posted
Anybody played around with World Wind at all? Looks incredbily cool. I'll probably be downloading it tonight. Looks like it's been around for a year, but they've just released a lunar module for it. Very cool.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_raven: If "Xena" has a moon, will we be forced to call it "Gabrielle"?
I'd prefer Joxter.
Congratz and Good luck on the moon-rover.
You joke, but they did decide on Gabrielle for the moon. And it's Joxer, btw. A name I'd reserve for a planet or moon that's extremely annoying.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:The 10-centimetre-tall robot, called Minerva (Micro/Nano Experimental Robot Vehicle for Asteroid), was designed to hop around the 600-metre-long rock, snapping close-up images with three cameras and taking temperature measurements of the surface.
Do you suppose it's also because Minerva's mother, Thetis, was turned into a fly by Jupiter (for the all to common reason that her child was prophesied to overthrow him) and when she was born he had worse and worse headaches until Vulcan split his head open and let her out?
I guess I'm a little disappointed they didn't describe her as being a decimeter.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Different expiriment, and at least they aren't trying to catch it on the way down this time. Anyone going to go watch for it?
Posts: 1368 | Registered: Sep 2002
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Actually the star is believed to be too young to have planets in the sense of our SolarSystem. The article is about the discovery of oppositely-rotating inner and outer dust clouds. (Dust clouds are believed contain the material out of which planets are formed.) And probably more common during the early stellar&planetary formation process, and more expectable, than the article implies. Since planets traveling in opposite directions would gravitationally steal each others momentum, and thereby lower each others orbit, counter-rotating discs could be an explanation for how the hot jupiters formed.
posted
An interesting article on the development of new nomenclature for orbiting objects within the SolarSystem.
And it has been newly discovered that the "temperature" of dark matter particles within our galaxy would be ~10,000degreesKelvin*. But since a dark matter particle doesn't interact** with normal matter except gravitationally, it can't be assigned temperature*** except by analogy.
* A degree in Kelvin is the same size as one in Celsius -- ie 1.8degrees in the FahrenheitScale -- but the KelvinScale zero degrees is at AbsoluteZero while the CelsiusScale zero degrees is the freezing point of water.
** Or more accurately, interacts extremely rarely except gravitationally. A good analogy would be the neutrino, which can travel through a lightyear of lead before there is a 50% chance of it having hit a lead atom. And the less energetic that a neutrino is, the farther it could travel before reaching that 50% chance of collision.
*** And time for yet another airing of a pet peeve concerning science reporting for the general public: "about 6 miles per second (9km/s)" is disinformative in a way that it makes it hard to notice an interesting fact. 6 miles per second is equal to ~9.656 kilometers per second. And considering the "about", in this case it would be more informative to describe 6 miles per second as 10 kilometers per second. Due to a fortuitous coincidence in choices made for the duration of the second and the degree scale in Kelvin and the length of the metre, a first rule of thumb in translating a known speed into an equivalent temperature is: speed in metres per second approximately(~)equals degrees in Kelvin. Since one kilometre equals one thousand metres, "about 6 miles per second (~10km/sec)" would more accurately reflect the translation process into the 10,000degreesKelvin used within the article.
quote: Scientists were also able to conclude that the universe is composed of about 4 percent real matter, about 23 percent dark matter, and about 73 percent dark energy. Nobody actually knows what dark matter or dark energy are, however.
Loved that bit about not actually knowing what 96% of the universe actually is yet.
Posts: 1368 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
Looking at the problem backwards leads to drawing the wrong conclusions about the nature of the Hubble constant. Google up Hawking no boundary Baez end universe Rindler horizon Schwarzschild bubble Hoyle Narlikar
Why ya don't wanna live in the stellar neighborhood of cannibals or the living dead.
Interesting simulation showing how protoplanets decrease the size of their orbits because of the formation process. Though I'm fairly certain that the hypothesized subsequent destruction is wrong cuz the modelers started off with the wrong parameters for the proto-planetary disk formed by the stellar ignition process.
You know, every time I see an article like this I think about how long it would take us to realize that some smallish celestial object was actually a ship or probe built by some alien civilization.
Hm...I'm guessing that I've already talked about that somewhere in this thread, but I'm too lazy to go back and see for sure.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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PASADENA, CA—NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists overseeing the ongoing Mars Exploration Rover Mission said Monday that the Spirit's latest transmissions could indicate a growing resentment of the Red Planet.
quote: "Granted, Spirit has been extraordinarily useful to our work," Callas said. "Last week, however, we received three straight days of images of the same rock with the message 'HAPPY NOW?'"
**Should have warned that the article contains language that some people will find offensive.**
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
There's something bizarrely psychic going on here. I was thinking about this thread last night after I went to bed, a good four hours or so before sndrake bumped the thread. Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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I hadn't had time to check the news today, Architraz Warden, so I hadn't seen that. Thanks for the link!
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
This BBC article includes some cautionary notes about other - and possibly more plausible - explanations:
quote:Other scientists think it possible that gullies like this were caused not by water but by liquid carbon dioxide.
One of the reasons for favouring CO2 was that computer models of the Martian crust indicated water could exist only at depths of several kilometres. Liquid carbon dioxide, on the other hand, could persist much nearer the surface where temperatures can drop as low as -107C.
Prospects for life
Oded Aharonson, an assistant professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) said that while the interpretation of recent water activity on Mars was "compelling," it was just one possible explanation.
Aharonson said further study was needed to determine whether the deposits could have been left there by the flow of dust rather than water.
posted
Well, you know, the sun is hot; the sun is not a place where we could live, but here on Earth there'd be no life without the light it gives.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
In other news, it looks like there might be caves on Mars!
Big ones.
quote:Researchers say pictures from a Mars orbiter show holes the size of football fields that may be the entrances to subterranean caverns. If the claims prove to be true, such caves would be prime targets in the search for extraterrestrial life and prime real estate for future human settlements.
If this bears out, it's an exciting development, both in terms of exploration and possible habitation. It would probably be much easier to build secure habitats in stable caves, given the problems with radiation and duststorms on the surface.
(Link has pictures)
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
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