The thread for space cadets!

China is getting ready to debut their new space capsule which should be capable of supporting their new space station and eventually, interplanetary flights:
fohcL57ptpjEXtAfnMGBb9-970-80.jpg

https://www.space.com/china-new-spacecraft-crewed-moon-missions.html
You can say it looks a lot like a Dragon 1 but honestly all capsules tend to look the same based solely on their required functionality and extreme environment.

Their new heavy rocket (equivalent to a Delta-IV Heavy) is about to have a crucial return to flight test as they have corrected problems on it which caused a previous launch failure. They will use it to send up the first module of their new space station in Q2/Q3 of this year.
 
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This Martian dust devil was captured in motion on the volcanic plains of Amazonis Planitia by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The core of the rotating column of dust is roughly 50 metres across, and the length of its dark shadow suggests that it’s about 650 metres tall.
 
“Toffee Planets” Hint at Earth’s Cosmic Rarity
Exoplanets with stretchy, flowing rock may be bereft of plate tectonics—and of complex life.

It might not occur to us surface dwellers very often, but rocks can flow—more like the way exceedingly lethargic toothpaste would rather than water. Exposed to the extreme temperatures and pressures that reign in the hellish realms far below our feet, rocks can practically swim—slowly diving down and bobbing up through much of Earth’s subsurface.

For some rocky worlds around other stars, what is true for Earth’s innards may extend right up to the surface. Super Earths—sometimes rocky exoplanets that are bigger than our pale blue dot but smaller than massive ice giants such as Neptune—have comparatively strong gravitational fields. Thanks to this extreme gravity, some scientists suspect, rocks on such worlds would flow far closer to the surface.

This arrangement would mean rocks that snap, fracture and break might only be found in thin veneers on these exoplanets’ crust. If these rocky super Earths have thick, Venus-like atmospheres or are especially close to their parent star, they might exhibit no familiarly brittle geology at their surface at all. Instead, says Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University and lead author of a study on the Super Earths, their surface rocks would be strangely malleable over long timescales, flowing a bit like the stretchy, sugary confections on offer in any earthly candy shop.

Understandably, Byrne has dubbed such worlds “toffee planets.”
Click to expand...
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/...arth-s-cosmic-rarity?utm_source=pocket-newtab
 
Berzerker said:

the solution to loss of muscle mass and bone density in space

pump iron!
Click to expand...
They already do and it isn't a long term fix. Astronauts currently have to spend a lot of their precious time exercising every day. It sucks they did not include a 1-g spinning segment as originally intended to the ISS. They originally intended to have a spinning module for people, that got downgraded to a small spinning apparatus for experiments on mice and stuff and then eventually even that got cancelled.
 
Bit of a random question and I thought maybe it fit better here than in the many questions thread:

I was reading more about the programming error that caused Deep Impact (the spacecraft, not the movie) to be lost. It apparently stored time in 1/10 second increments starting on January 1, 2000 and it was stored as an unsigned 32-bit integer. But since it apparently was in use longer than they expected the number ended up overflowing and causing it to reboot over and over and over again.

What reasons would needed that time to be that precise for?
 
aimeeandbeatles said:
Bit of a random question and I thought maybe it fit better here than in the many questions thread:

I was reading more about the programming error that caused Deep Impact (the spacecraft, not the movie) to be lost. It apparently stored time in 1/10 second increments starting on January 1, 2000 and it was stored as an unsigned 32-bit integer. But since it apparently was in use longer than they expected the number ended up overflowing and causing it to reboot over and over and over again.

What reasons would needed that time to be that precise for?
Click to expand...

If you have multiple scientific instruments observing the same event, you need to tag the results with the time to be able to reconstruct the timeline of your results (was image A before or after image B). For an event that happens quite quickly (like the impact on a comet), you want fairly precise resolution for those timestamps.
 
And the timestamps all need to be synced. When the Amos-6 mission blew up on the pad, one of the review findings was that the various instrumentation loops were not synchronized together, which made it difficult to reconstruct events. All of the clocks were accurate, they just didn't agree with each other.

This is also part of why the recent Starliner mission suffered near-catastrophe a few weeks back as its clocks were also un-synchronized and that caused it to skip ahead in its flight program and do things out of sequence. Other stuff went wrong with it, but that was a fairly surprising thing to see on a man-rated flight due to all the extra precautions and double-checking they get as well as the fact that the Amos-6 findings were well publicized by NASA and SpaceX.
 
hobbsyoyo said:
And the timestamps all need to be synced. When the Amos-6 mission blew up on the pad, one of the review findings was that the various instrumentation loops were not synchronized together, which made it difficult to reconstruct events. All of the clocks were accurate, they just didn't agree with each other.
Click to expand...

If they did not agree with each other, at most one of them could have been accurate ;)

But yeah, unsynchronized clocks are a recipe for disaster. Do you remember the "Neutrinos are faster than light"-mismeasurement a few years ago. That was also caused by clocks that were out of sync.
 
I think there was a spacecraft that crashed into Mars because they forgot to convert the units to metric. I might be remembering this wrong though.
 
ı have been wrong the accident airline does not belong to the brother of the secretary for tourism of the palace cabinet , as that one went bankrupt last week . They haven't interrogated the pilot of the accident plane despite he was "less wounded" compared to the Korean who talked with the Police . To keep things going the wheels of a different boeing of the same company caught fire after landing in Germany ...


hardly the topic though . There's talk of a second coup because of the generally bad outlook , so one might have to look for the constitution expert who pressured the courts to release an Iranian drug baron , who than paid his dues with a claimed murder , some Iranian UAV designer in Istanbul , no less . See , the British handler of the famous Syrian White Helmets was suicided in Istanbul and yes , ı have been able to make passive sentences in English for the past 30 years . A perfect upbringing for the job , even his name was James and he spent some time guarding Serbian warcriminals in prison before serving against Taliban , etc etc . So , it's only natural for an Iranian spy to be died ; had never heard of that . Had a search last week , he was said to be a defector , tweeting that it would be him who would doom the Mullahs . All of a sudden , last week to be precise , ı learn he is actually some genious in UAV design and now "works" in the company of the second son-in-law of the PM . Don't know why he wasn't shut up , didn't he ever hear New Turkey designs everything 100% "local and national" ? Oh , am pretty sure this is about some unfinished business , some sentence uttered on July 15th, 2016 . When the second coup happens and fails , those who were like "untouched" during the Disgrace will be implicated with the dead Iranian and nobody will cry for them ...
 
All hail the cosmic snowman Arrokoth!!!

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It sounds to me like an Egyptian god, but it sounds pretty cool to me:

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft — a pioneering mission that travelled to the farthest reaches of the Solar System — took this image in January 2019, when it flew past Arrokoth at a distance of 3,538 kilometres. Arrokoth lies beyond Pluto in the frigid realm known as the Kuiper belt, and is the most distant object of the Solar System ever imaged up close.
Scientists with the mission have now published new findings1,2,3 on the rocky object, in Science on 13 February. The studies show that its two lobes are not quite as flat as they appear, and that they probably merged gently in the early days of the Solar System, at least four billion years ago. Arrokoth, which is 36 kilometres long, is extremely red, probably because cosmic rays have blasted its surface to create red organic molecules. Unlike many objects in the outer Solar System, Arrokoth does not have water frozen on its surface, although it does have methanol ice.
Arrokoth is probably typical of the Kuiper belt objects that share similar orbits, says David Jewitt, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles. But it would take another spacecraft visit to find out conclusively, he says. “We’ll never know for sure until we look.”​
 
The last I read was right when Betelgeuse started getting brighter again. This is exciting!

The company that arranged tourist flights to the ISS has now booked a SpaceX Dragon 2 spacecraft to take 4 tourists up to an orbit with an apogee of 1,000 km. This is quite high and generally even astronauts do not go that high unless they are flying to the moon. One Gemini mission in the sixties went to like 1,700 km but it's not a routine thing. These people will have a spectacular view of the whole Earth disc.

https://spacenews.com/space-adventures-to-fly-tourists-on-crew-dragon-mission/
 
Last edited:
winona Ryder and her Beetlejuice or whatever that clown was called . (Some famous movie , like before half the forum was born .)
 
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Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have captured the unprecedented dimming of Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion. The new images of the star’s surface show not only the fading red supergiant but also how its apparent shape is changing.
 
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