I have seen a number of military networks that are flat networks with all the same version of windows with all the same software behind a heavily locked down firewall (only port 80 and 443, typically). These are attack disasters waiting to happen - crunchy on the outside, sweet and chewy on the inside. If one machine gets infected, it's a good bet that all will be.
I bet they don't even know what the attack vector is.
I actually like the Mars part. But the Moon, Mars & ISS pieces do not fit together well and they run the risk that, by trying to do too much, we will not accomplish anything. In the space arena it is an iron rule that, if you drag things out, you increase the total cost.
I actually think that the asteroids will be where the economic payoff will be, and would recommend that manned Moon exploration be scrapped for now, and Near Earth Asteroids be used for test flights for the Mars mission.
Remember, if you can get to the Moon, you can get to a NEA. The energies required are very similar.
Except for the Hubble, I think that all future Shuttle missions will be in the ISS orbit. Then there are possibilities, since all you have to do is get them to the ISS, not down, during the emergency. The Soyuz TMA attached to the ISS might have enough delta-v to do that.
Of course, if we really ever wanted to have a space station that was a help for deep space travel, we need one in an equatorial orbit or at least a Florida inclination orbit. The ISS is just in the wrong orbit to serve as a way station to the Moon or Mars or anywhere else outbound.
The expected Apollo loss rate was 1 in 25, or 4%. The Soyuz loss rate has been 2 out of 100, or 2%.
Having said that, the Russians are very sensible in running basically the same spacecraft for decades. Once you get the bugs out, spacecraft (like any engineering) is a lot more reliable, and the Soyuz has had 90 successful missions in a row. (I am counting success here as the crew survived - obviously, not all of these missions did everything they were supposed to do.)
Yes, and their Moon mission is costing about 1/10th of what a similar NASA mission would cost. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea, but the lobbyists would hate it.
The ISS was started under Reagan, went "I" (International) under Clinton, and has largely been finished under Bush II. That's a lot longer than 8 years.
Going international really helps keep large science projects going, once you get over the initial barrier of getting a bunch of countries on-board. In my own personal connection to this, I actually said as much to the then Vice President when I had a chance to talk to him about the Space Station in 1993. I have no idea if my pitch influenced government policy, but I would make basically the same pitch today.
Our whole space program needs a general rethink. We have two big programs, flight to the Moon and Mars, that were started by Bush without a lot of thought, we have the ISS which is ready for experiments that we do not have money to fly - such as Samuel Ting's very interesting cosmic anti-matter detector, and we are canceling ready-to-go missions such as the SIM planet finder to pay for new stuff that is frankly never likely to happen.
We do not have a coherent space program, and so we are wasting much of our money. Fixing this will not be easy, but it is very urgent in my opinion.
I wish Space.com would fix the blank advertising page that comes up before every story. I don't mind advertising too much, but to click through an ad page with no ads is annoying.
Probably the biggest reason why NASA didn't put one in was the rovers were designed for 90 sol missions. Having them last 5 years is a bonus
Yes, people don't tend to realize the cost and redundancy required to design a mission to last for years on another planet. Basically every such mission is designed for 90 days or less and you hope to get a lot more.
The Viking 1 lander was killed by a software error - they had cut staffing to a few people, and they got out of the habit of testing the software before it was uploaded.
Spirit has not been moving much recently - I believe that since 2007 it has only gone about 1 or 2 meters. It's not just the power, it's also the crippled wheel.
What the spacecraft needs is a few dust-devils to blow the dust off. The original mission plan assumed that both rovers would suffer power failures after a few months due to dust, and people were pleasantly surprised to have the dust cleared off by the dust-devils. Why this is no longer working is unclear, at least to me - the climate may be changing, or maybe the spacecraft has acquired a static electricity charge.
"The hypothetical particle even seems to have the right mass to account for one theory of dark matter."
An excellent bet is that any new particle will rapidly give rise to dozens if not hundreds of theories as to why it is exactly what's needed to explain dark matter.
(In other words, instant physics is frequently not very trustworthy, and instant theoretical physics is especially frequently not very trustworthy.
There is the Moon treaty, which we never signed, and the Outer Space treaty, which we did. (Pay careful attention to Article 8 of the OST, which says that terrestrial laws apply unless you start making stuff up there. I am convinced that in the fullness of time this will be an issue.)
There have been some other, more focused, agreements as well - a complete list is here.
we could be able to read the content of brains and transfer it to that planet via some radio system, to embed it into androids.
I strongly believe that you can't escape your instantiation. You might be able to transfer the content of your brains into a robot, but it will not be you. You (and I) are driven much more by our biology and genetics than we typically like to admit. There will never be a robot civilization on another planet, that lives like we do, and loves what we love,
If you don't believe this, suppose that I invented a means to transfer the contents of your brain into a dolphin or an elephant. Would the dolphin or the elephant Hurricane78 have the same interests and desires as the human Hurricane78 ? I strongly doubt it. Why should we believe differently about the robot Hurricane78, which would be much more different from you than either the dolphin or the elephant versions ?
I agree (and I did RTFA). The Apollo 11 site is a bad target for this. It is quite small and they will mess it up.
Here is a suggestion : They should aim for the Apollo 12 landing site and specifically for the Surveyor 3 lander investigated by the Apollo 12 astronauts. For that spacecraft there is a 3 year baseline (its landing to the Apollo 12 landing) of observations and comparing that with 40 years in the lunar vacuum would be very interesting.
Sure it can be. It just tends to be slow. In 5 Earth years, the Mars Exploration Rovers have been superb, but what they have done could have been done by a crew of human geologists in a few weeks or less. We could be doing that, we just chose to put our resources elsewhere.
There are plenty of other places in the solar system where humans are unlikely to go. The surface of Europa, a very interesting place, sits bathed in the Jovian radiation belts, for example, which would be fatal to an unprotected human in a matter of minutes and would fry even a hardened lander in a few weeks. Sounds like a good place for a robot to me.
Lunkhod (or Lunakhod) 1 and 2 roved around on the Moon in the 1970's, with the second rover covering over 40 km (more than the current Mars Rovers combined).
Lunkhod 2 has a laser retroreflector package that is used for laser laser ranging (LLR) along with 3 Apollo LLR retroreflector packages; these 4 sites together determine the Moon's orbit to the order of centimeters and are thus crucial in a number of scientific investigations ranging from pure physics to Lunar dynamics.
As a PS, I would strongly urge any exploration of the Apollo 11 site to stay well away from its LLR retroreflectors, as moving them by even a mm could cause problems interpreting that data.
They operate in different wavelength bands - Hubble is not an long-wave IR telescope. The space analogy for SOFIA is the 85 centimeter Spitzer telescope.
These telescopes operate in the IR so their wavelengths are longer and thus their resolutions are poorer for a given size telescope.
So the score card is: Hubble 0.1 Arc Sec (best); Keck 0.3 Arc Sec many other telescopes are doing as well as the Keck; SOFIA greater than 2.0 arc sec
Note that radio Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) can routinely do factions of a milliarcsecond resolution, or a factor of 100 times better than Hubble. This requires synthesizing a telescope the size of the Earth, which you can do in the radio.
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I have seen a number of military networks that are flat networks with all the same version of windows with all the same software behind a heavily locked down firewall (only port 80 and 443, typically). These are attack disasters waiting to happen - crunchy on the outside, sweet and chewy on the inside. If one machine gets infected, it's a good bet that all will be.
I bet they don't even know what the attack vector is.
I actually like the Mars part. But the Moon, Mars & ISS pieces do not fit together well and they run the risk that, by trying to do too much, we will not accomplish anything. In the space arena it is an iron rule that, if you drag things out, you increase the total cost.
I actually think that the asteroids will be where the economic payoff will be, and would recommend that manned Moon exploration be scrapped for now, and Near Earth Asteroids be used for test flights for the Mars mission.
Remember, if you can get to the Moon, you can get to a NEA. The energies required are very similar.
Except for the Hubble, I think that all future Shuttle missions will be in the ISS orbit. Then there are possibilities, since all you have to do is get them to the ISS, not down, during the emergency. The Soyuz TMA attached to the ISS might have enough delta-v to do that.
Of course, if we really ever wanted to have a space station that was a help for deep space travel, we need one in an equatorial orbit or at least a Florida inclination orbit. The ISS is just in the wrong orbit to serve as a way station to the Moon or Mars or anywhere else outbound.
We are in a recession. I certainly hope he continues deficit spending at least for the near term.
The last President to cut spending because of hard economic times was named Hoover, and it didn't go so well for him.
The expected Apollo loss rate was 1 in 25, or 4%. The Soyuz loss rate has been 2 out of 100, or 2%.
Having said that, the Russians are very sensible in running basically the same spacecraft for decades. Once you get the bugs out, spacecraft (like any engineering) is a lot more reliable, and the Soyuz has had 90 successful missions in a row. (I am counting success here as the crew survived - obviously, not all of these missions did everything they were supposed to do.)
Yes, and their Moon mission is costing about 1/10th of what a similar NASA mission would cost. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea, but the lobbyists would hate it.
The ISS was started under Reagan, went "I" (International) under Clinton, and has largely been finished under Bush II. That's a lot longer than 8 years.
Going international really helps keep large science projects going, once you get over the initial barrier of getting a bunch of countries on-board. In my own personal connection to this, I actually said as much to the then Vice President when I had a chance to talk to him about the Space Station in 1993. I have no idea if my pitch influenced government policy, but I would make basically the same pitch today.
Our whole space program needs a general rethink. We have two big programs, flight to the Moon and Mars, that were started by Bush without a lot of thought, we have the ISS which is ready for experiments that we do not have money to fly - such as Samuel Ting's very interesting cosmic anti-matter detector, and we are canceling ready-to-go missions such as the SIM planet finder to pay for new stuff that is frankly never likely to happen.
We do not have a coherent space program, and so we are wasting much of our money. Fixing this will not be easy, but it is very urgent in my opinion.
I wish Space.com would fix the blank advertising page that comes up before every story. I don't mind advertising too much, but to click through an ad page with no ads is annoying.
If your car was on Mars, I would call it a spacecraft too.
Probably the biggest reason why NASA didn't put one in was the rovers were designed for 90 sol missions. Having them last 5 years is a bonus
Yes, people don't tend to realize the cost and redundancy required to design a mission to last for years on another planet. Basically every such mission is designed for 90 days or less and you hope to get a lot more.
The Viking 1 lander was killed by a software error - they had cut staffing to a few people, and they got out of the habit of testing the software before it was uploaded.
Spirit has not been moving much recently - I believe that since 2007 it has only gone about 1 or 2 meters. It's not just the power, it's also the crippled wheel.
What the spacecraft needs is a few dust-devils to blow the dust off. The original mission plan assumed that both rovers would suffer power failures after a few months due to dust, and people were pleasantly surprised to have the dust cleared off by the dust-devils. Why this is no longer working is unclear, at least to me - the climate may be changing, or maybe the spacecraft has acquired a static electricity charge.
...one says fewer resources, less management support, and increased workload.
Welcome to the recession. Please enjoy your stay.
An unmanned spacecraft when launched is "fully autonomous" and there are a number that are bigger than 700 metric tons.
Titan IVB - 943 tons
Delta IV - up to 733 tons
Saturn V (there were 3 unmanned launches) - 3000 tons
"The hypothetical particle even seems to have the right mass to account for one theory of dark matter."
An excellent bet is that any new particle will rapidly give rise to dozens if not hundreds of theories as to why it is exactly what's needed to explain dark matter.
(In other words, instant physics is frequently not very trustworthy, and instant theoretical physics is especially frequently not very trustworthy.
There is the Moon treaty, which we never signed, and the Outer Space treaty, which we did. (Pay careful attention to Article 8 of the OST, which says that terrestrial laws apply unless you start making stuff up there. I am convinced that in the fullness of time this will be an issue.)
There have been some other, more focused, agreements as well - a complete list is here.
we could be able to read the content of brains and transfer it to that planet via some radio system, to embed it into androids.
I strongly believe that you can't escape your instantiation. You might be able to transfer the content of your brains into a robot, but it will not be you. You (and I) are driven much more by our biology and genetics than we typically like to admit. There will never be a robot civilization on another planet, that lives like we do, and loves what we love,
If you don't believe this, suppose that I invented a means to transfer the contents of your brain into a dolphin or an elephant. Would the dolphin or the elephant Hurricane78 have the same interests and desires as the human Hurricane78 ? I strongly doubt it. Why should we believe differently about the robot Hurricane78, which would be much more different from you than either the dolphin or the elephant versions ?
I agree (and I did RTFA). The Apollo 11 site is a bad target for this. It is quite small and they will mess it up.
Here is a suggestion : They should aim for the Apollo 12 landing site and specifically for the Surveyor 3 lander investigated by the Apollo 12 astronauts. For that spacecraft there is a 3 year baseline (its landing to the Apollo 12 landing) of observations and comparing that with 40 years in the lunar vacuum would be very interesting.
much as Navteq's data forms the backbone of most terrestrial GPS services
Define "most." I think that the people who run the International GNSS Service (IGS) would disagree with you.
Sure it can be. It just tends to be slow. In 5 Earth years, the Mars Exploration Rovers have been superb, but what they have done could have been done by a crew of human geologists in a few weeks or less. We could be doing that, we just chose to put our resources elsewhere.
There are plenty of other places in the solar system where humans are unlikely to go. The surface of Europa, a very interesting place, sits bathed in the Jovian radiation belts, for example, which would be fatal to an unprotected human in a matter of minutes and would fry even a hardened lander in a few weeks. Sounds like a good place for a robot to me.
Lunkhod (or Lunakhod) 1 and 2 roved around on the Moon in the 1970's, with the second rover covering over 40 km (more than the current Mars Rovers combined).
Here are some pictures from the mission.
Lunkhod 2 has a laser retroreflector package that is used for laser laser ranging (LLR) along with 3 Apollo LLR retroreflector packages; these 4 sites together determine the Moon's orbit to the order of centimeters and are thus crucial in a number of scientific investigations ranging from pure physics to Lunar dynamics.
As a PS, I would strongly urge any exploration of the Apollo 11 site to stay well away from its LLR retroreflectors, as moving them by even a mm could cause problems interpreting that data.
"Magnetic Portals Connect the Solar Wind and the Earth's Magnetosphere" would be much better.
They operate in different wavelength bands - Hubble is not an long-wave IR telescope. The space analogy for SOFIA is the 85 centimeter Spitzer telescope.
These telescopes operate in the IR so their wavelengths are longer and thus their resolutions are poorer for a given size telescope.
Here are the numbers :
So the score card is: Hubble 0.1 Arc Sec (best); Keck 0.3 Arc Sec many other telescopes are doing as well as the Keck; SOFIA greater than 2.0 arc sec
Note that radio Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) can routinely do factions of a milliarcsecond resolution, or a factor of 100 times better than Hubble. This requires synthesizing a telescope the size of the Earth, which you can do in the radio.
SOFIA is much more sensitive.