I used to imagine a telescope of a pan filled with mercury, spinning, and attached to the lens assembly via rods on top, and the whole device turning to create gravity for the mercury so it stays in the pan, while the whole telescope like a lighthouse scans the skies.
Two problems with that: 1. You don't want it to scan the skies. You want it to look at one spot for a long time. 2. Your spinning arrangement wouldn't create a perfect paraboloid surface, so there would be aberration.
NASA is all about engineers, not scientists. Therefore you get "Let's build a big space station. We'll figure out what to do with it later"
Not only is that totally false, it also makes no sense whatsoever. If you're going to go accusing someone of something (ie. accusing the NASA engineers of insane shortsightedness) then at least do some background reading first.
Gravitational assist. It's impossible to escape the solar system without slingshots using today's rockets. (It would require about 4 times the exhaust velocity, and Tsiolkovsky tells us that even an ideal rocket would need to be over 98% propellant. We can do 90% but not 98%.)
I'd like to see software that works listed as a grand challenge (and the preeminent Sir Tony Hoare would seem to agree, promoting trusted components and verifying compilers as Grand Challenges). On the whole, we can't do that yet. The so-called "software engineering" field is truly pittiful compared with other engineering fields.
Uh, I work at IBM and use Firefox for everything, as do several others on my team. I have yet to encounter an internal app I can't use. (Though I don't really use that many...)
Whether or not they exist, clearly the submission was meant as a joke, judging from such lines as "which, of course, is very frustrating for anyone experimenting". Obviously, experimenting with petrification is impossible if it takes millions of years.
Parachutes, man. Read any one of the 2000 frickin articles on the landing, and you'd know they used parachutes. Parachutes are harder to use on Mars because the atmosphere is 150 times thinner.
As for why they didn't put all the Beagle stuff on it, can you really not think of any reasons? Here are three off the top of my head:
Cost. Given their budget, and the odds that they'd land in liquid methane, maybe they thought they had better things to spend money on than a drill.
Weight. Saturn is a lot harder to get to than mars, so each pound of instrumentation costs more fuel.
The Unknown. We know a lot about Mars, so we know drills, microscopes, etc. will be able to tell us something useful. We knew very little about what we'd see on Titan's surface, so those instruments have less chance of being useful. It's a bit like buying someone a new pair of windshield wiper blades before you even find out whether they have a car. As it turns out, the surface seems to be muddy, so a drill wouldn't have done much good.
No, orbital insertions require nearly 10 times the speed (or 100 times more energy).
It requires a bit more than 7 times the speed (mach 22 versus 3), which is 50 times the kinetic energy.
That doesn't mean that they are 100 times harder, and certainly not 100 times more expensive.
True, it's much harder. Exponentially so, according to the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. With Space Ship One's exhaust velocity of 2.5 km/s, getting to Mach 3 requires that your propellant makes up 63% of the launch mass of the rocket, which is easily achievable. For Mach 22, the propellant outweighs the spent rocket 20 to 1, which is almost impossible. In other words, they can't use the same rocket technology to reach orbit. (All of this ignores air resistance, which only makes achieving orbit much harder.)
And once you're in orbit... you're halfway to *anywhere*:-)
Not really. It's true that a circular orbit has half the kinetic energy required for escape, but that's not really relevant. Firstly, it's delta-v that costs rocket fuel, not kinetic energy. Secondly, you not only need to consider escaping Earth (which costs about 3.5 km/s from LEO), but also the Sun (which costs another 15 km/s). Even within the solar system, most places are harder to reach than escape, because you need to slow down when you get there.
But standing still its just a great big tube. Having seen the one at Kennedy, its just not that impressive as a static thing. When it was running then sure, what a beast.
Where's your imagination? Can't you look at that tube and imagine it firing up out of the atmosphere?
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
Having criticized you for not reading carefully, I just re-read your own original reply and I think I understand your point better. You were saying that even civil matters might warrant police intervention in other countries. Somehow that didn't sink in until just now. Sorry for the confusion.
Slow down a sec. You're not reading the words on the screen. He said "I was under the impression that copyright infringement was only a criminal matter in the USA". He didn't say he thought other places have no copyright laws. He said he thought it was a civil matter everywhere but in the USA:
This should be a civil matter, not a criminal one.
Just take a deep breath and re-read his original post without assuming he's being ignorant.
Wow that's weird indeed. The numbers don't add up on any of the links you provided, nor on NASA's sites. For instance, on the link I provoded, they give these numbers:
Radius = 9.45 x Earth
Mass = 95.2 x Earth
Computed gravity: M/R^2 = 1.066
Given gravity: 0.916
Go figure.
Anyway, what I find remarkable is that one's weight is practically the same on so many planets. Only on Jupiter would you feel much heavier, and you need to go to Mars or Mercury before you feel more than 20% lighter. (60% lighter, in fact.)
Well, Saturn is really nowhere near as massive as Jupiter, and is also much less dense. Anyway I think most people would be surprised to learn that they would weigh the same (or much less) everywhere in the solar system except Jupiter:
Jupiter: 236%
Neptune: 112%
Earth: 100%
Saturn, Venus: 91%
Uranus: 89%
Mercury, Mars: 38%
Until you get to Mercury and Mars, your weight is remarkably consistent. This, of course, comes with the caveat that the "surface" of the gas giants is taken to be the top of their atmospheres.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not using mercury.
Uh, let's not get over-excited. It wasn't bad, but I don't think it will mean much to non-fans.
Yeah, that's way worse than "Skywalker" or "Solo" or "Organa" or "Sidious" or "Maul".
Gravitational assist. It's impossible to escape the solar system without slingshots using today's rockets. (It would require about 4 times the exhaust velocity, and Tsiolkovsky tells us that even an ideal rocket would need to be over 98% propellant. We can do 90% but not 98%.)
I'd like to see software that works listed as a grand challenge (and the preeminent Sir Tony Hoare would seem to agree, promoting trusted components and verifying compilers as Grand Challenges). On the whole, we can't do that yet. The so-called "software engineering" field is truly pittiful compared with other engineering fields.
Uh, I work at IBM and use Firefox for everything, as do several others on my team. I have yet to encounter an internal app I can't use. (Though I don't really use that many...)
Whether or not they exist, clearly the submission was meant as a joke, judging from such lines as "which, of course, is very frustrating for anyone experimenting". Obviously, experimenting with petrification is impossible if it takes millions of years.
That was the sound of the joke going over your head.
As for why they didn't put all the Beagle stuff on it, can you really not think of any reasons? Here are three off the top of my head:
Here is a link with a better caption.
Nicely said.
We have a really whacky idea of appropriate jail terms these days. It's like another form of inflation.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
The very first meaning of end returned by dictionary.com is "Either extremity of something that has length".
If so, please post a reply under this article so people can find them.
Having criticized you for not reading carefully, I just re-read your own original reply and I think I understand your point better. You were saying that even civil matters might warrant police intervention in other countries. Somehow that didn't sink in until just now. Sorry for the confusion.
-
Radius = 9.45 x Earth
-
Mass = 95.2 x Earth
-
Computed gravity: M/R^2 = 1.066
-
Given gravity: 0.916
Go figure.Anyway, what I find remarkable is that one's weight is practically the same on so many planets. Only on Jupiter would you feel much heavier, and you need to go to Mars or Mercury before you feel more than 20% lighter. (60% lighter, in fact.)
-
Jupiter: 236%
-
Neptune: 112%
-
Earth: 100%
-
Saturn, Venus: 91%
-
Uranus: 89%
-
Mercury, Mars: 38%
Until you get to Mercury and Mars, your weight is remarkably consistent. This, of course, comes with the caveat that the "surface" of the gas giants is taken to be the top of their atmospheres.