Mission to Pluto - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

ObieX · 01-17-2006, 12:18 PM

The new horizons mission to Pluto is going to launch in like 3 minutes. Can watch on nasa tv here:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ne...ain/index.html

Quote:

Winds May Hold Out
Launch is set for 3:23 p.m. EST -- the very end of today's window. The upper level and ground winds, which have been cause for concern during today's countdown, are expected to stay within limits through the end of the window. However, if they do exceed limits within the final minutes prior to launch, the launch may be scrubbed for the day. The countdown has proceeded fairly smoothly, with otherwise favorable weather and no technical issues in work with either the Atlas V launch vehicle or the spacecraft.

As the first spacecraft to visit Pluto and its moon Charon, New Horizons looks to unlock one of the solar system's last, great planetary secrets. After launch aboard an Atlas V, the New Horizons spacecraft will cross the entire span of the solar system and conduct flyby studies of Pluto and Charon in 2015. The seven science instruments on the piano-sized probe will shed light on the bodies' surface properties, geology, interior makeup and atmospheres.

ObieX · 01-17-2006, 12:23 PM

Bleh.. nm .. they called an abort with like 1-2 minutes left

Try again tomorrow i suppose

liquidlight · 01-17-2006, 12:46 PM

What're we going to do when they find life on Pluto?

Carno · 01-17-2006, 02:01 PM

If the rocket blows up on launch, yall won't have to put up with me any more

flat5 · 01-18-2006, 06:24 AM

Pluto! Here boy!

sashime76 · 01-18-2006, 11:13 AM

Think we can find Mickey, Minnie and Donald up there? Personally I think it's tossing our tax money in the blackhole. Supposed we found life and it's liveable, what then? Unless you are Bill Gates or the likes, who can afford to take a trip up? Not to mention one way will take some 9 years...that's if the shuttle makes it all the way.....just my 2 cents.

ObieX · 01-18-2006, 12:31 PM

They're not looking for life on pluto. Its just mainly that its the only planet (well.. of the orignal 9 anyway) that has yet to be visited by any spacecraft or has really been looked at at all in any detail. The best images we have are rather crappy and have no detail at all.

It wasn't until last year that they found 2 new moons around pluto. We really don't know much of anything about the planet except that its really part of a new class of planet that we're starting to discover. There have recently been a lot of discoveries of new planets of the pluto type in our solar system. Pluto just happens to be one of the closest and biggest (though it isnt the biggest. "Planet" "Xena" is bigger than pluto, for example... bet most people didn't even know we had more than 9 planets in our solar system.. Xena is only the provisional name of that 10th planet [it even has a moon named gabrielle

])

Anyway these planets are of a type that is basically a building block for planets. Most, if not all, of the planets in our solar system started out mostly or exactly like pluto is. So in order for us to understand our own planet, the origins of the planets in our solar system.. and other reasons.. we're sending that craft to pluto to give us a better understanding of these things.

ObieX · 01-18-2006, 12:34 PM

Launch postponed again till tomorrow (thursday) btw.

flat5 · 01-18-2006, 03:16 PM

Will it check out many things on the way?

In the gospel according to Goofy, life started on Pluto.

ObieX · 01-18-2006, 03:24 PM

I'm not sure. It's supposed to do a swing-by of Jupiter to get a gravity assist, but i dunno if it will examine it. For that matter it wont even be at Pluto for very long either. It will be going so fast (i think the fastest craft ever sent from our planet) that it wont be able to slow down enough to get into orbit around pluto. They'll have to get all their information in a very small window which lasts less than a day iirc. Then it'll continue on past pluto, hopefully still able to examine some things along the way.

feelgood · 01-18-2006, 03:47 PM

Pluto?

flat5 · 01-19-2006, 04:57 AM

They cut his head off and he's still enthusiastic. What a great dog. or "The bastards! They killed Pluto!"

I would think they could find a way to slow it down or crash it on Pluto.
But what do I know? (not a thing about astro-physics)

ObieX · 01-19-2006, 08:46 AM

A 1060 pound object moving at 47,000 mph takes a lot to slow it down. Crashnig it into Pluto would be a waste since it can still study other objects out past pluto. (there are thousands)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...121800976.html

Quote:

NASA Readies to Launch Pluto Mission
Fastest Spaceship Ever Will Make 10-Year Trip to Gather Data, Take Photos

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 19, 2005; Page A02

NASA is making final preparations to launch the fastest spaceship ever made on a 10-year odyssey to Pluto, the scarlet-colored "ice dwarf" that shines brightly in the chill wilderness of deep space nearly 4 billion miles away.

Pluto is the only planet that has never yet had a human-engineered visitor, but if all goes well, New Horizons, a piano-size spacecraft wrapped in thermal blankets, will spend five months in close flyby, taking pictures and gathering data on features such as the planet's atmosphere, its surface geology and its temperature.
"We really expect the mission to be transformational," said New Horizons lead scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. "This is the capstone of the original visits to the planets. It takes us 4 billion miles away and 4 billion years back in time."

The $700 million mission is the first space expedition aimed specifically at a celestial body beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt, a remote region filled with debris from the creation of the solar system. Pluto is also the solar system's only known "binary planet," orbiting the sun in tandem with a moon, Charon, that is more than half as big as Pluto itself. Two other tiny moons were discovered earlier this year.

NASA plans to launch New Horizons from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida as early as possible during a 29-day window that opens at 1:24 p.m. on Jan. 17. If liftoff occurs during the first 11 days, the spacecraft will reach Pluto in the summer of 2015. Launching later will result in substantial delays; starting the voyage on Valentine's Day would mean arrival as late as 2020.

"We want to study the atmosphere, but Pluto is moving further away from the sun," said New Horizons mission systems engineer David Kusnierkiewicz of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. "Around 2020 the atmosphere is going to freeze and fall as snow, so we need to get there by then."

Kusnierkiewicz said the launch team has had two rehearsals for what will be the fastest space trip ever taken. It opens with liftoff aboard an Atlas V-551 rocket, NASA's biggest, with five solid rocket boosters strapped to it.

The first stage drops away four minutes and 33 seconds into the flight, and the second stage is gone after 42 minutes. When an added third stage falls away five minutes later, New Horizons will be traveling between 28,000 and 30,000 mph, passing Earth's moon in nine hours. The Apollo astronauts needed three days for the trip.

And unlike space probes that reach their destinations in ever-widening solar orbits, New Horizons is a simple rocket to Pluto, "just taking aim and shooting the gun," Kusnierkiewicz said. If launch occurs before Feb. 3, the probe will get a gravity assist as it flies by Jupiter, kicking the speed up to 47,000 mph.

For most of the 10-year flight, New Horizons will "hibernate," Kusnierkiewicz said, with only enough electronics lit to keep its insides at room temperature under the exterior thermal blankets.

Electricity will be provided by a thermoelectric generator powered by the heat from radioactive decay of a non-weapons-grade plutonium isotope. With the 200 watts supplied by the generator, New Horizons will operate seven different scientific instruments.

About 12 weeks before New Horizons's arrival at Pluto, the spacecraft's cameras will be able to get pictures better than those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and the data will improve steadily as it approaches the planet.

(continued)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...1800976_2.html

Quote:

NASA Readies to Launch Pluto Mission

The spacecraft has no moving parts, so engineers will program it to use 16 hydrazine fuel thrusters to turn the spacecraft so it can point individual instruments at targets, a process Kusnierkiewicz described as "a fairly involved ballet." Communications between Earth and New Horizons will take four hours and 25 minutes.

"We're going to see things we've never even dreamed of," said astronomer Marc Buie, a deep space specialist from Arizona's Lowell Observatory. "Over the years I've used every tool at my disposal to learn about Pluto, but there's absolutely no way from Earth to understand the geologic context -- craters, impact basins and whatever else has happened."
In fact, Pluto remains largely an enigma 75 years after it was discovered. It is an "ice dwarf" composed of water, carbon monoxide, nitrogen, methane ices and rocky material. It is yellowish red in color and bright, probably from the ice, but with darker regions. Pluto is the smallest planet in the solar system, with a diameter two-thirds that of Earth's moon.

When Pluto was discovered, "astronomers thought it was a solar system misfit," Stern said, but since then scientists have estimated there are 500,000 objects with a diameter of at least 60 miles in the Kuiper Belt, making the belt the "largest structure in the solar system," he added. "It turns out that we and Mars and Jupiter are the misfits. Pluto is typical."

But what does that mean? "There are very clearly surface features of some sort, and we have no idea at all what those features are," said astronomer Michael Brown, a Kuiper Belt expert from the California Institute of Technology. "We don't understand this body at all."

Besides taking pictures of Pluto and Charon with three imagers, New Horizons will also analyze Pluto's atmosphere and geology, measure temperatures and space dust, and document the effects of the solar wind as it peels ions from the upper atmosphere.

Brown said Pluto undergoes tremendous temperature changes during a 248-year elliptical orbit that takes it as close as 2.8 billion miles from the sun and as far as 4.6 billion miles. When the temperature gets low enough, scientists suspect, the atmosphere "collapses," with the gas freezing and falling back to the surface. Charon is too small to hold on to an atmosphere, and has none.

Buie said bright surfaces usually mean "there's been some activity down there," perhaps from an atmospheric collapse, while darkness usually means that meteors and other "space weathering" phenomena have pocked the surface enough to dissipate light. Charon is considerably less bright than Pluto.

After New Horizons passes Pluto and Charon, it will almost certainly have enough power left for both the thrusters and the generator to search out and explore at least one other Kuiper Belt object, maybe two.

"We're not even looking yet," Stern said. "Anything I pick now will seem quaint in 10 years. It would be like planning a trip to Paris in 2015 and making a restaurant reservation today."

ObieX · 01-19-2006, 08:51 AM

Should launch at 1:08 today. ----> http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

feelgood · 01-19-2006, 10:07 AM

1:08 eh? Something particularly special about 8?

ObieX · 01-19-2006, 10:58 AM

Going in 2 minutes hehe. damn clouds

BadNick · 01-19-2006, 11:43 AM

I'm all for this kind of exploration and research, but I hope this time NASA didn't forget to convert metric to U.S. dimensions during the design process.

flat5 · 01-19-2006, 03:16 PM

My idea about crashing on Pluto would be to collect increasing closer data.
Not a waste at all. However, if probes could leave the main unit to impact on Pluto that would be a better option. Guess I watch to many movies :-)

ObieX · 01-20-2006, 05:50 AM

Well that probe idea isn't so far fetched. They just recently did something similar with a comet on a mission called "deep impact" http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html They sent a probe from a craft that slammed into a comet to study what was inside.

(Deep Impact)

While i t would be interesting. I don't think you would get the same effect from a planetary impact.

flat5 · 01-21-2006, 11:18 AM

Probe? They seemed to have sent a missle to impact the comit to take a pictures of the explosion. Not my idea of a probe. I had multible sensors in mind.

ObieX · 01-22-2006, 09:20 AM

The probe itself that smashed into the comet had sensors/cameras and the craft it separated from also had them as it flew past watching the impact/scattering of debris. The reason it looks like such a big explosion is that spacecraft travel at thousands/tens of thousands of miles per hour and comets arent the most solid of objects (rock/ice snowballs basically) so the combination of the two made for a very large spash.

flat5 · 01-22-2006, 12:10 PM

That makes more sense. I looked fast at the link above for mention of sensors on the probe and did not find any.

You can take a little break if you want, ObieX. The ETA is about 9+ years :-)

ObieX · 01-22-2006, 07:41 PM

Yea, quite the wait. Fortunately for me there's still plenty of othr missions with cool pictures

The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, for example:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ca...ain/index.html

sashime76 · 01-26-2006, 07:41 AM

If baffles me when our national budget is in red, families in poverty, education system ailing. Perhaps space exploration can wait until everyone has a roof above their heads, three good meals to eat? Maybe it's just me that thinks this way?

The_Jazz · 01-26-2006, 09:34 AM

Sashime - poverty is a fact of life. No one in the recorded history of man has every successfully elimiated it, even for a short period of time. People in the US below the poverty line are significantly more comfortable than they would have been even 75 years ago because of inovations brought about in part by the space program. Computers, more efficient appliances, cheaper and better insulators, etc. all owe at least something to the space program of the US and other countries.

If we cut funding for the space program, what other science funding should we cut at the same time? How about genetic research that helps grow hardier and more productive crops? What about funding for engineering programs that help develop cheaper and safer ways to generate power?

Turbotom · 01-27-2006, 10:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sashime76

If baffles me when our national budget is in red, families in poverty, education system ailing. Perhaps space exploration can wait until everyone has a roof above their heads, three good meals to eat? Maybe it's just me that thinks this way?

Gar!
No! Research must be done! Science and research can put rooves over people's heads! In fact, much more money needs to be spent on this stuff and all science.
Just imagine if we had cheap, safe nuclear power! No need to blow money on oil or burn coal. Think how much money families might save, how much companies might save, how much the government might save...

sashime76 · 01-27-2006, 09:57 PM

Let me ask this, how long has it been since we set foot on the moon? We have soil samples, photos from Mars, then what? I'm all for technologies and science myself, my wife is a research scientist and I'm an IT geek.

"Poverty is a fact of life"....obviously you and I aren't a part of that population since we both sit behind our computer posting in this forum. In Jr high / high school days I was one of the very few in school to use a lunch ticket - issued only to low income students. Eliminating poverty is not possible that I agree. But pouring tens of billions of dollars into projects that warrants virtually nothing, does that make a whole lot of sense?

What is a higher priority? Rebuilding homes for the hurricane victims? Providing more education funds for our children? Reforming social security? Better healthcare, medicare for all? Do you realize each of us is in debt $27,000 and counting? As a nation, we are $8 trillion in debt!
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

One recent article indicates that our current corp of college grads lack skills.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/01...e.students.ap/
If we can't better educate our next generation of astronauts, rocket scientists, how do you suppose we can advance into the future?

I support NASA but in times of need, I would rather put my tax dollars somewhere other than the outter space. Maybe I just don't have the vision like some of you.....??

ObieX · 01-27-2006, 10:23 PM

NASA really only takes a very vry very small percentage of the nation's money. If you really want the government to put more $ toward poverty you should shift your telescope toward the massive sucking blackhole of our military.

The $ from ONE SINGLE Tomahawk Cruise Missile could feed dozens of families for an entire year.

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/bgm-109.htm

Quote:

$500,000 - current production Unit Cost
$1,400,000 - average unit cost (TY$)
$11,210,000,000 - total program cost (TY$)

Like you said, it's a time of need. Do we really need to be lobbing these things around in Iraq and Afghanistan like they're made of water?

The_Jazz · 01-28-2006, 07:20 AM

Obviously poverty cannot be elimated (see Johnson's War on Poverty), but there are tangible benefits that come from the space program. New material, new computers, new chemicals have all resulted from the last 40 years of NASA development. The side benefits of pure science research are longterm, but the payoff is huge in return on investment.

01-17-2006, 12:23 PM	#2 (permalink)
ObieX Pickles Location: Shirt and Pants (NJ)	Bleh.. nm .. they called an abort with like 1-2 minutes left Try again tomorrow i suppose __________________ We Must Dissent.

01-17-2006, 12:46 PM	#3 (permalink)
liquidlight AHH! Custom Title!! Location: The twisted warpings of my brain.	What're we going to do when they find life on Pluto? __________________ Halfway to hell and picking up speed.

01-17-2006, 02:01 PM	#4 (permalink)
Carno Junkie	If the rocket blows up on launch, yall won't have to put up with me any more __________________ http://how-to-spell-ridiculous.com/

01-18-2006, 12:31 PM	#7 (permalink)
ObieX Pickles Location: Shirt and Pants (NJ)	They're not looking for life on pluto. Its just mainly that its the only planet (well.. of the orignal 9 anyway) that has yet to be visited by any spacecraft or has really been looked at at all in any detail. The best images we have are rather crappy and have no detail at all. It wasn't until last year that they found 2 new moons around pluto. We really don't know much of anything about the planet except that its really part of a new class of planet that we're starting to discover. There have recently been a lot of discoveries of new planets of the pluto type in our solar system. Pluto just happens to be one of the closest and biggest (though it isnt the biggest. "Planet" "Xena" is bigger than pluto, for example... bet most people didn't even know we had more than 9 planets in our solar system.. Xena is only the provisional name of that 10th planet [it even has a moon named gabrielle ]) Anyway these planets are of a type that is basically a building block for planets. Most, if not all, of the planets in our solar system started out mostly or exactly like pluto is. So in order for us to understand our own planet, the origins of the planets in our solar system.. and other reasons.. we're sending that craft to pluto to give us a better understanding of these things. __________________ We Must Dissent.

01-18-2006, 12:34 PM	#8 (permalink)
ObieX Pickles Location: Shirt and Pants (NJ)	Launch postponed again till tomorrow (thursday) btw. __________________ We Must Dissent.

01-18-2006, 06:24 AM	#5 (permalink)
flat5 Very Insignificant Pawn Location: Amsterdam, NL	Pluto! Here boy!

01-18-2006, 11:13 AM	#6 (permalink)
sashime76 Addict Location: Hoosier State	Think we can find Mickey, Minnie and Donald up there? Personally I think it's tossing our tax money in the blackhole. Supposed we found life and it's liveable, what then? Unless you are Bill Gates or the likes, who can afford to take a trip up? Not to mention one way will take some 9 years...that's if the shuttle makes it all the way.....just my 2 cents.

01-18-2006, 03:16 PM	#9 (permalink)
flat5 Very Insignificant Pawn Location: Amsterdam, NL	Will it check out many things on the way? In the gospel according to Goofy, life started on Pluto.

01-18-2006, 03:24 PM	#10 (permalink)
ObieX Pickles Location: Shirt and Pants (NJ)	I'm not sure. It's supposed to do a swing-by of Jupiter to get a gravity assist, but i dunno if it will examine it. For that matter it wont even be at Pluto for very long either. It will be going so fast (i think the fastest craft ever sent from our planet) that it wont be able to slow down enough to get into orbit around pluto. They'll have to get all their information in a very small window which lasts less than a day iirc. Then it'll continue on past pluto, hopefully still able to examine some things along the way. __________________ We Must Dissent.

01-18-2006, 03:47 PM	#11 (permalink)
feelgood Free Mars! Location: I dunno, there's white people around me saying "eh" all the time	Pluto?

01-19-2006, 04:57 AM	#12 (permalink)
flat5 Very Insignificant Pawn Location: Amsterdam, NL	They cut his head off and he's still enthusiastic. What a great dog. or "The bastards! They killed Pluto!" I would think they could find a way to slow it down or crash it on Pluto. But what do I know? (not a thing about astro-physics) Last edited by flat5; 01-19-2006 at 05:02 AM..

01-19-2006, 08:51 AM	#14 (permalink)
ObieX Pickles Location: Shirt and Pants (NJ)	Should launch at 1:08 today. ----> http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html __________________ We Must Dissent.

01-19-2006, 10:07 AM	#15 (permalink)
feelgood Free Mars! Location: I dunno, there's white people around me saying "eh" all the time	1:08 eh? Something particularly special about 8?

01-19-2006, 10:58 AM	#16 (permalink)
ObieX Pickles Location: Shirt and Pants (NJ)	Going in 2 minutes hehe. damn clouds __________________ We Must Dissent.

01-19-2006, 11:43 AM	#17 (permalink)
BadNick Riding the Ocean Spray Location: S.E. PA in U Sofa	I'm all for this kind of exploration and research, but I hope this time NASA didn't forget to convert metric to U.S. dimensions during the design process.

01-19-2006, 03:16 PM	#18 (permalink)
flat5 Very Insignificant Pawn Location: Amsterdam, NL	My idea about crashing on Pluto would be to collect increasing closer data. Not a waste at all. However, if probes could leave the main unit to impact on Pluto that would be a better option. Guess I watch to many movies :-)

01-20-2006, 05:50 AM	#19 (permalink)
ObieX Pickles Location: Shirt and Pants (NJ)	Well that probe idea isn't so far fetched. They just recently did something similar with a comet on a mission called "deep impact" http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html They sent a probe from a craft that slammed into a comet to study what was inside. (Deep Impact) While i t would be interesting. I don't think you would get the same effect from a planetary impact. __________________ We Must Dissent.

01-21-2006, 11:18 AM	#20 (permalink)
flat5 Very Insignificant Pawn Location: Amsterdam, NL	Probe? They seemed to have sent a missle to impact the comit to take a pictures of the explosion. Not my idea of a probe. I had multible sensors in mind.

01-22-2006, 09:20 AM	#21 (permalink)
ObieX Pickles Location: Shirt and Pants (NJ)	The probe itself that smashed into the comet had sensors/cameras and the craft it separated from also had them as it flew past watching the impact/scattering of debris. The reason it looks like such a big explosion is that spacecraft travel at thousands/tens of thousands of miles per hour and comets arent the most solid of objects (rock/ice snowballs basically) so the combination of the two made for a very large spash. __________________ We Must Dissent.

01-22-2006, 12:10 PM	#22 (permalink)
flat5 Very Insignificant Pawn Location: Amsterdam, NL	That makes more sense. I looked fast at the link above for mention of sensors on the probe and did not find any. You can take a little break if you want, ObieX. The ETA is about 9+ years :-)

01-22-2006, 07:41 PM	#23 (permalink)
ObieX Pickles Location: Shirt and Pants (NJ)	Yea, quite the wait. Fortunately for me there's still plenty of othr missions with cool pictures The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, for example: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ca...ain/index.html __________________ We Must Dissent. Last edited by ObieX; 01-22-2006 at 07:44 PM..

01-26-2006, 07:41 AM	#24 (permalink)
sashime76 Addict Location: Hoosier State	If baffles me when our national budget is in red, families in poverty, education system ailing. Perhaps space exploration can wait until everyone has a roof above their heads, three good meals to eat? Maybe it's just me that thinks this way?

01-26-2006, 09:34 AM	#25 (permalink)
The_Jazz Asshole Administrator Location: Chicago	Sashime - poverty is a fact of life. No one in the recorded history of man has every successfully elimiated it, even for a short period of time. People in the US below the poverty line are significantly more comfortable than they would have been even 75 years ago because of inovations brought about in part by the space program. Computers, more efficient appliances, cheaper and better insulators, etc. all owe at least something to the space program of the US and other countries. If we cut funding for the space program, what other science funding should we cut at the same time? How about genetic research that helps grow hardier and more productive crops? What about funding for engineering programs that help develop cheaper and safer ways to generate power?

01-27-2006, 09:57 PM	#27 (permalink)
sashime76 Addict Location: Hoosier State	Let me ask this, how long has it been since we set foot on the moon? We have soil samples, photos from Mars, then what? I'm all for technologies and science myself, my wife is a research scientist and I'm an IT geek. "Poverty is a fact of life"....obviously you and I aren't a part of that population since we both sit behind our computer posting in this forum. In Jr high / high school days I was one of the very few in school to use a lunch ticket - issued only to low income students. Eliminating poverty is not possible that I agree. But pouring tens of billions of dollars into projects that warrants virtually nothing, does that make a whole lot of sense? What is a higher priority? Rebuilding homes for the hurricane victims? Providing more education funds for our children? Reforming social security? Better healthcare, medicare for all? Do you realize each of us is in debt $27,000 and counting? As a nation, we are $8 trillion in debt! http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ One recent article indicates that our current corp of college grads lack skills. http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/01...e.students.ap/ If we can't better educate our next generation of astronauts, rocket scientists, how do you suppose we can advance into the future? I support NASA but in times of need, I would rather put my tax dollars somewhere other than the outter space. Maybe I just don't have the vision like some of you.....??

01-28-2006, 07:20 AM	#29 (permalink)
The_Jazz Asshole Administrator Location: Chicago	Obviously poverty cannot be elimated (see Johnson's War on Poverty), but there are tangible benefits that come from the space program. New material, new computers, new chemicals have all resulted from the last 40 years of NASA development. The side benefits of pure science research are longterm, but the payoff is huge in return on investment.