PakledHostage

For what it is worth, I like Pavel's contribution to this forum. Sure he's a bit eccentric and some of his threads are redundant, but overall he's got a knack for starting discussions. We all benefit when these forums are busy with interesting debates. There hasn't been enough of that lately. Pavel is, to a degree, single handedly keeping things going.

While I agree that the report does sound a bit biased, I don't think you're being completely fair either. I would encourage people to read the report (I linked to it above) and form their own opinions. The report's authors focused specifically on MSL's first extended mission plan (EM1). They did not focus on the primary mission. They felt that more scientific activities should have been planned for the current phase of the mission. They were also critical of the way in which the science was/is being done. Specifically:

Interestingly, seasons on Earth aren't exactly equal in length.This is because the Earth's orbit is elliptical. Perihelion is reached in the first days of January while aphelion is reached on about July 4th each year. The time between the equinoxes and solstices is defined by how quickly the Earth moves around the Sun. Everyone here knows that orbital speeds are higher at perihelion than at aphelion. Correspondingly, the time between the northern hemisphere's spring equinox and autumn equinox is longer than the opposite half of the year by a couple of days. Spring and summer in the northern hemisphere extend over 186 days from March 21st (typical date of the Spring equinox) through September 23rd (typical autumn equinox), while the northern hemisphere's autumn/winter seasons only last 179 days.

I heard about this while listening to the latest "Quirks and Quarks" podcast on my way home from work yesterday: Curiosity Rover Science Plan Slammed by NASA Review Panel. I thought I'd share the story here because I haven't seen it mentioned on these forums yet. See pages 5 and 6 of the NASA Senior Review Panel Report for their specific comments about the MSL "Curiosity" mission.

Congratulations! India deserves to be proud of their achievement. Now let's hope that all of the probes currently orbiting Mars, new arrivals and all, are well placed to collect whatever data that they can as comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring makes its close aproach with Mars on October 19th.

Straw man much? As a sailor with over 10000 offshore sea miles under his belt, I absolutely would have encouraged Magellan to go despite my all too real understanding of the risks. Likewise, I would have been there cheering on the Apollo missions right up until the very end. I love an adventure, whether I undertake it myself or whether I do so vicariously through someone else. But the fact remains that there is currently no justification that warrants the cost and risk of manned missions to the moon. No monetary reason. No prestige. No scientific reason. Maybe the situation would be different if we had infinite resources but we don't. We have to make do with what we've got, which means robotic missions or nothing. We didn't give up on sending people to the moon because we got bored of going there. That was the point of my original retort.

"We" stopped sending people to the moon because the rewards no longer outweighed the risks. Once the Apollo 11 landed, the race with the USSR was over. They took tremendous risks sending missions to the moon. They were lucky that nothing worse than Apollo 13 happened in the process. If you watch the documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon", you can even see the fear in Neil Armstrong's eyes the night before the launch. And he was a test pilot. They went to the moon because, at the time, it was worth the risk in the hopes of winning the propaganda victory. Today, you need more than cool video of people loping around the moon's surface to justify the cost and risk to human life. We didn't stop going because we got complacent.

[Grabs mouse and holds it protectively beside head] Oh no you don't! [Turns to mouse] Poor little critter! I guess I just have a bit of empathy for them. I know I am anthropomorphizing, but it must be alternately frightening and one heck of a "wheee!" experience for them. They are pretty smart little creatures but they couldn't have had any idea what was coming when they were loaded aboard yesterday.

Thanks guys! Looking at some of the articles and related links, I've come to understand that the enclosure is made up of three modules. The two habitat modules provide access to food and water, and include bars for the mice to crawl along. I guess they are adaptable enough that they can choose to float from A-B or follow the bars. The habitat and access modules are bigger than I thought though. The habitats include cameras. It would be fun to see some of that footage. The only thing I haven't found is anything about how they are restrained during launch, but maybe they don't have to be? What are we talking? 4-5 g's? Maybe we just make them suck it up.

I understand that this launch included live animal cargo. Specifically, about 15 mice. What I find myself wondering is how they stowed the live animal payloads on board so that they could survive the launch and two days abroad Dragon before they get to the ISS? Presumably they didn't just load a cage full of mice, wood chips and all. But they also wouldn't have made little mouse space suits and custom fit couches... Presumably the experiment would need to meet standards for ethical treatment of animals. How would they have restrained the mice so they could survive the ride to orbit without injury? What about access to food and water? I am envisioning something along the lines of little mouse sleeping bags to restrain them from floating away from their food and water source during the two day trip. But maybe I am totally off? Does anybody know the details?

We're getting off topic but some guy in Australia managed to get a patent for the wheel. Admittedly he did it to test the workability of Australia's (at the time) new national patent system, but the point stands.

Haha, haha, ha... Heh... You were joking right? I hope you were joking... [Cricket, cricket, cricket] ... Oh...

There's a press release on NASA's press office website.

I don't have any guesses myself, but SpaceFlightInsider has some more details that might fuel the speculation.

While I was similarly critical of the media hype, I agree that these things are extremely difficult to forecast. And to be fair to the space weather forecasters, they WERE bang on with their forecasts. According to the POES site, there was level 10 activity late yesterday evening, UT. There was also very strong auroral activity ~16 hours before that. The trouble was that the first episode, although visible from much of the Canadian prairies, wasn't as strong as the second episode and the second episode only lasted a bit more than an hour. The second episode would probably have been spectacular from Scandinavia, northern Russia and maybe even Scotland. There was also a corresponding aurora down south, but unless you were on Gough Island or a ship, you probably wouldn't have seen it. Australia, like North America, were in the wrong half of the planet, given the timing. (You can still see the start/end of the favorable conditions for the second episode in the ACE data plot below. Bz only goes from strongly positive to negative at about 2000 UT and everything ends abruptly just after 2200 UT.) I can't speak to whether or not the second CME has reached us yet, but the aurora forecast app on my phone is predicting strong auroras again in about 8-10 hours from the time of this writing. The ACE satellite data seems to be trending in the right direction too:

I never said you should do all of those things all the time. I sometimes drive. I sometimes use the drive-through. I sometimes take a plane trip. But I also ride my bike 100 km a week commuting to work. And I unplug my toaster. And I bought an econobox car rather than the sporty model the salesman tried to push on me. Sure I use more energy than people in the third world (or "off-the-grid hippies"), but I try to be conscientious about my carbon footprint. That's all I am saying. Most people can probably find ways to reduce their own impact by 10-20%. If everyone did that, we'd go a long way to reducing the amount of C02 we put into the atmosphere each year. Soon enough, we're going to have to get used to using less energy per capita, anyway. It doesn't cost anything to start reducing your impact now, in ways that don't affect your quality of life. Heck, some energy saving efforts may even improve your quality of life.

I think that Seret's point is that there are "low hanging fruit" around the house that don't require renovations to take advantage of. Things like unplugging appliances (like your toaster and wall warts) when you're not using them. These leach a surprisingly high amount of energy over the course of a year. And everyone's mother's advice to turn off the light when you leave the room makes a difference too. It is true that incandescent lights help to heat your house when it is cold outside, but most of the time it still makes sense to be conscientious about turning off the lights when you don't need them. And there are other low hanging fruit. Air travel burns as much fuel per seat per km as an economy car. That's impressive when you consider that the aircraft travels 10 times as fast as an economy car, but would you really go to Vegas for the weekend if you had to drive 60 hours for the round trip? The convenience of air travel leads to waste because people over use it. Ride your bike, use public transit (even if only occasionally), avoid idling needlessly in drive-throughs, turn out the lights, skip the frivolous plane trip, unplug your toaster. All off these things make a difference. None of them cost you very much to implement. Some will even save you money.

Something is starting as of this writing. Planetary Kp index just shot up. Unfortunately, the Bz component of the Sun's magnetic field alignment is significantly in the wrong direction. And the NOAA Ovation site seems to be down. Probably from all the people spamming the forecast page. Maybe some of you northern Europeans can see something? Fingers crossed that we do get to see a spectacular aurora tonight and that it lasts for a few more hours until nightfall in North America. Edit: Seems all the hype was over hyped... As of this writing, the ACE data suggests that there may have been something at about 2100 UTC on the 12th, but the show's probably over by now. Hopefully people in Scandinavia had clear skies. I don't think anyone else would have seen anything. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.

I think that is a very important point. It is easy to point the finger of blame at someone else... "Stupid hippies and their antinuclear campaigns!", etc. But everyone should ask themselves " What am I doing to solve this problem?" What have we, as individuals, done to reduce our energy consumption? Do we really need an F150 to drive to work? Do we need to fly to Vegas for the weekend? Do we need the A/C running all summer? A lot of energy consumption is wasteful. Cutting down on that waste at the individual level will make a big difference if we all work on it.

Like, for example, the star Gliese 710 probably will in 1.4 million years from now. Heck, Gliese 710 may even have its own Oort cloud. Maybe our entire solar system will pass through Gliese 710's Oort cloud at the same time?

Mid-Michigan is generaly a pretty good place to view auroras from within the continental US. You are at a fairly high magnetic latitude (i.e.closer to the magnetic north pole than many other locations in the lower 48). For your best chance of seeing them, get out to somewhere very dark at midnight. 1:00 am might be a bit better because you're probably currently in daylight savings time. If there happens to be a strong aurora at that time, you'll see it. You just have to take the chance. Take a camera and a tripod if you do go out. You'll need a long exposure (roughly 15-30 seconds at f5.6 and ISO 1600), but the camera will see it more clearly than you will with the naked eye. Edit: I should add that you can get a sense of whether or not it is worthwhile going out before you leave the house by looking at the Ovation site that I linked to above. Lots of red over your part of the sky is a good sign. You can also have a quick look at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center's magnetic field plots. The red line on the top plot is the important one. You want Bz values below -5 and ideally near -10. I am sure someone here can explain better than I can why those values are important, but my understanding is that they indicate how well the solar magnetic field is aligned with the Earth's magnetic field.

The University of Fairbanks Aurora Forecast is predicting increased activity on Friday and Saturday. Their forecaster comments are:

Does this maybe help?: Darnok and Dominatus at Tenagra. Dominatus, his eyes red! Darnok, his head on backwards! ... I'll show myself out.

I'll jump in by pointing out that the "flat Earth" example actually hinders Darnok's argument... Even at the time of the ancient Greeks, people knew the world was spherical. Eratosthenes even made a remarkably accurate estimate of its circumference in ~200 BC. Ptolemy later made a less accurate estimate of the Earth's size (revising Eratosthenes' estimate downward by ~30%) that stood for over 1500 years as the accepted size of the spherical Earth. Contrary to myth, the only people at Columbus' time who believed the world was flat were uneducated hicks who were ignorant of science.

And the fact that you need a mix of warm and cold to get really exciting weather. Look at the stormiest places on our own planet. The interior of Antarctica is pretty much a frozen desert. There's not much in the way of precipitation as the antarctic high dominates. Closer to the coast, where katabatic winds tumble down off the ~3000 metre high central plateau and mix with the relatively warm and moist air over the southern ocean is where you get the exciting weather. Likewise, the north wall of the Gulf Stream in the western Atlantic is a notorious breeding ground for nasty North Atlantic storms. There, the warm moist air over the Gulf Stream mixes with the cooler air sitting over cold water brought south by the Labrador current. There are other examples too, including the Gulf of Alaska in the North Pacific and the "roaring forties" in the southern ocean. They are all locations where cold and warm moist air masses mix.