NASA To Deploy Four Spacecraft To Study Magnetic Reconnection 29
Zothecula writes: NASA has released a video depicting the initial deployment of an undertaking designed to study a phenomenon known as magnetic reconnection. "Reconnection happens when magnetic field lines explosively realign and release massive bursts of energy, while hurling particles out at nearly the speed of light in all directions. Magnetic reconnection powers eruptions on the sun and – closer to home – it triggers the flow of material and energy from interplanetary space into near-Earth space." The launch of the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission will see four identical spacecraft deployed from a single Atlas V rocket, set to lift off from cape Canaveral, Florida, no earlier than March next year.
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What do hippies have to do with Illuminati nutters? The top few names that pop to mind when it comes to that nonsense are hard-right folks like John Todd or Des Griffin.
And Alex Jones, if you count relabeling the same conspiracy theories as "NWO".
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Or, you know, I've actually read a bit about the conspiracies, and how their re-emergence is tied into the 60s anti-satanic panics, and the bullshit balance fallacy you're pushing isn't substantiated by any, you know, evidence.
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Boring.
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Boring.
Yeah, I bet Hitler found his detractors equally boring.
If I may invoke Godwin's Law in a rather unique way, everyone is a potential Hitler if they lack humility. We're ALL limited, and we're ALL flawed.
It's when we deny our limitations that we have the potential to truly fuck things up.
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Magnetosphere-sensing satellites in a pyramid formation?
Relax. It's not a pyramid. It's a tetrahedron. [wikipedia.org]
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Fox News doesn't make stuff up.
You're right, they don't. But only 18 percent of the time. [forwardprogressives.com]
Slightly better summary I hope (Score:1)
Technical part first:
MMS is essentially the 2.0 version of CLUSTER. CLUSTER is an ESA mission launched in 1996 first time with the first Ariane 5 and a big boom and the tears of a thousand scientists and engineers, second time in 2000 with two soyuz rockets). It has the standard space plasma physics payload, which is instruments that measure electric field, magentic field, electrons and protons. It has way better time resolution especially for electrons and protons (and some other less dramatic instrumental
Fusion power applications? (Score:2)
It will be interesting to see whether this research on the phenomenon in the large scale produces insights useful at the smaller scale of fusion plasma confinement.
In case it's not clear, magnetic reconnection is a phenomenon of magnetic field/plasma interaction. (Without the plasma and its currents (or extreme accelerations like those around black holes) the magnetic field wouldn't be simultaneously twisted up and bent around so it can reconnect differently.
I see two ways this might apply to plasma confi
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Re your sig: Jobs are not the goal. Make a basic income available to everyone (funded by the Fed, not the taxpayer, at zero cost). Hold challenges, public and private, to stimulate innovation.
Not zero cost. (digression on my sig line) (Score:2)
Make a basic income available to everyone (funded by the Fed, not the taxpayer, at zero cost).
The point is that it's not zero cost. Every penny of money "funded by the Fed" comes from your and my pockets - sometimes with a big multiplier - by paths that are not as obvious, but just as costly, as a tax bill.
The biggest one is inflation: If the Fed just prints money, it dilutes the rest of the money. Your wages go down (though the numbers don't change.) Got retirement savings? They go down, too. Your in
Good news for HST and others in LEO (Score:2)
...this means further study can be carried out on the South Atlantic Anomaly which is a continuing risk to pretty much anything which crosses its boundaries (which Hubble and the ISS do an average of 3 times a day each)
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Tethers (Score:2)