No, they have no microphones. Mars Polar Lander, the one the crashed, had one but, uh... as would be apparent by its crashed state, we never got data back. I don't know if Phoenix is going to have a microphone or not, but if not, I doubt we'll have audio coming back from Mars any time soon.
If I recall correctly, these blood-clotting bandages also come in a powder form, but in both cases the reaction of the chitosan and your blood/plasma is significantly exothermic, so if you're not careful you can burn someone in their wound with the clotter. Ouch.
While there are many arguments to be made for and against space weaponry in terms of other nations rising to the challenge, possible space arms races, and the militarization of space as a whole, I think that there's a different way to look at this.
Is there anything we can do from space that we can't do from the air?
No.
We can bomb people just fine with aerial bombers and use directed energy weapons just as well a bit lower in the atmosphere (even a bit less air to cut through). We can disable enemy communications satellites from the ground with relative ease with directed energy weapons; vacumn is a great insulator, and if you can get the thing to heat up enough, the solar panels will suffer a huge failure in efficiency and you end up with a satellite with no power - a dead one.
Thus, the question becomes, is space weaponry better than aerial weaponry for these activities?
Technologically, there is precious little you can't do from the air that you can do from space. The only possible reason from this angle to choose space over air is if its cheaper, and guess what? Space operations cost a hell of a lot more than aerial operations, as a whole, and if you can do it in the air, almost anything can be done cheaper in the air.
Sure, GPS and communications satellites can't be done better from the air, but target bombardment and directed energy attacks can be done from airplanes.
So, what we're seeing is a huge push by the military to quietly create a huge surge in funding for technology that could do the job of other machines, but its more expensive. This is what we in the business call the military/industrial complex getting even richer; space weapons can't do anything air weapons can't, but they cost a lot more and are easier to sell as a whole than increased funding of aerial weaponry.
This is just government corruption and lack of military accountability at work, people.
Even though these cars are using more electrical, they're still getting electricity from a grid largely powered by filthy coal and gas power plants, and through a system that's most likely less efficient than the car's internal power grid. They might be using less gasoline in the car, but in the grander scheme they're creating more pollution by making the power plants burn even more for them.
From the article: Under the new laws, an ISP or ICH will face penalties of $11,000 for the individual and $55,000 for body corporates if they are made aware that their service can be used to access material that they have reasonable grounds to believe is child pornography or child abuse material and they do not refer details of that material to the AFP within a reasonable time.
What that equates to is if child porn is reported to the ISP/webhost, they have to then report it to the Australian police quickly or face penalties. This isn't some ridiculous content-policing scheme - its just imposing a penalty on those who don't forward child pornography reports to the police at a reasonable pace.
Most design documents for space projects say that increased funding simply decreases the risk, because you can buy more of each part and test more to destruction to see the exact limits of your hardware. I believe the rock abrasion tool was tested to destruction dozens of times by honeywell before the current ones were put on the rovers pre-launch, and so they have a very good idea of exactly what it can do. It also means that there's less risk of pushing the hardware too far and breaking something. They weren't wasting money, they were making sure these things completed the mission objectives, and they did; and then they didn't break immediately afterward, while it was entirely possible that they would.
As has been said before, they did their best to make sure the rovers would survive to three months, but the biggest problem they expected in the long term was heat cycling from daytime temperatures to nighttime temperatures slowly cracking and destroying the rovers, which must have happened as a lesser rate than their worse-case estimates.
The MiniTES instrument needs to be kept above a certain temperature to avoid possible damage, and its heater has been disabled during deep sleep, and temperatures have gone into the danger range during the nights. In that sense, the MiniTES is getting mildly close to being permanently shut down, though I believe its still collecting data at the moment.
The ISS has a political significance totally separate from whatever minimal scientific value may be claimed for it, and the shuttle program is an extension of this political program. The ISS is there soley to foster cooperation with the Russians; we have NASA engineers working in the same room as Russian engineers in Moscow controlling the ISS, and as long as that is happening, we keep pouring in money and we keep cooperating. The ISS could fail to do anything but continue to exist, and we will continue the program, because failing to do so would be a catastrophic collapse of US-Russian relations.
That said, we're starting a new space race with China and India; China wants men on the moon soon and are already sending manned flights into orbit, and India is taking a different track in similar directions. What do we do to outdo China on the moon? Americans on Mars! Right? Guys?...Guys?
A new director would have to figure out a way to balance these sorts of international relations issues with getting real science done, and I think NASA does a decent job of it now by keeping unmanned science moving forward with JIMO/Prometheus and manned politics in the right place with ISS. If NASA is supposed blow off the Russians and focus on science, then their current strategy isn't the right one, but the fact remains that NASA cooperative projects remain a cornerstone of international politics (not to get into pork barrel considerations) and will remain such for the forseeable future.
Show me someone using very thin wires for velocity sensors already and I'll accede that I didn't know about that, but I fail to see where I missed anything in the article. I never said you couldn't do it with non-nanotube materials, now did I?
Gedanken experiment:
You have two tanks of air at equal pressure, and a nanotube setup like the one described in the article in the valve connecting the two tanks. You open the valve - and no air moves across the nanotube, since the tanks are at equal pressure. Now, you pump air from tank 1 to tank 2, and the nanotube will generate energy - but only an equal or lesser amount of energy than it took to pump the air across the tanks.
Unfortunately, nanotubes are still so expensive, velocity sensors are probably all these would be good for - larger power generating variants would be cost prohibitive.
I also wonder how robust any velocity sensor made with nanotubes could be; sure, you could probably put one in a steam pipe or a LNG line and get reasonable data (in fact, in any nanotube-friendly chemical you could probably get good data from this sensor), but if you wanted to put one on the outside of a car or an airplane for velocity measurements, I can see nanotubes being easily damaged; either pulled from their moorings/leads in the device or simply snapped - nanotubes may be strong, but that's not going to help if you have a 500mph tiny sharp projectile impact just a few nanotubes. Also, in 'dirty' environments such as those outside of a car or a plane, you would probably start getting buildup of different pollutions at a reasonable rate, causing a need for either a) constant recalibration or b) sensor replacement.
One of the greatest hurdles in getting these very small and very powerful computers to be very useful is how to handle input - its hard to build in a fully-sized or totally usable keyboard into something like this. I'm not finding any straightforward explanation of how you get input into this computer on the website at first glance; I also don't see a stylus in any of the pictures, which makes me think touch screen (which can be implemented well... just not ideal).
The Deep Space Network is probably one of the largest continuing costs of any mission, including the rovers. The rovers need the 70m antennae at Canberra/Madrid/Goldstone to do direct-to-earth low-bandwidth links, and running those 70m antennae is extremely expensive - and it comes out of the project's pockets. Fortunately, Odyssey has been working beautifully as a telecom relay, getting high bandwidth links to the rovers, and then getting a high bandwidth link DTE to send several dozen megabits of data back at a time. MEX (the ESA satellite) was used to send back some data earlier, too, because both MEX and MER (the rovers) use the same Proximity-1 connection protocol. Eventually, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launches in a year, will be added to the set of potential telecom links, and several years down the line the Mars Telecom Orbiter should provide a very high speed connection back to earth.
All of this is building up a network between Mars and Earth that eventually should be able to support even the most data-intensive *cough* missions.
One of the cooler technologies being proposed now are line-of-sight laser comms - cheaper because you don't need a 210' dish for each link, and potentially faster. MTO is probably going to include these optical connections, though I don't know if they will be used for DTE connects as well as local connects.
I believe this site was shown to be a fake - she didn't go through there alone, but took a bunch of pictures from other sources and some of her own pictures during a standard tour. I can't find a source easily, though I'm sure someone else here can.
Earlier, when the astronauts were doing spacewalks with the Russian suits, the whole spacestation started wobbling and bucking around enough to activate the thrusters that keep it in orbit (though they had been disabled for fear that one would hit an astronaut). As it turned out, the Russian suits vent excess air with about 1N of force, enough to cause the station to ripple noticably over long spacewalks. Using a robot for construction will allow the astronauts to stay inside and avoid causing further wobble with the suits, not to mention reduce the risk involved in sending an astronaut outside (or for some construction projects, both astronauts, leaving the ISS unmanned inside).
There was one file improperly created by one person that induced a tiny amount of error - a miscalculation of 10 nanometers per second^2 of acceleration adds up to a 3.7km drift over 10 days - so the incorrect file could have induced error on the level of mere nanometers.
Also, we didn't miss Mars entirely - that's a false statement. It got there, but it either burned up in the atmosphere or bounced off of the atmosphere - there is only a very small window in which a probe can survive reentry.
GPB detects frame dragging - the future LISA laser interferometer in space, will measure gravitational waves like LIGO does now, but with much higher accuracy.
Thank you for those comments - I work at NASA/JPL (insert disclaimer, my opinions, not theirs). I looked - out of a $1,400,000,000 budget for our particular center, there was a total of $10,000,000 directly allocated to DoD joint research, and it was in the area of optics (spy sats for them, telescopes for us). NASA is totally not a DoD front - they have no problems just getting the money that they want for themselves without somehow perverting NASA goals. Probably the closest we come to that is letting them use our shuttles to put their satellites in orbit nowadays.
Note that I'm totally not an expert (or perhaps not even correctly informed) on the subject, but these are just numbers I remember from poking through the budget.
From the article:
"Now that the ITRP has made its decision, particle physicists plan to carry out three more years of R&D and hope to complete an engineering design for the ILC by 2010. Construction of the collider could then begin, assuming that funding agencies and politicians can agree on where to build the machine."
Interesting, too, how they assume the LHC is going to find the Higgs boson - that's a pretty big assumption, I would think.
GPB is intended to measure 'frame dragging' - basically a minor vortexing action in gravity's pull as predicted by Einstein. To measure it, the most accurate gyroscopes in the world are going to have to be affected by it for over a year before the scientists can give the results - and while a positive result showing frame dragging would certainly reaffirm that Einstein's theory of relativity is so close to reality as to be indistinguishable from reality (in non-quantum regimes), a negative result would roil the physics community, since it would show a violation of relativity. However, the sort of measurement as shown in the article is measuring effects that are extremely slight - it wouldn't be a far stretch for their errors to 'create' this phenomenon, but if GPB shows frame dragging to be nonexistent, perhaps those who didn't see the phenomenon were the ones experiencing the error. Time and physics will tell.
By the way, you didn't hear about the probe since unlike the Mars Rovers, it doesn't send back any pretty pictures, and its testing a hard-to-explain phenomenon that is so slight it would seem negligibly useful to test for it. Therefore, unless it returns a(n unexpected) negative result, most media will probably ignore it.
In a word, no. Mars simply doesn't have the gravity needed to have a high enough pressure at its surface - its got about 1/3rd the gravity of Earth. And while its low gravity does rule out liquid CO2, it doesn't rule out a larger and higher pressure past atmosphere, now blasted away by some means (one theory: Mars has no magnetosphere, so it has no shielding from the solar wind, so possibly billions of years of constant weak pushing from the sun slowly removed the atmosphere).
Bigger radio dishes are in the works, but those aren't built yet - another concern for a later day. As it is, DSN (deep space network) recieve/transmit time on 70m dishes is massively expensive, and making these missions cost efficient is a big deal - so I see this as one of the major areas in which there could be improvement before outer solar missions.
The reactors they are talking about actually aren't PBRs, I believe, but complex rod arrangements that allow reactors to be as inert as several hundred pounds of radioactive material can be until its far away from earth. Even so, your point about political repercussions is absolutely valid - Prometheus could be totally shut down because of these at any time, and I can just imagine hundreds of people showing up at the launch to protest the proliferation of nuclear fission technologies to space.
And I'm not trying to say there is no future for RTG missions - just that Prometheus will be the first time experiements requiring very large amounts of power will be attempted beyond Earth. Surely a simple mission that isn't so monolithically encompassing as JIMO could benefit from the lower costs and political troubles provided by RTGs, but I believe that the future of outer solar system exploration is going to be primarily in Prometheus-type missions.
Prometheus is meant to lead in to manned Martian missions too... so the cut in funding is doubly dubious.
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No, they have no microphones. Mars Polar Lander, the one the crashed, had one but, uh... as would be apparent by its crashed state, we never got data back. I don't know if Phoenix is going to have a microphone or not, but if not, I doubt we'll have audio coming back from Mars any time soon.
If I recall correctly, these blood-clotting bandages also come in a powder form, but in both cases the reaction of the chitosan and your blood/plasma is significantly exothermic, so if you're not careful you can burn someone in their wound with the clotter. Ouch.
While there are many arguments to be made for and against space weaponry in terms of other nations rising to the challenge, possible space arms races, and the militarization of space as a whole, I think that there's a different way to look at this.
Is there anything we can do from space that we can't do from the air?
No.
We can bomb people just fine with aerial bombers and use directed energy weapons just as well a bit lower in the atmosphere (even a bit less air to cut through). We can disable enemy communications satellites from the ground with relative ease with directed energy weapons; vacumn is a great insulator, and if you can get the thing to heat up enough, the solar panels will suffer a huge failure in efficiency and you end up with a satellite with no power - a dead one.
Thus, the question becomes, is space weaponry better than aerial weaponry for these activities?
Technologically, there is precious little you can't do from the air that you can do from space. The only possible reason from this angle to choose space over air is if its cheaper, and guess what? Space operations cost a hell of a lot more than aerial operations, as a whole, and if you can do it in the air, almost anything can be done cheaper in the air.
Sure, GPS and communications satellites can't be done better from the air, but target bombardment and directed energy attacks can be done from airplanes.
So, what we're seeing is a huge push by the military to quietly create a huge surge in funding for technology that could do the job of other machines, but its more expensive. This is what we in the business call the military/industrial complex getting even richer; space weapons can't do anything air weapons can't, but they cost a lot more and are easier to sell as a whole than increased funding of aerial weaponry.
This is just government corruption and lack of military accountability at work, people.
That would be telemetry through Mars Express (MEX), which is ESA. It worked fine because they're both communicating with the Proximity-1 protocol.
Even though these cars are using more electrical, they're still getting electricity from a grid largely powered by filthy coal and gas power plants, and through a system that's most likely less efficient than the car's internal power grid. They might be using less gasoline in the car, but in the grander scheme they're creating more pollution by making the power plants burn even more for them.
From the article:
Under the new laws, an ISP or ICH will face penalties of $11,000 for the individual and $55,000 for body corporates if they are made aware that their service can be used to access material that they have reasonable grounds to believe is child pornography or child abuse material and they do not refer details of that material to the AFP within a reasonable time.
What that equates to is if child porn is reported to the ISP/webhost, they have to then report it to the Australian police quickly or face penalties. This isn't some ridiculous content-policing scheme - its just imposing a penalty on those who don't forward child pornography reports to the police at a reasonable pace.
Most design documents for space projects say that increased funding simply decreases the risk, because you can buy more of each part and test more to destruction to see the exact limits of your hardware. I believe the rock abrasion tool was tested to destruction dozens of times by honeywell before the current ones were put on the rovers pre-launch, and so they have a very good idea of exactly what it can do. It also means that there's less risk of pushing the hardware too far and breaking something. They weren't wasting money, they were making sure these things completed the mission objectives, and they did; and then they didn't break immediately afterward, while it was entirely possible that they would.
As has been said before, they did their best to make sure the rovers would survive to three months, but the biggest problem they expected in the long term was heat cycling from daytime temperatures to nighttime temperatures slowly cracking and destroying the rovers, which must have happened as a lesser rate than their worse-case estimates.
The MiniTES instrument needs to be kept above a certain temperature to avoid possible damage, and its heater has been disabled during deep sleep, and temperatures have gone into the danger range during the nights. In that sense, the MiniTES is getting mildly close to being permanently shut down, though I believe its still collecting data at the moment.
The ISS has a political significance totally separate from whatever minimal scientific value may be claimed for it, and the shuttle program is an extension of this political program. The ISS is there soley to foster cooperation with the Russians; we have NASA engineers working in the same room as Russian engineers in Moscow controlling the ISS, and as long as that is happening, we keep pouring in money and we keep cooperating. The ISS could fail to do anything but continue to exist, and we will continue the program, because failing to do so would be a catastrophic collapse of US-Russian relations. That said, we're starting a new space race with China and India; China wants men on the moon soon and are already sending manned flights into orbit, and India is taking a different track in similar directions. What do we do to outdo China on the moon? Americans on Mars! Right? Guys? ...Guys?
A new director would have to figure out a way to balance these sorts of international relations issues with getting real science done, and I think NASA does a decent job of it now by keeping unmanned science moving forward with JIMO/Prometheus and manned politics in the right place with ISS. If NASA is supposed blow off the Russians and focus on science, then their current strategy isn't the right one, but the fact remains that NASA cooperative projects remain a cornerstone of international politics (not to get into pork barrel considerations) and will remain such for the forseeable future.
Show me someone using very thin wires for velocity sensors already and I'll accede that I didn't know about that, but I fail to see where I missed anything in the article. I never said you couldn't do it with non-nanotube materials, now did I?
It costs energy to blow gas over the wire.
Gedanken experiment:
You have two tanks of air at equal pressure, and a nanotube setup like the one described in the article in the valve connecting the two tanks. You open the valve - and no air moves across the nanotube, since the tanks are at equal pressure. Now, you pump air from tank 1 to tank 2, and the nanotube will generate energy - but only an equal or lesser amount of energy than it took to pump the air across the tanks.
Unfortunately, nanotubes are still so expensive, velocity sensors are probably all these would be good for - larger power generating variants would be cost prohibitive. I also wonder how robust any velocity sensor made with nanotubes could be; sure, you could probably put one in a steam pipe or a LNG line and get reasonable data (in fact, in any nanotube-friendly chemical you could probably get good data from this sensor), but if you wanted to put one on the outside of a car or an airplane for velocity measurements, I can see nanotubes being easily damaged; either pulled from their moorings/leads in the device or simply snapped - nanotubes may be strong, but that's not going to help if you have a 500mph tiny sharp projectile impact just a few nanotubes. Also, in 'dirty' environments such as those outside of a car or a plane, you would probably start getting buildup of different pollutions at a reasonable rate, causing a need for either a) constant recalibration or b) sensor replacement.
One of the greatest hurdles in getting these very small and very powerful computers to be very useful is how to handle input - its hard to build in a fully-sized or totally usable keyboard into something like this. I'm not finding any straightforward explanation of how you get input into this computer on the website at first glance; I also don't see a stylus in any of the pictures, which makes me think touch screen (which can be implemented well... just not ideal).
The Deep Space Network is probably one of the largest continuing costs of any mission, including the rovers. The rovers need the 70m antennae at Canberra/Madrid/Goldstone to do direct-to-earth low-bandwidth links, and running those 70m antennae is extremely expensive - and it comes out of the project's pockets. Fortunately, Odyssey has been working beautifully as a telecom relay, getting high bandwidth links to the rovers, and then getting a high bandwidth link DTE to send several dozen megabits of data back at a time. MEX (the ESA satellite) was used to send back some data earlier, too, because both MEX and MER (the rovers) use the same Proximity-1 connection protocol. Eventually, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launches in a year, will be added to the set of potential telecom links, and several years down the line the Mars Telecom Orbiter should provide a very high speed connection back to earth.
All of this is building up a network between Mars and Earth that eventually should be able to support even the most data-intensive *cough* missions.
One of the cooler technologies being proposed now are line-of-sight laser comms - cheaper because you don't need a 210' dish for each link, and potentially faster. MTO is probably going to include these optical connections, though I don't know if they will be used for DTE connects as well as local connects.
I believe this site was shown to be a fake - she didn't go through there alone, but took a bunch of pictures from other sources and some of her own pictures during a standard tour. I can't find a source easily, though I'm sure someone else here can.
Earlier, when the astronauts were doing spacewalks with the Russian suits, the whole spacestation started wobbling and bucking around enough to activate the thrusters that keep it in orbit (though they had been disabled for fear that one would hit an astronaut). As it turned out, the Russian suits vent excess air with about 1N of force, enough to cause the station to ripple noticably over long spacewalks. Using a robot for construction will allow the astronauts to stay inside and avoid causing further wobble with the suits, not to mention reduce the risk involved in sending an astronaut outside (or for some construction projects, both astronauts, leaving the ISS unmanned inside).
The Hubble telescope is run off of a ruggedized 486 system - ancient computer technology is everywhere :)
There was one file improperly created by one person that induced a tiny amount of error - a miscalculation of 10 nanometers per second^2 of acceleration adds up to a 3.7km drift over 10 days - so the incorrect file could have induced error on the level of mere nanometers. Also, we didn't miss Mars entirely - that's a false statement. It got there, but it either burned up in the atmosphere or bounced off of the atmosphere - there is only a very small window in which a probe can survive reentry.
GPB detects frame dragging - the future LISA laser interferometer in space, will measure gravitational waves like LIGO does now, but with much higher accuracy.
Thank you for those comments - I work at NASA/JPL (insert disclaimer, my opinions, not theirs). I looked - out of a $1,400,000,000 budget for our particular center, there was a total of $10,000,000 directly allocated to DoD joint research, and it was in the area of optics (spy sats for them, telescopes for us). NASA is totally not a DoD front - they have no problems just getting the money that they want for themselves without somehow perverting NASA goals. Probably the closest we come to that is letting them use our shuttles to put their satellites in orbit nowadays. Note that I'm totally not an expert (or perhaps not even correctly informed) on the subject, but these are just numbers I remember from poking through the budget.
From the article: "Now that the ITRP has made its decision, particle physicists plan to carry out three more years of R&D and hope to complete an engineering design for the ILC by 2010. Construction of the collider could then begin, assuming that funding agencies and politicians can agree on where to build the machine." Interesting, too, how they assume the LHC is going to find the Higgs boson - that's a pretty big assumption, I would think.
GPB is intended to measure 'frame dragging' - basically a minor vortexing action in gravity's pull as predicted by Einstein. To measure it, the most accurate gyroscopes in the world are going to have to be affected by it for over a year before the scientists can give the results - and while a positive result showing frame dragging would certainly reaffirm that Einstein's theory of relativity is so close to reality as to be indistinguishable from reality (in non-quantum regimes), a negative result would roil the physics community, since it would show a violation of relativity. However, the sort of measurement as shown in the article is measuring effects that are extremely slight - it wouldn't be a far stretch for their errors to 'create' this phenomenon, but if GPB shows frame dragging to be nonexistent, perhaps those who didn't see the phenomenon were the ones experiencing the error. Time and physics will tell.
By the way, you didn't hear about the probe since unlike the Mars Rovers, it doesn't send back any pretty pictures, and its testing a hard-to-explain phenomenon that is so slight it would seem negligibly useful to test for it. Therefore, unless it returns a(n unexpected) negative result, most media will probably ignore it.
In a word, no. Mars simply doesn't have the gravity needed to have a high enough pressure at its surface - its got about 1/3rd the gravity of Earth. And while its low gravity does rule out liquid CO2, it doesn't rule out a larger and higher pressure past atmosphere, now blasted away by some means (one theory: Mars has no magnetosphere, so it has no shielding from the solar wind, so possibly billions of years of constant weak pushing from the sun slowly removed the atmosphere).
Bigger radio dishes are in the works, but those aren't built yet - another concern for a later day. As it is, DSN (deep space network) recieve/transmit time on 70m dishes is massively expensive, and making these missions cost efficient is a big deal - so I see this as one of the major areas in which there could be improvement before outer solar missions.
The reactors they are talking about actually aren't PBRs, I believe, but complex rod arrangements that allow reactors to be as inert as several hundred pounds of radioactive material can be until its far away from earth. Even so, your point about political repercussions is absolutely valid - Prometheus could be totally shut down because of these at any time, and I can just imagine hundreds of people showing up at the launch to protest the proliferation of nuclear fission technologies to space.
And I'm not trying to say there is no future for RTG missions - just that Prometheus will be the first time experiements requiring very large amounts of power will be attempted beyond Earth. Surely a simple mission that isn't so monolithically encompassing as JIMO could benefit from the lower costs and political troubles provided by RTGs, but I believe that the future of outer solar system exploration is going to be primarily in Prometheus-type missions.
Prometheus is meant to lead in to manned Martian missions too... so the cut in funding is doubly dubious.