Kryten

No, they saw that this distribution changed over time, seasonally. They didn't just see hydrated salts, they saw salts becoming hydrated and drying out over relatively short periods of time, and they're pretty sure the quantities involved are much too high to be due to absorption from the atmosphere. If you're going to try and criticise their work, at least read the abstract first.

Vandenburg put up 4 sats a month at times during the 60s heyday of film-return spysats, as did Plesestsk for Russia. Modern sats with much longer lifetimes means we're unlikely to see such rates again any time soon.

Then the exact same articles about causing damage still apply? As would national laws against deliberate property damage. You're not talking about any breakage that isn't illegal even without the OST. The punishments are well established. You're talking about what would be, in practice, war. At the very least, piracy. Nations do not ignore either, especially when they can stop it just as easily as walking into a control centre somewhere and slapping on handcuffs. If you're thinking that won't happen because people will be living out in space... go back to reading Heinlein novels, and maybe have a think about how much it actually costs to support humans in deep space.

The question doesn't make a lot of sense, given what we're actually able and willing to do with either Saturn or Venus in the forseeable future. We can't treat Venus like Saturn because the main draw at Venus is understanding the geology happening at or below the 'nearly unreachable surface', and we can't treat Saturn like Venus because the main draws are the moons, atmosphere and magentosphere, two of which Venus doesn't even have.

i.e the provisions of the treaty apply to all citizens of nations that have signed the treaty, and the nation involved must enforce them So no weapons on any asteroids. Here is the OST; read it, because you very clearly haven't. It's not very long or difficult to understand. Any state party is considered liable for damage caused by a space vehicle registered to them, so they would intervene. It doesn't even matter if the damage is deliberate or not, never mind whether is was strictly caused by a 'weapon'.

How exactly are they supposed to 'use force to back up their claims' when the OST bans any kind of weapons or military activity on other celestial bodies? Judo?

All the lineae are on rather steep slopes made of what seems to be loose soil, current rover designs would have great trouble. It's doubtful planetary protection rules would allow a direct mission to such a site anyway, at least with current procedures.

Also, here's an open-access short conference paper that seems to be presenting the same results.

You don't have to, the paper this is all about just released.

NASA had zero involvement in that, other than the researcher involved being a NASA research fellow; the actual publication was in Science. Accepting big hyped-up papers without proper checks is par for the course for them and their colleagues at Nature, thanks to their laser-focus on publishing 'big' results.

Cross-posting from the other thread; note also that the presence of McEwen means this is something spotted by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, not something from any of the rovers. That rules out microbial life straight-off, unless they're really big microbes.

The water speculation isn't just from the vague statements about a solved mystery. If we take a look at the presenter list; Most of these are planetary science heavyweights you'd expect at a conference of this sort regardless of exact content, but Wilhelm and Ohja are just PhD candidates. Wilhelm's most recent work has been on Martian crater gullies, and Ohja's on a specific subset of those known recurring slope lineae, or RSLs. RSLs are an active feature, observed to grow and shrink annually, and our best guesses as to how and why have included transient water flow for a while.

They have a bare tower and Plesetsk, and I can assure you the weather in Plesetsk is going to be worse than what you'd get in Vostochny or Baikonur. This new structure is mostly to protect the workers and generally make access easier, not to protect the rocket.

They're all really big, which throws off scale somewhat. Note the coach near the lower-left corner.

Yeah, you're right. Nothing bad can possibly come of the US openly ignoring both a nuclear arms control treaty and the very idea of being held to international treaties. EDIT: And it's own constitution to boot;

It's that it's not banned. So no WMD's in orbit, and no weapons on the moon, but conventional weapons in earth orbit are a-ok. This is the sole article of the outer space treaty concerned here; This does not apply to parts of said bodies that have been removed, as per the precedent in the Lavochkin case. Your friend is probably confusing it with the much more stringent moon treaty, which was intended as an extension of it; but no nations that have crewed spaceflight ratified it, so it has little real effect.

You don't remember. Not only does the ban not apply to conventional weapons, there sometimes is a pistol on the ISS as part of the survival package on Soyuz. A specific crew decides whether to take it or not, completely unrestrained by international treaties. Lavochkin ended up with some samples taken from the monn with one of their probes after the USSR fell, and sold them at auction, without any UN complaint.

No it doesn't. Look at NASA's lunar samples; apart from some symbolic bits of a single rock, they've been retained by NASA. Same for Russian robotically-retained samples that remained in state ownership.

Given there was no UN objection to the sale of lunar samples collected by Lavochkin, there's legal precedent for this to be allowed. None of the nuclear powers are going to just leave the outer space treaty, because that also invalidates the ban on WMDs in earth orbit, along with a few other arms control clauses. They'd have to draw up a replacement first.

Remember the ignore function, it makes life a lot easier. It's not as if your going to miss him coming up with something insightful, after all this time.

China already has an operational quick-response launcher, Kuaizhou. It's payloads (also called Kuaizhou) so far have been optical EO sats, and it's apparently intended to be launched to provide extra coverage in the event of natural disasters. This has been demonstrated by the first Kuaizhou, which adjusted it's orbit for better coverage of the 2013 Pakistan earthquake. This could obviously have military applications as well, as intended for similar US projects like SWORDS and ALASA, but the military didn't bite, and all Kuaizhou launches have been made on behalf of the civilian earth observation ministry.

The clouds are actually sulphur dioxide, the substance that produces sulphuric acid when dissolved in water.

Your body doesn't need to counteract water pressure outside of the lungs, because it's basically incompressible. Nitrogen dissolving is just something that happens under increased pressure, not a physiological response to anything.

How do you handle RCS?

Liquid metal cooling is standard for space based reactors, as far as I know all flown models have used it. About half of those have subsequently spewed said liquid metal into earth orbit, which is another reason people are wary of space nuclear reactors-they're major debris hazards.