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Space: The Final Frontier

fallout

Member
michaeld said:
Do you guys thin there are parallel universes? I was listening to an interview with some particle physicist and he was talk about alternate dimensions used to be a joke but now are a serious point of discussion.
Multiverses are an interesting discussion, for sure ... but not really something we can test for (at the moment, anyway). In my own mind, it all sort of gets back to the Anthropic Principle and the difference between the Weak one and the Strong one, but then you start drifting off into philosophy land, where I try not to tread very often anymore. Basically, it's something best discussed over a few beers.

dark_chris said:
Whats the sound though? Just radio waves or somethin? I don't really get it.
From here:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia07966.html

Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions, which have been monitored by the Cassini spacecraft. The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth's northern and southern lights. This is an audio file of radio emissions from Saturn.

The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these radio emissions in April 2002, when Cassini was 374 million kilometers (234 million miles) from the planet, using the Cassini radio and plasma wave science instrument. The radio and plasma wave instrument has now provided the first high resolution observations of these emissions, showing an amazing array of variations in frequency and time. The complex radio spectrum with rising and falling tones, is very similar to Earth's auroral radio emissions. These structures indicate that there are numerous small radio sources moving along magnetic field lines threading the auroral region.

Time on this recording has been compressed, so that 73 seconds corresponds to 27 minutes. Since the frequencies of these emissions are well above the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a factor of 44.
 

michaeld

Banned
080116-iod-rovertracks-04.jpg

nasapix01ck9.jpg

2007240611392869et1.jpg
 

michaeld

Banned
fallout said:
Multiverses are an interesting discussion, for sure ... but not really something we can test for (at the moment, anyway). In my own mind, it all sort of gets back to the Anthropic Principle and the difference between the Weak one and the Strong one, but then you start drifting off into philosophy land, where I try not to tread very often anymore. Basically, it's something best discussed over a few beers.

From here:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia07966.html


If Nasa or the gov. knew anything, we would never be told I am sure. It would shake religious foundations and society.
 
Shorty said:
Why do you think so? I'm interested.

It was taken by Bill Anders of the Apollo 8 crew, the first humans ever to leave the orbit of the Earth. It's (IIRC) the first image of the earth in its full circle form and added the perspective that the Earth is not an invulnerable permanent identity. But a fragile small object that we need to take care of.

It changed a lot of peoples perspectives of the Earth which has contributed to the environmental movement.
 

Amir0x

Banned
DeathNote said:
does the bible or any religious doctrine explain other planets?

Explain in what way?

The Mormons have an entire religious theology surrounding planets. Many religions "explain" the planets in the natural ways the Bible does: expressions which glorify God, bodies which represent guidance from God (help for light, navigation, time keeping purposes). Some say further yet that the final ultimate purpose has not yet been revealed by God.

The Bible makes several mentions of Planets, but mostly as dramatic devices. Venus, or Mazzaroth, "son of the morning." Saturn as well, summarized here:

Saturn is no less certainly represented by the star Kaiwan, adored by the reprobate Israelites in the desert (Amos 5:26). The same word (interpreted to mean "steadfast") frequently designates, in the Babylonian inscriptions, the slowest-moving planet; while Sakkuth, the divinity associated with the star by the prophet, is an alternative appellation for Ninib, who, as a Babylonian planet-god, was merged with Saturn. The ancient Syrians and Arabs, too, called Saturn Kaiwan, the corresponding terms in the Zoroastrian Bundahish being Kevan. The other planets are individualized in the Bible only by implication. The worship of gods connected with them is denounced, but without any manifest intention of refering to the heavenly bodies. Thus, Gad and Meni (Isaias, lxv, 11) are, no doubt, the "greater and the lesser Fortune" typified throughout the East by Jupiter and Venus; Neba, the tutelary deity of Borsippa (Isaias xlvi, 1), shone in the sky as Mercury, and Nergal, transplanted frorn Assyria to Kutha (2 Kings 17:30), as Mars.

There's nothing inherently anti-religious about the existence of planets, if that's your point.
 

C.Dark.DN

Banned
Amir0x said:
Explain in what way?

The Mormons have an entire religious theology surrounding planets. Many religions "explain" the planets in the natural ways the Bible does: expressions which glorify God, bodies which represent guidance from God (help for light, navigation, time keeping purposes). Some say further yet that the final ultimate purpose has not yet been revealed by God.

The Bible makes several mentions of Planets, but mostly as dramatic devices. Venus, or Mazzaroth, "son of the morning." Saturn as well, summarized here:



There's nothing inherently anti-religious about the existence of planets, if that's your point.
I'm asking more in terms of knowing what the planets are (that it's a planet similar to earth but bigger) around the time Jesus was born in the bible rather than a big star randomly named saturn. Because I don't see people being aware of it in early times especially since we used to think the world was flat and the shinny dot named saturn is circular. The answer has to be no, since if they knew planets like earth existed then they would have concluded earth was round.

On biblegateway.com searching like the king james version and etc, planets and saturn don't come up. So are these examples rewritten in modern times?

I dont know, after watching that video, I'm just thinking that religious views are very... everything extends from earth rather than earth is a small dot in everything. I have no point to lead into.
 

XMonkey

lacks enthusiasm.
Shorty said:
Why do you think so? I'm interested.

Subarushian summed it up well.

The image is stunning simply for the perspective it portrays as human beings for the first time left our own planet, traveled to, and landed on an object in outer space. The foreground of the moon makes it unlike almost every picture of the Earth out there, and puts the viewer in the place of someone observing our planet from afar. Very few photographs can represent so much.
 
pia09188-browse.jpg


This is the storm on the polar cap of Saturn. I believe someone else posted a picture of it here. Notice it's shape. It's not circular. It's a Hexagon.

This is not normal, and scientists don't understand it. (According to the discovery channel's show "The Universe")
 

NumberTwo

Paper or plastic?
DeathNote said:
actually, not really?
Listen. I just don't want this thread of beautiful imagery to devolve into another pointless philosophical debate, people get all pissy about that shit and their are plenty of threads to contain that topic. Let's just enjoy the show.
 

Rindain

Banned
So who here thinks a manned mission will be sent to Mars within 40 years?

I sure hope so, for my own sake. I'm jealous of those who lived through the Apollo program.
 

lexi

Banned
Scopebob Sniperpants said:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/cassini/pia09188-browse.jpg

This is the storm on the polar cap of Saturn. I believe someone else posted a picture of it here. Notice it's shape. It's not circular. It's a Hexagon.

This is not normal, and scientists don't understand it. (According to the discovery channel's show "The Universe")

I'd say more septagon.
 
Scopebob Sniperpants said:
pia09188-browse.jpg


This is the storm on the polar cap of Saturn. I believe someone else posted a picture of it here. Notice it's shape. It's not circular. It's a Hexagon.

This is not normal, and scientists don't understand it. (According to the discovery channel's show "The Universe")

I remember that. Very intriguing.
 

Amir0x

Banned
DeathNote said:
I'm asking more in terms of knowing what the planets are (that it's a planet similar to earth but bigger) around the time Jesus was born in the bible rather than a big star randomly named saturn. Because I don't see people being aware of it in early times especially since we used to think the world was flat and the shinny dot named saturn is circular. The answer has to be no, since if they knew planets like earth existed then they would have concluded earth was round.

On biblegateway.com searching like the king james version and etc, planets and saturn don't come up. So are these examples rewritten in modern times?

I dont know, after watching that video, I'm just thinking that religious views are very... everything extends from earth rather than earth is a small dot in everything. I have no point to lead into.

Well, for the record, you should know that the few allusions to Earth's shape in the Bible aren't exactly incorrect - they suggest the Earth was round (or circular), not flat, for the record.

Isaiah 40:22

It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:

There's a few who say these references may refer to a flat circle surface with a dome stretched over it, but that interpretation doesn't seem particularly sound. There wasn't a appropriate word for "sphere" in the language at the time.

In any event, in philosophical terms the ancients were aware of the vastness and scale of space... and used it in many ways. "Host of heaven", etc.

That said, this is a science thread... clearly, if you're asking religion to address each of these aspects of scientific research in their holy books you're looking for the wrong place :p
 

RiZ III

Member
Why the heck to they spend billions of dollars and not equip some of these stupid things with color cameras? The pics from the mercury website are all b&w.
 

GaimeGuy

Volunteer Deputy Campaign Director, Obama for America '16
The_Dude said:
Seeing those size comparisons makes me glad the human brain can't truly coprehend our own insignifigance. The worst thing, though, is that (correct me if I'm wrong) YV Canis Majoris is the largest known star. Could even that be dwarfed by something else out there?

Anyway, there are some truly amazing pictures in this thread. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for reincarnation so that I might get to explore these places myself one day!
All those stars we know of are in our own galaxy.

We haven't seen the insides of other galaxies yet.
 

Arthas

Banned
RiZ III said:
Why the heck to they spend billions of dollars and not equip some of these stupid things with color cameras? The pics from the mercury website are all b&w.

A B&W photo is just as good as a colour photo for research purposes. The addition of colour doesn't really tell them all that much more, and considering they have a puny amount of bandwidth between earth and the far away spacecraft, which would you choose...20 black and white photos beamed back in 24 hours or 1 colour photo beamed back in 24hours?

From my understanding, their communication bandwidth with these long range robotic spacecraft means that they don't even approach 1Kb/sec. That's the sad reality of mixing radio waves with spastic distances.
 

fallout

Member
RiZ III said:
Why the heck to they spend billions of dollars and not equip some of these stupid things with color cameras? The pics from the mercury website are all b&w.
You'd be surprised how much it costs to put a camera on a space probe. Usually, it means removing another scientific instrument. In general, scientific bodies fight to keep cameras off and the space agencies' PR department fight to keep them on. It's an interesting balance.
 

RiZ III

Member
GaimeGuy said:
What is this? :O

The global defense system. It's like a big shield that will protect us from asteroids and such.

You'd be surprised how much it costs to put a camera on a space probe. Usually, it means removing another scientific instrument. In general, scientific bodies fight to keep cameras off and the space agencies' PR department fight to keep them on. It's an interesting balance.

Huh. Interesting. MOAR PICTURES!
 

Ketchup Boy

Junior Member
this only reason why i'm taking astronomy even though i have to take a lab science. i hate science classes but this stuff actually looks interesting so I hope I'm not dissapointed
 

Kuramu

Member
Not for the sights but for the sounds...
A few of you might remember this site I made. We used real sounds from NASA of natural events as well as hours of mission audio. We each won a Webby for this site as you might recall.

click on either the "Spacesounds Navigator" or "Mission Control"
http://www.spacesounds.com/
 

Windu

never heard about the cat, apparently
Supernova Destroys "Pillars of Creation"
8a4a2pv.jpg

In a thousand years, astronomers predicted in January, people on Earth will see the iconic "Pillars of Creation" get toppled by a supernova, the explosive death of a giant star.

The pillars are dense clouds of gas in the Eagle Nebula, a star nursery in the constellation Serpens, near Sagittarius. They were made famous by a dramatic 1995 Hubble Space Telescope image (inset).

The tricky part is that the forecast was based on evidence that the pillars were demolished by the supernova's shockwave about 6,000 years ago.

"[They] have been destroyed. I use the past tense because the nebula is 7,000 light-years away," said Nicolas Flagey, a French doctoral student working for NASA.

In other words, light from the nebula has taken 7,000 years to reach Earth, and everything we see is that much out of date.

An infrared image of the Eagle Nebula shows a bubble of hot, rapidly expanding material directly behind the pillars, Flagey reported on January 8 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.

In the image, taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, a red mass of hot dust warmed by the supernova can be seen behind the ghostly green of the nebula. The pillars are directly in the shockwave's path.

"The pillars are not dense enough to resist" the blast, Flagey said.

The red ball can't simply be gas heated by nearby stars, he added, because only a supernova could generate that much energy.

But the blast isn't entirely bad news. Supernova shockwaves, astronomers believe, help to ignite new stars in the dust clouds that they reach.
Bizarre Object Found Circling Star
8f1vk3m.jpg

An object detected orbiting a neutron star is among the strangest planet-mass bodies ever found, astronomers said in September.

Instead of circling around a normal star, the low-mass object—likely the "skeleton" of a smaller star—orbits a rapidly spinning pulsar, or neutron star.

The neutron star spins hundreds of times a second—faster than a kitchen blender.

The odd mass, which was spotted on June 7 by NASA's Swift and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellites, orbits the bigger star in a little less than once an hour.

The body is located about 230,000 miles (370,149 kilometers) away from the star—slightly less than the distance from Earth to the moon.

Neutron stars usually slow with age, but the gas spiraling from the bizarre object has likely maintained, or even increased, the star's speed.

The star siphons off gas from the orbiting body, as seen in the above artist's illustration. The gas flow occasionally becomes unstable and causes the bright outbursts that can be seen from Earth.

Astronomers suspect the system was once made up of two stars that formed billions of years ago. Eventually the larger star went supernova, leaving behind the neutron star, while the smaller star expanded into a red giant.

It's unknown whether the smaller star will survive much longer, however.

"It's been taking a beating," Hans Krimm of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said in a statement. The neutron star, after all, has been siphoning away its mass for billions of years.

"But that's part of nature."
Jupiter Auroras "Northern Lights on Steroids"
725yp3p.jpg

No, Jupiter hasn't acquired a new toupee and goatee to impress Venus.

Those dashing purple puffs are x-ray images of the gas giant's high-voltage auroras—"northern lights on steroids," said planetary scientist Randy Gladstone of an image released by NASA in March.

The colorized picture—one of the most popular space photos featured in National Geographic News—is something of a collage. Several x-ray images from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory were combined and superimposed on the latest Hubble Space Telescope image of Jupiter.

"Jupiter has auroras bigger than our entire planet," said Gladstone, of the independent nonprofit Southwest Research Institute in Texas, in a statement.

Gladstone hopes these latest observations will help him crack some Jovian mysteries. For starters, what causes these "hyper-auroras"?

The solar system's biggest planet and its magnetic field rotate extremely quickly—every ten hours—generating ten million volts around its poles. Toss in charged particles from the volcanic moon Io and you've got a crackling, nonstop sky show.

But how do the volcanic particles get from a relatively small moon to Jupiter's planetary poles? That, Gladstone said, remains one of the planet's unsolved puzzles.
 

fallout

Member
This Project Excelsior stuff got me thinking about Apollo. For anyone with any remote interest in space travel, do yourself a favour and check out From The Earth to the Moon. It's an excellent mini-series produced by Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer and it chronicles the entire Apollo space mission in great detail. It's on Amazon for 20 bucks.



http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000A0GYD2/?tag=neogaf0e-20

TOM f'N CRUISE said:
that guy has balls.....ill give him that
From the Wikipedia article:

The first test, Excelsior I, was made on November 16, 1959. Kittinger ascended in the gondola and jumped from an altitude of 76,400 feet (23,300 m). In this first test the stabilizer chute was deployed too soon, catching Kittinger around the neck and causing him to spin at 120 revolutions per minute. This caused Kittinger to lose consciousness, but his life was saved by his main chute which opened automatically at a height of 10,000 feet (3,000 m).

Despite this near-disaster on the first test, Kittinger went ahead with another test only three weeks later. The second test, Excelsior II, was made on December 11, 1959. This time Kittinger jumped from an altitude of 74,700 feet (22,800 m) and descended in free-fall for 55,000 feet (16,800 m)before opening his main chute.

The third and final test, Excelsior III, was made on August 16, 1960. During the ascent the pressure seal in Kittinger's right glove failed, and he began to experience severe pain in his right hand. He decided not to inform the ground crew about this, in case they should decide to abort the test. Despite temporarily losing the use of his right hand, he continued with the ascent, climbing to an altitude 102,800 feet (31,300 m). The ascent took one hour and 31 minutes and broke the previous manned balloon altitude record of 101,516 feet (30,942 m), which was set by Major David Simons as part of Project Manhigh in 1957. Kittinger stayed at peak altitude for 12 minutes, waiting for the balloon to drift over the landing target area. He then stepped out of the gondola to begin his descent.

The small stabilizer chute deployed successfully and Kittinger fell for 4 minutes and 36 seconds, setting a still-standing world record for the longest parachute free-fall (although some authorities do not count this as a free-fall record because of the use of the stabilizer chute). At an altitude of 17,500 feet (5,300 m), Kittinger opened his main chute and landed safely in the New Mexico desert. The whole descent took 13 minutes and 45 seconds and set the current world record for the highest parachute jump.

During the descent, Kittinger experienced temperatures as low as −94 °F (−70 °C). In the free-fall stage he reached a top speed that is variously estimated as 214 to 250 meters per second; in later interviews, Kittinger put his top speed at 614 mph (274 m/s).

A plaque attached below the open door of the Excelsior III gondola read "This is the highest step in the world".
Yeah. Balls.
 

Windu

never heard about the cat, apparently
Here are some cool links from Howstuffworks.com

How Inflatable Spacecraft Will Work
Inflatable spacecraft will revolutionize satellites and space habitats.
How Light Propulsion Will Work
Like many new technologies, light propulsion was originally conceived as a tool of war and national defense. But the "Star Wars" missile defense system may eventually send rockets, rather than missile-destroying lasers, into space.
How Robonauts Will Work
Robot astronauts will be able to work in space much more efficiently than people
How Space Elevators Will Work
A space shuttle launch is expensive -- about $10,000 per pound. The LiftPort Group is developing a new system that could cut the cost down to about $400 per pound. Find out how a space elevator might be your ticket into orbit.
How Space Planes Will Work
Space planes are likely to be the replacement for the space shuttle.
How the Orion CEV Will Work
NASA needs a vehicle capable of carrying crew and payloads to Earth orbit, the moon and Mars. Learn about the technologies of the new Crew Exploration Vehcile and find out how it will help us explore the moon and beyond.
What if we lived on the moon?
it's safe to assume there won't be a moon colony any time soon. But it's still a tantalizing thought. But wouldn't it be cool to be able to live, vacation and work on the moon?
Why is NASA playing with marbles?
Bill Cooke, NASA scientist, is regularly shooting marbles into carefully arranged piles of soil. Why is NASA paying this man to do something most of us would do for free? It's all about our return to the moon.
more here
 
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