Newt

Well, I think we also have to realize a couple of things. Sure, NASA needs its PR, there is no question about that, but is there that much that quickly releasing many colour images are going to do for them? It may be the case that more people are excited by colour images, but black and white ones are better than just releasing scientific papers and technical reports. Colour images will come, certainly, but I think that already there is plenty as far as visually appealing PR work done by NASA to further interest in this and other missions.

Feel free to head over to our external forum site, mossat.org. That is where most of the planning and discussion are currently taking place. Thank you for the interest.

Well, the US military has the luxury to be well funded and powerful, not all militaries do. I think perhaps more what PB666 was getting at was that it would be absurd to make one that small to fit on a vehicle the size of a fighter, like trying to put a nuclear powerplant of the sort on aircraft carriers into a wristwatch. It is not about economic efficiency, but technological efficiency. Even the US military cares about doing things well. @Rakaydos: Of course, at that point you need not worry about armament, only armor and acceleration. To fight someone, you merely fly past the fleet with your engine going, and sit back .

According to Cicero, at least, a dictatorship can be the most efficient and effective government possible, iff the dictator is benevolent and intelligent. If not, it can be the worst. And their successor is. And their successor is. And their successor is, ad infinitum. Republics such as are popular today seek to balance the ideas of vesting power in a few individuals as the 'dictators', and the wider population, as well as the elite, through democratic election of representative bodies and high officials. This ideally balances to make a government that is perhaps slower than an ideal dictatorship, but quicker than an anarchic pure democracy (in which all choices are made by all people. In the best of circumstances this is very slow), and balances the possibility of poorly selected officials with the needs to get past the representatives. As for the website: This line jumped out at me, as well, since when has redesigning culture been straightforward? Generally such developments take ages to develop, and attempts to hasten change are generally termed genocide from what I can see. There are some aspects of the ideas here which are, from what I can tell viable, but in general, it seems like a fun exercise of 'what if?'.

Gets a mountain range. Inserts .exr file.

Its the Kraken! Could you get past (but hardly fix) the issue with hotkeys?

Kindly requesting that albedo discussion move along elsewhere. Feel free to start a new thread, and I will contribute, but this thread is meant to be about Ceres, not about shingles and asphalt. A thought occurred to me that one of the spots could be elevated as it is on a crater central peak. The height we could get from the image (not excellent resolution) makes it hard to tell how high up it would be, but that is a possibility. There are similarly sized craters on Ceres with apparent peaks.

In reality.

In a general description, we are attempting to design, build, and fly a small, 1U cubesat in LEO. The cubesat will carry a cargo of moss and a small set of sensing instruments, cameras and possibly others, to monitor the life and death of several moss samples in different psuedogravity conditions, generated by rapid spinning of the vehicle around an axis. while often people talk about farms on Mars or the Moon, there has not been particular investigation into the growth of plants in any gravity environment apart from 1 and 0 gees. We thought we could help with that. The Mars flight and Phobos landing had been suggested, but it is not currently the target to go beyond LEO, although there is another group associated with KSP trying to fly a lunar orbiting satellite.

I usually say (or so I think...) just 'Earth', if there is a context in which a 'the' is required, one almost universally has the option of 'the planet', or 'the object', which seem more to warrant the use of that definite article as they are broad, general categories, Earth is pretty specific as is. @Bill Phill, from what I can tell, Uranus/Ouranos is Greek pretty generally, with the Roman name Caelus. Of course, this is pretty crude investigation, and it is not improbable that there were some Roman references to him by the Greek names at some point in time, they are just more elusive and generally ignored by secondary sources. @Kibble. Interesting, I will have to look more into that, I am pretty sure I have seen Roman references to Pluto by the name 'Pluto', whether some of these may have been translated from 'Dis Pater' I can try to ascertain. Sometimes the names are rather odd, and sometimes it seems that several gods have the same name as aspects of eachother (Venus Cloacina, for instance, or Jupiter Capitolinus), and then there just are so many gods. This does of course come in handy for the IAU, for you can pull heaps of names of gods to stick onto new objects. Ceres is probably going to get a feature named after the Roman god (or goddess) of wheat rust, Robigus. And how many people knew there was a god for wheat rust?

That is incredible. I need to get into Kerbal robotics.

Albedo of 1 means 100% of light reflected. As for Moon, if you take a piece of dark material, say that absorbs 99.9999% of all the light that hits it, there still is a tiny bit of light reflected. Shoot enough light at the thing, and it will be really bright anyway. Moon is dark, absorbing 86% of the light that hits it (about), but as it is hit by so much light generally, low albedo regolith looks light grey. We do not have some high albedo surface to compare in the same conditions, so it is not really put into perspective as it is when dealing with objects close by. I hope that clears up some of the confusion. (Wishing to post something more about Macula Mons (just a name I came up with, by no means official), but needing to do some more investigation first)

Granted. You can sleep, but it in a sleep study. The attendants wake you up and random hours of the night, and your sleep is ultimately less fruitful. I wish for unlimited and magical power all to myself, that I can do anything I please (Muah ha ha!).

Granted. You get helix fossil, and also a screwdriver that can fit into any screw. I wish for a Neptune orbiter.

I highly doubt it--that would be a rather inconsiderate thing to do, and the air force's interests would also be impacted. From what I can tell about the sat, no one else would care to blow it up. Plus there is a lot that could cause a temperature spike. Perhaps a battery exploded, perhaps it was hit by something, perhaps something else happened. We may never know. But a laser seems like a silly conclusion to jump to without more evidence. Aethon's article suggests it spun out of control prior to comming apart completeley, which to me sounds like something very well could have exploded and given the rest of the vehicle a spin. An impact could have elicited the same response.

You mean Roman. Mars is Roman (Greek Ares), Venus (Greek Aphrodite) Mercury (Hermes (you should get that these are all Greek)) and Jupiter (Zeus), are Roman, Saturn (Cronus) Neptune (Poseidon), Pluto (Hades) and Charon (same in Greek) are Roman, so are Vesta (Roughly Hestia) and Ceres (Demeter). The one planet which is Greek is Uranus (Roman Caelus). Vanamonde you incomplete ninja you!

Why is this fun and no. mellojoe?

Guys, Oleg lost Gilgamesh's auto; let's make Oleg regret. Euphkduu

The Winking, is awesome. I do not know what is wrong with you, but if you think The Winking should be replaced, something must be wrong. If my name is Bob, then what is my bank's routing number, and how do I tie my shoes?

Granted. The game goes fine, but the computer heats up incredibly, so it is impractical to have it run for more than a minute or so. I wish that my boots were dry (we did get the snow, maybe not quite 30cm over the last few days, but it is still falling, hence the wet boots).

0.17. A fun time in astronomy class .

Yeah. Refueling the Sun would also probably take so much energy that it would not really stop entropy, just keep one small star going for a while longer. I would say that giving mankind a millennium is a tad alarmist. We have survived in this star system for a considerable period, and we probably are not going to have some cataclysm that destroys all mankind in the next thousand -- that is absurd. Smash earth with a couple large asteroids like the one that flew past a bit ago, even smash cities directly, and humanity will be virtually the same. Give us another five-hundred year dark age, and chances are will will recover and get back going again, reduce humanity to the bronze age, and chances are we will be able to recover before something truly bad happens. You have to remember that recorded history is barely the blink of an eye in the vast scale of time the Earth has lived through, a huge setback for civilization is really not that long in the grand scheme of things, and we can probably get back to where we were before, albeit differently. I hope we have interstellar travel (not necessarily FTL) before 3000, we probably could do it with modern technology, but I do not think that failing to do that will have any major consequences orrisks for humanity in itself. I agree about the fate of humanity, by the time the earth is uninhabitable for humans, if any of us are still around they will be in museums of truly ancient history, and research labs (dead the lot of them). Our posterity will not fit the bill for homo sapiens by a long shot. But they may still be our civilization, and its preservation is more what we should care about.

Well, if you want to spell it that way.... Capt'n Skunky.

I just thought of the crater Messier on the Moon, possibly the pair of spots is a fresh double crater?

The others in the Q Continuum, as they can strip him of his powers and leave him helpless.