#space on irc.freenode.net is hosting a Phoenix Landing Party on Sunday, May 25 to share in this momentous occasion for planetary exploration. We'll be following NASA TV through landing, then ogling the raw images when they are released several hours later. Historically, #space has been a hub for collaborative efforts in image processing by the space enthusiast community (Mars Exploration Rovers, Huygens, etc). Hope you can join us!
But her 'new' immune system isn't coming from mature, pre-trained cells from a bone-marrow transplant. It seems more likely that her 'new' immune system came from errant stem cells that differentiated and went through self-tolerance training in her body. No GVHD issues there, since the central tolerance training occurs in her body, not his.
I wouldn't give too much credit to the movies planting images. The whole point of putting an image or story on the screen is so that people will recognize it for what it is. Sure, that usually means visualizing something which people don't ordinarily see in their everyday lives, but if the movies starting portraying computers using a completely realistic but unrecognizable visual device, then people (average joe included) wouldn't understand what they were looking at.
The communication bottleneck created by the MGS problem may be partly to blame.
As has been mentioned in another not-reply, the main reason for the dearth of new images from Opportunity is that Mars was at conjunction with the sun.
Even if this weren't the case, losing MGS won't put a major strain on rover communications. I don't have more recent numbers handy, but as of Jan 19 2005, MGS had only returned 7% of the data from the rovers compared to the Mars Odyssey relay which returned 90% (with the remaining 3% coming down directly from the rovers).
The Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) has reported that the Huygens signal has been picked up by several Radio Telescopes on the ground. There was already a plan in place to investigate the Doppler on the signal to learn about Huygens' descent profile. Also, the most recent ESA press conference on Huygens stated that they are trying to recover data from the ground telescopes (which they are now referring to as Channel C), although it was unclear if this would be just the signal's Doppler or actually decoding some of the lost data stream.
Its highly unlikely that its either liquid, or ice. We're seeing a smooth area of sand falling down into the crater from above. Keep in mind that although it may look flat, it is actually, quite steep
Superior for science isn't the same as superior for viewing. They were designed towards the goal of geologic investigation, and to that end, aren't actually all that great at capturing 'true human vision color' at all. The filters are narrow and don't overlap in coverage, missing entire segments of our visible spectrum.
Also, a good deal of the 'debate' comes down to how to process the true color images from the auto-contrasted, separately exposed frames released as JPGs by NASA/JPL on a real time basis. The folks at NASA (and those that are using the calibrated files released by NASA through the Planetary Data System) are working with good data, whereas a huge number of people are working with the jpg's that weren't designed to be combined to make color. That alone is the source of most of the debate over the MER missions.
It is very easy to create wildly different colors simply by balancing the frames in a certain way, which has to be done anyway to undo some effects that aren't calibrated out by the time the raw jpg images are released. So a person who is sitting down to "properly" balance the frames will see a variety of possible outcomes, some of those balancing acts produce images that agree with the calibrated (true) view, and others will produce blue skies and green dirt, further fueling the debate.
They do. The rovers use filters to capture specific (~40 nm) color ranges in 12 individual wavelengths ranging from infrared to blue, which can later be combined to form a near-true-color view of the scene. It is specifically useful for doing analysis of the spectrum of light thrown by rocks or the sky using 12 points of along the spectrum, instead of just 3 which you would get from a standard red/green/blue camera.
The most recent report on the failure of Beagle II, done by the House of Commons Science and Technology select committee sighted many "amateurish" funding woes and a lack of cooperation between the USA and the UK government as the underlying cause of failure. Pillenger responded by saying that they couldn't get guarantees of funding mostly because those groups didn't have the money to give. But what does that say about the success of the next project if the funding for Beagle II was dependant on groups that couldn't afford to guarantee funding but said they'd try to find the money anyway...and then failed to do so, unless they go at the next mission with a different attitude?
NASA has backed off of its Faster-Better-Cheaper which left faster and cheaper intact, while somewhat disregarding better, in favor of Faster-Better-Fund_Projects_Appropriatly...which seems certainly to have done the trick for such projects as the Mars Exploration Rovers, which (I would agrue appropriatly) cost hundreds of millions of dollars to properly build and test for the challenges they were being asked to face.
The image linked to in the main story as "bright patches" does show the bright surface features (bright, diffuse background), but the sharply defined bright feature at the bottom of the image is a cloud. There is a 4 frame image of the cloud, as it moved across the surface over the duration of the flyby.
This 3 frame image prepared by the Cassini team, for their press conference yesterday, shows the surface definition through visual and infrared spectra, defining the areas of surface features, ices, and possible hydrocarbons.
I understand the concern often put forth towards new materials, and I would be the first to say extensive testing should come *before* extensive deployment of new compounds....but....
I'd love to know the sources for the carbon fiber health risk study. Most of the ones I was able to find describe physical problems (structural damage to cells, clumping in airways, etc) and not chemical reactions to the Carbon contained with the buckyball/tube. I was under the impression that the carbon bound within such structures gained its inherient strength from the relativly strong bonds between the carbon, thus making is unavailable to react with compounds in the body. I could also be completely wrong, hence my desire to read your sources.
I just fear for times when phrases like ... reacts in a serious way ...incredibly small concentrations...can cause tremendous and unexpectedly severe ...potentially serious and unpredictable impacts
lead the debate, that we are building fear on a base of unmentioned facts.
The differance might be a factor of sheer. With a sideways velocity, the airbags (either from the bounch marks visible in sleepy hollow, or from where they pulled back next to the lander) have probably moved the dust to show a bit of what is underneath. This would also explain why only the last couple of lander "bounces" are readily visible from the pictures they've taken so far.
I think the "dust" they described in the news conference yesterday is just that, the very top layer of dust thats settled out of the various windstorms this location has recently seen. It is the dust that has the mystereous bonding that keeps it together in the "globs" visible in the Microscopic Imager pics.
Seems like they're working pretty quick over at JPL to get the colorized version of the images out to the general public, since this week, they've been releasing them less between 6 and 18 hours after receiving them. But if you're not happy with their coloration, then I invite those among the slashdot community who know such things to do it themselves.
The pan cam is black and white, and uses filters to pick out certain colors in the images it takes. If you want, you can read more about what filters are on which half of the pancam (l and r). There are 8 on a side, each with its own particular wavelength and bandpasses. The description of each as well as the numbering scheme is available from the Athena instruments website at Cornell University
The raw images are being freely distributed from the JPL MER website. You'll notice camera (l or r) and filter (1-8) used is described from the naming of the pancam files (eg. 2P126471535EDN0000P2303L6M1.JPG)
Just from this last days images, they have quite a few images in differant filters, of the color wheel itself, for calibration. For a better description of the filters themselves, and of the way they plan to (and have *BEGUN* to) calibrate the images, check out several differant publications. (thanks to JPL-Gene and doug_ellison of #maestro irc.freenode.net for the links).
I, for one, am thankful that they're releasing the raw data/images at all, considering the scale of the global-slashdotting currently going on. The speedy data turnaround, and amazing openness with which they are conducting this mission is really impressive compared to anything else of this scale. Thanks to everyone at JPL, Cornell, and NASA as a whole for all the incredible work from this meager enthusiast.
What would happen if they had to evacuate
on
ISS May Have A Leak
·
· Score: 4, Informative
a couple articles from 2002 when NASA figured contingency plans in the case of an emergency or budget shortfall.
herehere and here
With regarsds to Playstations, Sony makes money on its games, not the consoles...doesn't mean they give them away.
Same with all game systems, Tivo, razors / blades (ok...they do give those away from time to time) but if they get someone who signs up for the game, plays for about a week...decides its not for him, then they still got him for $50 upfront...so they're making back their "packaging" fee.
as another beta tester, i couldn't agree more...this must have been a *GIANT* push from Sony to get it out the door, since even the dev's admitted to a vast number of bugs. They char-wiped the beta-3 about 1 1/2 months ago, and since that time, the high end professions remained largly untested through many changes, many of which introduced new bugs into the advanced capabilities of the game. The battlefields (rebels vs. imperials in a singular brawl, which can be infinitly repeated) was massivly un-usable, having barely gone in bug-tastically about 2 weeks ago.
I would have to agree that the baseline of play is above and beyond much of whats out there, and they definetly touch the surface of delivering a "star wars feel" to the universe, but it still feels rote and somewhat boring (need money? run 10 delivery missions flying on a shuttle back...and forth...and back...and forth...between 2 cities, want to advance as a crafter...click through the basic items craft sequence about 300 times and you'll get some advanced thing...you can click through...about 300 times to advance).
I have a feel that much of the interaction is yet to come in the form of player events and player cities, both of which were un-seen in the beta. But only time will tell, i just hope their buggy release doesn't turn off so many people that the project suffers in the long run because of it.
In following the "big questions" of astrophysics, it seems like it boils down to
1. Dark Matter - Look at spinning galaxies, our current theories of gravity say they spin too fast for so little mass...do some math, ok...we're short by 90% from what is visible.
2. Dark Energy - Look at far off galaxies, they are moving away from us...and they're accelerating, and since our current theories say that gravity, an attractive only force, is the only significant player on those scales.
So, if we lack an understanding of what forces act on large scale distances to such a degree that...well, it isn't even orders of magnitude, its positive where we'd expect it to be negative...hell, we don't even *have* candidates for repulsive forces acting on something the size of a galaxy at that distance, then why do we think that our calculations of what a target galaxy's mass *should* be based solely on...yup, our imcomplete equations for gravity, would be correct? Seems to me like they're both wrong in the same direction...if there were a sustained repulsive force, say...the force or "geometry" behind einstien's cosmological constant, then we'd fill in both blanks: repulsions to make distant galaxies travel away from us faster, and a force which would explain the lack of mass in galaxies.
Not only is the genome mapped out, but C. elegans has been a model organism for development. A complete flow-chart-esque understanding of the division of the first egg cell down to the last of its 959 cells. Its one of the first model organisms for a complete body-plan understanding of genetic development, but knowing the genes and figuring out the genes are 2 differant matters. Hence the experiments in space trying to understand how 0 g and amazingly controled environments affect gene expression.
Seeing as the Columbia Mission was the first *pure science* mission not having to do with Space Station construction in 2 years, I think its a great legacy for those who lost their lives that some really amazing science can come out of their work.
Slashdot Mirror
#space on irc.freenode.net is hosting a Phoenix Landing Party on Sunday, May 25 to share in this momentous occasion for planetary exploration. We'll be following NASA TV through landing, then ogling the raw images when they are released several hours later. Historically, #space has been a hub for collaborative efforts in image processing by the space enthusiast community (Mars Exploration Rovers, Huygens, etc). Hope you can join us!
But her 'new' immune system isn't coming from mature, pre-trained cells from a bone-marrow transplant. It seems more likely that her 'new' immune system came from errant stem cells that differentiated and went through self-tolerance training in her body. No GVHD issues there, since the central tolerance training occurs in her body, not his.
[group] points of inadequacies of [rival group]
www.google.com/mars/ has been active for almost exactly a year now.
I wouldn't give too much credit to the movies planting images. The whole point of putting an image or story on the screen is so that people will recognize it for what it is. Sure, that usually means visualizing something which people don't ordinarily see in their everyday lives, but if the movies starting portraying computers using a completely realistic but unrecognizable visual device, then people (average joe included) wouldn't understand what they were looking at.
The communication bottleneck created by the MGS problem may be partly to blame.
As has been mentioned in another not-reply, the main reason for the dearth of new images from Opportunity is that Mars was at conjunction with the sun.
Even if this weren't the case, losing MGS won't put a major strain on rover communications. I don't have more recent numbers handy, but as of Jan 19 2005, MGS had only returned 7% of the data from the rovers compared to the Mars Odyssey relay which returned 90% (with the remaining 3% coming down directly from the rovers).
"$121,000 showed a value in the database at $800,000,000"
Did anyone actually bother to rtfa, or is it just cool to make up numbers for post summaries now?
"A house erroneously valued at $400 million"
"The house had been valued at $121,900 before the glitch."
They left out the key word:
Not since June 1987 has the full moon been this low in the sky
See this story for a bit more detail.
oops, the link to the ground based experiment should have been : http://www.atlasaerospace.net/eng/newsi-r.htm?id=1 849
The Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) has reported that the Huygens signal has been picked up by several Radio Telescopes on the ground. There was already a plan in place to investigate the Doppler on the signal to learn about Huygens' descent profile.
Also, the most recent ESA press conference on Huygens stated that they are trying to recover data from the ground telescopes (which they are now referring to as Channel C), although it was unclear if this would be just the signal's Doppler or actually decoding some of the lost data stream.
It is indeed a spring, one of the 6 "kickoff springs" used to guarantee the heatshield seperated from the rest of the lander. There is another visible in this image:9 EFF40A3P2577L234567M1.JPG
http://www.lyle.org/~markoff/processed/1P15712277
Its highly unlikely that its either liquid, or ice. We're seeing a smooth area of sand falling down into the crater from above. Keep in mind that although it may look flat, it is actually, quite steep
Superior for science isn't the same as superior for viewing. They were designed towards the goal of geologic investigation, and to that end, aren't actually all that great at capturing 'true human vision color' at all. The filters are narrow and don't overlap in coverage, missing entire segments of our visible spectrum.
Also, a good deal of the 'debate' comes down to how to process the true color images from the auto-contrasted, separately exposed frames released as JPGs by NASA/JPL on a real time basis. The folks at NASA (and those that are using the calibrated files released by NASA through the Planetary Data System) are working with good data, whereas a huge number of people are working with the jpg's that weren't designed to be combined to make color. That alone is the source of most of the debate over the MER missions.
It is very easy to create wildly different colors simply by balancing the frames in a certain way, which has to be done anyway to undo some effects that aren't calibrated out by the time the raw jpg images are released. So a person who is sitting down to "properly" balance the frames will see a variety of possible outcomes, some of those balancing acts produce images that agree with the calibrated (true) view, and others will produce blue skies and green dirt, further fueling the debate.
They do. The rovers use filters to capture specific (~40 nm) color ranges in 12 individual wavelengths ranging from infrared to blue, which can later be combined to form a near-true-color view of the scene. It is specifically useful for doing analysis of the spectrum of light thrown by rocks or the sky using 12 points of along the spectrum, instead of just 3 which you would get from a standard red/green/blue camera.
Here is a color image of the heatshield taken on sols 326 and 328 taken through the 6 visible light filters (albeit from the auto-contrasted jpgs released by NASA, so it is not true color)
above post should have read "between the ESA and UK governments"
MPs blame lack of cash for failure of Beagle 2
The most recent report on the failure of Beagle II, done by the House of Commons Science and Technology select committee sighted many "amateurish" funding woes and a lack of cooperation between the USA and the UK government as the underlying cause of failure. Pillenger responded by saying that they couldn't get guarantees of funding mostly because those groups didn't have the money to give. But what does that say about the success of the next project if the funding for Beagle II was dependant on groups that couldn't afford to guarantee funding but said they'd try to find the money anyway...and then failed to do so, unless they go at the next mission with a different attitude?
NASA has backed off of its Faster-Better-Cheaper which left faster and cheaper intact, while somewhat disregarding better, in favor of Faster-Better-Fund_Projects_Appropriatly...which seems certainly to have done the trick for such projects as the Mars Exploration Rovers, which (I would agrue appropriatly) cost hundreds of millions of dollars to properly build and test for the challenges they were being asked to face.
The image linked to in the main story as "bright patches" does show the bright surface features (bright, diffuse background), but the sharply defined bright feature at the bottom of the image is a cloud. There is a 4 frame image of the cloud, as it moved across the surface over the duration of the flyby.
This 3 frame image prepared by the Cassini team, for their press conference yesterday, shows the surface definition through visual and infrared spectra, defining the areas of surface features, ices, and possible hydrocarbons.
I understand the concern often put forth towards new materials, and I would be the first to say extensive testing should come *before* extensive deployment of new compounds....but....
... reacts in a serious way
...incredibly small concentrations...can cause tremendous and unexpectedly severe
...potentially serious and unpredictable impacts
I'd love to know the sources for the carbon fiber health risk study. Most of the ones I was able to find describe physical problems (structural damage to cells, clumping in airways, etc) and not chemical reactions to the Carbon contained with the buckyball/tube. I was under the impression that the carbon bound within such structures gained its inherient strength from the relativly strong bonds between the carbon, thus making is unavailable to react with compounds in the body. I could also be completely wrong, hence my desire to read your sources.
I just fear for times when phrases like
lead the debate, that we are building fear on a base of unmentioned facts.
The differance might be a factor of sheer. With a sideways velocity, the airbags (either from the bounch marks visible in sleepy hollow, or from where they pulled back next to the lander) have probably moved the dust to show a bit of what is underneath. This would also explain why only the last couple of lander "bounces" are readily visible from the pictures they've taken so far.
I think the "dust" they described in the news conference yesterday is just that, the very top layer of dust thats settled out of the various windstorms this location has recently seen. It is the dust that has the mystereous bonding that keeps it together in the "globs" visible in the Microscopic Imager pics.
Seems like they're working pretty quick over at JPL to get the colorized version of the images out to the general public, since this week, they've been releasing them less between 6 and 18 hours after receiving them. But if you're not happy with their coloration, then I invite those among the slashdot community who know such things to do it themselves.
The pan cam is black and white, and uses filters to pick out certain colors in the images it takes. If you want, you can read more about what filters are on which half of the pancam (l and r). There are 8 on a side, each with its own particular wavelength and bandpasses. The description of each as well as the numbering scheme is available from the Athena instruments website at Cornell University
The raw images are being freely distributed from the JPL MER website. You'll notice camera (l or r) and filter (1-8) used is described from the naming of the pancam files (eg. 2P126471535EDN0000P2303L6M1.JPG)
Just from this last days images, they have quite a few images in differant filters, of the color wheel itself, for calibration. For a better description of the filters themselves, and of the way they plan to (and have *BEGUN* to) calibrate the images, check out several differant publications. (thanks to JPL-Gene and doug_ellison of #maestro irc.freenode.net for the links).
I, for one, am thankful that they're releasing the raw data/images at all, considering the scale of the global-slashdotting currently going on. The speedy data turnaround, and amazing openness with which they are conducting this mission is really impressive compared to anything else of this scale. Thanks to everyone at JPL, Cornell, and NASA as a whole for all the incredible work from this meager enthusiast.
a couple articles from 2002 when NASA figured contingency plans in the case of an emergency or budget shortfall.
here here and here
Because they can:
With regarsds to Playstations, Sony makes money on its games, not the consoles...doesn't mean they give them away.
Same with all game systems, Tivo, razors / blades (ok...they do give those away from time to time) but if they get someone who signs up for the game, plays for about a week...decides its not for him, then they still got him for $50 upfront...so they're making back their "packaging" fee.
as another beta tester, i couldn't agree more...this must have been a *GIANT* push from Sony to get it out the door, since even the dev's admitted to a vast number of bugs. They char-wiped the beta-3 about 1 1/2 months ago, and since that time, the high end professions remained largly untested through many changes, many of which introduced new bugs into the advanced capabilities of the game. The battlefields (rebels vs. imperials in a singular brawl, which can be infinitly repeated) was massivly un-usable, having barely gone in bug-tastically about 2 weeks ago.
I would have to agree that the baseline of play is above and beyond much of whats out there, and they definetly touch the surface of delivering a "star wars feel" to the universe, but it still feels rote and somewhat boring (need money? run 10 delivery missions flying on a shuttle back...and forth...and back...and forth...between 2 cities, want to advance as a crafter...click through the basic items craft sequence about 300 times and you'll get some advanced thing...you can click through...about 300 times to advance).
I have a feel that much of the interaction is yet to come in the form of player events and player cities, both of which were un-seen in the beta. But only time will tell, i just hope their buggy release doesn't turn off so many people that the project suffers in the long run because of it.
In following the "big questions" of astrophysics, it seems like it boils down to
...well, it isn't even orders of magnitude, its positive where we'd expect it to be negative...hell, we don't even *have* candidates for repulsive forces acting on something the size of a galaxy at that distance, then why do we think that our calculations of what a target galaxy's mass *should* be based solely on...yup, our imcomplete equations for gravity, would be correct? Seems to me like they're both wrong in the same direction...if there were a sustained repulsive force, say...the force or "geometry" behind einstien's cosmological constant, then we'd fill in both blanks: repulsions to make distant galaxies travel away from us faster, and a force which would explain the lack of mass in galaxies.
1. Dark Matter - Look at spinning galaxies, our current theories of gravity say they spin too fast for so little mass...do some math, ok...we're short by 90% from what is visible.
2. Dark Energy - Look at far off galaxies, they are moving away from us...and they're accelerating, and since our current theories say that gravity, an attractive only force, is the only significant player on those scales.
So, if we lack an understanding of what forces act on large scale distances to such a degree that
Not only is the genome mapped out, but C. elegans has been a model organism for development. A complete flow-chart-esque understanding of the division of the first egg cell down to the last of its 959 cells. Its one of the first model organisms for a complete body-plan understanding of genetic development, but knowing the genes and figuring out the genes are 2 differant matters. Hence the experiments in space trying to understand how 0 g and amazingly controled environments affect gene expression.
Seeing as the Columbia Mission was the first *pure science* mission not having to do with Space Station construction in 2 years, I think its a great legacy for those who lost their lives that some really amazing science can come out of their work.