The thread for space cadets!

possession is nine tenths of the law and Trump gets to start from one tenth .
 
I saw this video this morning and was not sure if it has been posted in this thread yet.
Mercury transiting the sun. (Takes 5.5 hours viewed from Earth?)


Can't we build a base on Mercury in a polar crater that has frozen water without any sunlight?
Mercury doesn't really have any tilt on an axis.

Draw heat from the scalding hot surface, put up some crazy solar panels, emit extra heat into the crater, etc?
https://www.space.com/28356-how-to-live-on-mercury.html
 
I saw this video this morning and was not sure if it has been posted in this thread yet.
Mercury transiting the sun. (Takes 5.5 hours viewed from Earth?)


Can't we build a base on Mercury in a polar crater that has frozen water without any sunlight?
Mercury doesn't really have any tilt on an axis.

Draw heat from the scalding hot surface, put up some crazy solar panels, emit extra heat into the crater, etc?
I did not realise that there was water ice, and possibly even organic compounds on mercury!
 
I saw this video this morning and was not sure if it has been posted in this thread yet.
Mercury transiting the sun. (Takes 5.5 hours viewed from Earth?)


Can't we build a base on Mercury in a polar crater that has frozen water without any sunlight?
Mercury doesn't really have any tilt on an axis.

Draw heat from the scalding hot surface, put up some crazy solar panels, emit extra heat into the crater, etc?
https://www.space.com/28356-how-to-live-on-mercury.html
Yes, the same thing is possible on the moon as well.
 
I saw this video this morning and was not sure if it has been posted in this thread yet.
Mercury transiting the sun. (Takes 5.5 hours viewed from Earth?)


Can't we build a base on Mercury in a polar crater that has frozen water without any sunlight?
Mercury doesn't really have any tilt on an axis.

Draw heat from the scalding hot surface, put up some crazy solar panels, emit extra heat into the crater, etc?
https://www.space.com/28356-how-to-live-on-mercury.html


Old time scifi authors have suggested solar panels on Mercury as a power source for making antimatter.
 
The executive order doesn't really say much other than to implement policies according to a law passed in 2017 which was intended to enable US companies to claim and extract resources in space. There's nothing in it that I saw that was controversial but to your point, Trump has plenty of opportunity to screw things up going forward and I expect he will.

The executive order does push the government to work on agreements with other countries to cement the US position vis a vis allowing commercial resource extraction, which is a good thing. This is the sort of thing we should all agree on before it's needed.


None that the US, Russia or any other space-faring nation have signed on to. It is opposed to the Moon Treaty which has only been signed by 18 non-space countries (and not the US or Russia, et al). The Outer Space Treaty (which the US, Russia and others have signed on to) is silent on private property ownership and extraction of outer space resources. It states no nation can claim parts of outer space but has nothing on commercial activity.

tl;dr - No, this does not violate treaties that the US or other space fairing nations have signed.

There's a damn cultural meme around thinking that space as a whole is off-limits...which, no, it isn't, and if there was, would be meaningless once anyone gout up there and fired a nuke or cracked open a vein of ore on the moon and shoved it into the forge.

Most odd.
 
Well thankfully there are treaties that keep nukes from being deployed in space but yeah, trying to pretend space is a nature preserve that no one should touch is silly. Especially when you realize we can use space so we can actually preserve nature on Earth.
 
The Outer Space Treaty (which the US, Russia and others have signed on to) is silent on private property ownership and extraction of outer space resources. It states no nation can claim parts of outer space but has nothing on commercial activity.

It is an ingenious, but somewhat flawed, argument.

Many consider that property ownership only meaningfully exists where nation states recognise it as
existing and states are not empowered to allocate property outside their realms; so if nation states
can not claim ownership of parts of space, any of their corporate's claims are legally unenforceable.

The way I see it is it is like fish in the middle of an ocean far away from territorial waters or
internationally recognised maritime preserves, nobody owns them until they are caught.

Besides which IMO the USA will change its tune when China surges forward into space.
 
It is an ingenious, but somewhat flawed, argument.
It's not an argument, it's the text of the treaty. And the treaty does allow nations to use outer space but did not define that. The Moon Treaty attempted to curtail commercial activity in space but was roundly rejected by the world.

Besides which IMO the USA will change its tune when China surges forward into space.
Doubtful. The US is surging forward with its own plans in this area and they are not going to back down if China catches up but would much more likely put forward even more expansive plans.
 
Have we just found out why we are not made of antimatter?
Physicists have found the strongest evidence yet that neutrinos are fundamentally different from their antimatter counterparts. Researchers produced neutrinos and antineutrinos at an accelerator in Tokai, Japan, and shot them 295 kilometres through the Earth’s crust to the Super-Kamiokande detector. The team found that one flavour of neutrino — muons — morphed into different types of particle at a different rate than did their antimatter twins. If confirmed, the results could help to solve the Universe’s greatest mystery: why there is more matter than antimatter.​

d41586-020-01132-y_17901770.jpg

There is a cool interactive view of this neutrino detector in the link above.
 
As usual when the headline ends with a question mark, the answer is 'No', but at least we are one step closer to maybe getting the whole picture one day.
 
Has there been naturally occurring antimatter detected?

Positrons are created on earth by cosmic rays and these naturally occurring Positrons were the first evidence for antimatter.

Also, sea quarks are about 30% of the mass of nucleons, so a significant fraction of all matter mass is actually antimatter quarks.
 
Nature very spacey today (welcome light relief from the plague):

d41586-020-01158-2_17910658.jpg

A view of the IS-901 satellite from MEV-1 during approach from approximately 20 metres, with Earth in the background.

For the first time ever, a space ‘tow truck’ has rescued a commercial satellite. US aerospace-technology company Northrup Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicle-1, or MEV-1, docked with Intelsat 901, an ageing communications satellite, in late February. Last Friday, MEV-1 adjusted the satellite’s inclination and orbit to give it a new lease on life. MEV-1 itself has a lifespan of 15 years, and can dock to and undock from multiple satellites.

An unprecedented signal from unevenly sized objects gives astronomers rare insight into how black holes spin.

Gravitational-wave astronomers have for the first time detected a collision between two black holes of substantially different masses — opening up a new vista on astrophysics and on the physics of gravity. The faint space-time ripples offer the first unmistakable evidence from this technique that at least one black hole was spinning before merging, which provides astronomers with valuable information on one of the few features that they can study in these dark objects.


Astrophysicists recoil from lopsided cosmos

A map of 850 distant galaxy clusters hints that the Universe might not be uniform. Combining data from US, European and Japanese X-ray space telescopes, researchers have revealed galaxy clusters that were around 30% brighter or fainter than expected, suggesting that their distances had been poorly estimated. Taking these clusters as beacons of the rate of cosmic expansion, the findings would mean that one region is expanding slower than the rest of the Universe, and another is expanding faster. Astrophysicist Megan Donahue comments that a lopsided expansion “would be astonishing and depressing” because it suggests that our understanding of the Universe could be permanently incomplete.

Cosmic_expansion_measured_across_the_sky.jpg

All-sky map showing what may be a lopsided expansion of the universe, based on x-ray surveys of hundreds of galaxy clusters. Orange-yellow hues indicate a faster-than-expected expansion rate. Purple-black colors correspond to slower-than-expected expansion. Credit: K. Migkas et al. 2020 (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
 
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