Live streaming + animations on Curiosity Mars rover & launch
Curiosity Rover Animation:
Nuclear Mars Rover:
11 Amazing Things NASA’s Huge Mars Rover Can Do: http://www.space.com/13689-nasa-amazing-mars-rover-curiosity-science.html
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mazsa
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mazsa
The colonization of outer space is key to the survival of humankind. It will be difficult for the world’s inhabitants to avoid disaster in the next hundred years. We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space. This is why I favour “personed” space flight and encourage further study into how to make space colonization possible.
Stephen Hawking -
mazsa
The end of the Space Age – Inner space is useful. Outer space is history http://www.economist.com/node/18897425
An Elegy for the Age of Space http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/08/elegy-for-age-of-space.html
Why Not Space? http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/ Cf. http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/10/18/2258237/space-is-not-the-place-says-professor
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admin
Planets with Stabilizing Moons May Be Common: “The Earth’s comparatively massive moon, formed via a giant impact on the proto-Earth, has played an important role in the development of life on our planet, both in the history and strength of the ocean tides and in stabilizing the chaotic spin of our planet. Here we show that massive moons orbiting terrestrial planets are not rare. A large set of simulations by Morishima et al. (Morishima, R., Stadel, J., Moore, B. [2010]. Icarus. 207, 517–535 [cf. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.0579 ]), where Earth-like planets in the habitable zone form, provides the raw simulation data for our study. We use limits on the collision parameters that may guarantee the formation of a circumplanetary disk after a protoplanet collision that could form a satellite and study the collision history and the long term evolution of the satellites qualitatively. In addition, we estimate and quantify the uncertainties in each step of our study. We find that giant impacts with the required energy and orbital parameters for producing a binary planetary system do occur with more than 1 in 12 terrestrial planets hosting a massive moon, with a low-end estimate of 1 in 45 and a high-end estimate of 1 in 4.” http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.4616
Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/planetary-anthropic-selection
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mazsa
A Fusion Thruster for Space Travel – Clean, highly energetic reaction delivers a lot of drive from a drop of fuel “[...] improvements in short-pulse laser systems could make this form of thruster more than 40 times as efficient as even the best of today’s ionic propulsion systems that push spacecraft around. The specific power of the proton-triggered boron fuel would be so great that a mere mole of it (11 grams) would yield roughly 300 megawatts of power. [...]” http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/a-fusion-thruster-for-space-travel/0
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mazsa
“Imagine life on an Earth-like moon, one so close to its gas giant host that its landscape is bathed in a dusklike planetary glow. Such places are not only possible but also probable, according to a new study, which finds that as many as 5% of gas giant planets orbiting their stars at Earth-like distances may harbor habitable “exomoons.”
For the past decade or so, planet hunters have been scanning the skies, hoping to detect an Earth-like planet in a habitable orbit around its sunlike star. NASA’s Kepler observatory, currently orbiting Earth, is expected to detect dozens of such planets as they make their way across the face of their parent stars. But so far, most of the discoveries have been giant planets in Earth-like orbits, which are much easier to spot but too hot and gaseous to harbor life. The new study provides them with the possibility of life-supporting satellites.
Simon Porter, a predoctoral fellow at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and colleagues created computer models of 12,000 hypothetical planets about the size of Earth that had been gravitationally captured by gas giants like Jupiter. The simulated gas giants orbited their stars at just the right distance for life to be possible on these planets-turned-moons.
All of the simulated satellites started out on very elliptical orbits around their gas giants, the team will report in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Over hundreds of thousands of years, half of them crashed into their planets or were spat out of orbit. But the other half evolved steady orbits, allowing them to develop stable climates over billions of years. Such climates are thought to be necessary for the evolution of complex life. [...]” http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/06/does-life-exist-on-distant-moons.html
http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/are-we-unlikely-to-ever-leave-the-solar-system
http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/planetary-anthropic-selection
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mazsa
Are we unlikely to ever leave the solar system? http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456
admin is discussing. 
mazsa
Project Icarus: Flying closer to another star http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/
http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/icarus_project.php
http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.3833
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/1929201/Project-Icarus-an-Interstellar-Mission-Timeline
mazsa
52 Years and $750M Prove Einstein Was Right “[...] the Gravity Probe results would live forever in textbooks as the most direct measurements [....]
Empty space in the vicinity of Earth is indeed turning, Dr. Everitt reported at the news conference and in a paper prepared for the journal Physical Review Letters, at the leisurely rate of 37 one-thousandths of a second of arc — the equivalent of a human hair seen from 10 miles away — every year. With an uncertainty of 19 percent, that measurement was in agreement with Einstein’s predictions of 39 milliarcseconds.
Likewise, the “sag” should alter the space-time geometry around Earth, warping it from the Euclidean ideal and cutting an inch out of the Gravity Probe’s orbit around it, so that the circumference is slightly less than the Euclidean ideal of pi times the orbit’s diameter, a fact confirmed by the Stanford gyroscopes to an accuracy of 0.3 percent. [...]” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/science/space/05gravity.html?_r=1
mazsa
NSA Document Admits ET Contact: “Recently a series of radio messages was heard coming from outer space. The transmission was not continuous but was cut by pauses into pieces which could be taken as units, for they were repeated over and over again. The pauses show here as punctuation. The various combinations have been represented by letters of the alphabet, so that the messages can be written down. Each message except the first is given here only once. The serial number of the message has been supplied for each reference”:
Original: https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/ufo/et_intelligence.pdf
Key to the messages: https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/ufo/key_to_et_messages.pdf
Html: http://agoragraphie.canalblog.com/archives/2008/10/27/11130768.html
History & wording:
It is curious, to say the least, that this document was cleared for release on October 21, 2004. Why was that? Because the NSA did not release it into public information until April 21, 2011. Though cleared for release, the NSA had been stonewalling it along with hundreds of other NSA documents about contact with UFOs and extraterrestrials until they lost the lawsuit brought by Peter Gersten, a lawyer from Arizona. When they well and truly lost, the judge’s order had to be carried out, and the documents had to be released. [...]
Dr. Campaigne’s presentation to the NSA on decoding the extraterrestrial messages was not a hypothetical exercise. I contacted someone who is formerly associated with the NSA and still has TS clearance, and asked him to view the document. I asked him to give me his take on it. There was no question about its authenticity since it was published in the NSA Journal, and was released by the NSA on their web site. What I wanted to know was whether this document had any particular impact or importance (other than its startling revelations) for someone familiar with the inner workings of the NSA. It did.
My contact told me that he was blown away by the wording of the document. He said that NSA communications are filled with words like “possibly” , “allegedly”, and “thought to be”.
He said, “This document has none of the normal NSA disclaimer words in it. They just come out and say ‘we received messages from outer space’ and this is the way to decode those messages.”
I asked, “What does that mean to you?”
His reply was instant.
“Disclosure, pure and simple. They aren’t making any fanfare about it, but there it is. They have just made open disclosure.” http://www.ufodigest.com/article/official-et-disclosure-nsa-document-admits-et-contact-kevin-w-smith
mazsa
Roswell files: FBI agent reported to the director of the Bureau that an Air Force official told him they recovered Alien bodies; “three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico [...] each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape”:
https://vault.fbi.gov/hottel_guy/Guy%20Hottel%20Part%201%20of%201/view?searchterm=Guy%20Hottel
admin
“Planetary anthropic selection, the idea that Earth has unusual properties since, otherwise, we would not be here to observe it, is a controversial idea. This paper proposes a methodology by which to test anthropic proposals by comparison of Earth to synthetic populations of Earth-like planets. The paper illustrates this approach by investigating possible anthropic selection for high (or low) rates of Milankovitch-driven climate change. Three separate tests are investigated: (1) Earth-Moon properties and their effect on obliquity; (2) Individual planet locations and their effect on eccentricity variation; (3) The overall structure of the Solar System and its effect on eccentricity variation. In all three cases, the actual Earth/Solar System has unusually low Milankovitch frequencies compared to similar alternative systems. All three results are statistically significant at the 5% or better level, and the probability of all three occurring by chance is less than 10−5. It therefore appears that there has been anthropic selection for slow Milankovitch cycles [that is, the periodic variations in Earth’s climate that are induced by changes in Earth’s orbit and orientation in space. The key factors here are axial precession (time varying axis orientation), orbital precession (time varying orbital orientation), and time variation in orbital eccentricity (circularity of the orbit)]. This implies possible selection for a stable climate, which, if true, undermines the Gaia hypothesis [that
is, that life modifies the environment in ways which are beneficial to itself] and also suggests that planets with Earth-like levels of biodiversity are likely to be very rare. [...]
It is widely recognized that regions of Earth that have stable temperatures (e.g., tropical rainforests) have high levels of biodiversity (see review by Wilson, 2001). The hypothesis that this link is direct and causal is reinforced by the observation that the deep ocean seafloor also has high biodiversity (Sanders, 1968), even though the conditions are, stability excepted, poor and biological productivity therefore low. Further evidence of a link between rapid climate change and loss of species richness has been gleaned from studies of Earth’s glacial-interglacial cycles. The most recent ice ages have resulted in reduced biodiversity within the temperate zones where the greatest changes in climate occurred (see review by Hewitt, 2004). There are, therefore, two independent lines of evidence that support the proposition that biodiversity is, in general, lower when climate change is significant. [...]” http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/ast.2010.0475
Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/the-great-filter-are-we-almost-past-it
Update: http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/planets-with-stabilizing-moons-may-be-common
mazsa
Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth ‘Crying In Rage’: “The problem was Gagarin. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed.
The question was: Who would tell Brezhnev? Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. With less than a month to go before the launch, Komarov realized postponement was not an option. He met with Russayev, the now-demoted KGB agent, and said, “I’m not going to make it back from this flight.”
Russayev asked, Why not refuse? According to the authors, Komarov answered: “If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead.” That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn’t do that to his friend. “That’s Yura,” the book quotes him saying, “and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.” Komarov then burst into tears. [...]” http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/03/18/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage
mazsa
A measure for the multiverse: “[...] Everything we need to know about the multiverse might be right here in our own universe.” http://www.sott.net/articles/show/204004-A-measure-for-the-multiverse
mazsa
The development of an artificial intelligence may lead to the destruction of the human race. What we may need to also consider the possibility that not inventing such an intelligence might be the more dangerous option.
Alonzo Fyfe
mazsa
NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite: “[...] Dr. Hoover fractured the meteorite stones under a sterile environment before examining the freshly broken surface with the standard tools of the scientist: a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to search the stone’s surface for evidence of fossilized remains.
He found the fossilized remains of micro-organisms not so different from ordinary ones found underfoot — here on earth, that is.
“The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. But not all of them. “There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stumped.”
Other scientists tell FoxNews.com the implications of this research are shocking, describing the findings variously as profound, very important and extraordinary. But Dr. David Marais, an astrobiologist with NASA’s AMES Research Center, says he’s very cautious about jumping onto the bandwagon.
These kinds of claims have been made before, he noted — and found to be false.
“It’s an extraordinary claim, and thus I’ll need extraordinary evidence,” Marais said.
Knowing that the study will be controversial, the journal invited members of the scientific community to analyze the results and to write critical commentaries ahead of time. Though none are online yet, those comments will be posted alongside the article, said Dr. Rudy Schild, a scientist with the Harvard-Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cosmology.
“Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5,000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis,” Schild wrote in an editor’s note along with the article. “No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting, and never before in the history of science has the scientific community been given the opportunity to critically analyze an important research paper before it is published, he wrote. [...]”
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mazsa
Why exactly can nothing go faster than the speed of light? http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fjwkh/why_exactly_can_nothing_go_faster_than_the_speed/ (Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2244304 )
Cf. http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-Space-Texture-Reality/dp/0375727205 Index: ‘speed of light’, p. 564.
mazsa
Space Solar Power System (SSPS) : http://www.usef.or.jp/english/f3_project/ssps/f3_ssps.html
mazsa
Space Fence: Watching Over Us [video]
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mazsa
Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design: http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
mazsa
The Human Mission to Mars – Colonizing the Red Planet http://journalofcosmology.com/Contents12.html
mazsa
NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery: “NASA will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. PST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. [...] It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency’s website at http://www.nasa.gov.” http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2010/M10-110.html
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mazsa
10 recommendations shortly before Obama is expected to release his National Security Space Strategy
The recommendations of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), shortly before Obama is expected to release his National Security Space Strategy, which will define U.S. strategic goals for national security aspects of space:
“1. Elaborate on the administration’s National Space Policy and publicly articulate its approach and goals, both to provide clear high-level guidance for U.S. policy makers— military and nonmilitary alike—and to clarify U.S. intentions for the international community.
The approach and goals should:
• Emphasize international cooperation rather than
unilateral actions.
• Reaffirm that all countries have the same rights to
the peaceful use of space.
• Take a more balanced view of commercial, civil,
and military uses of space.
• Support and reinforce long-held norms against station-
ing weapons in space and against disabling or destroying
satellites.
2. Declare that the United States will not intentionally
damage or disable any satellites operating in accordance with the Outer Space Treaty, and pledge that the United States will not be the first to station dedicated weapons in space. Strongly urge the other space powers to make parallel pronouncements.
3. Declare that the United States will not develop or deploy space-based missile defense interceptors. Pledge not to use any element of the U.S. land-, sea-, or air-based missile defense systems to attack or destroy a satellite. And review plans to sell systems with this capability to other countries in order to ensure that any missile interceptors sold by the United States will not be used as anti-satellite weapons.
4. Vigorously pursue a capability-preserving strategy and make satellites less attractive targets by reducing their vulnerabilities; building in redundancies; improving the capacity to rapidly reconstitute key functions; and devel- oping air-, space-, or ground-based backup systems.
5. Modify U.S. export-control and related regulations to reduce unnecessary barriers to commercial and civil space cooperation.
6. Begin discussions with the international community to identify the most productive venue and agenda for nego- tiations on space security and sustainability. Play a leading role in setting up these discussions.
7. Assemble a negotiating team and begin building the diplomatic, technical, legal, and other kinds of expertise needed to support negotiations. Encourage other coun- tries to do so as well.
8. Appoint a high-level expert panel to review and prioritize space situational awareness missions and to recommend corresponding improvements to U.S. space surveillance capabilities.
9. Create a standing program to assess and improve options for verifying compliance with potential space security agreements.
10. Develop and implement transparency measures aimed at improving safety and predictability in space.”
mazsa
‘Impact: Earth!’ simulator shows effects of asteroid hit
http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth
http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/general/2010/101103MeloshImpactEarth.html
mazsa
“[...] At least based on our current human characteristics, we’d expect that our technology would advance to the point where we can tool around the universe—and colonize it.
So why haven’t we met any extraterrestrials? It seems like it’d take only one instance to eventually fill the whole universe.
Well, maybe there just aren’t ones close enough to human-like. Or maybe we’ve got something wrong in our expectations for the future.
Perhaps exploration just isn’t terribly popular. I mean, there are lots of parts of the Earth—like the bottoms of the oceans—where we could in principle go, but we usually don’t bother.
But unless something kills off diversity in purposes, even if there wasn’t a giant cultural push towards exploration, one might still expect one solitary extraterrestrial to decide to do it. And that’d be enough.
Of course, what really is the point? Let’s assume we know the fundamental theory of physics; we know the program for our universe.
Well, there’s computational irreducibility, so we can’t make general predictions from it. But we can certainly use it to systematically search for possible technology that we can implement in our universe, and so on.
But in a sense we don’t need physical—starships and everything—exploration to find it.
We just need to be running computations.
Well, you might think surely it’d be good to do a giant, bizarrely modified version of SETI@home all over the universe. But, you know, there are a lot more orders of magnitude that can be achieved by making things smaller than by going out and co-opting other planets to turn into computers and so on.
Well, OK, so we have a sort of strange view of the limiting future.
We’re reduced to computations. But computations that in some absolute sense are nothing special; they’re just as sophisticated or unsophisticated as lots of other computations happening around the universe.
But what’s special about these computations is that they have evolved from us—with our various special features and purposes.
How will those purposes evolve? Perhaps they will in effect dissipate—and it will in a sense be the end of meaningful history.
But I have a slight—perhaps self-serving—guess.
That when our current constraints are all removed, our future selves will indeed have a difficult time knowing which of all possible purposes to pursue.
But that one of the most important guides will be to look at history. To look back at a time when there were constraints—like mortality and scarce resources—that pruned out possible purposes.
And perhaps there will be a desire to go back as far as possible—to understand the origins of purposes.
But one will need data—as much as possible—on what actually happened.
So here’s the funny thing: our times, these years, are the first times in history when a decent fraction of everything that happens is recorded.
And that will only increase over the next few years.
So from the future, as one tries to analyze history and purposes, one will potentially land right on our times in these years.
So that it’ll be our activities and purposes in these years that define the purposes for our whole future.
I don’t know if that’s actually how things will work. It’s perhaps satisfying to think so. Though it’s a big responsibility.
To think that our efforts at this time in history might not just be stepping stones to the future, but actually define all of it.
In effect, pulling from the computational universe that part which defines the future essence of the human condition.
Well, I think I should wrap up.
I hope you found this interesting, and that it didn’t get too abstract.
I find all this fun. But I also like to think more seriously about how it relates to things I actually do.
And for example to my own life projects.
Well, obviously NKS is trying to tell us about everything that’s out there, independent of our human condition—and giving us a paradigm to think about it all.
And Wolfram|Alpha is trying to capture the computable knowledge of our civilization—the stuff that in a sense defines what’s special about the human condition.
And Mathematica is in a sense the bridge between these two—a language that makes raw, formal, precise computation accessible to us humans.
I have my next big project picked out: trying to find the fundamental theory of physics.
But if I get the chance to do more projects, it’s this kind of thinking about the future that’s going to determine what they are.
It’s always fun at that moment when all the abstraction condenses into something very definite—and turns into something that helps us concretely define the future.
I hope I’ll be back in a few decades to talk more about what happened.
Well, I should stop now. I’d be happy to discuss both abstract and concrete things.
Thanks very much.”
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/hplus2010/
Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/if-the-answer-is-42-what-is-the-question
mazsa
100-Year Starship Program
http://www.kurzweilai.net/nasa-ames-worden-reveals-darpa-funded-hundred-year-starship-program
mazsa
The International Space Station (ISS) Multilateral Coordination Board (MCB) has approved for public release an International Docking System Standard (IDSS) which contains the information necessary to describe physical features and design loads of a standard docking interface.
International Space Station Partner Agencies:
Canadian Space Agency (CSA)
European Space Agency (ESA)
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)
Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos)
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
http://www.internationaldockingstandard.com/
http://www.internationaldockingstandard.com/download/IDSS_IDD_Basic_Revision_101810_1245.pdf
Cf:
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/oct/HQ_10-266_Docking_Standards.html
mazsa
A new planet that’s the right size and location for life has been discovered 20 light-years away.
The newly discovered world exists in a solar system very similar to our own but much smaller.
Current technologies won’t allow scientists to study the planet’s atmosphere for chemical signs of life.
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Recently Discovered Habitable World May Not Exist http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/10/recently-discovered-habitable-world.html
admin
First ever solar sail is successful: “HAYABUSA Completed TCM-4 operation, precise guidance to WPA – JAXA would like to announce that TCM-4 operation was successfully completed (15:00 June 9th, 2010 (JST)). By this operation, Hayabusa spacecraft was precisely guided to WPA in Australia. Hayabusa system is going well.”
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/12/10/1335245/is-the-earth-special