Did anybody watch the most recent shuttle launch on monday? They are going up to service the Hubble Space Telescope and put some new devices up there. Im really excited to see what new things we will be able to see and learn. I have grown up watching the hubble view getting better bit by bit. And now with the huge leaps in imaging capabilities we have had since the last time we serviced hubble I cant imagine what we will be able to see.
Does anybody else have this strange addiction to space and everything that is out there?
The Hubble is old and busted.
well of course fermi is the new and sexy but its nice to know that hubble at least generally represents what i would see with my own eye. And now ESA is about to launch two new space telescopes this week which will be pretty sweet too…
You’re able to see galaxies? All I see are little pinpoints of light when I look up in the sky at night.
There’s a lot going on in space that is undetectable by the human eye. In comparison to Hubble, Fermi will be able to detect, measure and characterize a much greater range of energies. Hubble’s missing a huge chunk of the picture!
Well of course i can see galaxies… I mean hell… if you know where to look you can see Andromeda with your naked eye… bust out your good ol’ backyard telescope and now you have one hell of a view… Now if i look at the fermi representation of that its gonna be a hell of a lot diffrent than what i see… Hubble on the other hand takes what i see and makes beauty from it.
the repairs on the Hubble telescope have been successful according to the spokesperson from NASA…
You appear to be new here; welcome! Let me explain this forum to you a little bit. The title of this forum is “Just Conversation”… so we’re here to have some conversation. Y’know, a dialog, where we stimulate responses from each other, talk issues, share humor, etc. We love to hear from new people as it often adds a little spice to the conversation… thanks for joining us.
Now, don’t get me wrong, we like to talk current events here, too, but I’m not finding anything worthy in your post. You see, what you’ve done is taken a potentially interesting topic and sucked all the life out of it by condensing it down to a single sentence.
You could’ve taken the scientific angle and mentioned exactly what was repaired and how we might benefit. You could’ve also taken the taxpayer angle and tell us what this repair cost us, and how else the money could’ve been used. You could even have made a pun on the headline such as “man in a bubble repairs Hubble trouble on the double”. But you gave us nothing.
Now, these fora aren’t too different from real life (with some exceptions). Have you ever tried delivering a “post” such as yours above in real life? I mean, go up to someone and give them a single-sentence summary of a news article? I’d surmise you won’t get much of a reaction out of most, aside from a “so?” Well, that’s about what you’re getting here. Had I not posted, this thread may have sunk off the front page, and possibly floated off into obscurity with no response. The RL equivalent of you being ignored.
As you should know by now, we’re here for “Just Conversation”. You’re welcome, as many have, to stick around and practice conversing. I suggest you do just that. Sooner than later, you’ll elicit a positive response, and you may even spark a lively debate, or get a few LOLs out of us. We’d love that, and I bet you’d get a kick out of it, too!
If I could oblige you, please try a little harder next time; give us a little more content in your posts. Try sharing a link to an editorial or blog, give us your thoughts or feelings on the subject, add a little color to the story if you will. If all this is too difficult, you could just go at it “infinite monkey style” and mash the keyboard until something sensible comes out. We’re open minded folk, here. Don’t be shy!
Best of luck, new friend!
Yours,
Jason
well anyways
how much longer has the hubble got ,5 ,10 years?
@maestro8 : haha,alright… i guess i did kill that topic huh. thanks for the pointers, i will make it more interesting in my forthcoming posts Mr Pointy head 
doesn’t nasa have plans for launching a new telescope with 1000 times the clarity of hubble? i forget the name but i’m pretty sure it’s in the works.
^
would that by any chance be the james webb telescope ? I’m not too sure either… but its about time they came up with another telescope, the hubble is just a few years younger than me
it might be the keplar telescope i’m thinking of but i have no idea. i think the new one is named after one of the guys that made progress toward an accurate universe model back in the days of the highly inacurrate early models.
it’s driving me crazy that i can’t think of the name. i’ll find it eventually.
Old and busted is me bringing this back up… haha
I believe you were referring to the james webb telescope…
The kepler telescope is just up to find planets transiting stars…
Its actually looking at about 100,000 stars to look for dips and in brightness level. It is sensitive enough to notice something as small as earth passing in front of the star… Although it is going to have to watch the star for several years to actually say that the planet is there since you have to observe it multiple times.
Anyway…
On to the space topic.
How does everyone feel about the US dropping the constelation program and saying that they will just invest in commercial space companies?
I feel that it is good and bad. I think that we need to have our own way to get to space…
The bad being: Imagine having to rent submarines or other navel ships. Imagine renting tanks or fighter jets when you want to go to war… How stupid that would be. You have to be able to get yourself to space without relying on someone else.
It is good beacause we need some commercial space investment. We could greatly increase our access to space through commercial companies competing for customers. Making this or that better… Making this or that more affordable…
I wish that there were more people on earth that thought it was important to explore space.
“We already went to the moon, whats the point in going back?”
The point in space exploration isnt just getting somewhere. It is in going back and using what you have discovered. We are a species that can and need to spread itself. There is much out there that we could use, so much out there we could do. The sooner we start the sooner we can get there…
Anyway… thats my space rant for now. I just want to go up there.
I’m with your SpaceFmK, nothing replaces the visible spectrum. How else am I going to see something like the Ultra Deep Space images from Hubble?
First came the visible light spectrum. The rainbow. Even though we know just about all there is to know about the light spectrum it is still a beautiful thing with wondrous secrets. For instance I recently found out that light that has been spread out into a spectrum, can be refracted back through a prism and become ‘white’ light again. The light is not filtered, diminished in any way. How cool is that! But I’m impressed easily. I still thing that the inclined plane being the technology behind screws amazing enough!
I think on the telescopes, it just perspective (no pun intended), for instance on earth, we have:
a) reading about the pacific ocean. It’s depth, it’s currents, it’s waves and it’s storms. Data set: close to unlimited.
b) See pictures of it. Pictures of waves, fish, sea mammals, icebergs, etc. Data set: close to unlimited
c) See the ocean from dry land (to keep some semblance of similarity with space) See the waves, almost feel the pound if the surf is big enough. Feel and smell the salt air. Data set: Limited, very.
d) Xcientific data. Composition of sea water, biology, etc. Data: set close to unlimited.
The lay person, the scholar, and the scientist are going to rank those in their own order of importance. They are going to find discoveries, amazement, and wonder in the one they understand best,the one whose language they know the best (I assume).
But what can’t be put in a book, in a data set, in an equation is the visceral thrill of direct experience/observation. What astronomer doesn’t want to see a full eclipse of the sun at least once? (is it too early to start talking about 2017? Anybody already picked their viewing city like me?). What physicist doesn’t want to see the Northern Lights?
To get current. Again I’m with SpaceFmK. I don’t know how I feel about the cancellation of the Constellation Project.
So far NASA has done all the big stuff, while private enterprise has lagged behind. Looking back at history, Columbus was state funded, The US Gov’t funded Lewis and Clark . . .
We are a world of explorers, always have been. I’m not sure I can answer the question of does the Gov’t belong in the Space Biz. Can space exploration be cost effective for private enterprise? For Gov’t?
Perhaps we are not ready, don’t have the technology for cheap enough to make a colony on Moon/Mars worthwhile. I believe that if there was enough of some kind of unobtanium that could be brought back for a profit on the moon, there would be colonies on the moon today. Don’t they have diamond mines above the arctic circle? The only thing they have in the arctic circle that they don’t have on the moon is breathable air. We got that technolgy pretty wired, as for example in the ISS.
For Mars it becomes even more of a money pit for what pay back? Some new physical discoveries? Some confirmation of others? Are we going to find some completely unknown substance with some power that leads to new discoveries in science or medicine? Or are we mostly going to find elements that we already know of and can be obtained more cheaply on earth?
With all that said, if I had to say (vote for instance) I would keep funding NASA. While I’m not a fan of nation building, it is how the world was divided up. I guess the question become who best to put us on Mars, private enterprise or the US Gov’t (or via consortium with other nations).
As I said above we have always been explorers both for explorations sake and for new/more natural resources to benefit business.
But then I come back to is the money better spent exploring this planet. A cure for cancer would be nice, plus any other number of disease the wreak havoc on someone. Maybe the money is better spent exploring space the way we are now, with new telescope technologies and experiments done in low earth orbit.
Maybe the new space in atomic/sub atomic. Nano-technology, etc. When we were kids we all thought we would have flying cars by now. Well at least we are finally taking infant steps away from the that dinosaur of a technology, Petrol products.
Anyway that’s my ramble for now. I just want to see the full eclipse in 2017 (and the northern lights)
we went to the moon at 25,000 mph
A crap shoot really. Space is misnamed. A wonderful name to sell. It’s like it’s empty. Just nothing waiting for us to zip through.
Truth is that there is almost nothing out there. Except for super fast zingegers. Fast like let me explain it by 60’s. Light is 186,000 miles a second. We need to reduce this by 60 to get miles a minute, then by 60 to get miles/hr. Something we can sorta grasp as a mental picture. Going 1/3600 th of the speed of light, we will be going 186,000 mph. At this piddling speed, it would take 10,000 ish years to reach the nearest star. On our way, we may hit stuff. It would be like hitting stuff, perhaps just a thing smaller than a speck of sand. At a 186,000 mph impact, we would need new materials or science magic to deal with that. A speck of sand wouldn’t just derail a train, hitting it at 186,000 mph, it would light up the sky. A grain of sand would not just blow through any material we have at 186,000 mph, sand in space arrives with it’s own velocity. It may be coming at you as if it was ejected from a super nova.
Anyway, no one has designed a module that can be hit by a grain of sand at 186,000 mph. Going to the moon was a crap shoot, a grain of sand could have killed them, but they beat the odds.
Of course going to the nearest star is not really possible by todays standerds. But if you went to someone 10000 years ago and asked them to go around the world, it would have not really been possible… We evolve… Not just our bodies either, but our minds… We always make new things… You have to start a little closer than the nearest star… Just like we have done here on earth… Maybe go back to the moon… than people really could say “im going to the new world”… Im sure we would learn a bit faster that way than if we just stuck to wasting time and money orbiting earth… Than there is also other things, mars, moons of jupiter, saturn… There is a lot we could do to make this possible…
Saying its a crap shoot is what holds us back… You cant learn if you dont try…
Now you might ask, whats the point in going to the moon or mars or what not? We are born to be explorers… Who knows what you might get from going to those places… There is tons of science you can get from it… There might be opportunities for new mining coorporations or why not solar farms? Who knows… How would life be if people had never gone back to the americas… or if people had never migrated ever? There are only possibilities…
The worst that could happen? Oh well there is nothing here for us to use… at least we know…
Eh… Maybe people will see when we run out of space here on Earth.
Let’s boost robotic development
Most of the space on earth is underwater. I like diving, but despite the fact that making an underwater town is cheaper than building one on the moon, I think underwater towns are a bad idea. Also, towns on the moon are a bad idea.
At this juncture in human development, safety is to expensive. To send a human safely to space costs to much.
I propose we send robots exclusively, allowing us to go full steam ahead, safety be damned.
People off earth are to costly to care for. Plus learning how to make better robots is an advancement comparable to tang.
Am I the only one who saw this thread and immediately thought of this?
agreed. we are going nowhere. even at the speed of light, which we will never reach, it’d take 4 years to get to just the nearest star, which would actually be useless to go to. i’m assuming it would take an incredible amount of fuel to make something go 186,000 miles per sec…and for years to get anywhere. lets face it…the nearest things we’d be interested in…like planets are probably a minimum of 50 light years away.
so not only would you need some ship that could prevent specs of dust from penetrating at 186,000mps, the ship would have to be unbelievably massive, to be able to sustain human life for many many years.
but like i said…we’ll never get something to go the speed of light. it would take probably months to just accelerate to the speed of light.
i think we should just continue to research mars, for resources or whatever…
leave the rest to telescopes cause thats the only way people are gonna find out more about the universe. i think even sending multi million dollar satellites out to just go as far as they can is useless.
so even at the speed of light it would take years upon years to get somewhere, very impractical. plus there’d be no contact with earth. radio waves would take years to travel back to earth.
we’re stuck here in the solar system at best…