Category: Misc

Last weekend I saw a program on the New Horizons Spacecraft on the Discovery Channel, and while this was a great program and very informative, I was disappointed about one fact that continued to be misrepresented. I cannot find a link to the show itself on the Discovery Channel website, because I’d like to view the whole program again.

I found the artwork of the spacecraft itself by Mike Derer.

I wrote about the subject matter I was disappointed in back in September, 2006 (here and here) when the whole Pluto is a planet or not stuff was going on. Journalism has a duty to inform the public, but when poor diagrams are utilized, the facts are misinterpreted.

New Horizons lifted off on 1/19/2006 and after a little more than a year, just had a Jupiter flyby in order to gain a speed boost, but trading the increase in speed for a little loss of Jupiter’s rotational momentum. It’s speed after launch was 16.21 km/s (36,260 mph) making it the fastest spacecraft so far, but as it approached Jupiter at 23 km/s (51,449 mph) relative to the sun. After the Jupiter flyby, on 2/28/2007, the gravity assist increased the spacecraft’s speed by nearly 4 km/s (8,947 mph).

Even with the increase in speed, New Horizons will not get to the Pluto flyby until 7/14/2015, a little more than 8 years from now. The program mentioned this, but only stating these facts in passing, sort of letting the viewer figure it out. In fact, the pictures they showed were very similar to the inaccurate ones you used to see in text books, or similar to the planet models your kids make in school.

• one year to get to Jupiter
• 8 more years to get to Pluto
• without the gravity assist from Jupiter, it would have been 10-12 years to get to Pluto

Gee, it must be pretty big distances involved out there…

Well, as a matter of fact, yes they are very big distances… So here was an opportunity to inform the public, be a little more descriptive with the facts, but they didn’t quite put the facts out there in the right manner.

Albert Einstein (b. 1879, died 1955)

1906 – SF earthquake and the fire afterwards, destroyed much of San Francisco.

(Sorry, should have posted this last week)

I know you all get your share of spam, but I had an observation for one piece I got today.

Subject: approach on parachute
Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2007 22:38:43 -0800

Our loan officers is seriously happy to obtain your house refinancing requisition affirmation that we accepted nearly 4 days ago

Were pushing through your finance query
Please if you would this minute you need to finish up your last details at our form

“approach on parachute”????
“Our loan officers is seriously”

Seriously, even if they had received a req from me “nearly 4 days ago” (is that, like, 3.9 days ago? or 3.8 days ago?) because of the bad English, I certainly wouldn’t respond to this. I guess they get what they pay for, the bottom of the Internet barrel responding to this junk. It’s too bad that there are so many illiterate people that all have computers and driver’s licences now…

BTW, this idiot didn’t even bother to include a form or link to click, completely wasted spam, no way to harvest anyone.

I mean, they are not even trying anymore, it’s like, jeez, copy the dictionary, man, at least that would be more interesting…

I try to write about Technology here in this blog, but I noticed this today and had to speak out. I guess everyone needs to speak out.This behaviour is unacceptable. I’m glad Mr. Myron F. Olesnyckyj is facing some stiff penalties and perhaps some jail time. It’s about time these people were shown the door AND punished.

It’s hard enough to do good things in a company, even harder in the bigger ones. When the executives are cooking the books, it makes the engineer and the rest of people on the front lines want to just give up.

Good companies, they need to set the example. Instead, we have so many examples of bad behavior. I mean, “What were you thinking? That you could get away with it and it wouldn’t hurt anyone?”

Did you know that Ben Franklin is/would have been 300 years old?

You might know about that electricity thing with the kite and perhaps bi-focals, but did you know about the rest of his contributions to medical science and technology?

Click the title above or the link here

Courtesy of ABC Radio National in Australia (Ockham’s Razor Program)

About 11 years ago, Gregory Benford, noted science fiction author and physicist (on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine) wrote in a column that saving a single life in 1995 dollars would cost

• $200, in third world countries (usually due to malnutrition)
• $75,000, in advanced nations (cancer screening)
• $120,000, in USA (highway safety agencies, better highway dividers, easier on-ramps, etc.)
• $1,000,000, in USA (to avoid one case of deadly lung disease by having better air pollution controls)
• $5,000,000, in USA (to eliminate natural radioactivity in drinking water, which is why we don’t do it)
• $2,500,000,000, in USA (for nuclear plant safety)
• For about 600 times the cancer screening rate, or $50,000,000 per year, killer asteroids could be identified and eliminated from threatening the earth.

This last point has always intrigued me, particularly when that Bruce Willis movie came out a couple of years ago.

The ABC Science Show had an interview with Sima Adhya, a space mission scientist at QinetiQ in Great Britain. This interview aired September 23, in which the asteroid proposition was again discussed, but in more current terms and with some ideas about how to actually do something like this, Hollywood not withstanding.

A link to the transcript and podcast of that broadcast is herehttp://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2006/1744501.htmand herehttp://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/ssw_20060923.mp3

The European Space Agency is planning to send two spacecraft in about 5 years to an asteroid about 30 million miles away. It will take another 5 years after launch to get to the asteroid. So from Benford’s earlier notation to now, 11 years passes. In 10-11 more years we shall find out some other things about this particular issue.

The plan is to have one spacecraft go into orbit around the target asteroid. It will be in charge of measuring the mass, density, finer details on it’s speed and direction, and other information about the asteroid. The second spacecraft (which will be about the size of a refrigerator) will crash into the asteroid (about 100 meters long) while the first one will watch, taking even more measurements.

In this David and Goliath move, scientists are hoping to alter the orbit of the asteroid by a very, very small amount. According to this interview, the expectation is a few millimeters per second, but at 30 million miles away, this event and the alteration will add up over time and distance. If the asteroid were indeed on a collision course with the Earth, such a minute adjustment in direction would allow the asteroid to miss the Earth completely.

As a prototype proposal for activity they are actually proceeding with, I’m impressed with the European scientific community.

But more to the point, if this works, then obviously real money estimates will come out of the exercise. Ultimately we may see if Benford’s estimates were in the ball park or not. Commercial interests might include reduction of risk on the part of the insurance industry. I’m sure they’d rather fund a space flight so that in 5 years a killer asteroid might be deflected and thus reduce to nil any claims at all from such a tragedy.

Perhaps the biggest problem is convincing anyone to actually do the kind of follow-up activities needed. The odds of an extinction level event are so small, and because of this, it is assumed that these odds are zero, when in fact they are just very close to zero. My sense is that this low risk will always be weighed against actually doing something.

Of course, the other thought is that we would rather be living here without a dinosaur type extinction event, no matter what, than try to live here after one…