When is the 170GB ISO data torrent going to appear? ;-)
El Reg touches down at the ESA's Spanish outpost, sniffs around
"Are you really going to wear that into the canteen?" That was the perfectly reasonable question posed by Emmet Fletcher, communication officer at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) as my nephew Matt Haines braced himself for lunch sporting a Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) lab coat and pipe. Back in April …
COMMENTS
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Sunday 2nd August 2015 11:00 GMT JeffyPoooh
SMOS "...was the first spacecraft launched operating with L-band..."
As quoted, not correct.
Perhaps the first spacecraft launched to use L-band for scientific measurements (?), but (for example) the Iridium constellation uses L-band for communications. As does Inmarsat, and Sirius and XM satellite radio. Many other examples. All from the previous millennium.
Lovely article. Above is a nitpick.
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Friday 31st July 2015 16:14 GMT Chris Miller
I'm confused*
Why do they need to keep a 1999 model computer running? I assume it can't be just to store data in esoteric formats, so presumably the answer must be that there are programs that are still needed and won't run on anything else, but I struggle to think what they might be. Probably, I'm just missing something obvious.
* What, again?
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Friday 31st July 2015 20:55 GMT Vincent Ballard
Re: I'm confused*
Drivers for esoteric hardware? That's the classic reason for science labs to keep antique kit running.
Or maybe they value stability over all else and don't want to risk a migration. That's the reason that a lot of hospitals still use WinXP. I was seeing IE6 in my logs for a clinical trial progress tracking website last year.
Incidentally, I spotted the Sun Microsystems badge in one of those photos before I got to the line about kit from companies which don't exist any more. Been a while since I saw that logo.
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Saturday 1st August 2015 20:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'm confused*
There could be several reason, software that otherwise should be rewritten (and heavily re-tested), parts and counterparts of mission hardware designed for, or to be connected to those rigs, and so on.
IIRC, the last Hubble service mission needed technicians to work on '80s era hardware and software, because that is what is used on Hubble - and to be sure everything worked as designed they needed to test on the real test hardware, not on a simulated one.
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Sunday 2nd August 2015 11:49 GMT JeffyPoooh
Re: I'm confused*
It's because many a Program Manager, a.k.a. decision maker, has tried to plan, budget and manage a software project before, and had their fingers burnt.
"Oh, it'll only take a man-month..."; and then it takes three years.
They'd literally rather manage a 'rocket science' space mission than another 'simple code migration' software project.
THAT'S why.
You know I'm right.
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Sunday 2nd August 2015 11:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
"...35 million objects this size (6 mm)..."
There's about 180 million square km of Near Earth Orbit area, let alone the dimension of variable altitude. So that's at least dozens of cubic km of NEO space per fragment. Even at 8 km/s, each is carving out a volume of 0.0007 cubic km per day, assuming a roughly 1 sq m death zone.
It's a bit like those aircraft tracking apps that give the impression that the skies are completely filled with commercial air traffic, but when I go outside and look up there are only one or two. It's because the app shows each aircraft not to scale, as if it were many km wide. Shown to scale, they're nearly invisible, and widely scattered.
If all of these 35 million objects were painted bright pink and gently dropped straight down to rest upon the Earth, and you went looking for them, it's unlikely you'd ever find one. Some people would find a few, but not you.
It's funny how '35 million' can be such a small number.
We humans still need to figure out how to clean up this mess in NEO.