The Space Thread

[zkom]

The first known space hurricane pours electron ‘rain’

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00493-2

[zero]

50 minutes ago, zkom said:

The first known space hurricane pours electron ‘rain’

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00493-2

glad to know hurricanes are not just ravaging the US gulf coast, those fuckers are targeting other planets as well.

[Nebraska]

NASA's Perseverance Rover Gives High-Definition Panoramic View of Landing Site

https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8873/nasas-perseverance-rover-gives-high-definition-panoramic-view-of-landing-site/

[MaartenVC]

I wrongly assumed that the SpaceX Starships were the first fully reusable launch vehicles, but apparently there were already functional prototypes of fully reusable launch vehicles built in the '90s!

McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper
"The DC-X, short for Delta Clipper or Delta Clipper Experimental, was an uncrewed prototype of a reusable single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle built by McDonnell Douglas in conjunction with the United States Department of Defense's Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) from 1991 to 1993. Starting 1994 until 1995, testing continued through funding of the US civil space agency NASA. In 1996, the DC-X technology was completely transferred to NASA, which upgraded the design for improved performance to create the DC-XA." ... "...cause for considerable political in-fighting within NASA due to it competing with their home grown Lockheed Martin X-33 / VentureStar project." ... "...cancelled..."
McDonnell Douglas DC-X Launch 8
"On July 7, 1995 a rocket known as the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X)  launched into the sky.  This is the world's first fully reusable rocket vehicle. Flight 8 proved that the vehicle could turn over into a re-entry profile and re-orient itself for landing.  This flight took place at the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico."

Beautiful. ♥
It was sub-orbital and didn't carry a lot of payload though, but still: an amazing achievement.
Nasa should've developed it further imo.
_{(also, most of their tests didn't explode, lol)}

Edited March 4, 2021 by MaartenVC

[Rubin Farr]

beautiful 

[zkom]

World's first space hotel scheduled to open in 2027

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/voyager-station-space-hotel-scn/index.html

Well, let's see..

[Nebraska]

Quote

The Perseverance rover has recorded the 1st laser sound on Mars.

"These recordings have demonstrated that our microphone is not only functioning well, but we also have a very high-quality signal for our scientific studies," SuperCam team member Naomi Murdoch, a researcher at the Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace in Toulouse, France

https://www.space.com/perseverance-rover-mars-laser-sound-recording

[MaartenVC]

redditsave.com_the_search_for_life_on_mars_has_begun-yn5afog4bgm61.mp4

[auxien]

a few other Mars/space/etc* at his page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinmgill/

 

Spoiler

*birbs

 

[chronical]

showed a friend of mine the audio samples and a bunch of photos of mars last weekend.. he shrugged it off, saying he doesn't believe it's real. so many hippie/alternative folks I know have this mindset, completely blows my mind!! wtf???

[Rubin Farr]

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/scientists-335-million-seed-sperm-egg-samples-moon-noahs-ark/

[zkom]

Scientists have now confirmed that an unusually powerful particle of antimatter crashed down into Antarctica back in December 2016.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/incredibly-powerful-antimatter-particle-crashed-antarctica

Quote

Doing this requires the extremely-tiny antineutrino to carry 6.3 petaelectronvolts, or the amount of energy of 6.3 quadrillion electrons accelerated by a single volt. That’s the same, Live Science calculated, as 6,300 mosquitos traveling at one mile per hour — or one mosquito traveling 8.2 times the speed of sound.

That’s 450 times the energy that the Large Hadron Collider is expected to produce after it’s done being upgrade, Live Science reports, meaning scientists are left waiting for these bizarre, rare phenomena to happen on their own in nature.

This is interesting because one alternative to building particle accelerators with ever increasing power (and size) is to observe the particles coming from space and hitting our atmosphere. The universe can generate particles with much higher energies than what we could ever even dream of generating on Earth. The hard part is of course trying to observe them because these events are really anomalous.

Also lol at the 6300 mosquitos. But it's an incredible energy for a single sub-atomic particle.

[may be rude]

 

Edited March 18, 2021 by very honest

[MaartenVC]

4 hours ago, very honest said:

 

You can listen to some of the recordings of the Perseverance Mars Rover on the NASA Soundcloud page:
https://soundcloud.com/nasa/tracks
Could be interesting to analyze the sounds in the 16 min recording.
What I guess we hear:
Low:
- Metallic wheels bumping into rocks.
- Metal on metal clunking.
Mid:
- Dusty wind whooshing along the vehicle.
- Rocky sand in the hollow part of the wheels.
High:
- Loose leftover protective anti-static foil / insulation material / other wrapping foil shaking in the wind.
- Metal on metal grinding. Maybe the weight on the arms of the wheels. Or a hinge of one of the instruments turning.
- Plastic on plastic grinding.
- A rat stuck in the vehicle screaming for his life. : )
- A binary message being transmitted to the rover by an intelligent digital martian life-form. : )

Edited March 18, 2021 by MaartenVC

[Nebraska]

earth without water

[t yst r]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.space.com/amp/interstellar-object-oumuamua-pancake-shape-pluto-like-planet

Looks like something straight out of the Jodoverse...

[Rubin Farr]

 

[MaartenVC]

Space Planes

[cloud capture]

 

[auxien]

bit more detail and explanation in here, but that PBS Spacetime vid^ is also a good one. more explanations i can get of this high-level stuff helps me understand, or at least get about as close as i can expect lol... still all up in the air tho, at about 20 minutes they start to get to the cold water 'okay well maybe it's not a new particle' discussion. i think the physicists kinda just want something new to be there tbh, but obv there's some shit that needs to be figured out one way or the other.

Edited April 12, 2021 by auxien

[Rubin Farr]

The blue dunes on Mars

[zkom]

Finnish forestry company UPM is going to launch the world's first wooden satellite https://www.wisaplywood.com/campaigns/wisawoodsat/

 

[YEK]

4 hours ago, zkom said:

Finnish forestry company UPM is going to launch the world's first wooden satellite https://www.wisaplywood.com/campaigns/wisawoodsat/

 

I hope they use lots of lacquer 

[MaartenVC]

On 4/13/2021 at 12:48 AM, auxien said:

bit more detail and explanation in here, but that PBS Spacetime vid^ is also a good one. more explanations i can get of this high-level stuff helps me understand, or at least get about as close as i can expect lol... still all up in the air tho, at about 20 minutes they start to get to the cold water 'okay well maybe it's not a new particle' discussion. i think the physicists kinda just want something new to be there tbh, but obv there's some shit that needs to be figured out one way or the other.

Found another video explaining the recent results from the Muon g-2 experiments with some more analogies.
I'm going to have to watch all these videos multiple times in order to fully comprehend them though.
I have love-hate relationship with Particle Physics. It's very interesting, but so incredibly complicated.
Especially Quantum Mechanics. No matter how much I read or watch videos about it, my brain just doesn't get it...

[auxien]

4 hours ago, MaartenVC said:

Found another video explaining the recent results from the Muon g-2 experiments with some more analogies.
I'm going to have to watch all these videos multiple times in order to fully comprehend them though.
I have love-hate relationship with Particle Physics. It's very interesting, but so incredibly complicated.
Especially Quantum Mechanics. No matter how much I read or watch videos about it, my brain just doesn't get it...

oh, she's good yeah. she mentions right at the outset that 'there's not really even new particles theorized but this seems to be evidence for new particles' and imo that's a bit of a checkmark in the column for 'physicists just want there to be a new particle so any possible evidence that there is they're jumping on and claiming it's new particles/forces!' ...and she never mentions the other relevant study from the BMW group that basically just says that the measurements are fine, nothing new here, just some calculation errors in one or more of the experiments. but she does explain things pretty well there, maybe easier for some than the other vids.

yeah, i came to terms with the fact that there's a limit to how much us as laypersons will never grasp particle physics/QM fully...you'd have to be doing the math and deeply involved in the guts to 'get it' past a certain point. i can at least follow along for 90% of these discussions now so that's cool but it's taken literally decades of regular reading at varying levels. 

i really do think they're all getting too excited here...there was a fair amount of discussion after the Higgs discovery of 'okay, well so now we have all the particles we think, but shit still doesn't add up re: forces (gravity in particular) & grand scale observations/behaviors of the universe on a full time scale...plus discrepancies at the quantum level otherwise....' and so i think the physicists are just hoping something new will solve all their problems and be the key since the Higgs didn't do it. i don't think that any one new particle or group of new particles is going to be their savior. i'm of the mind that there's fundamental flaws in their understandings and assumptions about the basics that they're already aware of.