You cannot trust corporations without contracts. No matter how trustworthy the current leadership seems, the time will come when they will be replaced by persons unknown.
I would only use services where you are paying for it and a contract guaranteeing confidentiality exists. I believe that Google offers that on some services, but, if they don't, there are others that do. As for whether or not some service is HPAA compliant, ask your lawyer, not Slashdot.
(I don't know if they would gain or lose substantial velocity from the encounter as do many gravity assists nowadays, perhaps it would only change direction).
Viewed in a planet fixed frame, all gravity assists do is change the direction of the velocity vector at "infinity" before and after the flyby. (This assumes the effect on the planet's orbit itself is negligible, which is a good approximation.)
The point of a manned mission to Venus? This was an extension of the German-American engineering ethos that got us to the Moon. The first mission would have been just to have sent men into deep space, go by Venus, drop up a few 1000 kg of probes, and come back. A lot would have clearly been learned about long-duration spaceflight. The second would have involved (IIRC) two launches, and a Venus space station. My guess is that after that point, attention would have turned to Mars, or an near-Earth asteroid. But, the thing that interests me is that this was a staged developmental program that could have been done with the engineering assets available at the time. A Mars landing by 1980 was not inconceivable.
This was not canceled because of popular opposition or any such thing, but because neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon was interested in manned travel to the planets. Once the original set of space nuts (both German and American) were then put out to pasture and replaced by bureaucrats, the opportunity was gone, and I'm not sure we'll ever get it back.
I think that the Moon will be really good for one thing - as a place for scientific telescopes. While orbit is dynamically "quiet", every orbiter is basically like a free-floating bunch of springs linked together - all spacecraft have lots of resonances that get excited and free flying spacecraft tend to vibrate. That is especially true if there are people on it. The Moon is this nice heavy thing that doesn't vibrate (much). There are a number of things, such as optical interferometers, that would be much easier from the Moon than in free space. Now, I wouldn't go to the Moon just to put telescopes there, but, if you are going there, it is a good place to put telescopes.
One of the people on the mars lander program (specifically Spirit and Opportunity) stated that the amount of work done by the probes over the course of all the years they've been in operation could have been accomplished by one man in a month and a half.
Sure, at 10000x the cost. And, of course, we wouldn't have done it yet. And, for that matter, we'd still need to send the probes to prepare.
No, that's not true. The US Mars program has absorbed many 10's of billions of (current) dollars in the last 33 years. I would say that this is somewhere between 1/10 and 1/100 of the cost of a manned missions, not 10^-4. Just 2 weeks ago, Weiler was complaining that the unmanned Mars program needed another $ 1 billion per year to remain viable.
In different words for the price of sending one man to Mars for a couple of months (or even a year), we can send hundreds of probes to every planet, planetoid, and major rock in the solar system.
Also not true, for the same reason. And, oh, by the way, we had the chance to do that, and didn't. That experiment was tried and failed.
The trouble with relying on unmanned planetary exploration is that it is just too slow. Thirty three years, and we still haven't found liquid water on Mars (for example). (It almost certainly does exist, as parts of the surface are warm enough during the day and well above the triple point of water.) Don't get me wrong, lots of cool stuff has been found out, but at a glacially slow pace. And, all of those results will become historical footnotes about 1 week after the first manned expedition reaches Martian orbit.
I hope so. This should have been done IMHO in 1973.
People who have gone to the Air and Space Museum in DC may remember the "Skylab" space station there, which was actual flight hardware. What they may not realize is that this space station, the third state of a Saturn V, was intended to support manned deep space flight, starting with a Venus flyby in 1973. The idea was that the Saturn V third stage would be launched fueled, would be used to send 3 astronauts towards Venus (thus emptying it of fuel), the astronauts would then take up residence inside and the weight taken by the "LEM" in Lunar flight would have been used for food and other provisions. It would have been risky, but it could have been done.
I also remember discussions at about the same time about going to some of the Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) - even then, some were energetically easier to reach and return from than the Moon. Again, there is no need for a LEM (Astronauts could just space walk over in the weak gravity of any NEA), and the LEM's mass would have been used for provisions. All of this could have been done, if the USA hadn't have turned its back on space exploration 40 years ago.
than current rovers without the 10-minute time lag to Earth.
At opposition, the average round trip time (RTT) to Mars is 9 minutes.
At superior conjunction, the average RTT to Mars is 42 minutes.
At other times, the RTT will be in between these two values.
Both of these numbers will vary at the 10% level due to orbital eccentricities and inclinations, but, clearly, most of the time the RTT will be greater than 10 minutes.
However, this is almost irrelevant. All currently and planned rovers or landers use "bent-pipe tracking," where data is sent to an orbiter, and then the orbiter, sometime later, sends it to the Earth. This greatly increases the effective RTT (there are not orbiters passing over any given surface location at any time).
I believe that the Phoenix, the current rovers, and the Mars Science Laboratory all basically plan on an effectively daily RTT (i.e., at best one up and down link per day). These long effective RTTs and the use of orbiters to store-and-forward data are part of the motivation behind the efforts around Delay / Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) - AKA the Interplanetary Internet.
This has been used for years - for example, back in Maggie Thatcher's day they caught a mole this way. What, exactly, is new about this ? That it's in software ?
One of the things that I think was near criminal about the post Apollo period was that the ALSEPs were turned off, including the seismometers, to satisfy Senator Proxmire. So many billions of dollars to put them on the Moon, but $ 250,000 / year to keep collecting data was just too much.
Many 'amateur' astronomers are not amateur at all.
Note that 'amateur' comes from the French for "lover" and has a primary meaning someone who loves what they are doing, someone who is not paid being a secondary meeting. I would say that almost all astronomers are amateur. Some are even paid for doing it as well.
Amateur astronomers in the "unpaid" sense make many discoveries and (if they know what they are doing) tend to get a high regard from the professional astronomical community.
You obviously have not looked at many deep sky astronomical images, nor at the article in question. Meteor trails in deep sky images are fairly common.
First, if you look at the original picture, http://www.mikesastrophotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/july6-bolide-hankey.jpg , you will see it's more like a square degree in size (i.e., about 1000 to 10,000 times more area than your calculation). These sorts of wide-angle images are common with people observing near-by galaxies, which are after all fairly big things fairly close by.
Second, most astronomical photos are time exposures (or, now-a-days, many short CCD exposures may be taken to sum up and get one good picture). The OA picture looks like a fairly short time exposure, but I bet he took more than one picture.
Third, most nights with a dark sky, you will see a meteor trail every minute or so, and of course more during meteor showers. All of this means that getting a meteor streak in your photo is not nearly as rare as you think. Bolides (fireballs) are certainly more rare, and he was lucky to get one (assuming it wasn't a re-entering satellite).
Meteors get images in astronomical photo's all of the time - they do, after all, tend to be time exposure, frequently quiet long. There have been lots of these.
It looks, from this image, that this was possibly a bolide and that there were pieces coming off. (It also could have been a re-entering satellite.) I don't see what that tells you about the orbit of the meteor, except that it passed through a patch of sky. Meteor patrols, such as the Prairie Network and the one at Ondrejov Observatory in the former Czechoslovakia, used wide-angle cameras with rotating fans in front of the telescope, so you can determine the velocity of the bolide from the breaks in the streak. So, I doubt this picture helps to determine the orbit of the meteor much. Survellience camera images would be much more useful - it is fairly routine now-a-days for local imagery to determine the orbit of meteorites well enough to find falls.
Also, while it is true that some meteorites are very expensive, that is precisely because they are rare. The chances of this body, assuming it reached the ground, being rare are also rare.
If anyone reading this does find pieces, try not to touch them and use tongs or a shovel etc. to put them into a baggy or baggies. If they are fresh, seal these and put them in the freezer. That will reduce contamination and this enhance their scientific usefulness. Pictures of the pieces on the ground before they are moved would also be good.
Voyager 1 will take about 40,000 to pass by its first star system (not 2 billion years).
Voyager 2 will pass by (but not especially close to) Sirius in about 300,000 years.
Roughly every 100,000 years or so after that, one should pass through the Oort cloud of some star system (assuming that they all have Oort clouds).
These spacecraft will be (are) in galactic orbits, just like the stars. The vacuum of space will not slow them down. How long they will last is anyone's guess, but probably in the order of millions of years. Micrometeorite erosion is more likely to degrade them than radiation.
Neither the spacecraft nor the golden disks were designed to survive planetary entry.
That's enough for now. I do agree that the chance of them being found (except by humans looking for them, which is my expectation) is remote.
Size is tricky here - each knot is thought to be about 5 times the mass of the Earth, and could be less if they were fed by a central body. Those knots are like comet comas and tails - they would make a very good vacuum, here on Earth.
The really interesting thing to me about this is this : If these knots reveal in any way what is already existing in the outer solar system of the dying star, as opposed being some odd expulsion from the star, or the interaction between different expulsions, this is telling us something very profound about outer solar systems : There could be a lot of stuff out there. One tenth of a Solar mass - 30,000 Earths - is a lot of dark baryonic matter. Maybe we should go out and look in our own Oort cloud and see what's hiding there.
Here is the original paper : http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.2870 . Note that HST detected about 3500 of these, so this is an advance, not an overturning, of older work. These knots are pretty strange.
The Helix Nebulae is a sphere of gas expelled by a dying star, probably in multiple episodes, with. many thousands of these "comet-like objects." Typical theoretical speculation is that they are gas instabilities as old gas is overtaken by new gas expulsions, possibly with dusty cores. In addition, the knots are expanding (away from the central star) significantly slower than the gas of the nebulae. If you Google or go to Arxiv.org, you can find lots of speculation on these knots.
For myself, I have to wonder if these could be "planetary comets" - i.e., giant comets resulting from the heating of bodies in the Oort cloud of the star. The mass is about right, and that would explain their longevity, but it is not clear why they would be expanding away from the central star.
3-D would be an obvious add-on here - the depth of the cut stone incision should reveal a lot about the force being used, and I would expect that to be a distinguishing characteristic.
A bunch of people, at least in the Lunar and planetary science community. Here is a review paper, and another on the physics return from LLR. We know where the Moon is at the sub-cm level without Lunakhod 1, but recovering this array would help determine Lunar rotation. Even though the Moon is commonly regarded as a dead body, it isn't, and these data might help to resolve this. There is a free libration of the Moon of unknown origin, so it would be good to have data from yet another point on the surface.
The Apollo LLR site has looked for Lunakhod 1, but without success so far. These LLR retroreflectors are arrays, and would work if a few corner cubes were cracked.
It's approximate position is of course known, but not well compared to the spot size. Searches can be made to go faster by defocusing the laser, thus making the spot larger, but that lowers the return (the larger spot has fewer photons per square meter). If the retroreflector isn't oriented towards Earth, that will cut down on the return, and it might not be possible to see it with a defocused laser. So, if LRO can see it, the Apollo LLR site will look for a return from the exact spot.
Lunakhod 1 carried a French retroreflector array for Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) but unfortunately, contact was lost and no one knows where it is. There are good returns for Lunakhod 2, so I (and others) want Lunakhod 1 back !
Finding this would be a great help for Lunar science (assuming it didn't get crushed in a landslide or something). I know that this is on their list, so good luck !
First, I was taught that on this side of the pond they are called English Engineering Units.
Second, the cost of the Mars orbiter lost due to conversion issues was about that of the estimated conversion cost. This foolishness will go on until another mission is lost, then the money will magically be found. Let's hope no one gets killed this time.
Slashdot Mirror
My answer would be, no.
You cannot trust corporations without contracts. No matter how trustworthy the current leadership seems, the time will come when they will be replaced by persons unknown.
I would only use services where you are paying for it and a contract guaranteeing confidentiality exists. I believe that Google offers that on some services, but, if they don't, there are others that do. As for whether or not some service is HPAA compliant, ask your lawyer, not Slashdot.
Phoenix survived being iced over? That's news to me.
Time will tell.
A lot of people will have smiles if it does. I have a bet riding on it myself.
However, you are correct - I believe Phoenix used a daily RTT. My tense choice was wrong there.
(I don't know if they would gain or lose substantial velocity from the encounter as do many gravity assists nowadays, perhaps it would only change direction).
Viewed in a planet fixed frame, all gravity assists do is change the direction of the velocity vector at "infinity" before and after the flyby. (This assumes the effect on the planet's orbit itself is negligible, which is a good approximation.)
The point of a manned mission to Venus? This was an extension of the German-American engineering ethos that got us to the Moon. The first mission would have been just to have sent men into deep space, go by Venus, drop up a few 1000 kg of probes, and come back. A lot would have clearly been learned about long-duration spaceflight. The second would have involved (IIRC) two launches, and a Venus space station. My guess is that after that point, attention would have turned to Mars, or an near-Earth asteroid. But, the thing that interests me is that this was a staged developmental program that could have been done with the engineering assets available at the time. A Mars landing by 1980 was not inconceivable.
This was not canceled because of popular opposition or any such thing, but because neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon was interested in manned travel to the planets. Once the original set of space nuts (both German and American) were then put out to pasture and replaced by bureaucrats, the opportunity was gone, and I'm not sure we'll ever get it back.
I think that the Moon will be really good for one thing - as a place for scientific telescopes. While orbit is dynamically "quiet", every orbiter is basically like a free-floating bunch of springs linked together - all spacecraft have lots of resonances that get excited and free flying spacecraft tend to vibrate. That is especially true if there are people on it. The Moon is this nice heavy thing that doesn't vibrate (much). There are a number of things, such as optical interferometers, that would be much easier from the Moon than in free space. Now, I wouldn't go to the Moon just to put telescopes there, but, if you are going there, it is a good place to put telescopes.
One of the people on the mars lander program (specifically Spirit and Opportunity) stated that the amount of work done by the probes over the course of all the years they've been in operation could have been accomplished by one man in a month and a half.
Sure, at 10000x the cost. And, of course, we wouldn't have done it yet. And, for that matter, we'd still need to send the probes to prepare.
No, that's not true. The US Mars program has absorbed many 10's of billions of (current) dollars in the last 33 years. I would say that this is somewhere between 1/10 and 1/100 of the cost of a manned missions, not 10^-4. Just 2 weeks ago, Weiler was complaining that the unmanned Mars program needed another $ 1 billion per year to remain viable.
In different words for the price of sending one man to Mars for a couple of months (or even a year), we can send hundreds of probes to every planet, planetoid, and major rock in the solar system.
Also not true, for the same reason. And, oh, by the way, we had the chance to do that, and didn't. That experiment was tried and failed.
The trouble with relying on unmanned planetary exploration is that it is just too slow. Thirty three years, and we still haven't found liquid water on Mars (for example). (It almost certainly does exist, as parts of the surface are warm enough during the day and well above the triple point of water.) Don't get me wrong, lots of cool stuff has been found out, but at a glacially slow pace. And, all of those results will become historical footnotes about 1 week after the first manned expedition reaches Martian orbit.
I hope so. This should have been done IMHO in 1973.
People who have gone to the Air and Space Museum in DC may remember the "Skylab" space station there, which was actual flight hardware. What they may not realize is that this space station, the third state of a Saturn V, was intended to support manned deep space flight, starting with a Venus flyby in 1973. The idea was that the Saturn V third stage would be launched fueled, would be used to send 3 astronauts towards Venus (thus emptying it of fuel), the astronauts would then take up residence inside and the weight taken by the "LEM" in Lunar flight would have been used for food and other provisions. It would have been risky, but it could have been done.
I also remember discussions at about the same time about going to some of the Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) - even then, some were energetically easier to reach and return from than the Moon. Again, there is no need for a LEM (Astronauts could just space walk over in the weak gravity of any NEA), and the LEM's mass would have been used for provisions. All of this could have been done, if the USA hadn't have turned its back on space exploration 40 years ago.
than current rovers without the 10-minute time lag to Earth.
At opposition, the average round trip time (RTT) to Mars is 9 minutes.
At superior conjunction, the average RTT to Mars is 42 minutes.
At other times, the RTT will be in between these two values.
Both of these numbers will vary at the 10% level due to orbital eccentricities and inclinations, but, clearly, most of the time the RTT will be greater than 10 minutes.
However, this is almost irrelevant. All currently and planned rovers or landers use "bent-pipe tracking," where data is sent to an orbiter, and then the orbiter, sometime later, sends it to the Earth. This greatly increases the effective RTT (there are not orbiters passing over any given surface location at any time).
I believe that the Phoenix, the current rovers, and the Mars Science Laboratory all basically plan on an effectively daily RTT (i.e., at best one up and down link per day). These long effective RTTs and the use of orbiters to store-and-forward data are part of the motivation behind the efforts around Delay / Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) - AKA the Interplanetary Internet.
This has been used for years - for example, back in Maggie Thatcher's day they caught a mole this way. What, exactly, is new about this ? That it's in software ?
One of the things that I think was near criminal about the post Apollo period was that the ALSEPs were turned off, including the seismometers, to satisfy Senator Proxmire. So many billions of dollars to put them on the Moon, but $ 250,000 / year to keep collecting data was just too much.
Many 'amateur' astronomers are not amateur at all.
Note that 'amateur' comes from the French for "lover" and has a primary meaning someone who loves what they are doing, someone who is not paid being a secondary meeting. I would say that almost all astronomers are amateur. Some are even paid for doing it as well.
Amateur astronomers in the "unpaid" sense make many discoveries and (if they know what they are doing) tend to get a high regard from the professional astronomical community.
You obviously have not looked at many deep sky astronomical images, nor at the article in question. Meteor trails in deep sky images are fairly common.
First, if you look at the original picture, http://www.mikesastrophotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/july6-bolide-hankey.jpg , you will see it's more like a
square degree in size (i.e., about 1000 to 10,000 times more area than your calculation). These sorts of wide-angle images are common with people observing near-by galaxies, which are after all fairly big things fairly close by.
Second, most astronomical photos are time exposures (or, now-a-days, many short CCD exposures may be taken to sum up and get one good picture). The OA picture looks like a fairly short time exposure, but I bet he took more than one picture.
Third, most nights with a dark sky, you will see a meteor trail every minute or so, and of course more during meteor showers. All of this means that getting a meteor streak in your photo is not nearly as rare as you think. Bolides (fireballs) are certainly more rare, and he was lucky to get one (assuming it wasn't a re-entering satellite).
They think it will get them press.
I bet, in the end, they don't do it, but send the rover elsewhere.
Meteors get images in astronomical photo's all of the time - they do, after all, tend to be time exposure, frequently quiet long. There
have been lots of these.
It looks, from this image, that this was possibly a bolide and that there were pieces coming off. (It also could have been a re-entering satellite.) I don't see what that tells you about the orbit of the meteor, except that it passed through a patch of sky. Meteor patrols, such as the Prairie Network and the one at Ondrejov Observatory in the former Czechoslovakia, used wide-angle cameras with rotating fans in front of the telescope, so you can determine the velocity of the bolide from the breaks in the streak. So, I doubt this picture helps to determine the orbit of the meteor much. Survellience camera images would be much more useful - it is fairly routine now-a-days for local imagery to determine the orbit of meteorites well enough to find falls.
Also, while it is true that some meteorites are very expensive, that is precisely because they are rare. The chances of this body, assuming it reached the ground, being rare are also rare.
If anyone reading this does find pieces, try not to touch them and use tongs or a shovel etc. to put them into a baggy or baggies. If they are fresh, seal these and put them in the freezer. That will reduce contamination and this enhance their scientific usefulness. Pictures of the pieces on the ground before they are moved would also be good.
So much mis-information, so little time.
Both Voyagers carried golden records
Neither was aimed at any star.
Voyager 1 will take about 40,000 to pass by its first star system (not 2 billion years).
Voyager 2 will pass by (but not especially close to) Sirius in about 300,000 years.
Roughly every 100,000 years or so after that, one should pass through the Oort cloud of some star system (assuming that they all have Oort clouds).
These spacecraft will be (are) in galactic orbits, just like the stars. The vacuum of space will not slow them down. How long they will last is anyone's guess, but
probably in the order of millions of years. Micrometeorite erosion is more likely to degrade them than radiation.
Neither the spacecraft nor the golden disks were designed to survive planetary entry.
That's enough for now. I do agree that the chance of them being found (except by humans looking for them, which is my expectation) is remote.
Most people don't care about anything after the next 50 years.
Some libraries certainly do.
No, just size. It's a huge ball of very thin gas, like a comet but much bigger.
Size is tricky here - each knot is thought to be about 5 times the mass of the Earth, and could be less if they were fed by a central body. Those knots are like comet comas and tails - they would make a very good vacuum, here on Earth.
The really interesting thing to me about this is this : If these knots reveal in any way what is already existing in the outer solar system of the dying star, as opposed being some odd expulsion from the star, or the interaction between different expulsions, this is telling us something very profound about outer solar systems : There could be a lot of stuff out there. One tenth of a Solar mass - 30,000 Earths - is a lot of dark baryonic matter. Maybe we should go out and look in our own Oort cloud and see what's hiding there.
Here is the original paper : http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.2870 . Note that HST detected about 3500 of these, so this is an advance, not an overturning, of older work. These knots are pretty strange.
The Helix Nebulae is a sphere of gas expelled by a dying star, probably in multiple episodes, with. many thousands of these "comet-like objects." Typical theoretical speculation is that they are gas instabilities as old gas is overtaken by new gas expulsions, possibly with dusty cores. In addition, the knots are expanding (away from the central star) significantly slower than the gas of the nebulae. If you Google or go to Arxiv.org, you can find lots of speculation on these knots.
For myself, I have to wonder if these could be "planetary comets" - i.e., giant comets resulting from the heating of bodies in the Oort cloud of the star. The mass is about right, and that would explain their longevity, but it is not clear why they would be expanding away from the central star.
From TFA : "Panagopoulos says his team is looking to use 3D images in the future."
So, not yet.
3-D would be an obvious add-on here - the depth of the cut stone incision should reveal a lot
about the force being used, and I would expect that to be a distinguishing characteristic.
Who cares about some junky old probe?
A bunch of people, at least in the Lunar and planetary science community. Here is a review paper, and another on the physics return from LLR. We know where the Moon is at the sub-cm level without Lunakhod 1, but recovering this array would help determine Lunar rotation. Even though the Moon is commonly regarded as a dead body, it isn't, and these data might help to resolve this. There is a free libration of the Moon of unknown origin, so it would be good to have data from yet another point on the surface.
The Apollo LLR site has looked for Lunakhod 1, but without success so far. These LLR retroreflectors are arrays, and would work if a few corner cubes were cracked.
It's approximate position is of course known, but not well compared to the spot size. Searches can be made to go faster by defocusing the laser, thus making the spot larger, but that lowers the return (the larger spot has fewer photons per square meter). If the retroreflector isn't oriented towards Earth, that will cut down on the return, and it might not be possible to see it with a defocused laser. So, if LRO can see it, the Apollo LLR site will look for a return from the exact spot.
My prediction, FWIW, is that they will find it.
Lunakhod 1 carried a French retroreflector array for Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) but unfortunately, contact was lost and no one knows where it is. There are good returns for Lunakhod 2, so I (and others) want Lunakhod 1 back !
Finding this would be a great help for Lunar science (assuming it didn't get crushed in a landslide or something). I know that this is on their list, so good luck !
Slugs, poundals, what's the difference ?
First, I was taught that on this side of the pond they are called English Engineering Units.
Second, the cost of the Mars orbiter lost due to conversion issues was about that of the estimated conversion cost. This
foolishness will go on until another mission is lost, then the money will magically be found. Let's hope no one gets killed this time.