Uh-oh. This is how Nomad started, and that didn’t go well AT ALL.
Is it too early to blame Obama?
Yes, but not too early to blame Clinton.
This thread is hysterical. hahahaha
This won’t happen during the Cruz Administration. We won’t be wasting money like this, trying to figure out things that the Bible explains satisfactorily.
And it won’t happen during the Trump Administration. After all, what kind of chump puts money into a venture that has no profit potential at all? Unless, of course, we can figure out how to get the Alpha Centaurians to pay for it.
But can it find Jimmy Hoffa?
“From 75 million miles away, signals would take 13 minutes to go back and forth, according to mission manager Charlie Sobeck at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.”
Kids today. They should have tried downloading porn at 1200 baud. Now THAT was some serious lag.
The next time I get a call from Windows Technical Support I’m going to strongly suggest it’s more important they call NASA and get on the Kepler problem.
How close is it to heaven?
They’ve been on borrowed time for at least the past three years (and the spacecraft was initially designed to last only until 2012). So it’s impressive they’ve gotten this far.
(Reading between the lines: Kepler originally had 4 reaction wheels, which turned the spacecraft to point accurately at wherever it was supposed to go. You need at least one wheel for each axis you want to control precisely. In 2012 one wheel failed. In 2013, another wheel failed, and they went to a backup mode using two wheels and the thrusters – which couldn’t do all the science they’d planned, but could do some. The “emergency mode” is described as fuel intensive, which probably means that at least one of the remaining reaction wheels has stopped working reliably, so that they now have to use the thrusters alone to control Kepler’s orientation. And they (almost certainly) have to control orientation to keep Kepler’s antenna pointing at earth so they can communicate with it. If they run out of thruster fuel before they can get reaction wheels back, RIP. But it’s been a heck of a mission.)
Conservatives believe the center rotates around the Milky Way.
Thanks for the explanation.
5,000 planets and not a single zoning regulation on any of them? I think Trump might be interested.
Yes, thank you. I love this stuff, just amazing.
Nice one…
That was a great episode! I had to look up quotes.
Spock: Your logic was impeccable, Captain. We are in grave danger.
Or printing out ASCII porn on the dot matrix machine
[hoping this one is within community standards – it is less explicit and erotic even than Spirit of Justice in the Dept. of Justice Great Hall]
Conservatives think the Milky Way is a liberal communist anti-peanut plot, and promote the alternate theory of the Snickers Galaxy, as originally designed by Jeebus.
So I was wrong, which makes me happy. NASA just sent out a release saying they’ve recovered from the emergency condition, and determined that the start of the glitch happened at a time when the reaction wheels and thrusters weren’t being called on to do anything. Back to gathering scientific data while the engineers go through a telemetry dump and figure out what did cause Kepler to declare an emergency.
(Oh, and BTW they’re not anywhere like in constant contact with Kepler, because at 75 million miles that requires using the dishes of the Deep Space Network. And those are, uh, kinda oversubscribed what with running communications for every mission you ever heard of. And underfunded, natch.)