If I was mission director, I would want to get Grunt out of Earth orbit as soon as I could. For one thing, fuel would have to be burnt to keep the orbit from decaying; for another, the main tanks were never intended to store fuel on-orbit for years. True, they might be just fine, but why take the chance? And, I am sure that some trajectory could be found to get it to Mars in less than 27 months.
One source will say the window has already closed, another says it's open until sometime in December.
Given that Mars Science Laboratory has yet to launch, and intends to use the same window, I suspect that there is still a chance.
The Grunt spacecraft has a given delta V available and was intended to use a particular window, which may be closing / have closed for that delta-V, but now the question is not "can Grunt get to Mars quickly and efficiently" but "can Grunt get to Mars at all," and I bet the answer to that is yes. I would look into Moon gravity assists, Earth gravity assists, and even Venus gravity assists.
It's not really the position, it's the signal strength. In low Earth orbit the orbit can be (and routinely is) determined from radar and optical observations without any cooperation from the spacecraft at all. The dish at Perth is 15 meters. At 10 cm wavelength, it has a beamwidth of order 7 milliradian, so at 300 km range they need about 2 km orbital accuracy for pointing, which should be easily achievable.
Note, from the same ESA press release :
In the past few days, ESA's 15 m-diameter Perth dish was modified by the addition of a 'feedhorn' antenna at the side of the main dish so as to transmit very low-power signals over a wide angle in the hopes of triggering a response from the satellite.
This wasn't about pointing the antenna, it was about lowering the signal power. The omni-directional antenna on the spacecraft is intended for use in deep space and was probably being saturated by full power blasts from regular tracking stations. It needed to be "tickled" by something weaker.
Kudos to ESA for doing this. You can bet this was a major effort at the ground station. The feedhorn receiver was probably jury-rigged from spare parts, and probably took days of round the clock work to install and get operational.
The probe was never lost. It is a large object in low Earth orbit; its trajectory is known perfectly well. (Right now it appears to be over Tahiti, for example.)
What it was was uncommunicative. A spacecraft that says nothing is essentially hopeless, unless you want to send someone up there to grab it. Now that it is talking, there may be a chance to save the mission.
The writers of the Constitution, who were obviously not stupid people, mostly thought that the Bill of Rights was unnecessary, being already covered implicitly in the Constitution itself. That's why the Bill of Rights are amendments to the Constitution.
In a democracy, if the majority of the population disagrees with a law to the extent of breaking it, the law should be changed and will eventually be changed. It is a measure of how much our democracy has degraded that this is even a matter for discussion.
Bouwen highlighted the value of a “turn-taking mechanism” that determines who should be next to speak.
In person, two people who begin to speak to a group at the same time tend to take their cues from the direction in which most group members are looking.
Those subtle cues are lost in current videoconferences, Bouwen said.
Note the subtle shift from telepresence to videoconference. The whole point of telepresence is that these sorts of cues ("gaze awareness," in the industry) are not lost. Polycom, Cisco, etc., are very aware of this and work hard to make this happen.
I don't think these sort of robots would replace telepresence rooms, but would be used (as the article says) in meetings with only one remote participants.
There has been a long debate on this, most of which you can easily find by search engine. These devices do a raster scan with a fairly intense spot beam (most of this radiation goes right through you; the spot beam has to be strong as the signal is actually the fraction scattered off of your skin). The spot beam would be a problem if it was to sit on one location for any length of time, so you are totally reliant on the software to not get a serious dose. That alone is a real worry, as most medical Xray radiation problems are due to software errors. That also means that any repeated glints out of the device (say, by people's metal buttons) are likely to cause problems for nearby agents (as they tend to stand in the same place, and so could get repeated exposures). It also means that just wearing a dosimeter is pretty worthless. The agent's chest might get no glint exposure and their feet or crotch might get a serious one.
The above is pretty much the conventional wisdom. As a physicist, I also worry about the way that they calculated dosage (whole body versus surface exposure) may seriously underestimate the risk, but that worry is not very conventional. If I am right, look for skin cancers to start appearing in frequent flyers in areas normally covered by clothing. Of course, that will take a few years; Michael Chertoff is likely to have retired with his loot by then.
I was around in the Government when the Reagan administration came in, RIFed a bunch of people, and put in hiring freezes all over the place, nominally to reduce the size and cost of government. However, they didn't really reduce either departmental budgets, or the tasks that those departments had to fulfill. The result was a vast hiring of contractors, replacing people making X with people making 2X, which (with burden) was billed to the US government as 4X+. I thought at the time that this was not about cost savings at all, or better efficiency, but about funneling cash to politically well connected contractors, and I have seen nothing to make me change my mind since.
Labor unions have had policies put in place by which government employees are impossible to fire if you don't fire them within one year.
Uh, the civil service protections of federal workers have nothing to do with unions. They started with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which was motivated by various scandals around "the spoils system" and the shooting of President James Garfield by an office seeker.
When I worked for the DOD the only people I knew in unions were government contractors (many military bases and NASA installations had union staff and I don't believe that that has changed). I came to have a great respect for the Teamsters, who negotiated very hard and worked very hard.
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Really. That is a standard procedural tool in the Senate.
The US and the Soviet Union / Russia has been flying these satellites since the 1970's, both scientific (starting with Seasat) and military.
RE: "Patent Expires On Best Selling Drug of All Time"
There's a patent on alcohol ? Who knew ?
The sense of humor is a ubiquitous human trait, yet rare or non-existent in the rest of the animal kingdom.
I have known parrots with excellent senses of humor.
Whereas the much superior Babelfish translation is
If the piece of now is git and Slotermeyer? Yes! Beiherhund the or the Flipperwaldt gersput!
If I was mission director, I would want to get Grunt out of Earth orbit as soon as I could. For one thing, fuel would have to be burnt to keep the orbit from decaying; for another, the main tanks were never intended to store fuel on-orbit for years. True, they might be just fine, but why take the chance? And, I am sure that some trajectory could be found to get it to Mars in less than 27 months.
One source will say the window has already closed, another says it's open until sometime in December.
Given that Mars Science Laboratory has yet to launch, and intends to use the same window, I suspect that there is still a chance.
The Grunt spacecraft has a given delta V available and was intended to use a particular window, which may be closing / have closed for that delta-V, but now the question is not "can Grunt get to Mars quickly and efficiently" but "can Grunt get to Mars at all," and I bet the answer to that is yes. I would look into Moon gravity assists, Earth gravity assists, and even Venus gravity assists.
It's not really the position, it's the signal strength. In low Earth orbit the orbit can be (and routinely is) determined from radar and optical observations without any cooperation from the spacecraft at all. The dish at Perth is 15 meters. At 10 cm wavelength, it has a beamwidth of order 7 milliradian, so at 300 km range they need about 2 km orbital accuracy for pointing, which should be easily achievable.
Note, from the same ESA press release :
In the past few days, ESA's 15 m-diameter Perth dish was modified by the addition of a 'feedhorn' antenna at the side of the main dish so as to transmit very low-power signals over a wide angle in the hopes of triggering a response from the satellite.
This wasn't about pointing the antenna, it was about lowering the signal power. The omni-directional antenna on the spacecraft is intended for use in deep space and was probably being saturated by full power blasts from regular tracking stations. It needed to be "tickled" by something weaker.
Kudos to ESA for doing this. You can bet this was a major effort at the ground station. The feedhorn receiver was probably jury-rigged from spare parts, and probably took days of round the clock work to install and get operational.
The probe was never lost. It is a large object in low Earth orbit; its trajectory is known perfectly well. (Right now it appears to be over Tahiti, for example.)
What it was was uncommunicative. A spacecraft that says nothing is essentially hopeless, unless you want to send someone up there to grab it. Now that it is talking, there may be a chance to save the mission.
The writers of the Constitution, who were obviously not stupid people, mostly thought that the Bill of Rights was unnecessary, being already covered implicitly in the Constitution itself. That's why the Bill of Rights are amendments to the Constitution.
It never hurts to be explicit.
Probably neither, and that is a competing interpretation to the Copenhagen one.
I would bounce this paper as a reviewer. It appears to be a recasting of Bell's Theorem, but it doesn't reference ANY of that work.
I certainly hope that they use this video to train the software.
Wang 3300 Basic Ready>
Touche
In a democracy, if the majority of the population disagrees with a law to the extent of breaking it, the law should be changed and will eventually be changed. It is a measure of how much our democracy has degraded that this is even a matter for discussion.
RIAA has shown itself to be incompetent in the making of public policy. That is clear. The hard part will be convincing Congress of that.
From the article :
Bouwen highlighted the value of a “turn-taking mechanism” that determines who should be next to speak.
In person, two people who begin to speak to a group at the same time tend to take their cues from the direction in which most group members are looking.
Those subtle cues are lost in current videoconferences, Bouwen said.
Note the subtle shift from telepresence to videoconference. The whole point of telepresence is that these sorts of cues ("gaze awareness," in the industry) are not lost. Polycom, Cisco, etc., are very aware of this and work hard to make this happen.
I don't think these sort of robots would replace telepresence rooms, but would be used (as the article says) in meetings with only one remote participants.
Oh, and robots like this are already on the market.
There has been a long debate on this, most of which you can easily find by search engine. These devices do a raster scan with a fairly intense spot beam (most of this radiation goes right through you; the spot beam has to be strong as the signal is actually the fraction scattered off of your skin). The spot beam would be a problem if it was to sit on one location for any length of time, so you are totally reliant on the software to not get a serious dose. That alone is a real worry, as most medical Xray radiation problems are due to software errors. That also means that any repeated glints out of the device (say, by people's metal buttons) are likely to cause problems for nearby agents (as they tend to stand in the same place, and so could get repeated exposures). It also means that just wearing a dosimeter is pretty worthless. The agent's chest might get no glint exposure and their feet or crotch might get a serious one.
The above is pretty much the conventional wisdom. As a physicist, I also worry about the way that they calculated dosage (whole body versus surface exposure) may seriously underestimate the risk, but that worry is not very conventional. If I am right, look for skin cancers to start appearing in frequent flyers in areas normally covered by clothing. Of course, that will take a few years; Michael Chertoff is likely to have retired with his loot by then.
These machines were rolled out because of lobbying. People are going to die because of security theater.
By the way, most of those people will be TSA agents. Whatever the general public is getting, they are getting as well.
"One thing I hadn't realized was just how close workers came to averting the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl."
It was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. It was very close to being worse than Chernobyl.
No. All union membership in the federal sector is entirely voluntary. At least where I worked, the number of CS union people was vanishingly small.
We did have to fire some CS employees, and I don't remember any union involvement in that either.
I was around in the Government when the Reagan administration came in, RIFed a bunch of people, and put in hiring freezes all over the place, nominally to reduce the size and cost of government. However, they didn't really reduce either departmental budgets, or the tasks that those departments had to fulfill. The result was a vast hiring of contractors, replacing people making X with people making 2X, which (with burden) was billed to the US government as 4X+. I thought at the time that this was not about cost savings at all, or better efficiency, but about funneling cash to politically well connected contractors, and I have seen nothing to make me change my mind since.
Labor unions have had policies put in place by which government employees are impossible to fire if you don't fire them within one year.
Uh, the civil service protections of federal workers have nothing to do with unions. They started with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which was motivated by various scandals around "the spoils system" and the shooting of President James Garfield by an office seeker.
When I worked for the DOD the only people I knew in unions were government contractors (many military bases and NASA installations had union staff and I don't believe that that has changed). I came to have a great respect for the Teamsters, who negotiated very hard and worked very hard.
Counties are BIG in Texas.
Gee, what did they do in 1911 ? Use dirigibles ?