No, that's not the choice. The Congress has just (with a supermajority from both parties) approved a new NASA that funds the Big New Rocket, partly because of jobs. So, if NASA is already building a rocket that can go to the Moon with two low-inclination launches, being redundant and going to ISS is both dumb and pointless. If you really want station-based exploration, it's probably cheaper to just build a new station at 23 deg...
Plus, I think you're vastly underestimating the cost to approve a new Visiting Vehicle for ISS. That's been nearly a third of Dragon and Cygnus costs so far, and they don't have massive propellant tanks.
The ISS is in a 51 deg orbit (so the Russians can reach it from Kazakhstan), which is one the worst possible places to depart for the Moon from. Optimally, you want a transfer orbit coplanar with the Moon's orbit, which varies from 18-28 deg (depending of the time of year). This is because trajectory errors in coplanar orbits tend to cancel out, increasing safety, as well as reducing the mass of fuel required launch to the transfer orbit. So, either the ISS-launched mission does a very-expensive plane-change maneuver, or weighs more and is more unsafe than a conventionally launched mission. Either way, launching to the Moon (or any Lagrange Points) from the ISS is orbitally dumb.
BTW, the latitude of Kennedy Space Center is 28 deg, the furthest north it can be to optimally launch a mission to the Moon...
Horsehockey; they're speaking as citizens of an overpopulated, near-bankrupt micronation that's desperate for someone else to pay to fix their problems. Kiribati has spent nearly all of modern history as colony of somewhere else simply because they have ZERO profitable industries. You can't run an economy off of a few hundred tourists a year plus seagull shit.
If they really want to save the island, they'll start exporting people to somewhere that can support them without handouts...
There do have to be consequences
on
Behind Cyberwar FUD
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Before you start dismissing the article without reading it, they do have a very good point that cyberattacks by governments should have consequences for those for those governments. If Russia were to blow up the HQ of a company they didn't like, everybody would up in arms about, but if they hire a bunch of script kiddies to go in an wipe the company's server farm (effectively destroying the company), it probably wouldn't even draw a comment from the State Department. That's not a good precedent to set for the future...
While there is always much waving of hands and gnashing of teeth about it, the reality is that the USA by far leads the world in science. And speaking as a science grad student, it's much easier to get into science here than anywhere else in the western world. I know plenty of foreign grad students in the US, but almost no US students that had any motivation to study overseas. Personally, even though I'm originally from Canada, I have no plans to go back, because it's so much easier to get funded as a scientist here.
It seems to me most of the of the people who complain about the "science gap" are those who aren't actually working in the field...
Hey, I've got one of those. It's got 1 TB of storage, and can load games from CDs, DVDs, USB, and the cloud. Plus, the hardware it open and upgradeable.
what happens in these binary captures is that you have two objects orbiting around each other and falling at essentially escape velocity towards Neptune. If it were just one object, it would either hit Neptune or zoom past and leave Neptune's sphere of influence. But since there are two objects, one is going slightly faster than escape velocity, and the other slightly slower. If there is no collision, then one that is going slower can be captured, while the other is ejected from the system. If the two objects are not of equal mass, then the smaller is going to be moving faster than the larger, and thus there is much wider window of opportunity for it to be captured. So, it's not impossible for the larger to be captured, just much less likely.
In the case of a collision, it is more like likely that the larger will impact, as the center of mass is closer to it, and impacts are the merging of centers of mass. In this case, we think that Triton would be in a sufficiently wide orbit that it would watch the impact from a distance, and then either ejected (if its orbital velocity was in the impact direction) or captured (if its orbital velocity was in the opposite direction). So, Amphtrite could have had multiple moons, but Triton was the one on the correct quarter of the orbital phase to be captured.
The reason we invoked the extra planet was that in these three-body encounters, it's much more likely that the more massive object gets ejected and the smaller captured. However, the surveys of the Kuiper Belt are such that if Triton had larger twin, we'd have found it by now. But noone has, so a different capture method remains plausible. The existence of the extra planet isn't actually the hard part to prove, but rather that it impacted instead of being tossed by Neptune down to Saturn or Jupiter, who could then throw it out of the solar system.
It's usually not an issue if you don't intend to commercialise your software, especially if you explicitly release the software as being free for non-commercial use...
C/C++ is clunky, but once you know it, you can figure out most every other modern programming language.
As a physics undergrad, I was required to take a Mathematica course. I already knew how to program, but for most of my classmates, it was their first time programming, with mixed results. Most ended up using it as glorified calculator, rather that actually creating structured programs...
What really annoys me is the anachronistic faculty who force their grad students to use Fortran 77...
Wow, it has a serial and a parallel port! That's great! Now I can hook up both my MS serial bus mouse AND my dot-matrix printer; I'll be in Windows 3.1 heaven!
A crewed mission to Mars won't be that expensive; on the order of $50-70 billion for the first flight (assuming the lunar program has already paid for launch vehicle development), and then around $5-10 billion for each flight after. For comparison, each Shuttle flight costs about $1 billion, and NASA's annual budget is $17 billion. So, it's expensive, but not enough to call for extreme measures.
Besides, most of the value of manned planetary exploration is in the collection and return of choice samples (we're still working through the Apollo samples). A one-way trip rather excludes that possibility...
Well, submariners may be good for transit, and fighter jocks for landing, but once you actually get on the surface of the Moon or Mars, it's the astrogeologists' turn. A few good field geologists could turn any landing site into a scientific bonanza...
Invention without a financial return is just an expense Invention without a financial return is called science.
It's what I do for living, though it's rather hard to make a business case that figuring out the decay rate of craters on Triton is going to enrich anyone financially. With hope though, it will enrich my fellow scientists and lead to a broader understanding of the solar system and our place it it. Can you put a price on that?
Turning the question around, would you have asked Max Plank for a business case for quantum physics, 50 years before it was used to invent the transistor?
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's not the choice. The Congress has just (with a supermajority from both parties) approved a new NASA that funds the Big New Rocket, partly because of jobs. So, if NASA is already building a rocket that can go to the Moon with two low-inclination launches, being redundant and going to ISS is both dumb and pointless. If you really want station-based exploration, it's probably cheaper to just build a new station at 23 deg...
Plus, I think you're vastly underestimating the cost to approve a new Visiting Vehicle for ISS. That's been nearly a third of Dragon and Cygnus costs so far, and they don't have massive propellant tanks.
The ISS is in a 51 deg orbit (so the Russians can reach it from Kazakhstan), which is one the worst possible places to depart for the Moon from. Optimally, you want a transfer orbit coplanar with the Moon's orbit, which varies from 18-28 deg (depending of the time of year). This is because trajectory errors in coplanar orbits tend to cancel out, increasing safety, as well as reducing the mass of fuel required launch to the transfer orbit. So, either the ISS-launched mission does a very-expensive plane-change maneuver, or weighs more and is more unsafe than a conventionally launched mission. Either way, launching to the Moon (or any Lagrange Points) from the ISS is orbitally dumb.
BTW, the latitude of Kennedy Space Center is 28 deg, the furthest north it can be to optimally launch a mission to the Moon...
Got a great career ahead of him, if he wants...
Horsehockey; they're speaking as citizens of an overpopulated, near-bankrupt micronation that's desperate for someone else to pay to fix their problems. Kiribati has spent nearly all of modern history as colony of somewhere else simply because they have ZERO profitable industries. You can't run an economy off of a few hundred tourists a year plus seagull shit.
If they really want to save the island, they'll start exporting people to somewhere that can support them without handouts...
Before you start dismissing the article without reading it, they do have a very good point that cyberattacks by governments should have consequences for those for those governments. If Russia were to blow up the HQ of a company they didn't like, everybody would up in arms about, but if they hire a bunch of script kiddies to go in an wipe the company's server farm (effectively destroying the company), it probably wouldn't even draw a comment from the State Department. That's not a good precedent to set for the future...
While there is always much waving of hands and gnashing of teeth about it, the reality is that the USA by far leads the world in science. And speaking as a science grad student, it's much easier to get into science here than anywhere else in the western world. I know plenty of foreign grad students in the US, but almost no US students that had any motivation to study overseas. Personally, even though I'm originally from Canada, I have no plans to go back, because it's so much easier to get funded as a scientist here.
It seems to me most of the of the people who complain about the "science gap" are those who aren't actually working in the field...
To "The Center for American Progress in Never Admitting That We Made a Silly Mistake Because Everything Bad Is The Fault of Lobbyists Who Are Not Us".
I'd make one heck of business card...
Hey, I've got one of those. It's got 1 TB of storage, and can load games from CDs, DVDs, USB, and the cloud. Plus, the hardware it open and upgradeable.
It's called a personal comp-you-tar.
what happens in these binary captures is that you have two objects orbiting around each other and falling at essentially escape velocity towards Neptune. If it were just one object, it would either hit Neptune or zoom past and leave Neptune's sphere of influence. But since there are two objects, one is going slightly faster than escape velocity, and the other slightly slower. If there is no collision, then one that is going slower can be captured, while the other is ejected from the system. If the two objects are not of equal mass, then the smaller is going to be moving faster than the larger, and thus there is much wider window of opportunity for it to be captured. So, it's not impossible for the larger to be captured, just much less likely.
In the case of a collision, it is more like likely that the larger will impact, as the center of mass is closer to it, and impacts are the merging of centers of mass. In this case, we think that Triton would be in a sufficiently wide orbit that it would watch the impact from a distance, and then either ejected (if its orbital velocity was in the impact direction) or captured (if its orbital velocity was in the opposite direction). So, Amphtrite could have had multiple moons, but Triton was the one on the correct quarter of the orbital phase to be captured.
Simon Porter
The reason we invoked the extra planet was that in these three-body encounters, it's much more likely that the more massive object gets ejected and the smaller captured. However, the surveys of the Kuiper Belt are such that if Triton had larger twin, we'd have found it by now. But noone has, so a different capture method remains plausible. The existence of the extra planet isn't actually the hard part to prove, but rather that it impacted instead of being tossed by Neptune down to Saturn or Jupiter, who could then throw it out of the solar system.
Still lots of work to be done...
-Simon Porter, Coauthor
You are trying to apply logic and reason to an energy debate, and that's not allowed.
There is never an end to skepticism, especially regarding extraordinary predictions about the future.
Or, you could open it up in Google Docs, make the change, and save it. No install or money required...
It's usually not an issue if you don't intend to commercialise your software, especially if you explicitly release the software as being free for non-commercial use...
Simon
It's Megaweapon!
http://mst3k.wikia.com/wiki/Megaweapon
Simon ;)
Which is precisely why the current front-runner (Odyssey Moon) is based on the Isle of Man, despite being a mainly US/Canadian team...
Simon ;)
C/C++ is clunky, but once you know it, you can figure out most every other modern programming language.
;)
As a physics undergrad, I was required to take a Mathematica course. I already knew how to program, but for most of my classmates, it was their first time programming, with mixed results. Most ended up using it as glorified calculator, rather that actually creating structured programs...
What really annoys me is the anachronistic faculty who force their grad students to use Fortran 77...
Simon
Wow, it has a serial and a parallel port! That's great! Now I can hook up both my MS serial bus mouse AND my dot-matrix printer; I'll be in Windows 3.1 heaven!
A crewed mission to Mars won't be that expensive; on the order of $50-70 billion for the first flight (assuming the lunar program has already paid for launch vehicle development), and then around $5-10 billion for each flight after. For comparison, each Shuttle flight costs about $1 billion, and NASA's annual budget is $17 billion. So, it's expensive, but not enough to call for extreme measures.
;)
Besides, most of the value of manned planetary exploration is in the collection and return of choice samples (we're still working through the Apollo samples). A one-way trip rather excludes that possibility...
Simon
Well, submariners may be good for transit, and fighter jocks for landing, but once you actually get on the surface of the Moon or Mars, it's the astrogeologists' turn. A few good field geologists could turn any landing site into a scientific bonanza...
Last I checked, Canada was not a member of the European Union...
It's what I do for living, though it's rather hard to make a business case that figuring out the decay rate of craters on Triton is going to enrich anyone financially. With hope though, it will enrich my fellow scientists and lead to a broader understanding of the solar system and our place it it. Can you put a price on that?
Turning the question around, would you have asked Max Plank for a business case for quantum physics, 50 years before it was used to invent the transistor?
Simon
I, for one, welcome our liquid metal overlords!
;)
Simon
Here's the actual article's URL; the also had some supporting papers at LPSC that show up at ADS...
i bcode=2007LPI....38.1371C&db_key=AST&data_type=HTM L&format=&high=44e3b245f913347
;)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?b
Simon
Speak for yourself; Media Center and Movie Maker are useless, and a few gigs is a small price to pay (relative to Vista license)...
;)
Heck, you can just burn it on a dvd if yiu need the space...
Simon