Octopus Overlords

The countdown clock for the Chandrayaan-2 mission — which had been due to blast off from the country’s east coast at 2:51 a.m. — was halted with 56 minutes 24 seconds left to run.

The Indian Space Research Organization, which had planned to live-stream the event for online viewers, said in a tweet that a problem had been detected in the launch vehicle system and that officials had postponed the mission “as a measure of abundant precaution.” A new date is expected to be announced soon.
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Pallava Bagla, science editor of news channel NDTV, reporting from the site, said the fault appeared to be in the cryogenic engine stage — the final stage of the space launch vehicle.
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Made up of an orbiter, a lander and a rover, Chandrayaan-2 was to be launched by the country’s most powerful rocket, known as Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III. At a height of 144 feet, it weighs over 640 tons, about 1.5 times that of a fully loaded Boeing 747 jet.

Kraken wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:46 pm When we watched "They Shall Not Grow Old" a few days ago, I realized that WW1 : Apollo 11 as Apollo 11 : today. Not quite exactly, but within a year.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:49 pm

Kraken wrote: ↑Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:46 pm When we watched "They Shall Not Grow Old" a few days ago, I realized that WW1 : Apollo 11 as Apollo 11 : today. Not quite exactly, but within a year.

Pluto was discovered in 1930. We visited it in 2015 with technology we launched in 2006.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2019 12:33 am Also a live feed as it happened. Will take days to see it all and of course launch has passed.

Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., who died July 22, 2019, created the concept of NASA's Mission Control and developed its organization, operational procedures and culture, then made it a critical element of the success of the nation's human spaceflight programs.

“America has truly lost a national treasure today with the passing of one of NASA’s earliest pioneers – flight director Chris Kraft," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement. "We send our deepest condolences to the Kraft family.

“Chris was one of the core team members that helped our nation put humans in space and on the Moon, and his legacy is immeasurable. Chris’ engineering talents were put to work for our nation at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, before NASA even existed, but it was his legendary work to establish mission control as we know it for the earliest crewed space flights that perhaps most strongly advanced our journey of discovery. From that home base, America’s achievements in space were heard across the globe, and our astronauts in space were anchored to home even as they accomplished unprecedented feats."

Alan Duffy was confused. On Thursday, the astronomer’s phone was suddenly flooded with calls from reporters wanting to know about a large asteroid that had just whizzed past Earth, and he couldn’t figure out “why everyone was so alarmed.”

“I thought everyone was getting worried about something we knew was coming,” Duffy, who is lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, told The Washington Post. Forecasts had already predicted that a couple of asteroids would be passing relatively close to Earth this week.

Then, he looked up the details of the hunk of space rock named Asteroid 2019 OK.

“I was stunned,” he said. “This was a true shock.”

This asteroid wasn’t one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers (45,000 miles) of Earth. That’s less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers “uncomfortably close.”
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The asteroid’s presence was discovered only earlier this week by separate astronomy teams in Brazil and the United States. Information about its size and path was announced just hours before it shot past Earth, Brown said.
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Duffy said astronomers have a nickname for the kind of space rock that just came so close to Earth: “City-killer asteroids.” If the asteroid had struck Earth, most of it would have probably reached the ground, resulting in devastating damage, Brown said.

The Planetary Society’s crowdfunded craft consists of a CubeSat roughly the size of a loaf of bread, and a now-unfurled solar sail that stretches more than 18 feet wide.

How the solar system actually travels through the galaxy

A day after India’s bold mission to land on the moon appeared to have failed, the country’s space agency announced that the missing lander had been located, raising hopes for a turnaround.

K. Sivan, head of the Indian Space Research Organization, told the news agency ANI that the mission’s orbiter had clicked a thermal image of the lander from its cameras. “We are trying to establish contact. It will be communicated soon,” he said.

Vikram, the lander of Chandrayaan-2, which blasted off in July, was scheduled to soft-land on the lunar south pole early Saturday. While its descent began as planned, communication with it snapped minutes before touchdown, leading to heartbreak across the nation.
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The success rate of landing on the moon is about 50 percent. Earlier this year, an Israeli spacecraft, Beresheet, attempting to land on the moon crashed in its final moment.

India’s homegrown and low-cost space exploration program has notched previous successes. In 2014, it became the first country to reach Mars on its first attempt [Mars Orbiter Mission - Isg], making space for itself in the elite global space club. It has announced plans to send its first manned mission to space by 2022.

lexei Leonov, the legendary Soviet cosmonaut who became the first human to walk in space 54 years ago, has died in Moscow at 85.

The Russian space agency Roscosmos announced the news on its website on Friday, but gave no cause of death. Leonov had health issues for several years, according to Russia media.

Sepiche wrote: ↑Thu May 24, 2018 5:28 pm Remember NASA's impossible EMDrive? Surprising no one, it probably doesn't actually work:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/201 ... e-science/

To get to grips with the principle of Burns’s engine, picture a box on a frictionless surface. Inside that box is a rod, along which a ring can slide. If a spring inside the box gives the ring a push, the ring will slide along the rod one way while the box will recoil in the other. When the ring reaches the end of the box, it will bounce backwards, and the box’s recoil direction will switch too. This is action-reaction – also known as Newton’s third law of motion – and in normal circumstances, it restricts the box to wiggling back and forth.

But, Burns asks, what if the ring’s mass is much greater when it slides in one direction than the other? Then it would give the box a greater kick at one end than the other. Action would exceed reaction and the box would accelerate forwards.

This mass changing isn’t prohibited by physics. Einstein’s theory of special relativity says that objects gain mass as they are driven towards the speed of light, an effect that must be accounted for in particle accelerators. In fact, a simplistic implementation of Burns’s concept would be to replace the ring with a circular particle accelerator, in which ions are swiftly accelerated to relativistic speed during one stroke, and decelerated during the other.

But Burns thinks it would make more sense to ditch the box and rod and employ the particle accelerator for the lateral as well as the circular movement – in which case, the accelerator would need to be shaped like a helix.

It would also need to be big – some 200 metres long and 12 metres in diameter – and powerful, requiring 165 megawatts of power to generate just 1 newton of thrust, which is about the same force you use to type on a keyboard. For that reason, the engine would only be able to reach meaningful speeds in the frictionless environment of space. “The engine itself would be able to get to 99 per cent the speed of light if you had enough time and power,” says Burns.

Holman wrote: ↑Tue Oct 01, 2019 12:21 pm Look at this gorgeous Mars pic.

Jaymann wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2019 6:04 pm If a star is 14.46 billion years old and is part of the universe, then by definition the universe is older than 14.46 billion years. Reducto ad absurdum.

Flagstaff became the first city to earn a designation from the International Dark Sky Association in 2001. That came as a result of its long history of hosting astronomy research at local Lowell Observatory, as well as facilities operated by the US Navy. The city has an official ordinance governing the use of outdoor lighting—public and private.
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A few years ago, though, a problem arose. The type of dark-sky-friendly streetlight that the city had been using was going extinct, largely as a casualty of low demand. In fact, as of this summer, there are none left to buy. Meanwhile, the age of the LED streetlight has arrived with a catch: limited night-sky-friendly LED options.
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The problem with LEDs boils down to blue light. Older streetlights are high-pressure sodium bulbs, which produce a warm yellow glow around a color temperature of 2,000 K. The bulbs Flagstaff relied on for most of its streetlights were low-pressure sodium—a variant that only emits light at a single wavelength (589 nanometers) near that yellow color, producing something resembling candlelight. Many of the LED streetlights on the market have much cooler color temperatures of 3,000 or even 4,000 K.
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Narrow-band amber (NBA) LEDs provide a different option. These lights actually use a type of LED that only emits warmer colors from the start. In this way, they actually compare pretty well to the low-pressure sodium streetlights that recently went extinct. The range of wavelengths emitted is a little broader, but the practical effect is about the same.

The downsides of the NBAs are basically cost and efficiency. But both have improved considerably over the last few years. Flagstaff Traffic Engineer Jeff Baumann—who is in charge of the plan for replacing the city’s 3,500 streetlights—told Ars that the available NBA options have recently climbed over 30 lumens per watt (on the ground), with efficiencies over 40 right around the corner. For comparison, the city’s low-pressure sodium streetlights weigh in at about 50 lumens per watt.
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Flagstaff’s plan is generally to swap in NBA LEDs for all the low-pressure sodium lights, and PCA LEDs for the high-pressure sodium lights that are used along the busier streets (as they’re a little brighter). The better directionality of LEDs—combined with resident requests for slightly dimmer lighting on residential streets—actually means that the total output of the city’s streetlights is going to drop from about 29 million lumens to about 19 million lumens. That’s not unusual.

“If you absolutely must use white LEDs, you could do what Tucson has done,” Hall said. “They... switched out their whole high-pressure sodium system to 3,000 degree white but reduced their lumen budget for street lighting from 480 million to, like, 170 million [lumens] or something. And you need to do that. For every white LED lumen, you're increasing your skyglow by a factor of about three, but they cut the lumen budget by about a factor of three. So overall, they managed to wash out the skyglow because they’ve got a lot of observatories down there.”

At nearly the same time, a large balloon came down onto a power line in Wheeler, Mi., a few miles away. Welke says power had to be shut off in the area while crews removed the popped balloon from the power line on Barry Road in eastern Gratiot County. Welke estimates her power was off for about two hours.

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Staff from a company called Raven Industries came to pick up the space contraption. Welke says the Raven representative wouldn’t say much about the situation. That person only told her the contraption was launched from Iowa yesterday and was being used to take pictures. The Raven representative told Welke the company is based “out of the Dakotas.”

Samsung just this week launched a program called Space Selfie. According to the Samsung website, the idea is for people to upload their picture and a space photo of Earth will be merged with their photo. The photo will then be sent back to the original uploader.