OmicronCeti

>One thing that's never really been shown to the public, not even 50 year old 1970s era stuff, are photos/examples of the SIGINT systems that the NSA likely has in orbit.

See High Jump: the JUMPSEAT signals intelligence satellite

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/5151/1

Seems like a poor naming choice as Nano is already a common text editor

>There has long been debate in the scientific community about whether Mars had an ocean in its low-elevation northern hemisphere, Cardenas explained. Using topography data, the research team was able to show definitive evidence of a roughly 3.5-billion-year-old shoreline with substantial sedimentary accumulation, at least 900 meters thick, that covered hundreds of thousands of square kilometers.

Many, many single-purpose rovers can be sent in the place of a human mission with no risk to human life. There is no scientific justification for sending humans on a science mission, it's mostly just adventurism.

2) https://www.businessinsider.com/yandex-russia-former-news-di...

>The ex-head of news at Russia's largest internet company has advice for his former colleagues: quit.

>Lev Gershenzon worked at Yandex in various roles for four years, according to his LinkedIn profile. He took to Facebook early Tuesday morning to warn people still working at the company — which is one of the largest search engines in Russia — that it was contributing to the censorship of the country's invasion into Ukraine.

>"The fact that a significant part of the Russian population may believe that there is no war is the basis and driving force of this war," Gershenzon wrote, also tagging six of his former coworkers. "Today, Yandex is a key element in hiding information about war. Every day and hour of such "news" costs human lives. And you, my former colleagues, are also responsible for this."

2) https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/16/russia-yandex-news-vk/

>Yandex’s former head of news accused the company of being a ‘key element in hiding information’ from Russians about the war in Ukraine.

3) Result of Yandex's slower crawler and default display mode, although the effect is as described: https://twitter.com/maryilyushina/status/1510930537187319813...

>Elena Bunina, who is Jewish, is stepping down from her role as CEO of Yandex LLC, 'Russia's Google,' amid the war in Ukraine. Sources confirm she is in Israel and has no intention of returning to Russia

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/tech-news/2022-04-06/ty-...

Even more interesting, if you search that string of characters on DDG, the results are mostly Russian...

journal prestige does not correlate with review quality. Usually it does, but then there's always reviewer 3...

Pretty sure journals wouldn't allow it, but who's going to read my dissertation anyway (:

A typical PhD dissertation these days is 3 publications in high-quality journals. It is explicitly required at most schools.

I snuck her into my own dissertation acknowledgements: https://imgur.com/bDgtBAE

Also, nearly every developed country is experiencing high inflation. Supply << Demand and OPEC wants it that way.

I would like to meet one of those journals. Every journal I've published with has been a 'pay first, then we publish' model.

PloS One is not really open access... The vast majority of journals function under a Subscription/Paid open-access model, PloS One just mandates the second option.

I've forked out >$4k for a high-quality journal to make my research open-access. Or I could have paid $0 and it would be behind a paywall.

Some like Nature, publish largely open-access but it can cost >$8k to be published there.

PDF here: https://sci-hubtw.hkvisa.net/10.1017/apa.2017.26

>Zhurong’s mission is expected to last three months

This seems laughably short, even by the low bar countries like to set for their Mars rovers.

No. Many aspect of NASA's work is highly controlled under ITAR.

I used to have to be debriefed after ANY foreign travel because other people in my lab used image processing software that was covered under ITAR...

It looks like the equirectangular Mars projection. Details can be found on the HiRISE or THEMIS sites.

Why should I mind? Species come and go.

Why should we spend trillions of dollars to put a few people on a distant rock when we could spend that money to help many more people right now, and potentially avert the need for a colonial life raft? It feels self-evident to me.

The 6th extinction is well underway IMO

>credible designs

As I said elsewhere, I think the disconnect here is between potential and probable. Homo sapiens have twice come to the edge of nuclear oblivion already (being saved only by luck essentially), and I would wager we are are speeding much faster towards nuking each other than reaching the stars.

That's simply a facile comparison because most of the fuel is needed to get out of the atmosphere. The energy required for that 0.0005% distance is nearly 66% of the total.

Let's say it takes ~8 minutes to get to LEO vs 4,380 minutes to get to the Moon. That's a factor of ~550x longer flight time for a distance 2000x further.

Alpha Centauri is 1500x further away than Mars. It currently takes ~7 months to go from Earth to Mars (at 25,000 mph), assuming similar scaling that comes out to only 400x the flight time, or just about 230 years.

As I said elsewhere, I do not believe we will ever travel beyond our own solar system so we should preserve what we already have close by, instead of counting on pristine worlds elsewhere.

Hey! Sorry I took so long to reply. The commenter below you is somewhat correct that I would identify as a 'Red' in Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy.

I am not opposed to scientific exploration at all, (I work with several people who run Ops on MSL and Percy), but putting people on the surface requires much more infrastructure and expense. A sample return mission is already extremely complex and costly, and would be orders of magnitude more so if the mission also had to support human life.

Further, terraforming Mars so that people could go explore it seems completely backwards, since you would be altering the conditions you would be studying.

To your question:

>There must be so many questions you have about the planet that just won't be answered in your lifetime unless we go there and have a look around.

I'm not even sure what those would be. Almost any question we could want answered could be solved with a probe or a rover. Obviously there are questions we can't answer right now, but those are largely because we send rovers that are specialized in some areas, and totally ignorant of others. To answer those questions, it would be simpler, cheaper, and better for Mars to send more robots than to send people in my view.

Thanks, that's more insightful!

I commented elsewhere about how much I like the series.

Thoughtful response, thanks for your participation.

I'd be down, but it's more likely going to be an awful penal mining colony armed with nukes pointed back down at us.