...and increase your propellant mass by 25-50%, add and additional level of complexity.
Hybrids are horribly inefficient incomparison to solid motors and liquid engines.
The "dark" and "light" side of the moon recives about 14 days of sunlight and 14 days of eclipse at the lunar equator.
It's only called the dark-side b/c we can never see it from our posistion on Earth. The lightside is always facing towards Earth. In fact we have very little data regarding the dark-side of the moon. Only recently the Clementine probe was able to take somewhat detailed scans of surface (1999??)
Now the polar regions of them moon get pretty cold due to lack of sunlight during the entire lunar cycle. So if you want to cool anything continuously, then you'll probably do it at the polar regions.
I'm not too sure you realize the magnitude of size, volume, and distance when talking about using solar cells on one side of the moon to power the other. The surface area of the moon is equivalent to that of Africa.....that's a freaking long area to be stringing power cabling...
As a soon to be graduate from an engineering university here are my recommended tools for the college life for the next 5 years:
1. Get a laptop. 2 years ago I would have said laptops weren't necessary and that you could make due with the campus' workstations and a desktop at home. That simply isn't the case today. If your campus, library, labs, study areas, or clubs are wired then I highly recommend getting the laptop. It might not be as important during your first 2 years, but those last few years when you start taking upper-classmen classes, that laptop will give you a tool and an advantage to be more productive, flexible, and resourceful.
2. Get a flatbed scanner. I'm sure you can type up your notes and you might have a PDA around, but the vast majority of people do not. One of the things in college that you learn is that you should not be working alone and it is almost always more productive to work with other people. Despite what many techies were hoping for, a paperless world will not come into exisitance. You can bet your life that you'll have to deal with papers and other forms of hardcopy materials. The scanner is important because it will allow you to digitize any written material (handwritten notes, sketches, diagrams, library books, reference books) and convert them into a format that is easily distributed by email.
3. Get a freaking watch!!!!
I'm not going to spend the time to justify this one.
4. Setup an alternate email address aside from the one you're going to get fromt the school. When email starts to become extremely pervasive in your college life, you'll want a backup addess just in case. Trust me on this...it's a critical problem now when the schools email system craps out. Just imagine how much worse it will be when the use of email in universities increases over the next 5 years. Another reason to get a 2nd address is because you may eventually want to hide the fact that you attend a college.
5. Cellphone. If you plan on making a lot of calls to home or want to make yourself easily accessible to others, I say consider getting one. You don't need a fancy-ass, $300 phone, with a $80 monthly payment. Get something that works and keeps you in touch with others. You're in collge now, so you needs to start communicating and network with people. Note "network" means establish a some kind of relationship with other people, not setup a freaking computer network. (I know some of you think this is pretty obvious, but I've been seeing incoming freshmens for the last 2 years and they just don't understand the concept much less of its importance.)
Best to think of it as a multiplayer-first-person-shooter game with the strategic and tactical elements of a RTS. Simply put, Natural Selection is multiplayer FPS Starcraft.
Why? signal strenght is not a problem in any way, in space you dont need strong signals and solar energy is plenty at planets close to sun
It's not that simple...signal strength is a function primarly of data rate, distance, beam angle, and view time with target. Here's one example:
Have a lot of data to transmit with a short view time to the antenna on Earth? Well then just up the data rate at the cost of power consumption.
Is your power requirment greater than your solar array's ability to provide? No problem,you can decrease your power consumption if you narrow the beam angle, but it may require you to have a pointing accuracy of.00001 degrees.
Is the pointing requirement of.00001 degrees not feasible? Then install a RTG (Radioisotope Electric Generator, think Cassini) and your power problems are solved
The RTG bring the American public down your back? No problem, just ask for an additional $ 200,000,000 and you'll buy more solar arrays, batteries, the gimbling system with.00001 accuracy, and the larger lauch vehicle.
Who ever thought sending porn to Mars and back could be so expensive??
The communication system is a key driving factor to any spacecraft design. This is especially true for any spacecrafts not orbiting around Earth.
The communications system drives:
- power requirements
- size of solar arrays
- # of batteries
- # of ground stations
- mission operations
- level of autonomy
- antenna pointing accuracy
- quality and quantity of scientific data
and much more...
In short, the comm system is a key factor in mission risk, cost, and spacecraft design. It sounds like IPN is trying to establish a permanent communication network in our solar system by placing communication relay satellites at various locations in the solar system.
If they are successful, then future interplanetary spacecrafts will no longer be required to "phone home" directly (i.e. have line of sight). Instead, those spacecrafts would need to only transmit to the nearest relay satellite. Therefore, interplanetary spacecrafts could be designed with less complexity, cost, and risk while benefitting from constant command and control access, higher data rates, and greater scientific data returns.
In regards to the 3 probes and spacestation issue: if we look farther ahead, we'll see that there are a number of interplanetary probes, vehicles and spacecrafts that will be launched within the next decade. Most notably the New Horizons mission (Pluto), the twin Mars rovers, and the Next Generation Telescope (at Earth-Sun L2 poing?). All 3 of those missions would benifit greatly by having their communications architecture simplified.
, but guarantee its revealing at a certain future date even if you and everybody you know is long gone? For example, could you bounce an electromagnetic signal describing the discovery off a celestial body several light-years away?
What makes you think that revealing the information at a later date won't cause social choas? How would you know, you would be long dead. There's no guarentee that societly later on will be able to cope with the discovery.
Also note that by releasing the information at a later date, you risk someone else making the same discovery and releasing their findings. If you can do it, you can be sure someone else can do it too, it's only a matter of time
IMHO, you are a coward & too irresponsible to handle such information if you choose to release your discovery at a later date because you do not want be held responsible for the social upheval. At least while you are alive you have some control over the information, but waiting until your dead only means that you've passed the responsiblity to someone else.
IMHO I think the release schedule is going to annoy people more than it's going to generate money. However, I think the main effect is going to be hype. Let's face it the advertising for FOTR was 90% self generating hype. So why should we expect the next two films to be any different.
You also got to consider the fact that they cannot release 2 different dvd sets simutaneously. There are people out there that would not realize the difference between the the 2 sets and would mistaekenly purchase the wrong one.
I think they made the right decision by seperating the releases by 3 months, which would allow the casual fan plenty of time to purchase the orginal movie. Therefore it may be a bit of coincidence that the november release is right before the Two Towers.
As an aerospace major, there's no freaking way that I could study/research in a paper free environment. Electronic media simply cannot function effeciently in situations where I require graphs, tables, drawings & references simutaneously and directly in front of me.
Now textbooks are another issue...the disadvantages most definitely out weigh any possible benefits of a paperless environment. This is especially the case for technical texts where it is common for students to add personal notes and comments into their textbooks. Therefore that $100 I spent on my aerodynamics text was not just because my class required it, but was an addition to my personal reference library.
Ideally, it would best to have everything in paper and electronic media. Look up what you want electronically and perform detailed research with both paper and electronic media
i mean, when the russians are ready to launch this mission, and it blows up on the pad, their attitude is like, 'whelp, that sucks. here, stick 6 more guys in that other rocket and lets try it again'.
I don't understand why this was modded as "funny" cause it is a serious difference in philosphy between the Russians and the Americans.
Those 6 guys that are in the other rocket, I'd consider them test pilots or some equivalent. So long as Russia and China are willing to accept the loss of life during their space programs then they will be on the cutting edge of space technologies (the former already is & the latter soon to be).
Then they justified the ISS on pretty much bogus grounds... the microgravity research is unlikely to be worth the many dozens of billions of dollars going into it.
I'm not sure what kind of microgravity research they were planning on, but IMO, the real payoff will come with the research and experience gained from the construction of structures and materials in hostile microgravity environments (low earth orbit). Research in the physics or biology fields are great and everthing, but I don't think they're going to be the fields that a new space era for us. With the right techniques and plenty of experience we could make the cost of microgravity structures plummet.
but there is one aspect of this thread that everyone has seemed to overlook. The ridicule ( yes you pointed it out for the student that sits down ), but surely you must recall how anybody would look to find a fault to another person, specifically if that person was a geek. Any excuse was valid. ( i'm recalling the 80's so I might not be able to relate much to this )
Bad enough ( for that student ) that someone wishes him/her to participate in the pledge, where in high school there is no opt-out policy, otherwise you'll suffer with the school pier presures. Now you find out you have the right, then you exersize it and you will suffer for it. I don't think that any group would welcome that person.
Potentially, the ridicule could blow up into something that's worse. How about discrimination for lack of patriotism? This may not be an issue in heavily populated areas, but in small towns and tightly knitted communities you can be damn sure not saying the pledge will get you some attention. How brave are you to refuse to say the pledge after Pearl Harbor, 9/11, or (insert next US tradegy here).
And to counter the previous posts, silently omitting the 'Under God' is simpily conforming to the majority (not that it is bad), but it is silent conformity where no protest or defense of one's own rights is made. Conformity of this nature is the worst since a person essentially waives his/her rights without defending them.
Something that grabbed me besides the lightsaber duel, was the commanding presence of Yoda while he was an active general on the field.
There were great scenes where Yoda demonstrated the power of his position and reputation as a master jedi knight. Particularly when Yoda is giving direct orders to the commander of the troopers and watching those orders get passed down.
It was a great reminder that Yoda is not only a master of the force, but also that he is most likly a master tactician/strategist
"Furthermore, a second-generation reusable launch system is being sought that lowers the cost-per-pound to orbit from $10,000 to just $1,000 a pound. The second-generation launcher would be capable of lofting crew and cargo separately"
Finally!! I was wondering how much longer NASA/Aerospace industry planned on trying to keep crew and cargo on the same payload. Yes, it's not as efficient, but it's more economic and it's the economics that's the space industry's main obstacale.
It never made sense to me as to why you would launch a billion dollar payload on a risky rocket transporation system and then on top, make a crew part of the payload. As if there wasn't enough risk and cost to the whole operation.
they would let the gamers trade their online game items/characters. Then create the uber-ultimate-weapon (Level 999 longsword with a +500 attach) and promply begin to auction the item off.
If people are willing to spend a couple hundred US dollars on some electronic gold coins, then imagine what they would spend on a weapon like that!
So how is this different from collecting baseball cards?
Both are initially valued as worthless until some parties take intrest in them.
The value of each item (baseball card or some game item) can be manipulated by the manufacture/creator by limiting the avaliable supplies.
The interested parties spend time collecting and even money trading the items in question
Small economies are created by the lucrative process of obtaining the rare item and then selling them off for profit.
There are even those individuals who collect those rare items like art masterpieces so they can show off or satisfy their inferiority complex.
The primary difference I see between baseball cards and game items are the manufacturs' intent. Where the cards have been produced with the intent to have some economic value it, and the game items are just part of the game's experience
(sorry for the rant if I started going incoherrent)
In regards to sputnik, it was essentially only a simple reciever and transmitter, built with parts that we could probably obtain today at Radio Shack.
Launching that sucker is a whole other financial issue. Materials alone for the rocket must have taken a nice gouge out of their alloted budget. Then you consider the years of R&D, Support and Logistics, and prior failed launches. At the time nobody really cared what the payload did once in space (except for military purposes) all they wanted to know was how high can we the bloody thing in the sky before it starts come crashing down (aka ballistic missile)
Hell, lauching from a Pegasus rocket today still costs a handful of million of dollars and it's one of the cheaper rockets in terms of cost per mass.
The test might not show them to be sensitive to electrical/magnetic fields, but that doesn't mean that these people are having some kind of symptons. Its been documented before that persons with strong physcological (sp??) reactions/emotions do exhibit physical reactions on their bodies.
So it wouldn't suprise me that if you whipped out your pda (without batteries) some poor bastard would go into convulsions upon seeing it.
It would be a great error to assume that the military would employ the exoskelotons in front line combat. As the current design stands now, it still only takes a single bullet/shrapnel/explosion to incapacitate the user. And once that soldier goes down, so does all his/her equipment and becomes nothing more than an obstacale in road.
The first military role I see for these exoskeletons are primarly in the support areas. Like the article used for an example, a technician using an exoskeleton could probably get a fighter's armement loaded in a shorter amount of time. But why stop there, what about the engineers in the field? Soldiers outfitted with the units could be loaded down with heavy and bulky equipment, cross what was an impassable terrain, and set up a forward post/bridge/mobile artillary unit. Even in urban combat, I see the exoskeletons being used to transport large weapons and ordinances that would typically be too much for today's soldiers to lug around.
The exoskeletons currently have too many vulnerabilities for them to even be considered as a front line unit. But who knows, in 10 years we could be seeing fully armored walking tanks (elementals)
Slashdot Mirror
...and increase your propellant mass by 25-50%, add and additional level of complexity. Hybrids are horribly inefficient incomparison to solid motors and liquid engines.
There's other things to consider like fairing size, support equipment for installation, launch ring adapters, and risk of launch failure.
Don't know what the specs and requirements are, but I'd be interested in why design considerations were made in regards to the launch vehicle.
The "dark" and "light" side of the moon recives about 14 days of sunlight and 14 days of eclipse at the lunar equator.
It's only called the dark-side b/c we can never see it from our posistion on Earth. The lightside is always facing towards Earth. In fact we have very little data regarding the dark-side of the moon. Only recently the Clementine probe was able to take somewhat detailed scans of surface (1999??)
Now the polar regions of them moon get pretty cold due to lack of sunlight during the entire lunar cycle. So if you want to cool anything continuously, then you'll probably do it at the polar regions.
I'm not too sure you realize the magnitude of size, volume, and distance when talking about using solar cells on one side of the moon to power the other. The surface area of the moon is equivalent to that of Africa.....that's a freaking long area to be stringing power cabling...
1. Get a laptop. 2 years ago I would have said laptops weren't necessary and that you could make due with the campus' workstations and a desktop at home. That simply isn't the case today. If your campus, library, labs, study areas, or clubs are wired then I highly recommend getting the laptop. It might not be as important during your first 2 years, but those last few years when you start taking upper-classmen classes, that laptop will give you a tool and an advantage to be more productive, flexible, and resourceful.
2. Get a flatbed scanner. I'm sure you can type up your notes and you might have a PDA around, but the vast majority of people do not. One of the things in college that you learn is that you should not be working alone and it is almost always more productive to work with other people. Despite what many techies were hoping for, a paperless world will not come into exisitance. You can bet your life that you'll have to deal with papers and other forms of hardcopy materials. The scanner is important because it will allow you to digitize any written material (handwritten notes, sketches, diagrams, library books, reference books) and convert them into a format that is easily distributed by email.
3. Get a freaking watch!!!!
I'm not going to spend the time to justify this one.
4. Setup an alternate email address aside from the one you're going to get fromt the school. When email starts to become extremely pervasive in your college life, you'll want a backup addess just in case. Trust me on this...it's a critical problem now when the schools email system craps out. Just imagine how much worse it will be when the use of email in universities increases over the next 5 years. Another reason to get a 2nd address is because you may eventually want to hide the fact that you attend a college.
5. Cellphone. If you plan on making a lot of calls to home or want to make yourself easily accessible to others, I say consider getting one. You don't need a fancy-ass, $300 phone, with a $80 monthly payment. Get something that works and keeps you in touch with others. You're in collge now, so you needs to start communicating and network with people. Note "network" means establish a some kind of relationship with other people, not setup a freaking computer network. (I know some of you think this is pretty obvious, but I've been seeing incoming freshmens for the last 2 years and they just don't understand the concept much less of its importance.)
Best to think of it as a multiplayer-first-person-shooter game with the strategic and tactical elements of a RTS. Simply put, Natural Selection is multiplayer FPS Starcraft.
Check it out here: www.natural-selection.org
It's not that simple...signal strength is a function primarly of data rate, distance, beam angle, and view time with target. Here's one example:
Have a lot of data to transmit with a short view time to the antenna on Earth?
Well then just up the data rate at the cost of power consumption.
Is your power requirment greater than your solar array's ability to provide? .00001 degrees.
No problem,you can decrease your power consumption if you narrow the beam angle, but it may require you to have a pointing accuracy of
Is the pointing requirement of .00001 degrees not feasible?
Then install a RTG (Radioisotope Electric Generator, think Cassini) and your power problems are solved
The RTG bring the American public down your back? .00001 accuracy, and the larger lauch vehicle.
No problem, just ask for an additional $ 200,000,000 and you'll buy more solar arrays, batteries, the gimbling system with
Who ever thought sending porn to Mars and back could be so expensive??
The communication system is a key driving factor to any spacecraft design. This is especially true for any spacecrafts not orbiting around Earth.
The communications system drives:
- power requirements
- size of solar arrays
- # of batteries
- # of ground stations
- mission operations
- level of autonomy
- antenna pointing accuracy
- quality and quantity of scientific data
and much more...
In short, the comm system is a key factor in mission risk, cost, and spacecraft design. It sounds like IPN is trying to establish a permanent communication network in our solar system by placing communication relay satellites at various locations in the solar system.
If they are successful, then future interplanetary spacecrafts will no longer be required to "phone home" directly (i.e. have line of sight). Instead, those spacecrafts would need to only transmit to the nearest relay satellite. Therefore, interplanetary spacecrafts could be designed with less complexity, cost, and risk while benefitting from constant command and control access, higher data rates, and greater scientific data returns.
In regards to the 3 probes and spacestation issue: if we look farther ahead, we'll see that there are a number of interplanetary probes, vehicles and spacecrafts that will be launched within the next decade. Most notably the New Horizons mission (Pluto), the twin Mars rovers, and the Next Generation Telescope (at Earth-Sun L2 poing?). All 3 of those missions would benifit greatly by having their communications architecture simplified.
What makes you think that revealing the information at a later date won't cause social choas? How would you know, you would be long dead. There's no guarentee that societly later on will be able to cope with the discovery.
Also note that by releasing the information at a later date, you risk someone else making the same discovery and releasing their findings. If you can do it, you can be sure someone else can do it too, it's only a matter of time
IMHO, you are a coward & too irresponsible to handle such information if you choose to release your discovery at a later date because you do not want be held responsible for the social upheval. At least while you are alive you have some control over the information, but waiting until your dead only means that you've passed the responsiblity to someone else.
You also got to consider the fact that they cannot release 2 different dvd sets simutaneously. There are people out there that would not realize the difference between the the 2 sets and would mistaekenly purchase the wrong one.
I think they made the right decision by seperating the releases by 3 months, which would allow the casual fan plenty of time to purchase the orginal movie. Therefore it may be a bit of coincidence that the november release is right before the Two Towers.
Now textbooks are another issue...the disadvantages most definitely out weigh any possible benefits of a paperless environment. This is especially the case for technical texts where it is common for students to add personal notes and comments into their textbooks. Therefore that $100 I spent on my aerodynamics text was not just because my class required it, but was an addition to my personal reference library.
Ideally, it would best to have everything in paper and electronic media. Look up what you want electronically and perform detailed research with both paper and electronic media
I don't understand why this was modded as "funny" cause it is a serious difference in philosphy between the Russians and the Americans.
Those 6 guys that are in the other rocket, I'd consider them test pilots or some equivalent. So long as Russia and China are willing to accept the loss of life during their space programs then they will be on the cutting edge of space technologies (the former already is & the latter soon to be).
I'm not sure what kind of microgravity research they were planning on, but IMO, the real payoff will come with the research and experience gained from the construction of structures and materials in hostile microgravity environments (low earth orbit). Research in the physics or biology fields are great and everthing, but I don't think they're going to be the fields that a new space era for us. With the right techniques and plenty of experience we could make the cost of microgravity structures plummet.
Bad enough ( for that student ) that someone wishes him/her to participate in the pledge, where in high school there is no opt-out policy, otherwise you'll suffer with the school pier presures. Now you find out you have the right, then you exersize it and you will suffer for it. I don't think that any group would welcome that person.
Potentially, the ridicule could blow up into something that's worse. How about discrimination for lack of patriotism? This may not be an issue in heavily populated areas, but in small towns and tightly knitted communities you can be damn sure not saying the pledge will get you some attention. How brave are you to refuse to say the pledge after Pearl Harbor, 9/11, or (insert next US tradegy here).
And to counter the previous posts, silently omitting the 'Under God' is simpily conforming to the majority (not that it is bad), but it is silent conformity where no protest or defense of one's own rights is made. Conformity of this nature is the worst since a person essentially waives his/her rights without defending them.
Something that grabbed me besides the lightsaber duel, was the commanding presence of Yoda while he was an active general on the field.
There were great scenes where Yoda demonstrated the power of his position and reputation as a master jedi knight. Particularly when Yoda is giving direct orders to the commander of the troopers and watching those orders get passed down.
It was a great reminder that Yoda is not only a master of the force, but also that he is most likly a master tactician/strategist
"Furthermore, a second-generation reusable launch system is being sought that lowers the cost-per-pound to orbit from $10,000 to just $1,000 a pound. The second-generation launcher would be capable of lofting crew and cargo separately" Finally!! I was wondering how much longer NASA/Aerospace industry planned on trying to keep crew and cargo on the same payload. Yes, it's not as efficient, but it's more economic and it's the economics that's the space industry's main obstacale. It never made sense to me as to why you would launch a billion dollar payload on a risky rocket transporation system and then on top, make a crew part of the payload. As if there wasn't enough risk and cost to the whole operation.
they would let the gamers trade their online game items/characters. Then create the uber-ultimate-weapon (Level 999 longsword with a +500 attach) and promply begin to auction the item off.
If people are willing to spend a couple hundred US dollars on some electronic gold coins, then imagine what they would spend on a weapon like that!
So how is this different from collecting baseball cards?
Both are initially valued as worthless until some parties take intrest in them.
The value of each item (baseball card or some game item) can be manipulated by the manufacture/creator by limiting the avaliable supplies.
The interested parties spend time collecting and even money trading the items in question
Small economies are created by the lucrative process of obtaining the rare item and then selling them off for profit.
There are even those individuals who collect those rare items like art masterpieces so they can show off or satisfy their inferiority complex.
The primary difference I see between baseball cards and game items are the manufacturs' intent. Where the cards have been produced with the intent to have some economic value it, and the game items are just part of the game's experience
(sorry for the rant if I started going incoherrent)
In regards to sputnik, it was essentially only a simple reciever and transmitter, built with parts that we could probably obtain today at Radio Shack.
Launching that sucker is a whole other financial issue. Materials alone for the rocket must have taken a nice gouge out of their alloted budget. Then you consider the years of R&D, Support and Logistics, and prior failed launches. At the time nobody really cared what the payload did once in space (except for military purposes) all they wanted to know was how high can we the bloody thing in the sky before it starts come crashing down (aka ballistic missile)
Hell, lauching from a Pegasus rocket today still costs a handful of million of dollars and it's one of the cheaper rockets in terms of cost per mass.
The test might not show them to be sensitive to electrical/magnetic fields, but that doesn't mean that these people are having some kind of symptons. Its been documented before that persons with strong physcological (sp??) reactions/emotions do exhibit physical reactions on their bodies.
So it wouldn't suprise me that if you whipped out your pda (without batteries) some poor bastard would go into convulsions upon seeing it.
It would be a great error to assume that the military would employ the exoskelotons in front line combat. As the current design stands now, it still only takes a single bullet/shrapnel/explosion to incapacitate the user. And once that soldier goes down, so does all his/her equipment and becomes nothing more than an obstacale in road. The first military role I see for these exoskeletons are primarly in the support areas. Like the article used for an example, a technician using an exoskeleton could probably get a fighter's armement loaded in a shorter amount of time. But why stop there, what about the engineers in the field? Soldiers outfitted with the units could be loaded down with heavy and bulky equipment, cross what was an impassable terrain, and set up a forward post/bridge/mobile artillary unit. Even in urban combat, I see the exoskeletons being used to transport large weapons and ordinances that would typically be too much for today's soldiers to lug around. The exoskeletons currently have too many vulnerabilities for them to even be considered as a front line unit. But who knows, in 10 years we could be seeing fully armored walking tanks (elementals)