A small object in space is still reasonably large, and given the speeds they tend to move at, the energy of their motion is immense, and the accelerations, forces and sheer destruction they experience (and cause) are correspondingly awesome. For a tiny piece of space junk to be able to elicit the equivalent of a…

Please read the peer reviewed publication: http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/807/…

Go away.

Sorry. I got part of the way through this and was a little baffled by a lack of some basic information. I can only assume they have basically created a functional virus that they believe they can control? How else would they be achieving this?

Impressive that they were able to use the data from multiple sensors in the LOX tank and acoustic triangulation to locate the strut failure. Good to see a solution and a plan for return to flight.

Except in the Pluto/Charon’s case the barycentric center isn’t within either body. The Earth/Moon point is still 1710 km below the surface of the Earth. The Earth wobbles but doesn’t orbit an empty point in space. On the other hand the Sun does due to Jupiter, one of the things we look for while looking for other…

You are really adding a lot to the conversation with your 2 and 3 word responses. Keep it up!

Wait, that is David Bowie’s son?

Not hard to believe he’s the son of the man who fell to earth:

It looks like he runs on plutonium 238, the same used in New Horizons probe. It’s not going to run out of battery soon. Don’t freak out if you go near the robot.

Love it. But what powers hitchBOT? Are people expected to recharge it?

Why would you extrapolate, from this story, that car crashes will go up as more driverless cars go on the road? A human driver would have been hit in exactly the same way in this situation - a distracted driver who never applied the brakes rear-ended the google car.

But the car did exactly that. What’s your problem with it?

In what way would this accident have turned out differently if the autonomous car had instead been driven by a human? Are you saying a human would have pulled into the intersection, to get stuck in the middle when the light turned red?

I am currently doing my Ph. D. in Comparative Literature. Trust me, I’ve read a lot of books. And being written in present tense has never been a problem.

This was used by the WWII “dam busters”. The bombs had to make it over an anti-torpedo net, then skip, skip, hit the dam, curve downwards, and boom next to the dam but underwater. So cylindrical bomb, transverse axis, mounted beneath the bombers, motor to spin them up before dropping them.

I can’t stop flailing. I’ve taught so many geomorphology labs on landscapes, and run my students through crater-counting dating exercise, and both of those tell me that this is NOT what we expect to find on freaking Pluto.

Tidal heating works SO WELL as a model for the icy moons. That tidal massaging can exactly create…

BART uses the early warning system already (the only public transit system in the US to do so). Japan has a system just for its trains. Japan is also probably the expert on shutting down nuclear reactors, not FEMA, because they have done so in the past. What happened at Fukushima was because the earthquake was larger…

It only takes a few seconds to turn off a nuclear reactor via a scram. Decay heat, on the other hand, means that certain types of reactors still need active cooling for a few days after shutting down. If the cooling fails in those types of reactors (as it did at Fukushima Daiichi), then catastrophic failure may occur.

You cannot make that comparison. It does not make sense. Sending a probe off world requires knowledge in physics, chemistry, etc. Our DNA requires more complex understanding of biology, chemistry, biophysics, etc. The number of elements involved in gene regulation are mind-blowing and we are starting to uncover some…