A reactor is better than an RTG because it offers more power... The Russians used to lead the US in space propulsion and space nuclear power... but I'm not sure how much of their past expertise they have retained.
"Flying a reactor" isn't a virtue in and of itself. It's kind of like saying, "the Russians are the only ones ever to fly a 16-kilobyte vacuum tube computer in space". Sure, you can often substitute brute force to avoid have to optimize solutions. But that's not necessarily something to be proud of; simply a case of managing requirements given a realistic assessment of capabilities.
An RTG will never give the power/mass ratio of a reactor. Electric propulsion (like in JIMO) requires a reactor and not RTG's. The Russians have flown a couple working reactors in space, Europe and the US have not.
If you read the article, you'd see that they were proposing an ESA orbiter and a NASA relay satellite that would put the ESA orbiter into orbit.
Most of the cost of a Europa orbiter, is the getting into orbit part.. the deal Southwood is proposing stinks. He's basically proposing a plan ESA has tried before to do itself but couldn't find the money for, and proposing the US pay for the most expensive part and ESA gets the high visibility part.
I am a proponent of NASA - ESA coorperation, just not of Southwood and his glory-hounding. Cooperation means it should benefit both sides...
Well, perhaps they'd be more interested in the science they could do than any perceived 'glory' from being the one who lands a probe.
ESA and NASA routinely fly instruments on each other's spacecraft. What Southwood wants is the accolades in the press.
Nasa because of lack of money for science missions, and ESA because of Nasa's experience with RTGs.
If they want better RTG's they should team up with the Russians... The Russians are the only ones to actually fly a reactor in space. NASA has a lot more money than ESA for space science missions, which is the real reason why Southwood wants to team up.
Nasa has after all cancelled the Jimo mission due to lack of funds.
No JIMO was cancelled because the concept won't work. The spacecraft is too large to launch, and the reactor technology isn't ready.
Southwood's plan is for the US to settle for building a simple 'relay satellite' and to get their glory probe into orbit around Europa so that they can claim all of the credit.
Why would NASA want to do all of the hard work and spend all of the money to put an ESA orbiter at Europa??
After recently wathcing A&E's Biogrpahy series about Colonel Sanders, Dave Thomas, and Glenn Bell (of Taco Bell). It's pretty clear that the fast-food industry has no patent protection... invent the americanized taco (very different from the original taco, btw) and everyone copies it, invent drive thru windows and everyoine copies it. The only way to protect a recipe is to keep it secret (11 herbs and spices).
This is the normal way that restaurants operate... and I see no reason why software should be treated any different to recipes. The innovators do well, because they're innovative and keep a step ahead of everyone else.
As a programmer, I am much more productive in Linux because I can tie almost everything I do in Gnome (or KDE) to a key command. I don't use the mouse very much (or at all) while programming in gvim or Eclipse, and it really slows me down when I need to, say, launch a terminal or a browser.
It will let you lots of cool things with hot keys...
To quote the Quicksilver site: "In the end, Quicksilver has one very important effect. , The effort associated with frequent tasks fades into the background and you are able to act without thinking. After an adaptation period, Quicksilver becomes an extension of yourself; the process fades away leaving only the results"
Unfortunately Excel is widely used in Aerospace, mostly because of how much Matlab and Mathematica cost. But I wish people would use Octave and Python more...
Excel is so damn buggy, and microsoft makes you pay for the privilege of telling them that they round seconds to minutes incorrectly or any other serious bug. Why corner yourself into relying on a tool by a company that won't even fix simple bugs?
(as an exercise to the reader just try and figure out how to file a bug against Excel!)
Not that mathworks is much better in dealing with bugs:( You have to be some sort of premium customer to get any useful response from them.
For a lot of in-house software user time costs more than programmer time. For example, if your app has 100 users you have to make 100 times their average salary for your time to be more costly.
Trying to optimize in your head rarely does any good... Use a good profiling tool (like Apple's Shark) to find out what part of your code uses the most time and then just concentrate on making that part faster.
Using a profiler and your own brain you can often significantly improve over what a compiler can do.
To get the doppler shift due to the winds, you need a probe at Titan being blown by the winds. This is true whether you receive the signal at Cassini or in West Virginia.
DWE just requires carrier... to get pictures you need telemetry too, which is much harder to get from such a weak signal. ESA has always claimed it was impossible to get telemetry from Earth... but green bank and the other telescopes kept turning away from Huygens to a quasar and back to Huygens every few mintues. This suggests that they may be trying to do interferometry across multiple telescopes to get the telemetry. So there may be a long shot of them getting some telemetry (i.e. pictures) from chain A... but it will take a while to do all of the processing.
Who still expected a G5 Powerbook any time this year. TOO MUCH HEAT, PEOPLE.
But what about those pictures taken in the French elevator of the aluminum backpack and hose connected to that laptop... clearly this is the new prototype G5..
And a lot of what is in OS X / NeXT was in SmallTalk as developed by Xerox PARC. It really seems like Steve was profoundly influenced by Smalltalk, but he couldn't implement all of the ideas in the first Mac.
I don't mean Steve's vision is the same as SmallTalk... it was just inspired by SmallTalk. But he seems to have been pursuing the same basic vision for computers since the first Mac.
The early Mac was headed towards NeXT and OS X, but then Apples fired Steve and we entered the dark ages where the vision couldn't take hold.
But now, Steve has more than enough resources with Apple, along with humility and wisdom enough to temper his rashness. I think we're in for a very fun decade as we watch his vision finally be made manifest.
Humorous as the retro image is, that's actually a reasonable thought -- give us a camcorder that does *both* HD and tape, can optionally record directly to either one, AND can dump from one to the other as needed.
i'd like a compact hard disk camcorder, with a tape deck that I could plug in to export onto from the hard disk. That way the camcorder wouldn't have to be bulky.
using a separate reader and then loading the files off of the hard drive from whatever weird filesystem the camcorder uses and then importing those files into your editing software is a big hassle compared to having it work directly with iMovie or final cut pro.
they could have done a lot better than just _working_ with final cut pro or imovie... they could have integrated with the programs... say they mounted the camera as a disk when it plugs in and the camera gives the option of the camera saving footage directly as a final cut pro or imovie project. then you could plug in a laptop and edit your movie directly on the camera without taking the time to copy over files until everything is done. just imagine how cool this would be:)
I gotta keep complaining about how much JVC just doesn't get it. I've been waiting forever for a HD camcorder, but this thing is a dog. Why would anyone want to edit video on a camcorder? The camcorder should concentrate on being a camcorder and leave the editing up to laptops. Keep it simple and elegant and eliminate all of the little thumb buttons and crazy menus within menus within menus that makes most digital camcorders and cameras such a drag to use.
And no viewfinder! What are you going to do on a sunny day when the LCD is all washed out... shoot in a random direction?
For over a grand, I'd expect more thought put into how a camcorder is actually USED.
The discussion should revolve around actual political concepts, not news postings, he-said-she-said stuff, people dying, or any of that, since that only serves to raise an emotional and typically irrational response.
I don't see how some twisted academic ego-stroking debate can be more important than if my street gets speed bumps. Those damn teenagers drag race on my street, and I'm afraid a little kid is going to get hit and killed.
Emotion is important. Rationality usually fails to give good policy because those who apply it are too arrogant to realize that they are basing their reasoned conclusions on garbage assumptions about the world around them.
This can really only be approached on a conceptual basis, not by hollow posturing on how much a certain detail sucks, or by yelling and screaming about how more brain-dead one candidate is over the other.
A conceptual approach, only works at dinner parties. In the real world, no one knows enough to plan all actions in advance without changing plans in response to what really happens.
That's why the quality of the person who'll be president is often more important than the issues. A brain-dead president would be no good.
Here are a few suggestions for good conversation:
Should the US take an isolationist foriegn policy? What defines isolationist? Should it be that way, or exclusionist, or completely open?
This sets up a false dichotomy... either we are isolationist or interventionist. And it's a silly question anyway... sure historically this has been important in US politics, but today the question is more realpolik vs. neo-con idealism.
Where is the line between governmental power and the rights of the citizen? What should it be?
The county line.
This is a silly question. "What should it be?" What criteria is to be applied to "should". This question can only be answered out of one's ass. There's no way to have a 'reasoned' discussion of this.
What is the responsibility that every man has to everyone else? Why should it be this way? Should the government have any responsibility for taking care of it's citizens? How would the proposed answer be possible, and why?
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
What is the individual's responsibility to the environment? Is it something individuals should be concerned with, or is it something that only the government should deal with?
The individual has no responsibility to the "environment". As you use "enviroment" it's an abstract noun. How could anyone possibly be held responsible to an abstract noun? sheesh.
Hey who's responsible for the warming of the arctic. Let's go kick his ass, 'cuz he's really screwing up.
which should invite intelligent thought instead of red-faced finger waving.
You're not as intelligent as you think of yourself!! Stop being so judgmental, and sit down and think!
The funny thing about this is that it's a lot like Herbert Hoover's philosophy of government. He had a lot of ideas directly based off of engineering, but he was a miserable failure as far as the effect of his policies.
Too bad, because I wish we could replace the politicians with Dilberts:)
So the plasma instruments and magnetometer would be busy for probably half the distance of each orbit. I imagine the cosmic dust analyzer is probably useful the whole time, and the UV cameras (I'm too lazy to compare the resolution to Hubble...). That's a lot of data.
These measurements aren't data intensive, and they don't fill up the SAR.
The problem is Titan encounters are followed immdiately by Saturn periapses.... both of which generate lots of data. If you decide to keep Titan data to download a second time that means you have to throw away some other important measuremnt of Saturn, the rings, or one of the other moons.
But that's what you get with spacecraft. Their computers and data storage always lag behind. Cassini was launched 7 years ago, it was designed 14 years ago... and when it was designed it had to use rad hardened electronics which lag behind comsumer electronics.
I agree the recovery was a team effort, but the fact remains that what Smeds did was a rarity: a singular individual effort that, if it hadn't occured, would have resulted in disaster. Thus we felt he deserved some serious kudos and so the article focused on him.
In no way do I want to take away from what Boris did. He was key to finding the problem... as were Claudio and Jean-Pierre. Take away any of the three and we would be finding out about the problem the hard way.
I'm in no way deingrating the amazing and creative work that the trajectory guys did. But think of it like this: If any one of those guys were absent from the project, because of a sabbatical, or, God forbid, an accident, chances are that the mission still would have been salvaged.
This is very much _not_ true. Traditional techniques to design the distant flyby required more fuel than Cassini had on board. ESA was orignally pushing for an all electrical engineering approach that would leave the trajectory unchanged but just pre-heat the probe's crystal.... this would have given a mission, but with severe data loss. The nav solution with the retrograde flyby saves all probe science while preserving all orbiter science for only 80 m/s. Nothing lke this has ever been done before, and it is the result of a couple people who refused to give up on finding a solution, and kept banging on the problem. If you take away one person in particular the mission never would have been saved.
(also, we don't get sabbaticals... we're lucky to get weekends)
Slashdot Mirror
A reactor is better than an RTG because it offers more power... The Russians used to lead the US in space propulsion and space nuclear power... but I'm not sure how much of their past expertise they have retained.
"Flying a reactor" isn't a virtue in and of itself. It's kind of like saying, "the Russians are the only ones ever to fly a 16-kilobyte vacuum tube computer in space". Sure, you can often substitute brute force to avoid have to optimize solutions. But that's not necessarily something to be proud of; simply a case of managing requirements given a realistic assessment of capabilities.
An RTG will never give the power/mass ratio of a reactor. Electric propulsion (like in JIMO) requires a reactor and not RTG's. The Russians have flown a couple working reactors in space, Europe and the US have not.
If you read the article, you'd see that they were proposing an ESA orbiter and a NASA relay satellite that would put the ESA orbiter into orbit.
Most of the cost of a Europa orbiter, is the getting into orbit part.. the deal Southwood is proposing stinks. He's basically proposing a plan ESA has tried before to do itself but couldn't find the money for, and proposing the US pay for the most expensive part and ESA gets the high visibility part.
I am a proponent of NASA - ESA coorperation, just not of Southwood and his glory-hounding. Cooperation means it should benefit both sides...
Well, perhaps they'd be more interested in the science they could do than any perceived 'glory' from being the one who lands a probe.
ESA and NASA routinely fly instruments on each other's spacecraft. What Southwood wants is the accolades in the press.
Nasa because of lack of money for science missions, and ESA because of Nasa's experience with RTGs.
If they want better RTG's they should team up with the Russians... The Russians are the only ones to actually fly a reactor in space. NASA has a lot more money than ESA for space science missions, which is the real reason why Southwood wants to team up.
Nasa has after all cancelled the Jimo mission due to lack of funds.
No JIMO was cancelled because the concept won't work. The spacecraft is too large to launch, and the reactor technology isn't ready.
Southwood's plan is for the US to settle for building a simple 'relay satellite' and to get their glory probe into orbit around Europa so that they can claim all of the credit.
Why would NASA want to do all of the hard work and spend all of the money to put an ESA orbiter at Europa??
After recently wathcing A&E's Biogrpahy series about Colonel Sanders, Dave Thomas, and Glenn Bell (of Taco Bell). It's pretty clear that the fast-food industry has no patent protection... invent the americanized taco (very different from the original taco, btw) and everyone copies it, invent drive thru windows and everyoine copies it. The only way to protect a recipe is to keep it secret (11 herbs and spices).
This is the normal way that restaurants operate... and I see no reason why software should be treated any different to recipes. The innovators do well, because they're innovative and keep a step ahead of everyone else.
As a programmer, I am much more productive in Linux because I can tie almost everything I do in Gnome (or KDE) to a key command. I don't use the mouse very much (or at all) while programming in gvim or Eclipse, and it really slows me down when I need to, say, launch a terminal or a browser.
Try Quicksilver
It will let you lots of cool things with hot keys...
To quote the Quicksilver site: "In the end, Quicksilver has one very important effect. , The effort associated with frequent tasks fades into the background and you are able to act without thinking. After an adaptation period, Quicksilver becomes an extension of yourself; the process fades away leaving only the results"
Unfortunately Excel is widely used in Aerospace, mostly because of how much Matlab and Mathematica cost. But I wish people would use Octave and Python more...
:( You have to be some sort of premium customer to get any useful response from them.
Excel is so damn buggy, and microsoft makes you pay for the privilege of telling them that they round seconds to minutes incorrectly or any other serious bug. Why corner yourself into relying on a tool by a company that won't even fix simple bugs?
(as an exercise to the reader just try and figure out how to file a bug against Excel!)
Not that mathworks is much better in dealing with bugs
For a lot of in-house software user time costs more than programmer time. For example, if your app has 100 users you have to make 100 times their average salary for your time
to be more costly.
Trying to optimize in your head rarely does any good... Use a good profiling tool (like Apple's Shark) to find out what part of your code uses the most time and then just concentrate on making that part faster.
Using a profiler and your own brain you can often significantly improve over what a compiler can do.
To get the doppler shift due to the winds, you need a probe at Titan being blown by the winds. This is true whether you receive the signal at Cassini or in West Virginia.
DWE just requires carrier... to get pictures you need telemetry too, which is much harder to get from such a weak signal. ESA has always claimed it was impossible to get telemetry from Earth... but green bank and the other telescopes kept turning away from Huygens to a quasar and back to Huygens every few mintues. This suggests that they may be trying to do interferometry across multiple telescopes to get the telemetry. So there may be a long shot of them getting some telemetry (i.e. pictures) from chain A... but it will take a while to do all of the processing.
it was a collaboration between NRAO / JPL / ESA... and the idea originated with ESA.
Who still expected a G5 Powerbook any time this year. TOO MUCH HEAT, PEOPLE.
But what about those pictures taken in the French elevator of the aluminum backpack and hose connected to that laptop... clearly this is the new prototype G5..
And a lot of what is in OS X / NeXT was in SmallTalk as developed by Xerox PARC. It really seems like Steve was profoundly influenced by Smalltalk, but he couldn't implement all of the ideas in the first Mac.
I don't mean Steve's vision is the same as SmallTalk... it was just inspired by SmallTalk. But he seems to have been pursuing the same basic vision for computers since the first Mac.
The early Mac was headed towards NeXT and OS X, but then Apples fired Steve and we entered the dark ages where the vision couldn't take hold.
But now, Steve has more than enough resources with Apple, along with humility and wisdom enough to temper his rashness. I think we're in for a very fun decade as we watch his vision finally be made manifest.
First images from the probe are very curious indeed.
try this in the terminal window instead:
:)
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly
they do wonders for a wayward mac
Humorous as the retro image is, that's actually a reasonable thought -- give us a camcorder that does *both* HD and tape, can optionally record directly to either one, AND can dump from one to the other as needed.
i'd like a compact hard disk camcorder, with a tape deck that I could plug in to export onto from the hard disk. That way the camcorder wouldn't have to be bulky.
using a separate reader and then loading the files off of the hard drive from whatever weird filesystem the camcorder uses and then importing those files into your editing software is a big hassle compared to having it work directly with iMovie or final cut pro.
:)
they could have done a lot better than just _working_ with final cut pro or imovie... they could have integrated with the programs... say they mounted the camera as a disk when it plugs in and the camera gives the option of the camera saving footage directly as a final cut pro or imovie project. then you could plug in a laptop and edit your movie directly on the camera without taking the time to copy over files until everything is done. just imagine how cool this would be
I gotta keep complaining about how much JVC just doesn't get it. I've been waiting forever for a HD camcorder, but this thing is a dog. Why would anyone want to edit video on a camcorder? The camcorder should concentrate on being a camcorder and leave the editing up to laptops. Keep it simple and elegant and eliminate all of the little thumb buttons and crazy menus within menus within menus that makes most digital camcorders and cameras such a drag to use.
And no viewfinder! What are you going to do on a sunny day when the LCD is all washed out... shoot in a random direction?
For over a grand, I'd expect more thought put into how a camcorder is actually USED.
It seems silly beyond belief that these JVC camcorders don't support Macs. Something like this would have wide appeal to the Final Cut Pro crowd...
:)
hmm... someone need to make a mac friendly one of these with
an iPod dock to use iPod mini's as the removable hard drive
Your offense is merely an illusion.
The discussion should revolve around actual political concepts, not news postings, he-said-she-said stuff, people dying, or any of that, since that only serves to raise an emotional and typically irrational response.
I don't see how some twisted academic ego-stroking debate can be more important than if my street gets speed bumps. Those damn teenagers drag race on my street, and I'm afraid a little kid is going to get hit and killed.
Emotion is important. Rationality usually fails to give good policy because those who apply it are too arrogant to realize that they are basing their reasoned conclusions on garbage assumptions about the world around them.
This can really only be approached on a conceptual basis, not by hollow posturing on how much a certain detail sucks, or by yelling and screaming about how more brain-dead one candidate is over the other.
A conceptual approach, only works at dinner parties. In the real world, no one knows enough to plan all actions in advance without changing plans in response to what really happens.
That's why the quality of the person who'll be president is often more important than the issues. A brain-dead president would be no good.
Here are a few suggestions for good conversation:
Should the US take an isolationist foriegn policy? What defines isolationist? Should it be that way, or exclusionist, or completely open?
This sets up a false dichotomy... either we are isolationist or interventionist. And it's a silly question anyway... sure historically this has been important in US politics, but today the question is more realpolik vs. neo-con idealism.
Where is the line between governmental power and the rights of the citizen? What should it be?
The county line.
This is a silly question. "What should it be?" What criteria is to be applied to "should". This question can only be answered out of one's ass. There's no way to have a 'reasoned' discussion of this.
What is the responsibility that every man has to everyone else? Why should it be this way? Should the government have any responsibility for taking care of it's citizens? How would the proposed answer be possible, and why?
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
What is the individual's responsibility to the environment? Is it something individuals should be concerned with, or is it something that only the government should deal with?
The individual has no responsibility to the "environment". As you use "enviroment" it's an abstract noun. How could anyone possibly be held responsible to an abstract noun? sheesh.
Hey who's responsible for the warming of the arctic. Let's go kick his ass, 'cuz he's really screwing up.
which should invite intelligent thought instead of red-faced finger waving.
You're not as intelligent as you think of yourself!! Stop being so judgmental, and sit down and think!
The funny thing about this is that it's a lot like Herbert Hoover's philosophy of government. He had a lot of ideas directly based off of engineering, but he was a miserable failure as far as the effect of his policies.
:)
Too bad, because I wish we could replace the politicians with Dilberts
So the plasma instruments and magnetometer would be busy for probably half the distance of each orbit. I imagine the cosmic dust analyzer is probably useful the whole time, and the UV cameras (I'm too lazy to compare the resolution to Hubble...). That's a lot of data.
These measurements aren't data intensive, and they don't fill up the SAR.
The problem is Titan encounters are followed immdiately by Saturn periapses.... both of which generate lots of data. If you decide to keep Titan data to download a second time that means you have to throw away some other important measuremnt of Saturn, the rings, or one of the other moons.
But that's what you get with spacecraft. Their computers and data storage always lag behind. Cassini was launched 7 years ago, it was designed 14 years ago... and when it was designed it had to use rad hardened electronics which lag behind comsumer electronics.
I agree the recovery was a team effort, but the fact remains that what Smeds did was a rarity: a singular individual effort that, if it hadn't occured, would have resulted in disaster. Thus we felt he deserved some serious kudos and so the article focused on him.
In no way do I want to take away from what Boris did. He was key to finding the problem... as were Claudio and Jean-Pierre. Take away any of the three and we would be finding out about the problem the hard way.
I'm in no way deingrating the amazing and creative work that the trajectory guys did. But think of it like this: If any one of those guys were absent from the project, because of a sabbatical, or, God forbid, an accident, chances are that the mission still would have been salvaged.
This is very much _not_ true. Traditional techniques to design the distant flyby required more fuel than Cassini had on board. ESA was orignally pushing for an all electrical engineering approach that would leave the trajectory unchanged but just pre-heat the probe's crystal.... this would have given a mission, but with severe data loss. The nav solution with the retrograde flyby saves all probe science while preserving all orbiter science for only 80 m/s. Nothing lke this has ever been done before, and it is the result of a couple people who refused to give up on finding a solution, and kept banging on the problem. If you take away one person in particular the mission never would have been saved.
(also, we don't get sabbaticals... we're lucky to get weekends)