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samc
Trad climber
Berkeley, CA
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Nov 12, 2014 - 11:37am PT
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Nov 12, 2014 - 11:45am PT
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No rack required. An 80 kg climber would weigh about a gram.
Thin cracks? Tiny flakes? No worries - glue on those Hollywood Nails and start scratchin.
But don't scratch too hard. Gotta stay on the thing.
And if you peel off - you can't fall far enough to get hurt.
A bit chilly though.
In space, no one need hear you scream.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Nov 12, 2014 - 12:17pm PT
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Leave the ice harpoons at home, I reckon.
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Bushman
Social climber
The island of Tristan da Cunha
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Nov 13, 2014 - 10:12am PT
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Breaking News!!!
Comet launches probe on two year mision to earth. The spacecraft detected to be originating from comet 67P on Tuesday November 12th, 2014 has been reported to be carrying a payload of thousands of melon sized drones which will be delivered into our atmosphere upon its arrival projected to be on or around January 1st, 2017. The drones will drop into earth's atmosphere and land at predesignated coordinates whereupon they will seek out all top ranking political leaders on the planet and initiate a cranial cavity implantation procedure.
This procedure may or may not affect the ability of our world leaders to perform their duties or to make better decisions but the inhabitants of comet P67 are banking on a tried and true system of planetary dominion by attempting to provide themselves with the best neighboring government money can buy. Their mission might possibly negate the need for the comet's inhabitants to steer themselves into a collision course with earth.
In the event that this attack might take place, leaders of earth's top nations are meeting at a secret location to plan on finding a way to set the earth on a collision course with the comet as a preemptive strike. Top astrophysicists worldwide had no comment.
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Sierra Ledge Rat
Mountain climber
Old and Broken Down in Appalachia
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Nov 13, 2014 - 12:55pm PT
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Ever detect an object that caused a course change? How involved where you in that sort of thing? As a matter of fact, I was awarded a Joint service medal for detecting the first first possible orbital collision between the space shuttle and space junk. NASA sent me proposed orbital changes, and I gave NASA calculations showing which proposed orbit gave the shuttle the most clearance. They woke up the shuttle crew and had them fire the thrusters for 7 seconds to avoid the space junk.
Wikipedia has a brief story about my work:
"The first official Space Shuttle collision avoidance maneuver
was during STS-48 in September 1991. A 7-second reaction control
system burn was performed to avoid debris from the Cosmos
satellite 955."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Nov 13, 2014 - 03:40pm PT
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Badass FA man.. nice work! How much time was there from detection to possible collision?
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jul 13, 2015 - 07:46am PT
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July 12, 2015
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
An historic moment is nearly upon us.
In only two more days, and after a long journey of nine years, the New Horizons spacecraft will make its highly anticipated flight past Pluto
and its five moons. With scientific sensors on alert, the spacecraft
will silently and quickly go about gathering precious bits of insight into what prevails on and around this body, more than 30 times farther from the Sun than is the Earth.
Its arrival at Pluto marks the start of our official exploration of the Kuiper Belt ... that distant realm beyond Neptune where dwell millions of small, pristine icy bodies, and the source of many of the spectacular comets that from time to time grace the skies of Earth.
With hopefully two more encounters with smaller Kuiper Belt objects forthcoming in the next several years, next Tuesday's flyby also marks the beginning of the end of our initial reconnaissance of our solar system. We have come far.
Already, strange features are seen on Pluto's surface (see attached 2
recent images of Pluto). Might they be as strange as the structures
Voyager found in 1989 on Neptune's moon Triton, a body of similar size and composition to Pluto, and believed also to be from the Kuiper Belt?
I would say so.
Accordingly, in preparation for our grand entrance into the Kuiper Belt in two days' time, and in anticipation of that moment when we come face to face for the first time with its most renowned member, gaze upon the phenomenal discoveries Voyager made at Triton 26 years ago, seen here in this large mosaic of Voyager images ...
http://www.ciclops.org/view_media/18314/Global-Color-Mosaic-of-Triton
... and wonder.
And allow next Tuesday to remind you that you have been blessed to live in extraordinary times.
(Mosaic caption here: http://www.ciclops.org/view.php?id=3580 ; More Triton images can be found at http://t.co/NLj3N1pQzu )
Enjoy!
Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team leader
Director, CICLOPS, Space Science Institute, Boulder, CO
Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley, CA
Fellow, California Academy of Sciences
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Off White
climber
Tenino, WA
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Jul 13, 2015 - 08:16am PT
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I'm pretty damned excited about this, thanks Mouse.
I love this thread.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Jul 13, 2015 - 08:30am PT
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Has Cosmic returned yet? I need my windows washed.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jul 14, 2015 - 10:56am PT
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drljefe
climber
El Presidio San Augustin del Tucson
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Jul 14, 2015 - 07:17pm PT
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LBT
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jul 15, 2015 - 05:18am PT
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Nine point five years later...ET got his call thru.
From Yahoo's science news this morning...
LAUREL, Md. (Reuters) - A U.S. spacecraft sailed past the tiny planet Pluto in the distant reaches of the solar system on Tuesday, capping a journey of 3 billion miles (4.88 billion km) that began nine and a half years ago.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft passed by the ice-and-rock planetoid and its entourage of five moons at 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT). The event culminated an initiative to survey the solar system that the space agency embarked upon more than 50 years ago.
"Pluto just had its first visitor," President Obama posted on Twitter. "Thanks NASA. It's a great day for discovery and American leadership."
About 13 hours after its closest approach to Pluto, the last major unexplored body in the solar system, New Horizons phoned home, signaling that it had survived its 31,000 miles per hour(49,000 km per hour) blitz through the Pluto system.
Managers had estimated there was a 1-in-10,000 chance a debris strike could destroy New Horizons as it soared just 7,750 miles (12,472 km) – about the distance from New York to Mumbai – from Pluto.
But right on time, New Horizons made radio contact with flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab outside Baltimore, sparking a wave of shouts and applause from an overflow crowd gathered to watch the drama unfold.
With 99 percent of the data gathered during the encounter still on the spaceship, New Horizons' survival was critical to the mission.
"This is a tremendous moment in human history," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science.
New Horizons spent more than eight hours after its closest approach looking back at Pluto for a series of experiments to study the planet's atmosphere and photograph its night-side using light reflected off its primary moon Charon.
Sending back its first post-flyby signal took another four-and-a-half hours, the time it takes radio signals, traveling at light speed, to travel the 3 billion miles (4.88 billion km) back to Earth.
Already, the trickle of images and measurements relayed from New Horizons before Tuesday's pass by Pluto has changed scientists' understanding of this diminutive world, which is smaller than Earth's moon.
Once considered an icy, dead world, the planetoid has yielded signs of geological activity, with evidence of past and possibly present-day tectonics, or movements of its crust.
"This is clearly a world where both geology and atmosphere climatology play a role," said Alan Stern, New Horizons lead scientist, with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He noted that it appears that nitrogen and methane snow fall on Pluto.
Pluto circles the sun every 248 years in a highly tilted orbit that creates radical changes from season to season. Pluto travels closer to the sun than the orbit of Neptune before it cycles back into the solar system’s deep freeze more than 40 times farther away than Earth.
Scientists have many questions about Pluto, which was still considered the solar system's ninth planet when New Horizons was launched in 2006. Pluto was reclassified as a "dwarf planet" after the discovery of other Pluto-like spheres orbiting in the Kuiper Belt, the region beyond the eighth planet, Neptune.
The objects are believed to be remnants from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.
"Now the solar system will be further opened up to us, revealing the secrets of distant Pluto," British cosmologist Stephen Hawking said in a message broadcast on NASA TV.
"We explore because we are human and we want to know. I hope that Pluto will help us on that journey," Hawking said.
It will take about 16 months for New Horizons to transmit back all the thousands of images and measurements taken during its pass by Pluto. By then, the spacecraft will have traveled even deeper into the Kuiper Belt, heading for a possible follow-on mission to one of Pluto's cousins.
(Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Richard Pullin)
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