Scott Ruggels Posted November 30, 2022 Report Share Posted November 30, 2022 Yeserday's Starship Test fire was successfulhttps://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/spacex-completes-long-duration-test-fire-of-super-heavy-booster/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted December 3, 2022 Report Share Posted December 3, 2022 Orion Capsule has successfully performed a 1 minute burn to drop out of the "Distant, Retrograde Orbit".https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2022/12/01/nasa-orion-capsule-performs-burn-leave-distant-retrograde-orbit/1341669933799/ tkdguy 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted December 4, 2022 Report Share Posted December 4, 2022 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted December 8, 2022 Report Share Posted December 8, 2022 The third member of the rocket news trinity is Felix Schlage of “What About It” This cheerful German moved to the space coast of Florida to be closer to the action. DShomshak 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BoloOfEarth Posted December 9, 2022 Report Share Posted December 9, 2022 Can't you just feel your superpowers starting to come into being? A bizarre gamma-ray burst breaks the rules for these cosmic eruptions (sciencenews.org) Lawnmower Boy and DShomshak 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted December 15, 2022 Report Share Posted December 15, 2022 A pretty disaster in progress…in space! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkdguy Posted December 25, 2022 Author Report Share Posted December 25, 2022 The planets align again for the second time this year. Old Man 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted December 26, 2022 Report Share Posted December 26, 2022 Quickly! Prepare the virgin sacrifice! tkdguy 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted December 26, 2022 Report Share Posted December 26, 2022 On 12/25/2022 at 8:01 AM, tkdguy said: The planets align again for the second time this year. 6 hours ago, Old Man said: Quickly! Prepare the virgin sacrifice! In this economy? Old Man and tkdguy 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lawnmower Boy Posted December 26, 2022 Report Share Posted December 26, 2022 11 hours ago, Old Man said: Quickly! Prepare the virgin sacrifice! Leave me alone! tkdguy and DentArthurDent 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted December 31, 2022 Report Share Posted December 31, 2022 Marcus house brings the weeks news on the last day of 2022, and then doest a retrospective of the year's launches. Sure, it's mostly Space-X, putting up Starlink satellites, but there is a lot of private space going up. THis year really had a very hig Optempo, and Elon promises more in 2023. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted January 6, 2023 Report Share Posted January 6, 2023 Beautiful Timelapse is Space-X 200th launch https://www.space.com/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-transporter-6-video Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted January 17, 2023 Report Share Posted January 17, 2023 Soon Space-X’s Starship may be launching soon. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted January 22, 2023 Report Share Posted January 22, 2023 Tech 8 Non Jump Capable Traveller?https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/01/avatar-movie-valkarie-antimatter-rocket-design-is-a-real-design.html Apparently the ship from Avatar, and Avatar: The Way of Water is a real ship design. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted January 23, 2023 Report Share Posted January 23, 2023 Hubble Space Telescope still in use, and could last another decade or more (in Nature) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted January 23, 2023 Report Share Posted January 23, 2023 On 1/22/2023 at 10:53 AM, Scott Ruggels said: Tech 8 Non Jump Capable Traveller?https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/01/avatar-movie-valkarie-antimatter-rocket-design-is-a-real-design.html Apparently the ship from Avatar, and Avatar: The Way of Water is a real ship design. On the detectability of Antimatter Propulsion Spacecraft Plausible designs are detectable, and recognizable out to a few hundred parsecs. Probably further out now (that paper is from 1986). (The author also wrote a follow-up article some years later which I haven't seen, because I'm too cheap to pony up 15 quid for a reprint from the British Interplanetary Society) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted January 24, 2023 Report Share Posted January 24, 2023 https://spacenews.com/spacex-completes-starship-wet-dress-rehearsal/ Big Rocket soon (?) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted January 24, 2023 Report Share Posted January 24, 2023 Mars probe discovers possibly frozen water 1 -3 meters below Martian Grand Canyonhttps://blog.physics-astronomy.com/2022/11/scientists-discover-giant-reservoir-of.html Duke Bushido 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted January 29, 2023 Report Share Posted January 29, 2023 Successful wet dress rehearsal, and nuclear rockets! Beast 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted February 2, 2023 Report Share Posted February 2, 2023 Boeing's Starliner has been sidelined for most future space shots> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted February 7, 2023 Report Share Posted February 7, 2023 Architectural and psychological questions about Mars settlements. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkdguy Posted February 7, 2023 Author Report Share Posted February 7, 2023 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted February 10, 2023 Report Share Posted February 10, 2023 Space-X completes a full duration test burn of the Starship First Stage! (Minus two engines) https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/as-early-as-today-starship-faces-its-final-exam-before-a-launch-attempt/ tkdguy 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Ruggels Posted February 12, 2023 Report Share Posted February 12, 2023 Weekly Space News, by the cheerful Australian, Marcus House U.S. Air Force shoots down a high altitude "not a balloon" Over the Yukon. (with Canadian Permission)https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/high-altitude-object-shot-down-over-northern-canada/ar-AA17ndgF "Cylindrical Object" may be one of those Tic Tac shaped things the Navy spotted a few years ago. Canadian Forces get dibs on the wreckage. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted February 12, 2023 Report Share Posted February 12, 2023 A new paper in Nature leaves me thinking more and more that there's lots of wholly unimagined weird stuff out past Neptune (along the bizarre circumstances of the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth, past which the New Horizons spacecraft flew a couple years back, and was found to be a contact binary of two roughly disk-shaped small objects). The paper is almost certainly behind the paywall. ESA (European Space Agency) has a press release not behind a paywall here, though that lacks the "crunchy bits" of data I prefer to read before passing on news. The trans-Neptunian object 50000, named Quaoar, is about 555 km in diameter. It has a small satellite, named Weymot, about 80 km in diameter, orbiting Quaoar about 24 Quaoar radii out. The TNO itself was discovered from Mt Palomar in 2002; the moon was discovering using HST in 2006. Both were detected by direct imaging. The new paper reports discovery of a ring around Quaoar, discovered by observing four occultations of stars. An occultation is when one body "walks in front of" another and blocks it from view temporarily. (An eclipse can be an occultation, but the word occultation is preferred when you're observing at least one "point object", usually a star far in the background, and its light is blocked by a much closer -- usually Solar System -- object which you may or may not be able to detect by any other means.) Timing exactly when and for how long the background star "blinks out" gives you indications of a very precise position of the occulting body and its dimensions, since you usually have a pretty good idea of the occulting object's orbit around the Sun. If the occulting object has an atmosphere, seeing a gradual "fade-out" of the background star as the occulting object drifts in front of it can give you information about the extent and structure of that atmosphere. If you can get a number of observers scattered across Earth to observe a given occultation event, you can get a lot of information about shape, size, etc. The ring is inhomogeneous, i.e., it is not uniformly dense all the way around. That sort of thing has been seen before; at least one of the rings of Uranus is denser in some places than others. (Because occultations are not like images and don't give you measurements of the complete ring, only at very specific points on it, it seems possible to me that the ring is in fact incomplete, that is, it's better described as an arc rather than a full ring.) The surprise is that ring is out at 7.4 Quaoar radii from the TNO. That is well outside the classical Roche limit of Quaoar, which is the distance inside which tidal forces of the central body will disrupt (tear apart) a decent-size moon. All the other ring systems we know about, including the one around another TNO named Haumea (which was discovered some 6-8 years back, also by occultation), are inside that limit. (In general, there's nothing stopping material that distance from the central body from clumping up and forming a moon.) They do some dynamical calculations about rings out that far. Maybe a clue is that both Haumea's ring and Quaoar's ring are in 1:3 spin-orbit resonance with their central bodies (that is, the orbital period of a ring particle is 3 times the rotation period of the central body), though that may also be a coincidence. On a more general basis, occultation studies are kind of the ultimate form of opportunism; it requires that you know the position of a star extremely precisely, and that some Solar System object is going to walk in front of it in circumstances you can observe. That's a low-odds bet, generally. The ongoing GAIA mission is producing high-precision stellar motion and position measurements literally by the million, and it is those that enabled this published study of Quaoar to be done. DShomshak 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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