Felix Baumgartner’s recent amazing skydive from the edge of space (128,100 feet /39,045 metres), where he was the first unaided human to break the sound barrier by free-falling to earth (or is it the earth rushing up to meet him?). The speed of s
Light speed
ound is around 750 mph/1207 kph depending on air pressure. Whilst this is fast by humans standards, it is incredibly slow to nature’s fastest speed, that of light.
The speed of light is measured at 186,000 miles, 300,000 kilometres per second, that is 671 million miles per hour/1080 million kilometres per hour- very large numbers to say the least!
Just to best exemplify the difference between speeds:
If spacecraft could travel to the moon at 750 mph, the speed of sound ( not really possible or recommended as it is far too slow and there is no sound barrier to break b
Felix Baumgartner
because space is near vacuum), it would take approx 25 days to reach lunar orbit.
The Apollo moon landers and other spacecraft traveling to the moon average a speed of 17000 mph and take nearly three days to complete the journey.
The speed of light would take just over a second to reach the moon.
Currently, science states that nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light.
Congratulations to Felix Baumgartner for his amazing fete!
At work, we provide kitchen automation software & hardware for some of the top quick service restaurants around the world.
One of the features of our software is providing Speed of Service reports for the managers to check on the performance of their staff.
One of our clients requested reports to be sent out from a centrally managed location. Each of the servers on site will have to generate & send reports to a mapped network drive to the central report server via VPN, and from there they are sent out to the individual area managers, store managers, accountants etc.
A common problem with good old Windows XP is a network disruption can cause a network drive to “disconnect” and would require you to manually double-click the drive in My Computer to re-connect it.
As there are hundereds of these restaurants, these network drive disconnections can be quite frequent, but are not monitored so it is up to the recipients of the reports to inform us that reports had not been sent through.
I figured out a quick simple fix to force a drive to reconnect at a regular interval using a Windows Scheduled Task.
The following code is very simple. Simply, it attempts to find a file on drive R: named donottouch.txt and rename the file extension from “.txt” to “.000”.
It then pings google.com. This is to simply give it a slight pause from the inital rename command, to moving on with renaming the extension back to “.txt”.
Now, the above is simply my preference. You would obviously need to create the donottouch.txt (a blank text document) in the mapped network drive.For a slightly easier setup (say if you were to mass deploy this file), you could simply get the batch file to create a temporary file on the mapped drive. You could even include error levels with some sort of email notification (using blat for example) if any issues were to arise.
Now for the scheduling, I set this to run every 20 minutes, every single day with the highest privileged This is in case the user account gets logged out.
So far, 6 months down the line, I have had no problems with this and have not received any emails from concerned managers regarding missing reports!
I read a few months back that Voyager 1 has left our solar system. What is really going on?
Anyway, isn’t this just the most breathtakingly amazing information ever. Something man-made has broken the barrier into interstellar space. I cannot even begin to imagine nor fathom this event. It is almost fantastical, very sci-fi!
This means to me that the world is not only man’s oyster, the universe is.
It is exciting to know what life is out there, what things will we find out in the next 10-20 years.
Just amazing!!!
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35 years on, Voyager ‘dancing on edge’ of outer space
By Michael Thurston | AFP –
NASA’s Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is nearing the outer boundary of the solar system and may already be “dancing on the edge” of outer space, the experts behind the pioneering craft said.
In a lecture marking the 35th anniversary Wednesday of the space craft’s launch, Ed Stone said it could be “days, months or years” before it finally breaks into interstellar space.
Earlier this year a surge in a key indicator fueled hopes that the craft was nearing the so-called heliopause, which marks the boundary between our solar system and outer space.
Scientists were intrigued in May by an increase in cosmic rays hitting the spacecraft, which for decades has snapped images of the Earth and other planets in the solar system as it has made its long journey into outer space.
But measurements since then have fluctuated up and down, indicating that, while the craft is near to the edge, it may still not get there for some time.
“The question is, how much further is it to the heliopause?” Stone asked at the lecture on Tuesday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
“We don’t know .. whether we’re dancing along the edge of a new region which is connected to the outside,” added Stone, a Voyager project scientist from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Noting that Voyager 1 moves a billion miles every three years, he said: “It’s hard to imagine that it’s going to be too much longer, but I can’t tell you if it’s days, months or years. I really can’t tell you.”
But he underlined how important a milestone it will be.
“Crossing into interstellar space — that will be a historic moment when the first object launched from Earth finally leaves the bubble,” he said.
The twin Voyager craft — Voyager 2 was actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5 — were designed primarily to study the biggest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn.
Taking advantage of a planetary alignment, they fulfilled that mission before pushing on to Uranus and Neptune, beaming back stunning images of the first two in 1979 and 1980, and the latter pair in 1986 and 1989.
But with those jobs complete and both craft still functioning perfectly, project managers decided to keep mining information as the devices fly further into the void and towards the very edge of our solar system.
Before May’s surge in cosmic rays researchers had said they expected Voyager 1 would leave the solar system and enter interstellar space — between the boundary of the Sun’s influence and the next star system — within two years.
NASA has described Voyager 1 — now 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) away from the Sun — and its companion Voyager 2 as “the two most distant active representatives of humanity and its desire to explore.”
The scientists controlling Voyager 1 — whose 1970s technology gives it just a 100,000th of the computer memory of an eight-gigabyte iPod Nano — decided to turn off its cameras after it passed Neptune in 1989, to preserve power.
Assuming the craft continues to function normally, they will have to start turning off other on-board instruments from 2020, and it is expected to run out of power completely in 2025, said Stone.
Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.
Neil Armstrong
Neil Armstrong – Iconic Astronaut
One of the Titans of the twentieth century passed away this week. Neil Armstrong the first human to step onto the surface of another heavenly body, our moon, died aged 82. A modest publicity shy man who would never regard himself as endowed with the stature conferred upon him after that historic even in July 1969. He was the pinnacle of a team consisting of tens of thousands of scientists, engineers and fellow astronauts striving for the ultimate goal as stated by President Kennedy nearly a decade before to safely land a crew on the moon and return them home safely.
I remember as a wee girl watching on TV the grainy live TV pictures beamed to earth as he alighted from the Apollo 11 lunar lander, which had the day before landed on the moon. It was surreal watching Armstrong being the first one of the two-man crew step onto the moon, but because of it, space travel and future space exploration has never looked back since.
“That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”, This must be one of the most iconic quotations of all time.
Neil Armstrong: Global Icon, Reluctant Hero
Sky News
Neil Armstrong was a self-described “nerdy engineer” who became a global hero when he became the first person to set foot on the moon.
His first words upon stepping on the lunar surface have since been etched in history: “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”
An estimated 450 million people watched the grainy black and white broadcast that showed Mr Armstrong, clad in a white space suit, climb down the lunar module’s ladder onto the moon’s desolate surface.
He commanded the Apollo 11 spacecraft that landed on the moon on July 20, 1969.
As the lead astronaut, it was also Mr Armstrong who notified mission control that the module had made a successful landing. “Houston, Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed.”
He and fellow astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin spent nearly three hours walking on the lunar surface, collecting samples, conducting experiments and taking photographs.
“The sights were simply magnificent, beyond any visual experience that I have ever been exposed to,” Mr Armstrong once said.
The third astronaut on the mission, Michael Collins, circled the moon in the mother ship Columbia 60 miles overhead while Mr Armstrong and Mr Aldrin went to the moon’s surface.
Born in Wapakoneta, Ohio on August 5, 1930, Mr Armstrong had an early fascination with aircraft and worked at a nearby airport when he was a teenager.
He took flying lessons at the age of 15 and received his pilot’s licence on his 16th birthday. A US Navy aviator, he flew 78 missions in the Korean War.
He studied Aeronautical Engineering at Purdue University in Indiana, and later earned a Master of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Southern California.
In 1955, he became a test pilot at the High-Speed Flight Station at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where he flew about 50 different types of aircraft.
Seven years later, Mr Armstrong was selected by the National Air and Space Administration (Nasa) to train as an astronaut in Houston, Texas.
After retiring from Nasa in 1971, Mr Armstrong taught at the University of Cincinnati for nearly a decade and served on the boards of several companies, including Lear Jet, United Airlines and Marathon Oil.
He married Carol Knight in 1999, and the couple lived in Indian Hill, a Cincinnati suburb. He had two adult sons from a previous marriage.
Despite his worldwide fame, the lunar pioneer shied away from the limelight. After learning his autographs were being sold at exorbitant prices, he stopped signing memorabilia.
“I am, and ever will be, a white socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer,” he said during one of his rare public appearances in February 2000.
“And I take a substantial amount of pride in the accomplishments of my profession.”
However, he stepped back into the cameras in 2010 to voice his “substantial reservations” about President Barack Obama’s space policy that shifted attention away from a return to the moon, with an emphasis on private companies developing spaceships.
Along with more than two dozen Apollo-era veterans, he signed a letter calling the plan a “misguided proposal that forces Nasa out of human space operations for the foreseeable future”.
Mr Armstrong underwent cardiac bypass surgery earlier this month after doctors found blockages in his coronary arteries.
He died following complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures, his family said in a statement. He was 82.
The ever-increasing number of planets being discovered around other stars solar systems raises the probability that life and even possible other civilizations exist.
Human Beings may not be the only beings in the vast universe surrounding us. In the 1960s, US astronomer Frank Drake devised a formula that calculated the number of probable alien civilizations advanced enough to send signals into space.
With billions of stars scattered in the cosmos, it is only a matter of time before we discover planets capable of supporting life.
Whether any the life on these planets would be sufficiently advanced to at least our current level or even above is another question.
As our space probes and telescopes get more sophisticated, signs of life and even civilisations may be eventually detected.
Like the ever-expanding ripples of a stone thrown into water, our planet has been leaking radio/TV waves into space for over a hundred years. Possible other civilisations within 100+ light-years of earth and at our same technological level also using radio telescopes would readily detect our artificially produced signals.
Post-1800s industrialisation, our fragile earth’s atmosphere now contains non-natural elements mainly derived from pollution. Again other advanced civilisations would have the means to detect these anomalies as we too are also beginning to analyse the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.
