The post is incorrect. That's just the cost of finishing the work on the instruments. The cost of launching a shuttle to get them installed is something over $500 million.
And it mostly hurts the Goddard Space Flight Center and the Space Telescope Science Institute, both of which are located in solidly Democratic Maryland.
Wind River's VxWorks is very popular in space technology for real-time functions. When I was at the Goddard Space Flight Center in the early 90's, most of the ground control centers used VxWorks for their real-time components.
>> At least one Tom Baker story ('The Stones Of Blood') was shot with OB (Outdoor Broadcast) video instead of a 'piebald' video/film production.
Tom Baker's first story, "Robot," was the first to be shot using all OB video. That was so the special effects shots of the robot would be consistent throughout.
>> You do realise that the US Doctor Who fan club dwarfs it's British, Canadian, Australian, etc counterparts by an order of magnitude?
That's pretty amazing, considering there is no US Doctor Who fan club. The last one was the Friends of Doctor Who, which disbanded about five years ago.
>> You do realise that the US Doctor Who fan club dwarfs it's British, Canadian, Australian, etc counterparts by an order of magnitude?
That's pretty amazing, considering there is no US Doctor Who fan club. The last one was the Friends of Doctor Who, which disbanded about five years ago.
"A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for."
All right, a pragmatic answer:
- The lander is not built like a garage - it's a platform, not an enclosure.
- If it were an enclosure, then the solar panels wouldn't get any power.
- An enclosure wouldn't protect (much) against the Martian temperature extremes.
- Finally, it's a ROVER. Rovers are supposed to ROVE. If they thought they could get more science by keeping the science instruments in place, they would have just had a lander.
The real issue is that the rovers should have had a nuclear power supply rather than solar, like the Viking landers (which lasted for years) and the Voyager deep space probes (which have lasted for decades and are still going). But of course nuclear power is nasty awful stuff that we have to avoid at all costs because people get upset about it.
Everywhere we've looked so far, water = life. Wherever there's liquid water, no matter how hostile the environment, there's life. If there's no water(e.g., Atacama Desert), there's no life. So that's at least the way to bet until proven otherwise.
The Hubble.... oops, we didn't check the f*cking thing would *work* before we sent it up.
Actually, they checked very carefully. The problem was that the test tool they used was miscalibrated, so with painful meticulousness and exactitude they ground the Hubble mirror to the wrong depth.
If it's any consolation, with the next servicing mission all the Hubble instruments will be capable of compensating for this, so the spacecraft will be working as well as if the problem did not exist.
The second one failed in April.
If Hubble only had two working gyros, it would be shut down until repairs could be made (as was done in 1999). Three is the minimum required for pointing the telescope (one for each dimension).
SETI Institute: Dr. Christopher Chyba leads a team that will investigate a wide range of questions in astrobiology, including the origin of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, a comparison of nitrogen and carbon cycles on Earth and Mars, the possible habitability of Jupiter's moon Europa, and the prospects for finding habitable worlds around cool stars.
In other words, they will be doing environmental modeling and research - there's no "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" being funded. People seem to be missing this little point.
Mars is much more likely than Venus to have had life in the past. There are definite indications of water, past and present, and while life would be difficult on the surface, just underneath is a definite possibility.
There is virtually zero chance of life on the surface of Venus, and it's way too hot for any kinds of lakes other than, say, lead. Ammonia, which evaporates at room temperature even on Earth, is right out. However, there is a benign zone in Venus's upper atmosphere, deep enough to avoid nasty radiation from the Sun but high enough to be temperate, that might possibly host life.
Soyuz not that good
on
Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 3, Informative
The Russian Soyuz spacecraft has made 1500 successful launches in a life of over 30 years. Several hundred of those have been manned, with only one catastrophe.
This is inaccurate in several respects. The Soyuz/R7 launch vehicle has a 97.5% success rate (1 failure per 40 missions). 106 of those launches have been manned with 2 fatal failures (Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11) and several aborted missions, including the Soyuz T-10A, where the launch vehicle exploded and only the recovery system saved the cosmonauts.
As others have pointed out, this is the third Doctor Who webcast adventure. In addition, the producers of this story have also done numerous other audio stories, which are available on CD. The audio stories feature the original television Doctors and numerous of the television Companions, as well as some original Companions (some of whom I think are better than any of the televised ones.
"Will we even be writing programs in a hundred years? Won't we just tell computers what we want them to do?"
What the fuck? That's what a programming language is, and that's exactly what we do with them TODAY.
Today we have to tell the computers what to do and also exactly how to do it. Debugging largely consists of ensuring that the "how" matches the "what." Someday all that should be unnecessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Water != life
On Earth, it just about is: if you find water, you find life. If there's no water, there's no life.
Maybe they should go back and take another look at the Viking biological results.
"The most likely source of the current bug is the fix you made to the last one."
Hubble's done some amazing stuff, but it didn't find Dark Energy - WMAP did.
The post is incorrect. That's just the cost of finishing the work on the instruments. The cost of launching a shuttle to get them installed is something over $500 million.
And it mostly hurts the Goddard Space Flight Center and the Space Telescope Science Institute, both of which are located in solidly Democratic Maryland.
Wind River's VxWorks is very popular in space technology for real-time functions. When I was at the Goddard Space Flight Center in the early 90's, most of the ground control centers used VxWorks for their real-time components.
>> At least one Tom Baker story ('The Stones Of Blood') was shot with OB (Outdoor Broadcast) video instead of a 'piebald' video/film production.
Tom Baker's first story, "Robot," was the first to be shot using all OB video. That was so the special effects shots of the robot would be consistent throughout.
%^$%^#$^#$ Slashdot formatting (or lack thereof). Try again:
>> You do realise that the US Doctor Who fan club dwarfs it's British, Canadian, Australian, etc counterparts by an order of magnitude?
That's pretty amazing, considering there is no US Doctor Who fan club. The last one was the Friends of Doctor Who, which disbanded about five years ago.
>> You do realise that the US Doctor Who fan club dwarfs it's British, Canadian, Australian, etc counterparts by an order of magnitude? That's pretty amazing, considering there is no US Doctor Who fan club. The last one was the Friends of Doctor Who, which disbanded about five years ago.
"A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for."
All right, a pragmatic answer:
- The lander is not built like a garage - it's a platform, not an enclosure.
- If it were an enclosure, then the solar panels wouldn't get any power.
- An enclosure wouldn't protect (much) against the Martian temperature extremes.
- Finally, it's a ROVER. Rovers are supposed to ROVE. If they thought they could get more science by keeping the science instruments in place, they would have just had a lander.
The real issue is that the rovers should have had a nuclear power supply rather than solar, like the Viking landers (which lasted for years) and the Voyager deep space probes (which have lasted for decades and are still going). But of course nuclear power is nasty awful stuff that we have to avoid at all costs because people get upset about it.
Everywhere we've looked so far, water = life. Wherever there's liquid water, no matter how hostile the environment, there's life. If there's no water(e.g., Atacama Desert), there's no life. So that's at least the way to bet until proven otherwise.
Spaceflight Now also maintains good coverage and often posts the latest news even before the JPL weenies do.
Yes, they did There are internationally developed protocols for this.
The Hubble.... oops, we didn't check the f*cking thing would *work* before we sent it up.
Actually, they checked very carefully. The problem was that the test tool they used was miscalibrated, so with painful meticulousness and exactitude they ground the Hubble mirror to the wrong depth. If it's any consolation, with the next servicing mission all the Hubble instruments will be capable of compensating for this, so the spacecraft will be working as well as if the problem did not exist.
RTFA
The second one failed in April. If Hubble only had two working gyros, it would be shut down until repairs could be made (as was done in 1999). Three is the minimum required for pointing the telescope (one for each dimension).
It's been anticipated, and DSN is being upgraded and expanded to meet the crunch:
Bracing for an interplanetary traffic jam
With all the launch delays it was late, so it has to hurry to catch up.
Mars is much more likely than Venus to have had life in the past. There are definite indications of water, past and present, and while life would be difficult on the surface, just underneath is a definite possibility.
There is virtually zero chance of life on the surface of Venus, and it's way too hot for any kinds of lakes other than, say, lead. Ammonia, which evaporates at room temperature even on Earth, is right out. However, there is a benign zone in Venus's upper atmosphere, deep enough to avoid nasty radiation from the Sun but high enough to be temperate, that might possibly host life.
The Russian Soyuz spacecraft has made 1500 successful launches in a life of over 30 years. Several hundred of those have been manned, with only one catastrophe. This is inaccurate in several respects. The Soyuz/R7 launch vehicle has a 97.5% success rate (1 failure per 40 missions). 106 of those launches have been manned with 2 fatal failures (Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11) and several aborted missions, including the Soyuz T-10A, where the launch vehicle exploded and only the recovery system saved the cosmonauts.
As others have pointed out, this is the third Doctor Who webcast adventure. In addition, the producers of this story have also done numerous other audio stories, which are available on CD. The audio stories feature the original television Doctors and numerous of the television Companions, as well as some original Companions (some of whom I think are better than any of the televised ones.
For more information, go here.
And how do I find the $%#$%#$%?
No, I just describe Java as "C++ for dummies."