I'm not sure of whether they would have approached from a different angle, but they've already used the HiRISE images to plan their trek to
where Opportunity is now (it's no longer in the spot as seen in the HiRISE image).
It's already on its way. I can provide no proof except that I know that people from the THEMIS instrument at Arizona State University http://themis.asu.edu/ were recently seen on Google's campus.
Atmospheric conditions do matter. Those are, of course, taken in to account when designing the "best" instrument to send to a planet. We use imagers that are sensitive to wavelengths of light through which there is a relative "window" in the atmosphere. At times of dust storms on Mars, HiRISE won't be able to see the surface. We can't get around that; the basic physics of light extinction does us in there. We also sometimes have to worry about whether what we're seeing is a cloud or some other atmospheric anomaly. However, for the most part, we can see through the atmosphere quite well. Consider being on a mountain top and looking at the stars--it's probably about that clear as we look down on Mars, usually.
A better example (for the extremes) is with Cassini. Cassini's ISS is a decent resolution telescope/camera. On airless bodies such as Enceladus, the distance to the object defines the resolution. However, at Titan, which has a massive atmosphere, the distance only partially defines the "resolution".
I put resolution in quotes because, and there's a discussion in this thread, being able to resolve objects and the telescope-camera's intrinsic resolution are different. Anyway, Titan's atmosphere actually diffuses light in such a way as to limit the ISS's resolving power by a couple times what it would be based on distance to the surface. It's like on a foggy day in San Francisco: you can't see nearly as far or as well as if the day was clear.
Hmm... Perhaps you have an axe to grind and misread my post. I never said rad-hardening drove down performance. It drives up cost. . . Re-reading my post shows me where you probably picked that up from.
Of course the telescope matters. If you can't get a good telescope to Mars, you can't get decent resolution images. However, we COULD NOT collect the data coming through those optics with a MOC-equivalent computer/CCD. We had to have something faster and more reliable.
HiRISE's computer drives the electronics faster than any other computer ever sent out of Earth orbit (I don't know if it's also faster than any DoD stuff, as I'm not privy to that information). To get such a sensitive computer to Mars (well, to be sure it worked once it got there), radiation hardening has to be performed. That added to R&D cost, and it added to mass cost, not to mention the R&D cost of creating a computer that could collect the data fast enough as we zip along relative to the surface.
HiRISE has 14 CCDs, with two channels each, for a total of 28 channels. Each of those channels is 1024 pixels across. There are also 28 line-calibration pixels on each channel, for a total of 1052 columns per channel. It is a push-broom style camera, and it has what's called Time Delay Integration (TDI). TDI allows us to add up to 128 lines of data into a single line so we can collect enough signal. There's more: there are also 20 pixels of column-calibration, giving us a total of 1052x168 pixels per channel. Thus, there are 1052*28*168 pixels that need to be driven through the camera electronics for each of up to 60,000 lines. This is slightly misleading as each channel has independent electronics, for the most part, so you can consider it to be 1052*168 pixels per line of data that need to be driven through the electronics to the A to D converter and then stored on the solid state recorder (writing to the SSR is when the 28 channels are put into one large file). This all needs to be done as MRO orbits Mars at a speed of a little more than twice per Mars day. This is a VERY fast computer.
The problem with analog data is that you cannot interpret brightness values quantitatively. Without digital, we'd just be looking at photographs, which ARE nice, but they don't tell us what we want to know.
Resolution is the physical size of a pixel's footprint on the object in question. The pixels on HiRISE cover about 20-30 cm on the surface of Mars, depending on distance from the surface. That is the resolution of the imaging system. You are right in that it is independent of any human or computer recognition algorithm. That's also why I made a distinction between resolving and resolution.
The resolving power, or how large something must be to be recognized, by a human or computer, as a distinct object, is always larger than what a single pixel covers. Your example is flawed. Usually you need three or so pixels, but it's not necessarily so you can separate one object from another. It's because one or two pixels are nearly always ambiguous as to what they represent. Three is where you start to have some confidence. The more pixels that cover something, the better-->hence higher resolution => higher resolving power => recognizing smaller objects.
I'm entirely not convinced that was from a spy satellite (to read 1-inch high lettering, the targetting and stability problems alone would be quite difficult to solve for such high resolution; you'd have blurring (from spacecraft issues and the person holding the book), mis-targetting, etc.). Given that:
All of the electronics have to be radiation hardened. This usually puts back the technology by a few years to even a decade compared with what one could afford without the rad-hardening.
Given that, the actual resolution is 20-30 cm per pixel (depending on distance from the surface). That's 10 or so inches. However, you can't actually resolve/recognize anything that's only a pixel across. The canonical requirement is 3+ pixels to be sure you're detecting what you think you're detecting. So, the actual resolving power is about 1 meter.
If the spacecraft (and camera) had been designed to orbit at a lower elevation, the resolution would have been higher, but as it is, it's pretty darn close to Mars' atmosphere and you don't want to orbit there. MRO's orbit is going to be about 320 km above the surface. Some satellites at Earth (I have no idea if they're "spy" sats) orbit at around 150 km above the surface--much closer. Many spy planes fly over the surface at only a few tens of km. With that and some amazing engineering to reduce smear, they could easily resolve very small objects.
One of the major issues with HiRISE is going to be spacecraft jitter (the spacecraft shakes, other instruments move, etc.). This could effectively limit the resolution by a few factors if it's not resolved. There is a high stability mode in which nothing is allowed to move and the spacecraft holds itself still while HiRISE images very important targets (future landing sites, etc.), but that mode is resource intensive and excludes some instruments from doing certain activities. What HiRISE is trying to do is equivalent to trying to take a picture of the street through a glass-bottomed car at 125 about miles per hour.
Another problem is context--sometimes the MOC images are uninterpretable because we don't know what's going on around them. With too-high resolution images, we'll just be looking at... well, noise, essentially. We can't really understand things without context to place them into. That's why we have a MOC-equivalent "context" imager bore-sighted with HiRISE.
All-in-all, this is the most powerful telescope/camera sent to another planet.
HiRISE also doesn't need to use extra spacecraft fuel to achieve its 30 cm resolution; MOC has to slew the entire spacecraft against the velocity vector in order to stay on target. HiRISE gets its high resolution from superior optics (this is the largest telescope ever sent on an inter-planetary mission) and from superior camera design (14 CCDs, insanely fast electronics, etc.).
Your first image is not from Mars. It's of a catena on Ganymede, and the chain is about 150--200 km long. This was almost certainly created by a comet breakup similar to the breakup of Shoemaker-Levy 9. We watched SL9 break up and impact Jupiter, producing similar "features". We've never, ever seen EDM on such a scale.
Your second image is perfectly consistent with aborted graben formation. Your third image is, again, consistent with the breakup of a comet or asteroid before impact.
I note that you do not have scale bars on these images. However, for edification, the features in your second image are hundreds of meters to several kilometers across and are located near Valles Marineris, a very large canyon system on Mars. EDM is used for machining metal parts, and happens at small scales, not at the scales of these features. The amount of energy required to "machine" a crater of even a few meters across would be enormous (I'm seeing values of kW for 1--10 mm^3 removal--you do the scaling math; it's likely a power law scaling). You do not see such features created by lightning on the Earth, for example. Believing that these are from such a mechanism as EDM is just silly. There are more reasonable mechanisms that DO create these kinds of features on the earth.
Deep Impact: The predicted impact size was about not more than about 200 m IN DIAMETER. The actual size was not more than about 300 m in diameter. This is NOT "much, much larger than . ..predicted." Much, much larger would be an order of magnitude larger, not almost twice the diameter. Wrong about the zero volatiles, too. Hot (1000--2000 K) gases (water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbons, among others) were observed, in line with expectations. Theory does not say the projectile "burrowed a mile" into the comet "before exploding". The projectile exploded on impact, as all things travelling at that speed do. Theory allowed for a large range of diameters simply because we didn't know what the comet was made of (thus our interest in performing this experiment). The depth of the crater was not predicted to be anywhere near a 1/2 mile, nor was there enough material ejected to account for such a large hole--thus, the depth was NOT 1/2 mile. Typically, on strength-dominated, simple impacts, the depth:diameter ratio is about 1:10--a 1 km crater is about 100 m deep. In (low) gravity dominated (Deep Impact) regimes, it's a bit higher, but certainly it's not greater than 1, which your assertation would require. There was not enough material ejected to account for even a 1 km deep crater.
Seeing as you're trying to pass off images of Ganymede as from Mars, that you take very small crops of images out of context of surrounding terrain, that you don't know what EMD really is capable of, that you don't really even know what the working theories are, and that YOU haven't bothered to "follow up" on what are better, more reasonable, and perfectly sufficient explanations of such features, you are the one who needs to explain why we should even bother with such proposals--it's a waste of taxpayer money to consider such papers or proposals.
. ..We can't account for . . . volcanoes drifting around the surface of Io. ..
1) The volcanoes at Io's surface have nothing to do with plasma physics or MHD. 2) No volcanoes have "drifted around" the surface of Io. 3) There have been migrations of Ionian eruption plumes (the gas/dust "geysers" above the surface). 4) We can quite readily explain this with simple thermophysics. Plasma or MHD has nothing to do with it. 5) Some people have claimed that MHD has influenced the shape of plumes, but we can't reconcile that with the observations of WHERE the fields interact with Io. 6) Some have claimed that electric currents can cause the elevated temperatures of some of Io's volcanoes, but they haven't done the simple math to know that even at 100% efficiency, there simply isn't enough energy available, and AGAIN, the field lines don't intersect the high temperature volcanoes.
Theory is fine, but if your pet theory can't handle the observations, go back to the theory--the observations are rarely "wrong".
. . . gullies that cross over one another. ..
Not sure what the hell this has to do with plasma physics or MHD. Electrical currrents don't do a damned thing to effect morphology. Same with craters. Same with IMPACTS into comets and subsequent ejection of materials.
Are you really claiming that high energy particles accelerated by the nearly non-existant magnetic field of Mars is causing flat-bottomed craters?! Wow! They must be moving really fucking fast.
Not sure what you mean that "these guys" never studied plasma fluid dynamics. If by, "these guys", you mean planetary scientists, cosmologists, or astronomers (all VERY broad fields), "they" invented or extended just about any new branch physics (I'm talking real science, with perdictions and ways to test the predictions) you care to talk about.
Or, and I'm just guessing here, they're going to compress (!) the data before sending it back to Earth.
Ok, I'm being a smart ass. But, come on, we have great compression technologies, why wouldn't we use them?
Re:how did we miss that before?
on
Ice Lake on Mars
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· Score: 1
We've seen such things before, and we've known that water ice exists at the poles. I'm fairly sure this crater has been the subject of a peer-reviewed paper in the past, but I haven't done a complete search of the literature, and I'm not sure the HRSC people have either. MGS MOC saw this crater as early as 2000 (and possibly early).
Having looked at the "full resolution" JPEG, I see zero impact craters on the ice. Which is good, because we KNOW there is water ice near the poles (which is where this is), and it'd be really darn surprising to find water ice old enough to have impact craters on it. It should be relatively stable this far north, but not THAT stable--i.e., it's probably very young, as in still being modified by deposition and sublimation.
You could also consider "self-publishing", as well as creative commons. . . Something like http://cafepress.com/, which sends you a check for anything over their costs - some profit for themselves. You determine the price, AND you continue to own the copyright, so you can still provide free downloads of the PDF, if you like.
I have no affiliation with Cafepress besides having bought a couple of t-shirts from them.
Thanks, I really needed to waste more time on this. [/sarcasm]
Wow. Just wow.
This is like the timecube (which appears to be four dimensional, but I can't really tell--I must be evil). I wonder. .. Since time is four dimensional and the brain (mind?) is seven dimensional, why can't we visualize/understand the whole of time? Clearly it's within our capacity to do so since our minds completely contain the whole of time!
The link given for GAC is nothing but 80,000 poorly written "questions" (many of which have misspellings and poor grammar, and many of which are not questions) with an arbitrary number before them. They are meaningless.
1.00 is the earth round??????????
No, it's not. It's a triaxial ellipsoid. What's with all the question marks?
1.00 Are unripe banans green?
What is a banan?
1.00 Would you find a closet in a h?use?
What is a h?use?
1.00 do chillies make your mouth burn?
What are chillies?
0.62 Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with will?
huh?
0.55 Can I wear underpants on my head?
Yes. 1.00
0.14 where is my mind?
How does this even have a number associated with it?
0.14 How many countries are there in this world?
So, there are 0.14 countries in the world? Good lord, I sure hope google doesn't pick this crap up.
How is this NOT relevant to the entire community (US and otherwise)? This is one of only NINE people who have ultimate say in interpreting ALL the laws of the US, laws like the PATRIOT act, laws involving copyright, laws involving data transmission, laws involving environmental stewardship, etc.
No problem. It always surprises me that Io isn't as well known as it should be (IMHO). It's the most geologically active body we've ever observed, but it's quietly ignored by so many people simply because it doesn't have water on it (thus it doesn't fall under NASA's "follow the water" mantra). Well, that's sad because the Earth was likely very similar to Io right around the time life started popping up here (although Earth had [nearly] infinitely more water). If you want to understand the conditions that dictated when life could evolve, study Io!
I'm not sure what you mean by permanent liquid, and I'm guessing that's why you deleted it. =-}
Re:What would be the significance of this?
on
Lake spotted on Titan?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Umm. . . No.
Io was the second known body to have liquids on its surface (1979 Voyager flybys discovered active, extrusive volcanism). Titan was next, though we couldn't see through the clouds, so we had no idea. Triton was the fourth to possibly have liquids on its surface, though we still don't know for sure. Venus also likely has some liquid lava on its surface, though we've not seen actual volcanism. Plus, Venus probably sometimes has sulfuric acid rains, but we're not sure. Mars may also have transient liquids on its surface.
Titan's cool because it's probably got an active hydrologic cycle (don't read hydro- to mean water, read it to mean fluid). Earth does, Venus might, Io has. . . something, Mars had one, it might still, occasionally. Triton has. ..something, and that's about it for the bodies in the solar system.
Earth is a big body, so it still has radionuclide heat, and it's close to the sun, so it's got an abundance of energy to drive a hydrologic cycle. We can't see through Venus' clouds with more than RADAR, so we don't know what's going on there. Mars is small, so its heat has mostly left it, and it gets nearly 1/4 the energy the Earth gets from the sun, so it's cold and has little atmosphere left. Io is in a weird, slightly eccentric, orbital resonance, so its energy comes at the expense of Jupiter (and Ganymede and Europa). Titan's also in an eccentric orbit, but it doesn't have the resonance with other sats that Io has, so it "should" have lost most of its energy--one of the mysteries is why such a small body has such a huge atmosphere (and thus a hydrologic cycle). Triton might have a bit of an atmosphere, and why is also a mystery.
So, of the many, many bodies in the solar system, there are only a few that have atmospheres, and fewer that have an active, observable hydrologic cycle. . .
OpenOffice.org does it, but last I tried, it needed work (pre-1.0 days). Bibtex works great, and as far as I'm concerned is an essential part of LateX, which is an essential part of writing a thesis. . .
Most employers I know of are not interested in people who don't have (or haven't recently had) a job. It doesn't matter so much what the job is, just that you show that you're willing to work and that you aren't unemployable. Holding out for your ideal job just makes you look spoiled and unwilling to work. The few places that aren't like this are the places "you" start working at, flipping burgers and folding shirts, or at your parents' places of work.
I suggest you go out and get a job. Any job that you can get. Unemployment is currently high enough that you're lucky to get a job, much less something you really want to do. After you have your job, spend your free time looking for your ideal job. Do everything you can do to work where you want to work; apply for internships (Spacegrant comes immedietly to mind, if you are interested in science at all), apply for google jobs, whatever. But in the meantime, as you keep searching (and searching, and searching, and. ..), you'll have a job, which is better than 50--100k (5--10% of the employable) people in this country.
The uni-solars run about $120 for a 7.2x1 foot (3 sq ft exposed) shingle, which is rated at 17 watts, with about 23-32 Whr / sq ft. Still not at all competitive with asphalt (~$2/sq ft for the cheap shingles), even if you consider that you're saving money elsewhere. However, they are competitive with slate and other exotic materials once you consider the energy savings.
They have a 20 year power warranty (typical for PV and this just means the power output will stay above 80% of the rated for at least 20 years) and a 5 year "system" warranty. I would easily trust them to perform as well as or better than asphalt w.r.t. roofing material, especailly here in Arizona, where asphalt only lasts about 14 years.
Keep in mind that these are the currently available shingles. . .
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure of whether they would have approached from a different angle, but they've already used the HiRISE images to plan their trek to where Opportunity is now (it's no longer in the spot as seen in the HiRISE image).
Try 544 channels at ~18 m/pixel.
http://crism.jhuapl.edu/instrument/innoDesign.php
It's already on its way. I can provide no proof except that I know that people from the THEMIS instrument at Arizona State University http://themis.asu.edu/ were recently seen on Google's campus.
Atmospheric conditions do matter. Those are, of course, taken in to account when designing the "best" instrument to send to a planet. We use imagers that are sensitive to wavelengths of light through which there is a relative "window" in the atmosphere. At times of dust storms on Mars, HiRISE won't be able to see the surface. We can't get around that; the basic physics of light extinction does us in there. We also sometimes have to worry about whether what we're seeing is a cloud or some other atmospheric anomaly. However, for the most part, we can see through the atmosphere quite well. Consider being on a mountain top and looking at the stars--it's probably about that clear as we look down on Mars, usually.
A better example (for the extremes) is with Cassini. Cassini's ISS is a decent resolution telescope/camera. On airless bodies such as Enceladus, the distance to the object defines the resolution. However, at Titan, which has a massive atmosphere, the distance only partially defines the "resolution".
I put resolution in quotes because, and there's a discussion in this thread, being able to resolve objects and the telescope-camera's intrinsic resolution are different. Anyway, Titan's atmosphere actually diffuses light in such a way as to limit the ISS's resolving power by a couple times what it would be based on distance to the surface. It's like on a foggy day in San Francisco: you can't see nearly as far or as well as if the day was clear.
Hmm... Perhaps you have an axe to grind and misread my post. I never said rad-hardening drove down performance. It drives up cost. . . Re-reading my post shows me where you probably picked that up from.
Of course the telescope matters. If you can't get a good telescope to Mars, you can't get decent resolution images. However, we COULD NOT collect the data coming through those optics with a MOC-equivalent computer/CCD. We had to have something faster and more reliable.
HiRISE's computer drives the electronics faster than any other computer ever sent out of Earth orbit (I don't know if it's also faster than any DoD stuff, as I'm not privy to that information). To get such a sensitive computer to Mars (well, to be sure it worked once it got there), radiation hardening has to be performed. That added to R&D cost, and it added to mass cost, not to mention the R&D cost of creating a computer that could collect the data fast enough as we zip along relative to the surface.
HiRISE has 14 CCDs, with two channels each, for a total of 28 channels. Each of those channels is 1024 pixels across. There are also 28 line-calibration pixels on each channel, for a total of 1052 columns per channel. It is a push-broom style camera, and it has what's called Time Delay Integration (TDI). TDI allows us to add up to 128 lines of data into a single line so we can collect enough signal. There's more: there are also 20 pixels of column-calibration, giving us a total of 1052x168 pixels per channel. Thus, there are 1052*28*168 pixels that need to be driven through the camera electronics for each of up to 60,000 lines. This is slightly misleading as each channel has independent electronics, for the most part, so you can consider it to be 1052*168 pixels per line of data that need to be driven through the electronics to the A to D converter and then stored on the solid state recorder (writing to the SSR is when the 28 channels are put into one large file). This all needs to be done as MRO orbits Mars at a speed of a little more than twice per Mars day. This is a VERY fast computer.
The problem with analog data is that you cannot interpret brightness values quantitatively. Without digital, we'd just be looking at photographs, which ARE nice, but they don't tell us what we want to know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbiting_sa tellite
ISS's orbit does not define the orbits of all satellites.
Umm. . . No.
Resolution is the physical size of a pixel's footprint on the object in question. The pixels on HiRISE cover about 20-30 cm on the surface of Mars, depending on distance from the surface. That is the resolution of the imaging system. You are right in that it is independent of any human or computer recognition algorithm. That's also why I made a distinction between resolving and resolution.
The resolving power, or how large something must be to be recognized, by a human or computer, as a distinct object, is always larger than what a single pixel covers. Your example is flawed. Usually you need three or so pixels, but it's not necessarily so you can separate one object from another. It's because one or two pixels are nearly always ambiguous as to what they represent. Three is where you start to have some confidence. The more pixels that cover something, the better-->hence higher resolution => higher resolving power => recognizing smaller objects.
I'm entirely not convinced that was from a spy satellite (to read 1-inch high lettering, the targetting and stability problems alone would be quite difficult to solve for such high resolution; you'd have blurring (from spacecraft issues and the person holding the book), mis-targetting, etc.). Given that:
All of the electronics have to be radiation hardened. This usually puts back the technology by a few years to even a decade compared with what one could afford without the rad-hardening.
Given that, the actual resolution is 20-30 cm per pixel (depending on distance from the surface). That's 10 or so inches. However, you can't actually resolve/recognize anything that's only a pixel across. The canonical requirement is 3+ pixels to be sure you're detecting what you think you're detecting. So, the actual resolving power is about 1 meter.
If the spacecraft (and camera) had been designed to orbit at a lower elevation, the resolution would have been higher, but as it is, it's pretty darn close to Mars' atmosphere and you don't want to orbit there. MRO's orbit is going to be about 320 km above the surface. Some satellites at Earth (I have no idea if they're "spy" sats) orbit at around 150 km above the surface--much closer. Many spy planes fly over the surface at only a few tens of km. With that and some amazing engineering to reduce smear, they could easily resolve very small objects.
One of the major issues with HiRISE is going to be spacecraft jitter (the spacecraft shakes, other instruments move, etc.). This could effectively limit the resolution by a few factors if it's not resolved. There is a high stability mode in which nothing is allowed to move and the spacecraft holds itself still while HiRISE images very important targets (future landing sites, etc.), but that mode is resource intensive and excludes some instruments from doing certain activities. What HiRISE is trying to do is equivalent to trying to take a picture of the street through a glass-bottomed car at 125 about miles per hour.
Another problem is context--sometimes the MOC images are uninterpretable because we don't know what's going on around them. With too-high resolution images, we'll just be looking at... well, noise, essentially. We can't really understand things without context to place them into. That's why we have a MOC-equivalent "context" imager bore-sighted with HiRISE.
All-in-all, this is the most powerful telescope/camera sent to another planet.
HiRISE also doesn't need to use extra spacecraft fuel to achieve its 30 cm resolution; MOC has to slew the entire spacecraft against the velocity vector in order to stay on target. HiRISE gets its high resolution from superior optics (this is the largest telescope ever sent on an inter-planetary mission) and from superior camera design (14 CCDs, insanely fast electronics, etc.).
Yes. Point your web browser here:
a ys-0-postorder-asc-start-0.html?sid=8b7707c9b98f82 504047ca1a6888802d
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-246098-postd
It's mostly up to date. . . There was a recent hotfix that broke things, but the work around is posted in the discussion.
Works fine for me (with the fixes). I run at 1920x1200 with a little slow-down compared with XP, but not so much that it matters.
Your first image is not from Mars. It's of a catena on Ganymede, and the chain is about 150--200 km long. This was almost certainly created by a comet breakup similar to the breakup of Shoemaker-Levy 9. We watched SL9 break up and impact Jupiter, producing similar "features". We've never, ever seen EDM on such a scale.
.predicted." Much, much larger would be an order of magnitude larger, not almost twice the diameter. Wrong about the zero volatiles, too. Hot (1000--2000 K) gases (water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbons, among others) were observed, in line with expectations. Theory does not say the projectile "burrowed a mile" into the comet "before exploding". The projectile exploded on impact, as all things travelling at that speed do. Theory allowed for a large range of diameters simply because we didn't know what the comet was made of (thus our interest in performing this experiment). The depth of the crater was not predicted to be anywhere near a 1/2 mile, nor was there enough material ejected to account for such a large hole--thus, the depth was NOT 1/2 mile. Typically, on strength-dominated, simple impacts, the depth:diameter ratio is about 1:10--a 1 km crater is about 100 m deep. In (low) gravity dominated (Deep Impact) regimes, it's a bit higher, but certainly it's not greater than 1, which your assertation would require. There was not enough material ejected to account for even a 1 km deep crater.
Your second image is perfectly consistent with aborted graben formation. Your third image is, again, consistent with the breakup of a comet or asteroid before impact.
I note that you do not have scale bars on these images. However, for edification, the features in your second image are hundreds of meters to several kilometers across and are located near Valles Marineris, a very large canyon system on Mars. EDM is used for machining metal parts, and happens at small scales, not at the scales of these features. The amount of energy required to "machine" a crater of even a few meters across would be enormous (I'm seeing values of kW for 1--10 mm^3 removal--you do the scaling math; it's likely a power law scaling). You do not see such features created by lightning on the Earth, for example. Believing that these are from such a mechanism as EDM is just silly. There are more reasonable mechanisms that DO create these kinds of features on the earth.
Deep Impact: The predicted impact size was about not more than about 200 m IN DIAMETER. The actual size was not more than about 300 m in diameter. This is NOT "much, much larger than . .
Seeing as you're trying to pass off images of Ganymede as from Mars, that you take very small crops of images out of context of surrounding terrain, that you don't know what EMD really is capable of, that you don't really even know what the working theories are, and that YOU haven't bothered to "follow up" on what are better, more reasonable, and perfectly sufficient explanations of such features, you are the one who needs to explain why we should even bother with such proposals--it's a waste of taxpayer money to consider such papers or proposals.
1) The volcanoes at Io's surface have nothing to do with plasma physics or MHD.
2) No volcanoes have "drifted around" the surface of Io.
3) There have been migrations of Ionian eruption plumes (the gas/dust "geysers" above the surface).
4) We can quite readily explain this with simple thermophysics. Plasma or MHD has nothing to do with it.
5) Some people have claimed that MHD has influenced the shape of plumes, but we can't reconcile that with the observations of WHERE the fields interact with Io.
6) Some have claimed that electric currents can cause the elevated temperatures of some of Io's volcanoes, but they haven't done the simple math to know that even at 100% efficiency, there simply isn't enough energy available, and AGAIN, the field lines don't intersect the high temperature volcanoes.
Theory is fine, but if your pet theory can't handle the observations, go back to the theory--the observations are rarely "wrong".
Not sure what the hell this has to do with plasma physics or MHD. Electrical currrents don't do a damned thing to effect morphology. Same with craters. Same with IMPACTS into comets and subsequent ejection of materials.
Are you really claiming that high energy particles accelerated by the nearly non-existant magnetic field of Mars is causing flat-bottomed craters?! Wow! They must be moving really fucking fast.
Not sure what you mean that "these guys" never studied plasma fluid dynamics. If by, "these guys", you mean planetary scientists, cosmologists, or astronomers (all VERY broad fields), "they" invented or extended just about any new branch physics (I'm talking real science, with perdictions and ways to test the predictions) you care to talk about.
Who the hell modded that post "insightful"?
Or, and I'm just guessing here, they're going to compress (!) the data before sending it back to Earth.
Ok, I'm being a smart ass. But, come on, we have great compression technologies, why wouldn't we use them?
We've seen such things before, and we've known that water ice exists at the poles. I'm fairly sure this crater has been the subject of a peer-reviewed paper in the past, but I haven't done a complete search of the literature, and I'm not sure the HRSC people have either. MGS MOC saw this crater as early as 2000 (and possibly early).
3 /E0302478.html3 /M2301915.html0 /M2001204.html2 /E0200677.html .)
i bcode=1976Sci...194.1341K&db_key=AST&data_type=HTM L&format=d ft ian+crater&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Search
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e01_e06/images/E0
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/m19_m23/images/M2
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/m19_m23/images/M2
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e01_e06/images/E0
(there are more, but I don't feel like posting all of them. .
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?b
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/1080497v1.p
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=water+ice+mar
Having looked at the "full resolution" JPEG, I see zero impact craters on the ice. Which is good, because we KNOW there is water ice near the poles (which is where this is), and it'd be really darn surprising to find water ice old enough to have impact craters on it. It should be relatively stable this far north, but not THAT stable--i.e., it's probably very young, as in still being modified by deposition and sublimation.
p df
It's not news that water ice exists in north pole craters:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/LPSC99/pdf/2026.
You could also consider "self-publishing", as well as creative commons. . . Something like http://cafepress.com/, which sends you a check for anything over their costs - some profit for themselves. You determine the price, AND you continue to own the copyright, so you can still provide free downloads of the PDF, if you like.
I have no affiliation with Cafepress besides having bought a couple of t-shirts from them.
Thanks, I really needed to waste more time on this.
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[/sarcasm]
Wow. Just wow.
This is like the timecube (which appears to be four dimensional, but I can't really tell--I must be evil).
I wonder. .
Since time is four dimensional and the brain (mind?) is seven dimensional, why can't we visualize/understand the whole of time? Clearly it's within our capacity to do so since our minds completely contain the whole of time!
Ah, well, back to science.
WTFO?
The link given for GAC is nothing but 80,000 poorly written "questions" (many of which have misspellings and poor grammar, and many of which are not questions) with an arbitrary number before them. They are meaningless.
1.00 is the earth round??????????
No, it's not. It's a triaxial ellipsoid. What's with all the question marks?
1.00 Are unripe banans green?
What is a banan?
1.00 Would you find a closet in a h?use?
What is a h?use?
1.00 do chillies make your mouth burn?
What are chillies?
0.62 Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with will?
huh?
0.55 Can I wear underpants on my head?
Yes. 1.00
0.14 where is my mind?
How does this even have a number associated with it?
0.14 How many countries are there in this world?
So, there are 0.14 countries in the world? Good lord, I sure hope google doesn't pick this crap up.
Good luck.
No, she voted that the constitution doesn't restrict the States' rights to immenent domain, and that the State law wasn't unconstitutional.
How is this NOT relevant to the entire community (US and otherwise)? This is one of only NINE people who have ultimate say in interpreting ALL the laws of the US, laws like the PATRIOT act, laws involving copyright, laws involving data transmission, laws involving environmental stewardship, etc.
How can you possibly think this isn't relevant?
No problem. It always surprises me that Io isn't as well known as it should be (IMHO). It's the most geologically active body we've ever observed, but it's quietly ignored by so many people simply because it doesn't have water on it (thus it doesn't fall under NASA's "follow the water" mantra). Well, that's sad because the Earth was likely very similar to Io right around the time life started popping up here (although Earth had [nearly] infinitely more water).
If you want to understand the conditions that dictated when life could evolve, study Io!
I'm not sure what you mean by permanent liquid, and I'm guessing that's why you deleted it. =-}
Umm. . . No.
.something, and that's about it for the bodies in the solar system.
Io was the second known body to have liquids on its surface (1979 Voyager flybys discovered active, extrusive volcanism). Titan was next, though we couldn't see through the clouds, so we had no idea. Triton was the fourth to possibly have liquids on its surface, though we still don't know for sure. Venus also likely has some liquid lava on its surface, though we've not seen actual volcanism. Plus, Venus probably sometimes has sulfuric acid rains, but we're not sure. Mars may also have transient liquids on its surface.
Titan's cool because it's probably got an active hydrologic cycle (don't read hydro- to mean water, read it to mean fluid). Earth does, Venus might, Io has. . . something, Mars had one, it might still, occasionally. Triton has. .
Earth is a big body, so it still has radionuclide heat, and it's close to the sun, so it's got an abundance of energy to drive a hydrologic cycle. We can't see through Venus' clouds with more than RADAR, so we don't know what's going on there. Mars is small, so its heat has mostly left it, and it gets nearly 1/4 the energy the Earth gets from the sun, so it's cold and has little atmosphere left. Io is in a weird, slightly eccentric, orbital resonance, so its energy comes at the expense of Jupiter (and Ganymede and Europa). Titan's also in an eccentric orbit, but it doesn't have the resonance with other sats that Io has, so it "should" have lost most of its energy--one of the mysteries is why such a small body has such a huge atmosphere (and thus a hydrologic cycle). Triton might have a bit of an atmosphere, and why is also a mystery.
So, of the many, many bodies in the solar system, there are only a few that have atmospheres, and fewer that have an active, observable hydrologic cycle. . .
OpenOffice.org does it, but last I tried, it needed work (pre-1.0 days).
Bibtex works great, and as far as I'm concerned is an essential part of LateX, which is an essential part of writing a thesis. . .
Most employers I know of are not interested in people who don't have (or haven't recently had) a job. It doesn't matter so much what the job is, just that you show that you're willing to work and that you aren't unemployable. Holding out for your ideal job just makes you look spoiled and unwilling to work. The few places that aren't like this are the places "you" start working at, flipping burgers and folding shirts, or at your parents' places of work.
.), you'll have a job, which is better than 50--100k (5--10% of the employable) people in this country.
I suggest you go out and get a job. Any job that you can get. Unemployment is currently high enough that you're lucky to get a job, much less something you really want to do. After you have your job, spend your free time looking for your ideal job. Do everything you can do to work where you want to work; apply for internships (Spacegrant comes immedietly to mind, if you are interested in science at all), apply for google jobs, whatever. But in the meantime, as you keep searching (and searching, and searching, and. .
http://www.oksolar.com/roof/
http://www.oakland.edu/energy/solar.htm
http://www.ips-solar.com/pv/bipv.htm
The uni-solars run about $120 for a 7.2x1 foot (3 sq ft exposed) shingle, which is rated at 17 watts, with about 23-32 Whr / sq ft. Still not at all competitive with asphalt (~$2/sq ft for the cheap shingles), even if you consider that you're saving money elsewhere. However, they are competitive with slate and other exotic materials once you consider the energy savings.
They have a 20 year power warranty (typical for PV and this just means the power output will stay above 80% of the rated for at least 20 years) and a 5 year "system" warranty. I would easily trust them to perform as well as or better than asphalt w.r.t. roofing material, especailly here in Arizona, where asphalt only lasts about 14 years. Keep in mind that these are the currently available shingles. . .