Nixon ended America as a space-faring nation, by canceling Apollo and the interplanetary Apollo follow-ons (and, not so incidentally,by firing most of the Apollo engineers). Since then, manned space-flight outside of Low Earth Orbit has always been at least a decade away, and has slipped by at least one decade per decade.
Maybe, but I would think that it got to the surface as part of the excavation of a meteor crater, which of course doesn't require any tectonics.
I, personally, have always thought that the linear nature of Tharsis indicates some sort of internal tectonics, but that is decidedly not a majority view.
Spirit and Opportunity are geology missions. Looking for & at rocks is what they are intended to do.
There is a back story here. After the perceived strategic failure of Viking (the spacecraft all worked fine, but a lot of money was spent to find life, and then positive results from the bio experiments were disbelieved because of the low levels of organics on the surface), it has taken NASA 3+ decades to attempt another biology test - the MSL. The MER were sold to do geology, and that's what they have been doing.
I concluded 7 years ago that there was really no hope for the current music industry, and that the only rational thing to do was to wait for it to crater. Nothing has changed, except the smell of desperation is ever more palpable. Yesterday, I heard Steve Marks of RIAA talked about their graduated response plan. He denied it was a "3 strikes plan," which of course means that it is. It is no more likely to work than any of their previous plans.
Someone asked me afterwards why the industry continues to be so disastrously stupid. All I could come up with is that the people executing the stupidity are getting paid, and paid well, for continuing to hold out hope to the old men running the business that things can get put back the way that they were. As long as the people in charge have such delusions, and as long as they still have something to be in charge of, nothing will change,
Of course, bands like OK Go are basically serfs in this process. As they admit, they have no actual power whatsoever, and are just along for the ride.
Yeah, an astronaut in a space suit would be able to free the rover in seconds, and clean its solar panels while he was at it. And, while we are at it, two or three astronauts in space suits could have done their entire multi-year missions in a few weeks in each location. But, since we don't have any astronauts in space suits handy on Mars, we are stuck with trying to wheelie it out.
Complete opposite side of the planet. That was deliberate - that way, Spirit and Opportunitynever compete for the same ground tracking time, or for the same satellite relay time.
I am sure that some in the studios would love to do this, and I am also sure that it will lead to results that James Cameron won't like.
To see why, just imagine that this technology had been invented in the 1930's, and that every "major" motion picture today only used actors that had been dead for 30 - 50 years.
Well, suppose your Mom was at a restaurant having dinner, and it got blown up, killing her and most of the rest of the clientele, and you learned that the restaurant was bombed without warning because a "high value target" was supposed to have been there, but wasn't. (This has happened, and it was no accident.) I assume, based on the above, you would feel that "them's the breaks," but I can assure you that many people would conclude that the people dropping the bombs don't really care much as to whether civilians were killed or not, and you don't have to dig very deep to learn that in reality many of the people at the receiving end of such incidents do indeed feel that the people behind the bombs deserve punishment.
Yes. A 2 or 3 meter spacecraft could look like a 10 meter asteroid (and would typically not weigh much even for its size, being probably largely hollow).
Everything that leaves the Earth to go into solar orbit will return to the close vicinity of the Earth's orbit, unless the spacecraft has its orbit further modified. So, for example, the upper stages of spacecraft sent on to elsewhere will typically come back to the vicinity of our orbit. If there is any sort of orbit commensurability, periodically the Earth will also be at that point in its orbit at the same time, and so you will get a close approach.
Sorry, this is commonly said, but in my humble opinion it is BS. I certainly expect privacy when I am out and about. I expect, for example, that TeraHz waves will not be used to look through my clothing, and that microphones will not be synced together to capture my every word. If, say, Walmart, does these things, and I will find out about it, I will sue.
This is from discussion about a letter sent from a lawyer of the Queen of England (Elizebeth II) to the press :
"Members of the royal family feel they have a right to privacy when they are going about everyday, private activities," said Paddy Harverson, spokesman for the queen's son Prince Charles.”
Note that the Queen is referring to activities that are visible in public, by the public. I am an American. If it is a right for the Queen of England, it is a right for me.
Oppportunity is making 6 km / year. They are something like 8000 km apart, so this would take ~ 140 years or so, assuming no accidents (and, of course, there is no way either vehicle could last that long.)
I'm not even sure there's a replacement mission in the works in any meaningful timeline.
The next US rover will be the Mars Science Laboratory, a much bigger (five times as heavy) and more capable spacecraft, now planned for 2011.
There is a very strong pressure in NASA to build new things. While it would make a lot of sense to send several more MER just like Spirit to different parts of the planet, that's not how NASA and the Congress (and the contractors and their lobbyists) think. The good side of this is that the new stuff can do more. The bad side is that it makes exploration slow and halting. If you just wanted to explore Mars, sending a MER to a different location every two years would make a lot of sense. Since the pressure is more on the building side, we get a shiny new mission every 7 or 8 years instead.
He might try, but the accurate calculation of black hole orbits requires the complete infrastructure of General Relativity, so Einstein is calling this tune.
Those of us who are interested in Martian climate oscillations hope that they can turn Spirit into a Martian geodetic observatory, to study the rotation of Mars. There hasn't been a good platform for doing this since Viking 1 died some 27 years ago.
As Bill Folkner says : ""Long-term change in the spin direction could tell us about the diameter and density of the planet's core. Short-period changes could tell us whether the core is liquid or solid." There would also be good science in comparing the current rotation rate of Mars with the value determined by Viking; such data would be sensitive to changes in the water and CO2 accumulated at the Polar Caps.
" Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."
Whenever I hear something like this, I always feel like there is either a will to mislead or a statistical idiot on the other end. This would be much more impressive a statistic if it were statistically controlled for income.
I think it is a reasonable presumption that Kindle owners are wealthier (or have more wealthier relatives) than the average person. If they have the money to put $ 259 on a Kindle, they probably have the money to buy more paper books as well.
Those big brains would not have evolved without an evolutionary advantage of some sort, lack of literary hard drives or no. Now, their relative fitness against homo sapiens is another matter - that could depend on things like population size, climate change, and the accidents of history. ("The race is not always to the swift" and all that.)
I bet that, if this is true, someone starts looking for these genes in the current human population. They should be able to get some DNA from those 10,000 year old bones to compare against.
As a physicist, I find it interesting that both physicists and engineers have similar skill sets, but I have never heard of a terrorist physicist (unless you want to count Edward Teller).
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Nixon ended America as a space-faring nation, by canceling Apollo and the interplanetary Apollo follow-ons (and, not so incidentally,by firing most of the Apollo engineers). Since then, manned space-flight outside of Low Earth Orbit has always been at least a decade away, and has slipped by at least one decade per decade.
Maybe, but I would think that it got to the surface as part of the excavation of a meteor crater, which of course doesn't require any tectonics.
I, personally, have always thought that the linear nature of Tharsis indicates some sort of internal tectonics, but that is decidedly not a majority view.
Spirit and Opportunity are geology missions. Looking for & at rocks is what they are intended to do.
There is a back story here. After the perceived strategic failure of Viking (the spacecraft all worked fine, but a lot of money was spent to find life, and then positive results from the bio experiments were disbelieved because of the low levels of organics on the surface), it has taken NASA 3+ decades to attempt another biology test - the MSL. The MER were sold to do geology, and that's what they have been doing.
It was the six months producing the album that the track behind the video was taken from that cost all the money.
Basically all that money went to the label and their minions, it just had to be loaned to the band first to leave them in debt to the label. Steve Albini explained this process much better than I ever could.
I concluded 7 years ago that there was really no hope for the current music industry, and that the only rational thing to do was to wait for it to crater. Nothing has changed, except the smell of desperation is ever more palpable. Yesterday, I heard Steve Marks of RIAA talked about their graduated response plan. He denied it was a "3 strikes plan," which of course means that it is. It is no more likely to work than any of their previous plans.
Someone asked me afterwards why the industry continues to be so disastrously stupid. All I could come up with is that the people executing the stupidity are getting paid, and paid well, for continuing to hold out hope to the old men running the business that things can get put back the way that they were. As long as the people in charge have such delusions, and as long as they still have something to be in charge of, nothing will change,
Of course, bands like OK Go are basically serfs in this process. As they admit, they have no actual power whatsoever, and are just along for the ride.
Yeah, an astronaut in a space suit would be able to free the rover in seconds, and clean its solar panels while he was at it. And, while we are at it, two or three astronauts in space suits could have done their entire multi-year missions in a few weeks in each location. But, since we don't have any astronauts in space suits handy on Mars, we are stuck with trying to wheelie it out.
Oh, and that separation translates to centuries of driving time, even if they could last that long, which they can't
"How far away is the other rover, Opportunity ?
Complete opposite side of the planet. That was deliberate - that way, Spirit and Opportunity never compete for the same ground tracking time, or for the same satellite relay time.
We need a Mars Geodetic Observatory - and Bill Folkner and the celestial mechanics guys at JPL have dibs on Spirit if it can't be freed.
All we need is a dust-devil a year !
"and that an ethical line needs to be drawn somewhere."
Haven't you figured out movie speak yet ? In movieland,
"yes" means "maybe"
"maybe" means "no"
"soon" means "never"
and "somewhere" means "elsewhere"
To you, maybe, but not to the people making the movies. If they wanted awkward teens, there is no shortage of them at Santa Monica High School.
I am sure that some in the studios would love to do this, and I am also sure that it will lead to results that James Cameron won't like.
To see why, just imagine that this technology had been invented in the 1930's, and that every "major" motion picture today only used actors that had been dead for 30 - 50 years.
Well, suppose your Mom was at a restaurant having dinner, and it got blown up, killing her and most of the rest of the clientele, and you learned that the restaurant was bombed without warning because a "high value target" was supposed to have been there, but wasn't. (This has happened, and it was no accident.) I assume, based on the above, you would feel that "them's the breaks," but I can assure you that many people would conclude that the people dropping the bombs don't really care much as to whether civilians were killed or not, and you don't have to dig very deep to learn that in reality many of the people at the receiving end of such incidents do indeed feel that the people behind the bombs deserve punishment.
Yes. A 2 or 3 meter spacecraft could look like a 10 meter asteroid (and would typically not weigh much even for its size, being probably largely hollow).
Everything that leaves the Earth to go into solar orbit will return to the close vicinity of the Earth's orbit, unless the spacecraft has its orbit further modified. So, for example, the upper stages of spacecraft sent on to elsewhere will typically come back to the vicinity of our orbit. If there is any sort of orbit commensurability, periodically the Earth will also be at that point in its orbit at the same time, and so you will get a close approach.
Sorry, this is commonly said, but in my humble opinion it is BS. I certainly expect privacy when I am out and about. I expect, for example, that TeraHz waves will not be used to look through my clothing, and that microphones will not be synced together to capture my every word. If, say, Walmart, does these things, and I will find out about it, I will sue.
This is from discussion about a letter sent from a lawyer of the Queen of England (Elizebeth II) to the press :
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-queen-writes-to-editors-over-paparazzi-1835247.html
"Members of the royal family feel they have a right to privacy when they are going about everyday, private activities," said Paddy Harverson, spokesman for the queen's son Prince Charles.”
Note that the Queen is referring to activities that are visible in public, by the public. I am an American. If it is a right for the Queen of England, it is a right for me.
Could this be another Police test gone awry ?
"Huge" quantities of cocaine delivered to supermarkets in Spain hidden in boxes of bananas.
Seriously. This could get someone killed. Someone needs to be punished for this.
(Assuming, of course, that this report is true.)
Oppportunity is making 6 km / year. They are something like 8000 km apart, so this would take ~ 140 years or so, assuming no accidents (and, of course, there is no way either vehicle could last that long.)
I'm not even sure there's a replacement mission in the works in any meaningful timeline.
The next US rover will be the Mars Science Laboratory, a much bigger (five times as heavy) and more capable spacecraft, now planned for 2011.
There is a very strong pressure in NASA to build new things. While it would make a lot of sense to send several more MER just like Spirit to different parts of the planet, that's not how NASA and the Congress (and the contractors and their lobbyists) think. The good side of this is that the new stuff can do more. The bad side is that it makes exploration slow and halting. If you just wanted to explore Mars, sending a MER to a different location every two years would make a lot of sense. Since the pressure is more on the building side, we get a shiny new mission every 7 or 8 years instead.
choreographed by Newton himself.
He might try, but the accurate calculation of black hole orbits requires the complete infrastructure of General Relativity, so Einstein is calling this tune.
Those of us who are interested in Martian climate oscillations hope that they can turn Spirit into a Martian geodetic observatory, to study the rotation of Mars. There hasn't been a good platform for doing this since Viking 1 died some 27 years ago.
As Bill Folkner says : ""Long-term change in the spin direction could tell us about the diameter and density of the planet's core. Short-period changes could tell us whether the core is liquid or solid." There would also be good science in comparing the current rotation rate of Mars with the value determined by Viking; such data would be sensitive to changes in the water and CO2 accumulated at the Polar Caps.
Well, if his object is to get noticed, his plan is working.
" Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."
Whenever I hear something like this, I always feel like there is either a will to mislead or a statistical idiot on the other end. This would be much more impressive a statistic if it were statistically controlled for income.
I think it is a reasonable presumption that Kindle owners are wealthier (or have more wealthier relatives) than the average person. If they have the money to put $ 259 on a Kindle, they probably have the money to buy more paper books as well.
Assume the hypothesis is true.
Those big brains would not have evolved without an evolutionary advantage of some sort, lack of literary hard drives or no. Now, their relative fitness against homo sapiens is another matter - that could depend on things like population size, climate change, and the accidents of history. ("The race is not always to the swift" and all that.)
I bet that, if this is true, someone starts looking for these genes in the current human population. They should be able to get some DNA from those 10,000 year old bones to compare against.
As a physicist, I find it interesting that both physicists and engineers have similar skill sets, but I have never heard of a terrorist physicist (unless you want to count Edward Teller).