Mission Complete! WMAP In 'Graveyard Orbit' 114
astroengine writes "The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has, quite literally, changed our view of the Universe. And after nine years of mapping the slight temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, its job is done and NASA has commanded the probe to fire itself into a 'graveyard orbit' around the sun. WMAP measured the most precise age of the universe (13.75 billion years), discovered more evidence supporting dark energy and dark matter theories, and found one or two mysteries along the way."
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We put it in the Graveyard and wait for night to send it all the way.
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Yes, we're waiting for it to become a zombie, and then start killing satellites that are still working, turning them into zombies as well...
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No, no, no... graveyard = night... they have to wait for the daytime to send it to the sun. Everyone knows the sun goes out at night.
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It would be very expensive to do so. The probe would have to lose a massive amount of momentum for its orbit to decay far enough for it to pass through the Sun.
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It would be very expensive to do so. The probe would have to lose a massive amount of momentum for its orbit to decay far enough for it to pass through the Sun.
I see now that WMAP is at an L2 point, whereas I had naively/foolishly assumed it was at an L3 point.
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...which would make virtually no difference (and anyway, when was the last time we put anything at L3? Plus probably we won't live to see it)
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Don't we use quantities of rare materials to create the sensitive instrumentation onboard?
Yes, we do use quantities. Very small quantities relative to the amount here on earth. Let's put it this way:
The energy cost to keep these satellites 'stored' and then reactivate/repair them from storage would be MUCH more than the energy cost to mine whatever rare mineral you might need that is currently available here on Earth.
Or look at it another way: If it was so valuable as to put these into a non-useful, but
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Why would you reactivate/repair the satellite? The GP is saying to harvest the rare materials from the defunct satellites, not repurpose the entire satellite.
You would probably get more benefit from that than the minuscule amounts of materials that go into creating them. Rare is relative with respect to these minerals.
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Amounts of raw materials involved are miniscule; our spacecraft tend to LIGHT. And as for creating a dangerous debris field with high risk of collision / Kessler syndrome...
Re:Why not send it plunging ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It would actually require a lot of delta-v; you need less to get to other stars (time of travel being what limits us in this case)
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I've heard that it's actually quite hard to just shoot something into the sun, even though it sounds simple--big target, lots of gravity. Can someone explain why, or point to a link that does?
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I've heard that it's actually quite hard to just shoot something into the sun, even though it sounds simple--big target, lots of gravity. Can someone explain why, or point to a link that does?
It wouldn't be hard if that was your initial goal, but making something that isn't currently on that trajectory or very near to it would be tough.
Orbital velocity (Score:2)
I'm absolutely not a physicist. At all.
But from what I basically understand :
- we're shooting from our Earth location.
- before shooting it, it's more or less following earth around the sun.
- so, relatively to the sun, both Earth and the satelite have the same orbital velocity around the sun (because both follow earth's orbit, instead of plunging into the sun).
- this velocity comes for free as we launched the satelite from Earth.
- to plunge the satelite into the sun, we have to decelerate it well under the o
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As an analogy, think about playing tetherball as a kid. If the ball is already in motion, you have to hit hard enough to cancel all the rotational velocity so it can hit the pole. In the case of a spacecraft, the initial motion is actually the motion of the Earth around the sun -- that's a lot of velocity to make up for.
That's not to say that going to the Sun is impossible. Actually, a recent press release [jhuapl.edu] says that NASA will be doing just that in an a mission launching in 2018.
The problem, however, is t
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And if you don’t hit the pole exactly, it whips around and comes back to hit you in the face.
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West takes you In, In takes you East, East takes you Out, Out takes you West.
Re:Why not send it plunging ... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why not send it plunging ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Probably on the off-chance that it discovers something while in a graveyard orbit. You never know what sort of crazy stuff happens when you just leave a camera running. Sure, the odds are pretty low, but the satellite's already in space, so why not?
Or some SciFi writer discovers it and the damsels appear, followed by the evil tentacled villains . . .
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Or some SciFi writer discovers it and the damsels appear, followed by the evil tentacled villains . . .
Sounds like a day in the life of my Adamantine miners.
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Yeah, what would the Klingons do without deactivated shooting targets?
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Economics at the most basic.
Sunk costs are sunk. May as well get the most of what you have.
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Because it costs money and consumes personnel, communications, etc., resources.
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It'll come back as W'AP looking for the creator.
Uuhhh... clumsy PR? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re:Uuhhh... clumsy PR? (Score:4, Informative)
If there's some clumsy PR, it seems to be in other part of TFS. WMAP has not ,"quite literally, changed our view of the Universe" - it further refined it nicely [tufts.edu], continuing in the footsteps (if mentioning only large space experiments) of COBE and RELIKT-1 (the latter might be one sad example of another type of clumsy PR - apparently already gave us large part of the results for which COBE is praised, but...)
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RELIKT-1 saw the quadrupole, but only at 90 percent confidence [wikipedia.org]. COBE rightly gets credit.
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Which is of course some part of the results. RELIKT-1 gets virtually no credit at all...rightly?
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Sometimes I can't figure out why TFS links one source when there are better sources. It seems NASA's report [nasa.gov] is a far better FA than Discover Magazine. And here's [nasa.gov] a link to the official WMAP website.
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Dark Matter (Gravity); please explain (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Dark Matter (Gravity); please explain (Score:4, Informative)
So Dark Matter was a theory invented to explain why stars orbit a galaxy's core like they were on spokes around the hub of a wheel ...instead of how we observe the motion of object orbiting our sun. So if Dark Matter exerts such a huge force to keep huge objects (stars) moving in such a manner, how come that same force doesn't affect the objects going around the star? Or, in other words, if it's powerful enough to keep the outer-most stars in a galaxy moving in the same period as inner stars, how come we can't detect it here? Or have we detected such tidal forces already?
While there's a lot of dark matter in a galaxy compared to "normal" matter, it's typically spread out over a much larger volume than the viewable parts of a galaxy. Thus, it is actually quite diffuse and has very little effect within something on the scale of a solar system (to the point of being unmeasurable with current technology).
Re:Dark Matter (Gravity); please explain (Score:5, Informative)
The dark matter halo around our galaxy is theorized roughly as a large sphere, not just extra mass along the flattened wheel of the spiral. Look at the graphic here: http://startswithabang.com/?p=656 [startswithabang.com]
That's a lot of extra room. So much so that even when those researchers calculated that our solar system should have 300 times the dark matter density compared to the galactic dark matter halo, this only ends up being a very tiny fraction of the earth's mass in dark matter bound to our solar system. See: http://www.universetoday.com/15266/dark-matter-is-denser-in-the-solar-system/ [universetoday.com]
So basically, it's going to be rather difficult to detect dark matter nearby.
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The dark matter halo around our galaxy is theorized roughly as a large sphere, not just extra mass along the flattened wheel of the spiral.
I guess no one knows such things, but I wonder what would prevent it from clumping up like normal baryonic matter. Maybe it's too diffuse to form dark matter nebulae, but those are only held together by gravity too, right? Or would fast-moving particles just fly apart before gravity could act? Or maybe we just can't see the clumps. Or maybe it's a happy medium—loosely bound to the galaxy but nothing more...
Argghh! So many questions and so little knowledge of cosmology and particle physics!
I guess
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I guess no one knows such things, but I wonder what would prevent it from clumping up like normal baryonic matter. Maybe it's too diffuse to form dark matter nebulae, but those are only held together by gravity too, right? Or would fast-moving particles just fly apart before gravity could act? Or maybe we just can't see the clumps. Or maybe it's a happy medium—loosely bound to the galaxy but nothing more...
Actually, the explanation for this one is pretty simple: it's because the dark matter is dark. The reason why baryonic matter collapses into a (relatively) tiny disk in the center of a much larger dark matter halo is that baryonic matter emits light... and light carries off energy. So baryonic matter quickly loses all the energy it can while still conserving angular momentum, and the result is a disk-like structure (spiral galaxies). Once it collapses into a disk, the density becomes high enough that it c
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Dark matter is dark (Score:1, Offtopic)
dark matter is dark
Obvious tautology is obvious [encycloped...matica.com]. But is dark matter darker than Longcat is long?
Cosmic background radiation (Score:2, Interesting)
What if the cosmic background "warmth" which hovers just above 2 Kelvin isn't the remnants of the Big Bang but rather a physical phenomenon produced by some more general aspect of our universe. Like goldfish in a bowl, the limits of our experience are defined by our universe, so the phenomena we experience define and are defined within that framework. But like a human outside the goldfish bowl, we can understand why certain phenomena (such as bending of light through the glass) occurs at a simpler, more gen
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If only CMB was actually strictly about things "in the bowl" / providing data beautifully supportive of some ideas about the early state of "the bowl"... we can dream, huh?
Oh, wait.
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Re:Cosmic background radiation (Score:5, Insightful)
What if the cosmic background "warmth" which hovers just above 2 Kelvin isn't the remnants of the Big Bang but rather a physical phenomenon produced by some more general
What you need to understand is that what you said, while sounding philosophical to the uneducated is gibberish. To a scientist what you said sounds something like "What if what I thought was my hand was actually an ardvaark in disguise". There are specific properties/features of the CMB that require it to be left over radiation from the Big Bang. Of course to understand this you also need to understand the Big Bang itself and why we'd collectively believe something so counter-intuitive as the universe beginning from a singularity. In other words you need to read your science historyf or the last couple of hundred years.
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A hypothesis that makes no sense and is pulled out of ignorance is just gibberish and has no scientific merit. Skepticism is also an important part of science. But to post what you said as A/C I'd guess you're trolling.
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Actually, remnants of the big bang is simply the best theory we have going. There may or may not be another interesting theory that would explain it (and the universe) as well, but given that we have a workable elegant theory now, that's all just pie in the sky. It isn't however quite so ludicrous as my hand being a disguised aardvark.
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Actually, remnants of the big bang is simply the best theory we have going.
It's a pretty good theory, though. Well tested, lots of lines of evidence. Ignoring it is like ignoring evolution, or better yet gravity. You won't see me walking off any cliffs and speculating that hey gravity might be wrong.
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You've misunderstood the difference between doubting a theory and doubting an observable. Walking off a cliff would be stupid, it it clearly observed that things fall. On the other hand doubting that the reason is due to the attraction of masses, perhaps in favour of some alternative source of the force, does not lead to such stupid mistakes.
The original poster did not contradict the evidence for the big bang, rather the explanation.
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It's been observed that things fall in the past. But that gives no a priori proof that you will fall if you walk off a cliff. Of course, every time we observe something it does fall, which means the simplest consistent explanation is that things always fall, independent of time - but the exact same thing is true, on a higher level, of the real theory of gravity. And doubting that falling was due to gravity would in fact lead to eq
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The original poster did not contradict the evidence for the big bang, rather the explanation.
The CMB *IS* part of the evidence for the Big Bang.
The CMB is the afterglow - of a very consistent temperature produced by the Big Bang. This explanation is greatly oversimplified: The Universe being very compact in the past resulting in a uniform distribution of energy at the point at which it went from being opaque to translucent is the only good explanation we have for a uniform glow in all directions.
WMAP mapped the very minor variations in the CMB that tell us about conditions at the point in time when
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More accurately, CMB is an observation we have made that is currently best explained by the Big Bang theory.
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It's somewhat depressing though... (*) And actually I don't think (might be just that I simply prefer to) it happens typically quite far, if you look at the hunble group; and if generally higher rates of depression/etc. among "smarter" (to use the most broad term) are any indication.
(*)At least it shows nicely how certain societal systems promoting blisfull ignorance about fundamental stuff were and in most settings still are very much adaptive.
Re:Cosmic background radiation (Score:5, Informative)
I concur, and a favorite comic springs to mind:
Science: It works, bitches [xkcd.com]
From the wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] about the CMB:
Two of the greatest successes of the big bang theory are its prediction of its almost perfect black body spectrum and its detailed prediction of the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background.
When basically the whole observable universe matches your theory, it's generally considered pretty strong evidence that you're going in the right direction.
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Actually he's not so far off in his suggestion, but he's missing additional facts. The CMB could in fact be caused by some phenomena giving the universe a certain temperature. But the CMB is not the only evidence for the Big Bang.
I saw a (BBC) educational program once where a scientist was put in a fictional dock, before a court and accused of making the big bang up. It was a nice way of presenting the debate by lamp-shading the fact that, at a basic level, the Big Bang theory is an extraordinary propositio
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Dude, you should make a website. About analogies. Just like ideas are experienced.
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But surely there is no "outside the bowl".
Or am I just thinking like a goldfish?
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So long..... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Maybe I am being espically thick right now (Score:1)
Yea I know its failing, but instead of sending it on a death mission couldnt it just float around till it crapped out? maybe get every single last ounce out of it, and besides what is it going to hit?
of course my wife picks on me about how clean my plates are after eating so I am just that way
Re:Maybe I am being espically thick right now (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maybe I am being espically thick right now (Score:4, Informative)
The orbit was *around* L2, not at L2. The orbit around L2 appears as loops with an apreciable extension wrt to the Earth-L2 distance.
The paradox is that L2 is actually unstable, but orbits can be found around L2 which are stable over a sufficiently long time.
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And that's why it has to be moved to a retirement orbit. The fuel will run out soon and left where it was it would wander off into some unpredictable and perhaps inconvenient orbit, possibly cluttering up the L2 region and making it hard to use it for anything else. This way it's in a known, out-of-the-way orbit.
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On sufficiently wide scale it won't really register above "background noise" of natural debris, especially if left in uniteresting spots. I'd also guess that once you can spend a lot of fuel hunting and bringing wrecks to processing facility, then few hundred kg / max few tons of raw materials aren't of much use.
A pile on the moon? Even having fuel to direct old spacecraft in its general direction would be an enormous luxury...there would be certainly nothing left for soft landing; what's good a field of cr
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a) just cluttering up the wider solar system
Sure, but we have to leave it somewhere - there isn't enough fuel to send it back to earth or anything - and it's better if that somewhere isn't the L2 point, which is a small region with some nice properties for certain types of missions.
b) eliminating our chance at recouping and reusing the materials onboard?
If we're placing it in a known, stable retirement orbit we can always pick it up later if we need it - space being a vacuum there's very little differenc
ol' buddy (Score:1)
Now it can go hang out with Veejer and taunt alien races.
"Mission Accomplified" (Score:2, Interesting)
Ever since Bush, people say mission "complete" instead of "accomplished". Then again, the word "stimulus" is tainted also, replaced with "recovery program".
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Ever since Bush, people say mission "complete" instead of "accomplished".
In this case I don't think it has anything to do with Bush.
"Complete" simply states that the mission is over, without the context of success or failure. An "accomplished" mission is a mission that is complete and confirmed successful.
The mission (forgive me if I'm way off-base) was to determine the nature of the universe. As we've no other data to compare to, we don't know if what the probe related to us is correct or not.
Because the probe isn't going to send us any more data, its mission is, indeed, co
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2. ...well, 13.6 billion years later in the baby universe.
Godtcha! (Score:1)
Based on all the band-aides on the map, I'd say God is a clumsy shaver. I hope he doesn't try to create a sentient being.......oh
It's all crap (Score:1, Funny)
This stupid thing would have accurately reported the age of the universe as 6,000 years (give or take a little) if only they hadn't launched it with a rocket (Satan's Gravity Sled).
Obviously shooting it off into space like that wrecked its sensors. They should have done it the way god said...by having Jesus throw it toward the dinosaur Adam and Eve were riding to church and letting it use its tail to blast it on its way like Babe Ruth done with them baseballs.
Who says us Creation Science people don't
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Not all creationists believe the world was 6,000 years old.
That's right: only the intellectually rigorous creationists believe that. Old Earth Creationists have to for some reason accept geology and parts of physics and chemistry, while denying the greater part of physics, chemistry and, most importantly, probability theory. Which I guess makes sense to them, because it's "only a theory".
They are subject to the same sort of insanity makes people think casino gambling is a game of chance.
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In that way, it's sort of like the game. Which I just lost.
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Heretics!!!
Re:It's all crap (Score:4, Funny)
Silly Christian propaganda! Islam provides a far more accurate view of the heavens than any man-made space doohickey . I bet Muhammed (Geese be upon him) got a pretty good look at space while he was traveling around on his flying mutant horsie, hobnobbing with all and sundry in heaven.
Hmm, come to think of it I think there may have been some man/horse love - at least if this excerpt is anything to go by:
"Hearing this he (the mutant horsie) was so ashamed that he sweated until he became soaked, and he stood still so that the Prophet mounted him."
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Either hell works. Better that than an eternity spent in the company of crazed virgins, all dedicated to stroking the ego of the most powerful chap in the universe.
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You know, despite being an atheist i'm finding these frequent and gratuitous anti-christian trolls tedious. They are not funny, they are not relevant, they are not informative, and they are not original. They are all crap.
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> They are not all slack-jawed, mouth breathing rednecks...
Unfortunately, some atheists are.
> ...from the hinterlands.
Most doofuses, whether christian fanatic or anti-christian troll, are from the city (as are most people). Most of us country dwellers are as rational and reasonable as any other human being (i.e., not very). Dismissing all country people as ignorant hicks is 19th century bigotry.
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Sorry if your failure to get the point offended you.
Ease up there with the backhanded apologies.
It was just a slight misinterpretation.
You intended it to be a descriptive element to one insult. He interpreted it to be TWO separate potential insults. Likely due to the fact that they are often tied together. "You must be from West Virginia." is used as an insult, so him getting it confused is not unlikely.
That you both got bent out of shape over mundane issues is really what you two should be examining.
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"Most people" (as in "above 50%") are from the city since, basically, right now. Urbanization has surpassed 50% only a year or two ago.
Doesn't help how some places how somewhat lax and/or weird standards or calling something a "city"...
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No. It is the "slack-jawed, mouth breathing bluenecks from the cities" who tend to make the most noise and get the most attention. The "slack-jawed, mouth breathing rednecks from the cities" come in second. The "slack-jawed, mouth breathing rednecks from the hinterlands" come in a distant third.
Dark Flow (Score:1)