It is sad to see NASA's science and exploration focus abandoned to instead spend billions on new technology to send people to low earth orbit slightly less unsafely than before.
All of the cancelled missions were of great scientific and exploratory importance. Sadly, the same cannot be said of the missions replacing them.
Hopefully under a new administration, sanity (and science) will return to NASA.
Given that Ares, the Greek war god, became the Roman god Mars, I figured the name was an indication of where they would really like to be sending people.
You would have had the same problem with the original X-Box. They were impossible to buy except in bundles with 2 or 3 games.
Sure enough, a few months after release, Microsoft issued a press release saying that the X-Box had the highest rate of games purchased along with the console.
You'll have to wait a few more months to get your bundle-free 360.
JIMO was cancelled because of the enormous cost and high technical risk of its nuclear electric propulsion.
No. JIMO does not even compare with a manned lunar landing in terms of cost. It's far cheaper and would have achieved far more in both science and exploration.
Jupiter spends 95%+ of the time outside of the window for *any* flyby trajectory to the outer solar system.
Which is why it's important to take these opportunties, as they don't come by often at all. This opportunity has been missed in favour of going to the moon.
So we have heard for the past 30 years. Yet groundbased results continue to pour in. There is no question the US will build a TPF.
30 years? The first extrasolar planet was detected in the 90s! Detections will contine - of large bodies around Saturn size and larger. Detection of earth sized planets requires the TPF, which has been indefintely postponed to make way for a moonwalk.
Sightsee? What else is exploration?
You managed to miss the "30-minute" part of that. Let me try to make this clearer for you. Sending two pilots to the moon for 30 minutes walking around, looking for things to pick up will cost more than the combined total of Cassini and Gallileo. Those two were exploration, just as a JIMO mission or TPF would be. Another lunar walk is very marginal both for science and for exploration. It is a poor use of limited resources.
Space science is dramatically less of a priority in Europe than in the US when you compare budgets and GDP.
I know. I wish it were otherwise.
Russia and China don't even have programs.
Russia doesn't have much of anything right now. China on the other hand has a very ambitious manned program, which has already made great strides. I would also argue that China's current lunar strategy has been a driver to the renewed American efforts in this area.
Let's see. Almost all of the missions you list are ongoing and doing great science. Sadly their successor missions are gone. "Getting out" of course implies you are currently in, but won't remain so.
The others have little exploratory value. Lunar reconnaissance simply means looking for another landing site.
Meanwhile, real actual exploration is being cancelled. Why? Because we want to go back to the moon.
JIMO was a mission that would have explored probably the single most important place in the solar system - Europa. Mission cancelled. Why? Because we want to go back to the moon.
Earth is currently moving out of a window of opportunity to send a probe off to Neptune via Jupiter (moving out in terms of mission planning time) Those resources won't now be committed, and we will not be revisiting the outermost of the giant planets, to view it and its moons up close. A mission just as important in its way as the current Cassini (which has already discovered so much). Now cancelled. Why? Because we want to go back to the moon.
Earth-based observations are limited in the size of planets they can discover due to their detection methods. A space-based telescope would allow us to detect earth-sized planets. That will not now happen (postponed until the 12th - of never). Why? Because we want to go back to the moon.
I can tell you are really excited about the idea of us building some really big rockets to carry some guys off to the moon for a 30 minute sightsee again. I'm happy for you, really I am. I'm not even concerned about the cost of this mission either - it's the opportunity cost that bothers me.
Still, given that the US is the sole operator of solar system exploration probes right now, maybe it's time for the rest of the world to actually come on board and free the US to do what it wants without having to carry the load of the world's expectations.
Sorry, but spending billions to repeat an exercise from over 30 years ago does not have anything to do with space exploration.
This flag-waving project has casued the indefinite postponement of the Terrestrial Planet Finder, and the not-quite indefinite postponement of the James Webb Space Telescope (Hubble's replacement), as well as cancellations of any exploratory probes after Pluto Express, so it can be argued that the US is now getting out of the business of space exploration.
Actually the sugar industry has responded to the cane toads' failure by dousing their crop in a potent chemical that is a major source of the coral bleaching affecting the Great Barrier Reef.
This is not news, the toads were brought over here in the 1930s. information, yes. news, no.
I didn't bother to read the article, but the crows here have recently worked out that they can flip the toads over to kill and eat them, and avoid any toxin. As a result, crows have moved from listed pest to protected species.
Bringing the toads over was more a political decision than a scientific one. The sugar industry was crying out for a magic bullet to solve their problem, and the toad was it. The toads failed to control the pest they were supposed to eradicate, and became a major pest themselves. When cane toads move into an area, the first thing that happens is that the native frog population plummets.
The toads are spreading annually and have recently arrived in Daintree, one of the last native frog habitats we have.
Predicably, our sugar industry is still a bunch of government-subsidised whingers, and no one has yet suggested they start helping pay to control this major pest they introduced.
I've got to admit, the guaranteed presence of Diddy Kong Racing on the Revolution will make that console a guaranteed purchase for our household. It's one of the few electronic games my wife was ever interested in, and my daughter will be old enough to play by the time the Revolution comes out.
Even today, I will be driving somewhere, and my wife will say "no, no, no - wrong way!" (yes, I'm a poor navigator).
I played a game at school called (I think) Kingdom. It was on the BBC Micro.
The game was quite simple, in that you had a certain number of villagers. Each year, you had to set a certain number to work the fields, some to mind the dam, and some to guard. Then you clicked enter to see what happened.
If you didn't have enough field workers, there would be starvation, if not enough were set as guards, then there would be a bandit raid. If the dam wasn't maintained, there would be a flood, and blocky yellow water would come across your field and huts. Yes, there were graphics. Simply, blocky graphics, but it was 1985.
If you got things right, your population would increase and it went on to the next year. The game ended when you ran out of villagers.
I remember we used to have fun setting 0 people to guard the dam, and then try to fill the whole screen with yellow.
I didn't know then what this game was trying to teach, and I don't know now, but if there's a retro version out there, that would make me happy!
Europa Universalis 2 would be my pick for worthwhile classroom use. Many of the playable countries have an extensive set of "historical events" which are accurate for that country, and allow the player to make choices, but also say what, historically, actually happened and the result.
Since the game covers the world 1419-1815 there is a lot of stuff going on, and plenty of learning opportunities. Also, along with actual lessons on world history, it lets students see that history is not an inevitable monolith, but could have turned out different if only.... those discussions make for interesting history classes.
we had a GATE (gifted and talented education) program which was used to ensure any kid with decent grades from becoming disinterested and totally clocking out of school (which I guess was considered a rational fear at the time
I note that the "gifted" program at your school was designed to take students who had advanced beyond the level of work the teacher wanted the class to be doing. It removed potentially bored (and therefore disruptive) students from the class to make life easier for the teachers. What did you get? Well, they stuck you all in a room (presumably the seldom-used computer lab) to play games until the bell rang.
Essentially they had you marking time while the rest of your peers tried to catch up. Nice education.
Yes it is. If someone invents a space ship capable of travelling at 0.57c, and it does so, then that is its speed. That speed is not realtive to any other moving object- it is relative only to c.
Likewise a car's speed is not "relative to the ground" it is relative to the unit of distance we call a mile (assuming you are measuring in mp/h). Capice?
To suggest that a car's speed changes based on the trajectory of another car is nonsense. Likewise a space ship's speed does not change just because some distant galaxy is moving away from it, and neither does the earth's speed change for a similar reason.
See the first reply to your post for a better corrective explanation than mine though.
Whenever I run across a discussion of light speed or near-light speed travel, I always find myself asking, relative to what?
You must have a hard time believing the speedometer in your car then. If you are moving at 0.57c, then that is your speed, just like if you are driving at 75mph. Your speed does not change just because something else is moving towards or away from you.
If that is the case, then any one object is at any given moment "travelling" at any number of velocities, depending on how many other objects in the universe you "relate" it to.
You are confusing speed with relative speed, and these are two quite different measures. With speed, you need only 1 object, and a unit of speed/distance to measure against (i.e. light speed, or miles per hour). With relative speed, you measure the speed and trajectory of two objects. Your 75mph car does not suddenly jump in speed just because some other car is coming towards you at 55mph, but relative to each other, you have a closing speed of 130mph. That is not your speed, but your speed relative to one another. Get the difference now?
Just as the only pertinent measure in your car is your own speed (feel free to check this with traffic police sometime), so the only pertinent measure when travelling through space is the speed you attain. Any considerations of whether an object you are trying to reach is moving towards or away from you is a question of distance, not of speed. The two are related, but different. So it is perfectly reasonably to state 0.57c as your speed, just as it is reasonable to state 75mph as your speed.
t would seem pretty obvious that some of our existing velocities are already pretty close to light speed
Obvious, but wrong, once you understand the difference between speed and distance. Our planet orbits its sun at a mean speed of 18.5mph. That's it. This speed does not increase or decrease because other objects move towards or away from us. We can measure, a red-shift galaxy, for example, and say that it is moving away from us at a speed of blah, but this does not increase our speed.
We are travelling at the same speed we always did, and this speed is not changed by looking at our speed relative to another object.
Speed and relative speed are two different measures.
Without looking for a correct, scientific explanation (or worse, a wikipedia link) I'll try to explain.
If a probe approaches a planet at just the right angle, the gravity of that planet will catch the probe, and pitch it in a new direction, at a faster speed. The additional energy comes from the interaction of the probe with the gravitational forces of the planet in question.
To be useful, you need to have your planets nicely lined up. Voyager was a once in three lifetimes experience. It's about 140 years before the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune will line up again, in the way that enabled Voyager.
For this mission, only Jupiter is in the right place of a gravity assist, but it will shave 4 years off the travel time, so it's not insignificant.
With all the delays, I was getting worried that the mission would be delayed.
For those not aware, had it been delayed past early Feb, the mission would have taken 4 years longer to reach Pluto, due to missing Jupiter for a gravitational 'slingshot' assist.
Roll on 2015. The best images we have of Pluto now are fuzzy Hubble pics, and I can't wait for this to change.
This is nothing more than a method to direct some EU funds towards French and German companies (state-owned in the case of France Telecom) rather than towards the poorer EU members.
France and Germany are two of the largest contributors to the EU budget, so don't be surprised when they suggest projects that ensure they get a good return on their "investment".
It's not so much a 'anti-US' thing (what's wrong with using Google anyway?) as it is a way for France and Germany to give indirect subsidies to their largest IT companies.
I'm not sure whose "estimate" that $20,000 billion is, presumably some hack trying to sell "mining rights" to the credulous. You can make up whatever figure you want, but right now there's no economic impetus to go there.
We have barely scratched the earth's surface with our mines. Most mining operations go a few hundred metres at most into a crust many miles thick. It will be a long time before mining space is more viable than mining earth, no matter what figure you make up.
I have no idea where you get the impression that gold, platinum, lead, and other heavy elements can be found on Eros. Eros is an S-type asteroid [http://www.nineplanets.org/asteroids.html#astype% 5D, meaning its composition is mainly nickel-iron with iron and magnesium silicates mixed in. Nothing spectacular or special, quite pedestrian as floating rocks go - there are millions of them out there.
Also worth pointing out to you is what while Earth is not the largest body in the solar system, it is the largest rocky body known anywhere. Therefore it is unlikely that any other rocky body, from planet to floating pebble, will have a greater amount of any element than is found here, certainly not a 33 mile-long floating rock.
Also, none of the minerals you mention are currently uneconomical to mine on earth, the value of some them is rising not because they are running out, but because demand is rising.
Also worth pointing out here is that as Jupiter is a gas giant, it has no surface at all. There's little point discussing mining prospects on the surfaced of a planet that has no surface, but hey, maybe someone will buy a license from you.
Slashdot Mirror
four-track, surely ;)
All of the cancelled missions were of great scientific and exploratory importance. Sadly, the same cannot be said of the missions replacing them.
Hopefully under a new administration, sanity (and science) will return to NASA.
Given that Ares, the Greek war god, became the Roman god Mars, I figured the name was an indication of where they would really like to be sending people.
Sure enough, a few months after release, Microsoft issued a press release saying that the X-Box had the highest rate of games purchased along with the console.
You'll have to wait a few more months to get your bundle-free 360.
No. JIMO does not even compare with a manned lunar landing in terms of cost. It's far cheaper and would have achieved far more in both science and exploration.
Jupiter spends 95%+ of the time outside of the window for *any* flyby trajectory to the outer solar system.
Which is why it's important to take these opportunties, as they don't come by often at all. This opportunity has been missed in favour of going to the moon.
So we have heard for the past 30 years. Yet groundbased results continue to pour in. There is no question the US will build a TPF.
30 years? The first extrasolar planet was detected in the 90s! Detections will contine - of large bodies around Saturn size and larger. Detection of earth sized planets requires the TPF, which has been indefintely postponed to make way for a moonwalk.
Sightsee? What else is exploration?
You managed to miss the "30-minute" part of that. Let me try to make this clearer for you. Sending two pilots to the moon for 30 minutes walking around, looking for things to pick up will cost more than the combined total of Cassini and Gallileo. Those two were exploration, just as a JIMO mission or TPF would be. Another lunar walk is very marginal both for science and for exploration. It is a poor use of limited resources.
Space science is dramatically less of a priority in Europe than in the US when you compare budgets and GDP.
I know. I wish it were otherwise.
Russia and China don't even have programs.
Russia doesn't have much of anything right now. China on the other hand has a very ambitious manned program, which has already made great strides. I would also argue that China's current lunar strategy has been a driver to the renewed American efforts in this area.
The others have little exploratory value. Lunar reconnaissance simply means looking for another landing site.
Meanwhile, real actual exploration is being cancelled. Why? Because we want to go back to the moon.
JIMO was a mission that would have explored probably the single most important place in the solar system - Europa. Mission cancelled. Why? Because we want to go back to the moon.
Earth is currently moving out of a window of opportunity to send a probe off to Neptune via Jupiter (moving out in terms of mission planning time) Those resources won't now be committed, and we will not be revisiting the outermost of the giant planets, to view it and its moons up close. A mission just as important in its way as the current Cassini (which has already discovered so much). Now cancelled. Why? Because we want to go back to the moon.
Earth-based observations are limited in the size of planets they can discover due to their detection methods. A space-based telescope would allow us to detect earth-sized planets. That will not now happen (postponed until the 12th - of never). Why? Because we want to go back to the moon.
I can tell you are really excited about the idea of us building some really big rockets to carry some guys off to the moon for a 30 minute sightsee again. I'm happy for you, really I am. I'm not even concerned about the cost of this mission either - it's the opportunity cost that bothers me.
Still, given that the US is the sole operator of solar system exploration probes right now, maybe it's time for the rest of the world to actually come on board and free the US to do what it wants without having to carry the load of the world's expectations.
Never before have I come across a user ID so fitting. That truly was a bad analogy, guy.
This flag-waving project has casued the indefinite postponement of the Terrestrial Planet Finder, and the not-quite indefinite postponement of the James Webb Space Telescope (Hubble's replacement), as well as cancellations of any exploratory probes after Pluto Express, so it can be argued that the US is now getting out of the business of space exploration.
Actually the sugar industry has responded to the cane toads' failure by dousing their crop in a potent chemical that is a major source of the coral bleaching affecting the Great Barrier Reef.
I didn't bother to read the article, but the crows here have recently worked out that they can flip the toads over to kill and eat them, and avoid any toxin. As a result, crows have moved from listed pest to protected species.
Bringing the toads over was more a political decision than a scientific one. The sugar industry was crying out for a magic bullet to solve their problem, and the toad was it. The toads failed to control the pest they were supposed to eradicate, and became a major pest themselves. When cane toads move into an area, the first thing that happens is that the native frog population plummets.
The toads are spreading annually and have recently arrived in Daintree, one of the last native frog habitats we have.
Predicably, our sugar industry is still a bunch of government-subsidised whingers, and no one has yet suggested they start helping pay to control this major pest they introduced.
Even today, I will be driving somewhere, and my wife will say "no, no, no - wrong way!" (yes, I'm a poor navigator).
The game was quite simple, in that you had a certain number of villagers. Each year, you had to set a certain number to work the fields, some to mind the dam, and some to guard. Then you clicked enter to see what happened.
If you didn't have enough field workers, there would be starvation, if not enough were set as guards, then there would be a bandit raid. If the dam wasn't maintained, there would be a flood, and blocky yellow water would come across your field and huts. Yes, there were graphics. Simply, blocky graphics, but it was 1985.
If you got things right, your population would increase and it went on to the next year. The game ended when you ran out of villagers.
I remember we used to have fun setting 0 people to guard the dam, and then try to fill the whole screen with yellow.
I didn't know then what this game was trying to teach, and I don't know now, but if there's a retro version out there, that would make me happy!
Since the game covers the world 1419-1815 there is a lot of stuff going on, and plenty of learning opportunities. Also, along with actual lessons on world history, it lets students see that history is not an inevitable monolith, but could have turned out different if only.... those discussions make for interesting history classes.
I note that the "gifted" program at your school was designed to take students who had advanced beyond the level of work the teacher wanted the class to be doing. It removed potentially bored (and therefore disruptive) students from the class to make life easier for the teachers. What did you get? Well, they stuck you all in a room (presumably the seldom-used computer lab) to play games until the bell rang.
Essentially they had you marking time while the rest of your peers tried to catch up. Nice education.
Yes it is. If someone invents a space ship capable of travelling at 0.57c, and it does so, then that is its speed. That speed is not realtive to any other moving object- it is relative only to c.
Likewise a car's speed is not "relative to the ground" it is relative to the unit of distance we call a mile (assuming you are measuring in mp/h). Capice?
To suggest that a car's speed changes based on the trajectory of another car is nonsense. Likewise a space ship's speed does not change just because some distant galaxy is moving away from it, and neither does the earth's speed change for a similar reason.
See the first reply to your post for a better corrective explanation than mine though.
Whoa, yeah, of course I meant per second.
You must have a hard time believing the speedometer in your car then. If you are moving at 0.57c, then that is your speed, just like if you are driving at 75mph. Your speed does not change just because something else is moving towards or away from you.
If that is the case, then any one object is at any given moment "travelling" at any number of velocities, depending on how many other objects in the universe you "relate" it to.
You are confusing speed with relative speed, and these are two quite different measures. With speed, you need only 1 object, and a unit of speed/distance to measure against (i.e. light speed, or miles per hour). With relative speed, you measure the speed and trajectory of two objects. Your 75mph car does not suddenly jump in speed just because some other car is coming towards you at 55mph, but relative to each other, you have a closing speed of 130mph. That is not your speed, but your speed relative to one another. Get the difference now?
Just as the only pertinent measure in your car is your own speed (feel free to check this with traffic police sometime), so the only pertinent measure when travelling through space is the speed you attain. Any considerations of whether an object you are trying to reach is moving towards or away from you is a question of distance, not of speed. The two are related, but different. So it is perfectly reasonably to state 0.57c as your speed, just as it is reasonable to state 75mph as your speed.
t would seem pretty obvious that some of our existing velocities are already pretty close to light speed
Obvious, but wrong, once you understand the difference between speed and distance. Our planet orbits its sun at a mean speed of 18.5mph. That's it. This speed does not increase or decrease because other objects move towards or away from us. We can measure, a red-shift galaxy, for example, and say that it is moving away from us at a speed of blah, but this does not increase our speed.
We are travelling at the same speed we always did, and this speed is not changed by looking at our speed relative to another object.
Speed and relative speed are two different measures.
When a company that consistently produces sub-par titles goes under, I view this as the industry working.
Were you trying to make a point? Because I don't think that was it.
I know I've heard this one somewhere before...
If a probe approaches a planet at just the right angle, the gravity of that planet will catch the probe, and pitch it in a new direction, at a faster speed. The additional energy comes from the interaction of the probe with the gravitational forces of the planet in question.
To be useful, you need to have your planets nicely lined up. Voyager was a once in three lifetimes experience. It's about 140 years before the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune will line up again, in the way that enabled Voyager.
For this mission, only Jupiter is in the right place of a gravity assist, but it will shave 4 years off the travel time, so it's not insignificant.
For those not aware, had it been delayed past early Feb, the mission would have taken 4 years longer to reach Pluto, due to missing Jupiter for a gravitational 'slingshot' assist.
Roll on 2015. The best images we have of Pluto now are fuzzy Hubble pics, and I can't wait for this to change.
This is nothing more than a method to direct some EU funds towards French and German companies (state-owned in the case of France Telecom) rather than towards the poorer EU members.
France and Germany are two of the largest contributors to the EU budget, so don't be surprised when they suggest projects that ensure they get a good return on their "investment".
It's not so much a 'anti-US' thing (what's wrong with using Google anyway?) as it is a way for France and Germany to give indirect subsidies to their largest IT companies.
We have barely scratched the earth's surface with our mines. Most mining operations go a few hundred metres at most into a crust many miles thick. It will be a long time before mining space is more viable than mining earth, no matter what figure you make up.
I have no idea where you get the impression that gold, platinum, lead, and other heavy elements can be found on Eros. Eros is an S-type asteroid [http://www.nineplanets.org/asteroids.html#astype% 5D, meaning its composition is mainly nickel-iron with iron and magnesium silicates mixed in. Nothing spectacular or special, quite pedestrian as floating rocks go - there are millions of them out there.
Also worth pointing out to you is what while Earth is not the largest body in the solar system, it is the largest rocky body known anywhere. Therefore it is unlikely that any other rocky body, from planet to floating pebble, will have a greater amount of any element than is found here, certainly not a 33 mile-long floating rock.
Also, none of the minerals you mention are currently uneconomical to mine on earth, the value of some them is rising not because they are running out, but because demand is rising.
Also worth pointing out here is that as Jupiter is a gas giant, it has no surface at all. There's little point discussing mining prospects on the surfaced of a planet that has no surface, but hey, maybe someone will buy a license from you.
I like my theory better, but yours is probably right ;)