That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons bring us some web forums whereupon we can gather
http://www.octopusoverlords.com/forum/
Coincidentally? Really? I think we know now why the launch was delayed by a day...raydude wrote: ↑Tue Aug 14, 2018 9:36 am APL's Parker Solar Probe launched on Sunday*. Folks at the Lab are pretty excited about it.
* Coincidentally also my birthday so that was cool.
Of course I never tried to crash into the sun so I am not sure how much Δv that would take.
Looked at that graphic and thought KSP, then I thought of you and how much I suck at that game and how that looks more like me attempting to orbit Mercury from Earth and failing then it look like someone successfully attempting to orbit the sun and succeeding.coopasonic wrote: ↑Tue Aug 14, 2018 1:30 pm Kerbal experience tells me I can burn retrograde at the apoapsis and bring my periapsis down to the sun pretty easily.
Before KSP I didn't know what most of those words meant and my wife doesn't think video games are good for the kids!
Of course I never tried to crash into the sun so I am not sure how much Δv that would take.
A lot, apparently!coopasonic wrote: ↑Tue Aug 14, 2018 1:30 pm Kerbal experience tells me I can burn retrograde at the apoapsis and bring my periapsis down to the sun pretty easily.
Before KSP I didn't know what most of those words meant and my wife doesn't think video games are good for the kids!
Of course I never tried to crash into the sun so I am not sure how much Δv that would take.
Challenge... accepted.wonderpug wrote: ↑Tue Aug 14, 2018 2:33 pmA lot, apparently!coopasonic wrote: ↑Tue Aug 14, 2018 1:30 pm Kerbal experience tells me I can burn retrograde at the apoapsis and bring my periapsis down to the sun pretty easily.
Before KSP I didn't know what most of those words meant and my wife doesn't think video games are good for the kids!
Of course I never tried to crash into the sun so I am not sure how much Δv that would take.
Scientists say they have definitive evidence for water-ice on the surface of the Moon.
The ice deposits are found at both the north and south poles, and are likely to be ancient in origin.
The result comes from an instrument on India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which explored the Moon between 2008 and 2009.
Details of the work have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The distribution of the ice deposits is patchy. At the lunar south pole, most of the ice is concentrated in craters. At the northern pole, the water-ice is both more sparse and more widely spread.
The Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument aboard Chandrayaan identified three specific signatures of water-ice at the lunar surface.
M3 not only picked up the reflective properties one would expect from ice, but was able to directly measure the distinctive way its molecules absorb infrared light. This meant that it could differentiate between liquid water and vapour and solid ice.
The National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico has been closed since last Thursday.
ABC-7 Monday spoke with Shari Lifson, who is with AURA, the company that co-manages the Observatory with NMSU.
Lifson told ABC 7 there is no time-table for the Observatory to be re-opened.
- “The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy who manages the facility is addressing a security issue at this time. We have decided to vacate the facility at this time as precautionary measure. It was our decision to evacuate the facility.”
ABC-7 also reached out to the FBI, but did not hear back from the federal agency in time for deadline. The FBI did speak with local law enforcement about the length of the observatory closure.
The FBI did not tell Sheriff House the reason for the closure. Sheriff Benny House did tell ABC 7 that his local law enforcement did not have anything to do with either the observatory closure.
- “The FBI is refusing to tell us what’s going on. We’ve got people up there (at Sunspot) that requested us to standby while they evacuate it. Nobody would really elaborate on any of the circumstances as to why.
- The FBI were up there. What their purpose was nobody will say. But for the FBI to get involved that quick and be so secretive about it, there was a lot of stuff going on up there.
- There was a Blackhawk helicopter, a bunch of people around antennas and work crews on towers but nobody would tell us anything.”
For the conspiracy-minded, Sunspot is a mere 130 miles from Roswell, New Mexico, and about 90 miles from the White Sands Missile Range. Established in 1958, the observatory predates the unincorporated area in the Sacramento Mountains that was named for it.
I heard there were big problems in the southwest region.Bakhtosh wrote: ↑Wed Sep 12, 2018 12:23 pm https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09- ... torm-looms
National Solar Observatory Mysteriously Closed As Geomagnetic Storm LoomsThe National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico has been closed since last Thursday.
ABC-7 Monday spoke with Shari Lifson, who is with AURA, the company that co-manages the Observatory with NMSU.
Lifson told ABC 7 there is no time-table for the Observatory to be re-opened.
- “The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy who manages the facility is addressing a security issue at this time. We have decided to vacate the facility at this time as precautionary measure. It was our decision to evacuate the facility.”
ABC-7 also reached out to the FBI, but did not hear back from the federal agency in time for deadline. The FBI did speak with local law enforcement about the length of the observatory closure.
The FBI did not tell Sheriff House the reason for the closure. Sheriff Benny House did tell ABC 7 that his local law enforcement did not have anything to do with either the observatory closure.
- “The FBI is refusing to tell us what’s going on. We’ve got people up there (at Sunspot) that requested us to standby while they evacuate it. Nobody would really elaborate on any of the circumstances as to why.
- The FBI were up there. What their purpose was nobody will say. But for the FBI to get involved that quick and be so secretive about it, there was a lot of stuff going on up there.
- There was a Blackhawk helicopter, a bunch of people around antennas and work crews on towers but nobody would tell us anything.”
For the conspiracy-minded, Sunspot is a mere 130 miles from Roswell, New Mexico, and about 90 miles from the White Sands Missile Range. Established in 1958, the observatory predates the unincorporated area in the Sacramento Mountains that was named for it.
Not much.
The observatory's main mission, since being retrofitted in early 2017, has been to detect signs of intelligent life in Washington DC, specifically in the White House and on Capitol Hill.
Kiddie porn.Bakhtosh wrote: ↑Wed Sep 12, 2018 12:23 pm https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09- ... torm-looms
National Solar Observatory Mysteriously Closed As Geomagnetic Storm LoomsThe National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico has been closed since last Thursday.
Astronomers have announced the possible discovery of the first known moon outside our Solar System.
This "exomoon" is not like any in our cosmic neighbourhood: it's the size of Neptune and orbits a planet the size of Jupiter - but with 10 times the mass.
The object was spotted in data from Nasa's Kepler spacecraft, and later observed using the Hubble telescope.
Astronomers David Kipping and Alex Teachey have published their results in Science Advances journal.
But they say that further observations are needed to understand the distant planetary system.
"We've tried our best to rule out other possibilities such as spacecraft anomalies, other planets in the system or stellar activity, but we're unable to find any other single hypothesis which can explain all of the data we have," said Dr Kipping, from Columbia University in New York.
The Hubble Space Telescope is operating with only essential functions after it lost one of the gyroscopes needed to point the spacecraft.
The observatory, described as one of the most important scientific instruments ever created, was placed in "safe mode" over the weekend, while scientists try to fix the problem.
Hubble had been operating with four of its six gyroscopes when one of them failed on Friday.
The telescope was launched in 1990.
After the gyro failure at the weekend, controllers tried to switch on a different one, but that was found to be malfunctioning. That leaves Hubble with only two fully functional gyros.
At any given time, Hubble needs three of its gyroscopes to work for optimal efficiency.
A US astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut were forced to make an emergency landing after their Russian Soyuz rocket malfunctioned en route to the International Space Station (ISS).
Shortly after taking off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Nick Hague and Alexey Ovchinin reported a problem with the rocket's booster.
The men were forced into a "ballistic descent", with their capsule landing a few hundred miles north of Baikonur.
They have been picked up by rescuers.
"The search and recovery teams have reached the Soyuz spacecraft landing site and report that the two crew members... are in good condition and are out of the capsule," US space agency Nasa said.
Russia said it was suspending any further manned flights, and an investigation into what went wrong had begun.
It turned out to be easier than that. All they had to do was turn it off and turn it back on again.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft has gone silent, ending a historic mission that studied time capsules from the solar system's earliest chapter.
Dawn missed scheduled communications sessions with NASA's Deep Space Network on Wednesday, Oct. 31, and Thursday, Nov. 1. After the flight team eliminated other possible causes for the missed communications, mission managers concluded that the spacecraft finally ran out of hydrazine, the fuel that enables the spacecraft to control its pointing. Dawn can no longer keep its antennae trained on Earth to communicate with mission control or turn its solar panels to the Sun to recharge.
The Dawn spacecraft launched 11 years ago to visit the two largest objects in the main asteroid belt. Currently, it's in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, where it will remain for decades.
After examining the images, another international research team discovered that 'Oumuamua had increased in velocity, rather than slowing down as expected. The most likely explanation, they claimed, was that 'Oumuamua was venting material from its surface due to solar heating (aka. outgassing). The release of this material, which is consistent with how a comet behaves, would give 'Oumuamua the steady push it needed to achieve this boost in velocity.
To this, Bialy and Loeb offer a counter-explanation. If 'Oumuamua were in fact a comet, why then did it not experience outgassing when it was closest to our sun? In addition, they cite other research that showed that if outgassing were responsible for the acceleration, it would have also caused a rapid evolution in 'Oumuamua's spin (which was not observed).
Basically, Bialy and Loeb consider the possibility that 'Oumuamua could in fact be a light sail, a form of spacecraft that relies on radiation pressure to generate propulsion – similar to what Breakthrough Starshot is working on. Similar to what is planned for Starshot, this light sail may been sent from another civilization to study our solar system and look for signs of life. As Prof. Loeb explained to Universe Today via email:
"We explain the excess acceleration of `Oumuamua away from the sun as the result of the force that the sunlight exerts on its surface. For this force to explain measured excess acceleration, the object needs to be extremely thin, of order a fraction of a millimeter in thickness but tens of meters in size. This makes the object lightweight for its surface area and allows it to act as a light-sail. Its origin could be either natural (in the interstellar medium or proto-planetary disks) or artificial (as a probe sent for a reconnaissance mission into the inner region of the solar system)."
