MPC has enlarged the packed format to include more digits in the repeat count. Meanwhile, the current packing uses alphanumeric characters to get to roughly "year and four or five letters and numbers" in your terms.

ZTF is already up to speed and has notched 7109 asteroids (230 NEOs) as of this morning. It is a wonderful survey for a wide range of science, but is not tuned for moving object discoveries and its 1.2-m aperture keeps its limiting magnitude (for NEOs) about 1.5 mags brighter than the dedicated NEO surveys.

VRO simulations produce about 6 million main belt asteroids (plus about 10^5 NEOs) over ten years. As you say, a million of those are already known, so if evenly distributed over the decade it would be about 500,000 per year. Most MBAs should be discovered early in the survey, however, and numbers of discoveries (not the same thing as scientific value) will ramp down rapidly in successive years.

Archive "precoveries" will be very important, but matching against the growing catalog will likely be a larger effect than software improvements. VRO's survey operations will not generally make actionable detections on a single night, but it may well be that multi-opposition linking will dig out additional orbits. This will be less help for the smaller near-Earth asteroids which will vanish beyond the reach of even the mighty Rubin telescope.

The International Astronomical Union has always been responsible for naming asteroids. What has changed is the mechanism for submitting nominations. There are limits on political and military figures, and the IAU working group can reject offensive or otherwise inappropriate names. Named asteroids can still be referenced by their numerical designations. Names can be in any language and presumably could be submitted in a non-ASCII character set.

My Dad was an electrical engineer working for GE Aerospace. (General Electric long since sold off that division, perhaps part of the reason my GE stock is tanking.) Dad was program manager for several spacecraft, including the first Landsat, launched in 1972. He's not around anymore to ask about any professional certifications, but one aspect of the concept of engineering is building things nobody else has before. How do you certify brand new thinking?

Landsat 1 (still in orbit, traversing the South Atlantic as I type this) evolved out of work done by GE on the Nimbus weather satellites. Side-by-side they are very similar. Conceivably somebody might have instituted a certification program based on the 3-axis stabilized Nimbus/Landsat, but then what about other spacecraft that spin or have different sensors or more modern computers or are stationed at L-1 instead of LEO?

I presume the professionals who built the Delta rocket that lofted Landsat thought of themselves as engineers of various types. Certainly few human occupations are as potentially dangerous as "rocket scientist". Is there a certification for booster engineers? (Asking, don't know the answer.)

Disneyland has featured several attractions that simulate spaceflight. Even, or perhaps especially, the Astro Orbiter kiddy ride at the entrance to Tomorrowland demanded serious civil engineering.

Before my Dad's grandkids went on the rides, I trusted the Disney corporation to have conducted all appropriate reviews, to have filled out large amounts of paperwork, and to have employed certified civil engineers as presumably required by the State of California. One assumes the many miles of high-tension wires running underground are properly bonded and breakered (and kept dry) and only licensed electricians laid them.

Whether the programmers who sequence the rides are certified by anybody is another question. Personally it would not offend me if some of the imagineers are licensed by the state and if rather draconian testing and reviews are conducted before flinging my family around hairpin turns.

Z80's were the first domino to fall in our ongoing collapse of civilization. Clearly the post-apocalyptic economy will be based on the wholesome 6502 processor. Humanity must start stockpiling KIM-1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1) and SYM-1 single board computers asap in the vaults at Svalbard.

...and different Geodetic datums ...and continental drift

There are other ways of looking at the problem:

"You're standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?"

Other posters have pointed out that "Where are you?" is ambiguous and could mean a Simon says sort of answer like "I'm in your office, Mr. Musk." And also that it could be taken to mean relative to a Sun-centered coordinate system. This latter requires waiting N years to return to the same part of the Earth's orbit.

Once one notices that no time limit is required you get many more solutions by allowing for the polar motion over some period of time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... - that is, the pole isn't in the same place at the end as at the beginning.

Then there's the notion of repeating the exercise at the north and south magnetic poles (and perhaps geomagnetic). But there is also no explicit constraint that south, west and north are all interpreted the same - they need not all be geographic or all magnetic. In that case there are families of solutions near each of the four poles that interpret the initial motion one way and the final mile the other.

And then the magnetic poles wander much more rapidly (several miles per year) than the geographic poles and over much more than the mile allowed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Magnetic_Pole), so you can put constraints on the time period allowed for the exercise while exploring solutions covering motions over a few weeks.

It is not true that "there have been many, many, many more attempts at Mars than missions that actually got there", see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Mars exploration splits into two eras, the cold war competition between the U.S. and Soviets - which the U.S. won hands-down, Yay Mariner! Yay Viking! - and the past couple of decades with the U.S. and other countries collaborating in various combinations.

During the cold war the U.S. had a track record of 8 successful missions versus 2 launch failures. During the recent couple of decades we've had 9 successes versus 3 diverse spacecraft failures. And many of those successes have been far beyond mission profiles. So the NASA Mars team is about 17 wins against 5 losses. This would be regarded as stunningly successful in any sport.

The Soviets in the early days had many launch failures that can't really be charged to the Mars missions themselves - and were about the reverse of the U.S. cold war ratio for those that did get to Mars. It was still a remarkable achievement for them to place any one of those missions in orbit.

There have also been about a half dozen non-NASA Mars missions during the past two decades. Two Russian missions unfortunately continued the trend of never leaving LEO. And now India is one-for-one. May they keep it up! Europe is one-for-two and Japan is zero-for-one. Talk about small number statistics, but that's 2 wins / 2 losses. Quite respectable. One hopes other nations join the fun.

In the aggregate this is a remarkable tally of successful missions considering Mars is never closer than 50 million kilometers or so. Anybody know the corresponding statistics for missions in LEO?

Just as long as he doesn't get his hands on Galaxy Quest. Some things are sacred!

It would be all like "Give up! Surrender!"

"Political Scientist" is a colossal oxymoron.

Whatever this guy and Thomas Friedmann (and alas! Terry Pratchett) say, the world is not flat. Algebraic equations of degree higher than linear (and even - gasp - other than polynomials entirely) are needed to describe how it works. Algebra is the bare minimum to comprehend how functions work. It is telling that TFA doesn't even mention differential equations - the real basecode of the universe. A grounding in algebra provides the most basic of tools to understand graphical representations of a dynamic multivariate world, even without calculus.

That a political scientist would emphasize "lies, damn lies, and statistics" as the pinnacle of mathematics is unsurprising.

NASA Goddard is near Baltimore. They lost power in the storm and are operating under "Code Red": http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/

Quite likely other misbehavior blamed on the leap second is actually the result of the storm (or like Pirate Bay, some unrelated crash).

It depends on the figure of merit and on the measure of central tendency being applied to it. "Average" can mean different things. If the distribution is skewed, the arithmetic mean will always lie to one side or the other of the median.

Stuart Smalley seems the poster child for Dunning-Kruger and related effects.

Astronomical data are background limited. The noise is as interesting as the signal, and many sources lie beneath the noise and are only visible through coadding. The gain and read-noise of LSST's detectors will be tuned similarly to other astronomical cameras because these parameters are governed by the experimental design.

Lossless Rice compression should be around R of 2-2.5 (http://arxiv.org/pdf/0903.2140.pdf) with lossy compression of reduced data products falling between R of 3 to 5 depending on the quantization selected (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.1179.pdf).

There will be no delta frame advantage since the compression is governed entirely by the noise (i.e., entropy) due to the sparse signal in astronomical data and the noise is a combination of gaussian and poisson (shot noise) sources that varies from exposure to exposure.

In fact, a key goal of the project is precisely to look for differences between each frame and a baseline static sky so the differences must be preserved in great detail.