Octopus Overlords

Jaymann wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:01 pm Yet in 1969, Apollo 11 supposedly soft landed in a lander made of cardboard and tin foil

Redfive wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:08 pm

Jaymann wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:01 pm Yet in 1969, Apollo 11 supposedly soft landed in a lander made of cardboard and tin foil

You don't think it happened?

Kraken wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2019 4:59 pm Bummer. But to me, they already accomplished the coolest thing: Using Earth gravity boosts to turn an elliptical Earth orbit into a lunar orbit. AFAIK that's a first (somebody please set me right if not).

Jaymann wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:11 pm

Redfive wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:08 pm

Jaymann wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:01 pm Yet in 1969, Apollo 11 supposedly soft landed in a lander made of cardboard and tin foil

You don't think it happened?

I would say it strains credibility under modern analysis.

Jaymann wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:01 pm Yet in 1969, Apollo 11 supposedly soft landed in a lander made of cardboard titanium and tin foil aluminum

In the debate over whether human beings should set off to other worlds beyond Earth, one of the most compelling cons is this: Our bodies don’t like it.

Few people know this better than Scott Kelly, the NASA astronaut who spent nearly a year on the International Space Station from 2015 to 2016. Like other astronauts, Kelly served as a test subject in the study of space travel’s effects on the human body. Unlike other astronauts, Kelly has an identical twin, Mark, an astronaut himself. This gave researchers an uncommon opportunity to monitor the two brothers as they lived in two very different environments—one on Earth and the other 250 miles above it.

According to their results, published Thursday in Science, Scott experienced a number of changes that Mark did not. Most of those changes went away after Scott returned to Earth. The long stint in space, the researchers say, produced some unexpected changes—but did not lead to any clinically significant health differences.

The body, sensing and reacting to weightlessness, bristles at life in space. Fluids float freely and clog the sinuses, giving faces a puffy appearance. Bones, relieved of the job of bearing weight, thin. Muscles, faced with the same, atrophy. Parts of the eyeball, for reasons scientists are still trying to pin down, become squished or swollen. And from head to toe, cells, exposed to unearthly levels of radiation, become more at risk for cancer.

Only the brain seems to love it; after all, it’s the one that fervently processes the beautiful views of the gleaming planet below, delights in the somersaults made natural by microgravity, and comprehends—or at least attempts to comprehend—the wonder of being there, in outer space.

A metals manufacturer faked test results and provided faulty materials to NASA, causing more than $700 million in losses and two failed satellite launch missions, according to an investigation by the U.S. space agency.

The fraud involved an Oregon company called Sapa Profiles Inc., which falsified thousands of certifications for aluminum parts over 19 years for hundreds of customers, including NASA.

The bad parts were used in the making of Taurus XL, a rocket that was supposed to deliver satellites studying the Earth’s climate during missions carried out in 2009 and 2011. The launch vehicle’s fairing, a clamshell structure that carries the satellite as it travels through the atmosphere, didn’t fully open, causing the unsuccessful launch, according to a statement from NASA.
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News of the satellite failures comes a week after Norsk Hydro ASA, the current parent company of Sapa, agreed to pay $46 million to NASA, the Department of Defense and others to resolve criminal charges and civil claims related to the fraud, which took place from 1996 to 2015.

The company admitted that employees had faked test results related to the metal’s strength and reliability under pressure. Sapa Profiles, now known as Hydro Extrusion Portland Inc., also agreed to plead guilty to one count of mail fraud and is barred from U.S. federal government contracting.
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A spokesman for Norsk Hydro said the case has been settled. Last week, it said it has invested “significant time and resources to completely overhaul our quality and compliance organizations.”

The full set of everything New Horizons captured won't be available for more than a year yet. But with 10 percent of the total cache in hand, researchers decided they had enough to do the first analysis of 2014 MU69.
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Overall, 2014 MU69 looks exactly like what we'd hope for: a world that underwent some major changes immediately after its formation but has since become static, preserving its state largely as it was billions of years ago. Hopefully, more details on that state are sitting in storage on New Horizons. Because we're not likely to send something back to 2014 MU69 any time soon.

A Chinese Long March 4C rocket failed to place its top secret military payload into orbit Wednesday after a launch from the Taiyuan space base southwest of Beijing, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

The three-stage rocket lifted off around 2249 GMT (6:49 p.m. EDT) Wednesday, according to numerous Chinese social media posts from local spectators. The Long March 4C turned toward the south, aiming to place its satellite payload into a polar orbit a few hundred miles above Earth.

But confirmation of the launch did not immediately come through official Chinese media channels, which typically announce a successful mission soon after it is completed. And the U.S. military’s catalog of orbiting space objects did not list any new spacecraft in orbit early Thursday that could be attributed to the Long March 4C launch.
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China’s official Xinhua news agency confirmed suspicions that the launch failed in a brief statement released Thursday. Xinhua reported that the Long March 4C’s third stage failed, after good performance by the rocket’s first and second stages during the climb into space from Taiyuan.

The Long March 4C failure Wednesday was the second Chinese launch failure this year, after the debut flight of a new commercial launcher in March by OneSpace.

The Long March rocket family is developed and manufactured by state-owned enterprises. The last failure of a Long March rocket before Wednesday was in July 2017, when a heavy-lift Long March 5 launcher fell short of orbit.
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The third stage blamed for Wednesday’s launch failure is only used on the Long March 4 family of rockets, which could limit the impact of the accident on upcoming missions using other Chinese Long March launch vehicles.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has successfully cleared another critical testing milestone, taking this ambitious observatory one step closer to its 2021 launch. The spacecraft has gone through its final thermal vacuum test meant to ensure that its hardware will function electronically in the vacuum of space, and withstand the extreme temperature variations it will encounter on its mission.

One half of the Webb observatory, known as the "spacecraft element," completed this testing at the facilities of Northrop Grumman, the mission's lead industrial partner, in Los Angeles. The other half of Webb, which consists of the telescope and science instruments, has already successfully completed its thermal vacuum testing at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston prior to delivery at Northrop Grumman last year.

In the most recent major environmental test, technicians and engineers locked the Webb spacecraft element inside a special thermal vacuum chamber. The testing team drained the atmosphere from the room to replicate the vacuum of space, and exposed the Webb spacecraft element to a wide range of hot and cold temperatures, spanning from minus 235 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 148 degrees Celsius) to a sweltering 215 degrees Fahrenheit (102 degrees Celsius). This variation of temperatures ensures the spacecraft will survive the extreme conditions it will actually experience in space.

A team of astronomers led by Federica Govoni at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics has discovered, for the first time, a “ridge” of plasma emitting radio waves and connecting two galaxy clusters in the process of merging: Abell 0399 and Abell 0401. The ridge, which is part of the cosmic web along which galaxy clusters tend to gather, stretches for about 10 million light-years and shows evidence of both a magnetic field and relativistic particles — electrons moving at close to the speed of light. Their work will be published June 7 in Science.

The cosmic web is exactly what it sounds like: spiderweb-like filaments of hydrogen gas stretching throughout the universe. Astronomers believe the cosmic web traces out the distribution of dark matter, which cannot be detected except by its gravitational pull, as well. Galaxy clusters tend to gather at the intersections of these filaments, which makes them extremely interesting places to study.

Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology ... is an experimental project aimed at producing a new design for nuclear reactors for space travel. The project started in October 2015, led by NASA and the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).[4] The Kilopower reactors will come in 4 sizes able to produce from one to 10 kilowatts of electrical power (1-10 kWe), continuously for 12-15 years. The fission reactor uses readily available uranium-235 to generate heat that is carried to the Stirling converters via passive sodium heat pipes.

Potential applications include nuclear electric propulsion and a steady electricity supply for crewed or robotic space missions that require large amounts of power, especially where sunlight is limited or not available.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Fri Jun 07, 2019 10:45 pm KRUSTY

Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology ... is an experimental project aimed at producing a new design for nuclear reactors for space travel. The project started in October 2015, led by NASA and the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).[4] The Kilopower reactors will come in 4 sizes able to produce from one to 10 kilowatts of electrical power (1-10 kWe), continuously for 12-15 years. The fission reactor uses readily available uranium-235 to generate heat that is carried to the Stirling converters via passive sodium heat pipes.

Potential applications include nuclear electric propulsion and a steady electricity supply for crewed or robotic space missions that require large amounts of power, especially where sunlight is limited or not available.

NASA’s asteroid-sampling OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which is currently in position around the tiny, near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu, has transmitted its closest shot of the asteroid’s surface yet.
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Now, per the Verge, NASA has released a photo taken on June 13 from a circular orbit of just 0.4 miles (690 meters) above Bennu—described as the closest a spacecraft has ever orbited a body in the Solar System.

morlac wrote:Ill be in CoCo beach this Sunday and watching the launch Monday night. My 10 yo daughter and I are both super excited! Well start that day off with VIP tour of Kennedy space center thanks to a friend who works for Nasa.