According to the FAQ, you can't put more than one of those puppies in any given system.
The designers first go into something about heat, to which I thought "hey, any decently designed case ought to be able to overcome that!"
Then, to my dismay, the next thing they say is that each processor only has 3 bits to identify itself in the array by, and so you're limited to 8 total processors per system. Grrr....
huh? That would cost a *lot*. It takes an amazing amount of energy to alter the orbit of a spacecraft by any significant amount. You can't just blow off a few pounds of TNT on the side of the sucker and expect it to fall into the sun within a few years. The cost to put an orbital transfer engine on the spacecraft would be sizeable in and of itself, not to mention the costs associated with shooting the heavier spacecraft to the Moon. And if you're thinking about having landers lift off the surface of the moon just to clean things up, forget about it.
Just not really feasible to go slapping engines big enough to knock something into the sun on a cheap little throwaway spacecraft. It pretty much defeats the stated purpose of the program, which is to get to the Moon *cheap*.
Well, the original plan was to land the little guy at end-mission, lift off a bit, and look at the imprint that we leave. We're still fairly unsure what the surface composition is like, and sometimes the oldest tricks are best....unfortunately, the way things went last year with the whoopsie and the probe going into safe mode and the spinning and the losing lots of propellant stabilizing the craft, we don't know about that now. We don't know if we could get down into an orbit that tight with what little fuel we have left and keep the orbit controllable, for one - we might just smack into a boulder or something and that would suck. There's no problems with the spacecraft outright crashing into the asteroid Ranger-kinetic-death-style; the relative velocities are too low for anything that spectacular. But we might not be able to control the orbit if we start going down. On top of that, some of the mission scientists are complaining that they want to keep getting data as long as possible since the probe is only funded for so long, and they don't want to drop the sucker into the asteroid within that period if there's the risk of losing the craft. I think it'd be cool, though...if it works and we can lift off again, we'd get to see what the regolith is like (can't tell how thick it is right now, just have to do it the-Eagle-has-landed-like), and the image resolution would be *obscene*...the camera can stay focused on objects that are as close in as a few centimeters.
Same thing, pretty much. Comets have a whole lot more volatiles since they formed (we think) farther out in the solar system, around Uranus/Neptune-type orbits, and then the lot of them migrated out to the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud (not nearly enough material out there to form anything, not in the amounts that we see/predict) On top of that, their orbits are a bit different, but one of the things that the '86 Halley probes told us is was that there's really not a lot of difference between comets and asteroids, just a lot more light elements on the former and *substantially* more eccentric orbits, although some of the near-earth-objects have some pretty stretched-out ones themselves. Heck, astronomers have a nasty habit of mistaking comets far from the sun (far enough that there's not much, if any, gas venting) for rogue asteroids. But there's a *lot* more carbon in comets than we used to think - it's more a rocky/chondritic asteroid with water pockets frozen in it than anything else.
Well, on top of the Ida/Gaspra/2685 pictures, there's also Phobos and Deimos (moons of Mars), of which there's some pretty extensive data. The Viking orbiters took a gander at them way back when, and MGS also returned some data on them recently (apparently there's some pretty thick regolith on the two of them, which is kind of cool). The Soviet Union even sent two probes (Phobos 1 and 2) to check out the bigger moon. Both moons display enough spectroscopic, structural, and just general visual similarities to asteroids that we can pretty safely say that they're captured asteroids. Kinda tough to say how they got there, though; Mars ain't no big player gravitationally in the solar system... Phobos, especially, is pretty cool. Lots of grooves and huge craters that we're really not sure how they got there.
There's also Dactyl, a moonlet orbiting Ida. *Really* cool stuff - before Galileo saw that, the idea of an asteroid having anything major orbiting it was kind of a "well, I suppose it could theoretically" thought. So the Galileo encounters weren't worthless by any means.
Not to mention that I don't think that's the same format/hardware as what the article speaks of. DVD-RAM has been on the market for some time but it's just a glorfied PD drive and I'm not real impressed by it - have to have cartridges that you can't (reasonably) take the disc out of, it only goes up to 5.2GB, etc etc etc. Rather depressing. HiVal makes one, I think... I know LaCie does and so do some of the other hardware firms. I'm holding out.
I seem to recall that NASA used to launch commercial satellites from the shuttle, before that whole nasty Challenger-blowing-up thing back in '86. I don't think they've launched a commercial satellite since, they've been concentrating largely on scientific payloads...anyone have any more data on why this is?
And, on a more pragmatic note, would anyone actually pay to launch a commercial satellite on the shuttle? What with the competition between Boeing, Lockheed, the ESA, the Russian Space Agency, and the Chinese to boost satellites these days, it would seem a *lot* cheaper to use one of their launch systems rather than paying NASA directly to launch two SRBs, a fuel tank, an orbiter, five to ten crew, and all the equipment necessary to keep them alive along with your satellite...you know it'll get up there in one piece, but is it worth the tradeoff?
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Check out this story on the New York Times...
For Many Online Music Fans, Court Ruling is a Call to Arms
According to the FAQ, you can't put more than one of those puppies in any given system.
The designers first go into something about heat, to which I thought "hey, any decently designed case ought to be able to overcome that!"
Then, to my dismay, the next thing they say is that each processor only has 3 bits to identify itself in the array by, and so you're limited to 8 total processors per system. Grrr....
I believe the appropriate phrase is "Imagine that."
I loved those ads.
do you have any idea of the market value of just one medium-sized chunk of asteroidal nickel-iron?
:)
No, actually, come to think of it. What is the market value?
And no, for once, I'm not being a smartass. Just curious.
huh? That would cost a *lot*. It takes an amazing amount of energy to alter the orbit of a spacecraft by any significant amount. You can't just blow off a few pounds of TNT on the side of the sucker and expect it to fall into the sun within a few years. The cost to put an orbital transfer engine on the spacecraft would be sizeable in and of itself, not to mention the costs associated with shooting the heavier spacecraft to the Moon. And if you're thinking about having landers lift off the surface of the moon just to clean things up, forget about it.
Just not really feasible to go slapping engines big enough to knock something into the sun on a cheap little throwaway spacecraft. It pretty much defeats the stated purpose of the program, which is to get to the Moon *cheap*.
Well, the original plan was to land the little guy at end-mission, lift off a bit, and look at the imprint that we leave. We're still fairly unsure what the surface composition is like, and sometimes the oldest tricks are best....unfortunately, the way things went last year with the whoopsie and the probe going into safe mode and the spinning and the losing lots of propellant stabilizing the craft, we don't know about that now. We don't know if we could get down into an orbit that tight with what little fuel we have left and keep the orbit controllable, for one - we might just smack into a boulder or something and that would suck. There's no problems with the spacecraft outright crashing into the asteroid Ranger-kinetic-death-style; the relative velocities are too low for anything that spectacular. But we might not be able to control the orbit if we start going down. On top of that, some of the mission scientists are complaining that they want to keep getting data as long as possible since the probe is only funded for so long, and they don't want to drop the sucker into the asteroid within that period if there's the risk of losing the craft. I think it'd be cool, though...if it works and we can lift off again, we'd get to see what the regolith is like (can't tell how thick it is right now, just have to do it the-Eagle-has-landed-like), and the image resolution would be *obscene*...the camera can stay focused on objects that are as close in as a few centimeters.
Same thing, pretty much. Comets have a whole lot more volatiles since they formed (we think) farther out in the solar system, around Uranus/Neptune-type orbits, and then the lot of them migrated out to the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud (not nearly enough material out there to form anything, not in the amounts that we see/predict) On top of that, their orbits are a bit different, but one of the things that the '86 Halley probes told us is was that there's really not a lot of difference between comets and asteroids, just a lot more light elements on the former and *substantially* more eccentric orbits, although some of the near-earth-objects have some pretty stretched-out ones themselves. Heck, astronomers have a nasty habit of mistaking comets far from the sun (far enough that there's not much, if any, gas venting) for rogue asteroids. But there's a *lot* more carbon in comets than we used to think - it's more a rocky/chondritic asteroid with water pockets frozen in it than anything else.
Well, on top of the Ida/Gaspra/2685 pictures, there's also Phobos and Deimos (moons of Mars), of which there's some pretty extensive data. The Viking orbiters took a gander at them way back when, and MGS also returned some data on them recently (apparently there's some pretty thick regolith on the two of them, which is kind of cool). The Soviet Union even sent two probes (Phobos 1 and 2) to check out the bigger moon. Both moons display enough spectroscopic, structural, and just general visual similarities to asteroids that we can pretty safely say that they're captured asteroids. Kinda tough to say how they got there, though; Mars ain't no big player gravitationally in the solar system... Phobos, especially, is pretty cool. Lots of grooves and huge craters that we're really not sure how they got there.
There's also Dactyl, a moonlet orbiting Ida. *Really* cool stuff - before Galileo saw that, the idea of an asteroid having anything major orbiting it was kind of a "well, I suppose it could theoretically" thought. So the Galileo encounters weren't worthless by any means.
Not to mention that I don't think that's the same format/hardware as what the article speaks of. DVD-RAM has been on the market for some time but it's just a glorfied PD drive and I'm not real impressed by it - have to have cartridges that you can't (reasonably) take the disc out of, it only goes up to 5.2GB, etc etc etc. Rather depressing. HiVal makes one, I think... I know LaCie does and so do some of the other hardware firms. I'm holding out.
Hey, it's a cultural thing. Here in the Land of Dixie, *everything* is Coke.
"Hey, I'm going to the gas station. Want anything to drink?"
"Sure, grab me a Coke, will you?"
"Okay, what kind?"
It sounds confusing, but somehow it's not...go figure.
Copy that, Red Leader.
Looks like ye olde slashdot effect has taken hold at last..... *cackle*
If you find yourself in a hole, it's time to stop digging.
I seem to recall that NASA used to launch commercial satellites from the shuttle, before that whole nasty Challenger-blowing-up thing back in '86. I don't think they've launched a commercial satellite since, they've been concentrating largely on scientific payloads...anyone have any more data on why this is?
And, on a more pragmatic note, would anyone actually pay to launch a commercial satellite on the shuttle? What with the competition between Boeing, Lockheed, the ESA, the Russian Space Agency, and the Chinese to boost satellites these days, it would seem a *lot* cheaper to use one of their launch systems rather than paying NASA directly to launch two SRBs, a fuel tank, an orbiter, five to ten crew, and all the equipment necessary to keep them alive along with your satellite...you know it'll get up there in one piece, but is it worth the tradeoff?