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"Hard work often pays off after time but laziness always pays off now!"
by xita » Thu Jan 22, 2004 10:48 pm
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"Hard work often pays off after time but laziness always pays off now!"
by Gatito Grande » Thu Jan 22, 2004 11:54 pm
Out by justin » Fri Jan 23, 2004 7:12 am
Postel's Prescription: Be generous in what you accept, rigorous in what you emit.
by Warduke » Fri Jan 23, 2004 9:19 am
Quote:
NASA Gets Half-Hour of Signals From Rover
By ANDREW BRIDGES, AP Science Writer
PASADENA, Calif. - NASA received data from the Spirit rover Friday morning for the first time in two days, ending a period of anxious worry that the Mars mission may have come to a calamitous halt.
The six-wheeled rover communicated for 10 minutes at about 4:30 a.m. and transmitted "limited data" for 20 minutes about an hour later, officials said in statements early Friday.
"The spacecraft sent limited data in a proper response to a ground command, and we're planning for commanding further communication sessions later today," said Pete Theisinger, rover project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Engineers are eager to pore over data from Spirit to assess the health of the spacecraft, pinpoint any problems and allow NASA to begin working on a potential fix or fixes.
Scientists planned a Friday morning news conference to explain the signals. Officials said Friday's signals were received by NASA's Deep Space Network antenna complex near Madrid, Spain.
Since Wednesday, its 19th day on Mars, the Spirit had sent back to Earth only meaningless radio noise or simple beeps acknowledging receipt of commands.
Among the possible causes: a corruption of its software or computer memory. If the software is awry, NASA can fix it from Earth by beaming patches across more than 100 million miles of space or by rebooting the rover's computer. But if the problem lies with the rover's hardware, the situation would be far more grave — perhaps beyond repair.
Baffled scientists were still working to pinpoint the trouble Friday morning.
"It is precisely like trying to diagnose a patient with different symptoms that don't corroborate," said Firouz Naderi, manager of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars exploration program.
Spirit is one-half of an $820 million mission. Its twin, Opportunity, is expected to land on Mars late Saturday. The twin rovers are supposed to examine the Red Planet's dry rocks and soil for evidence that it was once wetter and more hospitable to life.
Until Wednesday, Spirit had functioned almost flawlessly and NASA scientists and engineers had been jubilant.
Cushioned by its air bags, the rover made a bull's-eye landing, surviving what was by far the most dangerous part of the mission — the descent through the atmosphere at 12,000 mph. Then on Jan. 15, in another nail-biting moment for NASA, the rover safely rolled down a ramp onto Mars' ruddy soil without becoming snagged.
It has snapped thousands of pictures, including breathtaking panoramic views and microscopic images of the martian soil. It also carried out preliminary work analyzing the minerals and elements that make up its surroundings.
The problem surfaced while Spirit was preparing to resume analysis of its first rock, just a few yards from where it landed.
Early Thursday, NASA initially heard nothing from Spirit that would indicate it was in "fault mode," a state that the rover enters by itself when it has experienced a problem. Later, NASA sent a command to Spirit as if it were in fault mode, anyway. Spirit acknowledged with a beep that it received the command, indicating an onboard problem. That puzzled engineers.
The rover had since missed several scheduled opportunities to communicate, both directly with Earth and by way of two NASA satellites in orbit around Mars. It finally communicated at 4:34 a.m. Friday, about 90 minutes after it "woke up" for the day, officials said. At 5:26 a.m., data was sent at a faster rate for 20 minutes.
The rover's radio appeared to be working, and it continued to generate power from the sun with its solar panels. Spirit's internal clock also was running and had roused the rover several times on cue.
JPL director Charles Elachi said that once NASA receives engineering signals, "we can do a diagnostic and understand what happened, what are the corrective actions that need to be done and how do we bring it carefully and thoughtfully to its normal operation mode."
Initially, engineers believed bad weather on Earth — a thunderstorm near a Deep Space Network antenna in Australia — had caused the communications glitch. But weather was later discounted as the source.
Quote:
Second Rover Lands Successfully on Mars
PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Opportunity rover successfully landed on Mars late Saturday, arriving at the Red Planet exactly three weeks after its identical twin set down.
"We're on Mars everybody," mission scientist Wayne Lee declared as fellow members monitoring the landing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory burst into wild applause.
The unmanned, six-wheeled rover landed at 9:05 p.m. PST in Meridiani Planum, NASA said. The smooth, flat plain lies 6,600 miles and halfway around the planet from where its twin, Spirit, set down on Jan. 3.
Together, the twin rovers make up a single $820 million mission to determine if Mars ever was a wetter world capable of sustaining life.
Since arriving, Spirit has developed serious problems, cutting off what had been a steady flow of pictures and other scientific data.
by justin » Sun Jan 25, 2004 2:45 am
Quote:
Search for lost Beagle 2 renewed
Scientists hope radio silence could force Beagle 2 into action
New attempts have been made to contact the Beagle 2 probe which is lost on the surface of Mars.
The craft landed on Christmas Day, but nothing has been heard from it since.
The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft tried to call Beagle on Saturday as it passed over the probe's presumed landing site.
Controllers stopped trying to contact it on 12 January, hoping that a period of radio silence would force the probe into an emergency communication mode.
Beagle 2, which was transported to the Red Planet by Mars Express, was designed to search for signs of past or present life.
The original radio silence period ended on Wednesday.
But scientists have been erring on the side of caution before hailing the lander again.
"These two flights cover the widest possible area where Beagle 2 should be, giving us the best chance of calling the lander and getting a response from the continuous transmission," the Beagle 2 team said.
New missions
Meanwhile, the project's lead scientist Colin Pillinger has talked about his plans to send more Beagles to Mars.
It is not inconceivable that we will talk to Nasa - no stone will remain unturned
Professor Colin Pillinger,
Beagle 2 lead scientist
The new mission would land two or more replicas of the ill-fated lander on Mars, Professor Pillinger said.
"We will look at the possibilities for launching," he said.
"There are other countries with Martian aspirations. It is not inconceivable that we will talk to Nasa. No stone will remain unturned."
This mission would be wholly dedicated to landing on Mars and would not include an orbiter. Because of this more than one Beagle lander could be carried on the journey, increasing the chances of successfully touching down on the Red Planet.
Mars Express will try again to contact Beagle 2 on Sunday night.
Scientists will announce whether the latest search for the British-built probe has succeeded or failed on Monday afternoon.
If scientists have not communicated with Beagle by the middle of next month, the probe will almost certainly be written off.
Dangerous plunge
Beagle 2 was the first UK-built spacecraft to travel to another planet.
The £35m ($62m) probe should have landed at 0254 GMT on Christmas Day after a six-month flight.
Its plunge through the thin atmosphere of Mars, slowed by parachutes and cushioned by airbags, was predicted to have been the most dangerous part of the mission.
It is feared it crashed on landing and is lying in fragments on the Martian surface.
If it had landed successfully, Beagle 2 would have spent 180 days searching for signs of life above and below the surface of Mars.
Postel's Prescription: Be generous in what you accept, rigorous in what you emit.
Edited by: justin at: 1/26/04 1:14 pmby BytrSuite » Mon Mar 15, 2004 2:38 am
Quote:
Scientists find '10th planet'
Monday, March 15, 2004 Posted: 12:07 AM EST (0507 GMT)
(CNN) -- Scientists may have discovered the solar system's 10th planet, more than 3 billion kilometers further away from the sun than Pluto.
NASA is set to make an official announcement later Monday U.S. time.
The object -- about 10 billion kilometers from Earth -- has been given the provisional name of Sedna after the Inuit goddess of the sea.
Dr. Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology and his team of astronomers, using the recently launched high power Spitzer Space Telescope, found Sedna during an ongoing three-year outer solar system project.
The Tenagra Observatory in Arizona was used to provide a verifying second set of measurements for the object.
Sedna is the largest object to be found circling the sun since Pluto was discovered in 1930.
The discovery has also sparked debate over what constitutes a planet.
Initial details indicated Sedna to be made of ice and rock and to be of a smaller size than Pluto, with a diameter of almost 2,000 km.
Many astronomers say Pluto, with a diameter of 2,300 km, is too small to be a termed a planet and is actually just one of many minor objects in the outer reaches of the solar system.
But those who argue Pluto is a planet are likely to push the claim for Sedna to become the 10th planet in the solar system.
Dr. Brown will present the discovery during a NASA briefing on Monday at 1:00 p.m. EST (1800 GMT).
The Spitzer Space Telescope was launched in August last year and is the fourth of NASA's Great Observatories. The program also includes the Hubble Space Telescope.
Our solar system
# Mercury Diameter: 4,880 km, Mean distance from sun approx. 58 million km.
# Venus 12,140 km, 108 million km.
# Earth 12,756 km, 150 million km.
# Mars 6,787 km, 228 million km.
# Jupiter 142,800 km, 778 million km.
# Saturn 120,660 km, 1,.4 billion km.
# Uranus 51,118 km, 2,9 billion km.
# Neptune 49,528 km, 4.5 billion km.
# Pluto 2,300 km, 5.9 billion km.
________
"...the sharks got smarter."
by urnofosiris » Mon Mar 15, 2004 4:26 pm
Quote:
Many astronomers say Pluto, with a diameter of 2,300 km, is too small to be a termed a planet and is actually just one of many minor objects in the outer reaches of the solar system.
by justin » Fri May 14, 2004 1:20 pm
"To mess up a Linux box you need to work at it; to mess up a Windows box you just need to work on it."
by maudmac » Thu Sep 02, 2004 11:21 pm
Quote:
Could Space Signal Be Alien Contact?
Thu Sep 2, 8:32 AM ET
LONDON (Reuters) - An unexplained radio signal from deep space could -- just might be -- contact from an alien civilization, New Scientist magazine reported on Thursday.
The signal, coming from a point between the Pisces and Aries constellations, has been picked up three times by a telescope in Puerto Rico.
New Scientist said the signal could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon or even be a by-product from the telescope itself.
But the mystery beam has excited astronomers across the world.
"If they can see it four, five or six times it really begins to get exciting," Jocelyn Bell Burnell of the University of Bath in western England told the magazine.
It was broadcast on the main frequency at which the universe's most common element, hydrogen, absorbs and emits energy, and which astronomers say is the most likely means by which aliens would advertise their presence.
The potentially extraterrestrial signals were picked up through the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through the huge amount of data picked up by the telescope.
Quote:
Astronomers deny ET signal report
By Dr David Whitehouse
BBC News Online science editor
Thursday, 2 September, 2004, 12:30 GMT 13:30 UK
Astronomers have moved swiftly to quell speculation they may have received a deep-space radio signal from ET.
It was reported on the internet that the signal had been found using the Seti@home screensaver that uses computer downtime to analyse sky data from telescopes.
But researchers connected with the project told BBC News Online on Thursday that no contact with extraterrestrials had been made.
"It's all hype and noise," said its chief scientist, Dr Dan Wertheimer. "We have nothing that is unusual. It's all out of proportion."
And Dr Paul Horowitz, of Harvard University, who specialises in hunting for possible alien contacts added: "It's not much of anything at all. We're not investigating it further."
Not a signal
For six years, the Seti@home project has used a downloadable screensaver on millions of computers around the world to sift through data for anything unusual.
The data has been collected by radio telescopes scanning the sky for any unusual signals from space.
It is believed that any extraterrestrial intelligence might want to send radio messages across the cosmos to make contact with other intelligences.
Over the years, Seti@home has detected many hundreds of thousands of spurious signals and has used statistical techniques to identify them as interference.
About 150 signals survived the process and were subjected to further scrutiny but none passed the final test to be classed as a potential signal from ET.
Large numbers
The "signal" that kicked off furious media excitement on Thursday is called SHGb02+14a and was first detected by computers running Seti@home software in Germany and the US.
It has a frequency of 1420 megahertz - one of the principal frequencies of the most abundant element hydrogen.
Speaking to BBC News Online from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, where he is preparing an observing run to follow up Seti@home analysis, Dr Wertheimer said: "It's all hype. We don't have anything we are excited about.
"At the moment, we have no candidates that we are particularly excited about and the new 'signal' is not a priority."
He continued: "With Seti@home having analysed some 50 trillion frequency bands, it is not surprising that a signal like this occurs purely due to chance."
Dr Horowitz, who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes, told BBC News Online that it was "not new and definitely not a signal".
i wasn't sniffing your spicy brains
by Sheridan » Fri Sep 03, 2004 2:30 am
Willow: ...I have to tell you....
Tara: No, I understand you have to be with the person you l-love
Willow: I am
by justin » Fri Sep 03, 2004 10:54 am
"VOOM"?!? Mate, this bird wouldn't "voom" if you put four million volts through it! 'E's bleedin' demised! - The Parrot Sketch
by werewolf123 » Fri Sep 03, 2004 11:03 am
by skittles » Wed Sep 08, 2004 10:50 am
Quote:
Genesis spacecraft crash-lands in desert
By Michael Coren, CNN News
(CNN) -- The Genesis return capsule crashed in the desert on Wednesday after its parachutes failed to deploy. The craft missed a mid-air retrieval meant to save the spacecraft from impacting the Earth.
"The capsule has suffered extensive damage. It has broken apart on the desert floor," said an official on NASA TV. "Hopefully, there will be enough evidence to see what went wrong. Whether there will be enough science left inside remains to be seen."
Teams are attempting to recover the craft. NASA has warned them that a "live mortar" or explosive charge designed to deploy the chutes may still be armed.
NASA officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said that long-range cameras did not detect the parachutes that should have slowed the craft.
"There was no drogue chute or parafoil," said a JPL spokesman. "Under those condition, the Genesis capsule hit the ground at about 100 mph."
NASA officials located the spacecraft around noon on Wednesday after it dug into the desert soil. NASA footage shows the craft tumbling rapidly through the air before hitting the ground with enormous force.
The return of the Genesis capsule was supposed to be visible for many in the U.S. as the capsule made a fiery ride across the skies of Oregon, northeastern Nevada, southwestern Idaho and western Utah.
By 11:55 am EDT, it reached the roof of the atmosphere, about 410,000 feet, glowing like a streaking meteor.
NASA officials were optimistic about the mission in the days leading up to the return of the Genesis capsule.
"We are bringing a piece of the sun down to Earth," said Charles Elachi, the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "That's going to give us some fundamental understanding of our origins."
Scientists say the data will not only reveal the composition of the sun, but illuminate how our planet could have formed from clouds of stellar dust.
"Four and a half billion years ago, all of the matter of the solar system, including us, was part of a giant molecular cloud," said Don Burnett, principal investigator for the Genesis mission. "Genesis is providing the chemical composition of that solar nebula. ...The material is still stored for us in the surface of the sun."
Two helicopters will be poised above a Utah Air Force base to snag the Genesis spacecraft's return capsule. The sturdy container contains atomic isotopes collected as particles streaming off the sun, known as the solar wind.
The unorthodox midair retrieval will snag the first extraterrestrial samples since the Apollo missions in the 1970s.
Genesis collected the particles over the last two years on special tiles made from silicon, diamond, gold, sapphire and other materials. The solar particles, embedded in the collector tiles, were ejected at about 280 miles per second (450 km/s) from the sun's scorching corona or outer atmosphere.
Genesis will fill in an astronomical blank spot about its makeup.
"What we've been missing is a starting point," says Burnett. "These samples allow precise measurements of the abundance of elements and isotopes in the sun."
Our star accounts for 99 percent of the mass in the solar system. It is composed mostly of isotopes of hydrogen and helium and includes 60 other elements including neon, argon carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and iron.
In all, Genesis has collected the equivalent of a few grains of the material. Scientists say that is enough to keep researchers busy for decades.
"In some cases, we will be studying these one atom at a time," said Burnett who estimates there will be a "billion billion" atoms available for study.
"We'll have a reservoir of solar matter," he said. "We can meet the requirements for (studying ) the solar composition through the 21st century."
Genesis mission
Launched in 2001 from Cape Canaveral, the Genesis spacecraft traveled beyond the protective cloak of Earth's magnetosphere for two years before heading home. Because of Earth's electromagnetic field, much of the sun's deadly radiation and material never reaches the planet's surface.
In April, the craft ejected a 500-pound return capsule for return to Earth.
It has been approaching the planet at a leisurely 600 mph. By the time it reaches Earth's atmosphere, the craft will be racing toward the planet at more than 25,000 mph. It will use a series of parachutes to slow its descent.
On Wednesday, it is expected to enter the atmosphere at 11:55 am ET above Oregon and, just two minutes later, glide down over the Utah desert. The main parachute, a wing-like parafoil, will deploy during its decent and a helicopter will snatch the Genesis capsule when it is still about a mile off the ground.
This daring retrieval method will protect the samples and sensitive instruments during reentry. A crash landing, even at the capsule's relatively slow speed of 9 mph, could ruin some of the data collected during the mission.
The prospects for success look good according to NASA's retrieval partner in the mission, the aerospace firm Vertigo.
"If they can find it, the success rate is very high," said Vertigo official Roy Haggard.
A modified helicopter -- with a winch, hydraulic capture pole and hundreds of feet of line -- will follow the capsule by radar until it moves in and snags the parafoil. Because the Genesis capsule must repressurize in the upper atmosphere, scientists want to minimize the sample's exposure to air and possible contamination.
Once it is secured at a NASA facility, scientists can breathe easier, said Burnett.
"After that we can take our time, and we will see what we have," he said.
Quote:
Solar capsule crashes into Earth
(BBC)A capsule from the Genesis probe, which has been gathering particles blown off the Sun, has crashed back to Earth.
The capsule entered the atmosphere as planned at 1555GMT (1655BST) but its drogue parachute failed to open.
Hollywood stunt pilots had been waiting to catch the capsule in midair to give its cargo a special soft landing.
The particles of solar wind in the capsule were being sought by scientists to help them understand the origin and evolution of the Sun and the planets.
"It appears that it hit the ground at about 100 mph (161 km/h)," said Chris Jones, of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
He said it might take some time to recover the capsule from the Utah desert floor because charges used to deploy the drogue could still be live.
The capsule impacted with such force that it dug itself into the ground. From aerial pictures from chasing helicopters it is clear the pod has sustained severe damage.
The return of the Genesis probe was supposed to mark the first bits of extraterrestrial matter retrieved from space by human means since the 1970s, when Moon rocks were carried back to Earth by manned US Apollo and unmanned Soviet Luna missions.
The $264m Genesis mission was launched in 2001. It carried delicate hexagonal wafers of pure silicon, gold, sapphire, diamond and other materials.
These were hung outside the probe for more than 800 days, sifting space for 10-20 micrograms of atoms that had been blown off the Sun.
The precise nature of the atoms could have told scientists how the Sun and the nine major planets grew out of a huge cloud of dust and gas 4.5 billion years ago.
Professor Colin Pillinger, of the UK's Open University, which was to analyse some of the Genesis samples, said the mission looked lost.
"The outer part of the spacecraft is carbon fibre and that is very resilient - it is basically in one piece," he told the BBC.
"There could be fragments inside there that still contained some kind of scientific information. But the contamination from the desert is going to be a killer at the end of the day for the scientists."
skittles
by WebWarlock » Mon Oct 03, 2005 8:00 am
'Planet Xena' has a sidekick: Gabrielle
Scientists find moon circling 'planet'
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- The astronomers who claim to have discovered the 10th planet in the Earth's solar system have made another intriguing announcement: it has a moon.
While observing the new, so-called planet from Hawaii last month, a team of astronomers led by Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology spotted a faint object trailing next to it. Because it was moving, astronomers ruled it was a moon and not a background star, which is stationary.
The moon discovery is important because it can help scientists determine the new planet's mass. In July, Brown announced the discovery of an icy, rocky object larger than Pluto in the Kuiper Belt, a disc of icy bodies beyond Neptune. Brown labeled the object a planet and nicknamed it Xena after the lead character in the former TV series "Xena: Warrior Princess."
By determining the moon's distance and orbit around Xena, scientists can calculate how heavy Xena is. For example, the faster a moon goes around a planet, the more massive a planet is.
But the newly discovered moon, nicknamed Gabrielle after Xena's faithful traveling sidekick in the TV series, likely will not quell the debate over what exactly is a planet and whether Pluto should keep its status. The problem is there is no official definition for a planet and setting standards like size limits potentially invites other objects to take the "planet" label.
Possessing a moon is not a criteria of planethood since Mercury and Venus are moonless planets. Brown said he expected to find a moon orbiting Xena because many Kuiper Belt objects are paired with moons.
The moon is about 155 miles wide and 60 times fainter than Xena, the farthest-known object in the solar system. It is currently 9 billion miles away from the sun, or about three times Pluto's current distance from the sun.
Scientists believe Xena's moon was formed when Kuiper Belt objects collided with one another. The Earth's moon formed in a similar way when Earth crashed into an object the size of Mars.
The moon was first spotted by a 10-meter telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii on September 10. Scientists expect to learn more about the moon's composition during further observations with the Hubble Space Telescope in November.
Brown planned to submit a paper describing the moon discovery to the Astrophysical Journal next week.
The International Astronomical Union, a group of scientists responsible for naming planets, is deciding on formal names for Xena and Gabrielle.
by cattwoman » Mon Oct 03, 2005 6:39 pm
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