The Japanese probe you refer to used a slingshot technique several times, but it had absolutely nothing to do with a cable. As pointed out before, a sling is not a slingshot.
Unfortunately, that page is incomplete and misleading, as it only mentions the probes that actually got near Venus. For example, the page lists Mariner 2, but not Mariner 1. Mariner 1 went off course due to a sofware error resulting from a missing hyphen. Venera 1, though in the list, suffered a communications failure and was a complete failure. Also failing was Sputnik 7, whose 4th stage didn't ignite. Sputnik 23 and 24 never made it from Earth orbit. Sputnik 25's 3rd stage blew up the entire craft. Cosmos 21 failed to leave Earth orbit. Venera 1964A and Venera 1964B failed to achieve Earth orbit. Venera 1964C did, but couldn't leave orbit (renamed Cosmos 27. Soviets apparently named things in Earth orbit as 'Cosmos', even if they were failed missions to somewhere else). Zond 1 is on the list as being succesful, but contact was lost with it 2 months before it got to Venus. Also failing: Cosmos 96, Venera 1965A, Cosmos 167, Cosmos 359, Cosmos 482. Obviously there have been far more failed missions to Venus than your list implies.
I suppose you would have preferred photos of a featureless sky and a flat horizon? The Soviets took photos of the only interesting things there: the rocks. And they included the base of the lander as a convenient scale. Venera 14, for example, landed in a region with basalt-like rocks. They are thin and flat in appearance, though, suggesting that the high pressure and temperatures at Venus's surface allowed the source magma to spread out and become very thin before cooling.
Re:How they manage it still has them puzzled...
on
Camouflage in Motion
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It doesn't seem that simple to me. Imagine a dragonfly flying in a circle around its prey. It yaws appropriately so that it always faces its prey, and so it maintains the prey's image at the same position on its retinae. Instead of appearing to stay at a fixed point to the prey, however, the dragonfly revolves around it a full 360 degrees. This very unstealthy maneuver shows that trying "to keep the thing it's hiding from in the same position on *its* retina" is insufficient.
In the simplest case, with the prey not moving, all the knowledge the dragonfly needs is the position of the prey. The solution is to fly straight at the prey. It never seems to move from its position on the background but appears larger and larger as it moves in for the kill.
Cases with the prey moving are more difficult to visualize. You can simplify it by assuming that they are confined to a 2D plane and then drawing their positions on a sheet of paper (or a computer screen). Imagine two diifferent scenarios:
Case #1. The dragonfly is on a straight line and about half way between the prey and a bush. The dragonfly is superimposed on the bush, from the prey's point of view. The prey is flying perpendicular to this straight line. In order to stay on a straight line between prey and bush, the dragonfly must also move.
Case #2. Same situation, except that now the dragonfly is practically touching the bush. The prey moves but the dragonfly hardly needs to move at all to appear to remain at the same spot on the bush.
It should thus be obvious that the distance of the dragonfly to the background object is an important variable. Perhaps it somehow memorizes what object is exactly 180 degrees away from the prey, and then it keeps an eye on both at the same time and flies so as to maintain their positions 180 degrees apart on its retinae (both objects might drift across the retinae, so long as they are exactly opposite each other).
Nothing that major has been observed since. There was a spectacular near miss, though. This object skipped off the atmosphere in Aug., 1972, starting over Utah and leaving the atmosphere over Alberta. I was a fetus when it passed over my parents' house.
But if I were you, I'd be more worried about the small stuff.
Thou Shalt Not Consider Things Beyond Your Particle Horizon. When a supporter of science tells me that it is improper to think about things outside of the observable universe, than that person is guilty of mind control. But my main criticism is that I think you read only the introductory paragraph, which was quite misleading about the contents of the paper as a whole. To quote Rees:
My attitude towards religion is really two-fold. First, as far as the practice of religion is concerned, I appreciate it and participate in it, but I'm skeptical about the value of interactive dialogue. There's no conflict between religion and science (except, of course, with naive creationism and suchlike) , but I doubt--unlike some members of the Templeton Foundation--that theological insights can help me with my physics. I'm fascinated to talk to philosophers (and with some theologians) about their work, but I don't believe they can help me very much. So I favor peaceful coexistence rather than constructive dialogue between science and theology.
I believe fertility rate is synonymous with birth rate. The claim that there are many infertile people in first-world countries is nonsense. The medical profession in first world countries has done an amazing job of overcoming fertility problems. I would guess infertility is far more common in the third world from such things as scarring from untreated STDs, malnutrition, violent acts on pregnant women, etc..
The whole page is suspicious, having more than 10 (unknown) people state he is a scientist.
Alan Guth is the originator of the inflation model of the big bang. He is much more qualified than you to speak about Martin Reese's standing in the scientific community. Your problem stems from the fact that you believe science and religion are mutually exclusive. One can believe in science and another religion at the same time. There are no rules stating that you must believe one or the other but not both. If you believe there is such a rule, then you are the one with a closed mind.
Average hair dryer takes about 2kW, so does ironing your shirt or vacuum your room.
And I suppose you iron your shirt 24 hours a day. I just calculated a thirteen month average of my home's electrical usage (data straight from the power bill), and it comes out to 0.765 kW. The two of us use a 25 year old refrigerator, an electric hot water heater, electric stove, '80s vintage dishwasher, clothes washer and dryer, and limited electric baseboard heating and a space heater during the winter. Oh, yeah, and the computer, tv, stereo.....and lights. And a 24/7 fan to eliminate radon. And the iron and vacuum
I *lived* in place which had 20Amp circuit brakers (which gives 20kW at 120V), and the circuit brakers were out all the time.
Your electrical system's inability to handle peak usage says nothing about average usage.
China is the only country to have made significant progress in controlling birthrates and that's because they are a totalitarian government.
You ignore a large number of countries in Europe and Japan whose birth rates have dropped so perilously low they are in danger of losing population. Eastern European countries' fertility rates, while higher than those of Western Europe, dropped dramatically after the fall of the Soviet Union, a totalitarian government. The female literacy rate correlates better than the type of government with low growth rates.
The word potassium is derived from the word potash, literally meaning "pot ashes". The word alkali comes from the Arabic qalay, "to fry or roast in a pan", and al-qalay , "the substance that had been roasted." The English word soda is derived from suwwad, the Arabic name of a plant of which the ashes are rich in sodium carbonate (paraphrasing from the bottom of this reference). This most recent effort is most certainly not the first time salt has been extracted from plants, and in fact is such an ancient practice that it has given rise to the names of some of the alkali metals.
The "400 captured asteroids" aren't called moons, not because they are asteroids, but because they are not moons, i.e. they are not captured. They are Trojans that orbit the sun (not Jupiter) with the same period as Jupiter. And there's over 1600 of them.
There are two different methods of storing H2. One method is to store it as a highly pressurized gas, which doesn't need to kept at cold temperatures but does need a strong container. The other method involves cooling it until it condenses... at -460 deg. F. As a liquid it doesn't need to be stored at pressure but needs extremely good insulation. The drawback of the first method is that the hydrogen gas takes up an enormous volume, and combined with the weight of the container becomes impractical for use in anything but large buses. Diamond steel would not help much. The mechanical strength and insulating properties of the tank wouldn't increase by much, but it would be scratch resistant! Designers of fuel cells have opted to dispense with H2, instead storing the hydrogen in chemical form such as sodium borohydride. This is a good article on the subject.
Fill a tall glass (or similar container w/ clear sides) with vegetable oil. Pour a teaspoon of water colored with food-coloring (red for iron?) on top. You may repeat this many times, as it also simulates the formation of the Earth's core from myriads of iron blobs.
For starters, volcanos and tectonic spreading centers are areas where magma is moving upwards, which would tend to force your probe upward. Also, the chambers and tunnels that feed a volcano don't necessarily go straight up and down, and almost certainly don't extend all the way down to the core, so you'd run the risk of your probe landing on a rock shelf and not going anywhere. And many volcanos are plugged up, slowly building up explosive pressure. Mess with that and you might launch your probe into the stratosphere instead of downward. With a self-forming, self-healing crack created by a blob of iron, we don't have to worry about trying to use pre-existing channels that may or may not actually be there.
You didn't read the proposal very carefully. The difference in density between the molten iron and the rock it passes through is so great that the iron itself causes the crack. It would never pool up and dissipate horizontally. It just keeps sinking down in its own self-formed, self-healing crack.
It doesn't work by melting the surrounding rock. Its high density forces the crack open in front of it, and it is molten merely so that it can flow into the advancing tip of the crack. And no, the surrounding rock after a few miles will not be hot enough to keep the iron molten (not until you reach the outer core). The iron, however, does generate heat from its own gravitational potential energy.
Slashdot Mirror
The Japanese probe you refer to used a slingshot technique several times, but it had absolutely nothing to do with a cable. As pointed out before, a sling is not a slingshot.
They just sent up a Beagle! You started it.
Unfortunately, that page is incomplete and misleading, as it only mentions the probes that actually got near Venus. For example, the page lists Mariner 2, but not Mariner 1. Mariner 1 went off course due to a sofware error resulting from a missing hyphen. Venera 1, though in the list, suffered a communications failure and was a complete failure. Also failing was Sputnik 7, whose 4th stage didn't ignite. Sputnik 23 and 24 never made it from Earth orbit. Sputnik 25's 3rd stage blew up the entire craft. Cosmos 21 failed to leave Earth orbit. Venera 1964A and Venera 1964B failed to achieve Earth orbit. Venera 1964C did, but couldn't leave orbit (renamed Cosmos 27. Soviets apparently named things in Earth orbit as 'Cosmos', even if they were failed missions to somewhere else). Zond 1 is on the list as being succesful, but contact was lost with it 2 months before it got to Venus. Also failing: Cosmos 96, Venera 1965A, Cosmos 167, Cosmos 359, Cosmos 482. Obviously there have been far more failed missions to Venus than your list implies.
You're kidding, right? It's far harder to land on a planet's surface than it is to do a simple flyby.
It or something like it has the potential to do research in Mars's atmosphere.
Actually, someone did. Apparently it's such a stupid joke that almost nobody noticed. That's what's going on.
I suppose you would have preferred photos of a featureless sky and a flat horizon? The Soviets took photos of the only interesting things there: the rocks. And they included the base of the lander as a convenient scale. Venera 14, for example, landed in a region with basalt-like rocks. They are thin and flat in appearance, though, suggesting that the high pressure and temperatures at Venus's surface allowed the source magma to spread out and become very thin before cooling.
In the simplest case, with the prey not moving, all the knowledge the dragonfly needs is the position of the prey. The solution is to fly straight at the prey. It never seems to move from its position on the background but appears larger and larger as it moves in for the kill.
Cases with the prey moving are more difficult to visualize. You can simplify it by assuming that they are confined to a 2D plane and then drawing their positions on a sheet of paper (or a computer screen). Imagine two diifferent scenarios:
Case #1. The dragonfly is on a straight line and about half way between the prey and a bush. The dragonfly is superimposed on the bush, from the prey's point of view. The prey is flying perpendicular to this straight line. In order to stay on a straight line between prey and bush, the dragonfly must also move.
Case #2. Same situation, except that now the dragonfly is practically touching the bush. The prey moves but the dragonfly hardly needs to move at all to appear to remain at the same spot on the bush.
It should thus be obvious that the distance of the dragonfly to the background object is an important variable. Perhaps it somehow memorizes what object is exactly 180 degrees away from the prey, and then it keeps an eye on both at the same time and flies so as to maintain their positions 180 degrees apart on its retinae (both objects might drift across the retinae, so long as they are exactly opposite each other).
Then people are viruses too. Perhaps your corruption of the word 'virus' is less than useful.
But if I were you, I'd be more worried about the small stuff.
Wow.... My favorite is A Lunar Revisionist performs a statistical experiment PROVING the moon non-material. Note that the wine bottle was empty.
My attitude towards religion is really two-fold. First, as far as the practice of religion is concerned, I appreciate it and participate in it, but I'm skeptical about the value of interactive dialogue. There's no conflict between religion and science (except, of course, with naive creationism and suchlike) , but I doubt--unlike some members of the Templeton Foundation--that theological insights can help me with my physics. I'm fascinated to talk to philosophers (and with some theologians) about their work, but I don't believe they can help me very much. So I favor peaceful coexistence rather than constructive dialogue between science and theology.
I believe fertility rate is synonymous with birth rate. The claim that there are many infertile people in first-world countries is nonsense. The medical profession in first world countries has done an amazing job of overcoming fertility problems. I would guess infertility is far more common in the third world from such things as scarring from untreated STDs, malnutrition, violent acts on pregnant women, etc..
Alan Guth is the originator of the inflation model of the big bang. He is much more qualified than you to speak about Martin Reese's standing in the scientific community. Your problem stems from the fact that you believe science and religion are mutually exclusive. One can believe in science and another religion at the same time. There are no rules stating that you must believe one or the other but not both. If you believe there is such a rule, then you are the one with a closed mind.
And I suppose you iron your shirt 24 hours a day. I just calculated a thirteen month average of my home's electrical usage (data straight from the power bill), and it comes out to 0.765 kW. The two of us use a 25 year old refrigerator, an electric hot water heater, electric stove, '80s vintage dishwasher, clothes washer and dryer, and limited electric baseboard heating and a space heater during the winter. Oh, yeah, and the computer, tv, stereo.....and lights. And a 24/7 fan to eliminate radon. And the iron and vacuum
I *lived* in place which had 20Amp circuit brakers (which gives 20kW at 120V), and the circuit brakers were out all the time.
Your electrical system's inability to handle peak usage says nothing about average usage.
You ignore a large number of countries in Europe and Japan whose birth rates have dropped so perilously low they are in danger of losing population. Eastern European countries' fertility rates, while higher than those of Western Europe, dropped dramatically after the fall of the Soviet Union, a totalitarian government. The female literacy rate correlates better than the type of government with low growth rates.
But first our Milky Way Galaxy collides with Andromeda and a new round of star birth and supernovae commences. It's going to be beautiful.
The word potassium is derived from the word potash, literally meaning "pot ashes". The word alkali comes from the Arabic qalay, "to fry or roast in a pan", and al-qalay , "the substance that had been roasted." The English word soda is derived from suwwad, the Arabic name of a plant of which the ashes are rich in sodium carbonate (paraphrasing from the bottom of this reference). This most recent effort is most certainly not the first time salt has been extracted from plants, and in fact is such an ancient practice that it has given rise to the names of some of the alkali metals.
The "400 captured asteroids" aren't called moons, not because they are asteroids, but because they are not moons, i.e. they are not captured. They are Trojans that orbit the sun (not Jupiter) with the same period as Jupiter. And there's over 1600 of them.
p=1
There are two different methods of storing H2. One method is to store it as a highly pressurized gas, which doesn't need to kept at cold temperatures but does need a strong container. The other method involves cooling it until it condenses... at -460 deg. F. As a liquid it doesn't need to be stored at pressure but needs extremely good insulation. The drawback of the first method is that the hydrogen gas takes up an enormous volume, and combined with the weight of the container becomes impractical for use in anything but large buses. Diamond steel would not help much. The mechanical strength and insulating properties of the tank wouldn't increase by much, but it would be scratch resistant! Designers of fuel cells have opted to dispense with H2, instead storing the hydrogen in chemical form such as sodium borohydride. This is a good article on the subject.
Fill a tall glass (or similar container w/ clear sides) with vegetable oil. Pour a teaspoon of water colored with food-coloring (red for iron?) on top. You may repeat this many times, as it also simulates the formation of the Earth's core from myriads of iron blobs.
For starters, volcanos and tectonic spreading centers are areas where magma is moving upwards, which would tend to force your probe upward. Also, the chambers and tunnels that feed a volcano don't necessarily go straight up and down, and almost certainly don't extend all the way down to the core, so you'd run the risk of your probe landing on a rock shelf and not going anywhere. And many volcanos are plugged up, slowly building up explosive pressure. Mess with that and you might launch your probe into the stratosphere instead of downward. With a self-forming, self-healing crack created by a blob of iron, we don't have to worry about trying to use pre-existing channels that may or may not actually be there.
You didn't read the proposal very carefully. The difference in density between the molten iron and the rock it passes through is so great that the iron itself causes the crack. It would never pool up and dissipate horizontally. It just keeps sinking down in its own self-formed, self-healing crack.
It doesn't work by melting the surrounding rock. Its high density forces the crack open in front of it, and it is molten merely so that it can flow into the advancing tip of the crack. And no, the surrounding rock after a few miles will not be hot enough to keep the iron molten (not until you reach the outer core). The iron, however, does generate heat from its own gravitational potential energy.