The amateur radio community can only communicate with them if the frequencies are public. A bunch of these cubesats are for commercial operators who (a) don't want to make their comms public and (b) aren't using the amateur satellite frequency band. Some of the others are using the amateur bands, and the lack of contact probably means they just failed to operate.
Inadequate ground station design and inadequate satellite transmitter design are surprisingly common cubesat failure modes.
I had someone from the Beeb prepping an interview on the Japanese solar sail probe last week who kept calling it a "space shuttle"., apparently under the impression that that was a general term for anything that went into space. Sigh. I propose the following correct astronomical and astronautical senses of 'satellite':
1) Any object in closed orbit around another object of larger mass (the most general sense, considered a loose usage: "the Earth is a satellite of the Sun" is rare, although "The Ikaros probe is a satellite of the Sun" does crop up. By 'closed' orbit I am excluding hyperbolic orbits - Voyager 2 was not a satellite of Saturn when it flew past.) 2) A natural celestial body in closed orbit around a nonstellar object of larger mass; a "natural satellite": "Phobos is a satellite of Mars". All known examples to date are rocky bodies, but one could imagine a Neptune orbiting a super-Jovian... the boundary between 'satellite and primary' and 'binary world' is fuzzy, as has been pointed out in the case of the Earth-Moon and Pluto-Charon systems. 3) An artificial object in closed orbit around any larger mass body: an "artificial satellite". "Space Shuttle Atlantis is an artificial satellite; the ISS is the largest artifiical Earth satellite; Cassini is an artificial satellite of Saturn". "The spacewalker's tool bag floated off and is now a separate artificial satellite" - so this includes all space debris objects. ("orbit" here implies gravitationally dominated motion: when Atlantis makes a flyaround of the ISS, it is not a satellite of the ISS. But possibly Luke's X-wing fighter, if his engines go out, is a satellite of the Death Star, even though the Death Star is artificial....) 4) An artificial satellite payload. "The satellite separated from the launch vehicle final stage". This is a narrower sense - satellite with a functionally useful payload as opposed to inert orbiting object. 5) A functioning artificial satellite payload. "How many satellites are there orbiting the Earth right now?". Often the questioner just means the ones that are still working. 6) An artificial satellite payload that does not include design provisions for carrying humans (i.e. is not a 'spaceship'), propulsion intended to send it onto a hyperbolic orbit after a brief stay in parking orbit (i.e. is not a 'space probe'), or aerosurfaces intended to provide controlled reentry and landing (i.e. is not a 'spaceplane'). This even narrower sense is the one being used by the original poster: a 'satellite' is an 'ordinary' spacecraft that isn't in any of these more interesting categories (but for some reason, other interesting categories: satellites with tethers for example, don't matter...).
I encounter frequent confusion caused by people mixing senses 3,4 and 5. Especially when they are asking me questions along the lines of the one in 5. The X-37 clearly meets the definitions in senses 1, 3, 4 and 5, and so is a satellite *in those senses* even though one can argue that it's not *simply* a satellite per sense 6.. I, however, argue that sense 6, while valid nontechnical English by moderately widespread usage, should be eschewed by readers of slashdot as too muddily defined.
Exactly. Actually NASA TV has been dumbed down too much already compared to how it was in the late 1980s. The commentators speak over space-to-ground comms while repeating the same limited statistics they've said 5 times already. We're geeks, we want data, so give us some different numbers - delta-V of the latest burn, what's the airlock pressure now, not just the official landing time that the reporter was complaining about but the latitude and longitude of the landing site as well. That's the background info we need so we can go off and write the purple prose that Ferrell is looking for.
Better yet, stream the raw MOCR console data to us so we can crunch the numbers ourselves:-)
(Why yes, I am a scientist too. Why do you keep asking that?)
This detail got left out of the story summary, making this sound like a bigger deal than it actually is. This is a routine, mundane event — only the prediction is newsworthy.
What this really means is that the new surveys are looking at more of the sky more frequently and deeper (seeing fainter objects), so now we are starting to catch things hitting the Earth that would have been missed in the past.
I wouldn't say this is a mundane event though, this is going to be bigger than the majority of fireballs that get seen. Yes, every few months, but most are over uninhabited areas and don't get seen. And they are not tracked in advance - so we'll get to see how big a fireball you get for a body whose size we have a rough idea of (a few meters across).
For technical updates, see http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/RecentMPECs.html
These spacecraft are also low mass, and can fly on smaller rockets like the Pegasus, so the total mission cost is a lot lower than a big James Webb Telescope 'flagship' mission.
They are also a lot less capable, but can solve one specific science problem while Hubble, Chandra etc. are general facilities that can solve many different science problems - but not all problems, which leaves some nice 'discovery space' for the small missions. Also, SMEX missions are done in a finite number of years, and are thought of as good training for young scientists. I work on a big mission, but I think the small missions are crucial for the field's health.
Of course, you're right that bringing the launch cost down would be even better.
Of course, TurboTax's web based form is one of the few options for Linux users.. I tried a bunch of different sites; of course there's no excuse for a purely web-based service to be incompatible, but of course they mostly are! In contrast, I have had good experiences with Turbotax for the past couple years. And so far the contents of my bank account haven't vanished.... well actually they did, but that was because I spent all the money... Any recommendations for full-featured tax services that work well on firefox under linux?
Right. If you want a timescale that guarantees that it's dark at midnight,
you use UTC, locked to the Earth's rotation. If you want a timescale which
guarantees a simple calculation of the elapsed time between two time stamps,
use TAI or TT or GPS time or another timescale that's linked to atomic time or proper time in some rest frame. The scientific community provides all the different timescales
that you might want, all of them within a couple of minutes of being GMT.
The Earth-locked one makes sense for civil time. There's a problem that many
technical applications - for instance a lot of stuff at NASA - use UTC in places where it would
really make more sense to use TT or TAI, causing needless software grief.
Original poster is slightly wrong - it's not the length of the 1900 ephemeris second, it's the fact that the Earth, like all of us, is getting older and slowing down, so that the 2005 "Earth rotation" second (i.e. 1/86400 of one spin of the Earth) is longer than the 1900 equivalent and longer than the atomic time (SI) second. Instead of changing the length of the second, it is currently deemed less painful to keep using the old length and stick in an extra second every now and again.
Since this depends on the slop of the Earth's interior, it's not a fully regular and predictable thing - we might even have to remove a second one year.
No, you stupid offensive troll, I am trying to continue being the person who in his scarce free time provides the community with more completely free technical information on the history of the space program than anyone else in the world, but am somewhat averse to losing my government-funded day job and getting thrown in jail.
I emphasise the contractual stuff in my posting because I think the current US administration will be more likely to be sympathetic to those concerns than to the open-source peace-and-love free information issues that many slashdotters care about. And I have urged Space-Track to clarify their policies so that we can all get on with both the public information and the support contract stuff without having to worry about ending up in Guantanamo; I'm certainly not trying to get out of anything.
> result of calculations based on the data, however.
WRONG WRONG WRONG... That's exactly the problem - the current user agreement does appear to keep them from distributing the results of such calculations.
At least by some readings of the agreement - it's not very clearly worded.
This is the thing that is really screwing us; if it were just 'don't redistribute the TLEs themselves' we wouldn't be whining nearly as much.
Here's the problem: the new site not only forbids redistributing the keps (orbital parameters) to other people, which is a problem for/.-loved sites like http://www.heavens-above.com/ which tell you when things are coming overhead, but also forbids redistributing analysis based on the data. So if you have a business that's a subcontractor to a satellite operator, and your job is to analyse the orbital data and tell the satellite owner if they are drifting off station or something, then as of last week you are theoretically out of business. And even if you are using the data to provide very basic info on satellites that falls short of what you'd need to predict where the satellite is - like my newsletter at http://www.planet4589.org/ - it's not clear if you're even allowed to do that.
Now I suspect this is just a bureaucratic screwup, and the intent wasn't to be quite that restrictive. But there was way too little communication between the folks who wrote the law, the folks at USAF and NRO who understand which security concerns are real and which are bogus, and the different set of folks at USAF who run the orbital data service and had to interpret the law with very little guidance when writing up the new rules. In the absence of communication, things tend to be written to be so cover-your-ass that it gums up the works and that's what is happening.
I so agree with these comments. I *hate* Gnome
and KDE! I don't want a Windows-like machine,
I want hundreds and hundreds of xterms (xterms
with microemacs to code in, xterms to compile in, xterms to
read mail in with commands like "inc; more 3278",
xterms to run scripts or commands like
"netscape 4.7 &" (and don't get me started on the
newer browsers, grrrr...) )
The key point: Modern "desktops" get in the way
of users who know how to use machines *efficiently*. fvwm doesn't get in my way;
desktops do nothing but get in my way. I
do wish Redhat would reinstate fvwm, it is a pain
to have to mess around to get basic functionality.
I'm an astronomer involved in the Virtual Observatory project so I can give a few opinions
which may or may not reflect the views of
the rest of the (immense) collaboration.
There's a huge amount of public astronomy
data out there. The trick is to make it both
easy to get at and easy to handle once you've
got it. Right now it's a challenge for PhD
astronomers never mind the general public.
The first priority of the Virtual Observatory
(VO) is making it easier for
professional astronomers to combine data from
different sources, but we're also committed to
involving the amateur astronomy and general
public - that will involve special portals and
eventually special software tools. I would caution that the whole project is at a very early stage,
but I'm optimistic that a few years from now you'll see some nifty tools to let you explore
the universe from your web browser (I don't know
about support for lynx as one person asked about,
personally I prefer wget...). Note that most
astronomy analysis
software is open source, and most
is *only* available for Unix/Linux, so many/. readers will have a leg up on the world if
they really want to do stuff with our data.
But you don't need fancy software to play with
the pretty pictures we make.
There are already
a lot of good tools around - someone mentioned
Tom McGlynn's Skyview, and he's part of the
VO team (perhaps a better word would be Collective,
since we are trying to assimilate everyone...)
and the VO will provide middleware to make it
easier for those public tools to interoperate
and get their hands on more data. So it'll be
a real help to people writing those kinds of
service (Skyview, NED, Aladin, etc.), more directly I think than to most end users at least
in the short term.
To address your specific question of format,
the current idea seems to be XML descriptive
wrappers paired with FITS binary data for most
applications. But there are usually GIF/JPEG
type preview images around, and the
image viewer
SAO DS9
for FITS data has been ported to
PCs and Macs and is pretty easy to use.
In the meantime, you may want to check out
NED Level 5
for an excellent overview site on extragalactic
astronomy.
As I pointed out in my newsletter
JSR on Friday (before
the BBC story, I note:-)) it's unlikely that
they will try a Shuttle rescue because it would
take more fuel to get down to a Shuttle orbit than
to get up to GEO, given where it is now.
All the previous rescues involved satellites in
much lower orbit. Oh, and as a side note to
the poster who commented on the post-Challenger
regulations, it's only liquid hydrogen that the
Shuttle won't deal with in the payload bay, there
have been plenty of payloads since then which
have had hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide on board,
which is what the BSS-601 satellites like TDRS-I carry.
I draw slashdot's attention to the fact that the story was originally broken by Keith Cowing's
excellent NASA Watch web page.
I expect that they will get the bird to GEO, although Space Command doesn't seem to have issued any new orbital data for it in several days.
It's not a quote, it's a paraphrase summary
of what "opponents" (of space-based strategic
defense) "reason". It's party based on the
journalist's interview with me and does not
reflect bias - he's reporting other peoples'
views accurately.
> this "respected space analyst" is either
> extremely arrogant and naive, or (more likely)
> an anti-Bush liberal democrat.
Can't I be both?:-) OK, it's true, I am
not only an anti-Bush liberal (sometimes Democrat,
although they are not liberal enough for me)
but even a Harvard-Liberal-Academic-Kennedy-Wannabe
(I am not technically Harvard faculty, but I do teach some of their students) and
(to quote another reply) semi pinko-Limey
(dual citizen, US-born, if it matters) and even a radical activist,
and worse yet, Linux user.
Nevertheless, I claim to be not an entirely
kneejerk stereotypical liberal, and I do support
the US intelligence community's use of spy
satellites and believe they contribute to
international stability.
But the US pushed for UN Res 1721B for a reason,
the State Dept felt that the loss of secrecy
on our classified birds was compensated by
the benefits of openness, particularly amid
concerns the USSR was launching secret satellites.
Now the shoe is on the other foot, it ill
behooves us to change our argument around.
Analysts who are on the other side of
the political fence - like Jim Oberg (Capt USAF ret.),
who of all my friends is probably the least
likely to ever be accused of being a pinko liberal Harvard type - have made very similar
criticisms of the US filings in the past.
I encourage you to check my more detailed
statement at hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/un/untxt.html in which I discuss why I think even
proponents of space-based weapons (of whom I am
clearly not one) should abide by the treaty.
Sorry to be joining this thread so late,
I've been a bit too busy to be checking/.,
but am kind of chuffed to be the target
of a thread instead of just a lurker:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The amateur radio community can only communicate with them if the frequencies are public. A bunch of these cubesats are for commercial operators
who (a) don't want to make their comms public and (b) aren't using the amateur satellite frequency band. Some of the others are using the amateur bands,
and the lack of contact probably means they just failed to operate.
Inadequate ground station design and inadequate satellite transmitter design are surprisingly common cubesat failure modes.
I had someone from the Beeb prepping an interview on the Japanese solar sail probe last week who kept calling it a "space shuttle"., apparently under the impression that that was a general term for anything that went into space. Sigh. I propose the following correct astronomical and astronautical senses of 'satellite':
1) Any object in closed orbit around another object of larger mass (the most general sense, considered a loose usage: "the Earth is a satellite of the Sun" is rare, although "The Ikaros probe is a satellite of the Sun" does crop up. By 'closed' orbit I am excluding hyperbolic orbits - Voyager 2 was not a satellite of Saturn when it flew past.)
2) A natural celestial body in closed orbit around a nonstellar object of larger mass; a "natural satellite": "Phobos is a satellite of Mars". All known examples to date are rocky bodies, but one could imagine a Neptune orbiting a super-Jovian... the boundary between 'satellite and primary' and 'binary world' is fuzzy, as has been pointed out in the case of the Earth-Moon and Pluto-Charon systems.
3) An artificial object in closed orbit around any larger mass body: an "artificial satellite". "Space Shuttle Atlantis is an artificial satellite; the ISS is the largest artifiical Earth satellite; Cassini is an artificial satellite of Saturn". "The spacewalker's tool bag floated off and is now a separate artificial satellite" - so this includes all space debris objects. ("orbit" here implies gravitationally dominated motion: when Atlantis makes a flyaround of the ISS, it is not a satellite of the ISS. But possibly Luke's X-wing fighter, if his engines go out, is a satellite of the Death Star, even though the Death Star is artificial....)
4) An artificial satellite payload. "The satellite separated from the launch vehicle final stage". This is a narrower sense - satellite with a functionally useful payload as opposed to inert orbiting object.
5) A functioning artificial satellite payload. "How many satellites are there orbiting the Earth right now?". Often the questioner just means the ones that are still working.
6) An artificial satellite payload that does not include design provisions for carrying humans (i.e. is not a 'spaceship'), propulsion intended to send it onto a hyperbolic orbit after a brief stay in parking orbit (i.e. is not a 'space probe'), or aerosurfaces intended to provide controlled reentry and landing (i.e. is not a 'spaceplane'). This even narrower sense is the one being used by the original poster: a 'satellite' is an 'ordinary' spacecraft that isn't in any of these more interesting categories (but for some reason, other interesting categories: satellites with tethers for example, don't matter...).
I encounter frequent confusion caused by people mixing senses 3,4 and 5. Especially when they are asking me questions along the lines of the one in 5.
The X-37 clearly meets the definitions in senses 1, 3, 4 and 5, and so is a satellite *in those senses* even though one can argue that it's not *simply* a satellite per sense 6.. I, however, argue that sense 6, while valid nontechnical English by moderately widespread usage, should be eschewed by readers of slashdot as too muddily defined.
Exactly. Actually NASA TV has been dumbed down too much already compared to how it was in the late 1980s. The commentators speak over space-to-ground comms while repeating the same limited statistics
they've said 5 times already. We're geeks, we want data, so give us some different numbers - delta-V of the latest burn, what's the airlock pressure now, not just the official
landing time that the reporter was complaining about but the latitude and longitude of the landing site as well. That's the background info we need so we can go off and write the purple prose that Ferrell is looking for.
Better yet, stream the raw MOCR console data to us so we can crunch the numbers ourselves :-)
(Why yes, I am a scientist too. Why do you keep asking that?)
This detail got left out of the story summary, making this sound like a bigger deal than it actually is. This is a routine, mundane event — only the prediction is newsworthy.
What this really means is that the new surveys are looking at more of the sky more frequently and deeper (seeing fainter objects), so now we are starting to catch things hitting the Earth that would have been missed in the past.
I wouldn't say this is a mundane event though, this is going to be bigger than the majority of fireballs that get seen. Yes, every few months, but most are over uninhabited areas and don't get seen. And they are not tracked in advance - so we'll get to see how big a fireball you get for a body whose size we have a rough idea of (a few meters across).
For technical updates, see
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/RecentMPECs.html
These spacecraft are also low mass, and can fly on smaller rockets like the Pegasus, so the total mission cost is a lot lower than a big James Webb Telescope 'flagship' mission.
They are also a lot less capable, but can solve one specific science problem while Hubble, Chandra etc. are general facilities that can solve many different science problems - but not all problems, which leaves some nice 'discovery space' for the small missions. Also, SMEX missions are done in a finite number of years, and are thought of as good training for young scientists. I work on a big mission, but I think the small missions are crucial for the field's health.
Of course, you're right that bringing the launch cost down would be even better.
Of course, TurboTax's web based form is one of the few options for Linux users.. .... well actually they did,
I tried a bunch of different sites; of course there's no excuse for a purely web-based
service to be incompatible, but of course they mostly are! In contrast,
I have had good experiences with Turbotax for the past couple years. And so far
the contents of my bank account haven't vanished
but that was because I spent all the money...
Any recommendations for full-featured tax services that work well on
firefox under linux?
- Jonathan
Right. If you want a timescale that guarantees that it's dark at midnight, you use UTC, locked to the Earth's rotation. If you want a timescale which guarantees a simple calculation of the elapsed time between two time stamps, use TAI or TT or GPS time or another timescale that's linked to atomic time or proper time in some rest frame. The scientific community provides all the different timescales that you might want, all of them within a couple of minutes of being GMT. The Earth-locked one makes sense for civil time. There's a problem that many technical applications - for instance a lot of stuff at NASA - use UTC in places where it would really make more sense to use TT or TAI, causing needless software grief.
Original poster is slightly wrong - it's not the length of the 1900 ephemeris second,
it's the fact that the Earth, like all of us, is getting older and slowing down, so that
the 2005 "Earth rotation" second (i.e. 1/86400 of one spin of the Earth) is longer than
the 1900 equivalent and longer than the atomic time (SI) second. Instead of changing
the length of the second, it is currently deemed less painful to keep using the old
length and stick in an extra second every now and again.
Since this depends on the slop of the Earth's interior, it's not a fully regular and predictable thing - we might even have to remove a second one year.
No, you stupid offensive troll, I am trying to continue being the person who in his scarce free time provides the community with more completely free technical information on the history of the space program than anyone else in the world, but am somewhat averse to losing my government-funded day job and getting thrown in jail.
I emphasise the contractual stuff in my posting because I think the current US administration will be more likely to be sympathetic to those concerns than to the open-source peace-and-love free information issues that many slashdotters care about. And I have urged Space-Track to clarify their policies so that we can all get on with both the public information and the support contract stuff without having to worry about ending up in Guantanamo; I'm certainly not trying to get out of anything.
OK?
> This doesn't keep them from distributing the
> result of calculations based on the data, however.
WRONG WRONG WRONG...
That's exactly the problem - the current user agreement does appear to keep them from distributing the results of such calculations.
At least by some readings of the agreement - it's not very clearly worded.
This is the thing that is really screwing us; if it were just 'don't redistribute the TLEs themselves' we wouldn't be whining nearly as much.
Here's the problem: the new site not only forbids redistributing the keps (orbital parameters) to other people, which is a problem for /.-loved sites like http://www.heavens-above.com/ which tell you when things are coming overhead, but also forbids redistributing analysis based on the data. So if you have a business that's a subcontractor to a satellite operator, and your job is to analyse the orbital data and tell the satellite owner if they are drifting off station or something, then as of last week you are theoretically out of business. And even if you are using the data to provide very basic info on satellites that falls short of what you'd need to predict where the satellite is - like my newsletter at http://www.planet4589.org/ - it's not clear if you're even allowed to do that.
Now I suspect this is just a bureaucratic screwup, and the intent wasn't to be quite that restrictive. But there was way too little communication between the folks who wrote the law, the folks at USAF and NRO who understand which security concerns are real and which are bogus, and the different set of folks at USAF who run the orbital data service and had to interpret the law with very little guidance when writing up the new rules. In the absence of communication, things tend to be written to be so cover-your-ass that it gums up the works and that's what is happening.
I so agree with these comments. I *hate* Gnome and KDE! I don't want a Windows-like machine, I want hundreds and hundreds of xterms (xterms with microemacs to code in, xterms to compile in, xterms to read mail in with commands like "inc; more 3278", xterms to run scripts or commands like "netscape 4.7 &" (and don't get me started on the newer browsers, grrrr...) ) The key point: Modern "desktops" get in the way of users who know how to use machines *efficiently*. fvwm doesn't get in my way; desktops do nothing but get in my way. I do wish Redhat would reinstate fvwm, it is a pain to have to mess around to get basic functionality.
The first priority of the Virtual Observatory (VO) is making it easier for professional astronomers to combine data from different sources, but we're also committed to involving the amateur astronomy and general public - that will involve special portals and eventually special software tools. I would caution that the whole project is at a very early stage, but I'm optimistic that a few years from now you'll see some nifty tools to let you explore the universe from your web browser (I don't know about support for lynx as one person asked about, personally I prefer wget...). Note that most astronomy analysis software is open source, and most is *only* available for Unix/Linux, so many /. readers will have a leg up on the world if
they really want to do stuff with our data.
But you don't need fancy software to play with
the pretty pictures we make.
There are already a lot of good tools around - someone mentioned Tom McGlynn's Skyview, and he's part of the VO team (perhaps a better word would be Collective, since we are trying to assimilate everyone...) and the VO will provide middleware to make it easier for those public tools to interoperate and get their hands on more data. So it'll be a real help to people writing those kinds of service (Skyview, NED, Aladin, etc.), more directly I think than to most end users at least in the short term.
To address your specific question of format, the current idea seems to be XML descriptive wrappers paired with FITS binary data for most applications. But there are usually GIF/JPEG type preview images around, and the image viewer SAO DS9 for FITS data has been ported to PCs and Macs and is pretty easy to use. In the meantime, you may want to check out NED Level 5 for an excellent overview site on extragalactic astronomy.
- Jonathan
I draw slashdot's attention to the fact that the story was originally broken by Keith Cowing's excellent NASA Watch web page. I expect that they will get the bird to GEO, although Space Command doesn't seem to have issued any new orbital data for it in several days.
It's not a quote, it's a paraphrase summary of what "opponents" (of space-based strategic defense) "reason". It's party based on the journalist's interview with me and does not reflect bias - he's reporting other peoples' views accurately.
> this "respected space analyst" is either
> extremely arrogant and naive, or (more likely)
> an anti-Bush liberal democrat.
Can't I be both? :-) OK, it's true, I am
not only an anti-Bush liberal (sometimes Democrat,
although they are not liberal enough for me)
but even a Harvard-Liberal-Academic-Kennedy-Wannabe
(I am not technically Harvard faculty, but I do teach some of their students) and
(to quote another reply) semi pinko-Limey
(dual citizen, US-born, if it matters) and even a radical activist,
and worse yet, Linux user.
Nevertheless, I claim to be not an entirely kneejerk stereotypical liberal, and I do support the US intelligence community's use of spy satellites and believe they contribute to international stability. But the US pushed for UN Res 1721B for a reason, the State Dept felt that the loss of secrecy on our classified birds was compensated by the benefits of openness, particularly amid concerns the USSR was launching secret satellites. Now the shoe is on the other foot, it ill behooves us to change our argument around.
Analysts who are on the other side of the political fence - like Jim Oberg (Capt USAF ret.), who of all my friends is probably the least likely to ever be accused of being a pinko liberal Harvard type - have made very similar criticisms of the US filings in the past.
I encourage you to check my more detailed statement at hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/un/untxt.html in which I discuss why I think even proponents of space-based weapons (of whom I am clearly not one) should abide by the treaty.
Sorry to be joining this thread so late, I've been a bit too busy to be checking /.,
but am kind of chuffed to be the target
of a thread instead of just a lurker :-)
- Jonathan
No, I'm still here! Wait... who are those guys with dark glasses coming up the hallway?
Aaaargh....
Seriously: check out http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/un/untext.ht ml for a more detailed and nuanced
statement by me on the problems with the UN
satellite listings.