throwaway_yy2Di

10 ms·

31.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
Japan's space agency had earlier reported they had lost contact, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/03/27/national/science...
32.
Japanese space telescope Hitomi (ASTRO-H) appears to have broken up in orbit(twitter.com)
5 points by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago|1 comments
33.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
I'm sort of asking if EFF's argument is legally sound. Is code-signing expressive in this case, or merely functional? Is it rather Apple's intent to communicate endorsement that transforms code-signing into an expressive ac
34.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
Is code-signing expressive if it's compelled?
35.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
The author used both methods, eye measurements, as well as digitized light curves from scanned plates. The paper has a graph of the latter. It's actually easy to replicate, the data is online. http://arxiv.org/abs/
36.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
There's no remaining explanation consistent with this new data, according to the author. “The comet-family idea was reasonably put forth as the best of the proposals, even while acknowledging that they all were a poor lot
37.
Comets can’t explain weird ‘alien megastructure’ star after all(newscientist.com)
17 points by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago|2 comments
38.
Back from the Brink: Akatsuki Returns to Venus(planetary.org)
2 points by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago|0 comments
39.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
Here's a very interesting article about this orbit insertion, how the main rocket engine was destroyed in flight, and how JAXA hacked together a solution using only RCS thrusters: The Akatsuki story is particularly interesting fo
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by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
If you go a bit further, you can build surprisingly interesting curves from this math. Try calculating Mars' apparent motion, as observed on earth (i.e., projecting the difference of their positions onto a unit sphere). Its path is a l
41.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
I think 2009 FD is the worrying one. It's incredibly dark, with a surface albedo of just 0.01. That means optical surveys would struggle to find it in deep space, even when it's half a kilometer wide, even with [0] the LSST telesc
42.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
Here's the paper they're talking about: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1280.summary Unfortunately only the abstract seems to be free.
43.
US Forest Service Prevents Its Own Scientists from Talking About Study(kvpr.org)
98 points by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago|28 comments
44.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
Just to be clear, this is a historic document (2001), not a current introduction to x86 assembly. There's entirely new floating-point architectures introduced since this was written (SSE and AVX).
45.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
According to a chemist on /r/askscience, the plastics probably contain carbon black [0] as a UV protectant. So it might not be deliberate. (/u/Platypuskeeper) Although I have not seen a specification of what th
46.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
They actually have nearly opposite goals. The fusion blanket is supposed to transmute lithium to tritium [0] (create more fusion fuel), so it has capture as many neutrons as possible. The fission-reactor coolant is supposed to be transparen
47.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
The article was written by MIT's public-relations office, so interpret that as you like.
48.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
According to their paper [0], the entire vaccum vessel is considered disposable and might survive only a few months. (It's also explicitly an experimental reactor meant to study neutron radiation damage, so they're hardly claimi
49.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
Here's the paper (no paywall): http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.3540 Interesting that the liquid blanket is the same as in the molten-salt thorium reactors (lithium beryllium fluoride (FLiBe)).
50.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
Here's the raw data if anyone wants, http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data.cfm (WaPo credits the source, but doesn't make it clear you can simply download it).
51.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
This is from the paper, All the COSAC organics can be formed by UV irradiation and/or radiolysis of ices due to the incidence of galactic and solar cosmic rays: alcohols and carbonyls derived from CO and H2O ices (19), an
52.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
That's the one! Thank you! (And shame on you, silly ESA, for allowing your publicly-funded science to be locked away by a third party). There's some fascinating, very suggestive CNOH compounds in that list. Here's what the la
53.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
To help out anyone trying to search for stuff, * This exoplanet is now "Kepler-452b" (kepler_name), * In the "Kepler Object of Interest" catalog, it's KOI "K07016.01" (kepoi_name), * Its star is both K07
54.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
I believe the main reason is for navigation. They need a stable frequency reference because they use its delta, due to Doppler shifting, as the measure of the spacecraft's radial speed relative to earth. From the paper, even this amazi
55.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9841831
56.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
Spoilers: https://xkcd.com/356/
57.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
Maybe the rotation angles aren't simple multiples of 60°.
58.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
I think those are sun-synchronous imaging satellites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit 98° inclination is the same as 82° in retrograde (against the earth's rotation).
59.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
I think it's just a math artifact. There's lots of "holes" in the orbit inclinations -- their distribution is actually very non-uniform. But at a frozen moment in time, the object's latitude will be anywhere from -i
60.
by throwaway_yy2Di 11y ago
"...encodes block frame data from the spacecraft Command and Data Handling (C&DH) system into rate 1/6, CCSDS Turbo-coded blocks." [pdf] http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~tcase/NH%20RF%20

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