Mr. Cobb also fails to address the issue the EC solves, that of representation for the states with smaller population centers. For all its flaws, the EC forces candidates to deal with issues in smaller states. Going to a proportional voting system or eliminating the EC altogether is going to disenfranchise these states and the people who live there.
How? Right now a vote in Wyoming counts four times as much as a vote in California. If Wyoming has the same number of people as Long Beach, it should get the same number of votes. There's nothing disenfranchising about one person's vote counting exactly as much as another's.
The Gyros are going to be on WFC3, which is the on axis insturment...a simple pull it out and plug the new one in replacement.
Okay, I hadn't heard about that approach before. However, I now recall hearing the proposal that the gyros would be incorporated into the booster module, which would also be a simple matter.
COS requires opening a side door, and astronauts have had problems closing these doors after they have warped in space due to the extreem environment. As for the other parts of SM4, I don't know if they are still on the table, especially with the new rocket motor on the back end (e.g. the cooling shroud may not be needed if the motor can act as a heat sync).
I see your point and will concede it: the COS installation is probably the hardest thing the robotic mission will do since anything potentially harder will either not be done or be done differently than it would be with a crewed servicing mission (which I continue to prefer even though odds seem remote right now).
This one would cost more as to satisfy the CAIB report a second shuttle and team would have to be on the pad, ready to go just in case there was a problem. They would have to train the second crew in rescue and have its support team prepped and ready to go.
NASA should just get a waiver from the CAIB requirements and go ahead and do the mission. Why a mission profile that's been successfully accomplished dozens of times is suddenly too risky even to consider is beyond me.
Now the question if can the robot really install the COS is a different question (the hardest part of the proposed mission).
Replacing the instruments is the easiest part of the mission, since it's just a matter of pulling out one refrigerator-sized box and replacing it with another one. Dealing with the gyros and the other stuff planned for the mission is going to be a lot harder.
The Hubble wasn't designed to be entirely serviceable...that led to problems with previous servicing missions, most notably replacing the old defective mirror.
I continue to gasp at Slashdot posts that sound so authoritative but yet are so wrong, and this is another one. Hubble's defective mirror was not replaced; it's right where it's always been. The initial fix for the defect was a device called COSTAR, which was put in an onboard instrument slot (with ease, since Hubble was designed to allow astronauts to change out instruments) and used small mirrors to correct the aberrations for each of the other instruments.
All later instruments have been designed with the necessary optical corrections built in, hence COSTAR is no longer necessary and was to be removed with the next servicing mission.
Not entirely true, but mostly, since the first man to set foot on the Moon was actually one of the very few civilians in the program, as was the last, geologist Jack Schmitt.
The total cost of the Mars rovers (combined) was $820 million, including operations for the first 90 days. The extended mission - another 150 days - was budgeted at $15 million.
(Can someone explain to me how it is that Nation's estate personally own the Daleks? Didn't he write those scripts on spec for the BBC?)
The way the BBC does things (or did), if you're an employee of the BBC, your ideas belong to them. If you were hired by the BBC to do something specific (like write a script), then your ideas belong to you. This explains why Terry Nation (not a BBC employee) "owns" the Daleks and has made millions off them, while the guy who designed them, Raymond Cusick (a BBC employee), received only his BBC salary and hasn't received a penny of the royalties.
I think of it more as a design specification: each subsystem engineer has to have high confidence that their subsystem is going to last the requisite 90 days. But a high confidence for 90 days equates to a pretty good confidence for 180 days and a decent chance for much longer than that.
Just a question I am curious about: given that the problem of dust buildup degrading the operation of the solar panels was anticipated, was there no way of incorporating some cleaning mechanism?
I've encountered two responses to this:
1. As others have pointed out, wipers would be heavy and expensive
2. The Martian dust is very fine and tends to bond to the solar panels, so just brushing the panels isn't going to do much good.
Any launch of a spacecraft that uses any sort of nuclear power requires a sign-off from the president, which is not assured, and will of course result in the massive protests that heralded Galileo and Cassini. Plus, the only RTGs that exist now are earmarked for the forthcoming Pluto mission. New ones need to be designed and built.
Fortunately, plans are in the works for the next-generation Mars rovers to use nuclear power and therefore to be able to last for a Martian year or two.
British and Canadian postal codes
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Typing in British and Canadian postal codes is about the only time I can think of that I use the caps lock key. British codes look like:
LN6 2QJ
while Canadian ones look like:
N2M 5E5
The caps lock key has the avantage over the shift key in that it doesn't affect numbers. If I use the shift key, I tend to end up with something like:
That they named the new telescope after some obscure NASA bureaucrat instead of a great scientist?
"Obscure NASA bureaucrat," my ass! James Webb was the NASA administrator during the development of Project Apollo, arguably the most complex and difficult endeavor in human history. They ought to name the whole damn agency after him, not just one little telescope.
My wife and I have an Insight. My best accomplishment so far has been to drive from the DC suburbs to Baltimore - about 20 miles of pure highway driving - and getting just over 80 miles per gallon. That was part of a road trip to northern New Jersey and back for which I got just under 70 mpg. (It would have been over if I hadn't done a bunch of in-town driving while there.)
The car gets around 55 mpg in mostly city driving with lots and lots of traffic lights.
I agree with those who say driving style makes a big difference. I have learned to take my time getting up to traffic lights that are red, while other people will go so far as to come up behind me, change lanes, rush past me, and get back in front of me just to get to the red light two seconds before I do.
As a computer programmer, most of the people with doctorates I know (physics, chemical engineering, etc.) are doing the same thing I do. But most of them got into programming because the job prospects were better. I don't know how easy it would be to switch back.
(Well, some of them, anyway.) I've been a real-time programmer at NASA for over 20 years. I've never needed any math beyond algebra and geometry, and what I learned in high school was more than sufficient.
Now I'm sure my flight dynamics and attitude determination colleagues down the hall would beg to differ, but I think for most computer programming purposes algebra and geometry are sufficient.
If Opportunity exhausts the scientific possibilities at Endurance Crater, the next target, according to NASA press releases is some "etched terrain" several kilometers to the south. Presumably they would be weighing the possibility of getting to that versus the benefits of spending the rest of the mission at or inside Endurance.
The dimensions of the cargo bay on the shuttle were more or less dictated by the hubble.
No, the dimensions of the shuttle cargo bay were dictated by the Department of Defense. The dimensions of the Hubble were then dictated by the size of the cargo bay.
Take some examples. I never had any trouble learning or figuring out what the dials, yes the dial, on the TV did. I never had any trouble figuring out the top dial had to be set to a certain place in order to use the bottom dial. It was actually a complex logic puzzle. I figured it out. The same thing with the VCR. I now see three year old children able to navigate the complex buttons of the modern TV with no trouble at all. And they can't even read. The do by spatial position.
Once upon a time, though, once you learned how to operate one television set (or watch or radio or...) you pretty much knew how to operate any of them. These days, it's more like one device has a dial, another has buttons, and a third has sliders - all to perform the same functions. It would be nice to have some standards so that, say, pressing a certain sequence of buttons on a digital watch had the same effect regardless of the manufacturer.
a similar site. For kicks, try sending a 1000 km rock asteroid into Mars at 20 km/sec and see what Marvin thinks of it. Then if you're not intimidated, try again with a 5000 km one.
Why bother debunking something so stupid? Just gives the conspiracy theorists more to talk about.
Also, anyone capable of rational thought would not believe such garbage in the first place. Anyone stupid enough to believe something that stupid isn't worth correcting.
NASA spent millions of dollars and sacrificed opportunities to do some real science just to get woo-woos like Hoagland and his followers the image of the Face they'd been demanding as soon as possible. If these people aren't addressed, we'll be having rovers sent to Cydonia to look for pyramids instead of looking for stuff that might actually be there, like signs of past water.
It's just interesting that each time they release pictures from really really deep space, they have to revise the estimate for the time of the big bang.
This is BS. The latest and best estimate of the age of the universe is from the WMAP data, which gave a result of 13.7 billion years. This was actually close to the lower (more recent) end of generally accepted estimates. Neither the original Hubble Deep Field nor this image has had any significant effect on estimates of the time of the Big Bang.
Slashdot Mirror
How? Right now a vote in Wyoming counts four times as much as a vote in California. If Wyoming has the same number of people as Long Beach, it should get the same number of votes. There's nothing disenfranchising about one person's vote counting exactly as much as another's.
Okay, I hadn't heard about that approach before. However, I now recall hearing the proposal that the gyros would be incorporated into the booster module, which would also be a simple matter.
COS requires opening a side door, and astronauts have had problems closing these doors after they have warped in space due to the extreem environment. As for the other parts of SM4, I don't know if they are still on the table, especially with the new rocket motor on the back end (e.g. the cooling shroud may not be needed if the motor can act as a heat sync).I see your point and will concede it: the COS installation is probably the hardest thing the robotic mission will do since anything potentially harder will either not be done or be done differently than it would be with a crewed servicing mission (which I continue to prefer even though odds seem remote right now).
NASA should just get a waiver from the CAIB requirements and go ahead and do the mission. Why a mission profile that's been successfully accomplished dozens of times is suddenly too risky even to consider is beyond me.
Now the question if can the robot really install the COS is a different question (the hardest part of the proposed mission).Replacing the instruments is the easiest part of the mission, since it's just a matter of pulling out one refrigerator-sized box and replacing it with another one. Dealing with the gyros and the other stuff planned for the mission is going to be a lot harder.
I continue to gasp at Slashdot posts that sound so authoritative but yet are so wrong, and this is another one. Hubble's defective mirror was not replaced; it's right where it's always been. The initial fix for the defect was a device called COSTAR, which was put in an onboard instrument slot (with ease, since Hubble was designed to allow astronauts to change out instruments) and used small mirrors to correct the aberrations for each of the other instruments.
All later instruments have been designed with the necessary optical corrections built in, hence COSTAR is no longer necessary and was to be removed with the next servicing mission.
Not entirely true, but mostly, since the first man to set foot on the Moon was actually one of the very few civilians in the program, as was the last, geologist Jack Schmitt.
Having spent $X billion so far,...
The total cost of the Mars rovers (combined) was $820 million, including operations for the first 90 days. The extended mission - another 150 days - was budgeted at $15 million.
(Can someone explain to me how it is that Nation's estate personally own the Daleks? Didn't he write those scripts on spec for the BBC?)
The way the BBC does things (or did), if you're an employee of the BBC, your ideas belong to them. If you were hired by the BBC to do something specific (like write a script), then your ideas belong to you. This explains why Terry Nation (not a BBC employee) "owns" the Daleks and has made millions off them, while the guy who designed them, Raymond Cusick (a BBC employee), received only his BBC salary and hasn't received a penny of the royalties.
I think of it more as a design specification: each subsystem engineer has to have high confidence that their subsystem is going to last the requisite 90 days. But a high confidence for 90 days equates to a pretty good confidence for 180 days and a decent chance for much longer than that.
Just a question I am curious about: given that the problem of dust buildup degrading the operation of the solar panels was anticipated, was there no way of incorporating some cleaning mechanism?
I've encountered two responses to this:
1. As others have pointed out, wipers would be heavy and expensive
2. The Martian dust is very fine and tends to bond to the solar panels, so just brushing the panels isn't going to do much good.
Any launch of a spacecraft that uses any sort of nuclear power requires a sign-off from the president, which is not assured, and will of course result in the massive protests that heralded Galileo and Cassini. Plus, the only RTGs that exist now are earmarked for the forthcoming Pluto mission. New ones need to be designed and built.
Fortunately, plans are in the works for the next-generation Mars rovers to use nuclear power and therefore to be able to last for a Martian year or two.
Typing in British and Canadian postal codes is about the only time I can think of that I use the caps lock key. British codes look like:
LN6 2QJ
while Canadian ones look like:
N2M 5E5
The caps lock key has the avantage over the shift key in that it doesn't affect numbers. If I use the shift key, I tend to end up with something like:
N@M%E%
unless I'm very careful.
It's called Pioneer 10
I'm not sure how they decided the official start date. They have users who signed up as early as March 1, 1999.
"Obscure NASA bureaucrat," my ass! James Webb was the NASA administrator during the development of Project Apollo, arguably the most complex and difficult endeavor in human history. They ought to name the whole damn agency after him, not just one little telescope.
My wife and I have an Insight. My best accomplishment so far has been to drive from the DC suburbs to Baltimore - about 20 miles of pure highway driving - and getting just over 80 miles per gallon. That was part of a road trip to northern New Jersey and back for which I got just under 70 mpg. (It would have been over if I hadn't done a bunch of in-town driving while there.)
The car gets around 55 mpg in mostly city driving with lots and lots of traffic lights.
I agree with those who say driving style makes a big difference. I have learned to take my time getting up to traffic lights that are red, while other people will go so far as to come up behind me, change lanes, rush past me, and get back in front of me just to get to the red light two seconds before I do.
As a computer programmer, most of the people with doctorates I know (physics, chemical engineering, etc.) are doing the same thing I do. But most of them got into programming because the job prospects were better. I don't know how easy it would be to switch back.
(Well, some of them, anyway.) I've been a real-time programmer at NASA for over 20 years. I've never needed any math beyond algebra and geometry, and what I learned in high school was more than sufficient. Now I'm sure my flight dynamics and attitude determination colleagues down the hall would beg to differ, but I think for most computer programming purposes algebra and geometry are sufficient.
If Opportunity exhausts the scientific possibilities at Endurance Crater, the next target, according to NASA press releases is some "etched terrain" several kilometers to the south. Presumably they would be weighing the possibility of getting to that versus the benefits of spending the rest of the mission at or inside Endurance.
No, the dimensions of the shuttle cargo bay were dictated by the Department of Defense. The dimensions of the Hubble were then dictated by the size of the cargo bay.
Once upon a time, though, once you learned how to operate one television set (or watch or radio or...) you pretty much knew how to operate any of them. These days, it's more like one device has a dial, another has buttons, and a third has sliders - all to perform the same functions. It would be nice to have some standards so that, say, pressing a certain sequence of buttons on a digital watch had the same effect regardless of the manufacturer.
a similar site. For kicks, try sending a 1000 km rock asteroid into Mars at 20 km/sec and see what Marvin thinks of it. Then if you're not intimidated, try again with a 5000 km one.
Excellent site. If you poke around, you can find that there's a happy moose on Mars!
Why bother debunking something so stupid? Just gives the conspiracy theorists more to talk about.
Also, anyone capable of rational thought would not believe such garbage in the first place. Anyone stupid enough to believe something that stupid isn't worth correcting.
NASA spent millions of dollars and sacrificed opportunities to do some real science just to get woo-woos like Hoagland and his followers the image of the Face they'd been demanding as soon as possible. If these people aren't addressed, we'll be having rovers sent to Cydonia to look for pyramids instead of looking for stuff that might actually be there, like signs of past water.
Actually, the claims aren't really debunked, instead, Plait attacks Hoaglands credibility.
Oh, and this article is old, there's already a rebuttal over at Enterprisemission
Which doesn't really rebut, just attacks Plait's credibility.
This is BS. The latest and best estimate of the age of the universe is from the WMAP data, which gave a result of 13.7 billion years. This was actually close to the lower (more recent) end of generally accepted estimates. Neither the original Hubble Deep Field nor this image has had any significant effect on estimates of the time of the Big Bang.