1530 posts tagged with space.
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I bonked my head on the moon
Hello! I'm SLIM! Do you want the good news first, or the bad news? The good news is, I'm on the Moon. The bad news is, I landed on my head and can't get up.
DC reporters check your sources for mistresses named "Ellie"
Newly detected near-Earth asteroid has astronomers’ full attention [WaPost 2025-02-02, gift link]
[At announcement, last Wednesday, the] likelihood of impact was very low, just 1.3 percent... Astronomers are making further observations and refining calculations for future orbits of Asteroid 2024 YR4. By Friday, the impact probability edged upward to 1.6 percent.In the week since the article was published, the probability has gone up further, to 2.3% (check the current probability at NASA/JPL).
Mothership RPG
Space is the Place
Everyone Who Has Ever Been to Space, Charted, a set of visualizations by Clara Moskowitz, senior editor at Scientific American, along with graphics intern Zane Wolf. Related: How many people are in space right now?
ATC response to Starlink 7 debris.
Finally, an actually useful function for home security cameras.
Steven Soderbergh's "Solaris"
At a time when many American movies pump up every fugitive emotion into a clanging assault on the audience, Soderbergh’s Solaris is quiet and introspective. There are some shocks and surprises, but this is not Alien. It is a workshop for a discussion of human identity. It considers not only how we relate to others, but how we relate to our ideas of others. - Roger Ebert [more inside]
An Organic Cosmos
The Cosmos Teems with Complex Organic Molecules "Organic molecules — compounds containing carbon — abound on Earth, especially in the bodies of living things. They’re often called the building blocks of life, and for good reason: Carbon atoms can chemically bond to four other atoms and easily form long, stable chains that serve as “carbon backbones” for complex biological molecules. The Rosetta mission and others have shown just how ubiquitous organic molecules are in space, too." [Spoiler: Still no evidence of life beyond Earth, but lots of cool science in the article]
A Christmas star
"We had been respectable, ordinary people until the comet"
Carmen Maria Machado (LitHub and also Conjunctions, 12/04/2024), "Endlings": "Lorraine patted my mother's arm and assured her that she believed her. The comet had been rustling up quite a lot of supernatural activity where you least expected it." Related: Kim Masters, Ashley Cullins (THR, 12/13/2017), "War Over 'The Conjuring': The Disturbing Claims Behind a Billion-Dollar Franchise" and movies based on cases of Ed and Lorraine Warren, e.g. on Fanfare: Annabelle; The Conjuring; The Amityville Horror; The Conjuring 2; and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. Also, personal ghost stories by other contributors to Conjunctions. And La Llorona (1960), a classic ghost story relevant to "Endlings" and in this version reviewed on Cinema Cats. CW: children are harmed in La Llorona stories and in the nonfiction article about The Conjuring.
Space Sweepers
Global Push for Cooperation as Space Traffic Crowds Earth Orbit - "More than 14,000 satellites including some 3,500 inactive surround the globe in low Earth orbit, showed data from U.S.-based Slingshot Aerospace. Alongside those are about 120 million pieces of debris from launches, collisions and wear-and-tear of which only a few thousand are large enough to track." (/. ;) [more inside]
returning to earth
“To look at the Earth from space is like a child looking into a mirror and realizing for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself” [ap: Samantha Harvey’s space-station novel ‘Orbital’ (g) wins the Booker Prize for fiction]
A steerable balloon
A balloon that goes where it wants by choosing an air current (if I understand correctly!). Knowledge rather than force; an interesting way to deal with the world. Also, shiny.
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only Sontag
Edwin Evans-Thirlwell of Rock Paper Shotgun spends some time unpacking the implications of sanitizing, softening, and aggressively commoditizing the originally absurdist, monstrous post-human Imperial war-slaves of the Warhammer 40K universe in: Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine
Super-Saturn isn’t real, it can’t hurt you.
Why did everyone fall for the J1407b myth? is 12 minute video essay that starts off as discussion about a cool astronomical mystery but becomes a measured, well-argued rant about knowledge in the age of Google and LLMs. It is by YouTuber Kyplanet who makes weekly videos about cool astronomical things, mostly exoplanets.
Concerns Over SpaceX as a Credible Launch Provider
The successful launch and recovery of the Heavy Booster (with a subsequent planned water landing of Starship) has provided SpaceX with very positive press and enthusiasm from the public. What remains, however, are significant issues that undermine the credibility of not just the Heavy Booster development program but SpaceX as a credible launch provider more widely.
Last month, the FAA, the controlling authority on commercial spaceflight, recently hit SpaceX with a potential fine, focusing on improper control room procedures, and perhaps more concerning, insufficient handling of explosives (note that the Super Heavy is the largest spacecraft launched to date with twice the thrust of a Saturn V. [more inside]
And her body was like the chrysolite
Tamsyn Muir -- creator of a queer gothic necromantic space dystopia/paradise from which only she is personally barred -- has nonetheless invited the rest of us back to her world in a new short story. The multi-genre script that is the story occurs midway through Nona the Ninth inside a nested set of souls and also a graduate seminar and also a British country house murder mystery. (Previously and previously).
Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars
Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars's dead core? No? Well. It's fine. I'm sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let's discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.
That’s a helluva lot of astronaut overtime
Juice rerouted to Venus in world’s first lunar-Earth flyby
ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) has successfully completed a world-first lunar-Earth flyby, using the gravity of Earth to send it Venus-bound, on a shortcut to Jupiter through the inner Solar System. The closest approach to the Moon was at 23:15 CEST (21:15 UTC) on 19 August, guiding Juice towards a closest approach to Earth just over 24 hours later at 23:56 CEST (21:56 UTC) on 20 August. As Juice flew just 6840 km above Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, it snapped a series of images with its onboard monitoring cameras, and collected scientific data with eight of its ten instruments.
well
What they found was that the readings collected by Insight are best explained by the presence under the surface of the Red Planet of a deep layer of fractured igneous rock saturated with liquid water [new atlas; uc berkeley]
Livestream of the earth, running (almost) 24/7
ISS High Definition Live Streaming Video of the Earth.
The High Definition Earth-Viewing System concluded its mission on August 22, 2019. In retirement, it has been showing a livestream of the earth from its spot on the International Space Station External Payload Facility of the European Space Agency’s Columbus module. [more inside]
Yes, they wood build a satellite out of that material
Magnolia wood is great for building, as it resists splitting and glues well. It's so good that Japan built the LignoSat probe out of the wood, which will be better for Earth when the satellite inevitably reenters the atmosphere.
“National Geographic’s Picture Atlas of Our Universe”
Nerd John Siracusa reminisced about a certain National Geographic book from his childhood and the reactions flooded in. Siracusa says the cover image is “burned in his brain,” more than 40 years later. Nearly everyone who responded also had fond memories of the book. One respondent said he had written a blog post about in 2009. [more inside]
“spaghettification is just 12.8 seconds away”
360 Video: NASA Simulation Plunges into a Black Hole answers the question of what it would look like to fall into a black hole. If you’d rather not, NASA also released 360 Video: NASA Simulation Shows a Flight Around a Black Hole. They also released videos explaining what is going on in the visualizations for the dive into the black hole as well as the flight around it. The press release has more information.
A compendium of Signs and Portents
The Book of Miracles unfolds in chronological order divine wonders and horrors, from Noah’s Ark and the Flood at the beginning to the fall of Babylon the Great Harlot at the end; in between this grand narrative of providence lavish pages illustrate meteorological events of the sixteenth century. In 123 folios with 23 inserts, each page fully illuminated, one astonishing, delicious, supersaturated picture follows another. Vivid with cobalt, aquamarine, verdigris, orpiment, and scarlet pigment, they depict numerous phantasmagoria: clouds of warriors and angels, showers of giant locusts, cities toppling in earthquakes, thunder and lightning. Against dense, richly painted backgrounds, the artist or artists’ delicate brushwork touches in fleecy clouds and the fiery streaming tails of comets. There are monstrous births, plagues, fire and brimstone, stars falling from heaven, double suns, multiple rainbows, meteor showers, rains of blood, snow in summer. [...] Its existence was hitherto unknown, and silence wraps its discovery; apart from the attribution to Augsburg, little is certain about the possible workshop, or the patron for whom such a splendid sequence of pictures might have been created.The Augsburg Book of Miracles: a uniquely entrancing and enigmatic work of Renaissance art, available as a 13-minute video essay, a bound art book with hundreds of pages of trilingual commentary, or a snazzy Wikimedia slideshow of high-resolution scans.
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“members of the Voyager flight team celebrate”
NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth reports NASA. After pinpointing the issue with the space probe, the mission team have devised a workaround. Previously, previouslier, many more previouslies.
Moon Train
DARPA has asked for proposals to build an American train on the moon, to compete with proposed Chinese base proposals, and Northrop Grumman has responded with a concept study. But will this be a levitational railway, or a more standard broad-gauge one to suit the lower lunar gravity?
Voyager 1 sends readable message to Earth
After 4 nail-biting months of gibberish, Voyager 1 is making sense again. Since November 2023, the almost-50-year-old spacecraft has been experiencing trouble with its onboard computers. Although Voyager 1, one of NASA's longest-lived space missions, has been sending a steady radio signal to Earth, it hasn't contained any usable data. Now, there may be hope for recovery.
ScienceClic English Presents:
The Lost Universe: NASA's First TTRPG Adventure
The Lost Universe (science.nasa.gov, 03/04/2024): "A dark mystery has settled over the city of Aldastron on the rogue planet of Exlaris. Researchers dedicated to studying the cosmos have disappeared, and the Hubble Space Telescope has vanished from Earth's timeline. Only an ambitious crew of adventurers can uncover what was lost. Are you up to the challenge? This adventure is designed for a party of 4-7 level 7-10 characters and is easily adaptable for your preferred tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) system." Adventure design by Christina Mitchell. Graphic design by Michelle Belleville.
To the Moon (eventually) but with great food!
Victor Glover will be the first African-American to eat maple cream cookies and smoked salmon while traveling to and from the Moon on the Artemis II mission
Moon landings, a wooden satellite, Tolkien on Mars, fiery descents
The Martian helicopter completed its final flight on Valinor Hills. "yeah it really could be an ocean moon" - Let's check in on humanity's exploration of space in early 2024. [more inside]
Death, Lonely Death
Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die
Zoozve — Now it's Official (plus contest to name an Earth quasi-moon)
Breaking news about Zoozve The International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Small Bodies Nomenclature has made a decision, and that decision is to accept Radiolab's suggestion to name Venus' quasi-moon Zoozve! (Why did they suggest this? Previously.) [more inside]
That's no moon
Yes, it is! No, it isn't!
Until scientists get more data from James Webb, or future missions such as ESA’s PLATO launch, it’s all down to what they can do with the existing numbers.[more inside]
ZOOZVE
It’s not a moon, but it’s also not not a moon. A strange label on his child’s bedroom poster leads Latif Nasser on an exploration of the solar system. Via Thread Reader and Radiolab.
What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?
"Space is a harsh, incredibly forbidding domain. It can play with the mind" Not everyone on a space mission is subject to the same rigorous tests as others - this assymetry between professional astronutters and mad scientists was once put to the test when one of the latter, Taylor Gun-Jin Wang, couldn't get his experiment to work - and spiralled into a deep funk... especially when the boss told him to not waste time trying to fix it...
SpaceX vs OSHA
“Elon’s concept that SpaceX is on this mission to go to Mars as fast as possible and save humanity permeates every part of the company." CW: Descriptions and a few photos of injuries.
“SpaceX’s idea of safety is: ‘We’ll let you decide what’s safe for you,’ which really means there was no accountability,” said Carson, who has worked for more than two decades in dangerous jobs such as building submarines. “That’s a terrible approach to take in industrial environments.”
Why did NASA build a vehicle designed to attack aircraft tires?
Why did NASA create the Tire Assualt Vehicle (TAV), a model radio-control tank with a drill?
The Space Shuttle Program had experienced some close calls with the landing and braking system, especially the tires. Hard data was desired about the response of the tires to various off-nominal situations. To obtain this data, a Convair 990 jetliner was converted into the Landing Systems Research Aircraft by adding an instrumented version of a Shuttle Orbiter landing gear.
(StackExchange, with an answer by the creator of the TAV) [more inside]
Coming in hot!
POV footage of NASA's Artemis 1's Orion spacecraft's re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere: Real-time (25m); Time-lapsed 25x (1m)
Beyond the Vomit Comet
"Blood flow in the jugular veins of six of the eleven ISS crew members they monitored had either stagnated or reversed direction" and "major surgery could result in the patient’s insides floating out," but, at least, “ there are good indications that erection and lubrication are not inhibited in space.”The Bodily Indignities of the Space Life (NYT guest link; archive), by Kim Tingley.
4.5 billion year old space rock tells us new things about Solar System
Launches, landings, elements, and the fiery golden apples of the sun
NASA started work on this day in 1958. So let's mark the occasion by checking on the past month of humanity's exploration of space. [more inside]
The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a term for it
Feeling lunar gravity
Had ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface. Let's check in on humanity's exploration of space as autumn 2023 draws nigh, starting with the Sun and working outwards from there. [more inside]
Ground control to Major Todd
Starfield | Overwhelming Scope [Game Informer] “Even in the increasingly crowded marketplace of big, expansive games, Starfield stands out. Leveraging the gameplay Bethesda popularized with The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, Starfield expands the breadth of exploration to a galaxy of solar systems, planets, and ships. It populates those environments with a rich palette of activities and missions that tap into the outer space fantasy. It’s a staggering span of content to wrap one’s head around. At times, that scope threatens to impair the focus and pacing, and moment-to-moment gameplay is not always a strong suit. But players can expect to uncover hundreds of hours of experimentation in a richly imagined sci-fi playground, and that thrill is worth experiencing.” [more inside]
The Riker Maneuver
Something in space has been lighting up every 20 minutes since 1988
On Wednesday, researchers announced the discovery of a new astronomical enigma. The new object, GPM J1839–10 [...] takes 22 minutes between pulses. [...] The list of known objects that can produce this sort of behavior is short and consists of precisely zero items. John Timmer writes 900 words for Ars Technica.
To the other side of the Sun, to resurrect the last Great Observatory
Launches, satellites, deep space missions, images, and more. Let's check in on humanity's exploration of space for July 2023. [more inside]