The Pod Bay

9:59 AM

Rosetta / Philae Media Update from ESOC Press Centre is now live via LiveStream

erm no it's not LOL ... it should have been according to this schedule esa.int/esatv/Television but I don't see a live stream ... I guess they'll post a replay like they did for the yesterday's media update

Everyone

12:37 PM

Gah. I can't get those Don sats out of my head. I keep wondering why they were thrown up in such irregular fashion.

TildalWave

12:49 PM

@Everyone And I still don't know what you mean. They served some purpose. Achieving that same purpose was done with more than just Orlets-1 satellites. There were also Orlets-2 (Yenisey) in between, Yantar before it, and Persona after. There were also similar Resurs sats but those were supposed to be commercial in nature.

I.e. Korsch type telescope LEO satellites with film return capsules or radio transmissions

Stu

1:15 PM

SpaceX working on micro-satellite constellation? twitter.com/elonmusk/status/531994668608024576

hopefully it's free internet for everybody

Stack Exchange

3:58 PM

Blog - Stack Exchange: Announcing Bosun, our new open source monitoring & alerting system

David Fullerton on November 11, 2014

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason. - Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey

A big part of scaling up an engineering team is getting serious about monitoring and alerts. A good monitoring system collects data from all of your various systems — for example, how fast pages are loading, or server CPU usage, or emails being sent — and alerts you when something isn’t working correctly. When everything works perfectly you can sleep easy at night knowing that you’ll get an alert if something isn’t working correctly. …

TildalWave

6:59 PM

Webcast of the Rosetta / Philae Landing Covergage Live from ESOC Mission Control Room is now available via Livestream. More info here, schedule here

The stream will be live for 24 hours

Stu

woah! long schedule

i thought landing was happening today haha

Everyone

@TildalWave http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/orlets-1.htm

Talking as a layman; the launch dates are what bug me. Each satellite series is a particular configuration - instruments/experiments(if any)/electronics. Better electronics, or instruments may come in and such. Yenisey apparently had better eyes - different configuration. It's those dates that keep tickling my rib - 1989, then nothing for a year until October 1990, then October 1991, Dec 1992, Sept '93. OK So far. Then all is quiet until 1997 by which time you already have real-time tracking, or even digital imaging available!

Why would they burn money to launch a satellite that returns film ?? 1997, 2003, 2006(??!?)

TildalWave

@Everyone there's no compromising emanations if you don't transmit any ;)

Everyone

Perhaps the situation was such in the period between 1989 through 1997 that Don's eyes were not needed regularly. But ...

uh. if you say so; it still causes a strange vibration in the Force though ...

TildalWave

that'd be my guess ... they wanted course tracking of new building sites in the middle of rural areas, as in missile silos and such, and you do see if they're preparing for anything (trucks et al.) ... perhaps doing that every now and then was enough?

Everyone

7:07 PM

Besides they could have retrieved images via relay; the way Geizer worked

Yeah but throwing a satellite up is a cost in itself, plus a satellite launch would hardly be kept invisible

TildalWave

you could still track its exact position then ... of course, considering that even their individual return capsules were tracked shows that (RF signature tracking) wasn't even needed, but they likely didn't know how accurate NORAD was?

Everyone

uh huh?

TildalWave

Just knowing that it's there isn't enough to deploy ASAT on it ... you need its exact position and you'd want it live

Everyone

Sounds noisy ... not smooth at all

TildalWave

how so?

Everyone

7:13 PM

Let me put it this way, how often would you use an old-fashioned box camera (the type the photog had to hide the camera, and himself under a black-cloth - manually remove the cover off the lense, and replace it) to photograph a car driving by if you had the option to use an SLR instead?

Not an exact analogy, I fear

TildalWave

Each time I wouldn't want my SLR to transmit any RF signals or if the camera still needs to work during a nuclear war and won't be knocked out by EM pulses they generate?

It's quite possible they were also hardened for in-orbit nuclear explosions or EM bombs that would be deployed specifically to take out spy satellites.

Everyone

Come now, 2003 and 2006 don't come across as being risky in that sense ...

I don't know |+: it keeps coming back me; why did they do that?

Sleep catching up now )+: 'nini

TildalWave

You believe that cold war is over? Wanna reduce their military budget to see if that's so?

Everyone

Things seemed to have settled down between the big players back around that period. 1997 through 2009 newer players were making their mark - 2001 would be a case in point

It's now that the cold seems to be ~~coldering~~ hottering more

Well, since about 2009 iirc after the financial issues

Off to bed now; 'nini

TildalWave

I personally mark that thawing period (détente) as significant to cold war only in budgetary terms. It's the point when military budgets of the two major players (that still remain) remained constant or even increased despite the "democratization" (right!) of the then lands behind the iron curtain.

OK, it was nice to watch the Pink Floyd concert in Berlin, and see whole nations rejoice to newly found freedom, but that was more of a party before the hangover sets in. Most new countries that formed are still not free of the communist influence, even control. Often from now other countries. Except perhaps those rare few that actually enforced lustration and don't border the baddies. And even of those not all are free of what once was, now disguised in different colors and similar.

And the big two still fight other nations around the word for influence, and often those interests clash with interests of the other big one. No, cold war is definitely not over IMHO. It's just a lot more convoluted now and lines aren't as clear as they used to be.

Jerard Puckett

7:53 PM

Sorry I waded in.

I had meant to add the bit about the color seal & B&W seal to the question, but never got around to it.

BTW I could have awarded the bounty that dotancohen posted?

Certainly will not be doing so now.

geoffc

9:34 PM

Good grief. My son came home with an eight inch loong strip of duct tape, stuck in his hair Covers the entire front of his head.

Good grief. Kids...

TildalWave

9:53 PM

@JerardPuckett No space.stackexchange.com/help/bounty If it's not awarded by whoever starts it, then the system awards half of it to the highest ranking answer, if it has a total score of at least 2

Jerard Puckett

10:14 PM

Thanks for the clarification, my apologies if I once again was a PIA.

BTW did anyone else notice Geoffrey Landis is now on SE?

TildalWave

@JerardPuckett No, you weren't, it was more likely that I was a bit too agitated by it. I don't even know what's his problem, but he downvoted my answer and didn't the other, even more vague one that doesn't even try to answer what he then commented in all bold is the question about. (I edited that all bold part so it doesn't seem like shouting)

Frankly, I don't care what's his problem. I'm not gonna let him make it mine.

@JerardPuckett I did now that you mention it. That's cool. We do have a few others from NASA since before tho. Also some from other space agencies. I can't really share much more since it's confidential information unless they choose to share it, but one that does share it (uses real name) is e.g. Mark Adler of JPL. Now a project lead on LDSD, and previously lead mission engineer on Cassini,... you name it.

geoffc

10:32 PM

What is Geoff's username?

Jerard Puckett

Geoffrey Landis

geoffc

Well that was hard.

Only one answer so far.

TildalWave

Wait, someone will comment that he's not citing any credible sources like Mark Adler once got a comment LOL

I think it went something like: Q: "Who's your source?", A: "I'm my source" :)))

geoffc

Maybe we can get Henry Spencer to join? That would be a monstrous win!

Anyone a verteran of sci.space.shuttle style newsgroups?

TildalWave

hey, I'm trying my best alright? :P

geoffc

10:40 PM

You are pretty good, but you are no Henry Spencer. (There is only one Henry Spencer!)

(Amusingly, I cited Henry in my Honours Thesis on the sweat bee, Halictus Poeyii. He both designed a specific font I was using, and wrote part of the Cladistics program I used in it. My degree is in Evolutionary Biology, got to prove a bee is really two species and name it!)

TildalWave

I meant that I'm trying my best getting people here. What, you think I know space better than those that actually do because I have more of some fake internet points on non-identifying nickname?

geoffc

But seriously, do we have anyone who gets the joke about "I corrected Henry" T-shirts? (Only 4 were ever awarded that I was aware of.)

Henry Spencer

Henry Spencer (born 1955) is a Canadian computer programmer and space enthusiast. He wrote "regex", a widely used software library for regular expressions, and co-wrote C News, a Usenet server program. He also wrote The Ten Commandments for C Programmers. He is coauthor, with David Lawrence, of the book Managing Usenet. While working at the University of Toronto he ran the first active Usenet site outside the U.S., starting in 1981. His records from that period were eventually acquired by Google to provide an archive of Usenet in the 1980s. The first international Usenet site was run in Ottawa...

A friend here in NJ, who is also from Toronto thought I was nuts at how excited I was, when it turns out her dad is a good friend of Henry's! :)

Hehe: "He also developed a 4 point font used by entomologists in labeling pinned insect specimens" Yep! I have used and cited that!

TildalWave

@geoffc What's to get? The guy was corrected 4 times. I'm corrected more times than that with each sentence I write.

geoffc

So that stat is: From 1983 to 2007 Spencer posted over 34,000 messages to the sci.space.* newsgroups.

And some were thousand word long responses. It was awe insprining! :)

I remember those days fondly!

And only 4 well known errors.

Not bad!!

Almost a good a record as Soyuz!

TildalWave

I wrote 14.7k messages here so far, does that count?

geoffc

10:46 PM

No.

:)

TildalWave

:P

how about 3111 actions on the main site and 478 on meta?

I still do more work on sec.se tho,... 19.7k messages in DMZ and I'm still alive, and 4,541 actions on main site and I still have a bit of self-respect left :)

or maybe that should be the other way around

Here's a nice (auto) bio on Mark Adler alumnus.caltech.edu/~madler

If any of them stop by here we cover for each other, right? "We were only sharing words of praise! Honest!" :)

Stu

11:27 PM

@geoffc where can i find the sci.space newsgroups? I haven't heard of them before! Sounds like a lot of good reading for a green-thumb like myself.

TildalWave

11:43 PM

@Stu newsville.com/news/groups/sci.space.html

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