71–80 of 85 posts
Juno was something about radar - penetrating the cloud layers to see what was below. In college my son worked on the FFT engine that processed the radar data. He has code circling Jupiter!
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Yeah, you got a lot of it and the ripple effect of things that go out from it. In addition to the extra mass of the camera and solar arrays, there is extra mass for the harnessing to connect the camera to the computer and engineering design for that as well. Integration of anything else on the spacecraft will have to go through Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA). Basically, this gets in to pretty…
> A radiation hardened equivalent of a $20 FPGA can be something like $20,000 Has anyone actually tried putting up non-rad hardened equipment to measure how they perform? The Mars helicopter wasn't RAD hardened and used off the shelf parts & succeeded and the Mars atmosphere is not thick enough to meaningfully block the amount of cosmic rays hitting the surface. I think NASA doesn't do a good job sometimes tolerating…
Juno was something about radar - penetrating the cloud layers to see what was below. In college my son worked on the FFT engine that processed the radar data. He has code circling Jupiter!
That would be a hilarious (and confusing) bumper sticker. When other parents say “my son is an honour student” you can smugly reply “yeah, but does he have code circling Jupiter?” Congratulations, by the way. I’m being (trying to be) funny but I genuinely think that is cool and a reason to be proud.
Anybody with code circling Jupiter definitely has bragging rights and should be proud. If it were a just world, he/she wouldn't have to pay for a drink in a bar, ever.
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If you want to go faster, you need more fuel, and eventually you max out the biggest rocket available. Clipper is the most massive planetary probe ever-- they had to use falcon heavy in fully expendable mode to get it up there.
Yep, for reference Europa Clipper is 6,065 kg [0]. It is an absolutely massive interplanetary probe. It is getting close in size to some of the largest GEO communication satellites. And to get it out to Jupiter they definitely need some of the gravity assist trajectories. On the opposite end of the spectrum, New Horizons was only 478 kg [1] and still holds the record for the fastest thing ever launched from Earth. It…
To expand on this a bit, it's the fastest launch. The unqualified speed record goes to the Parker Solar Probe in 2018, and was previous held by Helios B way back in 1976.
The distinction here is that New Horizons has spent it's life traveling away from the Sun, and it costs energy and thus speed to do so. Meanwhile, solar probes gain speed during their fall towards the Sun.
Maybe silly question, but why are the pictures cropped?
> The image is reprojected according to a preliminary geometrical camera model, cleaned from some of the camera artifacts, approximately illumination adjusted with a 3rd degree polynomial BRDF over the cosines of the incidence and emission angle
Check out the "Source Image(s)" link attached to each pic, it should give you a much better idea what the camera is actually seeing. Scroll to the bottom of the source image and you can see the different color channels as well as how it's interleaved for transmission. Here's the example I pulled that description from and it's source:
https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing?id=17025
https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing?id=JNCE_...
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That would be a hilarious (and confusing) bumper sticker. When other parents say “my son is an honour student” you can smugly reply “yeah, but does he have code circling Jupiter?” Congratulations, by the way. I’m being (trying to be) funny but I genuinely think that is cool and a reason to be proud.
On the other hand, depending on their development, the Jovians might think that everything at all is circling Jupiter. :D
You could imagine primitive aliens on the various moons each believing their own is the center of the Jupiter system, which is an elaborate world of epicycles. And when they communicate with the aliens of the other worlds (over shortwave radios each time the moons fly past each other), they debate Europacentrism and Ganymedocentrism and get into very heated arguments.
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> A radiation hardened equivalent of a $20 FPGA can be something like $20,000 Has anyone actually tried putting up non-rad hardened equipment to measure how they perform? The Mars helicopter wasn't RAD hardened and used off the shelf parts & succeeded and the Mars atmosphere is not thick enough to meaningfully block the amount of cosmic rays hitting the surface. I think NASA doesn't do a good job sometimes tolerating…
If you’re spending nearly $1m on something to launch a camera do you really want to take the risk, so you can launch for 950000 instead of 970000?
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I can't help find such edgy cynism nothing else than juvenile. Yeah, sure, in the end nothing matters and the universe doesn't give a fuck about you. And life on earth is just an accident, and that intelligence and consciousness exists here for a very brief time on the universe's path to heath death doesn't matter at all. Except of us poor conscious beings who find joy in being alive and actually have the capacity to…
I thought my point flowed nicely from yours, sorry you didn't like it. For me it's about not having these visions of grandure about us as some protectors of the universe and instead accept our tiny place in all this. For example even your concept that our consciousness is more important than slugs or rocks, is all rationalization on your part to make your place in the universe have some meaning. Anyway, I don't then…
Uh? Where did that come from?
> is all rationalization on your part
It's not rationalisation. But as all moral statements they are subjective, in the same way as the fact that you don't want your spouse or kids to die doesn't rest on some objective hard facts about the universe.
And meaning can't exist without creatures like us, so we are absolutely free to bestow it to whatever we want.
> I don't then use this fun thought experiments to justify not recycling or denying human impacting climate change if that was what put you off.
But for some reason this is the exact argument that comes up every time someone mentions that maybe we shouldn't fuck up our world. It's neither thoughtful nor original.
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I thought my point flowed nicely from yours, sorry you didn't like it. For me it's about not having these visions of grandure about us as some protectors of the universe and instead accept our tiny place in all this. For example even your concept that our consciousness is more important than slugs or rocks, is all rationalization on your part to make your place in the universe have some meaning. Anyway, I don't then…
> not having these visions of grandure about us as some protectors of the universe Uh? Where did that come from? > is all rationalization on your part It's not rationalisation. But as all moral statements they are subjective, in the same way as the fact that you don't want your spouse or kids to die doesn't rest on some objective hard facts about the universe. And meaning can't exist without creatures like us, so we…
You wrote you wanted more people to care for it, and at the end of your comment reveal that in fact that was the reason you got pissed off, so this question seems like an underhanded "omg I have no idea what you're talking about".
Also you're utterly wrong, most times the arguments are that: climate change isn't man made, that even if it is, it isn't going to affect us, that if it'll affect us it won't be that bad, to downright denying it's even changing.
If you think the regular argument is some reflection about the universe and how interesting it is...
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If you’re spending nearly $1m on something to launch a camera do you really want to take the risk, so you can launch for 950000 instead of 970000?
It’s not risking the entire mission. Just the part the camera is should be risked. And from that perspective attach a camera to each thing you do and you’ve got a good shot of it working most of the time rather than spending outsized amount of resources to guarantee success. This is very similar to how SpaceX does rockets by the way so even if the cameras are useless you have a good shot at learning more things.
Think of it another way, would you pay $99 for a camera which will work or $97 for a camera which might work.