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Author	Topic: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 11/19/03 12:51pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD - Date Edited: 11/19/03 1:05pm (1 edits total) Edited By: VadersLaMent
	There is something that perturbes me in that article; 'There are also space strategists who warn that OSP's tie to the space station and beyond is a shaky link. Other than crew rotation, and small payloads for minimal ISS resupply, and modest research instrument change-out, the OSP would not have the mass throughput, or volume required, to meet even the current requirements for ISS. Furthermore, they argue, OSP is not designed to meet longer-term goals for either ISS -- like completing station assembly -- much less handle future human exploration goals.' Um, the final design is not settled yet and critics have their minds made up as to wether or not it's worthwhile and what it can or can't do and so on. Let's see what comes of the design winner first. I do like the Lockheed Martin design, although an expendable booster is never cheap. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic-Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God-Michael Shermer I'm a sexy shoeless GOD OF WAR! #347 on SLG's List Of Sexy Men
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 11/19/03 2:41pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	An interesting little tidbit I found at MSNBC.com, excerpt: Burt Rutan, meanwhile, isn’t waiting for anything. Everything he has done so far with his space program appears to comply with no one’s rules but his own. He applied to the AST for a launch license. But he insists he doesn’t really need one, and worries that the moment his employees need to defend their spaceship to the FAA, they will be in the wrong frame of mind to keep examining and improving it. He’s put a human pilot at the controls of the ship, something no governmental space agency will do in an age of ubiquitous computer operations. (A computer, Rutan notes, would have surely crashed SpaceShipOne during the anomalous flight test, whereas pilot Mike Melville was able to save it with chutzpah and experience.) And he’s taking the quickest, most aggressive approach to flight testing his creation, throwing caution to the wind even if that means accepting a high degree of risk. One reason Rutan is able to do what companies like XCOR cannot is his unusually deep pockets: a $30 million grant from a mystery millionaire that his company calls “the customer.” NEWSWEEK reported last spring that the customer was rumored to be Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, the third-wealthiest man in America. Allen and Rutan still have no comment, but several Scaled employees note that the firm is making not just a spaceship, but also a movie—a documentary film crew has been capturing every major step of the project for more than a year. The production company making the film, NEWSWEEK has learned, does work for a small Seattle outfit called Vulcan Productions—Allen’s documentary film company. So, maybe those with the bucks are taking notice after all.... -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic-Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God-Michael Shermer I'm a sexy shoeless GOD OF WAR! #347 on SLG's List Of Sexy Men
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 11/20/03 12:37pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	Something Robert Bradbury mentioned in the MBrain page link in the head post, this is from Space.com: Seeing Extraterrestrials By Seth Shostak Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute posted: 07:00 am ET 20 November 2003 China’s Great Wall may, indeed, be a whale of a wall, but you can’t see it from space with your naked eye. I made this point in my column of last month, "Can Aliens Find Us?" where I considered whether sophisticated extraterrestrials could easily discover Homo sapiens. My example was intended to show that even from relatively nearby, the physical artifacts of human society are difficult to detect. Our radio signals are far more conspicuous. But a reader of that column, Fred Hapgood, wrote to say that, after all, just because the constructions of an advanced culture would be difficult to see directly, this doesn’t mean that they’re thoroughly impossible to find, does it? Consider how much better the telescopes of a civilization hundreds of times older than ours would be, Mr. Hapgood suggests. He’s right, of course. We inevitably tend to envision the capabilities of putative extraterrestrials as being similar to, or slightly more advanced than ours. But what could a society that’s many millennia beyond us do? Could they ever map our world and see our ancient walls, our cities, or even us? A parallel question, albeit in less extravagant form, was posed by former NASA Administrator, Daniel Goldin, shortly after astronomers detected the first extrasolar planets around normal stars. On a 1997 PBS television show, Goldin enthusiastically exclaimed "Could you imagine if in twenty-five, thirty, or forty years, we could take a picture of a planet that’s perhaps fifty light years from Earth, and… if the resolution was high enough… to take a picture of oceans and clouds and continents and mountain ranges – breathtaking!" Indeed it would be. So let’s consider this more modest proposal: to map the mountain ranges on a world 50 light-years distant. What’s required? Roughly speaking, you’d need to be able to see detail as small as about 50 miles (this is the necessary pixel size, as digerati would call it). With a bit of high school physics, you can work out that this necessitates a telescope with a mirror two thousand miles across. It wouldn’t have to be a one-piece mirror of course: you could borrow a technique in vogue with contemporary astronomers, and construct your instrument out of smaller, widely-separated, individual telescopes. This mammoth spyglass would have to be space-based, to avoid atmospheric blurring; but after all, if you can construct a telescope this size, you undoubtedly have the technology to heft it into space. In the accompanying figure, I’ve plotted the diameters of some existing and proposed mirror and lens telescopes, and not surprisingly, you can see that they have become larger over time. If you make the daring assumption that this growth curve continues into the distant future, then we will be able to build a 2,000-mile telescope in the middle of the next century. In fact, it’s conceivable that we will do this much sooner, since large telescope arrays will be easier to construct than the filled aperture telescopes of the type shown in the plot. Goldin’s vision, as it were, is not an impossible one; certainly not for clever extraterrestrials. But could they up the ante? Could a civilization for whom massive engineering projects are commonplace ever build an instrument that could actually see the life on Earth? Could they have detected the dinosaurs, for instance, simply by imaging them? No, I don’t mean the far simpler task of detecting the oxygen or methane in our air that betray biology on this planet. I’m asking, could they actually see the animals? Making even a crude picture of a stegosaurus (or us) would require pixels of about one foot in size. At 50 light-years, that demands a 500 million mile telescope, one that – if we built it – would just fit between the Sun and Jupiter. Of course that’s an instrument of ambitious dimensions. But what’s to stop an alien civilization from scattering small telescopes throughout its solar system, thereby achieving this impressive aperture size? Probably nothing. However, there’s another problem. Would enough light from the hide of that stegosaurus actually reach an extraterrestrial telescope? On a clear, sunny day, every square foot of dino skin would reflect about 10 billion billion photons per second back into space. That’s a lot of photons, but they spread out. At 50 light-years, it takes a mirror that’s 100 thousand miles in diameter to collect even ONE of those photons each second (and since dinosaurs move, you need short exposure times for the photo). Bottom line: such a dino-detector would need the equivalent of 100 million billion Keck-size telescopes, spread out over a half-billion miles of space. And we haven’t even talked about the difficulties alien engineers would face in precisely combining the data from these instruments. Nor have we considered the image-scrambling effects of interstellar gas. This is a project that should boggle the brain of the most ardent futurist. So what we can say is this: finding mountain ranges isn’t terribly hard. But making pictures of extraterrestrial megafauna is. Of course, there’s another approach: send robot probes to worlds with life. We’ll consider that in a future column. An MBrain could construct 100 billion Moon-sized telescopes with a planar diameter equal to the orbit of Jupiter. I asked Robert just how far away it could be and be able to take a pic of my face, he told me to figure it out. With some rather rough arithmatic I came to the conclusion that an MBrain with a setup of Moon-sized scopes equal to Pluto's orbit could be a third of the way across the galaxy and take a face pic. But like I said, rough math. The article gives a rough parameter, anyone care to try a more accurate conclusion for the MBrain scope? -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic-Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God-Michael Shermer I'm a sexy shoeless GOD OF WAR! #347 on SLG's List Of Sexy Men
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 11/20/03 12:43pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	And in other news: SpaceShipOne Soars on Fifth Test Flight By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 07:20 am ET 20 November 2003 A fifth glide flight of the privately built SpaceShipOne took place on November 14 at a Mojave, California test site. For the first time, pilot Pete Siebold put the space plane through its paces. Previous drop tests of the vehicle had Mike Melvill at the controls. SpaceShipOne has been designed and built by Scaled Composites of Mojave, California. Several changes have been made to the craft, based on stability and handling glitches that were uncovered in an earlier drop test. Along with checkout of a new pilot, new extended horizontal tails on SpaceShipOne were also evaluated. SpaceShipOne was released from the White Knight carrier plane at 47,300 feet. According to Scaled Composites, SpaceShipOne's control characteristics were found to be good. The drop test flight also involved the vehicle's tail section that moved in and out of a "feathered" position - shifted to a 65-degree angle to the main body. Handling qualities of the rocket plane remained excellent with good nose pointing ability during feathering of the tail section, a test report explains. Siebold steered SpaceShipOne to a touchdown at a targeted runway aim-point. Major milestone to come Aircraft designer and builder, Burt Rutan, head of Scaled Composites, along with his team, are leading the effort to construct and fly the passenger-carrying SpaceShipOne suborbital craft. Tests are carried out over the desert in Mojave, California. The previous high-altitude drops of SpaceShipOne: August 7, August 27, September 23, October 17, and now the November 14 test. All flights were done in 2003. The progression of ground and airborne tests is leading to a major milestone: an in-the-air ignition of the craft's propulsion system, a hybrid rocket motor. Ultimately, SpaceShipOne is to nose its way to the edge of space in a competitive bid to snag the $10 million X Prize. Rocket teams around the globe are eyeing the X Prize purse and are building varying types of suborbital, passenger-carrying vehicles. [i]Unless another Xprize group is being hush-hush I, and most experts, expect Rutan to win the Xprize. If I'm not mistaken SpaceDev is developing the hybrid rocket motor mentioned above. SpaceDev is actually on the stock market, maybe sometime soon I'll seek to invest. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic-Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God-Michael Shermer I'm a sexy shoeless GOD OF WAR! #347 on SLG's List Of Sexy Men
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MasterAero Registered: Aug '02	Date Posted: 11/20/03 12:53pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	I have a problem with that SETI article..you can see the great wall from space. whats visible from space I didn't like optics in school so I concede i can't do it. Unless there's an unfortunate accident, Rutan's going to win...probably within six months. He said at OshKosh that he wanted to originate a flight from there next year. -----signature----- My whole life all I've wanted to do is fly, bomb stuff, shoot people down.
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 11/20/03 1:44pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	A 3rd gem worth posting, Space.com is on a roll: November 20 Prometheus Nuclear Program Achieves Milestone NASA's Project Prometheus received a gentle nudge toward reality, courtesy of the first successful test of a High Power Electric Propulsion (HiPEP) ion engine. The event marked the first in a series of performance tests to demonstrate new high-velocity and high-power thrust needed for use in nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) spacecraft. NASA announced the test success in a November 20 statement. HiPEP is one of several candidate propulsion technologies under study by Project Prometheus for possible use on the first proposed flight mission, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO). The mission is not proposed for launch before the year 2011. The HiPEP experiment involved the largest microwave ion thruster ever built. The use of microwaves for ionization would enable very long-life thrusters for spacecraft applications. The test was carried out at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. JIMO's ion thrusters are to be powered by a nuclear fission reactor and a system for converting the reactor's heat to electricity. This could give the craft more than 100 times as much power as a non-fission system of comparable weight. A heavy lift expendable launch vehicle would place JIMO into high Earth orbit. The ion-propulsion thrusters would spiral the spacecraft away from Earth and then on its way to Jupiter. JIMO would orbit three different moons of Jupiter where earlier spacecraft discovered evidence for vast saltwater oceans hidden beneath icy surface layers: Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The proposed flagship mission is also being pursued to raise NASA's capability for space exploration to a new level by demonstrating safe and reliable use of electric propulsion powered by a nuclear fission reactor. DeepSpace1 had a thrust of 1/50th of a pound, the usual analogy being equal to the weight of a piece of paper on your hand. At 100 times that, half a pound of ion thrust could be achieved...equal to 100 pieces of paper! Some basic numbers: a fusion reactor could be a few hundred times more powerful than a fission one, and anti matter could be 1000 times better than a fusion reactor. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic-Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God-Michael Shermer I'm a sexy shoeless GOD OF WAR! #347 on SLG's List Of Sexy Men
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 11/21/03 1:28pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	A little more info about the ION engine test from Orion22.com: The test was conducted in a vacuum chamber at GRC. The HiPEP ion engine was operated at power levels up to 12 kilowatts and over an equivalent range of exhaust velocities from 60,000 to 80,000 meters per second. The thruster is being designed to provide seven-to-ten-year lifetimes at high fuel efficiencies of more than 6,000-seconds specific impulse; a measure of how much thrust is generated per pound of fuel. This is a contrast to Space Shuttle main engines, which have a specific impulse of 460 seconds. This new class of NEP thrusters will offer substantial performance advantages over the ion engine flown on Deep Space 1 in 1999. Overall improvements include up to a factor of 10 or more in power; a factor of two to three in fuel efficiency; a factor of four to five in grid voltage; a factor of five to eight in thruster lifetime; and a 30 percent improvement in overall thruster efficiency. GRC engineers will continue testing and development of this particular thruster model, culminating in performance tests at full power levels of 25 kilowatts. An Isp of 6,000 is awsome, and better yet a greater thrust meaning better acceleration than previous engines. JFYI: An Isp of 2,000,000 would be needed to get an spacecraft up to 13% lightspeed with a fuel requirement of 6 times the dry mass of the vehicle. Isp's that fall in the range of a few thousand make interplanetary travel somewhat practical. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic-Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God-Michael Shermer I'm a sexy shoeless GOD OF WAR! #347 on SLG's List Of Sexy Men
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 11/23/03 12:53pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	From Astronomy.com feature stories: In the July 2003 issue of Astronomy, Bob Berman describes some of the space age's failures, from the tragic loss of the shuttles Columbia and Challenger to the nearly catastrophic Apollo 13 mission. Here, in timeline form, are some of the disasters, scares, and other missteps that illustrate the inherent risks of exploration and what has been learned from them. ---------------------------------- Nedelin Disaster: October 24, 1960 Cold war hysteria led to the rushed test-launch of an R-16 intercontinental ballistic missile at the Soviet Union's Baikonur Cosmodrome that killed at least 92 people. With the R-16's fuel tanks filled — and leaking — and worsening electrical problems, Marshal of Artillery Mitrofan Nedelin, reportedly under pressure from the Kremlin, ordered launch preparations to continue over workers' objections. The rocket's second stage ignited accidentally and mushroomed into a fireball 130 yards across that left deadly toxic chemicals in its wake. Exactly three years later, another accident at Baikonur claimed eight lives. ----------------------------- Liberty Bell 7: July 21, 1961 Splashdown came not with relief but terror for Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom after his 15 minutes in space. The hatch on his Liberty Bell 7 capsule came off and the craft began to fill with water. Marine divers rescued Grissom, who denied claims that he might have pulled the hatch in panic, but helicopters had to cut loose the sodden capsule. In 1999, the Discovery Channel funded a search and recovery operation for the craft, which was dredged up from a depth of 15,000 feet. -------------------------------- Apollo 1 Fire: January 27, 1967 Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were conducting a practice run for their launch the next month when an electrical short sparked a fire in the command module's pure-oxygen environment. In the weightlessness of space, the fire's own combustion products would have surrounded it and snuffed it out, but on Earth, the blaze engulfed the module and within 24 seconds, all three were dead. On each future mission, NASA installed an emergency escape hatch (it would have taken 90 seconds for the Apollo 1 team to break out to safety) and a system to dilute the oxygen for ground tests. -------------------------------------------- Vladimir Komarov and Soyuz 1: April 24, 1967 Vladimir Komarov became the first man to die in spaceflight when his problem-plagued Soyuz 1 craft crashed on return to Earth. Four previous unmanned flights of the Soyuz design had each malfunctioned in different ways, and mission designers had not wanted to send a cosmonaut up in it. But up Komarov went, and once in orbit, nothing seemed to work — one of two solar panels failed to deploy and the ship wouldn't stabilize. On his 18th orbit around the planet, Komarov was able to manually fire the motor for re-entry, only to die when the craft's primary parachute failed to open and the backup became tangled. ------------------------------------------- First Moon Landing — Aldrin's Foot: July 20, 1969 Even when it puts its best foot forward, the space program sometimes stumbles a little. When U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, recited the line he had prepared for the momentous occasion, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," he forgot to say the word "a." And when his compatriot Buzz Aldrin put his foot down on the lunar surface, he felt the urine bag in his boot break. ---------------------------- Apollo 12: November 20, 1969 Less than a minute after launch, Apollo 12 was struck by lightning not once but twice. Circuit breakers tripped, and crewmembers Charles Conrad, Richard Gordon, and Alan Bean scrambled to reset the power buses before reaching orbit. They made it to the moon and on their second moonwalk, Bean and Conrad carried off pieces of the Surveyor 3 probe (shown at right with Conrad) that had landed two years before. Tests showed a bacterium on Surveyor 3's removed parts — a sign of possible life on the moon — but soon scientists realized the germ was Earth-born and the probe hadn't been properly sterilized. ------------------------- Apollo 13: April 13, 1970 Apollo 13, launched April 11 with a last-minute crew change because of rubella exposure, suffered an oxygen tank explosion on April 13 that nearly cost astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise their lives. Access to two fuel cells was lost and the only other oxygen tank began to leak, starving the remaining fuel cell. Giving up on a moon landing, the crew turned everything off except the communications and environmental controls systems and moved into the lunar module for 86 hours, straining its intended capacity of two people for 48 hours. Even the air crew members exhaled threatened to poison them in this cramped space, and mission controllers on the ground instructed the crew to make a carbon dioxide filter from materials on hand, just one of the measures that saved the astronauts' lives. ------------------------------------------- Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion: January 28, 1986 The Challenger was seared into the memories of millions of people who watched in horror as it exploded shortly after launch on a cold January morning. Six astronauts and high-school teacher Christa McAuliffe died when their cabin plunged into the Atlantic. Two years of investigations determined the cause was faulty O-rings, plastic washers sandwiched between joints in the booster rockets. The cold weather made the usually flexible rings stiff, and hot gases escaped, which helped ignite the explosion. --------------------------- Mir Fire: February 23, 1997 The Russian Space Station Mir launched in 1986, endured a string of worrisome accidents, including both a fire and a collision with a cargo craft carrying garbage in 1997. The fire started when an oxygen-generating tool malfunctioned and burned for 90 seconds, damaging surrounding hardware. The crew, including U.S. astronaut and physician Jerry Linenger, used masks to breathe through the heavy smoke until the air was deemed safe. The failing Mir was purposely crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2001. ---------------------------------------- Space Shuttle Columbia: February 1, 2003 The Space Shuttle Columbia was just 16 minutes from landing when it broke apart after nearly 15 days in space, killing all seven of its crew members and scattering debris across eastern Texas and western Louisiana. The international team of STS-107 enjoyed exceptional camaraderie, as evidenced by photographs such as this one, taken January 27. Clockwise from lower right are David Brown, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, and Ilan Ramon. Not pictured are Rick Husband, William McCool, and Laurel Clark. I remember the morning that Challenger blew up. I was still asleep when my little sister runs in my room telling me that the space shuttle exploded. I told her, "No it didn't, it was probably just on fire." I got up and sure enough it had blown to bits. The Xprize contestants, with Burt Rutan leading the way, face a great risk. Because of accidents in the past, and greater knowledge about aeronautics those risks can be minimized. If Rutan's Space Ship One makes it to orbit, it will be the number one topic on all news channels. If it doesn't make it and the crew dies, it will be the number one topic on all news channels. I hope for nothing but success, however, if there is failure I hope that after the pieces are picked up there is not some political backlash to prevent further attempts by private owners to launch into orbit. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic-Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God-Michael Shermer I'm a sexy shoeless GOD OF WAR! #347 on SLG's List Of Sexy Men
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 11/24/03 10:58am Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	2 articles coming today, the first one tells of ISS budget difficulties: Nov. 22, 2003, 2:26AM O'Keefe fears cutbacks could delay space station schedule By PATTY REINERT WASHINGTON -- With lawmakers scrambling to wrap up a massive spending package before Thanksgiving, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe complained Friday about efforts to strip $200 million from the international space station budget. "This is going to put a severe crimp in our reserves," O'Keefe said during a breakfast with reporters. The Senate passed a $15.3 billion budget for NASA on Tuesday, but not before reducing the $1.7 billion President Bush wants to spend on the space station. In July, the House approved a $15.5 billion budget for NASA, slightly more than President Bush had requested. The agency's spending plan is in the hands of Senate and House negotiators, who are trying to hammer out a gigantic $280 billion package to fund NASA and dozens of other federal agencies for the 2004 budget year, which began on Oct. 1. Senate appropriators argue that a reduction in the space station budget is justified because NASA is getting help from its Russian partners, who are providing spacecraft to keep the orbiting outpost going while American shuttles are grounded. The station project also has saved some money since the Feb. 1 Columbia shuttle accident because it has reduced the station crew from three to two, the Senate Appropriations Committee said in its report on the bill. With reserves of more than $250 million, the report said, NASA should be able to cover "this modest reduction." The Senate version of the spending bill also took away $20 million that NASA planned to spend on a project to explore the icy moons of Jupiter. At the same time, senators added $50 million to NASA's aeronautics research budget and moved some other funds around. O'Keefe said that lawmakers have been "righteously indignant" about cost overruns on the $60 billion space station and that he has spent the past two years working to get those costs under control. He also has tried to deliver more realistic cost projections to lawmakers, he said. "We did everything we were instructed to do and now everybody's decided over there that well, gee whiz, since things have slowed down" NASA can take the budget cut, he said. Even though construction on the station has temporarily halted, O'Keefe said, the next components are lined up at Kennedy Space Center, ready to be ferried into space once shuttles resume flying. "Nothing's slowed down," he said. "It's still moving along. "I understand (what happens) when you get down to the end (of a congressional session) like this and everybody's busting to get out of Dodge and trying to do what they've got to do to make the numbers work," said O'Keefe, who worked at the White House budget office before taking the top job at NASA. Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, one of the House appropriators, agreed with O'Keefe. "One of the problems identified by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board was the unpredictability of NASA's fluctuating funding levels year to year," he said. "It's unfair to NASA and all those magnificent people that we would jerk their funding around every year." Earlier this week, Texas' Republican Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn also urged funding increases for NASA, sending a letter to the White House asking Bush to request more money for NASA in fiscal year 2005. That budget request is due on Capitol Hill in February. I've stated my own opinion of how the ISS should not have been built, but really, if you are going to start something you might as well finish it. But, if Congress wants this thing axed I wish they would just go ahead and do it quickly and get on with business. The only problem with axing it is that the ISS becomes another project in a long list of other cancelled projects. It would be the hardest felt out of all the others because of the multiple billions already spent on it. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic-Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God-Michael Shermer I'm a sexy shoeless GOD OF WAR! #347 on SLG's List Of Sexy Men
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 11/24/03 11:08am Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	A little astronomy to top things off from Space.com: New Twists on the Milky Way's Big Black Hole By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer posted: 06:00 am ET 24 November 2003 The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy is heftier than thought and rotates at an amazing clip, new research shows. For years scientists said the black hole contained about 2.6 million times the mass of the Sun. They now believe the figure is somewhere between 3.2 million and 4 million solar masses. And a new study suggests all that mass, confined to an area about 10 times smaller than Earth's orbit around the Sun, spins around about once every 11 minutes. The Sun, for comparison, takes about a month to make a revolution on its axis. Earth spins once every 24 hours. Black holes can't be seen or measured directly, because light passing near them gets trapped. So astronomers measure a black hole's mass by observing the orbital speed of nearby stars. The orbit of a particle near a black hole depends on the curvature of space around the black hole, which also depends on how fast the black hole is spinning. A spinning black hole drags space around with it and allows atoms to orbit nearer to the black hole than is possible for a non-spinning black hole. The new mass estimate was made by two separate groups, one at the University of California, Berkeley, and another at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC Berkeley physicist Reinhard Genzel told SPACE.com. More interesting, perhaps, is what appears to be a precise measurement of the supermassive black hole's spin rate made by Genzel's group. Other studies have shown compelling evidence for the rotation of less massive black holes, formed when stars collapse. That's no surprise to astronomers, since these stellar black holes would logically retain the rotation of their progenitor stars. The first solid evidence for a spinning stellar black hole emerged more than two years ago. Only hints of spin have been noted from supermassive black holes, each of which is thought to form and evolve hand-in-hand with the development of the galaxy in which it sits. The location of the Milky Way's central black hole is well known. Called Sagitarrius A, or Sgr A, it sits about 26,000 light-years away, at the heart of the galaxy. It is surrounded by intense radio waves, X-rays and other radiation. Astronomers know the black hole is smaller than the diameter of Earth's orbit; they suspect it is about 10 times smaller but have not been able to measure it with enough precision to know for sure. Genzel's team saw a flickering of near-infrared light they presume is generated by hot gas falling into the black hole, just before the gas disappears beyond the "event horizon," a point of no return for light and matter. "If our interpretation is right, this is the first solid evidence for a spin of a massive black hole," Genzel said in an e-mail interview. The black hole spins once every 11 minutes or so, Genzel estimates, though an exact figure is difficult to pin down. The estimate represents a pace equal to about 30 percent of the speed of light. The data were collected by the 8.2-meter Kueyen telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile and detailed in a recent issue of the journal Nature. "These observations, reflecting similar patterns seen earlier in X-rays, open a new window on this enigmatic source," said Ramesh Narayan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in an analysis of the work for the journal. Theorists suspect other supermassive black holes, some containing as much matter as a billion Suns, should also spin. Smaller scale Not all black holes spin at the same rate, other investigations indicate. In fact, some may not spin at all. Another recent study pinned down how X-ray emissions from fast-moving iron atoms near a stellar black hole can be used to determine whether or not the unseen central object is rotating. The iron produces a distinct X-ray signature. The orbit of the atoms depends on the extent to which space around a black hole is curved. That mind-bending warpage, in turn, is determined by how much the black hole spins. A spinning black hole drags space with it, allowing atoms to orbit closer to the black hole than if it were not spinning. Observations by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite of a stellar black hole named XTE J1650-500 reveal some iron-generated X-rays just 20 miles from the event horizon. This black hole must be spinning rapidly, researchers say. Data collected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, on a stellar black hole called Cygnus X-1, finds atoms no closer than 100 miles from the event horizon, providing no evidence that it spins. Coming together Meanwhile, efforts to understand whether and why lightweights and heavyweights rotate are converging. Jon Miller, who worked on the recent stellar black hole research, said there is a high degree of correspondence between what happens to space around a spinning stellar black hole and its supermassive brethren. "Because stellar black holes are smaller, everything happens about a million times faster, so they can be used as a test-bed for theories of how spinning black holes affect the space and matter around them," Miller said. Of interest to me is the still VERY hypothetical math model that says spinning black holes form a ring sigularity(RS) rather than a point singularity. The RS opens up the possibility for travel to other places, times and dimensions due to the warpage of space-time withing the boundries of the ring itself. There is also an idea postulated that even with a point sigularity there may be a weak vector that a traveler could traverse in order to get to the singularity, this would only be possible if the black hole is of substantial size(like the one at our galaxy's center) where tidal forces would have a more gradual effect rather than the spagettification that would occur from a smaller blck hole. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic-Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God-Michael Shermer I'm a sexy shoeless GOD OF WAR! #347 on SLG's List Of Sexy Men
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MasterAero Registered: Aug '02	Date Posted: 11/24/03 11:12am Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	Cancelled ISS=Cancelled OSP= MasterAero I'm hopeful cancelling station isn't really an option. -----signature----- My whole life all I've wanted to do is fly, bomb stuff, shoot people down.
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 11/24/03 11:24am Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	I didn't even think about that. Since the OSP is not a heavy lift vehicle it would go bye bye as well. The possible and still to be announced return to the Moon would use a heavy lift vehicle like the shuttle C or else the new Delta rocket. I wish NASA would have listened to the Space Island Group and made use of the main fuel tanks to make an orbital hotel, then an OSP would be a certainty despite the hotel being a plaything for the rich. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic-Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God-Michael Shermer I'm a sexy shoeless GOD OF WAR! #347 on SLG's List Of Sexy Men
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MasterAero Registered: Aug '02	Date Posted: 11/25/03 5:31am Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	From Space.com CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Shrink-wrap the external fuel tank. Insulate the tank on the inside rather than the outside to prevent chunks of foam from breaking off and striking the space shuttle, as happened with Columbia. Cover the edges of the shuttle wings with titanium. Add a second layer of reinforced carbon skin. These are just a few of the hundreds of suggestions that have streamed into NASA, from both inside the space agency and outside, ever since the first version of its return-to-flight plan came out two months ago. In the latest update Monday, NASA summarized the suggestions and estimated it will cost $280 million to carry out all the safety recommendations put forth by Columbia accident investigators. But the ultimate cost of getting the three remaining shuttles flying again will almost certainly be higher. "This is obviously just our best estimate of return-to-flight costs," said NASA spokesman Allard Beutel. NASA has yet to figure out how to patch a hole in the wing like the one that brought down Columbia in February, and development of such a repair kit will probably drive costs up. Some of the suggestions made by NASA employees and members of the public would also run up costs and could keep the shuttle fleet grounded even longer if the proposals require an extensive redesign. Right now, NASA is aiming for a launch no earlier than next fall. Every suggestion, no matter how silly or outrageous, is being reviewed and getting an individual response, NASA said. "Even the ones you would characterize as junk or a joke, every one gets reviewed," Beutel said. "They're not just blowing them off. They are reviewing every single one." Some messages are passed up the NASA chain to avoid relying on a single person's judgment on "what is kooky and what is not," Beutel said. NASA's embrace of suggestions is in stark contrast to the attitude that prevailed during Columbia's doomed flight, when engineers' worries about wing damage were disregarded. NASA created an electronic mailbox for return-to-flight suggestions on Sept. 8, the day the space agency released its initial plan for implementing safety changes and resuming shuttle launches. As of Nov. 12, NASA had gotten 286 suggestions, most of them from the public. Dozens of messages involve highly technical aspects of the spacecraft, while others offer more general advice. One recurring question is why NASA cannot sell ads on the shuttles. Answer: Because it is a government agency. As for encasing the external fuel tank in shrink-wrap or netting, engineers say it is a good idea but caution it could make matters worse and cause even more foam shedding. Responding to every suggestion...wow..that's a lot of work, glad I'm not working on that. -----signature----- My whole life all I've wanted to do is fly, bomb stuff, shoot people down.
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VadersLaMent Registered: Apr '02	Date Posted: 11/25/03 1:12pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	Heh, there are those that think out of the box, then there are those who think shrink wrap will protect the shuttle. I mean come on, everyone knows duct tape is the way to go. I'd be curious to know how much duct tape NASA does actually go through in a year. I think we should start a betting pool on what corp will be the first to put their symbol on a rocket, Pepsi, Coke, McDonalds, Walt Disney, who knows. -----signature----- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic-Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God-Michael Shermer I'm a sexy shoeless GOD OF WAR! #347 on SLG's List Of Sexy Men
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obi_wan_kanathan Registered: May '01	Date Posted: 11/25/03 9:02pm Subject: RE: SPACE SCIENCE THREAD
	Heh, that reminds me of a picture I found awhile ago. Who wouldn't want the shuttle looking like this? (geocities, so drag and drop) -----signature----- Dark Lord of the JC \|\| JC/DLC Ambassador ~~The NEW Dark Lords' Council~~ http://www.thedarklordscouncil.com/
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