The funny thing is, the algebraic equation 14mi/22km results in a factor of one. But as to unit of measure, that factor is indeterminate. Either side of the equation can be rendered into the same uom as the other -- i.e., 14mi/14mi, or 22km/22km. Since it cannot be a radius of both 1km and 1mi, the resulting factor of 1 is thus indeterminate...



-the other Doug

SpaceflightNow has, like many other sites, an article talking about Opportunity's 10 years.
Opportunity rover marks 10 years on the red planet

It includes a couple of pictures, the first one is of a dusty deck pan and the second one is, according to the article, "Next up for Opportunity: a climb along the rim of Endeavour Crater to an area known as Cape Tribulation, straight ahead in this view from the rover's camera". But if you look at the picture, it's part of a mosaic taken by Spirit at the top of Husband Hill and looking down at Home Plate.
Click to view attachment

I am afraid this error came directly from JPL. At least part of it. On the press release page for the NASA Smithsonian 10 year event, they have the Spirit Everest pan image with a caption about Opportunity at Duck Bay.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-003

I reported the error to Kay Ferarri, the Coordinator for the Solar System Amabassador program at JPL and she sent it on to one of the PR people. I am not sure, but, I think the caption I originally saw was the one in the SpaceflightNow article; could it be that the changed one inaccurate caption for another without changing the picture?

Anyway, it is not always the fault of the media. But these errors can be very persistent on the internet once they are out there. One wishes that the SpaceflightNow people would be able to recognize the error and correct it before they posted it.

Ron, Solar System Ambassador since 2001.

I might be nitpicking on a detail here, but I cannot reconcile the term Exceptionally close with the supernova in M82 - 12 million light years away. That's to far even by astronomical standards.

Sigh...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/202863315/NASA-Lawsuit

Bet this gets dismissed in near record time. But it was amusing. I had expected a different plaintiff who has a history of outlandish claims concocted from planetary data

That is shockingly coherent and shockingly ignorant of the speed at which things happens on Mars, all at once.

a very "bad" lawsuit
you can see in just those two photos that the pebbles were moved and you can trace the route the "doughnut" took . by the moved small pebbles.

yes it is a bit "odd" but that is it , just odd

like the bits of plastic that were found and the rather "shiny" rock

then there is that one photo that has ( what is it about 6) anthropomorphisms in it

there will always be "odd" things in photos

that is the fun of all this data
finding things .

but finding REAL things .

On Astro0's 2014 survey, I had suggested that maybe the forum had been too hard on Astrobiology and that maybe that topic should be allowed. Sigh...probably not...I didn't realize how fast things can degenerate.

I'm a microbiologist who is very interested in what may eventually be discovered on Mars...Guess I'll have to be satisfied with finding molecular evidence for novel rare and interesting bacterial life forms here on earth.

MOD NOTE: Yeah, they sure can degenerate fast. Urge everyone to read the first paragraph of this post very carefully…Floyd nailed it.

Yes there's one or rather two persons who have been advocating their own interpretations of various data and images for many years.
This is another person though, but yet I expect it to be dismissed also.

@JhonnyVV: Yes the human brain have an ability to create images or patterns in forms we see, nature provides us with a Rorschach test. Not so long ago I were confused with some fossils in limerock here, turned out to be bivalvia - almost embarrassed to say what I thought they were at first.

@Floyd: Yes things can go downhill pretty fast, yet when it is part of the mission planning or profile, the instrumentation and purpose should be possible to discuss. Else the forum go into the shady territory of censoring actual science.

Until a few days ago, when I logged on and looked at the right hand side of my screen it would say "Bright supernova explodes in..djellison". Is Doug OK?

I survived long enough to get a picture of M99's supernova as well.

Glad to hear that!

And yes, nice cap, the supernova at 5 o'clock clearly seen in your image.
(I actually tried to do a bit of amateur astronomy myself last night, but.... it turned out to be one the worst aurora nights I had this year.)

From NASA page on the Venus “hot flow anomaly”

''... an atmosphere so dense that spacecraft landing there are crushed within hours, ....”

Was not the functional life of the Venera landers limited by battery life and possibly over heating? Crushed within hours, umm??

the crushing was not an issue once the 90 ATM was discovered

it is the 900C temp that plays ( to put it mildly ) havoc with the electronics .

It is fairly common to run across the imagery in the press of Venusian landers being "crushed" to death within hours of landing. IIRC, what happened more is that the systems which maintained the internal Earth-normal pressurized spaces (which housed the electronics) failed and the internal pressures and temperatures rapidly equalized with the local environment. (Russian electronics in their space probes of the day were generally air-cooled and were maintained at sea-level pressure, often in plain air but sometimes in a nitrogen-only atmosphere.)

The pressure shells didn't dramatically implode (once they figured out about the surface pressure, as was noted below), but the effect was quite similar. And I believe that the ultimate failure of the pressure control systems often occurred due to implosion of connecting pipes and of windows in the sea-level-pressurized spaces used to look out onto the surface and connect to external systems.

-the other Doug

So the Veneras and others might still hold their original shape even after all these years on the surface? A bit surprising!
Presumably they're not puddles either, but only one way to find out how well that engineering held up...

As something of a non-sequitur, the Science channel runs a program called Futurescape, with James Woods as narrator. The advertising tag line for this show is "What happens in the future starts right now." However, my mind keeps wanting to merge this into a different ad line from a different ad campaign, and thus making it a cosmologically more-correct statement:

"What happens in the future, stays in the future!""



-the other Doug

The Veneras recorded surface temps in the region of 455C-465C, but I agree temperature is a big problem!


That doesn’t necessarily mean it's correct!


The Venera landers had limited battery power [design life 30-32 minutes] and relied on the cruise stage/orbiters to relay data to Earth, once the battery failed or the orbiters flew out of range the mission ended. The JPL website states 'The landers’ capabilities were not the limiting factors in the surface survival time; instead, each mission terminated when its orbiter exited the communication range.’ http://vfm.jpl.nasa.gov/othervenusmissions/veneravegarussia/ What then happened to the landers after the data relay ended is speculation.


As the internal atmosphere warmed up, the internal pressure would increase thereby reducing the pressure differential and the loading! However I agree at some stage the internal and external must have equalised but whether that occurred dynamically (implosion) or by slow in-leakage, or by internal pressure build-up, we do not know. Nor whether it occurred within hours, or days or even years!

To state that the landers were “crushed within hours” I believe is highly misleading and serves only to mis-inform.


Difficult to say, but I think yes!

According to this blog posting by the University of Leicester, regarding "drilling in progress" by Curiosity, it appears as though we have a new (smaller diameter) drill on the rover

Puts a whole new spin on the phrase 'mini drill'

LINK to the report



Click to view attachment

Don't know if any other thread is a better place to put this, but July 2nd's xkcd is a pretty cool, especially for all you mappers.

Big version: http://xkcd.com/1389/large/

Unfortunately Europa isn't likely to replace Greenland anytime soon.

Can someone please reassure me that ESA did not Tweet: “Signal confirming closest approach has just been received". It is being quoted by the NYT and countless other outlets, via AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE.

The local NBC affiliate here in Seattle had terribly cynical copy about Philae's "battery dying" vs expectations of the battery lasting 90 days-- something that could be fact-checked by googling "philae mission nominal" and reading the FAQ which is currently the second result.



Sigh.

Oh, that didn't take the nutters very long.

Comet not a comet but an alien spacecraft and the Rosetta/Philae mission an attempt at first contact.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/...e-1227127884068

On the bright side, at least the 'electric comet' theory has been conclusively debunked by Philae's end... not that it makes a whiff of difference to those folks.

People at ESOC were very very pleased by the silence of those people during the landing

Check out the caption, too. My son's comment was "amazing the pictures they can take now from space, eh dad?"

Click to view attachment

Hmm finding PT1 - 3 is described as saving New Horizons "in the nick of time" from "missing out of ½ the mission".
The possible KBO encounter is a tag on, though a good and interesting one, but not even approved as of yet so how can that be seen as 'part of the mission' right now.
..and what the heck is a "principle investigator".

Sky and telescope

Zero gravity day(Jan4) is debunked in most media.
But the part about Pluto passing behind Jupiter (conjunction) is still included in some stories, and some appear to take some kind of compromise approach on the matter - stating that we might not float around but should fall down more slowly if we jump up at the correct time.

Sigh, it never ends, does it?

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/na...looking-5577958

--- WOW!!!!! ---
--- STOP THE PRESSES !!! ---
Andre Gignac found jpeg compression artifacts

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ethansiegel/20...eatest-mystery/

An otherwise ok article (is water ice stable at Ceres for billions of years?) is marred by this glaring error:

"But is that really sufficient to explain these “white spots” at the bottom of what appears to be perhaps the largest crater on Ceres?"

:headdesk:

It's not even the largest crater IN THAT PICTURE.

Huge lava lake spotted on moon orbiting Jupiter


Only off by 370 years.

I think these guys should have stuck with business reporting.

There is another interesting contradiction in this story. It starts with the statement that a "US radio telescope ... captured images of an enormous lava lake" which is questionable in its own right. It then goes on to talk about the Large Binocular Telescope observations.

I always wonder how these stories get so warped. This identical story is posted on at least three web outlets, but I can find no original story from the Puerto Rica Astronomical Society. I suspect they may be conflating a couple of different stories.

The actual story from the LBT press release is actually quite interesting. (And yes, they get the story of the discovery of Io correct.)

LBT Press Release

There is a way cool video of a transit of Io by Europa as seen by the LBT that is worth seeing. And there is a link to the Astronomical Journal article.

Maybe this information should be put up on the Jupiter forum.

from the New Horizons Facebook page, this is how NOT to report science. you just can't compare speeds in different reference systems!
for ex a person walking on Earth is still traveling at over 100,000 km/h relative to the Sun...

Those speeds are all relative to their local frame of reference and absolutely ARE suitable for comparison - nothing wrong with it at all.

I'm not sure what 'local frame of reference' means. The NH speed is in an inertial (solar system barycenter) frame with its origin instantaneously co-moving with Earth-moon-barycenter, Pluto-Charon-barycenter, or the solar system--but the origin locality is immaterial. The space shuttle is the same (with Earth) but is within ~10% of an Earth-surface-fixed value. All the others are in Earth-surface-fixed frames. So consistency demands Earth-surface-fixed, non-inertial frames.

I get 1.2 billion km/hr for NH. Light can eat its dust.

Of course, that's the same sort of math that makes one invent imaginary forces to explain which way bathtubs drain or something. The graphic misses chance to educate the public about inertial vs. non-inertial reference frames, translations and rotations and vector math, and basically misses out on the fun of a steep learning curve, all just to clearly communicate one relevant and potentially interesting thing[*].

OK, maybe that's not so bad.

(* And true too: it is fast in any relevant frame--compared to understandable scales--except for the most 'local' frame, one co-moving with the spacecraft. But in that frame, that pedestrian sure is zooming.)

If I drive a car 60mph, I'm moving 60mph in relation to the road/land/Earth beneath me which is the local frame of reference. New Horizons is moving ~34,000km/h away from the Sun, the Sun being the frame of reference once again.

Alternately, if you're floating in ultra deep, intergalactic space, you could be completely still or, moving near light speed and the only way to know is to have a frame of reference.

ENOUGH and now back to bad reporting in astronomy and science

this is something that reporters CAN get confused on
explaining the naif SPICE references without a chalkboard .......

It's a perfect way to represent speed for the general public.

A very cool visualization of the explored solar system objects from the WSJ... but not error free:
http://graphics.wsj.com/from-pluto-to-the-sun/

(Hint: something about Jupiter's moons...)

Agh. That's just painful.

That entire thing is terrible. It's arguably when the photographing happened, not the first photos.... but ... Proteus was imaged by Cassini in 1989??!? What the hell? I know Cassini has been around awhile, but that was 8 years before launch.

So Dactyl has left Ida behind and is now orbiting Jupiter. Well, that's an interesting development for sure.

If it is the most recent imaging, then we can note NH imaged Io...

I tweeted to one of the graphic creators; hopefully he'll take notice. It's a beautiful graphic, but it needs to be accurate!!!

Probably hitched a ride with Gaspra.

Now, the question is whether Annefrank hitched a ride with New Horizons or whether it was the other way around...

http://www.cnn.com/videos/weather/2015/07/...nni-nr-lklv.cnn

Says it's the 'dark' side, points to fully sunlit hemisphere
Do words even have meanings anymore? Oh, the next few days are going to be fun...

From The Times (London) yesterday: "It (the Ultima Thule flyby) will be the latest chapter in an already remarkable mission that took New Horizons on the first exploration of Neptune and its moons in 2015"



To be fair, New Horizons did actually image Neptune (and Triton) in 2014, from the range of a mere 4 billion kilometres....

Good luck all!