Just point the beam in a single direction and look for reflections. Once you start picking up the same particles over and oevr just redirect the beam slightly. Either way you collect a stream of data.
Are they just making shit up or what? 30,000 mph is relative to the ground. Anything orbiting with be near that speed, including the space men. Someone tell me I'm wrong, and please tell me why. It seems to me the relative velocities would be small.
The particles you collide with could be in the same orbit but going the other way, though this is unlikely. More likely they could be in a different orbital plane so they sideswipe you at significant speed, or in an orbit with a different eccentricity so they have a decent relative velocity. Many particles cross each others paths with the speed of a fast bullet.
Electro Optic Systems' laser technology, with the help of a federal government grant, will enable the Mount Stromlo observatory in Canberra to track space junk and sell the data it collects to satellite owners and companies like NASA.
Reading the summary I had hopes they had a laser rocket thing worked out: you heat the leading edge of a bit of space junk. Gas comes off that side and pushes the fragment backwards so it re-enters the atmosphere. But no. Its just a better way to detect the particles.
Not in a million years. Remember the Kin. MSFT could buy the Pre, spend two years porting windows 7 to it then sell a few thousand units and write it off on their tax.
And, if cars with fly by wire steering are eventually allowed in Europe, I expect they will be just as safe as all those farm tractors around the place, and more reliable because an awkward mechanical assembly doesn't have to be fitted into a restricted space.
My only reservation there is that steering, unlike power and braking, doesn't have an agreed safe state. Even on an aircraft you can afford (most of the time) to fall back to not changing the position of a control surface until the crew take action. This isn't the case with a surface vehicle because they are often within a tenth of a second of hitting something.
Yeah thats the fluffy reentry vehicle. Cometary dust grains get into our atmosphere that way because their surface area is large compared to their volume and mass. Unfortunately they also decelerate at hundreds of gravities, which is not going to be good for your passengers.
I do think, however, that large devices which generate drag could be used to passively deorbit rescue craft. You could use this if your retro rockets fail. If you had a very light canopy (say a few molecules thick) you could grab on to the thin atmosphere at 300 km altitude and drop your orbital altitude in a day or two.
Well it depends on the type of escape system we need. Historically the shuttle system may have benefited from a better high altitude escape system, but I doubt a reentry capable personal system would have helped the crews in any of the failure modes we observed.
I have long thought that the shuttle could have been an evolution of Apollo, with the flight deck being a Apollo capsule. Being able to eject and fly the flight deck may have saved the crew in both disasters.
Since from now on we are talking about apollo sized capsules I still doubt that there would be room for the type of escape system you describe. You still need RCS and guidance because heat shields do not always orient themselves when they enter the atmosphere. If you are tumbling on re-entry you might wind up in a stable attitude pointing the wrong way.
My focus is really on escape from a space platform (like ISS). For me this is the only place where an additional vehicle will help you at all.
You can't carry seven personal reentry capsules on a space shuttle because you have neither the space or the mass available to do so. You can carry seven parachutes and inflatable personal heat shields.
...and RCS. And guidance. And surface survival gear for Antarctica and the Sahara and the North Atlantic ocean. Once you sit down and specify it I think you will come up with an Apollo size emergency return vehicle with seven to ten seats inside. If you try to use small vehicles (capsules or re-entry kits) then you waste volume and mass on duplicated services.
A high altitude jump like this may give us some useful data, but it does very little to pave the way for an individual descent from orbit.
However, re-entry is largely a solved problem, whereas high-altitude parachuting isn't. If we had a need for an emergency system to bring astronauts down to 100,000 feet we could probably build a suitable heat-shield and reaction jet control system in a few months, but it won't help if their parachute fails after that.
But thats just a small capsule. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. Base your design off those. They all had parachute systems.
I have been thinking about the Falcon 1 and whether you could build an ultralight capsule for it. Total payload is about 500kg, including the pilot.
2. People climb it without supplementary oxygen all the time - it's considered the "real" way to climb Everest. Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler first did it way back in 1980 or so.
Yes but you need to work up to it. You can die at 20000 feet (for example if pressurization fails in an aircraft) even though people live at that altitude in Nepal.
Orbital speed is ~mach 21. Heat shields are pretty well established technology. Early spy satellites dropped film containers which were collected on Earth. Then there was Mercury up to Apollo. The Galileo entry probe hit Jupiter at 50 km/s (~mach 150).
So you can pretty much dial your own heat shield now. The problem is that it is going to be bulky. For a two metre human I expect you will need a conical structure ~3 metres in diameter and about a metre deep. Rockets and guidance will be needed if you need to deorbit. If the aerobraking is unguided then you will pull serious gees, but not enough to be fatal.
I don't think the parachute system is much of an issue. You are gong to be down to terminal velocity close to the ground anyway. Just fire the chute at 10km altitude.
A cartridge of silicone might be the answer. Smear it between the bricks and use masses of the stuff to fill the space between the bricks and the existing structure. Even where it won't stick it will tend to hang on to gaps, etc in masonry.
I think night rate started at 2 AM for me. The electronic power meter had two outputs. The normal one was on all the time and the switched output came on at 2 and locked on while the load drew current. It was optimized to give you a warm shower in the morning.
Slashdot Mirror
Just point the beam in a single direction and look for reflections. Once you start picking up the same particles over and oevr just redirect the beam slightly. Either way you collect a stream of data.
Are they just making shit up or what? 30,000 mph is relative to the ground. Anything orbiting with be near that speed, including the space men. Someone tell me I'm wrong, and please tell me why. It seems to me the relative velocities would be small.
The particles you collide with could be in the same orbit but going the other way, though this is unlikely. More likely they could be in a different orbital plane so they sideswipe you at significant speed, or in an orbit with a different eccentricity so they have a decent relative velocity. Many particles cross each others paths with the speed of a fast bullet.
I'm sure you meant kangaroos with frickin' laser beams!
Kangaroos with LEDs would cut the country road toll. You just need some of those power generators which slide a magnet through a coil.
More importantly, it's not a satellite owner.
NASA has lots of assets in low earth orbit.
Electro Optic Systems' laser technology, with the help of a federal government grant, will enable the Mount Stromlo observatory in Canberra to track space junk and sell the data it collects to satellite owners and companies like NASA.
Reading the summary I had hopes they had a laser rocket thing worked out: you heat the leading edge of a bit of space junk. Gas comes off that side and pushes the fragment backwards so it re-enters the atmosphere. But no. Its just a better way to detect the particles.
Ewwwwwww.
Microsoft would gain the WebOS,
Not in a million years. Remember the Kin. MSFT could buy the Pre, spend two years porting windows 7 to it then sell a few thousand units and write it off on their tax.
And, if cars with fly by wire steering are eventually allowed in Europe, I expect they will be just as safe as all those farm tractors around the place, and more reliable because an awkward mechanical assembly doesn't have to be fitted into a restricted space.
My only reservation there is that steering, unlike power and braking, doesn't have an agreed safe state. Even on an aircraft you can afford (most of the time) to fall back to not changing the position of a control surface until the crew take action. This isn't the case with a surface vehicle because they are often within a tenth of a second of hitting something.
To escape from the dinosaur?
Okay smartass so what did the dinosaurs eat for christmas lunch?
What came first? The molecule or the cell? The prion or the virus?
...until the eggs become too hard for the chicken to bite its way out, then you have a lower survival rate.
No the link target actually says cookie_setting_error.html
Yeah thats the fluffy reentry vehicle. Cometary dust grains get into our atmosphere that way because their surface area is large compared to their volume and mass. Unfortunately they also decelerate at hundreds of gravities, which is not going to be good for your passengers.
I do think, however, that large devices which generate drag could be used to passively deorbit rescue craft. You could use this if your retro rockets fail. If you had a very light canopy (say a few molecules thick) you could grab on to the thin atmosphere at 300 km altitude and drop your orbital altitude in a day or two.
Well it depends on the type of escape system we need. Historically the shuttle system may have benefited from a better high altitude escape system, but I doubt a reentry capable personal system would have helped the crews in any of the failure modes we observed.
I have long thought that the shuttle could have been an evolution of Apollo, with the flight deck being a Apollo capsule. Being able to eject and fly the flight deck may have saved the crew in both disasters.
Since from now on we are talking about apollo sized capsules I still doubt that there would be room for the type of escape system you describe. You still need RCS and guidance because heat shields do not always orient themselves when they enter the atmosphere. If you are tumbling on re-entry you might wind up in a stable attitude pointing the wrong way.
My focus is really on escape from a space platform (like ISS). For me this is the only place where an additional vehicle will help you at all.
But thats just a small capsule.
No, _it's not a capsule at all_
You can't carry seven personal reentry capsules on a space shuttle because you have neither the space or the mass available to do so. You can carry seven parachutes and inflatable personal heat shields.
...and RCS. And guidance. And surface survival gear for Antarctica and the Sahara and the North Atlantic ocean. Once you sit down and specify it I think you will come up with an Apollo size emergency return vehicle with seven to ten seats inside. If you try to use small vehicles (capsules or re-entry kits) then you waste volume and mass on duplicated services.
A high altitude jump like this may give us some useful data, but it does very little to pave the way for an individual descent from orbit.
However, re-entry is largely a solved problem, whereas high-altitude parachuting isn't. If we had a need for an emergency system to bring astronauts down to 100,000 feet we could probably build a suitable heat-shield and reaction jet control system in a few months, but it won't help if their parachute fails after that.
But thats just a small capsule. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. Base your design off those. They all had parachute systems.
I have been thinking about the Falcon 1 and whether you could build an ultralight capsule for it. Total payload is about 500kg, including the pilot.
1. Mt. Everest is 29,028 feet.
2. People climb it without supplementary oxygen all the time - it's considered the "real" way to climb Everest. Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler first did it way back in 1980 or so.
Yes but you need to work up to it. You can die at 20000 feet (for example if pressurization fails in an aircraft) even though people live at that altitude in Nepal.
Orbital speed is ~mach 21. Heat shields are pretty well established technology. Early spy satellites dropped film containers which were collected on Earth. Then there was Mercury up to Apollo. The Galileo entry probe hit Jupiter at 50 km/s (~mach 150).
So you can pretty much dial your own heat shield now. The problem is that it is going to be bulky. For a two metre human I expect you will need a conical structure ~3 metres in diameter and about a metre deep. Rockets and guidance will be needed if you need to deorbit. If the aerobraking is unguided then you will pull serious gees, but not enough to be fatal.
I don't think the parachute system is much of an issue. You are gong to be down to terminal velocity close to the ground anyway. Just fire the chute at 10km altitude.
A cartridge of silicone might be the answer. Smear it between the bricks and use masses of the stuff to fill the space between the bricks and the existing structure. Even where it won't stick it will tend to hang on to gaps, etc in masonry.
You can get buckets of cheap knock off bricks which are not technically LEGO.
Maybe that is the future of netbooks and iPad/slate devices. Draw a passive keyboard on a fold out case. Use a camera to detect keystrokes.
If the moon moves further away even faster NASA will never get there.
I think night rate started at 2 AM for me. The electronic power meter had two outputs. The normal one was on all the time and the switched output came on at 2 and locked on while the load drew current. It was optimized to give you a warm shower in the morning.
Dr Evil's secret hideout.