It talks about some stuff that the RSA is doing toward their manned Mars mission. Kind of interesting. You've got to love the headline though: "Russians conquered Mars 30 years ago".
I thought Pravda wasn't a propaganda machine anymore. Guess I was only partly right, just the headlines are.
It's an event similar to what we experience with the northern lights
Huh? I thought the Northern Lights were due to solar wind hitting out magnetosphere. Mars lacks a magnetosphere so I don't think it's the same event. Are you perhaps thinking of something different?
Then you'd have one heck of a lot of "planetary objects", considering the huge amounts of asteroids that orbit the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Should we give a name to all of them?;-)
Sure! We don't have to dig up mythological names for every ball of rock out there but it behooves us to catalogue all the stuff out there for our knowledge, defense and utilization. Numbers are fine. That's how most of the stars are named anyway.
All I'm saying is that trying to apply artificial and arbitrary standards to classify all that junk. We can keep our colloquial meaning for planet to mean mercury through Neptune but any more standardized category should encompass everything out there without making needless distinctions. If it's mostly ice, call it a comet. Call Jupiter a planet if you like and a 100 mile slab of iron an asteroid. The common understanding won't change but scientific categories should be kept free of arbitrary and possible subjective divisions.
even if you had a standard, you'd still run into borderline objects. plus, the standards would be just as arbitrary as the nomenclature we use now.
If you say at least 1000 km diameter, what about a 999km object? What if it's 1001km if measured from a different angle? it's going to be indistinguishable from a 1100km object but it would get a different classification. Same with the atmosphere. Is it required to hold an atmosphere all year long? Why?
I'm for calling everything that orbits the sun a "planetary object" and anything that orbits a planetary object a satellite. That's probably as far as an official classification can realistically go without delving into random requirements.
Calling things just planets would probably just be a rule of thumb thing in which the current 8 or 9 would be grandfathered in.
I was in the Pluto-is-a-planet camp for the most part. That's what I was taught in school. The thing is, I think we're going to find more and more that the difference between planet, comet and asteroid is more of a continuum than a stark separation. With that in mind, consider this: I heard this one astronomer on NPR last night say that he had expected to find hundreds of objects around the size of Pluto way out there. This might mean that if we classify Pluto as a planet, we might also have to say that 900 or 9000 other objects are planets too.
The word planet might just be a label that gets increasingly hard to apply as things get smaller just as it seems strange to call Pluto a comet. But just for the sake of not having to find 900 god and goddess names it might make sense to call the first 8 planets "major" and all the Ort cloud bodies "minor planets".
It's all just nomenclature anyway so it's all just a fight of how to right the textbooks.
Not just pie in the sky stuff either but detailed plans by experts with proven technology. Read up on it and you'll realize the only thing keeping humans off of Mars is politics.
I know this is a joke but robotic labor help on other worlds will be just about essential. semi-autonomous constriction robots and humans will pave the way for the settlement of space.
If the atmosphere is increased by 500 fold (high mountain on Earth type pressure) it will have much much more CO2 than it does now. remember that it's only 7 bars on Mars now while it's 1024 bars on Earth. There will be plenty of CO2 to trap heat.
CO2 is really weak too remember. Heating up the atmosphere will need to be done with a coctail of CO2, CFCs PFCs, amonia, water and methane.
This has been the thinking at NASA for the past 30 years "we need to find out more about X before we go to Mars".
This got us the shuttle program and ISS. The benefits of both I could count on one hand and the wastefulness of which is depressing to think about. While futzing around in low earth orbit for 30 years, we haven't learned anything that we couldn't have if Apollo had continued.
To steal a page from Robert Zubrin, the shuttle paradigm is like if Queen Isabella had sent Columbus out 100 miles to sea and sit there for a few months to study the effects of being on a boat for a long time.
We understand what it's like to survive in space and how to do it. More research is always needed but what's needed more is bold initiative.
The arguments he cited were taken straight from NASA's own risk assesment which has been leaked. I guess you can go ahead and call them a hoax or whatever but I'm inclined to believe them.
From the Mars Society and written by an actual rocket scientist:
Safety arguments won't wash either; if the Shuttle is safe enough to fly to the ISS, it's safe enough to go to Hubble. It is true then when flying to the ISS, the crew has a safe haven, so that if they should discover damage to the Shuttle's thermal protection tile system, they could retire to the space station and survive for a short time while they wait for retrieval by a Russian Soyuz capsule. In this scenario, ISS missions would possess a safety features that Hubble missions lack. But tile damage during launch is not the only source of Shuttle flight risk. According to most analysis, the greatest source of flight risk stems from the possibility fatal impacts by micrometeor or orbital debris (MMOD). ISS orbits are much more hazardous in this respect than Hubble orbits. For example, on STS-113, the last Shuttle station flight, the calculated probability of loss of vehicle and crew by MMOD was 1/250. In contrast, the last Hubble servicing mission (STS-109) had a much lower calculated MMOD probability of 1/414.
After MMOD, it is believed that the greatest risk faced by Shuttle flights stems from the possibility of engine failure during launch. Because Hubble missions lift off with a much lighter payload than most ISS missions, they are can deal with this danger much more effectively. For example, in order to be able to abort to orbit on an ISS mission such as STS-113 (Endeavor), all three Shuttle main engines must fire for a full 282 seconds before one cuts out. In contrast, on Hubble missions such as STS-103 (Discovery), only 188 s of full three-engine operation is required. This lower full-power time requirement for Hubble missions is a critical safety advantage, because the maximum time that either ISS or Hubble missions can attempt a Return to Launch Site (RTLS) abort is about 232 s. Thus Hubble missions have a 50 second overlap during which either a RTLS or orbital abort is possible, whereas ISS missions have a 50 s gap in which neither is possible.
If the Shuttle cannot perform either an RTLS or orbital orbit, it might be able to reach a transoceanic landing site, but in all probability will have to splash down in the ocean. When they depart the Cape, Hubble missions fly east-southeast, and they thus have the possibility to ditch in warm tropical waters. In contrast, ISS flights leave the Cape traveling northeast, and their crews face the bleak prospect of aborts into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, where their chances for survival would be much less. Thus, while no true quantitative engineering analysis has been done to establish whether and to what extent individual Shuttle flights to ISS are more or less risky than individual Hubble missions, there is good reason to believe that it is Hubble flights that offer greater safety.
I am paying for it and if you're an American tax payer, so are you. Hubble is part of the American space program who has it's budget approved by your representatives and mine. Thus, it is the case that the American people, or at least the ones who care to vote approve of the deployment and ongoing work of Hubble.
Do you also think that tax dollars shouldn't be spent on colleges in Florida because you don't live there or medical research because you don't have that particular sickness?
The question is not whether I should figure out how to pay for it myself but rather how to get what you and I've already paid for. If you feel so strongly that this is a waste of money, feel free to contact your representation. I would hope that you would educate yourself on the situation first though:
Actually, it's cheapest to go from the MOON to MARS, which is the idea with the Lunar base.
Not really. From an energy standpoint, it is cheaper to go from the Earth to Mars than Earth-Moon-Mars. But if you have a self-sustaining base on the Moon, it's cheaper right? Well yes but there's a difference between a scientific outpost and an industrial complex/mine/power plant/farm/foundry that you would need to make Cape Canaveral on the Moon. That would take decades and hundreds of billions (possibly trillions) to make. I find it questionable that it would ever pay for itself.
You start out with Earth-Mars missions (which are shorter, and you have the free-return trajectory in case things go wrong). Once you have a small construction system set up, you stop bringing people back every time, and just start doing more and more one-way trips to deliver work and supplies that can't be grown/built/mined on-site.
I'm assuming you meant Earth-Moon in that last paragraph. First, Mars has a free-return trajectory too. Second, the only things you'll be able to get on the moon are sunshine and rocks. You'd have to ship everything from Earth. Why not just send it to Mars where you can synthesize everything you need in-situ?
You're also thinking of only ONE mission. Hopefully when we get off our cans and start doing something useful (or at least interesting) in space again, we won't just do it once or twice and go back to piddling around in low-earth-orbit like we did last time.
The moon base would be the building, training, and launching point for NUMEROUS missions to Mars, as well as serving it's built-in scientific and economic potential as a permanent low-gravity (as opposed to our current permanent micro-gravity) installation.
I'm not thinking of one mission. Read up on Mars Direct. It outlines a cheap, repeatable way to do return missions that lead into a self sustaining colony within the current NASA budget.
Heck, once it's running well, Earth-Moon missions would become less and less necessary. The cool thing about human resources is that if you leave them in a confined area long enough, they tend to build more human resources for you.
They are not necessary now. They are useful as a hardware testground and that's about it. This isn't Warcraft or Civ where you start a colony and it magically grows. It costs money, time, life and votes. If we can't go to Mars in a timely and intelligent fashion, it will be doomed from day one.
Since Bilbo, Golum and Gandalf are the only characters in all the stories, I don't think that'll be a problem. Bilbo's actor can just be made up not to look older since Bilbo was supposed to be 60. Gandalf is always supposed to look old. Golum is just CG so they can make him look however they want.
I think the only reason to make it ASAP is cause I really want to see it.:)
I'm afraid you don't understand. The Moon is only useful for a Mars mission as a testbed for hardware. It's cheaper to launch directly from Earth to Mars. However, it's easier to test the hardware you're going to use on the Moon. Even Zubrin supports that and he's about as frantic as you can get on skipping the moon.
The Moon is a harsher environment than Mars so if your equiptment works there, it should work betters on Mars.
Building on the Moon means decades of preperation. During that time, the space program could be derailed by some future Nixon. Getting to Mars ASAP is the best hope for making a human persence in the solar system outside of Earth permanent.
He's right. If you run the numbers, you will see that going to Mars directly is the only real way to go. The Moon only turns out to be a good launch base for the gas giants.
The popes back then were no better the mullahs in Iran now. They bent religious teachings to suit their designs for power and used ignorance to subjugate their people. The real core beliefs don't even deal with this kind of stuff and it is widely accepted in the church that there is a great deal of symbolism (40 days, 7 days, etc) in the Bible.
It's been hundreds of years since the church done anything against people of science and I can't think of a single teaching that goes against scientific fact, symbolic numbers and the like aside.
Faith isn't a source of science. People who look to it as such are misguided.
The idea that God created the universe with countless planets, stars and habitable worlds is not in conflict with at least Catholicism. I'm willing to bet that there are a lot of other religions who would have no problem with such an idea but I'm no religious scholar.
If I recall correctly, nowhere in the Bible does it say that Earth is the only world in the universe or even the only one with life, intelligent or not. It's kind of an open question.
There's nothing special about radiation in space. It can and has been reproduced here and there had been extensive research done on it. This looks to me like another science fair type experiment on the ISS. It's like when I didn't water a plant in 4th grade, recorded that it died and called it a project.
It's not a doctoral thesis or anything but I've been doing a bit of armchair research on what it would take to terraform venus and I've posted it to my blog. If you're interested take a look.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better is this.
It talks about some stuff that the RSA is doing toward their manned Mars mission. Kind of interesting. You've got to love the headline though: "Russians conquered Mars 30 years ago".
I thought Pravda wasn't a propaganda machine anymore. Guess I was only partly right, just the headlines are.
It's an event similar to what we experience with the northern lights
Huh? I thought the Northern Lights were due to solar wind hitting out magnetosphere. Mars lacks a magnetosphere so I don't think it's the same event. Are you perhaps thinking of something different?
Then you'd have one heck of a lot of "planetary objects", considering the huge amounts of asteroids that orbit the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Should we give a name to all of them? ;-)
Sure! We don't have to dig up mythological names for every ball of rock out there but it behooves us to catalogue all the stuff out there for our knowledge, defense and utilization. Numbers are fine. That's how most of the stars are named anyway.
All I'm saying is that trying to apply artificial and arbitrary standards to classify all that junk. We can keep our colloquial meaning for planet to mean mercury through Neptune but any more standardized category should encompass everything out there without making needless distinctions. If it's mostly ice, call it a comet. Call Jupiter a planet if you like and a 100 mile slab of iron an asteroid. The common understanding won't change but scientific categories should be kept free of arbitrary and possible subjective divisions.
even if you had a standard, you'd still run into borderline objects. plus, the standards would be just as arbitrary as the nomenclature we use now.
If you say at least 1000 km diameter, what about a 999km object? What if it's 1001km if measured from a different angle? it's going to be indistinguishable from a 1100km object but it would get a different classification. Same with the atmosphere. Is it required to hold an atmosphere all year long? Why?
I'm for calling everything that orbits the sun a "planetary object" and anything that orbits a planetary object a satellite. That's probably as far as an official classification can realistically go without delving into random requirements.
Calling things just planets would probably just be a rule of thumb thing in which the current 8 or 9 would be grandfathered in.
I was in the Pluto-is-a-planet camp for the most part. That's what I was taught in school. The thing is, I think we're going to find more and more that the difference between planet, comet and asteroid is more of a continuum than a stark separation. With that in mind, consider this: I heard this one astronomer on NPR last night say that he had expected to find hundreds of objects around the size of Pluto way out there. This might mean that if we classify Pluto as a planet, we might also have to say that 900 or 9000 other objects are planets too.
The word planet might just be a label that gets increasingly hard to apply as things get smaller just as it seems strange to call Pluto a comet. But just for the sake of not having to find 900 god and goddess names it might make sense to call the first 8 planets "major" and all the Ort cloud bodies "minor planets".
It's all just nomenclature anyway so it's all just a fight of how to right the textbooks.
NO ONE has made a realistic case as to how to have a sustainable program in a cost-effective fashion.
Yes
they
certainly
have.
Not just pie in the sky stuff either but detailed plans by experts with proven technology. Read up on it and you'll realize the only thing keeping humans off of Mars is politics.
I know this is a joke but robotic labor help on other worlds will be just about essential. semi-autonomous constriction robots and humans will pave the way for the settlement of space.
If the atmosphere is increased by 500 fold (high mountain on Earth type pressure) it will have much much more CO2 than it does now. remember that it's only 7 bars on Mars now while it's 1024 bars on Earth. There will be plenty of CO2 to trap heat.
CO2 is really weak too remember. Heating up the atmosphere will need to be done with a coctail of CO2, CFCs PFCs, amonia, water and methane.
See here for a NASA study.
This has been the thinking at NASA for the past 30 years "we need to find out more about X before we go to Mars".
This got us the shuttle program and ISS. The benefits of both I could count on one hand and the wastefulness of which is depressing to think about. While futzing around in low earth orbit for 30 years, we haven't learned anything that we couldn't have if Apollo had continued.
To steal a page from Robert Zubrin, the shuttle paradigm is like if Queen Isabella had sent Columbus out 100 miles to sea and sit there for a few months to study the effects of being on a boat for a long time.
We understand what it's like to survive in space and how to do it. More research is always needed but what's needed more is bold initiative.
Zubrin and gang can be a bunch of zelots but I think active misinformation is something they would not engage in.
The arguments he cited were taken straight from NASA's own risk assesment which has been leaked. I guess you can go ahead and call them a hoax or whatever but I'm inclined to believe them.
http://www.marssociety.org/docs/Hubblerisk1a.pdf
http://www.marssociety.org/docs/Hubblerisk2a.pdf
Now who's spouting absurd FUD.
From the Mars Society and written by an actual rocket scientist:
Safety arguments won't wash either; if the Shuttle is safe enough to fly to the ISS, it's safe enough to go to Hubble. It is true then when flying to the ISS, the crew has a safe haven, so that if they should discover damage to the Shuttle's thermal protection tile system, they could retire to the space station and survive for a short time while they wait for retrieval by a Russian Soyuz capsule. In this scenario, ISS missions would possess a safety features that Hubble missions lack. But tile damage during launch is not the only source of Shuttle flight risk. According to most analysis, the greatest source of flight risk stems from the possibility fatal impacts by micrometeor or orbital debris (MMOD). ISS orbits are much more hazardous in this respect than Hubble orbits. For example, on STS-113, the last Shuttle station flight, the calculated probability of loss of vehicle and crew by MMOD was 1/250. In contrast, the last Hubble servicing mission (STS-109) had a much lower calculated MMOD probability of 1/414.
After MMOD, it is believed that the greatest risk faced by Shuttle flights stems from the possibility of engine failure during launch. Because Hubble missions lift off with a much lighter payload than most ISS missions, they are can deal with this danger much more effectively. For example, in order to be able to abort to orbit on an ISS mission such as STS-113 (Endeavor), all three Shuttle main engines must fire for a full 282 seconds before one cuts out. In contrast, on Hubble missions such as STS-103 (Discovery), only 188 s of full three-engine operation is required. This lower full-power time requirement for Hubble missions is a critical safety advantage, because the maximum time that either ISS or Hubble missions can attempt a Return to Launch Site (RTLS) abort is about 232 s. Thus Hubble missions have a 50 second overlap during which either a RTLS or orbital abort is possible, whereas ISS missions have a 50 s gap in which neither is possible.
If the Shuttle cannot perform either an RTLS or orbital orbit, it might be able to reach a transoceanic landing site, but in all probability will have to splash down in the ocean. When they depart the Cape, Hubble missions fly east-southeast, and they thus have the possibility to ditch in warm tropical waters. In contrast, ISS flights leave the Cape traveling northeast, and their crews face the bleak prospect of aborts into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, where their chances for survival would be much less. Thus, while no true quantitative engineering analysis has been done to establish whether and to what extent individual Shuttle flights to ISS are more or less risky than individual Hubble missions, there is good reason to believe that it is Hubble flights that offer greater safety.
I am paying for it and if you're an American tax payer, so are you. Hubble is part of the American space program who has it's budget approved by your representatives and mine. Thus, it is the case that the American people, or at least the ones who care to vote approve of the deployment and ongoing work of Hubble.
Do you also think that tax dollars shouldn't be spent on colleges in Florida because you don't live there or medical research because you don't have that particular sickness?
The question is not whether I should figure out how to pay for it myself but rather how to get what you and I've already paid for. If you feel so strongly that this is a waste of money, feel free to contact your representation. I would hope that you would educate yourself on the situation first though:
Risk assesment 1
Risk assesment 2
Op ed piece
http://savethehubble.org/
If they are willing to take the risk to finish ISS, there is no good reason not to fix Hubble.
Write your congressman.
Actually, it's cheapest to go from the MOON to MARS, which is the idea with the Lunar base.
Not really. From an energy standpoint, it is cheaper to go from the Earth to Mars than Earth-Moon-Mars. But if you have a self-sustaining base on the Moon, it's cheaper right? Well yes but there's a difference between a scientific outpost and an industrial complex/mine/power plant/farm/foundry that you would need to make Cape Canaveral on the Moon. That would take decades and hundreds of billions (possibly trillions) to make. I find it questionable that it would ever pay for itself.
You start out with Earth-Mars missions (which are shorter, and you have the free-return trajectory in case things go wrong). Once you have a small construction system set up, you stop bringing people back every time, and just start doing more and more one-way trips to deliver work and supplies that can't be grown/built/mined on-site.
I'm assuming you meant Earth-Moon in that last paragraph. First, Mars has a free-return trajectory too. Second, the only things you'll be able to get on the moon are sunshine and rocks. You'd have to ship everything from Earth. Why not just send it to Mars where you can synthesize everything you need in-situ?
You're also thinking of only ONE mission. Hopefully when we get off our cans and start doing something useful (or at least interesting) in space again, we won't just do it once or twice and go back to piddling around in low-earth-orbit like we did last time.
The moon base would be the building, training, and launching point for NUMEROUS missions to Mars, as well as serving it's built-in scientific and economic potential as a permanent low-gravity (as opposed to our current permanent micro-gravity) installation.
I'm not thinking of one mission. Read up on Mars Direct. It outlines a cheap, repeatable way to do return missions that lead into a self sustaining colony within the current NASA budget.
Heck, once it's running well, Earth-Moon missions would become less and less necessary. The cool thing about human resources is that if you leave them in a confined area long enough, they tend to build more human resources for you.
They are not necessary now. They are useful as a hardware testground and that's about it. This isn't Warcraft or Civ where you start a colony and it magically grows. It costs money, time, life and votes. If we can't go to Mars in a timely and intelligent fashion, it will be doomed from day one.
oh yeah, and Elrond but a little makup can probably take care of an extra 5 years on Agent Smith.
Since Bilbo, Golum and Gandalf are the only characters in all the stories, I don't think that'll be a problem. Bilbo's actor can just be made up not to look older since Bilbo was supposed to be 60. Gandalf is always supposed to look old. Golum is just CG so they can make him look however they want.
:)
I think the only reason to make it ASAP is cause I really want to see it.
I'm afraid you don't understand. The Moon is only useful for a Mars mission as a testbed for hardware. It's cheaper to launch directly from Earth to Mars. However, it's easier to test the hardware you're going to use on the Moon. Even Zubrin supports that and he's about as frantic as you can get on skipping the moon.
The Moon is a harsher environment than Mars so if your equiptment works there, it should work betters on Mars.
Building on the Moon means decades of preperation. During that time, the space program could be derailed by some future Nixon. Getting to Mars ASAP is the best hope for making a human persence in the solar system outside of Earth permanent.
He's right. If you run the numbers, you will see that going to Mars directly is the only real way to go. The Moon only turns out to be a good launch base for the gas giants.
The popes back then were no better the mullahs in Iran now. They bent religious teachings to suit their designs for power and used ignorance to subjugate their people. The real core beliefs don't even deal with this kind of stuff and it is widely accepted in the church that there is a great deal of symbolism (40 days, 7 days, etc) in the Bible.
It's been hundreds of years since the church done anything against people of science and I can't think of a single teaching that goes against scientific fact, symbolic numbers and the like aside.
Faith isn't a source of science. People who look to it as such are misguided.
This is a troll if I ever saw one but I'll bite.
The idea that God created the universe with countless planets, stars and habitable worlds is not in conflict with at least Catholicism. I'm willing to bet that there are a lot of other religions who would have no problem with such an idea but I'm no religious scholar.
If I recall correctly, nowhere in the Bible does it say that Earth is the only world in the universe or even the only one with life, intelligent or not. It's kind of an open question.
Please give me a verse if I'm wrong.
I love how this story was posted during the opening remarks of the press conference before they could go into much detail.
There's nothing special about radiation in space. It can and has been reproduced here and there had been extensive research done on it. This looks to me like another science fair type experiment on the ISS. It's like when I didn't water a plant in 4th grade, recorded that it died and called it a project.
All science and research should be stopped for fear of the off chance that something out of a crappy checkout-line novel will occur.
Have Stephen King books taught us nothing?
It's not a doctoral thesis or anything but I've been doing a bit of armchair research on what it would take to terraform venus and I've posted it to my blog. If you're interested take a look.
I'd appreciate some constructive error checking.