with astronauts) connected with a spent Agena module and using the rest of the Agena's fuel to reach a higher orbit to test if this was possible and a viable option for the rest of the Apollo programme. The stage did not go boom, but it did have a delayed ignition, which was not good!
To conclude: Realtering the Chandra's orbit down to something suitable for a shuttle mission is not an option!
Well thay definitly had to change the temperature.
If i recall correctly, the average summer temperature on Mars is somewhere arround -20 degree celcius, and at that temperature it would be hard to add nutrients (and especially liquid water) to the soil.
Few microbes can thrive at sub zero temperatures (or more correctly in solid water), they can survive in a sort of hibernation state but not live normally. If you have a sample of frozen dirt with / without microbes you would normally thaw the dirt and see if the microbes starts to grow and multiply (and produce waste chemicals like CO2).
I think this was how the Viking lander experiments was designed, however i have not checked the specifics.
Yours Yazeran
Plan: to go to Mars one day with a hammer.
I agree completely.
Science tells us how life and the universe was created, and religion tells us why the universe was created.
Of course this point of view is lost on those that still think the earth and univese was created in 7 days at arround 5000 BC (or whenever the Irish monk in the 17'th century calculated it to be).
Yours Yazeran
Plan: to go to Mars one day with a hammer.
A pyramid consists of huge blocks with cracks and small amount of air between the blocks. Although the pyramids are very well engineered, there will always be small amount of air between two piees of stone. This renders sonar useless below the first layer of stone.
One can measure the depth of the first stone layer with soner (assuming that the outer stones do not have too many cracks), but beyond that, no information wuld be obtained.
Yours Yazeran
Plan: to go to Mars one day with a hammer