I'm not sure even a briefcase nuke (which is somewhat more than 10kg) would have an effect on the moon visible to the naked eye. IIRC they're limited to about 10kt maximum yield, now that's a fairly big bang but less so with no atmosphere although the dust is there of course... I'd expect a brief flash, probably visible to people looking in the general direction, and a small crater visible only through a telescope (and very hard for an amateur to tell from the numerous surrounding impact craters)
It would be kinda cool to be the first person ever to be 'buried' (not literally, unless you were Verne Troyer you'd be too heavy for the cargo weight limit) outside of Earth.
Sorry, someone's beaten you to it - Gene Shoemaker, of comet fame.
Shortly before Professor Shoemaker died he said, "Not going to the Moon and banging on it with my own hammer has been the biggest disappointment in life."
Well, he sort of got his wish. I'm not certain he's the first but haven't heard of anyone before him.
I feel I must reiterate this again and again. The moon is FUCKING HUGE. If we have the capability to transport enough junk there to make any kind of a mess at all then our tech will be advanced enough that this won't be a problem.
Furthermore it's a dead rock anyway, and I can't think of a better place for an interplanetary garbage dump. Well maybe dropping stuff into Jupier. Even Venus is interesting.
Because it's REALLY FUCKING BIG. Agh! Why is it that so many people don't get this? (not a rant at you in particular) What is it with everyone thinking that by mining the moon or landing rockets on it we're going to shift it out of its orbit or something? It's -big-, people!
Well, the electrons in a CRT are around 30keV or so, shouldn't be that big a deal to go up to 50. I think (IANAPP) that electrons are relatively easy to accelerate since all you need is a filament and a grid, whereas it's other subatomic particles and nuclei that need honkin' big particle accelerators.
Funny you should say that, after all nobody died on board Mir and it lasted 15 years despite being designed for 5... seems like pretty good management to me, it takes skills to recover from a rocket crashing into you and a fire on a bloody space station!
This is an urban myth which I would like to dispel.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SATURN V PLANS Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, the Saturn V blueprints have not been lost. They are kept at Marshall Space Flight Center on microfilm. The Federal Archives in East Point, GA also has 2900 cubic feet of Saturn documents. Rocketdyne has in its archives dozens of volumes from its Knowledge Retention Program. This effort was initiated in the late '60s to document every facet of F-1 and J-2 engine production to assist in any future re-start. The problem in re-creating the Saturn V is not finding the drawings, it is finding vendors who can supply mid-1960's vintage hardware (like guidance system components), and the fact that the launch pads and VAB have been converted to Space Shuttle use, so you have no place to launch from. By the time you redesign to accommodate available hardware and re-modify the launch pads, you may as well have started from scratch with a clean sheet design.
If I ran the world NASA would have Mars-Rovers coming out of factories and firing those things over to Mars twice a month.
Sadly the launch window is only roughly every 18 months, at least if you want to use an efficient Hohmann transfer orbit. Probes -could- be launched on less efficient orbits but the cost would be substantially higher and presumably the extra fuel load would mean less rover.
Of course there's little reason not to send a dozen probes at every opportunity, you might have to expand the Deep Space Network infrastructure to handle communicating with them all at once though. Or you could have some stay in a parking orbit around Mars and be released over a period of time. Would need a bit more fuel for orbit insertion of course.
... any life on Mars is almost certainly indigenous.
Not necessarily... as has already been pointed out, it is possible, even likely that meteoroids could have been ejected from Earth some time in the past and ended up on Mars. If any bacteria hitchied a ride of those (and that's a big if) then they would have had millions or billions of years to adapt to the Martian climate.
Maybe, if Mars was something other than a rock. It's a barren desert of a planet. Let the geologists look it over for a few decades and then if we need the room, move in permanently.
I wonder, given a finite amount of money/resources, whether it is better to spend millions or billions on searching for ET intelligence or to spend it on research and development of our own space technologies. I suppose that sort of question can't be answered without knowing the odds of finding something, and you don't know that until you do!
Actually an ATM card is not a smartcard but just a magnetic stripe. These hold a surprisingly small amount of data, a little over a kilobit. Good luck fitting a rootkit in that!
Well actually the big news is that there definitely was liquid water on Mars millions of years ago. Not much sign of it now, although it's pretty certain that there's some water ice at the pole (I forget which)
I love the form factor but when will motherboard manufacturers as a whole produce something with integrated video that supports DVI for flat-panel displays? Integrated video sucks for games of course but it's fine for office work, and that's exactly where the sharp text from an LCD screen is needed most. The DVI port supports analog screens too, so why isn't it being used?
Actually it's just poor webpage design - the images are enlarged slightly within the IMG tag. If you go directly to the url of the JPEGs they come out fine.
Or rather did, before they stopped doing interesting things a year or so back and started threatening to sue a guy for "stealing" an image from their website... which they turn out to have got from someone else anyway, the same guy the accused got it from!
They are also big on posting unsubstantiated claims to the list and this has really harmed their credibility.
Just like to point out that although the skin effect does exist (in metallic conductors) it DOES NOT APPLY to humans. This is backed up by plenty of recent research - see the Pupman mailing list. You do not feel a shock from a Tesla coil (in theory) because the frequency is high enough that your nerves can't respond - therefore it is much less dangerous than DC or low frequency AC because there is little risk of stopping your heart. However it can and does still cause deep internal RF burns.
Actually on one of the two occasions I took a strike from my small Tesla coil, I certainly did feel it. The ground wire came disconnected and arced through me. The other time was on purpose but I carefully stood on an insulated platform and held a screwdriver to the streamers, much reducing the risk.
As I said, bulldozing the contaminated buildings will solve much of the radiation issue particularly with the most likely kind of dirty bomb, one that has relatively little radioactive material. Of course it would cause massive economic damage but not a lot of deaths. Whether you consider that more important I don't know.
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I'm not sure even a briefcase nuke (which is somewhat more than 10kg) would have an effect on the moon visible to the naked eye. IIRC they're limited to about 10kt maximum yield, now that's a fairly big bang but less so with no atmosphere although the dust is there of course... I'd expect a brief flash, probably visible to people looking in the general direction, and a small crater visible only through a telescope (and very hard for an amateur to tell from the numerous surrounding impact craters)
Sorry, someone's beaten you to it - Gene Shoemaker, of comet fame.
Shortly before Professor Shoemaker died he said, "Not going to the Moon and banging on it with my own hammer has been the biggest disappointment in life."
Well, he sort of got his wish. I'm not certain he's the first but haven't heard of anyone before him.
Furthermore it's a dead rock anyway, and I can't think of a better place for an interplanetary garbage dump. Well maybe dropping stuff into Jupier. Even Venus is interesting.
Because it's REALLY FUCKING BIG. Agh! Why is it that so many people don't get this? (not a rant at you in particular) What is it with everyone thinking that by mining the moon or landing rockets on it we're going to shift it out of its orbit or something? It's -big-, people!
The moon is really fucking big. It isn't going anywhere.
Well, the electrons in a CRT are around 30keV or so, shouldn't be that big a deal to go up to 50. I think (IANAPP) that electrons are relatively easy to accelerate since all you need is a filament and a grid, whereas it's other subatomic particles and nuclei that need honkin' big particle accelerators.
Funny you should say that, after all nobody died on board Mir and it lasted 15 years despite being designed for 5... seems like pretty good management to me, it takes skills to recover from a rocket crashing into you and a fire on a bloody space station!
Not to mention that in ~500 years' time the worst of the radiation hazard will be over, thanks to the short halflife of the most intensive waste.
This is an urban myth which I would like to dispel.
Sadly the launch window is only roughly every 18 months, at least if you want to use an efficient Hohmann transfer orbit. Probes -could- be launched on less efficient orbits but the cost would be substantially higher and presumably the extra fuel load would mean less rover.
Of course there's little reason not to send a dozen probes at every opportunity, you might have to expand the Deep Space Network infrastructure to handle communicating with them all at once though. Or you could have some stay in a parking orbit around Mars and be released over a period of time. Would need a bit more fuel for orbit insertion of course.
Not necessarily... as has already been pointed out, it is possible, even likely that meteoroids could have been ejected from Earth some time in the past and ended up on Mars. If any bacteria hitchied a ride of those (and that's a big if) then they would have had millions or billions of years to adapt to the Martian climate.
Maybe, if Mars was something other than a rock. It's a barren desert of a planet. Let the geologists look it over for a few decades and then if we need the room, move in permanently.
Plus, he didn't do his research - Einstein firmly did not believe in god.
I wonder, given a finite amount of money/resources, whether it is better to spend millions or billions on searching for ET intelligence or to spend it on research and development of our own space technologies. I suppose that sort of question can't be answered without knowing the odds of finding something, and you don't know that until you do!
Actually an ATM card is not a smartcard but just a magnetic stripe. These hold a surprisingly small amount of data, a little over a kilobit. Good luck fitting a rootkit in that!
Well actually the big news is that there definitely was liquid water on Mars millions of years ago. Not much sign of it now, although it's pretty certain that there's some water ice at the pole (I forget which)
If you can put up with somewhat grainy picture quality, NASA TV can be watched online.
Thanks for the heads-up :)
Ah, but the quality is so much better with the digital connection. It's digital all the way rather than digital -> analog -> digital.
I love the form factor but when will motherboard manufacturers as a whole produce something with integrated video that supports DVI for flat-panel displays? Integrated video sucks for games of course but it's fine for office work, and that's exactly where the sharp text from an LCD screen is needed most. The DVI port supports analog screens too, so why isn't it being used?
Actually it's just poor webpage design - the images are enlarged slightly within the IMG tag. If you go directly to the url of the JPEGs they come out fine.
They are also big on posting unsubstantiated claims to the list and this has really harmed their credibility.
Actually on one of the two occasions I took a strike from my small Tesla coil, I certainly did feel it. The ground wire came disconnected and arced through me. The other time was on purpose but I carefully stood on an insulated platform and held a screwdriver to the streamers, much reducing the risk.
"Radiation" is not just one thing. It all depends on how many curies there are, what the half-life is and which type is emitted.
As I said, bulldozing the contaminated buildings will solve much of the radiation issue particularly with the most likely kind of dirty bomb, one that has relatively little radioactive material. Of course it would cause massive economic damage but not a lot of deaths. Whether you consider that more important I don't know.