I'm not saying it should be tossed in the bin just because it's old, but it IS old, and technology has advanced tremendously since it was put into orbit.
This doesn't have any relation to the potential for valuable science. The fact of the matter is, there's still a huge amount of science that could be done with hubble. Even though it's not state of the art (and no satellite has state of the art components, because of the amount of testing that needs to be done to ensure they'll operate properly in space), it still would make large valuable contributions to astronomy.
A researcher who I believe is on this project was at RIT (where I'm a student) and gave a talk on this. It was quite interesting. Unfortunately I had to leave partway through, but the indications were very interesting. Also very cool was a plot of amplitude of temperature variation against period (time). There were spikes at 1 day (24-hour temperature variations) and 1 year (seasonal variations). But the most interesting were spikes at millions of years, indicating there were large scale temperature cycles with periods of millions of years, consistent with global warming being a natural phenomenon. (I'm not saying we aren't affecting though). It was a very interesting plot. (I'm not sure where they got the data from, or how they verified it actually is periodic. My guess is that they took temperature differences though the ages and used the amplitudes of the various instances to infer which were corresponding to the same "cycle")
The first IR astronomy imagers worked like that as well. With a single pixel. In fact, just last year I was in a class where we made a radio map of the sun using a single pixel (dish) radio telescope.
The sounds like just a different way to do the same thing people have been doing for 30+ years..
Actually this is incorrect, the secondary reflector would have blocked the radio waves, just as the secondary mirror of an optical telescope blocks light.
I thought part of the point of the off axis design was so that the secondary mirror is not blocking the dish. An on-axis parabaloid would suffer from this, but I don't believe the Green Bank telescope does.
Isn't it kind of dangerous both to you and the dish to be inside it? I'd be too scared of doing it some damage but then again, I'm a klutz.
It is when it's being used.. but I was able to walk around on a dish that was offline (it was also pointing straight up). With radio waves, it's not as big an issue as with optical telescopes. The requirements for the accuracy of the surface are lower due to the longer wavelengths involved. There was a quarter sized hole in the dish I was walking around on, and that doesn't affect the quality of the data from that telescope. Plus, I was taken on a tour by one of the people who works at the VLA, so I'm sure he was making sure I didn't touch anything I wasn't supposed to.
Not as impressive as Arecibo though. I was expecting more like an array but it really is just one giant dish.
It is *just* one big dish.. but it's also the world's largest full steerable telescope (aricebo isn't fully steerable). Also, it's one of very few off-axis paraboloid telescopes. (One of the nice things about this is the collection unit doesn't block any of the light that would be incident on the reflector.)
For impressive arrays, check out the VLA, ALMA (soon), or SKA (later). I was at the VLA last summer as part of my research (I do astronomy), it is very impressive. I was able to go into the dishes.. they're huge.
Um, none? I suppose I could try to think of some technological offshoot of current astrophysical science, but to be safe let's just round down to 0. Is this "practicality" the metric by which you think we ought to measure all scientific findings?
In terms of the practical application of the results of the research.. I'd agree with you. However, if you look at the technological advances that have been catalyzed by astrphysics, people might be somewhat surprised.. CCDs were pretty much discarded after their invention, until astronomers realized their use in data collection. They made improvements to the CCDs and camera companies ended up seeing the benefits years later and now we have digital cameras.
We can observe the full spectrum of x-rays already. By "getting closer" they mean we are now able to obtain data in a smaller radius, ie - closer to the black hole.
'Called active galactic nuclei, or AGN, these black holes have masses of up to billions of Suns compressed into a region about the size of our solar system. The all-sky census, performed using NASA's Swift satellite over a nine-month period, detected more than 200 nearby AGN.'
This is wrong. Active Galactic Nuclei are not the same as supermassive black holes. AGN are cases where one of these supermassive black holes is actively accreting on a large scale. The result is an accretion disk which shines brightly. Generally the region around the black hole is more luminous than the rest of the galaxy. These are observationally evident in various forms (quasars, radio galaxies, seyferts, etc...). The Milky Way does have a supermassive black hole, but it is not accreting, so it is not an AGN. However, I believe there is some evidence that it was part of an AGN in the past.
A little background on AGN.. they are seen in roughly 10% of all galaxies. This hints that the duty cycle is roughly 10% for a galaxy, and that all galaxies go through an "active" period as part of their evolution. Feedback from the AGN can affect the evolution and star formation of the host galaxy. Which is why they're important to study.
Given a position in space (X, Y, Z), a point in time (T), three oscillation frequencies (HzX, HzY, HzZ), three axes of rotation (RX, RY, RZ), and a size (M), that adds up to 11 characteristics of this "ball" of energy.
Yes, that adds up to 11 characteristics. But most of those are dimensions in phase space, not in real space. Only the first four (x,y,z,t) are space-time dimensions. The others are phase space coordinates. I'm not a string theorist by any means, but it's my understanding that the 11 Dimensions are space-time dimensions. So using phase-space values wouldn't account for the other dimensions.
'what's wrong with continuing to build solar rovers that we need a nuclear one?
Well, for one, this new rover is going to be much larger than the previous ones. More equipment = more power, and I imagine a nuclear fuel source would have a much higher energy/weight ratio than solar panels.
Exactly. I heard a presentation about how they reuse various products. According to the presenter, the "one-time use" cameras end up being used about 10 times...
Is this all we can do? Is this Slashdot, or what...
I'll just browse over there and hit "reload" a bunch of times...:D
Re:Just wait till they put a big red 'R' on it!
on
United Nuclear
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately, the webserver doesn't seem to be as fast as those cars on the site.... of course, it's still faster than the ricer cars I see everywhere.
What if I setup my own NDB/DME and get it to transmit an identifier saying "new york". Then put it at the end of a runway...
Well, if you put "new york" nothing would happen... because they'd (hopefully) be using UNIX, so the system would be say:
"hmmm. 'new york' != 'New York' "
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying it should be tossed in the bin just because it's old, but it IS old, and technology has advanced tremendously since it was put into orbit.
This doesn't have any relation to the potential for valuable science. The fact of the matter is, there's still a huge amount of science that could be done with hubble. Even though it's not state of the art (and no satellite has state of the art components, because of the amount of testing that needs to be done to ensure they'll operate properly in space), it still would make large valuable contributions to astronomy.
A researcher who I believe is on this project was at RIT (where I'm a student) and gave a talk on this. It was quite interesting. Unfortunately I had to leave partway through, but the indications were very interesting. Also very cool was a plot of amplitude of temperature variation against period (time). There were spikes at 1 day (24-hour temperature variations) and 1 year (seasonal variations). But the most interesting were spikes at millions of years, indicating there were large scale temperature cycles with periods of millions of years, consistent with global warming being a natural phenomenon. (I'm not saying we aren't affecting though). It was a very interesting plot. (I'm not sure where they got the data from, or how they verified it actually is periodic. My guess is that they took temperature differences though the ages and used the amplitudes of the various instances to infer which were corresponding to the same "cycle")
The first IR astronomy imagers worked like that as well. With a single pixel. In fact, just last year I was in a class where we made a radio map of the sun using a single pixel (dish) radio telescope.
The sounds like just a different way to do the same thing people have been doing for 30+ years..
My bad.. I missed the comment you were responding to. Your parent post didn't show up for me.
Actually this is incorrect, the secondary reflector would have blocked the radio waves, just as the secondary mirror of an optical telescope blocks light.
I thought part of the point of the off axis design was so that the secondary mirror is not blocking the dish. An on-axis parabaloid would suffer from this, but I don't believe the Green Bank telescope does.
Isn't it kind of dangerous both to you and the dish to be inside it? I'd be too scared of doing it some damage but then again, I'm a klutz.
It is when it's being used.. but I was able to walk around on a dish that was offline (it was also pointing straight up). With radio waves, it's not as big an issue as with optical telescopes. The requirements for the accuracy of the surface are lower due to the longer wavelengths involved. There was a quarter sized hole in the dish I was walking around on, and that doesn't affect the quality of the data from that telescope. Plus, I was taken on a tour by one of the people who works at the VLA, so I'm sure he was making sure I didn't touch anything I wasn't supposed to.
Not as impressive as Arecibo though. I was expecting more like an array but it really is just one giant dish.
It is *just* one big dish.. but it's also the world's largest full steerable telescope (aricebo isn't fully steerable). Also, it's one of very few off-axis paraboloid telescopes. (One of the nice things about this is the collection unit doesn't block any of the light that would be incident on the reflector.)
For impressive arrays, check out the VLA, ALMA (soon), or SKA (later). I was at the VLA last summer as part of my research (I do astronomy), it is very impressive. I was able to go into the dishes.. they're huge.
Um, none? I suppose I could try to think of some technological offshoot of current astrophysical science, but to be safe let's just round down to 0. Is this "practicality" the metric by which you think we ought to measure all scientific findings?
In terms of the practical application of the results of the research.. I'd agree with you. However, if you look at the technological advances that have been catalyzed by astrphysics, people might be somewhat surprised.. CCDs were pretty much discarded after their invention, until astronomers realized their use in data collection. They made improvements to the CCDs and camera companies ended up seeing the benefits years later and now we have digital cameras.
Heck, if you weren't in a hurry you could turn the ship by hand (actually, foot) by just "walking" around the outer wall without any gyros at all.
Now that's real spacewalking. None of this jetpack shit.
Going to lower dimensions can't be too hard though
--------------
^^^ There's a 1D screensaver.
:D
Wasn't that the bulge what's his name had in his pants in the movie Dodgeball?
Sometimes you gotta take the love you can get I guess.
We can observe the full spectrum of x-rays already. By "getting closer" they mean we are now able to obtain data in a smaller radius, ie - closer to the black hole.
'Called active galactic nuclei, or AGN, these black holes have masses of up to billions of Suns compressed into a region about the size of our solar system. The all-sky census, performed using NASA's Swift satellite over a nine-month period, detected more than 200 nearby AGN.'
This is wrong. Active Galactic Nuclei are not the same as supermassive black holes. AGN are cases where one of these supermassive black holes is actively accreting on a large scale. The result is an accretion disk which shines brightly. Generally the region around the black hole is more luminous than the rest of the galaxy. These are observationally evident in various forms (quasars, radio galaxies, seyferts, etc...). The Milky Way does have a supermassive black hole, but it is not accreting, so it is not an AGN. However, I believe there is some evidence that it was part of an AGN in the past.
A little background on AGN.. they are seen in roughly 10% of all galaxies. This hints that the duty cycle is roughly 10% for a galaxy, and that all galaxies go through an "active" period as part of their evolution. Feedback from the AGN can affect the evolution and star formation of the host galaxy. Which is why they're important to study.
Given a position in space (X, Y, Z), a point in time (T), three oscillation frequencies (HzX, HzY, HzZ), three axes of rotation (RX, RY, RZ), and a size (M), that adds up to 11 characteristics of this "ball" of energy.
Yes, that adds up to 11 characteristics. But most of those are dimensions in phase space, not in real space. Only the first four (x,y,z,t) are space-time dimensions. The others are phase space coordinates. I'm not a string theorist by any means, but it's my understanding that the 11 Dimensions are space-time dimensions. So using phase-space values wouldn't account for the other dimensions.
For some more info on phase space: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space
'what's wrong with continuing to build solar rovers that we need a nuclear one?
Well, for one, this new rover is going to be much larger than the previous ones. More equipment = more power, and I imagine a nuclear fuel source would have a much higher energy/weight ratio than solar panels.
Something like that, I'm not sure where I put the book.
;)
Probably with your keys!
Homer simpson anyone?
Whoops... Sorry about that. I meant they couldn't make a legal claim to it... I got carried away and lost in my own vagueness :-/
neurostaryes, that's true... but that code doesn't belong to SCO. It's not AT&T code, it's BSD code, so SCO has no right to it.
neurostarMinor correction... the age mandated is 16 (at least in Idaho).
neurostarExactly. I heard a presentation about how they reuse various products. According to the presenter, the "one-time use" cameras end up being used about 10 times...
neurostarIs this all we can do? Is this Slashdot, or what...
I'll just browse over there and hit "reload" a bunch of times... :D
Unfortunately, the webserver doesn't seem to be as fast as those cars on the site.... of course, it's still faster than the ricer cars I see everywhere.
neurostarWhat if I setup my own NDB/DME and get it to transmit an identifier saying "new york". Then put it at the end of a runway...
Well, if you put "new york" nothing would happen... because they'd (hopefully) be using UNIX, so the system would be say:
"hmmm. 'new york' != 'New York' "