Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

We are almost ready to explore Pluto! How cool is that?

NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Awakens To Begin Pluto Mission

i09 – By: George Dvorsky – “At 3:00 PM ET on Saturday, a pre-set alarm clock roused New Horizons from its hibernation mode. Owing to the extreme distance, NASA received confirmation at 9:30 PM ET, some 6.5 hours later.

New Horizons will make its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015. The probe will not be stationed in orbit around the dwarf planet. Mission planners say there are two reasons for this:

The first is an engineering reason. To get to Pluto (which is 5 billion kilometers or 3 billion miles from Earth) in just 9.5 years, as New Horizons will, the spacecraft must travel very, very quickly. As a result, New Horizons will speed by Pluto at a velocity of about 43,000 kilometers per hour (27,000 miles per hour). To get into orbit, operators would have to reduce that speed by over 90%, which would require more than 1,000 times the fuel that New Horizons can carry.

The second reason is scientific: If we did stop to go into orbit, we wouldn’t be able to go on to explore the Kuiper Belt!

The $700 million mission has the following objectives:

• Map the surface composition of Pluto and Charon
• Characterize geology and morphology (“the look”) of Pluto and Charon
• Characterize the neutral atmosphere of Pluto and its escape rate
• Search for an atmosphere around Charon
• Map surface temperatures on Pluto and Charon
• Search for rings and additional satellites around Pluto
• Conduct similar investigations of one or more Kuiper Belt Objects

The New Horizons spacecraft is roughly 8 feet (2.5 meters) across and weighs about 1,050 pounds (480 kilograms) — about half a ton. It’s about the size and shape of a baby grand piano.It carries seven scientific instruments:

Alice: An ultraviolet spectrometer used for measuring gas composition
Ralph: An infrared spectrometer (LEISA) for mapping surface composition and a color optical imager (MVIC) for mapping surface structure and composition
REX: A radio experiment for measuring atmospheric composition and temperature
LORRI: An optical telescope that provides the highest resolution imaging of the surface
PEPSSI: A plasma-sensing instrument for measuring particles escaping from Pluto’s atmosphere
SWAP A plasma-sensing instrument for measuring the properties of the solar wind at Pluto, Pluto’s atmospheric escape rate, and for searching for a magnetosphere around Pluto. The “solar wind” is a stream of charged particles streaming away from the Sun at high speed.
SDC: An instrument used to measure dust impacts at the New Horizons spacecraft during its entire trajectory

What an amazing time for space exploration! Just a few weeks ago we were bouncing probes off a comet, and now, in addition to New Horizons, we can expect Dawn to arrive at Ceres.”

Not finished, and very buggy, but it looks promising!

The this week the United States launched a new rocket called the Orion. This officially gets the United States back into the space business, at least as a government-based industry. There have been private space industry companies such as SpaceX that have been launching rockets and spacecraft since the American program was shut down. But now, we are back with a vengeance!

The Orion capsule will hold four men and and is designed for longer missions than the near-Earth Space Shuttle allowed us to be involved with. The new craft is designed to allow us to send a mission to the asteroid belt, and then further on to Mars. The launch was very spectacular, and it was sad that the regular news media chose not to cover it. In fact, unless you’re a space geek you probably didn’t even know that we were back in the space business again! It’s truly sad that it’s come to this.

I can remember when I was much younger, we followed space and space exploration very closely… there was a lot of public interest, now it has dwindled, and the media, at least, are not interested.

Fortunately, the Internet allows us the opportunity to follow things that no one else seems to care about… so I was excited to see Orion launch and successfully complete its mission, and then splash-down in the ocean. It was the first splash-down since the 70s for America and it went very well!

I trust this will be the first of many successful missions for the Orion spacecraft! Way to go, NASA!

Yikes, your car can be hacked in a VERY dangerous way!

YouTube Video of a Forbes Writer – “Stomping on the brakes of a 3,500-pound Ford Escape that refuses to stop — or even slow down — produces a unique feeling of anxiety. In this case it also produces a deep groaning sound, like an angry water buffalo bellowing somewhere under the SUV’s chassis. The more I pound the pedal, the louder the groan gets — along with the delighted cackling of the two hackers sitting behind me in the backseat.

Luckily, all of this is happening at less than 5 mph. So the Escape merely plows into a stand of 6-foot-high weeds growing in the abandoned parking lot of a South Bend, IN strip mall that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have chosen as the testing grounds for the day’s experiments…”

Whoa! One Dollar for the Samsung S5!

Amazon Cyber Monday Deal brings Samsung Galaxy S5 for $1 on contract with Verizon, AT&T, Sprint

The West Side Story – By: Clinton Hesler – “Cyber Monday deals are here, and deals can be found almost at every retail location. Sprint, AT&T, Verizon are offering the Samsung Galaxy S5 for $1.oo on Amazon.com. Not every day a deal like this shows up, so interested parties should jump onboard before stock runs out.

The Samsung Galaxy S5 is the 2014 flagship device from the South Korean giant, Samsung. The handset launched earlier in the year to a lot of raving reviews, though some critics Samsung added more gimmicks to give consumers the impression that the Galaxy S5 offers considerably more than the Galaxy S4.

The model Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon are offering, is the 16GB variety, a smartphone that usually goes for $599 when not available on a 2 or 3 year contract. If the 16GB internal memory is not enough, the device comes with an SD card slot for expandable memory.

When it comes down to features, the most standout on the Galaxy S5 is its 5.1-inch full 1080p Super Amoled HD display and dual frontal speakers. It’s a beautiful handset that should be owned by anyone with a love for Android devices.

Apart from the excellent display, the Galaxy S5 comes packed with a decent enough 16 megapixel rear camera, and a 2 megapixel, front-facing camera for video calls.

One of the best aspects about this handset is its 2800 mAh removable battery. Samsung never fails in this regard, as the company knows that removable batteries are important to the Galaxy loving fans.

The Samsung Galaxy S5, while not the best Android based smartphone in 2014, should be viewed as one of the most worthwhile. It is a solid smartphone for those who are in love with big screen devices and handsets with super-fast quad core processors. The deal right now is probably the lowest the handset will ever reach in its lifetime, so folks who have always wanted one should jump at this opportunity before the offer disappears for good.”