Sounds like their source material dates back to '65 or so.

Andy

According to this article, Eros will be 'hurtling past' Earth on Tuesday next week.

Closest approach will actually be ~27 million km.

Only 27 million miles! Why that's nearly 3/4 of the distance that the planet Venus "hurtles" past Earth every now and then! I hope someone is also working on a plan to blast Venus into tiny pieces.

That should be: "According to this headline..."

The article itself states, "...a chunk of rock 400 times the City of London is set to hurtle closer than a rock of its size has in a very long time." I take this to be a factual statement albeit vividly expressed.

(Sorry, no offense meant to the poster, but one of my pet peeves is condemning an article for language used in the headline.)

None taken!

It's a fair point, the body text does qualify the headline somewhat, it just made me smile. Eros will be 'hurtling past' Earth in a similar way to how I'll be 'hurtling past' the Eiffel tower later this week when I drive up the motorway into London

The Washington Post has announced that MSL has landed successfully.

Phew! What a relief!................WAIT! WHAT?!

Yep, they had even prepared a video for it, which has now been taken offline.

NASA's Curiosity Rover Successfully Touches Down On Mars
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/hea...810f_video.html

Strange reporting in one online success announcement:

(Emphasis mine)

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8511758/n...s-rover-on-mars

I wouldn't call it inaccurate. In fact, that's not bad at all from a media outlet that (I assume) is not primarily presented in the English language.

That was my first impression, until I Googled rocket blaster and discovered that they are popular toys powered by air. I can see how the use of that term could stand out as a humorous mistake to someone familiar with the toy.

Oh, this is beautiful. Just heard a local newscaster on NBC Los Angeles do a story on MSL describing the FSW upgrade.

Went fine, until he said something like 'Oh, by the way! The average celphone on Earth has a faster processor than Curiosity! The reason why is that technology on Earth has been advancing as Curiosity traveled 154 million miles to Mars!'

Gonna call the station and complain; this was just egregious. Considering that this is one of the local stations for Pasadena & therefore JPL, I hope I won't be the only one.

Went off the rails with "the reason why..."

Did anyone else have the unfortuneate experience of reading this article ?

MSL/MAHLI.

Ooof! The comments thread gallery agrees.

Egads! I mean, I know there is a movement out there to try and put down anyone with intelligence and an education (for reasons forum rules won't let me get into), but to let these kinds of comments about people smart enough to land spacecraft on other planets into media reporting on the space program is just plain wrong.

Can you imagine if CBS News, in 1969, felt it had to "counter-balance" Walter Cronkite's enthusiastic reporting on the space program with Ricky Redneck's comments on how we shouldn't let these gul-durned eggheads control everything?

I never thought the future would really bring us into the age of the Marching Morons. I'm disappointed to see I was wrong. Which does bring up the concept of using the space program to directly attack the problem -- you know, let everyone know about all those wonderful colonization opportunities on Venus, for example...

-the other Doug

I see people against space exploration fundamentally divided into two groups: a) people who have a different agenda, b ) people who do not understand space exploration. I view group b ) as the equivalent of an "electrical impedance matching" problem. That is, I need to find a common ground so that I can bring space exploration to their area of interest. I rarely succeed in doing so, but in those rare moments where I am successful I know I have reduced group b ) and removed power to group a).

Paolo

I don't exactly see the inaccuracy; statements of fact can be inaccurate but impressions are just impressions.
What we have here is just a struggling writer who vaguely grasps that controversy attracts attention, posting on a website trying hard to keep people's attention until it can figure out a business plan.

Just turned on an episode of "Mysteries at the Museum" on the Travel Channel. They visited a museum in New Mexico that has a well-designed, full-sized MER model, which encouraged them to tell the tale of Spirit, The Mars Rover!

Gee -- did you know that just as soon as the Sol 18 anomaly was resolved Spirit had to immediately run for the southernmost place it could get to so it could survive the winter that was closing in fast (and that promised a full 90 days of darkness)? And that, during this frantic flight for survival, her wheel then failed and then they discovered silica in the failed wheel trench and so stopped worrying about the winter?

Not exactly how I remember the timeline back in 2004...

-the other Doug

The Weather Channel just said the weather on Mars is unpredictable, which as we all know is not really true.

Well, yes and no...for example, when conditions are right, sometimes there's a global dust storm, sometimes there isn't. Whether anywhere is somewhat unpredictable.

An almost pointless story:

Guardian Website:


Now - while I'm glad the Guardian is raising the risk of impacts - had the meteorite's timing been "only a few hours" different, the Earth wouldn't have been in the way at all. And the latitude in this context is quite meaningless.

Andy

Perhaps the Copernican revolution didnt make it to the Gaurniad editorial offices.... in that context, the statement seems plausible.

Per the Guardian story, in Cosmos, Carl Sagan makes a very similar point about how if the Earth had rotated a bit more the Tunguska event might have leveled Moscow and if it had happened during the Cold War, that might have started a nuclear war.

Counterfactuals are always subject to scrutiny regarding their relevance ("if π were 2.5...", "if the Queen were a man...") but if Carl Sagan saw a point worth making, I can't blame The Guardian for making a similar one.

"...if it had entered the atmosphere at only a slightly different time of day..."j

The way to look at it is 'if there had been some difference in the timing of the event, due to a miniscule difference in the motion of the meteor or the Earth, the result would have been different.'

I'm zipping through the (otherwise highly readable) "The Little Ice Age - How Climate Made History" by Brian Fagan. It's the first edition from 2000. Hopefully the following line has been amended since then:





Sloppy writing like this always precipitates thoughts along the lines of "what else is hugely wrong in this book?"

Andy

Oh, I thought it just used sonar to measure its distance from the Sun.

Phil

It's easy to take shots at this admittedly sloppy writing, but I'm not sure that even sites like http://solar-center.stanford.edu/singing/singing.html do all that good a job of explaining how SOHO actually measures "sounds" from the Sun. Calling any periodic behavior a "sound" seems like be a source of some confusion.

At work, we tell people that we communicate with spacecraft via radio waves.
They ask if they can hear the radio signals we receive as if they were a sound*.
Most seem to simply equate radio with the one they have at home or in the car - the box that makes sound - as opposed to the electromagnetic medium being used to carry the data.

*Of course we can convert it to a sound but that partly defeats the purpose of the science we want to pass on.

But... but...

That really surprizes me. I thought these days everyone was listening to internet streaming radio stations rather than AM/FM, and thought of radio as a way to transmit data to their devices via wifi or cellphone connections. Maybe they don't realize that cellphones and wifi use radio waves?

British space penetrator passes icy test
"The steel penetrator was fired at a 10-tonne cube of ice to simulate the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa."

This doesn't seem like a very good test. If the surface of Europa is as hard as granite due to the extreme cold, maybe the real test would be to shoot the penetrator into a block of granite! Or maybe not. I'm sure there are other variables to consider, like brittleness. But in any case, it doesn't' t seem to me that this was a very realistic test.

Given that they were testing this on Earth, in our gravity, atmosphere and ice composition, I don't doubt the engineers knew that it wouldn't be perfect; not that we know very much about Europan surface ice conditions in the first place.
And at those speeds, hitting anything (at 24,000 G!) is probably a lot like hitting granite .

There's a Youtube video
showing a test (starting at 19:00) in sand a few years ago. The impact force in that test was 10,000 G. The force in the recent ice test was 24,000 G and in the talk about the sand test, the speaker mentions that the force of a Europa impact would be 50,000 G. If that is accurate, I guess they are closer than I thought to testing to the actual forces that would be seen.

They can always just margin test here... not a total facsimile, but do something like fire it at much higher speeds than expected.

Hardness and brittleness aren't correlated, either. Granite might be both harder and stronger than what they expect.

It seems to me that using what they expect the strength and hardness of Europa surface ice to be, a man-made facsimile could be made. It might be a resin mix of some sort for example. I wonder if something like limestone would provide a tougher (more accurate) test than ice.

Here's a really stoopid article inferring that NASA wants to build a theme park on the Moon
http://bit.ly/13jo6DJ

Article on blue moon --

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/...ht-sky/2679903/

"Initially, the phrase referred to the third full moon in a month, ..."

Have my own story this time; a few minutes ago CBC news showed this picture on TV, but had a caption saying that it commemorated the 'spacecraft's return' to Earth. For a second or two my jaw hung open; last time I checked, Cassini is exactly where it should be, and the only planet it's going to return to is Saturn itself in a couple of years!
I think the issue arose because of a misreading picture's caption, which says (emphasis mine)

Still, rather unexpected to see such a glaring blooper from this country's normally scientifically literate media...

...this country's normally scientifically literate media...

Oh, that made me laugh the hardest. You can add Australia to that list!!

The Sun's magnetic field is about to flip - and the Independent (a normally-ok UK newspaper) suggest this could cause:

Intergalactic weather fronts

Oh my!

Andy

Intergalactic? Blimey! We better duck and cover then.

I do wonder if such a magnetic reversal will cause any changes to the bubble around the sun? Still far short on anything intergalactic though. But the Voyagers might pick up something interesting perhaps.

Just watched the Science channel ISON documentary. Accuracy report/review:
They way overestimate the nucleus size, but as the latest results are from the week after we can't blame them for that.
Far worse is when they show the deep impact footage when explaining crater formation, but label it 'comet Halley'. At least they got Hartley right. A few misleading shots of asteroids and SDO Lovejoy pics, along with the usual reality TV cgi. No mention of amateur observation apart from about 10 seconds of the Russian discoverers.
The image processing behind the Hubble images is probably a welcome addition for many on this forum, along with the sample harpoon testing (and the Comet Hopper/ Rosetta bits) too.

A big deal is being made - and rightly - about the beautiful Lunar Orbiter image of Earth above the lunar horizon - apparently a digital file of it was loaded onto LADEE. Except that it's being equated with the Apollo 8 Earthrise pic and referred to as 'the first Earthrise image' (http://spaceref.com/the-first-earthrise-im...o-the-moon.html)

Actually, the Lunar Orbiter image shows Earthset. Nit-picky, I know, but this IS the interrnet.

Phil

Winnipeg beats out Gale crater for low temperatures (briefly):

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/win...lanet-1.2479967

Not exactly 'inaccuracy', but a bit of an odd comparison; night temperatures are a tad more insulated on Earth, hmm?

Well this takes the cake. :wacko:Quotes a whole lot of UMSF member related blogs, tweets etc.
http://on.rt.com/sgkqhk

Is 0630 local after a bad night at work for me.

After just seeing that, is it REALLY too early to begin drinking heavily?

This thing in the '(not) recommended' sidebar caught my eye:

"Sun-blown ISON comet remains harvested in Antarctic". :Groan:


The Russian equivalent of Weekly World News....

I usually hate nitpicking but today I feel like nitpicking.

On the release: NASA Hosts News Conference About 10 Years of Roving on Mars it says:
"Opportunity is continuing to provide scientific results, and currently is investigating the rim of a crater 14 miles (22 kilometers) wide."

The way that reads, it's saying that the rim is '14 miles/22kms' wide.
It would have read better if it said: '...investigating the rim of a 14 mile (22 kilometer) wide crater.'

But I'm just nitpicking

Are you saying that if I said 'I took the hat of a man six feet tall', you would think it was the hat that was six feet tall?

So the wikipedia entry on this says that post-positive adjectives are archaic or poetic. So I read Stu's latest poem commemorative, hoping for an example most poetical, and yet the opportunity on the line penultimate was squandered with "lost love."

Centsworth:
Grammatically yes
intellectually no
and the indicated that it was said in good humour.
Language is a funny thing.