f13.net

So we're always talking about random space topics in lots of scattered threads, and I figured it might actually be a good idea to have one thread to keep all the discussion in.  There are a lot of interesting public and private spaceflight programs coming up, so hopefully this thread will actually get some use.  Looking at threads in both, I'm really not sure what the difference between General Discussion and Serious Business is anymore, so mods can move if need be....

First up, Space-x is getting close to the 2nd Launch of their Falcon 9 rocket, scheduled for December 7th. (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jIy1pnVgB-sCS5T7Crd0JxVcHirQ?docId=CNG.fa0914aaf88efbfc94d9b1b4fc7fecae.91) 

The first launch was back in summer, and they had the whole thing streamed over the web live (including a camera on the rocket itself), which was a lot of fun.  Nothing blew up though, so not quite as exciting as the first launch of a brand new model of rocket could be.   :why_so_serious:  This launch has the Dragon capsule on it, which is a space craft they've developed to first deliver cargo to the International Space Station, and then a crewed version that will deliver people.  So its somewhat important this all goes smoothly, as this Dragon Capsule is the only near term solution to having a US craft that can put people in space after the Space Shuttles Retire.

They are, as we speak, streaming the Static Test Fire over the internet right now.  The test itself is set for a little under an hour.  I'm not sure it will really be that exciting, but here it is none the less:
http://www.spacex.com/webcast.php

Second interesting news today, the weird ass secret space shuttle drone the Air Force developed and launched into space earlier this year just touched down today. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11911335)  First unmanned landing of a spacecraft.  From all reports, it looks like everything worked perfectly during its test run.  What ever the fuck its actually suppose to do.  Sooo, go Air Force?

:why_so_serious: :oh_i_see:

I like Russia's plans to build and launch a vessel to collect debris from low earth orbit. Although the fact that they announced this on their facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=110670402336550&id=125342950826952) is a bit miffing.

That seems passé but wait till they're tweeting from the moon. Man Sarah Palin'll be jealous.

A picture of the crew:

(http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y222/Abagadro/quark16.jpg)

Nice Quark reference.

Yeah, I just dated myself.

I just wrote a new verse to Space Oddity.

Will they name it DS-12 Toybox (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DakRYsUIiIE)?

One could make a pretty penny collecting space junk from LEO.  Imagine the collectibility.  Also, imagine how much govt.'s would pay to get back some of the stuff they've left up there.

Anyways, I hope SpaceX does a better job streaming their launch tomorrow, 'cause last time was a serious joke save for Miles O'Brien's coverage, which he threw together in his own time on his own dime.

There was an issue found with a second stage nozzle, so it's been pushed back to Thursday or Friday, although there has been some rumblings that it may be back to Wednesday now.

Since it's a COTS flight NASA TV should have coverage too.

Is any of it valuable though? As far as I know most of it is screws, tools, frozen poop, bits of broken this and that and dead satellites. I guess the satellites might be worth something, but hardly relative to the cost of collecting it. I think the main aim is just to reduce the amount of dangerous debris which is starting to accumulate up there.

The spacex web stream worked pretty good for me last time.  Saw everything clearly.  Could have just been situational to you.

It would be much more lucrative to take the working satellites and ransom them back.

That's probably what the secret Air Force ship is for.   :why_so_serious:

The really dangerous debris is the stuff that is less than 1/2" in size. There is a lot of kinetic energy in an object traveling at orbital velocities, and things like solar arrays and people are delicate things. The big shit is relatively harmless so long as it stays intact as they can track that with radar.

Nothing, because anything that's actually a state secret is usually de-orbited into an ocean.

Well that's what I figured, screws and such.

But how would you gather all that space junk into a container? Megamaid?  :awesome_for_real:

First launch attempt for the Falcon 9 is in 15 min. http://www.spacex.com/webcast.php
Quality of the feed is good, the content of the show and tell coverage is a bit... eh...

Bah, stupid east coast time, launching the damn thing while I was commuting to work.   :oh_i_see:

Looks like everything has worked perfectly, and the Dragon capsule is in orbit.  They're suppose to test landing and recovering it though, I recall.  Anybody know when that will be?

It is to do at least two orbits, so three hours after launch is when it is scheduled to deorbit, I don't know if there is to be any video coverage of the splashdown.

This is a good place to keep track of the latest status. http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=23516.0

Hmm, ok.  That thread says they're going to order the de-orbit around 1:15 EST. 

Video of the launch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ci9xIgNZM

Well, everything went perfectly for the Falcon 9 launch.  The Dragon spaceship got into space, orbited the earth twice, then splashed down and was recovered successfully.  Apparently it had secret cargo, which they revealed upon recovery (its cheese):
(http://images.spaceref.com/news/2010/spacex.cheese.1.jpg)

(http://images.spaceref.com/news/2010/spacex.cheese.2.jpg)

Apparently the rocket was also carrying a micro satellite for the Army which was put into orbit successfully.

Pretty amazing though, as this is the first time a private company has done this (and only a handful of nation states have managed it as well).  There is hope yet for our space program!

Not a good week for space projects otherwise, however.  Japans probe (http://www.cnbc.com/id/40561379) to Venus managed to overshoot the target and is now heading off to fly around the sun.  They say they'll try again when the probe comes back around Venus in 6 years.

On Sunday, a Russian rocket carrying 3 satellites for they're own GPS system fucked up and they all crashed into the Pacific. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101206/wl_asia_afp/russiaspacescience)

Well, maybe it's a good time to riseeeeeeee this thread thanks to the Curiosity rover and see if we can keep it going (and talk about other NASA/space missions and astronomy discoveries in general)    :cthulu:
---

Yesterday, MRO passed over the Curiosity landing site and took a nice picture:




Here's the photo along with a detailed description of it:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4299

as it was explained in a press-conference, the photo was taken using the coordinates of the landing site *before* the touchdown: next time MRO will transit over the location, they'll be able to use the actual coordinates of the landing, so they will take much more detailed pictures, probably with colour too.

Also, a very first, partial look of a portion of Mount Sharp (or "Aeolis Mons"), the most prominent feature inside Gale Crater:

Description: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4271

In reality, from what I read, this mount is just an "enormous mound of eroded sedimentary layers sitting on the central peak of Gale".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolis_Mons


It's just a dwarf compared to other Mars "mountains", but still... :awesome_for_real:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mountains_on_Mars_by_height

Just like in other NASA missions, there is a section dedicated to raw, unprocessed images. Here's a nice, new one that show the edge of the crater (which is about 22km away):

(http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/msl/redops/ods/surface/sol/00002/opgs/edr/ncam/NRA_397681339EDR_F0020000AUT_04096M_.JPG)

Today we can watch two press conferences (of course related to the Curiosity mission), at 10am and 1pm EST (4pm and 7pm CET), on NASA Tv:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/MM_NTV_Breaking.html
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Looks like this thread was resurrected just in time for yet another similar incident :)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-07/russia-launch-of-two-satellites-fails-in-third-mishap-since-2010.html (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-07/russia-launch-of-two-satellites-fails-in-third-mishap-since-2010.html)

still on the subject of Mars Exploration (or rather, the first human expedition to Mars), here's the famous Mars Reference Mission 5.0 document (pdf); it has been updated over the last 18 years or so, and this is the latest version:

http://search.nasa.gov/search/search.jsp?nasaInclude=reference+mission (first link, called "Mars Design Reference")

100 pages, quite a complex read if you get into the technical details, but even if you are like me and understand only about 20% (err...I'm an optimistic guy :P) of what it's written, you can extrapolate a lot of interesting stuff  :grin:

I cannot wait for the hi-res color pictures to start coming in from Curiosity.   The color adjusted pictures from Opportunity are pretty awesome but almost 8 years difference in technology should be pretty impressive.

It looks like they are testing the cameras today and some of the images coming in are pretty interesting.  It also looks like they have the mast is up.


(http://p.twimg.com/AzyJ9OdCcAA0cHD.jpg:large)

One other link which is somewhat entertaining. They have a twitter feed for curiosity.  They have done this for other missions to and they have some stuff posted there you cannot get on JPL site right away.

http://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity

Hello, Number 5  :grin:

Interesting picture comparing the size of Curiosity, Spirit/Opportunity (http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/) and the lovely Sojourner (thanks Lucas) to that of an average human.

(http://imgur.com/JTxGO.jpg)

Unlike Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity doesn’t use solar panels as an energy source, but instead, relies on a much larger thermonuclear electric generator that produces electricity from the heat of plutonium-238’s radioactive decay. Longer-living and more reliable than solar power, the thermonuclear generator can provide Curiosity with power for at least a full year on Mars—687 days on Earth, while also pumping warm fluids through the rover to keep it at the right operating temperature.
Blatantly stolen from here (http://www.zmescience.com/space/curiosity-day-size-07082012/).

Actually, the smallest one is the lovely Sojourner rover, part of the Mars Pathfinder mission: I remember eagerly awaiting for the first pics from the rover back in 1997 (July 4th), just like today for Curiosity  :heart:

One more comparison pic, this time of the wheels (from left to right: sojourner, exploration rovers and curiosity):

While I really like the "let's fuck with people 10.000 years from now" vibe I get from the embedded hieroglyphic eye pattern on them wheels they seem to be rather different than the ones Curiosity is sporting in the rover comparison picture.

Actually, Curiosity's wheels (http://www.slashgear.com/curiosity-rover-tags-mars-with-morse-tire-tracks-06241847/) have holes in them that create the morse code symbols for J P L.

Look, it's a flying saucer!!!  :ye_gods: :ye_gods:  :grin:

(http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/674919main_pia16021-946.jpg)

Or, actually, a high resolution image of the heat shield protecting Curiosity and the Sky Crane module, immediately after its detachment, taken by the MARDI (Mars Descent Imager)

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/pia16021.html

The full sized picture at the provided link is even more astonishing.

Seriously... 20k years from now some alien race is going to hit Mars and find bits and pieces of these rovers and wonder what the hell happened to the creators.

Yeah, they'll look at the skycrane remnants and think 'wtf were those idiots thinking, this thing could never have taken off'.

Or they'll just look at the pockmarked and cratered Earth scattered with the remnants of The War of the American Succession and be like "Oh, that's what happened."

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/videos/index.cfm?v=81

Pretty neat vid of the descent and landing. The impact of the comms on the video really make it so much better than watching just the vid.

The area at the base of Mount Gale just looks really fascinating in the up-close shots they've released. It is going to be really interesting when the probe gets close to it if in fact it's a dry wash or riverbed of some kind. The lowest foothills of the mountain on the far side should also be really interesting. I almost, almost, almost wonder if they might not actually see very small exposed fossils at some point if there was in fact life on Mars that wasn't purely microbial.

(http://i47.tinypic.com/90txd5.jpg)
Like the lead imaging guy said, it looks like "something out of a John Ford movie."

Right in the center of the image is a black dot, about six pixels. It's under the center hill and at the edge of the scarp below. That's a boulder about the size of the rover. At top speed it would take the rover 100 days to get there, but there's science to do along the way... so it might take more than a year.

The boulder is on their short list of places to visit.

This might help:

(http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/4421/large/Mars_8-27-12.jpeg)

--Dave

(http://i.imgur.com/Mgvkj.jpg)

Turtle  :heart:


Or is that a tortoise?

It's a black dot.

If that's not sedimentation, at least at the lower levels of the hills, I dunno what else it could be.

It is, but is it caused by water, other liquid, wind, volcanic activity, or other?

It's an alien strip mine.  Seriously, that's what it looks like.
What if they dig down a bit and find an adamantium chisel or something.   :grin:

I'd be more amazed at the discovery of adamantium than the chisel, myself.

It'd have to be adamantium for it not to have broken down over a few 100 million years.

Every image I look at, I am just struck by how it looks like it could easily be here on earth. I find it fascinating.

You have to remember that those images are false color.  All the greys you see are the result of added contrast from post-process.  In reality the terrain is still mostly just clay red and monochrome.  Sexy images though, but not really Mars.

I thought that thing had color capabilities?

Its not just the color though, for me, its the formations too. Its less Alien than I would have imagined.

Even color images are generally adjusted, or at least they were (I'm not really familiar with Curiosity).  Here's an article about the Spirit rover, for example: (http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/spotlight/spirit/a12_20040128.html)

The imagers have color capabilities (three CCDs of three each, RGB I believe).  But they tweak the values to show darks as REALLY dark, so they can more easily pick out science targets.  

Yeah plus they try to make things look like they would under earth's atmospheric and lighting conditions, so that geologists familiar with Earth can grok them. Mars's sky is naturally pink, full of pink dust, illuminating pink rocks and pink sand. With occasional orange and red.

That said, it looks like the high desert does on Earth because it was formed in more or less the same way: Sedimentation eroded by wind rather than rain. What's missing is faults. There hasn't been plate tectonics on Mars for at least four billion years, and it's possible there never was. The sediment layers don't get broken up and twisted sideways by subduction, they just sit where they lay. So it looks like the deserts of western Utah or northern Arizona, say, rather than southeastern California.

I'm just thrilled to see real terrain. In the past, for safety and due to assumed landing inaccuracy, they've landed in some of the most boring places on the planet. We're finally getting to see the good stuff. Now imagine Valles Marineris (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valles_Marineris): Like the Grand Canyon except three miles deep, up to 80 miles wide, and stretching the distance from San Francisco to Boston.

They're doing a lot of white balancing, yeah. You can see some of the same images without color correction, etc. and it is indeed pretty monochrome, much harder to relate to.

Yep, it's a lot more alien-looking without the correction:

Either way, I get no sense of scale at all on these pictures.  Those hills in the background look maybe 1500 feet tall, and a mile or two away, but noooo, they are gigantic and really far off.  Different atmosphere and no trees/mountain goats really messes with one's brain, I guess.

Tortoise.

Scale will be a lot more obvious when the rover is actually driving around in those canyons a year or so from now. I look forward to watching them loom overhead.

One of the disadvantages of this design is that they can't leave a cam system static at the point of landing.  The rover carries everything.  Other rovers had cams on the landers that got to watch the rovers from the 3rd person.  That'd REALLY have helped here on this mission.

That still looks like somewhere on earth.

You must have terrible smog!

It's easier to see in the non-corrected version that they're going to have some serious challenges with deep sand at various points.

Uhh, no.  And there are 6 of these on a semi-independent suspension and a long arm that can dig "just in case."

Also the parts that look sandy from where the rover is now are at least a mile away. Most are several miles. They're as likely to be pebbles or gravel as finer dust. Plus it's not as hard to drive there as it is here. In Martian gravity the angle of repose is steeper on earth, so slops aren't as fragile as we imagine them to be.

I guess. I've already read that that there's an area approaching the base of Mt. Sharp that worries them enough that they're going to take a long detour around it, eight months or so from now.

Yeah, but they're NASA. Worry is their middle name.

And they'll enjoy every Martian minute of that detour.

Here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJgeoHBQpFQ) is the high resolution images from Curiosity's landing cameras during the final phases, slowed down to real time with frame interpolation to make it relatively smooth. Mars!

That's amateur work btw.  And more than just interpolated.  He's cleared up the dark frames also.  Awesome work and a testament to WHY the mission director is so adament about making the data as public as possible.

Bingo. Actually that point will help me this week as I try to make a case for why publishing public, reworkable "big data" is a good thing for almost every institution and project, maybe even some corporations. My colleagues are a very hard sell on this point (that is, when they even understand what I mean by it.).

Here's some stuff me and some of the guys over at #space IRC did during Huygens.  Unfortunately, my work was lost; it was similar to the that vid.  Interpolated frames put together into a long .gif animation set to the descent audio.

http://anthony.liekens.net/index.php/Main/Huygens

The story goes Univ. of Arizona was set on providing access to their FTP servers for those interested.  And since it was their cams on the Huygens this means we literally got RAWS the moment ESA did.  ESA was notoriously slow during Cassini at chunking any data whatsoever, so we just did it ourselves.  Was a lot of fun.  Sometimes we even got to see data from instrumentation; which we'd cross-correlate to the images.

This self-portrait of Curiosity is pretty awesome (high resolution version available here):
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4643

(http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/images/pia16159_MAHLI-br.jpg)

Need.
More.
Input.

Wall-E? Is that you?  :why_so_serious:

Saw that other videos of the landing have been posted, but this is the best one I've seen so far. Took the guy 4 weeks to put together. He even added sound.

Pretty nifty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Esj5juUzhpU

The sound is charming -- makes it sound "real" -- but the atmosphere on Mars is less than 1/150th as dense as Earth's. The parachute deployment and heatshield ejection that mark the functional beginning of the video happen 11km above the planet's surface. The whistling of wind would be almost nonexistent and the parachute would register less than a distant whisper. Even the rockets on the skycrane would produce little more than a hollow gust as they contacted the one thing that would carry sound excellently: The metal and plastic of the vehicle itself.

So a noise as the parachute's cord catches, the explosive bolts firing, a constant rattle as everything shifts position, that rocks kicked up by the landing clattering onto Curisoity, the thump as wheels hit the surface... but so far as our perception could detect, no air.

Yes and you wouldn't hear TIE fighters in space, but that would be booorrrriiinnngg.

I think he took the audio from an old NASA animation of the mission. I recognise a number of the sounds.

Actually, even though the atmo. is thin, since the gravity is so light you can float and fly around very easily.  So proportionally, the aerodynamics of Mars are much more forgiving than on Earth.

It looks like the Warp Drive may be more feasible than previously thought (http://www.space.com/17628-warp-drive-possible-interstellar-spaceflight.html). 



How cool is this?  Alpha Centauri here we come!  Hide yer wimmin. 

That eerily sounds like the UFP's warp field geometry class/theory.   Something so simple as a shape can change everything.

edit: Ahah!  Found it:
Warp Field Mechanics 101 (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936_2011016932.pdf)

I was reading some other articles on that earlier.  I especially like the part where it vaporizes everything in front of it when it stops.  :ye_gods:

http://www.universetoday.com/93882/warp-drives-may-come-with-a-killer-downside/

Whatever.  It's called the "Picard Maneuver"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK8o_rCFw4Q

So.....just watch where you're driving. 

Can't...too busy texting my friend about the horrible drivers out here.  :oh_i_see:

Something like that will be developed as a weapon before use as travel...

You're really looking to get the black helicopters to visit your house, aren't you?

Not once they can vaporize everything in front of them when they stop!

Meh, somebody wake me up when the "exotic matter" that's needed is actually detected or proven to exist.

Hey man, Dilithium chambers are expensive, time-consuming to make, and fragile. We don't need that kind of negativity.  :why_so_serious:

Once we master the Higgs we wont need to find exotic matter at all.   :grin:

Streams Of Water Once Flowed On Mars; NASA Says Photos Prove It (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/09/27/161896238/streams-of-water-once-flowed-on-mars-nasa-says-photos-prove-it)

Fascinating.

Am I the only one who reads that and thinks 'Finally, an explanation for gamma ray bursts that makes *sense*'?

--Dave

Yes.

No.
But the fact I said "no" should tell you something.

Robot Pants!!! (http://gizmodo.com/5951487/nasas-inventing-in-style-with-awesome-robot-pants)  :awesome_for_real:

Sorry, NASA. You lost to an earlier design from across the pond (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKZdsPvJq60#t=12m10s).

So the Stormtrooper construction begins.

Batman had those too...

I  :heart: The Wrong Trousers.

European astronomers found an Earth-sized planet orbiting Alpha Centauri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri_Bb) using the doppler variation of the star's red shift. The star is Alpha Centauri B, smaller of the binary pair, and mass is about all the planet shares with ours: Its orbital period is about 77 hours, and it's only an eighth the distance from its star as Mercury is from the Sun.

The surface temperature would be high enough to melt most stone, and tidal forces would keep its creamy center molten. So it's basically just a ball of magma and lava...

...ORBITING OUR (second) NEAREST NEIGHBOR IN THE SKY. WOO!

I've been trying in vain to dig up more info. on Nasa's new "Eagleworks" lab (the site is currently down even... spooky) mainly to gain clarity on their new Warp Field Interferometer.  In doing so I stumbled on some other stuff they're doing.


Yup.  So basically they'd couple your standard nuclear-fission generator to the anode/cathode of the q-thruster and suck propellent from quantum foam instead of a gas such as xenon (used currently).  That... is fuckin cool.  In the lab this apparently works, obviously at small scales.  Likely a bunch of hooey at a scale remotely useful, but still a fun thought experiment.  If it works we could shoot a 50mT payload into Jovian orbit in 1 month.   :drill:

This kind of thing is really awesome.  I do wish we had some way of getting actual photos of these things, though, I wanna see what they look like...

Well, you can, it just takes 4 years to get here.

Probably a bit longer than that unless he knows someone who can transform him into a being of pure light.

Actually, considering time dilation it may take even LESS than 4yrs. at near light-speed; given the traveller's reference frame.  The theoretical warp drive limit is 10c so that'd take 2yrs. earth time for an object 20ly away, but the time inside the ship may be like 5 mins.

In the traveller's reference frame it will take him 4 years to travel 4 light years at the speed of light. From the traveller's reference frame the rest of the universe "slows" down as he reaches the speed of light.

The "5 minutes of subjective time" is more in the area of going at 99.999% light speed. (Didn't check the actual numbers, so don't nail me down on the number of nines)

At 10c you'd run into far more fundamental problems with time, like travelling into the past and collapsing the universe.

No.  Assume the traveler is moving at .99c. From the perspective of a person on Earth, they see it taking the traveler a little bit longer than 4 years to get there.  Earth also sees the traveler's clocks running 1/7th as fast as it did on Earth.

The traveler sees her own clocks moving at the same speed they always did, but she sees the distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri as being 1/7th of what they originally saw.  From the traveler's perspective, it's a shorter trip and it only takes 1/7 * 4 years to get there.

My bad you're correct, but I'd add that the person travelling at 0.99c doesn't travel "4 light-years", they travel what we see as 4 light-years.

Funny, because my comment was based on what we're capable of now, not theoretically in umpteenth centuries after we've mastered FTL travel.

Well, no matter what, the nerd squad of F13 great grandchildren will be prepared. Love how an off hand comment meant to be a goof got analyzed to all heck. Love this board.

Not 'one for the history books' yet. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/no-chemical-building-blocks-of-life-in-first-analysis-of-martian-soil-by-nasa-rover-curiosity/2012/12/03/27a331c4-3d73-11e2-8a5c-473797be602c_story.html)

Curiosity found trace amounts of carbon and chlorine compounds, but not enough that NASA feels they can say for certain that they didn't arrive on board the rover or a meteor. Other than that statistically insignificant find, the Martian soil here seems composed of the same things as other samples elsewhere. Apparently this has led to NASA clamping down on allowing its scientists to say mysteriously optimistic things when they don't have data to back them up.

Yah, I dug deep enough into those experiments (which used the 1st of 59 sample containers) to find out the point of it was to sample the LEAST interesting and most prevalent soil on the planet.  It's really just a basic sampling of the very topmost soil, which is comprised largely of dust. (though they're getting rid of the 'dust data')    We can get excited when they start going back in time geologically and taking samples.  Till then, even if they get excited about topsoil stuff it's likely of little consequence given it's been exposed to current atmosphere.

Let them dig deeper 1st.

Magnetic fields and a solar flare produce plasma "rain" on sun. (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/coronal-rain.html)

Not science or anything. Just pretty.

Curiosity took a billion pixel panorama (http://mars.nasa.gov/multimedia/interactives/billionpixel/) before it set out on its year long, five mile trek to the base of Mount Sharp. Mars is brown.

... and has rox 'n stuff.
Really, more of a showoff of the camera tech. then anything else, which I gotta say is pretty striking once you zoom in on a target.

SPAAAAAAAACE

THREAAAAAAAAD

Jan, Jayce, run!

Man, you get like a hundred points for that one.

Deduct 40 nor not mentioning Blip.

We old people need to stick together.

I award 40 quatloos for not mentioning Blip.

I was debating mentioning blip, or going for the SGC2C reference with Zorak and Moltar. 

Two views of the Earth and the moon, one from Saturn, one from Mercury:

Circle your calendar for 2032.

http://io9.com/astronomers-discover-a-massive-asteroid-that-could-hit-1447068835

Great!  I won't have to worry about the 2038 Problem.

Comet Ison will reach perihelion on November 28th.  It will pass so close to the Sun it will actually pass through the corona.  If Ison survives, it could have a quite spectacular tail to see in December.

What's your image source?  They have an interesting amount of galaxies in that shot, but the star sparkles don't seem right.

I was just telling my wife about this comet; if all goes well we might have a 'comet of the century' event.  Pretty excited.

Not sure what the original source is.  I found that one here (http://planetsave.com/2013/11/20/comet-ison-shines-brilliantly-new-images-perihelion-november-28-2013/).  There are a lot of photos from amateur astronomers.  Universe Today (http://www.universetoday.com/105732/comet-ison-timelapse-and-recent-images/) has a couple of nice ones, too.



Edit: Hawkbit, the BBC credited the photo you asked about to a Damian Peach, taken with a 15cm telescope on November 15th.  He has a website. (http://www.damianpeach.com/)

Nothing yet, but this page should update during the event.  http://cometison.gsfc.nasa.gov/#

Sadly, it looks like Ison didn't survive the trip. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25143861)

SpaceX has a rocket on the pad in cap Canaveral, which they are about to launch in about 15 minutes.  You can watch the live stream here if you want some rocket entertainment for your thanksgiving.

http://www.spacex.com/webcast/

Space vampires appear to have repaired their spacecraft Comet Ison. http://io9.com/zombie-comet-ison-refuses-to-die-1473613064

Chinese moon rockets, motherfuckers!
 
(http://shanghaiist.com/attachments/benjamincost/change3-launch2.jpg)

http://shanghaiist.com/2013/12/02/and_were_off_lunar_lander_on_its_wa.php

There was some fallout:

(http://www.chinacartimes.com/wp-content/chang-e-three-parts2.jpg)
http://www.chinacartimes.com/2013/12/03/chinas-rocket-drops-roof/

But even so, some guys at NASA are literally turning green (and should perhaps consider funding the next launch by selling their salt mine):



edit: the Jade Rabbit has landed!

(http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/71743000/jpg/_71743769_71743191.jpg)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25356603

Well luckily for them it went better than the other rocket they shot off recently that destroyed a $250 million Brazilian satellite:  :why_so_serious:

http://www.space.com/23895-china-rocket-launch-failure-destroys-satellite.html

Neat the rover made it though, will be interesting to see how things progress.

Chinese moon rover deployed!

(http://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/images/3-moon/20131214_change3_rover_deploy_final.gif)

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2013/12141328-six-wheels-on-soil-for-yutu.html

Hope they take pictures of the US flag.  :why_so_serious:

Are they actually near enough to do that? That would be pretty neat.

Since the Tranquility Base flag is actually laying down, covered with moon dust, that picture might be a little more symbolic than you think.  But I don't think this rover is near there.

--Dave (it was too close to the lander, and got knocked over by the ascent stage according to Aldrin)

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4ZfKkbVjslo/UlWajyxdn_I/AAAAAAAARAo/6qyrLSXEXPI/s1600/french+on+the+moon.jpg)

Not technically accurate, but still got me to chuckle.

Rosetta woke up!
It was kind of interesting to watch it happen live (on tv) and see how the little spike in the signal was such a big thing  :awesome_for_real:

Big thing due to being all solar powered. Other satellites going beyond Mars had radioisotope thermoelectric generators. 10th year in space too, so it's holding up well.  :grin:

Some background: DLR | CHASING A COMET - The Rosetta Mission (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvibdkgvXXQ)

Scientists to unveil "Major Discovery" in the field of Astrophysics on monday, March 17th:

http://www.space.com/25066-major-astrophysics-discovery-announcement-monday.html?cmpid=556785

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/14/gravitational-waves-big-bang-universe-bicep

Ahh, thanks for that link: sure, not as glamourous as other theories that started circulating after the announcement, but very interesting nonetheless:


I guess it also implies and build a more solid ground for the Big Bang theory in general.

Great and exciting news, directly from the source (nice article) :


http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-103

http://www.space.com/25340-saturn-moon-enceladus-ocean-discovery.html

Yeah, this is more of a confirmation rather than a discovery, but a very interesting one nonetheless, just like Jupiter's Europa.

Was talking with a cosmologist I know and he says actually that the findings are driving everyone nuts. Yes, they confirm inflation, but in fact the gravitational waves are much, much stronger than any theory predicted they should be, and that's a huge problem that can possibly make sense only if there is a multiverse of a particular kind.

I actually thought that this was the big takeway and breaking news in all of this, that the findings push multiverses and string-theory/supersymmetry at the edge of "Fact."

Yeah. Though my colleague was saying that it is even causing some problems for supersymmetry and string theory, which are also being undercut in complicated ways by CERN work (nobody's seeing the predicted supersymmetric particles at the mass range they ought to be at). The strength of the gravitational waves requires some really particular kinds of multiverses--he was saying it's as if our observable universe is just a sort of bounded pocket universe where everything has cooled, but inflation from the Big Bang is still going on in adjacent "universes".

So what you are saying is that Sliders is actually possible.

Sounds like a vote for Culture multiverse.

I don't have the math to even vaguely understand, but I don't think it's the Sliders kind of multiverse that splits off from every action or difference. It's sort of like when you have a big plate full of soap bubbles. Maybe we're in one soap bubble and there are a bunch of others, and the whole thing is getting more and more air pumped into it, including our soap bubble.

Hope it doesn't pop.

Cosmologists -- well, technically physicists but physics doesn't get any funkier than early Big Bang -- really need something weird to study. They've been stuck. The Standard Model works too frickin' well, but they can't reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics. And they don't -- or didn't -- have anything far enough outside of expectations to really give them ideas.

So if it's multiverse crap that gets them a lever to pry open the next level of the universe's secrets, that's great. :)

Edited to add: I think they're talking brane theory or M-theory or something like that.

In order for those grav. waves to exist only within the spacetime of the big bang (when viewed from a higher reference frame), M-Theory (two branes banging together) would just about have to be a reality; so expect to see those guys showing off real soon.  
My thing though (especially if the energy levels dont fit) is that how do we know for sure that the grav. waves arent entirely non-local?  What if a large amount of them (if not all) actually come from another 'verse entirely?  

To me, that's always been the more compelling theory... Green's old 'Gravity Phone' analogy, wherein we could possibly divine data from grav. waves that are coming from another universe (or the multiverse) entirely, as it's posited that gravity would be the only recognizable force between universes/branes.

How does that mesh with the "oh crap we might just be a hologram" stuff that was found a few years ago.  With my limited knowledge it seems like they'd be reinforcing each other.  We're a reflection of another universe/ sprung off of the "primary" otherworld.

We're not the man, we're the mirror. (explains all these goatees...)

Well, what might be the news there:
NASA Hosts Media Teleconference to Announce Latest Kepler Discovery (http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/nasa-hosts-media-teleconference-to-announce-latest-kepler-discovery/#.U0_3H_l_u4I)

Meh, most of these teleconferences are letdowns.  NASA/JPL are very open with their data, so the majority of the time the "big news" is rather mundane.  Geeks love talking shop also; give 'em a pedestal and they'll use it, especially where grants are concerned.

Most this will be is a superearth sized planet located in the habitable zone.  It would prove the tech., for sure - but that's really already been done.  The main crux of all this is eventually linking SETI with projects at higher wavelengths that can narrow the field.  That's where the rubber meets the road.

Well they did add somebody from SETI to the lineup for the conference. No idea how usual that is though tbh.

I was right:
http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/nasas-kepler-discovers-first-earth-size-planet-in-the-habitable-zone-of-another-star/#.U1AYtvldU84

Science takes a step fwd.  At the least the data will let us hone in on areas of the sky to listen to in future experiments.

Great news (and this time is not even a so called "super-earth") ! Be sure to read the entire article 'cause it contains a lot more info:

I sat through the entire Ustream.  All 80 of us!   :awesome_for_real:
There were a whole 1000 people watching though.   :drill:

"SpaceX Unveils Dragon V2 Spaceship, a Manned Space Taxi for Astronauts (http://www.space.com/26063-spacex-unveils-dragon-v2-manned-spaceship.html)

Space egg!!!  :drill:

Very interesting article, video and photos; so, apparently, Boeing and Sierra are developing their own manned spaceships as well.

Interesting times :)

I hadn't realized they were doing a new ship instead of just man rating the Dragon v1. Ground landings with thrusters is really ambitious.

Sierra and Boeing are years behind on this. The Dream Chaser isn't even up for a test until 2016 and I have no idea what's going on with Boeing. If the Russians really do cut us off from lifts, I could see some $$ getting tossed at Space X to get the thing man rated sooner rather than later.

While it is cool and all that they have shown off their new design, it looks like a "hey look at the shiny" to me. The seats look to have zero vibration dampening built into them at all, not to mention they are just carbon fibre with a tiny leather pad that is just decorative. And touch screens are pretty useless if they can't be used with a pressure-suit glove since post Apollo 1 (and the previous Soviet training accident) no one does launch or re-entry sans pressure suit.

I like the idea of a lot of what SpaceX is doing but I have heard some pretty galling reports of terrible QA/QC on things like fuel tank welds in the past which tied with their whole "See we can do this better and cheaper and faster, FREE MARKET, YO!" attitude they scare me a little bit. I would love to be proven wrong and see them successful, but spaceflight is a dangerous business and the fact that they really have not had a big failure themselves to learn from makes me wait for the other shoe to drop more than if they had a catastrophic failure that caused them to revisit things.

It looked to me like the dampening is built into the struts--are those cushions or pistons or both. What's most astonishing to me is that something that small can carry enough fuel for a powered descent. It seems like that should require a huge amount of power.

I agree with all of this. You can tell they're lead by business rather than science. I applaud them trying to make it interesting for consumers though.

On touchscreens though, not sure it's that difficult even in a suit. Capacitive fingers and large enough points on the UI. Biggest issue is whether a touchscreen UI has a greater chance of input errors than discrete buttons. Consider how often I can screw something up on my iPad, I'm skeptical a shaky rocket under thrust is a valid use for UI even with the most well trained physically fit person :-)

Last May, Curiosity took nice pictures of two (plus one, a little farther away) iron meteorites. They're not small either, 2 meters!

http://www.space.com/26533-curiosity-mars-rover-meteorite-photos.html?cmpid=social_20140716_27948426
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/?ImageID=6433

Unprocessed, raw pic (much better ones in the NASA link):

What's the latest on the possible mission to mars, optimistically scheduled for the 2030 decade?

One angle is offered by another mission, the "ARM" (Asteroid Redirect Mission), where we'll pick an asteroid and make it orbit around the moon so that we can easily access and drill samples out of it:
http://www.nasa.gov/content/what-is-nasa-s-asteroid-redirect-mission/#.U8gpjfl_t8E

Here's how it can help this era's Holy Grail of space exploration:
http://www.nasa.gov/content/how-will-nasas-asteroid-redirect-mission-help-humans-reach-mars/#.U8gqTPl_t8E

It also touches other fundamental topics, like the needed advancements on spacesuits.

That seems extremely dangerous. I guess it could be a huge benefit, but man I'd hate to risk something going bizarrely wrong.

After a space-journey of merely 10 years Rosetta is of happenings!

Picture of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko taken this Tuesday at a distance of 1950 km:

(http://i.imgur.com/72LoCeq.png)

Roating image (earlier this month):

(http://i.imgur.com/W5nx9kt.gif)

Final rendezvous next Wedneday (6th August) and touchdown of the lander (Philae) in November.

And then the report that they knocked it off its orbit and it is now headed directly at the earth, and Bruce Willis isn't taking calls.

And Affleck is in Gotham, busy with shit.

 Impossible space drive might actually work  (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/31/nasa-validates-impossible-space-drive)

First ion-thrusters and now this. Man, the future is turning out to be boring. Bring on the space orcs! (And hot space elves!)

More information: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-08/07/10-qs-about-nasa-impossible-drive

If this is real (massive, planet-sized 'if'), this is quite possibly the biggest breakthrough in space travel since Robert Goddard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Goddard_%28scientist%29) went "Hmm, that H. G. Wells had some interesting ideas. I wonder...."

Not just space flight but physics and terrestrial production and consumer goods.


It's so awesome I expect it to be a hiccup and we discover, nope, sorry didn't work after all. It's mindbending if accurate.

If that less conservative estimate of the drive taking only 28 days to reach Mars turns out to be true... fuck me. That's just astounding. Even the 8 month trip is something special.

I'm fully expecting this to be a breakthrough that falls through on funding, because flinging shit on this mudball is preferrable to those in power.

Pitch the idea of robotic hover tanks to the pentagon.  Plenty of funding will then be forthcoming!

Superconducting magnets already do some weird levitation shit, so that's actually less of a violation of the laws of physics than reactionless thrusters.  You'd have to put in energy to raise or lower the hoverboard, and gravitational anomalies too small to mean much otherwise could cause some odd behavior.  Tides might get involved too, it might be a way to tap "tidal" energy without all that annoying saltwater.

--Dave

Constant thrust with no reaction mass is a game changer, even if it's only trivial amounts of thrust.  As little as 1/1000th of a G opens up the whole solar system for those pesky Belters.  Moving asteroids safely (barring nefarious intent) becomes a straightforward engineering problem.

Niven did an article about this back in the 70's, essentially even ion drives can't do it beyond very special cases, but a reactionless thruster can do it on solar power alone, given enough time.

--Dave

I think they were predicting a full sized one would be ion-drive power or better.

I can understand why NASA held off even testing it (and their tests were just 'we saw X'--- no analysis or hype. They're not getting burned until they're 100% sure, and seen other labs try it out).

There is a bit of incorrect information flowing around -- people are claiming the null case worked (basically the one with NO drive attached) which would indicate some sort of instrumentation problem or fraud, however that's not correct. Apparently the drive was not fully removed when that was seen. The true null test -- with the entire drive portion removed -- did exactly what you'd expect. nothing.

But yeah, fuel-less propulsion? The universe opens up. You're dropping somewhere between half and 99% of the mass you need to go anywhere. (Of course, getting off Earth is still a bitch).

I'm sure they can power it with their cold fusion power plants.

The more I read, the more this sounds like a classic combination of crackpot and wishful thinking. Invocations of overturning relativity (usually the #1 crackpot claim), quantum mumble-mumble with superconductors making it powerful enough for hoverboards (even though there's no indication that the actual unknown mechanism would be altered by superconductivity), asserting that the invention was "proven by NASA" and omitting that it was actually done by a tiny group who happens to work with NASA and which has a bit of a reputation for being overly excitable, some pretty major flaws in the experimental methodology (testing a device in a vacuum chamber without actually evacuating the air?), an invention that would essentially overthrow most of Newtonian (and modern) physics created by a salesman with no scientific background, and a device that just happens to be able to generate more thrust than is theoretically possible without getting "free energy".

This is one of those "inventions" that, if it's real, is pretty much the biggest breakthrough in physics in a hundred years. Like, "Remember your college physics textbook? Everything after chapter 3 is wrong".

Or, it's bogus.

If there was air in the vacuum temperature then there's an easy explanation: heat. Heat up the air inside the bulb by running electricity through it and, when it expands, it creates a little bit of thrust out the back of the bulb.

All this hype will almost certainly generate a test under proper, controlled conditions and it will show that the laws of physics are, in fact, just as accurate and complete as they were before the experiment.

Torinak:

Actually, they're not claiming anything new. It's based on the same principles as the Casimir effect (virtual pair particle production) which has been proven for, well, decades.

It's not rewriting physics at all, although I'm a bit dubious that it actually works. (Power-wise, solar cells or RTG's would be plenty). I mean, heck, NASA has a guy with a  model for a warp drive that doesn't violate modern physics (seriously. FTL travel that Einstein is fine with. Just need a ton of anti-matter for starters...Also, you can't steer. I'm not sure you can stop either. I don't even want to know what happens to what you hit...)


Anyways, the whole "probably something unaccounted for" is everyone's basic belief (sorta like the Voyager thing), but NASA finally got involved to generate some independent data, which is nice. It'll either put the nail in it or verify it, because once NASA's willing to test it (even if they refuse to do more than provide measurements) other people will test it.

And there's lots of people happy to figure out how it's wrong and I suspect they will. (Fuelless propulsion is a serious, serious claim. It's too important for people NOT to swing the big sticks at it. What's unique about this is it's gone this far and hasn't yet been shot down).

But again -- no new physics. Century old stuff, for the most part. No standard model violations, no Newton violations, no thermodynamics violations in the proposed mechanism of action. Energy converted to work, just like basic physics. Just via a rather curious mechanism involving some weird, but well understood, QM effects.

The Casimir effect doesn't invoke a non-existent "quantum vacuum virtual plasma" (oddly enough, the only people who seem to know about the aether quantum vacuum virtual plasma are the same ones doing this test). The device being tested is a microwave resonating chamber, with no understood mechanism that could trigger the Casimir effect. And you can't use virtual particles to generate thrust without violating conservation of momentum (and that'd overturn at least a century of physics).

People who are experts in the fields related to the actual experiment as well as the purported explanations all agree that the paper is bad (at best). Beyond the technobabble, there are apparently major holes in the experimental methodology, a conspicuous absence of descriptions of what else might be going on and how they compensated for it, and a bunch of speculation about how this experiment's results are going to scale up and change everything. (the paper is behind a paywall, so I rely on those in the field with both access and credentials to evaluate it) The experimenters apparently even used an instrument that's notorious for producing results that only they could reproduce, and there's no discussion of how past evaluations of the alleged engine(s) at Boeing yielded no thrust.

The "NASA scientists" are a tiny group (Eagleworks Laboratories) who work on hypothetical propulsion systems, like anti-gravity and Star Trek-style warp drives. The main researcher even did a press conference about NASA "starting development" of said warp drive before they even started designing the testing apparatus (and later discovered that it doesn't work). That doesn't fill me with confidence. That's not to say that they can't produce solid science, but they need to really do so and not go off before all of their ducks are in a row.

Yes, I understand how a reactionless thruster would completely revolutionize space travel. I'd love for it to be true--it'd be great to be able to send humans to Mars in a month or two, or to cheaply and easily send probes (or even humans) all over the solar system, and to reach nearby stars within a human lifetime. But that doesn't mean it is true.

Um, no. I even know what "quantum vacuum virtual plasma" is. It's right in the name. Quantum vacuum -- same thing as virtual particles. Virtual plasma? That's, um, you know -- plasma. Like you can make with ordinary particles. Which you shoot out the back end, like some actual engines do.

The only difference between this and a regular, plasma driven reaction drive is using virtual particles instead of ordinary ones. The whole complicated part is doing that before the particles decay. Or do whatever the hell they do in the very short time they're around. (Seriously, those things are nuts. They can even violate some basic laws of physics in their brief lifespans. Crazy, crazy stuff. It's real though -- Casmir effect is just one example of virtual particles interacting on the non-quantum scale)

THis isn't even the first time this idea has cropped up. A casual check of wikipedia shows several papers going back a decade toying with the idea. All mental modelling and abstract physics -- nobody's tried to build one, because it IS far fetched.

But these guys didn't just invent the concept. It's been around, toyed with my actual physicists and not considered fringe. Just unlikely as hell and difficult to impossible to engineer. The basic concept is just as sound as the Alcubierre drive, in terms of physics. It's not breaking any rules -- none at all. It's not even bending them.

Maybe you can't get quantum vacuum to react this way at all. But nobody's come up with a reason why, and some modelling's been done by people OTHER than the guys pushing it who say "Eh, yeah, could work. Maybe."

So you're saying that the resonating microwaves form standing waves that move the virtual particles a bit before they re-annihilate, thus creating momentum/force?  Because this is an enclosed chamber ("isolated system"), and all reaction drives shoot particles out the business end, but no EM radiation or mass comes out of this device.

Before this thread goes any further, I'm going to need to see some proof of physics degrees. :grin:

Fuck if I know. They -- virtual particles -- don't last that long. I'm not sure you'd even NEED a business end, so to speak. I mean, imagine an ion drive where the ions disappeared a few shakes after they imparted momentum? You wouldn't need an exhaust, just a sufficiently long tube.

*shrug*. As best I understand it (which comes from a 40 minute discussion during a department meeting, as two engineers derailed the meeting to talk about it. Our department's kinda weird. Mostly engineers. Most of them heavily involved in the space program. This was more interesting than the 20 minutes of gossip about SpaceX's welding techniques) it's an ion drive. Pretty much exactly. They just use virtual particles instead of real ones.

It's thermodynamically possible -- the energy required is greater than the work done. From the slap fight, the gist was whether it was technically feasible.

I honestly got the impression they both thought it was,, but they were very skeptical that it could be done this easily. VERY skeptical.

It's kinda like someone popping up with a backyard sized particle accelerator that's powerful enough to find the Higgs. You KNOW collides exist, you KNOW they can get powerful enough to do that, but you find it really damn unlikely they can somehow make one that fits that criteria in that small a space.

I'm glad you know more about quantum physics than some of the top experts in the field. Perhaps you can explain why some of the other top experts in the field (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/papers.html) are saying that the paper and the concepts behind it are pretty much full of crap (https://plus.google.com/117663015413546257905/posts/WfFtJ8bYVya)?

Yes, you can string together a bunch of words like "quantum vacuum" and "virtual" and "plasma" but that doesn't mean the result is a real thing--any more than me saying I have a new FPS with "predictive negative ping code". WTF is a "virtual plasma" supposed to be? "Like a plasma but virtual?" doesn't even start to make sense...especially since virtual particles are only particle-antiparticle pairs, not atoms that can become ionized into a plasma. I suppose one could assert that a bunch of virtual particles have a party and spontaneously assemble into full-blown atoms that are then ionized into a plasma so that this microwave resonance chamber can act on them to produce thrust, but that's about at par with invoking invisible flying space elves pushing the engine instead--there are many ways one could (and should have) observe this kind of thing happening, and it doesn't show up. Adding insult to injury, the device is completely unlike an actual plasma engine because it has no exhaust! (the devices are all sealed)

Pretty much all of these theories I've heard of (and I used to be into them, before I decided not to pursue a degree in physics) end up with "...and that's how you get infinite energy" or "...and that's why relativity is wrong" once taken a bit farther than the initial proposal. They can be modeled to one's heart's content, but they run into oopsies sooner or later--needing an infinite mass, or a ring of matter spinning at near light speed with a density higher than is possible, or "negative energy", or some inconvenient law of physics needs to be "relaxed" or "sidestepped" (usually relativity, sometimes conservation of momentum). Any real progress into any of these theories would be a license to print Nobel prizes.

I'd love to be wrong. Tell you what: I'll fly you to the Nobel prize acceptance ceremony for whichever of these scientists gets it for their discovery which upends a century of physics. Then you can say "I told you so". Meanwhile, I'll be booking a flight to Mars. :) If this turns out to be nothing, next time something claims to change everything perhaps you can demand a higher burden of proof?

My colleagues all say the paper is basically bad and that the press basically got it wrong to boot.

It definitely looks like total bullshit to me, but I'm hardly an expert.

What I've learned from this thread is that the light bulbs in my microwave oven might, just might help me travel to Mars faster.

None of this matters.  We don't have the will right now to research and develop such things even if they were possible.  It could make long distance trips more economically feasible, but nobody is going to spend the eleventy gajillion dollars it would take to find out.

One of the things I've seen in some of the critiques of the paper is that the effect was also measured even when the device wasn't supposed to be emitting. As per here: http://space.io9.com/a-new-thruster-pushes-against-virtual-particles-or-1615361369

It's also not a finished paper reporting extensively tested results--it's a work-in-progress report that just says, "I dunno, can anyone else see this going on?"

Aliens.

Chris Roberts should do a kickstarter for this.

And as noted, a casual glance at Wikipedia shows several papers going back a decade toying with the concept showing no roadblocks to the concept beyond the technical. (And yes, technical roadblocks can range from 'trivial' to 'impossible' to solve.)

And again, as I said about a dozen time, I suspect it doesn't actually work. But you're clearly keen to argue about it, despite the fact that I fucking agree with you that it's pretty likely to be bullshit.

Even if it doesn't work as described, something's happening - experimental error or not, it still needs to be investigated to determine the readings one way or another. Simply folding your arms and going "We don't understand this therefore it's not real" is not science.

And seriously, here's the steps:

1) Virtual particles exist. If briefly. (If you dispute this, there's a great deal of physics you dispute)
2) Ion drives work by taking regular particles, turning them to plasma, then expelling them out the back end.
3) If you can do that with regular particles, can you do it with virtual particles?

Virtual particles don't exist long. They come in pairs and mutually annihilate very quickly, keeping energy conserved. (And, amusingly, the mutual destruction also create a particle that possibly travels backwards in time and creates them in the first place. Thus says Fenymen, at least).

There's certainly no roadblock to turning virtual particles into plasma. They'll still annihilate. They're very real, for their brief existence -- so they can provide thrust the same way regular particles can. There's a certain background level of creation/destruction of the darn things that's independent of everything, so you've got an upward cap on how many particles are around at a given time.

The trick -- the insane, difficult to imagine working bit -- is turning them to plasma and using them to produce thrust before they mutually destruct. (There's no 3rd law violations or conservation of momentum violations -- the energy required to generate thrust is identical to regular particles, and same for momentum -- if it works for regular particles, it'll work for virtual particles).

Offhand, I'm like 99% sure these guys did NOT manage to do anything useful with virtual particles. All the papers I saw talked entirely about the physics behind it, handwaving away "how you harness the things" and talking entirely about whether or not virtual particles would work like regular particles for this.

So again -- I doubt these guys succeeded. I find it difficult to imagine anyone succeeding, anytime. Now or in the future. But it's physically possible because virtual particles are, for their brief existence, quite real. And you can certainly use particles to generate thrust. NASA's got a damn probe zooming around based on that right now.

Edited to add: Actually probably a lot less efficient than an ion drive, assuming it works. MORE energy for LESS thrust. 

Any time anyone says something won't get funding, I just assume that means "someone prove it's real, and then call Elon Musk."

Well if I've learned anything its that when Morat is really sure about specific things like physics or law or running a business he's usually wrong.

Comparison pics of Curiosity after two years on Mars:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/20/6046609/its-hard-out-there-for-an-interplanetary-robot

Damn. I wonder how they keep the solar panels clear?

They don't, periodic windstorms apparently do that for them.

http://www.space.com/25577-mars-rover-opportunity-solar-panels-clean.html

Couldn't resist posting the following pic I found in the comments section of the Verge article  :grin:  :

(https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3920/14982444302_9a510f9312.jpg)

So what are those wheels made of? I can't imagine they'd be made from fragile materials, though it would have to be lighter in weight. But still, either the wheels were not made from the most durable substances we have, or (more likely) Mars has some really hardcore fuckoff rocks.

Aluminum.

That seems painfully inadequate given this is NASA. I get the budgets are woeful these days, but I'd hope they'd come up with something more durable than that for this type of project. I mean they would have to have data from the other rovers outlining the type of terrain.

How do you know Aluminum wasn't the best option?

Aluminum is light, strong, corrosion resistant, and easy to shape.  It was a very good choice.

Keep in mind the rovers weren't expected to last more than a few months.  The wheels still work, too, they just have some damage.  It's only a problem if the damage inhibits movement.

I only commented out of curiosity in reaction to seeing that much damage on one of the key parts in terms of mobility. I have no idea about this stuff... but it doesn't seem like it is strong enough for the mission if they look that shredded - maybe they did not expect the beating the wheels would take and took a chance on a thinner wheel construction. But hey, that is data to be used for future stuff.

http://earthsky.org/space/curiosity-rover-is-having-wheel-problems

And I thought the mission for Curiosity was 2 years?

Aluminum also has no fatigue limit, so failure was a matter of when and not if. 

The light weight is a really important factor. They could have gone with titanium if they wanted something stronger, but titanium is like 60% or so heavier than aluminum, which would have all kinds of effects on the landing impact, energy needed to get it there, etc.

Curiosity doesn't have solar panels, it has a radio-isotope battery like the Voyager probes.

Whoops, got my rovers mixed up.

Cool. Surprised there wasn't bitching from environmentalists when that went up. I vaguely recall some about Cassini, but Cassini required an awful lot of...I dunno, plutonium or uranium. Something hot.

As for aluminium: The guys at my work get very, very, very excited about any new aluminum alloy. Rockets, rotors, turbines, airframes -- lots and lots of aluminum, and some of the alloys are supposedly very impressive. (Fuck if I follow it. It's all metal fatigue and UTS and yield stress and shit). Of course the new hotness is composites -- some sort of nifty new layering process or something. It's coming up as something the fracture guys are looking into testing and creating models of.

We've got a big ole' honking database of every material NASA has ever beaten into the ground to see how it bends, breaks, cracks, and fractures -- and there's lots and lots and LOTS of aluminum. Lots of steel too.

When every gram matters for launch, Aluminum alloys are very difficult to beat.

(http://gajitz.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/scotty.jpg)

Yeah, I pretty much feel that way when they get to talking about it.

Doesn't help that one of the new company's I've had to interact with is Sierra Nevada -- I keep wondering why beer maker's want our software. (Hint: Not the same company). I bet the beer company would also get excited about new aluminum's.

This was the first thing I thought of when I realized that the "Gorilla Glass", synthetic sapphire screens they put on high end smart phones are actual-for-real "Transparent Aluminum" (crystallized aluminum oxide).

--Dave

Man, that's like saying glass is "transparent sand".

almost. More like saying glass is transparent silicon.   :why_so_serious:

Littlefinger explains Rosetta (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H08tGjXNHO4)


It's a bit weird.  :psyduck:

"Private Orbital Sciences Rocket Explodes During Launch, NASA Cargo Lost" (unmanned; video included):

http://www.space.com/27576-private-orbital-sciences-rocket-explosion.html


Damn.

Yesh, they were already well behind Spacex in the commercial race.  This could seriously fuck them, and the future of the Virginia launch pad (which has had a lot of people lobbying for it).  At least nobody was hurt.

I know launching shit into space is hard, but we've been doing this for more than fifty years, and still shit explodes spectacularly on the launchpad.  We're never going to make it to Zagnar 7 at this rate.

Controlled explosions go awry when every little variable isn't exact. Whoda thunk.

So long as our propulsion out of the gravity well is a controlled explosion, this shit is going to happen. When you add a for-profit motive it's going to happen more frequently due to not taking things to the nth degree of safety. 

Morat has previously mentioned some of the NASA comments along the line of 'uh, we'd never be allowed to do that' stuff SpaceX did and they're better funded than OS, IIRC.

Orbital Science has a really sort of sketchy rocket plan as well (Elon Musk criticized it (http://abcnews.go.com/Business/elon-musk-called-orbital-sciences-rocket-design-joke/story?id=26540137), but people wrote that off as him just being a dick to a rival).  To save money, they bought a bunch of old soviet rocket engines from Russia that they built in the 60's, had them modified, and placed into their own rocket design.  Its really seems kind of haphazard, and they've had a lot of them fail in testing.

Then there is funding.  SpaceX, which designs and builds its rockets from the ground up, has been redeveloping and advancing its own tech year after year, and has a recoverable payload capsule that can return cargo to earth, took 1.6 Billion for 12 launches.  OS, which has a rocket that is totally destroyed after every launch, including the payload capsule upon leaving the ISS, got 1.9 Billion for 8 missions.  Or in short, the company that is buying surplus Soviet era equipment to save money and hasn't developed any recoverable technology, is charging about $237 Million per launch.  While SpaceX, which is the opposite of all that, is charging almost half rate at $133 Million per launch.  Lots of issues with OS, but I can understand NASA's thinking since they were the next closest competitor after SpaceX and wanted a backup company.  

I do hope they're able to recover (And learn) from this for the sake of space flight.  If anything they can hopefully develop their own homegrown rocket designs eventually, and more options are better.

POS rocket?

Suprise! Rocket science (engineering) is tricky business.

Coincidentally this article was posted 3 days ago by the Mission Operations Director at the time, Wayne Hale, about a near disaster on launch with the space shuttle mission STS-93 on July 23 1999 which flew the Chandra X-ray observatory into orbit. Long but fascinating read.

http://waynehale.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/sts-93-we-dont-need-any-more-of-those/

Virgin's SpaceShipTwo crashed, at least one of the pilots is dead.

"Ambition" -- beautiful short shot in Iceland starring Aidan Gillen (GoT) and Aisling Franciosi by the European Space Agency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H08tGjXNHO4

I posted that 8 posts ago, but no one noticed.  :grin:

That sucks.  Reading that they switched the fuel mixture between the last flight and this one.  Likely culprit.

Virgin Galactic spaceship crashes on test flight (http://www.euronews.com/2014/10/31/virgin-galactic-spaceship-crashes-on-test-flight/)


Quite some mishaps lately: Cygnus exploding on Tuesday and in August we had an ESA Soyuz rocket malfunctioning and delivering it's Galileo satellites in the wrong orbits.

e: mishap isn't the proper word on one dead and one wounded. Wasn't meant that way.

Eyewitness account:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141030-first-person-rocket-explosion-antares/

On a happier note, the Chinese Chang'e 5-T1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang'e_5#Chang.27e_5-T1) snapped this before it headed back to Earth:

Rosette and Philae (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvkPFXdpOQQ) - the 'awwwww soooo cute!' version  :heart:

I didn't even know this was a thing. Fuck our news media, that's goddamn awesome and will be a huge achievement if they pull it off.

Same, sort of. I planned to regularly follow the Rosetta blog after the waking-up phase, then promptly forgot about it...

Two things stand out for me so far: First, the the mission duration. To launch something and go "Now we fly for 10 years and then land!" is...well, impressive.

And Churyumov-Gerasimenko itself. To see dunes on a comet is eerie. Ignore the space background and it could possibly be an areal image from earth...

(http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/files/2014/10/ESA_Rosetta_NAVCAM_141018_D.jpg)

Just trying to remember where I was living 10 years ago and where I have lived since... sheesh

Those rocks are the size of houses and SUVs. So that set of dunes would make a substantial beach. More amazing to me, on a body that small (only a few kilometers across or around, even on the longest axis and the broadest diameter) gravity is more a concept than an experience. The correction burns that Rosetta has made are at angles practically to the perpendicular. Its orbital path looks more like a spirograph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph) than a scribble.

Plus, though it's reflective enough to look good in pictures, the surface is black as copier toner. Not at all the comet the mission was expecting, ten years ago.

I cannot wait to see the body evolve as Rosetta follows it around the sun and it gains first an atmosphere and then a tail. This is going to be amazing.

Apparently, the computer modeling that was done to simulate a black hole's event horizon and the accretion disk around it has led to some actual astrophysical breakthroughs about what black holes look like and how they behave.

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/

That makes sense to me; the distortion with a neutron star is such that you can see the surface details of both geographic poles at the same time, so it makes sense that with a black hole you can see past both poles and all the way to the far side, so yeah the accretion disk would look like that (though I'd imagine a bit narrower at the top and bottom due to perspective).

It'll depend on the angle.  It'll still warp everything, but the disk in front will be anything from edge on to perpendicular, so the warped light will be altered to.  They alluded to that briefly in talking about limiting shots to interesting angles.

PSA post for anyone interested (or bored at work) in the landing. The live-stream for the landing tomorrow (12. Nov) is already up, at the moment it's very quiet control center there though...


Event times tomorrow:

UTC 09:03 / CET 10:03 / EST 04:03 - Philae separation

UTC 16:02 / CET 17:02 / EST 11:02 - Expected landing

• http://new.livestream.com/ESA/cometlanding livestream link
• Full timeline (http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/07/rosetta-and-philae-landing-timeline/) - A timeline of activities related to separation, descent and landing
• Video (3m04s) (http://youtu.be/mggUVLFPkQg) explaining the landing procedure and the first experiments

+++ Philea ejected at UTC 08:35 +++


Some problems: The cold gas thruster on top of Philea that's supposed to prevent the lander from bouncing of is not working, so it depends on the harpoons and the three ice screws to hold it in place...

Damnit  :ye_gods:

Anyway, here's the full article:

http://sci.esa.int/rosetta/54930-rosetta-and-philae-go-for-separation/

I'm totally going to be watching the livestream out of the corner of my eye all day.

Edit: It must be kind of odd to be working there right now, when it's really quiet, not much going on... and yet 150,000 people are watching you live.  :uhrr:

Soon! ™


Last image of Philae:

(http://i.imgur.com/thLywZC.jpg)

-- The boom pointing downwards belongs to ROMAP the magnetormeter / plasma monitor.

-- The two little antennas are the dipols of CONSERT (COmet Nucleus Sounding Experiment by Radiowave Transmission). Rosetta has a similar instrument which will send a signal when on the other side of the comet, which is picked up by Philiea. Changes in wave propagation then give an insight into the comets interior makeup.

Space bus! (or mailbox)

Landed!



The control center went from cheering ""Touchdown. There is telemetry coming." to very tense "This one is not going down. The elevation is not going down." to to very relieved "It's going down." within the span of 3 minutes.

Public relations is rather good this time too. Rosetta and Philea have their own twitter :roll:. Pretty sure that anthropomorphizing spacecrafts is a trick ESA learned from her big sister across the pond.  ;D



Edit 17:56: Oh, FFS. Very soft touchdown, ice drills only sunk in around 4 cm. Harpoons did NOT fire. Lander might be moving slightly.

Please.....  :oh_i_see:

Briefing on DLR right now, transcribing...

Good news:

--- Touchdown, all the signals that trigger on touchdown worked.

--- Still communication, which means the lander did not tilt or topple.


Bad news:

--- ADS thruster did not fire, that is the issue was already known beforehand.

--- The anchors did not fire, this confusion was due to the rewind motors for the anchors going into action, but the harpoon wasn't actually fired.

--- Team doesn't know if it rebounded or not / if it's on the surface. Thus they don't dare issuing a re-firing signal for the harpoons, because they don't know in what position the lander is.


Current Situation:

--- The arm that damped the landing force only moved very little, which indicates a very soft surface. Which might mean if it rebound the rebound was very soft as well and in this case might settle down again.

--- On board computer is waiting for new commands.

--- There will be more telemetry in 30 minutes, but contact lost in 120 minutes, so the final verdict could be known only tomorrow.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B2QioF0IEAAkdkZ.jpg)

This image, taken over somebody's shoulder, is kicking around on Twitter (https://twitter.com/serpientes72/status/532588729945587713/photo/1).

EDIT: ...but this one, taken by Philae from 3 kilometers away, is definitely legit. They are receiving pictures:
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B2QgRveIAAAjCjM.png)

Higher-res version now available:

(http://i.imgur.com/z5uUrO3.png)

So, the take-away is that there will be no further information until tomorrow.


Stephan Ulamec (Head Philea Lander, German Aerospace Center) gave following interpretation of the telemetry data at the last press conference:


1) Initial touchdown confirmed.

2) Anchoring harpoons did not fire – Lander not anchored to the surface.

3) Fluctuations in the radio link observed. Those fluctuations showed some degree of regularity.

4) Additionally fluctuations in the solar power generator have been measured.

5) Take together this could indicate that the lander touched off again and started to rotate.

7) Some science data received also pointed towards this interpretation.

8) After two hours the fluctuation of the solar generator stopped. This indicates that the lander touched down again. Quote: “We landed twice!”

Here's the path that Rosetta took over the last 10 years:
(http://i.imgur.com/48iCmE1.gif)

If you've ever played Kerbal Space Program then you'll probably be really impressed by that  :awesome_for_real:

Yep. I looked it up to get some comparison, and Rosetta's journey has been the distance of traveling to the Sun and then back. Times 22x!  :ye_gods:

That animated GIF of the path is just incredible. It kind of hits home that space travel isn't about a point A to point B journey. Using the gravitational pull of different celestial bodies to slingshot through differing arcs is amazing. I'm assuming they did that to save time and fuel.

That last slingshot is freakin' awesome.

It amazes me that from what appears to be that 'little' distance out there in deep space where it shut off and turned back on was ~3 years long.

Philae bounced twice (landed three times) and is now mostly in the shadows preventing proper charging of its batteries.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/13/philae-lander-tight-spot-comet-tough-decisions-esa-rosetta

That GIF has accurate orbits for the planets (esp. visible with Mercury) rather than just circles, and accurate time; Earth going around the Sun 3 times = 3 years, by definition.

Space X to land their Falcon booster on a drone ship at sea.  (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-just-unveiled-game-160931899.html)

I think they are just going for a better degree of difficulty score now.

There is a logic to it, this is a drone booster stage, there's no point in risking lives on the recovery vessel. The wave compensation and station-keeping would all be automated anyway, having a crew on board would be redundant.

--Dave

It is very interesting, and will be an amazing achievement if they manage to land it successfully.  If they can consistently start to land and reuse rocket booster stages, will be a pretty big game changer as far as cost of space flight goes.  Even if it fails, it's really neat to see companies trying something new.

It's kind of a 'DUH' type of engineering concept.  Really, all the main stage is doing is saving just enough fuel to slow decent.  The rocket can be gyroscopically and/or aerodynamically stabilized on the way down (after transiting to subsonic); the only thing left to do being to fire the main engines again with enough time to decelerate.  There's 80% less mass at that point, so the logic is obvious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIlu7szab5I

Mars was nuked by aliens. Paper incoming.  :awesome_for_real:

http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/573878/20141125/nuclear-weapons-attack-explosions-aliens-life-mars.htm#.VHWTYvM8KUl

So he is not crazy he is doing a sales pitch. :roll: :roll:

Were the nukers led by Xenu?

Livestream for the first Orion unmanned flight test (go in about 20 minutes):

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html#.VIGaIzGG98E

edit 1: ALL SYSTEMS GO  :drill:

edit 2: SUCCESS!!  :heart: :awesome_for_real: :drill:

Looking at the Earth Curvature and atmosphere layer taking shape is always mesmerizing  :heart:

The Russian Angara-5 made it's maiden launch just before Christmas (23rd.)


(http://i.imgur.com/ZDaLvGv.jpg)

(http://i.imgur.com/irHqbbb.jpg)

I find the pictures awesome from a pure aesthetic perspective. The snow snow creates such a cold (duh!) and alien atmosphere. Almost if from another planet. (If that makes sense?  :headscratch:)

Edit: As for the rocket itself: It supposed to be a long-term replacement for the Proton and give to Russia greater independence from the Baikonur launching site. Main cargo will be heavy military satellites, but the official plan is to stabilize the cost by the 10th start so that a commercial offering is viable as well. Payload for GTO is 5.4 t.

 Elon Musk is tweeting  (https://twitter.com/elonmusk) out photos of the Falcon X missing the landing from the other day (while doing a twitter session with John Carmack of all people)

"Next rocket landing on drone ship in 2 to 3 weeks w way more hydraulic fluid. At least it shd explode for a diff reason."   :awesome_for_real:

Thanks, I meant to post about this earlier, but Polish ear worms got in the way.  It was a damn impressive first attempt, and looks like they almost got if not for the hydraulic fluid issue.  The next launch is going to be interesting.
Carmack is a big rocket guy (as I'm sure you know).  They had a twitter discussion a few weeks before this launch where each was debating their own idea on the best way to get the rocket back down.  The results from this seem to have mostly vindicated Elon (as Carmack admits in the tweets).  Lots of awesome rocket stuff going on lately, I love it.  Really looking forward to seeing how the first launch of the Falcon Heavy goes.

Also I learn a new (to me, I'm sure its ancient) engineering term.  RUD.   :awesome_for_real:

lol RUD. I think I may have to start using that in everyday life.

Must admit I'm fucking pumped to see how the second launch and landing goes!

Musk is a funny guy. I'm glad to see he's using his fortunes for something worthwhile even if he ultimately hopes it makes boat loads of money in the end.

(https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7329/15860939564_6a561df6d5_s.jpg) (https://flic.kr/p/qazsKf)
(link to high resolution)

Rosetta's pictures continue to be stunning and only promise to improve as the comet gets closer to the sun.

Also we're getting great photos of Ceres, with much closer ones available starting next month, and the Pluto flyby this June.

It's a good year for tiny, icy planetoids.

Timelapsed video of the last ATV-5 'Georges Lemaitre' undocking for destructive re-entry. In colour and with a view of nighttime Earth in the background. Looks like straight out of a SF film...


Youtube 1m 22s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztXdurBfZWo)

Edit: Sort of a waste of financial resources to develop, test and introduce something and then stop after building 5. And none of the potential enhancements were taken up: More cargo capacity, return cargo to earth, a manned version, etc ...

But 'no ambition' seems to be a general malaise in european space politics.  :oh_i_see:

In random news, since it still comes up as an item in my department meetings...

You remember that quantum rocket concept? The reactionless (well, sorta) drive?

NASA is still testing that thing. They're doing vacuum testing and have been fighting their own equipment for months now. The critical test bits keep breaking down in vacuum before they can get enough data.

The measuring rig is complicated, but the theory behind it is pretty simple: Hang the suspicious space drive off a long rope, turn it on, see if the rope moves. :) IIRC, they measured thrust in air -- which could be random airflow (proposed thrust is very, very low) so they moved to vacuum. I'm honestly surprised they've still not finished the test cycle.

But every department meeting, it's still on the list as 'in work'. (My department isn't doing it. But we see what the rest of the engineering groups are doing). In any case, NASA is getting paid to do the testing, so someone else is paying for NASA to work out how to vacuum harden some new fiddly bit.

I'm sure even the data of how to vacuum harden something is a fucking goldmine to someone.

NASA is fairly proficient at it. So is anyone who makes satellites. Something about the particular instrument they need to use, however, is just causing problems. I suppose they've never needed it to work in vacuum (probably never needed one this precise of whatever it is), so no one's engineered it for it. So they've been, basically, doing the usual "Fuck, slap some duct tape on it" method of getting it to work.

You  know, figure out what broke, slap a quick fix on it, start it up again, swear when something new breaks, fix that.....

Probably because building a special, vacuum hardened unit is way more than their test budget.

We have a temp/vacuum test-chamber at school (one of the few that do), for testing aerospace parts.   It's not that uncommon unless you want one the size that NASA sometimes uses.  Ours is small closet sized.  The Cubesat program uses it mostly these days; our project is collecting data on random bitflips due to cosmic rays.  Fuck me though, I have no time to work on it.

Recall, White is still working on his mini warp-field generator over at JPL too.  And the Diaz plasma drive is in full swing.  Exciting times; plenty of research monies out there w/o the shuttle program bogging us down.

Those bright spots on Ceres are getting more and more interesting the closer the probe gets. So far nobody seems terribly confident about what they are.

Yep, can't wait for the closest approach :)

And also, while poor Pluto has been demoted to dwarf planet, other probes already went far beyond it (Voyager, Pioneer), I don't think we're really grasping how significant New Horizons' mission is going to be; finally, Pluto and Charon will be pictured, no more a white dot, since its discovery in 1930 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#mediaviewer/File:Pluto_discovery_plates.png). Plus, I put  my name in the CD that was boarded on the damn probe back when it was launched in 2006  :grin:

Please be aliens... please be aliens.   :why_so_serious:

Shoggoths

http://www.space.com/29111-spacex-reusable-rocket-landing-test-video.html

Damn close. I am very curious as to the re-usability of a rocket given the stresses on all the joints and welds from liftoff to descent. In essence, once these rockets start hitting the return craft regularly, how usable will they be and how long before one of the reused rockets explodes because of a faulty weld that went undetected.

That said, this is pretty awesome regardless.

Whats the bet that everyone in the Space X control room was leaning hard to one side as it came down.

Better quality version of the second failed landing attempt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhMSzC1crr0

So close.

And you can see the RCS thrusters at the top of the first stage trying (and failing) to correct for the tilt to the left, just before it tops over.

At a guess, I bet you could xray the entire recovered first stage (and do whatever other inspection you need) and check the integrity of it for a fraction of the cost of building a new one.  And you could probably recover the engine and other subsystems even if not the entire stage.  You only need to get one or two re-uses out of the thing to get some pretty hefty cost savings.

The amount of fuel left in the rocket is pretty amazing.

They had a stuck valve that gave them less control over main thrust (either actuation or throttle), that's why the tilted landing and 'suicide burn' approach.  I think SpaceX is done with the whole barge thing.  Trying to land on a postage stamp in a rocky sea is not good testing imo.  They've proven they can get close, so it's time to give themselves some more cushion and come down on land.

Realize, a large part of the savings is having the landing site right near assembly in Texas no?  They may prove the concept at Canaveral, but the ultimate goal is to takeoff and land where they build the things.

Bet they have nets that come up and trap it in on the next version :P

Ermmm....Texas is rather near an ocean, too. Pretty sure the water landing is the long-term plan, getting liability insurance for landing rockets in Texas...would be interesting. If all they wanted to do was 'prove the concept', they could have had it 'land' a hundred feet in the air over a buoy in the open ocean.

--Dave

Landing on land is simpler in many ways compared to landing on a tiny moving target on the ocean.  My understanding is the barge would still be useful for flight scenarios where there is insufficient fuel to return to a land based site and it is useful for proving the capability in a more demanding environment first, but long-term landing on land and landing as close as possible to the plant is the goal due to the huge reduction in transport complexity, time, and cost.

It's *so* much simpler, why would you ever do it 'hard mode', if your plan was to switch to easy mode later? Not that I know what the long term plan is for certain, it just never occurred to me they would do the recovery ship at all if they didn't plan on using it after the test phase. Do you have a source for that, or are we both just speculating?

--Dave

Even if they get this right, space flight is a dangerous business. Landing in the ocean gives a margin of safety if something goes wrong as there is less chance of coming down on populated areas. They are also a private company so they are going to be much more concerned about liability than the government would be.

I would think not only liability but also there's possible recovery of a failed landing on water, where impact on land.. Nope nothing but shrapnel.

I've lived in Texas (briefly).  There's considerable portions that can only be improved by exploding rockets above it  :grin:

Joking aside, there's plenty of areas where you're only in danger of toasting the occasional armadillo, snake, or tarantula without ever coming near the humanoid population.

True enough, but what if those things are on the protected species list?  :why_so_serious:

I'd think there would be plenty of places in the southwestern US you could land this rocket without putting humans at risk, but having the rocket fly over places to get to that spot does pose a risk.

The long-term benefit of the barge is as Quinton said: it requires less fuel to reach a ship that is 'downstream' of the flightpath than performing a full return to the landing site. The reason they are (have to) using it exclusively now is safety. They need to demonstrate the ability to hit a target reliably before being allowed to do the same on land.

The real test IMHO will be the financial viability. The idea of reuse-ability isn't new (it was already considered for the Saturn V first stage). But executing it in a way that is safe and also less effort than just building a new stage is less easy. Two recent examples: A) The Russian Baikal is (or was) a proposed re-usable adoption of the new Angara rocket. But studies showed it would have required 40+ launches (per rocket) to be more economical than the single-use version. B) The Space Shuttle. The solid boosters had parachutes and were recovered & refurbished after each launch, but from what I read this never materialized any cost savings.

The act of landing instead of splashing down into the ocean is the big part.  Refurbishing anything that lands in the ocean is very expensive.  The salt water fucks things up, and even with a parachute, the landings aren't actually very soft.  Obviously it still remains to be seen how viable this is, but landing the rocket is a major bonus for reusability.

They actually saved money on the occasions when the buoyancy failed and the boosters sank, as I recall. If it hadn't been all tied up with contracts and the way the enabling legislation was written in an effort to sell how 'reusable' the system was, they could have saved a lot of money with single-use boosters.

If they can actually perfect the soft landing and make a system that just needs new nozzles and general maintenance, then it will certainly change the cost structure.

Looking into it, I don't see how dry landings are feasible. In addition to the safety issues, the problem is that the booster stage does not, can not reach orbit, it's going to come down well east of the launch site unless you burn a shitload of fuel. So you're not landing in Texas unless you launched from Baja California. You could launch from Texas and land in Florida, maybe.

Would make more sense to have a half-dozen drone landing ships you could space out around the potential landing zone so that nothing short of a major hurricane would render them all unusable. But I don't think you're going to get zoning permission for a rocket landing site any time in the immediate future.

--Dave

They need 4 poles in the corners of that platform, with 4 arresting cables that can basically lasso that rocket from 4 directions and hold it upright in the center of the platform.  Or maybe the rocket can deploy its own anchoring cables.

Somebody needs to develop anti-gravity. Or a way to cancel mass. Or some other way to flip physics the bird.

Or, less fantastical, just say "Fuck it" and build a space elevator.

Only two major roadblocks to go! Fiber length -- they can't grow the carbon nano-tube fibers as long as they need, but they're making steady progress. And, of course, the problem that there's a lengthy phase in construction where the ribbon is wide enough to be really likely to get hit by micro-meteorites, yet not so wide it'll survive until the next constructor up repairs it. (After a certain width, it doesn't matter. Crawlers going up and down repair the ribbon as they go, and the damage won't be big enough).

Of course, that's only the first one. After that, you can ship the ribbon up the first elevator and drop it down.

I keep seeing people say this and yet no explanation of why you can't do the same with the first. Drop it from the ISS or another fixed-orbit object vs. build it up to them.

Weight?

We can't actually build a space lift yet. None of the proposed materials are really mature enough.

Re: Dropping down from ISS: The ISS is at ~400 km height. A space elevator needs go up to GEO ~35000 km to have enough centrifugal force. And that loops back to the first sentence; building a 35000 km long cable that can sustain the weight (and the environment conditions of space) isn't a minor undertaking.

Essentially, yes, the mass of the entire beanstalk is way too much to lift on rockets, you have to lift just enough for the first strand, then use that.

--Dave

Edit: Much easier, in terms of energy, to nudge an asteroid with the right composition into GEO, if you can find an Earth-crossing rock that fits the bill. Especially if they can make the microwave thruster/Cannae drive work in practice

Yep. 35,000 miles of very, very, tiny thin thread. You can't lift a full of even partial ribbon.

Once you have the thread, you start sending crawlers up (small ones at first) to weave a second strand. Using beamed power.

We actually do have the proper materials -- we can make carbon nano-tubes that have the right properties, but we have to make tubes of a certain length to make it work (a foot or so, I think? It's been ages) and they best we can do is less than half that.

Ah, the distance is farther than I thought, so I get it now. I thought, "send up 400-800km of carbon monofilament across several trips for the ribbon.  That's not overly much, right?" 35000 km is a bit different. Newp! Thanks.

New theory on mysterious radio signals: (http://www.iflscience.com/space/astronomical-quest-leads-ovens)

So she did some experiments, and figured out what was happening:

The mental image of tiny robotic spiders spinning a web into space for us to climb makes me feel all warm and tingly in my nether regions.

I'm of the belief there long ago should have been a station on the moon wherein we could expand into a self-sustaining next-gen industrial complex.  Imagine 21st century manufacturing at 1/6th the gravity and no air resistance.  The potential gains are huge.  This is before even considering building rockets to launch from there, which is obviously ideal.

Also, getting people to orbit should not be as complex as it is currently.  Really, we should only be launching single-man "escape-pod" sized rockets into orbit and allow physics and whatever orbital retrieval vehicles to do the rest.  Even Soyuz to me is overkill.  Supplies can go up the traditional way on an unmanned dragon, atlas, etc.   Having this catchall system to launch man and material simultaneously is stupid.  Weight causes an exponential loss of efficiency in rocket systems.

First (preliminary and very blurry) colour image of Pluto & Charon:
http://www.nasa.gov/content/first-pluto-charon-color-image-from-new-horizons

Waiting for July  :awesome_for_real:

So Charon is "Texas-sized", just like the comet from Deep Impact (or was that the asteroid in "Armageddon"?). Anyway, looks like everything in space is Texas-sized. Cool, uh?

Industry? On the moon? The richest iron-bearing rock on the moon is about 25%, and that's rare. Most of the high-iron Moon ore is only 15%. Our meekest mines on Earth demand ore that's at least 35% iron. With that in mind: There is substantially more iron on the moon than any other industrial element, especially such Earth stalwarts as carbon (available only in parts per million).

So a lot of infrastructure is going to need to be shipped in.

How is this infrastructure going to be fueled? Solar power is only available for half of every month. Hydrogen - fundamental to most chemical fueling and abundant on earth's surface - is extremely rare on the moon, and evidence for the water which might hold it is still inconclusive. There are only the tiniest traces of the heavy elements that might be fission capable. Even lead is rare. And Helium-3 - despite it's numerous advantages over deuterium/tritium - still requires a functional fusion reactor... which remains beyond our technological grasp for at least half a dozen reasons.

So a lot of fuel is going to need to be shipped in.

How is this infrastructure going to be repaired? Humans can't live on the moon. There's no food, and both air and water would need to be mined. Growing food, even with hydroponics, has the same energy requirement problems that smelting does. Worse, remember Biosphere 2? Our ability to productively recycle and utilize atmosphere and biological waste is extremely limited. Having the forests of the Earth replenishing our air and the oceans replenishing our wastewater is easy to take for granted. Robots could do some of it, but look how clumsy, slow and unreliable the rovers are on Mars. Being designed to never require repair put a lot of limits on other capabilities.

So a lot of people and/or food and/or soil nutrients and/or robots are going to need to be shipped in.

All of this shipping is going to have to come from Earth. There's nowhere less expensive to mine for minerals, nowhere less expensive to produce food supplies, nowhere less expensive to construct robots and house human beings. All of the complaints that I have about industry on the moon also apply to closer orbital stations because one of the least efficient aspect of rocket travel is plowing through the atmosphere. Which brings us to your second complaint:First, smaller rockets are less efficient than larger rockets for the same reason that tiny things have a smaller terminal velocity than large things: More surface area per unit mass.

Second, it's a lot cheaper to produce and reclaim a single rocket system than to produce and reclaim several different rocket systems. Equipment re-use and industrial economy of scale are what theoretically drops the ASTP LEO costs to $200/kg by 2025.

The cost of putting a person (and their life-support and safety equipment) on board a large, efficient supply rocket is small-potatoes if we already have to launch a supply of large smelting crucibles and hopper trucks and whatever. That said, if you're interested in novel ways to put people in orbit, take a look at NASA's space plane plans. Getting from orbit to the moon would still require propellant, however, and that propellant will almost certainly have to come through Earth's atmosphere. Conventional, large rockets remain the best way to do that.

Just like conventional, Earth-bound industry remains the best way to support space programs.

Rendering of the E-ELT, together with some size comparisons. From Reddit, but I thought it's nifty enough to post here.

Image is too large for the forum, so as direct link:

http://i.imgur.com/QhCWWFe.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/QhCWWFe.jpg)

Overwhelmingly Large Telescope
(cancelled)

Ha!

Not stymied by the cancellation of the OLT, the team next prepares plans for the Ludicrously Large Telescope.

I was somewhat serious.  Their rocket has no issues staying vertical in-flight and aiming for the center of the platform, it's just once it touches down its side thrusters aren't sufficient for the problem of how to balance a pencil vertically on a desk.  And they'd want to turn off the thrusters at some point so they can refuel and whatnot.

That wasn't a sarcastic response. That was literally "Doing that would make this space travel stuff a lot easier".

Great map, but the James Webb is where's it's at.  Won't have to see through the pesky atmosphere. 

Well, the E-ELT uses (will use) adaptive optics (they bend the mirrors) to compensate for that. But it's really more a synergy situation: the JWST strong points are high wavelengths (near & mid infra-red), while the E-ELT has a much higher spatial resolution.

And thankfully it's more collaboration than competition: The E-ELT will be open to non-ESO scientists, time slots are given out based on scientific merit. JWST on the other hand as ESA as minority partner (it will be launched by an Ariane 5 actually).

If only there was a way to get a Texas-sized Texas out into space a lot of domestic problems would dwindle away.

A Russian Progress freighter that was launched yesterday from Baikunor to resupply the ISS is out of control and will most likely burn up in the atmosphere.

The issue seems to stem from the Soyuz 2-1A rocket it was launched with, the third stage engines either burned too long or with too much thrust, this resulted in an incorrect orbit:


Additionally the craft is spinning. The ground-control sent a command to fire up the engines [to stabilize the craft] which was received but failed to be executed.


Onboard camera - Progress rotating (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMiNjHjpunU)

Launch video from 28. 4. 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28jJ3sANL1o)


This isn't the only recent Soyuz failure: In August 2014 a Soyuz launched from Kourou put two Galileo satellites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_%28satellite_navigation%29) into a wrong orbit. The problem turned out to be a design failure: A connection between an hydrazine and a cold helium feed line worked as a thermic bridge and lead to the hydrazine freezing. Which lead to the connected attitude control thrusters failing.

Edit: I made a GIF:

(https://i.imgur.com/77gPI8a.gif)


Edit2: Roscosmos now officially considers Progress M-27M lost. De-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere is expected around 5th to 7th May. The next Progress freighter to supply the ISS (M-28M) is scheduled to launch in Q3 2015.

Source (https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.roscosmos.ru%2F21459%2F)

I'm still fuming the Russians lost my solar sail.  I fuckin donated to that project and it was never re-started.

Oh..do you have a story to tell?  :-) What are you talking about? Cosmos 1?



Fake Edit: If someone likes to watch rockets launches, there have been two successful ones in just the last days:

26th April: Ariane-5 ECA carrying Thor-7 and Sicral-2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rTNYyTjrcY&hd=1)

28th April: Falcon 9 v1.1 carrying Turkmenalem52e/Monacosat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pGp1jToCx4&hd=1)

Yah, Cosmos1.  I was really excited for that project only to see it explode due to the wonders of modern Russian engineering.   :oh_i_see:   Actually, it wasnt modern at all.  TPS took the cheap route and just strapped it to the back of an old ICBM.

Rosetta's approach to the comet last August, 800km to 30km. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY3kh_Enrk4)

What a weird little pile of rocks.

In other news MESSENGER crashed successfully into Mercury. That would have happened six weeks earlier when it ran out of the fuel required to maintain its orbit against the tidal forces of the Sun, but project scientists figured out how to use its helium coolant as reaction mass (and then propellant) to keep it taking photos and measurements.

Oh, that reminds me...

A follow up cartoon with Rosetta & Philea about the comet-landing. For children and today's average adult media consumers.  :grin:

Once upon a time # comet-landing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33zw4yYNGAs)

That was adorable, though I could have done without all the techno jibber jabber!  Now, where's mah beer..

Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, currently on the ISS, shows us how some of the most mundane cleaning rituals in the bathroom (cutting nails, shampoo, brushing your teeth, using soap) actually work in space.

Beside being so proud of her, I won't lie: tears came up during the water/soap part. Just so beautiful and mesmerizing  :heart: :heart: :heart:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=15&v=nPUvzn3CTQc

Ah yeah, shower scene in space!

Joking aside, that was pretty cool.

Oh my god, this is beautiful  :ye_gods:  :Love_Letters:

Sunset on Mars...with a blue-tinged sky! (no artificial color corrections)

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4581

That is some cool-ass shit right there.  Nice find Lucas.  I hope I live long enough to see someone put boots on Mars.

This one, on the other hand, is false color... stitched together by a guy (https://roadtoendeavour.wordpress.com/) who just wanted to make it feel like being on Mars:
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CEL4f7DWEAAJxTQ.jpg:large)

Also, the bright spots in the crater on Ceres are actually clusters of smaller spots (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=pia19547).

My guess is still ice, since I think the dwarf planet is a wandering centaur (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur_%28minor_planet%29), but I haven't got a clue what would make Ceres spew out shiny chunks of ice like that.

The geometry is kinda creepy to me from this angle. 

Ceres isn't a centaur. Its orbit doesn't cross the orbit of any of the major planets.

The bright spots are definitely weird and interesting, though. I am beginning to wonder if observation at even closest approach is going to resolve what they are.

Hence my 'wandering'. In much the same way that Pheobe is theorized to potentially be a captured centaur, I think that Ceres isa Kuiper belt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt) ice and rock ball that fell towards the sun and then got caught in the same gravitational interference pattern that created the rest of the asteroid belt. As opposed to being a collected cluster of smaller asteroids, or being a captured rocky NEO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object) from the inner solar system.

I think it's some kind of heavy mineral.  The reflection is way too strong for it to be an old ice formation (the ice would get discolored over time) and there is no indication of any kind of cryovulcan ice plumage.   It literally looks like the exposed corner of a geode... which have indeed been discovered at planetary scales, though obviously never imaged.

The death star's moon camouflage is wearing away...  :why_so_serious:

Lightsail just launched on the Atlas 5 carrying the x-37b:
http://sail.planetary.org/

Today, NASA announced the media activities and television coverage of the New Horizons mission:
http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-announces-television-coverage-media-activities-for-pluto-flyby

New video of Pluto & Charon "orbital dance", obtained from the most recent LORRI observations (29th May - 3rd June) :
http://www.space.com/29647-pluto-and-charon-orbital-dance-new-horizons-gets-closer-video.html

Damn, getting really excited about this, no matter it's going to be "just" a flyby  :awesome_for_real:

Too bad Lightsail is having problems, I really like this idea.

So Philae is back again.  :heart: Didn't expect that any more...

From the press release

• Contact yesterday at 22:28 CEST for 85 seconds
• Lander operating temperature - 35° C with 24 Watt power available
• 300 data packets received, 8000 more stored in memory
• Older data shows lander woke up several times before but couldn't connect to Rosetta then
• Last contact was in November 2014 when Philae hibernated due to lack of power

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/06/14/rosettas-lander-philae-wakes-up-from-hibernation/

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CHdTHfSWoAABBkB.jpg)

Philaebob Squarepants?

- 2 weeks to Pluto-Charon flyby (16M Km to go); here is a raw image taken yesterday by LORRI, but you can already make out some details! :

(http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/data/pluto/level2/lor/jpeg/029786/lor_0297860108_0x630_sci_1.jpg)

Full resolution here (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/data/pluto/level2/lor/jpeg/029786/lor_0297860108_0x630_sci_1.jpg)

I thought this was pretty cool. Run Away Star Pushing Bow Wave (http://gizmodo.com/a-runaway-star-makes-an-interstellar-bow-wave-1715854690)

Last time we see a major solar system object up close for the first time in our history. From here on, it's just about better looks and more information. Unless someone sends a probe to Eris or Makemake, but those might not get there while any of us are alive anyway even if they did.

If the Cannae or Em drives actually turn out to be usable, that's going to look like a very silly declaration.

--Dave

That's a big if, but reactionless drives are a holy grail. So's FTL, although I note the Ablecurrie drive continues to improve. They've got the energy requirements down to something actually sane, if we could make antimatter.

I don't think they've worked out how to make it stop. Or turn. Or see where you're going. I also kind of wonder what happens to anything you hit.

Pfffft details. To infinity and beyond.

Also its the 'alcubierre' drive, thanks for the heads up though, wikipedia dive commence!

(https://40.media.tumblr.com/b441d1ec3880fded8412595a3d2e728f/tumblr_nr9qoekUTQ1qmvxavo1_1280.jpg)

That is a close orbit. Also, here's Pluto colored its lovely methane brown.

Hey, dude invented an actual, relativity-complaint warp FTL drive in the 90s. Since then he (and others) have refined the concept to needing a Jupiter sized planet's worth of power to a basketball sized amount.

All by -- I shit you not -- 'changing the shape of the warp field'. STAR TREK TECHNOBABBLE IS REAL.

I think you're underestimating what a 'basketball size' of power actually is. This shit will absolutely not work. Ever. And even if it could, you can guarantee that we'd use it to create an 'earth shattering kaboom' first.

Sorry, I should have clarified: for those of us alive now.

Sonny White over at JPL already started Warpfield Mechanics 101; ala Starfleet Academy.  But really, making a large spacecraft travel FTL is not the only application.  If we can simply "flip a bit," that's enough for a Nobel and a few lifetimes worth of applied science.

As for the EM drive; the main thing that device does is provide the impetus needed for an orbital manufacturing platform that'll let us expand through our local space.  Because without needing the fuel, and once in orbit, the solar system is an easy nut to crack.  We need pvt. space trucking to set off here first though.

Note: viable lagrange point stations have been on the books since the 60's.  Fully blueprinted.  Do we have the balls though?  Of course not.

It's not about balls, it's about money.

The L4 and L5 Earth-Moon points are just as far and slightly harder to reach than the Moon, since they lack their own gravity well. The Moon can at least catch things we throw at it. Plus they're likely full of Trojans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_(astronomy)) the size of bowling balls and washing machines with eccentric orbits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_orbit#Tadpole_orbit).

The L1 and L2 Earth-Sun, besides being inherently unstable and prone to decay, are also about four times as far from Earth than the Moon... and, again, lack a gravity well for easy braking.

Earth-Sun L4 and L5 are 93 million miles away, have no inherent gravity well, and are orbited by Trojans up to the size of football stadiums (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_TK7).

Our failure to return to the Moon, far easier than any of these expeditions, has not been about a lack of balls. It's been about a lack of money for pointless grandstanding on useless hunks of dust. As you mention, lack of fuel-less propulsion makes orbital manufacturing all but pointless. Lunar manufacturing brings its own raw materials... and it's still not worth the trouble. Launching fuel separately is prohibitively more expensive than simply using that fuel in the original rocket.

The ISS is in low-Earth orbit because that's the cheapest space to visit. It's also an enormous waste of money and material compared to our unmanned satellites and probes. A really, really cool waste of money.

All we have to do is replace nearly all of modern physics with something that does a better job of matching observations. The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive) claims that the revision dropped the power requirements to the energy equivalent of 700 kg, which is only about 6.3E19 J...a bit less than the entire planet's energy consumption in 2012. So we just have to reroute the entire planet's energy consumption into a perfectly-efficient mechanism to produce and store antimatter. Unfortunately, current antimatter generation techniques are only about 0.0000001% efficient (http://angelsanddemons.web.cern.ch/antimatter/making-antimatter) so we'd need to harness the entire planet's energy consumption for a billion years.

There are a few other minor gotchas in the current formulation, like having to preserve causality or turn into a black hole instead of traveling, figuring out how to start or stop travel without being able to pass any information through the warp bubble/torus, etc.

Out of curiosity, are there any FTL travel proposals are out there that weren't obviously cribbed from science fiction?

Cart and horse.

Science fiction appropriates ideas as soon as science has them. Everything even remotely hopeful has been pretty thoroughly mined for story purposes.

Damn, the latest pics of Pluto are so intriguing: here's an article about those odd and evenly spaced dark spots:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20150711-2

Raw image (not enhanced like the one in the article):

(http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/Pluto-Encounter/data/pluto/level2/lor/jpeg/029889/lor_0298893474_0x630_sci_1.jpg)

Pluto certainly looks far more complex than predicted. Can't wait.

Looks like a polar cap is confirmed; also, Pluto is slightly larger than predicted (but it's still a so called "dwarf planet") :

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/how-big-is-pluto-new-horizons-settles-decades-long-debate

Latest processed images:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.html

(https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/nh-color-pluto-charon.jpg)

Just too beautiful. 13 hours to go.

NASA TV schedule for the next couple days:

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-announces-updated-television-coverage-media-activities-for-pluto-flyby

Just before today's flyby, here's a lovely pic of Pluto  :heart:

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CJ4AxFgXAAAjxRc.png:large)

Such a fabulous accomplishment and the pics we're getting are just beautiful!

From various Twitter feeds:

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CJ4iJE1WwAAd74Z.jpg:large)

You could say that the 1st generation of robotic exploration of the solar system ends today. Something that started back in 1962 with the Mariner probes (Venus).

Fucking Pluto. That's shit's awesome.

Lots of hype for a non-planet.  :why_so_serious:

You shut your dirty whore mouth.

The immediate timeline of the mission should go like this:

- Tonight, if all goes well, NH will "phone home" back to Earth. That will mean that all the data is taken and safe; several hours later, we should also get a very detailed first image of Charon, with more of Pluto to come (and of Nix and Hydra).
- It will take 16 months (yep) to download all the data NH gathered (from all the instruments onboard, I'm not talking about pictures).

Interesting AMA on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3d9luh/were_scientists_on_the_nasa_new_horizons_team

Why do you hate science?

From the AMA mentioned above:



Whoa, another KB object (not Eris nor Sedna, anyway: I saw a picture where their orbit just doesn't match NH trajectory)  :drill:

2 kilobits per second. It's like downloading pr0n from a bulletin board on 1200 baud.

Ahhhhh, memories. Memories of mammories.

And lines and lines of characters... then the dithering.

so. much. dithering.

Here's an interesting but preliminary analysis of those pre-flyby pics we've seen:

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/pluto-and-charon-shine-in-false-color

(https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_feature/public/thumbnails/image/nh-071315_falsecolorcomposite.jpg?itok=rpIj3Jro)

Which Science are you referring to.  There's a few branches that still call Pluto a planet and are pissed the astronomers made the call on their own: the planetary scientist who is the lead of New Horizons is one of them. He was pretty clear about it on science Friday's podcast.  Pluto is a planet in his field. 

His anogy was something like: you're asking your podieatrist about a dental problem when you talk to astronomers about it. Sure they're a doctor but they're not the right specialist.

His classification system would still put Pluto in a different category than Earth. So really its being pissy about the "dwarf" nomenclature.

Actually:

(http://pbs.twimg.com/media/CJ6MiSjUYAAvZZ1.jpg)

Edit: even better fit.

(http://pbs.twimg.com/media/CJ6MtchUYAAM7YX.jpg)

NH "phone home" in 10 minutes. Live right now on NASA TV:

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Actually, phone call arrived sooner than anticipated!!

Lock on carrier, symbol and telemetry. They expect 100% of the data will be transmitted back to Earth. All is green. Mission fully accomplished!!!!

(http://i.ytimg.com/vi/w7AXjEsKZk0/maxresdefault.jpg)

EDIT: the fact that the MOM (Mission Operations Manager) is called "Alice Bowman"  makes it even cooler  :grin:

"A class of chemical compounds called Tholins."

It's a web of lies!

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_lj9Q58xX4CA/S7RW0yyBaAI/AAAAAAAACAk/r7ZYayB7mJw/s1600/gw082-tholian.jpg)

(http://pbs.twimg.com/media/CJ7W6s4UAAAs7za.jpg)

No, we have already located the Death Star:

(http://i.imgur.com/MHE5n7J.jpg)

Just finished watching the latest briefing from NASA.

Charon is just incredible, definitely not a ball of craters. And that tiny region south of the "heart" they just finished downloading.....WOW. Pics will hopefully be posted soon.

Here they are. Charon:

(https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/nh-charon.jpg)

Full res: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/charon-s-surprising-youthful-and-varied-terrain

Pluto small region (black and white), just below the "heart":

(https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/nh-plutosurface.png)

Full res: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-icy-mountains-of-pluto

Here's a VERY interesting quote:

They found an earth size planet on sun like star's habitable zone. Pretty cool.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/index.html

Yeah until you read the details, then you get all "oh, ok we're still alone" about it again.

The star is 1.5 billion years older than ours, meaning it's entering the "burn everything" phase. Any oceans on the planet are likely slowly boiling-off as it enters a super-greenhouse cycle. The estimated size of the planet (5x earth) means there's likely lots of volcanic activity on the surface still.

Drat, no green women yet.

It's a very exciting discovery; I've been listening to the audio news conference for a while and from what I understand, all those slightly differences that are explained in one of the images provided in the article (Figure 4) basically balance each other out, making Kepler 452b VERY similar to Earth, although with (maybe) less water.

During the Q&A, one of the panelists implied that, from what they know right now, the amount of sunshine and the distance of the planet (but the exact composition of the body is unknown, of course) could result in a photosynthesis process not unlike the one on Earth, with all the consequences one can imagine.

Now, of course, life as it is now on Earth also relies on other things: among the most important ones, a moon (probably an impact with another celestial object billions of years ago) and gas giants diverting a lot of incoming comets and asteroids. But unicellular organisms? They're very likely to be there, IMO.

They've also had all that time to get off the planet and to somewhere safer.  There may be green women yet!

I read an article (which I can't find a link to at the moment) that breakdowns our chances of finding life/intelligent life in our galaxy. It was fucking depressing. (Don't get me wrong the chance of finding life out there excites me).
  Just consider the age of the galaxy, human civilization and the speed of light. What's the chance we detect radio signals (and why is it a given that an alien civizilation will want to point radios at the sky?, fuck why is it a given that alien life has to be carbon based?) any time in the near future? If that planet is 1000 light years away (aka only ONE PERCENT the diameter of the Milky Way) and it started broadcasting at EXACTLY the same time as we did we still have 900 years or so to go. That assuming a similar time for development on their planet.  If its off a million years or so (what? 0.01% the age of the galaxy or so?) we'll never see it.

I've managed to depress myself. Good times. 

Spoilered to spare the sensitive:

First, the good news: Carbon based life is practically a given. The distribution of elements in the solar system (excepting hydrogen and the noble gasses) is relatively similar to the distribution of elements in your body. Carbon is what two Heliums fusing makes, and that's common in all massive and/or dying stars. Oxygen and Nitrogen are other easy, stable products. Carbon compounds, even as complex as amino acids, apparently form in interstellar gas. Water is everywhere.

The step from self-replication cellular structure - and (even more so) the prokaryote/eukaryote boundary - may be difficult to crest, but the odds of organic chemistry fumbling together something bacterial given a few billion years are pretty good.

Establishing communication is a lot trickier. We are already becoming a post-radio civilization. Rather than broadcasting with more and more powerful antennae, we've been broadcasting smaller and smarter... using large numbers of low-power localized repeaters, and only when fiber-optic connections are unavailable. Worse, the stars produce enough radio that unless a broadcast is absurdly powerful and pinpoint accurate, it wouldn't last 50 lightyears before it gets diluted to indistinct noise. A Kardashev II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) might be able to manage a generalized cry into the wilderness, but the Fermi Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox) quashes that one pretty hard. Humanity isn't terribly interested in funding SETI, imagine how much harder it would be to convince them to spend the petawatts required to point a strong, focused, endless message at every star in the sky... in the hopes of not receiving a message for centuries.

The speed of light is a harsh mistress.

Actually what the Kepler folks are saying that because this planet is significantly bigger than Earth, its oceans aren't boiling off yet (if it has them). Has about 500 million years of good life left to go.

Yeah, basically they're saying that it will probably start experiencing the effects of the "greenhouse" phenomena  in 500-1billion years which isn't a long time in astronomical terms, but neither that short. Anyway, while the search for E.T. might sound depressing on the short term, I think that the launch of the James Webb telescope and the subsequent ones should bring very interesting results within our lifetime, like, for example, images of exoplanets.

I would love to know how you got one carbon from two helium atoms.

/chemistrypedant

Off by one error.

(http://www.quickmeme.com/img/9f/9f0b18b98a96c8014112fe4ab1326ec73008e2f189dfef1da51e350cd4f1514a.jpg)

Delta IV launch from yesterday that, thanks to the nice weather, looks better most than most. Has a sort of dreamy quality I think.

Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN7lVEA5_x4)

(The reason for the launch is rather prosaic though, WGS 7 (http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/wgs-4.htm), military communication sat for the airforce)

Fancy a trip at lightspeed from the Sun to Jupiter?  Better get comfy!

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150728-travel-from-the-sun-to-jupiter (http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150728-travel-from-the-sun-to-jupiter)

I see they're still futzing with the EM drive trying to sort out what's causing the reaction.

I'm a little annoyed with the science reporting on it (it's not a goddamn warp drive, it doesn't do FTL, and the only reason it's interesting is because it's potentially reactionless. Which means you don't have to carry reaction mass, which means it greatly simplifies travel once IN space. That's it. It's basically just an ion drive without need for reaction mass. It doesn't do magic).

Mostly I figure they'll find some weird interaction that explains it (sorta like Voyager's weird acceleration they finally sorted out), but who knows. It'd be pretty nice if it turns out the virtual particle theory is correct, but it won't change the world. It'll just mean NASA can pack more shit onto probes.

Yep, Dione is smaller than Saturn  :grin:

http://www.space.com/30435-saturn-moon-dione-amazing-cassini-photo.html?cmpid=514648


Gorgeous image  :heart:

Virtual particles experimentally maintaining the laws of classic mechanics.  Nothing to see here.  Move along now.   :awesome_for_real:
A big deal... it is actually.  The applications and revised theories?  Will take a long time to sort out.

I think I read that CERN just found some weird lepton-level interaction broke the Standard Model. THAT'S exciting shit. A reactionless drive is just useful. :)

Curiosity may not be clean enough to investigate (http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/29/nasa-crossroads-mars-water-without-contamination-curiosity-rover) the flowing (though extremely saturated with sodium and magnesium perchlorate) water on Mars:

If I understand it correctly the perchlorate is working as an antifreeze agent here, allowing the water to stay liquid and flow in the first place.

Imagine if are able to catch this live one camera one day. Water^{ish stuff} flowing down a hill on another planet. Mind boggling.

Another thing, where I think we tend too get too blasé about too quick is the rovers. Opportunity landed 11 years ago...and is still driving around. And about Curiosity...just look at that thing:



(https://i.imgur.com/c0LQRl2.jpg)

(Sorted by size: Sojourner, Opportunity/Spirit, Curiosity)

I had no idea it's that big.  :psyduck:

That's right, we're Americans so first SUV on Mars bitches!

Kidding, that's a cool pic though for scale.

The border between Pakistan and India is visible from space as the entire border is lit. Story:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=86725&src=fb

(http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/86000/86725/iss045e027869_lrg.jpg)

NASA's findings on the EM drive have been leaked. "It's still fucking doing it" is the result.

I'm too lazy to dig up a link, but the article I read boiled down to the vacuum chamber results were "Yep, it's still doing it" and someone preemptively criticized it as using the Earth's magnetic sphere, and one of the scientists snapped back with "We're not morons, we handled that".

Media reports remain stupid, with half of them confusing it with an Ablucurrie drive or FTL. Reactionless drive would be fantastic enough, thanks, even at the very small thrust in question. (It adds up quickly in space).

OTOH it took decades to figure out what was shoving Voyager wonky, so it's always really tricky with small forces.

Yeah, a bunch of them are reporting that it is violating conservation of energy or motion, which isn't true either. If it is doing what it seems to be, it's doing so in perfect accordance with those rules...we just don't know wtf it is pushing against.

The team investigating it is obviously being cautious as hell, and there's none of the hyper-paranoia that kept earlier claims of reactionless drives from being properly investigated. It's purely a space drive (like the ion drives), but even trivial amounts of constant acceleration without reaction mass would be a game-changer.

--Dave

Well, the purported theory behind it involves quantum mechanics and virtual particles, which (if you assume they are correct) does accord with Newton. It works exactly like an ion drive, Newton-wise, except the thrust is generated by virtual particles rather than, you know, the non-virtual ones of an ion drive.

Admittedly, you have to accept the fact that they're actually generating virtual particles AND aiming the things AND they exist long enough to turn energy into momentum AND it's this relatively easy to do (I mean the Casimir effect is virtual particles exerting force, so it's not exactly unknown), which is a giant leap that should be treated with giant amounts of skepticism. And honestly, the easiest way to test it would be to strap it to the back of a radio, toss it out the ISS airlock*, and see what happens.

I think the reporting confusion is that most reporters think "Really big news in space travel" and all they know is FTL. Whereas a reactionless drive doesn't sound as awesome, yet actually IS in terms of game changing. It won't get you to Tau Ceti in a human lifetime, but the actual TRIP becomes suddenly possible for probes. You don't need like 40 times an probe's weight in reaction material to get it there.

And certainly exploring the solar system would get a heck of a lot easier. RTG's are pretty straightforward, and not having to launch reaction mass? HUGE savings. And ion drives can get....really fast, actually. It's like compound interest. It starts slow as hell, but once it hits a certain point? Jesus.


*Well, actuall you'd need a regular rocket to get it out of LEO but once you got that, you just watch it for a few months and see if it's still accelerating. The radio makes that easy.

If you keep tabs on spaceflight.com you will see some of the most beautiful engineering in the world happening there.  What a great community... and yah, they still can't account for the thrust.  Even taking Lorentz interactions into account, the force they're seeing is like 100x's what that'd produce... even if they didn't compensate for it.

My favorite theory is in relation to a physical manifestation of Feynmann's advance wave theory; which has never been seen before (it was just a thought experiment).  Basically, the drive reacts against a wave traveling FTL (forward in "time" basically) moreso than the counter-wave traveling backwards.  At least, that's how I think it'd work.

The prior virt particle idea breaks physics to the point we'd have to invent some stuff.  Which is super cool too, and for me, helps explain the accelerating expansion of the universe (if you assume the universe computes).

Couldn't you kludge together something like a standing wave interacting with the Casimir force? Or if you really want to dredge the pseudoscience depths, a Tesla wave creating a high potential channel for the virtual particles?

 :awesome_for_real:

Sorry, just wanted to feel like I was helping.

--Dave

I dunno, there's some crazy stuff out there. I can at least wrap my head around the VP theory. I mean I know VP exist, so that's not made up. I know they're a lot like regular particles, except for their very brief existence. I know they can exert measurable forces (the Casimir effect).

And I know that energy is conserved because whatever thrust you're getting requires more energy to produce than the force generated.

And lastly I know ion drives work, and they use...rapidly accelerated particles as thrust.

So the big leap is "produce virtual particles and use them for the ion drive" which means you need to make them and have them impart thrust before they disappear. That's a pretty big leap, and honestly if it was possible it'd be the sort of thing I'd expect you'd need quantum computers and crap to figure out. Super-precise, ridiculously future engineering that we might be able to do in a century or two.

I've read physicists calling the whole notion poppycock and others saying "hey, wait a second, it's not impossible" and obviously I can't evaluate it. But I at least grasp the explanation for dummies, which beats the heck out of the time I tried to figure out what the whole "time travel via rapidly spinning ridiculously long tube" thing was about. Or that weird theory about black holes, holographic somethings, and causal arrows.

Yeah, the standing wave thing just occurred to me because the essence of the Casimir Effect is that when two surfaces are very close together, the 'virtual vacuum' between them becomes more empty of virtual particles than the surrounding space (or so I understand). So if you had a standing wave that was just the right distance displaced from a surface, it might act as a 'surface' for the purpose of the Casimir Effect, and since it was only a standing wave and not a physical surface, being continually recreated rather than held apart by some physical process, you might get that unipolar thrust.

But even trying to think about the math involved gives me a headache.

--Dave

It's a spooky action at a distance interaction.  You ride that advance standing wave before the inverse function collapses and negates it.

Virtual particles as spooky enough. They spontaneously generate in pairs, attract to each other, and then mutually annihilate -- conserving energy. Oh, and sending a particle back in time that generates them in the first place. I think.

And you can make them real, but that's sort of tricky. Black holes apparently do it though (Hawking radiation). You just have to shove in enough energy so that energy is conserved. The universe's books always balance.

Time for a Rosetta and Philae update  :-)



1) ESA released a new highlight video  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6aGXAhmyzs) of the latest science findings.  I created a GIF out of the most impressive (IMHO) section:


(https://i.imgur.com/9FuDWBK.gif)

And that's how 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko was born: Collision by two separate comets. The detection of Molecular Oxygen was another big surprise, details in the video.


2) Animation  (https://youtu.be/rJ2eqH3Bz4c)of the Philae's first touchdown and subsequent two hour flight. No graceful hoping but lots of tumbling and spinning. It was lucky to not land on it's head.


3) The comet has a water-ice cycle that creates a fresh layer of ice on it's surface every ration. Summarized it works like this:


During sun hours the ice on top and up to a few centimetres down turns into gas. It's flows away together with dust particles and produces the typical comet halo. At night this process stops as the surface cools down, but deeper layers of the comet retain the heat. Subsurface water ice from this regions turns into vapour and sublimates towards the top. Upon reaching the cold surface it freezes again and creates a new ice coating. Until the next comet day begins and everything starts again.

(https://i.imgur.com/hw6TsQg.gif)

GIF created from this source video (https://youtu.be/qLfNPQPt2hM)

Background info:

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/11/12/reconstructing-philaes-flight-across-the-comet/

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/09/23/rosetta-reveals-comets-water-ice-cycle/

Thanks Calapine, great stuff.

Wow, nice summary Calapine, thank you!

Welcome!  :-)

How big is the ISS? Find astronaut Kjell Lindgren for scale.

Spoilered for size:

Would help if he wore a red and white striped spacesuit.

The solar arrays are huge, but whatever that is he's working on seems barely large enough for him to stand up inside of. Hopefully it's just an equipment truss or something and not a hab or lab module?

By the location, that should be a truss section, looks like the radiators for the life support coming out of it. Hab/lab sections would be where the picture is being taken from.

--Dave

Well, SpaceX finally did it.  Last night they managed to to successfully launch a rocket into orbit (and deliver its payload) and land it again for the first time in history:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-22/musk-s-spacex-returns-to-space-in-first-launch-since-june-blast

Probably still years before they perfect the entire processes of launching it and reliably reusing the rocket (let alone perfecting the landing part), but this is a huge mile stone.  If they can get the whole process down, the cost of space launch will be reduced drastically.  Very exciting!

Launch and landing in one long exposure shot:

(http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--87NveHKE--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/lc4yk6jfu6fvu9fnrm8h.jpg)

They also deployed 11 satellites.  Not a bad night's work.

That's some got-damn science fiction right there!  The landing looked almost like the launch in reverse.  Very nice indeed!

So why is it that they tried so many times previously to land on rocky and unsteady sea barges?  Just to prove they could be accurate in the landing site before trying over land?

It is much more difficult to get the permits for attempting on land. In international waters there are no permits required. They also had systems that failed in pretty spectacular fashion on their first sea tests which would have done a lot of damage to the facilities nearby if they happened on land. (I believe the closest human to the sea barge was over a dozen miles away.)

Reuse of the device is awesome and I'm glad to see it. My only question has continually been why land it upright like that. The additional fuel for landing that has to be carried during launch is the antithesis of "every oz matters" that I'd previously understood for rocket launches. Some sort of glide landing or water landing seems like they'd be more efficient.

Sea water is not a friendly substance.

Yeah, even though the external tanks and solid boosters on the shuttle were "reused" it basically cost almost as much to recondition the tank as it would to build a new one after all the seawater damage.

I have always felt that the electromagnetic catapult was a better idea for putting things like cargo into orbit. My advisor when I was an engineering student had done some work with a team that was studying various designs.

Yeah, as others have said, landing it in salt water causes massive issues to the rocket.  It's very expensive to reuse after that.  Plus, with something that big and somewhat delicate, there is no such thing as a totally soft water landing that wont fuck up something that will need to be fixed.

Fuel is the cheap part of the rocket.  This method means you need a rocket able to carry enough fuel to get to its target, and have enough to land.  It means the rocket itself is more expensive (because it needs to be a bit bigger than the task at hand requires), but if you are able to relaunch the rocket, this is totally offset, and the extra fuel cost is minuscule in comparison.  The rocket used in this launch was also the newest upgraded version of the Falcon 9, which gave it a significant thrust boost compared to previous versions.  Meaning it has even more fuel to work with now.

It's not the cost of the fuel, but dollars I was referencing. An additional kilo of fuel is a kilo of cargo you can't take up.

I get that saltwater is damaging, and glide surfaces would also be additional weight. However, I just wanted to know details on the how and why the weight of fuel and control thrusters and the logistics of a reverse takeoff made more sense than other options.

Then again, we did do exactly that with the Curiosity and I imagine the algorithms to do such landings have come a long way even since it was launched.

When you save the cost of capital nary ting a total new rocket every time, you price per kg plummets.

 :oh_i_see: Yeah though they had it for the water landing stuff initially.  Anyway I'm on to gliding now.  :raspberry: :raspberry: :raspberry:

One of the better subplots of these launches are Bezos and Musk trolling each other on Twitter.

Blue Origin is a toy compared to SpaceX.

Edit: or more specifically the New Shepard is a toy compared to the Falcon 9.

Awesome stuff!  I love it that though SpaceX failed twice at the much harder but safer barge landing at sea, when Blue Origin one-upped them with a landing from a sub-orbital flight (vastly simpler both in velocities and navigation) and Bezos started trash talking SpaceX turned around and nailed their first attempt at land. 

I am curious as to why the arcs are parallel rather than in opposite directions.

To simplify things, just look at Falcon 9 as a 3-stage rocket built in 2-stages.  That's essentially what it is in order to backburn and retro all the way back to point of origin.  Which is perfectly ok, seeing as how every 3-stage rocket to date essentially destroys itself after every use. 

The fuel necessary isn't as much as you think either, since most of the weight is discarded and the majority of the flight time is spent in freefall.  Also, the most consuming burn is the backburn, but there is no drag at that point, so again... not as bad as you think.  It only uses 3 of its 9 engines to get back as well.

AHHHH!!!! *lightbulb* first stage booster doesn't go to orbit!  (duh! I know, right? I R dum)  it's just a catapult that goes up, then comes back down - into the ocean normally but back to where it started in this case. 

It's more of a slingshot than a catapult.  It's ballistic at time of separation and would likely hit LEO if it didn't make that backburn.  It's a long burn also, something like 30 seconds I believe.  But again,  its momentum and drag are relatively miniscule at that point.  When its hits atmo much of the control is also via flight surface (after retro and interface); so in a sense, yes, it does glide as well.

You must realize, at those speeds there's a tremendous amount of control even for something like a simple rocket.  For an example, look at vids of sidewinder missile tracking and so forth.  They rarely miss.  Falcon9 is really just a sidewinder without suicidal tendencies.

It's coming back from the direction it went, and landing at a pad very close to where it launched. As others have pointed out, most of the weight is fuel, and they've already burned most of that at separation. Maybe they could get fancy and make a single orbit, but there's really not much point, it wouldn't save enough fuel to be worth the complexity. So they just burn a bit more that it would take to de-orbit anyway to go back to where they came from.

--Dave

At launch, the bulk of the mass of the vehicle is the fuel but the cost of that fuel is a tiny fraction of the vehicle and launch.  

(via http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/spacex-press-conference-at-the-national-press-club-2014-04-25)

A little extra fuel, some deployable control surfaces, and some small thrusters seems like a small price to pay if they can successfully redeploy the recovered vehicles on future missions.  And of course when the rocket has expended almost all its fuel it only needs a small amount more to land, as it has shed the bulk of its mass (and has gravity on its side).

As another point, wings are weight, and a lot of it. A winged rocket can easily be twice or more the weight of an unwinged rocket, so since you already *have* rockets attached you might as well add a bit of extra fuel and use them.

Also, regarding the first two "failed" attempts at landing on a barge, those were always described as destructive testing by Musk. They were expected to fail, thus the barges out in the middle of the water. To the best of my knowledge this was the first landing that "better damn work," especially after the booster blew up on the one before.

Apparently the Falcon 9 rocket has no damage and is ready to launch again (http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/1/10697914/elon-musk-says-falcon-9-rocket-spacex-ready-to-fire)

They save $60m a pop with that thing.  Crazy.  The nanosats it launches costs more than the fuel burned.  With the next iteration of HLV's (that'll take them to Mars) the 2nd stage will be re-usable as well.  It's a damned good time to be a space engineer right now.

It will be an interesting process to see when they are brave enough to fully launch one of the used rockets again (AKA, how much do I trust the structural/material engineers I hired).  If they can do it fairly soon, that will put them well ahead of what was expected.  And puts the schedule for awesome space stuff that much closer.  As shit as the world has gone lately, space has really become interesting to follow again over the last few years (and for more than just SpaceX stuff).

Next few biggest challenges for SpaceX:

Launch from California - SpaceX refurbished an unused launch pad at Vandenburg air force base in Southern California awhile ago, but because of delays (rockets exploding) and politics, nothing has launched.  With everything going well after that last launch, they've been given the go ahead to try it out for the first time January 17th.  This increases cost savings since all the rockets are constructed in southern California.  Also neat because west coast gets a chance to see more rockets go off.  No idea if they are planning on trying to recover this rocket the same way or not.

Launching the Falcon 9 Heavy - For those of you not following, the Falcon 9 Heavy is their next big thing.  It's basically 3 Falcon 9's tied together.  If it works (has never been launched before, so all hypothetical), it will be able to launch a bigger payload into orbit than any other rocket in history other than the Saturn V (which is what we used to launch all the of the Apollo moon landing missions).  Things have been delayed it for a couple of years, but the first demo flight for it is currently scheduled for first half of this year.  Second in the later half.  And, if all goes well, full commercial by the end of 2016.  If (and big if, no doubt about it), it all works and goes on schedule, this would be the rocket by which we could start sending men and material back to moon (or beyond, Musk is set to announce his plans on how to colonize Mars soon, heh).  Be sure to tune in to watch either way though.  If it succeeds, our nations (and humanities) aspirations go that much further!  If it fails, the fireworks will be AMAZING.

Reusing the Falcon 9 Heavy - Curious to see how they manage to successfully land and recover three different rockets at once.  Should be very interesting and/or hilarious when they try.

Launching Astronauts - The Big One.  They've been awarded the contract, and the Dragon Capsule has successfully launched and docked with the ISS several times now.  So by 2017, they are suppose to be able to get the manned version of it ready, and launch people into space.  They've done several launchs well so far using the same tech that hopefully everything will go as scheduled.  But of course that one rocket blow up means everything built around their abort system will be highly scrutinized.  If you are curious how that system is suppose to work, here is a test launch they did earlier this year for the system. (http://www.space.com/29329-spacex-tests-dragon-launch-abort-system.html).  Looks a hell of a lot more promising than the space shuttle at least (not saying much).

Yeah, I'm really interested in how they're handling metal fatigue. Launches are brutal. High temperature, heavy vibration, tons of stress. There's thermal expansion (in both directions if they're using something like liquid hydrogen and oxygen) too. Pressures tend to be insane, and I'm not sure how possible it is to re-inspect every critical part.

The entire 1st stage is Aluminum-Lithium composite.  Likely not designed to flex much; therefore any apparent "fatigue" if bad enough would likely manifest as a failure/crack and easily found.  The worst kind of failure is not a failure at all, but just a weakness you can't easily find (additive manufacturing has really made this a mantra of late).  Also, part inspection has gotten a lot easier with next-generation radiography and tomography techniques (proton, neutron, electron, etc.)   Even for something as large as a rocket tube assembly.

The gravy will be when they can just leave the tube on a flatbed and just drive it slowly through the scanner.

Remember that star where they detected something big passing in front of it? It's been dimming for a century.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.03256
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=34837

I'm not entirely sure what the dimming means, but the idea that it would take 648,000 giant comets to cause it tells me it's something really big and perhaps some kind of phenomena we've never seen in astronomy. Pretty cool.

Reminder/heads-up: The next Falcon 9 launch with barge landing is Jan 17th (Sunday).

I hope it means somebody is building a Dysonsphere/-swarm and that the dimming is due to the construction work with more finished satellites eclipsing more of the star's light.  :heart:

The lesson learned here, is a great many space-science phD's like to prematurely blame comets for every goddamned thing.  I personally was never convinced (as said earlier), because the data blew past anything we currently know.  So essentially they took crazy numbers, pasted a simple comet explanation on it, and quieted the masses.  That's just dumb.

I applaud the guy for actually looking at the plates and injecting some common sense into it ("hai guys, umm this is a lot weirder than you said"), but then he goofs and says with certainty that there's no way a civilization could dim a sun by 20% in 100 years.  wtf?  Like how the hell would he even know this?  Is he from there or some shit?  Some kind of prophetic technomancer?

Completely bad science.

SpaceX update:
Looks like the landing leg failed on 1st stage approach to the drone ship.  The approach was supposedly on target however.  Bear in mind that the seas were pretty bad and the deck was heaving badly, making a cocked landing a likelihood.  Basically one of the legs bore too much of the load and broke.  Even if the angle was proper, if the rocket is landing during a deck upheaval, the loads would be much greater especially in a sharp sea.  It adds 10-20kts to the landing speed.

This whole drone ship thing is turning out to be a bad idea.

edit: landing leg lockout failed.  not the rough seas' fault

Video: https://www.instagram.com/p/BAqirNbwEc0/

Out of the four failed drone ship landings on water only one was due to bad weather/rough sea. The other three failed because of equipment malfunction in the first stage.

Rough sea is less of a factor than the media wants to make out of it. The barge they use is not just simply a hunk of metal floating in the atlantic it is a modified heavy equipment haulage barge. Those things are already fitted/designed to be as stable as possible in rough seas because they are used to haul heavy equipment like drilling platforms or entire ships. The ones used by SpaceX are modified to be even more stable and robust.

If you can watch the video. The barge is barely moving despite the rough sea and the drone ship lands smack dab in the middle of it. Topples over after it had landed and the engines cut off. According to SpaceX because one of the landing leg lockouts didn't work. In that case the rocket would have also toppled over after touchdown on land. They also used an older version of the Falcon for this launch than the one for the last one. At this pace they'll stick the next landing.

It hit 1.3 meters from the center of the barge.  The accuracy is astounding.

15-20 ft seas, unless in a period that does not effect the hull, are no joke and WILL mess up your landing.  Just before it touched down you could see the deck heaving pretty badly.  All these rigs have stabilizers, yes, but they only work to a point.  The sea takes no prisoners; personally, I'd rather risk a land-based landing than deal with those variables.

Granted, engineers will purposely fly in bad conditions to find the limitations (in this case, known icing and bad seas).  I applaud Musk for bleeding the money to do that.  But hell, in a normal flight profile you will never see them fly in that unless they're up against a deadline they can't move.

Seemed to be coming in a little hot to me....but WTF do I know.

Wait, that rocket landing was done on a MOVING SHIP that is piloted by a drone? In shitty, choppy seas?

I'd be less concerned about the fact that the legs on the thing broke and more awed that HOLY FUCK DID YOU SEE HOW ACCURATE THAT MOTHERFUCKER WAS? They could have literally landed that shit on a fucking Datsun truck bed. Looks to me like they've got their flight/landing software down and the only problems are mechanical. That ought to be trumpeted from the high heavens because that kind of shit is fixable.

... through icy atmosphere too

It's actually a boon that the conditions were what they were.  That's what you want when you iterate a design.  Try explaining that to a sponsor/politician though; they don't want to hear it.  They only want to see success.  That said, SpaceX has done poorly with marketing their dev. process to the media, so you can't blame the media either. 

Still though, fuck landing on a barge.  That has to be the last option unless conditions are perfect at the time of launch.

Naw, man, the barge is the best part of the whole thing. It's like the engineers are all like whipping their engineer dicks out and going "YOU LIKE THIS? HUH? YOU LIKE THIS?" And tattooed on the side are the words "Bad Engineering Mothefucker."

I think sea recoveries are ideal because land recoveries almost guarantee that the rocket will be in atmosphere over some populated area. A failure at sea means the rocket goes into the water. A failure on land might mean the rocket goes into a house.

If it's in space and not geosync'd it's always over a house.  I understand this just does a big upsy-downsy though, right? So someplace like Canaveral should be OK to launch from because it's so isolated.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cape+Canaveral,+Florida/@28.4141449,-80.6758034,25820m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x88e0a3f2a5fb9a45:0x87ef91ee250f8fde!6m1!1e1

Is the barge just used for testing launches and times when they can't use NASA's facilities during ramp-up or is a permanent feature of the SpaceX program?

Depending on orbit and inclination there are starts where the first stage can't touch down on land. The first stage uses the fuel reserves the rocket carries in case one of the motors fails (and the others have to take over and burn longer) to return back to earth.

Adding enough fuel to the stage so that it can always return to dry land under any launch condition would make it too heavy. For launches like the last one a touch down over water and hence the barge is the only option. Or you drop the launch vehicle into the ocean and lose 30 million in the process for either new rocket motors and turbo pumps or expensive refurbishing of the old ones that have been damaged by the salt water.

Making the first stage reusable by having it land is the key point to bring costs down.

Maybe get China to build an island somewhere in the vicinity of the launchpad to land on, win win  -except for the China owning it part.

The purpose of the last launch was to fire out of Vandenburg heading westward, which meant yes, they'd need more fuel to get back as the earth rotates away from the flight profile.  The Vandenburg site was used so they could avoid transport from the CA factory all the way cross-country.  It's really just to save time and money in shipping; there's no inherent advantage to that profile otherwise.

I guess the build site in Texas is for the Houston (theoretically) and Canaveral launch sites generally.  Who knows.  In any case, they've got a ton of flexibility.

So, apparently the Falcon 9 costs $200k to fuel, and can deliver a bit over 10k pounds to geosynchronous orbit (almost 14k to LEO). With the booster truly reusable, that puts costs per pound to orbit into the sub $50 range (I am assuming it's going to cost more, at least for a while, to manage the launch than to actually fly the bird).

That...changes everything for space exploration, actually puts serious space *exploitation* (mining asteroids and such) on the table. Even ion drives are feasible on sufficient scale at those prices, never mind Em or Cannae drives.

--Dave

There's a reason a lot of very smart, very wealthy people are getting into position for this upcoming space race.  It's not a fluke.  Many hundreds of millions have already been spent on the small business infrastructure alone, to support the industry.  Everyone hails the spinoff tech NASA pioneered, but the same thing is happening here in the private sector; albeit more closed-door.

Florida built a whole damned new Polytech University in the I-4 corridor largely on the back of space industry futures.

Moral is, if you're in the tech. space and want something new to do, it's not a bad time to dip your feet in.

While that's amazing, didn't NASA pass Cassini through a gap in the rings of Saturn, while affected by a 1.5 hr communication delay for each flight path correction?

Possible evidence for a new planet beyond Neptune

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/150119-new-ninth-planet-solar-system-space/
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/feature-astronomers-say-neptune-sized-planet-lurks-unseen-solar-system

Allegedly it's supposed to be larger than Earth (about 10 times our mass) but smaller than the gas giants, on a 20,000 year orbital period, running from about 250 AU perihelion to about 1,000 AU aphelion (Pluto's aphelion is about 50 AU).  It's supposed to explain oribital anomalies for objects outside the Kuiper belt, but hasn't been directly imaged yet so could be wrong.

Space is just fucking awesome.

Sitchin will have his last laugh, albeit from heaven  :heart:

Probably has, like, 197 moons.

My comp. sci professor's wife did the telemetry sourcecode for that mission.  Aside from the project director, she had the most important job in the entire project.  I cannot even fathom the stress of that.  She apparently had to report in front of large assemblies as well; routinely.

Gravitational Waves are real, direct detection by LIGO. Press conference live (https://youtu.be/c7293kAiPZw).

If only this led to artificial gravity, FTL, or anti-gravity.

I mean it's pretty damn cool, don't get me wrong. I'm just at the point where I'm all "Can we use this to finally crack fusion? Or let astronaunts not die in the horrible, radiation filled hellhole of space? Or let us get to LEO for like 12 bucks a pound? Or play that laser-tag game from Ender's Game on Earth?"

Sadly I'll just have to be satisfied with awesome science.

No closer to time travel either (source: press conference), though I'm not sure if that is a good or a bad thing.

Relativity was 20th century science's big bummer the way that thermodynamics was for the 19th century.

Proving that there weren't gravity waves would have been a lot more exciting because it would have shown that some part of our understanding of general relativity was wrong. Just like the Higg's Boson detection seemed to show that the Standard Model was complete rather than incomplete. Any day now somebody's going to prove the Riemann Hypothesis using conventional tools that don't expand the mathematical horizon at all.

Relativity itself was the result of a lot of experiments failing to find what they looked for. If the Luminiferous Aether were real, they would have been successes.

Keep your eyes open for negative results. That's where the game-changers are.

Eh, until they unify quantum mechanics with relativity there's still a big question mark.

Humans are good at leveraging tiny loopholes into interesting crap.

Although I suspect nanoscale engineering is the next "big thing" -- that combined with biohacking is going to be the next frontier in science. We're on the edges of engineering ourselves, of growing cloned tissues and organs, of being able to replace crap that breaks inside us.

Ones we can start using things like custom viruses to play with things at the cellular level? Sky's the limit. Fuck angioplasty's and stents. How about a virus that eats that crap clogging up your arteries? Cancer? Identify the specific markers, and let loose a nasty little bugger (machine or virus? It gets pretty blurry at that size) that kills those cells -- and nothing else.

What a load of horseshit. New frontiers? What fucking planet have you been living on? The day that humans can just code up a virus is the day that humanity becomes 100% irrevocably fucked.

Then it's just a matter of time until we're fucked.

But it still doesn't change the fact that the next revolution in science (well, honestly more in engineering) is going to be in biology. THere's a few people already walking around with lab grown organs (bladders, admittedly -- pretty simple), nano-scale engineering in general is starting to mature, and we've got at least one example of a purely lab created organism (some virus, I believe).

I've actually got quite a few professors who were integral parts of the LIGO experiment.  One of the perks of going to a leading space science school.  For the most part, the entire physics staff were somewhat involved in gravity experiments; then they were hired on at ERAU to continue that work.  Kinda cool.

Anyways, my thing with LIGO is this:  it's not a scope that uses the electromagnetic spectrum.  Let that sink in a bit.  Who needs Maxwell when you can just detect ripples in the fabric of spacetime?  And yes, it does indeed usher in a new form of astronomy.   Sure, you could cite the prior gravity experiments we've had limited (sometimes disastrous) success with... WISE and so forth.  But those instruments were "local space" or simply measuring photon displacement.  

LIGO is a telescope that peers into space without using any currently defineable wavelength.  It measures space itself.

To further this, we can now imagine MAYBE detecting other universes (if they're out there).  Theoretically, gravity is the only "force" that can permeate two completely different reference frames.  So yah, it's a big fuckin deal... even though for the time being there's not much we can do with it.

At this point, we just need more techs to get out there and build more detectors.  Miniaturize them if possible, and so forth.

And the smaller we get...

I know where you're coming from. But I think it's a testament to our generation that this isn't all that impressive even to the run of the mill geeks. Too much magic-science like Flux Capacitors and Tachyon Emitters in our upbringing maybe?

• Proves a 100 year old theory even Einstein later in life wasn't sure about.
• Required the equivalent of 50 times the energy output of all stars in the universe to shake a couple of stripes of metal.
  
• Reaches us a billion years after it started at just the right time in humanity's tech tree

That this is physically possible in this universe at all speaks to an order of energy and principals we know dick-all about.

Finally having been able to answer this question unlocks an area of science that could be a pathway off this planet at a meaningful scale.

This is a very big deal.

Is it funny that this reminds me of the original Michelson-Morley experiment?   :grin:

It's profoundly interesting that you can describe how the LIGO experiment works in ways ("lasers") that would've been science fiction 50 years ago.  Yeah, it's a very big deal.   :thumbs_up:

Except, like I said, Michelson-Morley was a negative result. It questioned the orthodoxy instead of confirming it.

Yes, it's amazing that we can detect a little spacetime wiggle - and that has consequences and potential for the future of astronomy - but it would have been a lot more exciting if the numbers didn't match the theory quite so well. We're running out of places to look for deeper understandings of physics.

Um, lots of "places to look" between 10e-35 m and 10e-15 m, and beyond 10e+26 m.

We should know more pretty soon when eLISA  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_Laser_Interferometer_Space_Antenna) goes active. Similar principle to LIGO (laser interferometer) but in space with an "arm length" of 1 million kilometres.


So check back in 2034.  :oh_i_see:

I know a few guys who were scratching their heads about this one.

Allegedly there are three types of black holes: stellar black holes, which are like 10 solar masses and are the result of supernovae, and intermediate or supermassive black holes which sit at the middle of galaxies / clusters and are thousands or millions of solar masses.  But LIGO was picking up two thirty solar mass black holes colliding to form a sixty solar mass black hole, and it did this within months of being switched back on, which suggests that either the LIGO team was incredibly lucky or there are a lot of these very large stellar black holes floating around that we've never seen before.

It's not a place to look unless we build a big enough telescope or microscope, or some other sort of sensitive detector. It's getting exponentially more expensive to build these things. Theoretically possible places to look are not actually places to look unless we can look there.

At least neutrinos (http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/neutrinos-continue-run-of-odd-behavior-at-daya-bay/) are still refusing to behave properly.

Still a long way from a warp drive or easy fusion, but these days you take what you can get...

Honestly they're exactly what I'm talking about when it comes to measurement equipment:

William Bragg, and his son William Bragg, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915 for inventing the first X-ray spectrometer, pictured HERE (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/X-ray_spectrometer%2C_1912._%289660569929%29.jpg). You can practically smell that Edwardian elbow grease.

Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015 for proving that neutrinos "oscillate" probabilistically between flavors as they travel through spacetime. This required the use of the Super Kamiokande, pictured HERE (http://41.media.tumblr.com/691a55245a1aad66d2f23d8fc31b9482/tumblr_nvr57a571g1r0qg4mo1_1280.jpg). Note the men in rafts.

The ATLAS detector, which I found a small enough photo to post rather than link:
(http://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kzqws7r0801qbuw3eo1_500.jpg)

It's a camera the size of an apartment building, mounted on CERN's 27km Large Hadron Collider and it may or may not have found a Higgs boson. It seems really likely.

LIGO (the gravity wave observation program) is two sites, 3000km apart each of which contain enormous vacuum-sealed tubes containing 4km long laser interferometers arranged at right angels.

Magnificent progress, yes. Sustainable progress, no.

(https://i.imgur.com/5XK0pnt.gif)

Orbital bombardment, probably.  :why_so_serious:

Only way to be sure.

Except they didn't go from nothing to LHC.

All progress is incremental, baby steps from the last thing achieved.

The only invention that happens is in fiction.

And yet at the same time that we're running the LHC experiments, we're tapping at the fringes of desktop accelerators (plasma wakefield accelerator) that have a significant portion of the energy as last generation's big boys - so they dont' hit the big numbers, but they hit more numbers and with a greater degree of tweaking the collision parameters to continue to probe nuclear and sub-nuclear reactions.

And I'm reminded of a period of time where space-based telescopes were considered to be the only path forward, until high launch costs and advances in adaptive optics made that not true at all... and now, (fingers crossed) we seem to be headed toward a time where that is exactly the opposite - launch costs come way down compared the headaches and costs of building another huge telescope on the ground.

So yeah, if there aren't any game-changing advances in corollary disciplines it becomes exponentially harder to just keep doing more of that we've been doing.  But when have we ever just done that?

I honestly don't see there to be any pessimism for the capacity to do scientific experimentation and exploration at this point in time.  It's, at least in physics, on the theoretical side of things that we seem to be a bit stuck.

I didn't mean to imply otherwise. My concern is that today's baby steps require seven league boots. The era when somebody could change our understanding of physics with something he built in his garage is long gone.

In 2001 one of the detector tubes at the Super Kamiokande imploded while the chamber was being refilled with water. The shockwave from that implosion led to a chain reaction of implosions in other tubes which ultimately cost somewhere upwards of $30 million. 7 thousand (out of 11 thousand) tubes imploded.

Only governments can afford these groundbreaking experiments.

Indeed. All I'm saying is that we're running out of places where we might push the frontier. The cost curves are too steep.

Not, mind you, that other experiments can't be done. There are all sorts of potential discoveries within the boundaries of our current understanding. Practical purposes may be found for the small scale accelerator technology you mention, for example. Ghost busting, perhaps.

I think at some point the only way to move ahead will be something that radically reduces the costs of instruments that have to operate at unprecedented scales. Not just incrementally reduces. Self-assembly of instruments in the asteroid belt by Von Neumann probes, something like that.

I lurk a lot, thought I should contribute.

I took this photo of Orion's Nebula tonight. I'm a very, very much an amateur, but for an unguided shot it's not too bad! If you're interested, you can find the acquisition info after the link.

(http://astrob.in/240612/0/rawthumb/gallery/get.jpg) (http://astrob.in/240612/0/)

That's amazing!

Just two nights ago the sky was crystal clear here and I was especially admiring Orion and M42. Nice to see I wasn't the only one!

Reminder & Heads up sort of:

The Exomars 2016 mission is packed and ready for launch on tomorrow in one week (2016-03-14 - 09:31UTC)

Already inside a Proton-M/Breeze-M in Baikonur:

(https://i.imgur.com/DbTyLlJ.jpg)


How it looks in natura:

(https://i.imgur.com/0Z742rH.jpg)

The thing on top is the Schiaparelli Entry, Descent and Landing demonstrator module (EDL), the spacecraft it sits on the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO).

More info about what it is and what is does later this week (I am feeling a bit lazy now :oops:)

Ack! (http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=23913) (paper from 2012)

As I understand it, the drag the interstellar hydrogen adds would also be formidable, which is also a problem with the hydrogen ramscoop concept (though a working magnetic ramscoop should also divert the relativistic hydrogen away from the hull too).

Anyway, that's just engineering!

 :awesome_for_real:

Irrelevant to a White-Juday drive system.  Basic warpfield mechanics 101.

Does it belong to Space or awesome pictures? Not sure, but here it is anyway:


(http://i.imgur.com/4asp8zS.gif)


http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=87675&eocn=home&eoci=iotd_image

Edit: It's as solar eclipse (obviously) and the shadow is moons (rather obviously too).

Edit 2: Not a but the solar eclipse of March 8 - 9th 2016. Images provided by GoreSat.  :grin:

Thank you Calapine, great stuff.

Nailed it! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pUAydjne5M&feature=youtu.be&t=35m47s)

Yes , the internet is going crazy over it right now  ;D

So Musk is printing more money I take it?  :drill:

The way I understand the situation:

Industry: You can't build cheaper high quality rockets.
SpaceX: We just did.
Industry: You can't build rockets that are high quality and lift heavier payloads.
SpaceX: We just did.
Industry: You can't improve the process and expense by recovering and recycling an entire stage.
SpaceX: We just did.
Industry: You won't be able to make a successful manned space craft.
SpaceX: Really...fuck you guys.

Am I correct in that this has been the general theme of this whole situation?

Replace Industry with ULA and you're basically correct

Nailing that landing gave me goosebumps. Now that's some fucking science.

Onboard view of the landing (https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/718605741288894464)

Apparently if all the testing goes well that Falcon 9 will be ready for re-use by June.

That landing was totally off-center; almost put that rocket in the drink.  :why_so_serious:

Watching the live stream of that yesterday was awesome, caught it at -0:04:00 and watched it until something like +0:20:00 when the solar panels on the Dragon deployed.

Nailing that landing on Of Course I Still Love You, made my day. :drill:

Let's go to Alpha Centauri!!!

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/stephen-hawking-and-billionaire-announce-project-send-tiny-probes-nearest-star-system-180958745/?no-ist

Presentation (just a snippet): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoCm6vZDDiQ




A frickin' mothership full of tiny probes with a sail in front and propelled by a laser beam from Earth.


FUCK YEAH  :drill: :drill: :drill:

Somebody's been reading Charles Stross.

Given current tech it is about as fiction too.

Work on JWST is contitung.

Today 13 of the 18 primary mirrors have been uncovered. NASA "streamed" it live, at 1 image per minute. So I created a 30 second timelaps out of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5IE1s1z9G0 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5IE1s1z9G0)

You know, looking at that -- more and more I'm certain the most incredible thing NASA has done with manned flight in the last few decades was fixing the Hubble.

Look at all the care they're having to take on Earth. Imagine trying to fix that in space.

The JWST is pretty freakin' badass though. I'm gonna be thrilled when it launches.

Also quite excited about the JWST, incredible piece of engineering.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory got some amazing footage of yesterday's Mercury transit:
https://youtu.be/AhWMOkrzKzs

Nothing special, just thought it looks nice:

(http://i.imgur.com/zjT1QLE.gif)

A timelapse from Mars Express, who is orbiting since 2003.

landed it again. Damn it!

It's starting to be a trend!

A 3D tour of pluto, sort of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIxQXGTl_mo

You need chrome to view it.

Ran fine here on Firefox.

This is kind of place to find a derelict starship full of eggs:



(https://i.redd.it/2fibzojki11x.jpg)



It's 67P of course, taken by Rosetta two days ago. The Picture is an out-take of a wider image that has been rotated & cropped to produce the "I am standing on it" effect. Full view here (https://planetgate.mps.mpg.de/Image_of_the_Day/public/NAC_2016-06-01T17.17.27.058Z_ID10_1397549002_F22.jpg)

LIGO found another blackhole merger (http://www.space.com/33176-gravitational-waves-from-second-black-hole-collision.html) event by observing the gravitational waves.

Something neat I saw when watching launch videos (yes...yes, I know...)

Soyuz boosters icing up progressively as they are being filled. Made a GIF:


(http://i.imgur.com/mN39W6R.gif)

Location of that is South Amercia btw, not Russia. Context:

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-1/Introducing_Sentinel-1

Not content with shitting up the Funny Picture thread with Polandballs I am now taking over the Space thread too!  :grin:


(Don't mean to be spammy, but it's a beautiful image...)


(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClU3bXhWQAAVKwi.jpg:large)


Last nights Ariane 5 start - her (it's?) heaviest* so far - 10730 kg to GTO (Geostationary Transfer Orbit).

The video itself worth a watch too, rare day launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5P_8PNKsrE


(*Heaviest to GTO, low earth orbit to ISS has been 21 tons)

That is a beautiful shot, I wish there was a higher res version!

I wrote CNES and asked. No idea how they are about public outreach, but let's see.

Hubble got re-upped for five years. Hopefully by the time that runs out, Space-X can get a manned vehicle high enough for a quick-and-dirty service. (Batteries and gryos are what it really needs, although I'm sure there's a ton of instrument packages they could swap out).

JWST is going to be fantastic, but it's not looking at the same wavelengths. If they can keep Hubble running, it's worth the rather small investment.

2001 is on TCM right now if you want to get in the mood for Juno's arrival.

Wow, thank you!

Yep, it's now confirmed: a rocky planet orbits the binary star system of Proxima Centauri, our closest neighbor  :heart: :heart:

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/24/health/proxima-b-centauri-rocky-planet-habitable-zone-neighbor-star/index.html


But, yeah, why it took so long to discover it, given the relatively small distance?


More stuff in the article linked above.

Excited  :drill: :drill: :drill:  Can't wait for my next four or five incarnations or so: I want to embark on the inevitable "noah's ark" that is going to head there  :grin:

What would the radiation and mag fields be like that close to the star??  Is it a linear degradation with temperature?

Mag field decays really quick, and radiation is going to be significantly less than it is here on Earth because red dwarfs release orders of magnitude fewer of the higher energy particles to begin with. The big trouble is that solar flares on some red dwarfs are just as impressive as the ones on yellow dwarfs like our sun, and the smaller distance they have to travel they'd be considerably less diffuse... and that could be pretty devastating. Proxima is just such a creature, and produces occasional bursts of X-ray fun.

Also it would always be, to our eyes, darker on the planet since so much of the radiation is in the invisible infra-red.

It might also be tidally locked with the star among other factors making the planet unfun to live on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri_b#Habitability)
There may, however, be more Planets within the habitable zone of Proxima.

Bad day for private spaceflight. SpaceX had a total lose in a preflight test fire. Not just the booster, but the payload and the pad, are total writeoffs.

No official announcement, but this probably means no more flights for months while the accident is being investigated.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/spacexs-falcon-9-rocket-apparently-blew-up-during-a-test-firing-thursday/

I went through a video of the explosion with a Frame-By-Frame function.

The two images are ~ 16 milliseconds apart, source is a 60 FPS recording


(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CrSk2EGWgAA-hIe.jpg)


Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BgJEXQkjNQ)

While it sucks that this happened, I think an event like this was needed and long overdue.

Musk's (and by extension, SpaceX's) hubris needed to be reigned in a bit. There have been reports of shoddy QA/QC on their manufacturing processes for years and they have been given a pass by the nerdisphere because "Musk is a visionary!" and "SpaceX hasn't had a failure in forever!". I am not saying that this was due to a manufacturing defect, but the "build it faster and cheaper, we need to ramp up our schedule because MARS!" attitude is pervasive and has the potential to be dangerous.

It happening now where the only loss was a few hundred million in hardware and a slipped launch schedule is much better than if it happened during a manned flight. Treating everything in the world as sonething that should be done in a Silicon Valley dot.com startup fashion is a dangerous outlook to have.

Some months ago I went through Glassdoor reviews of SpaceX and complains about practices on the workshop floor (so workers, not the engineers) cropped up a lot. What I remember: "You don't get decent training from the supervisor, its figure it out yourself" "People work in sneakers, no safety shoes" "Higher ups are all ex-car managers and have no clue about work procedures in aerospace manufacture"

This seems to fit as well:

(http://i.imgur.com/KZsVM2X.png)

Putting the payload on the rocket before the hotfire test - to save one single day - just cost them (their customer) > $300 million.

(The satellite was insured, but only AFTER rocket ignition...ouch)

Hacking rocket science and space travel -- what could possibly go wrong?

(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/84c63e4641266a860ab1435adff0a6ecf47c6b60/161_141_963_579/master/963.jpg?w=620&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=45d0e238d3689f1cf74035996f4994b0)

Some would call that a disaster; I'd call it an adventure.  :why_so_serious:

Better to learn it now, than when people are on board. Echoes of the Challenger bullshit.

Rosetta's Comet outburst.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Rosetta_captures_comet_outburst

At first I thought this was the comet blowing into two and then rejoining, but not quite.

I call it justice.  :drill:

Wait, they put the payload on the rocket for the TEST? To save themselves a day?

HOLY FUCK. My first thought when I read about the explosion being on a test run and not the final flight was "well, at least they didn't blow up their probably very expensive payload."

... the fuck?

Not only that it looks like SpaceX didn't take any insurance out on the Falcon 9 either, so it's a total write off for them as well (http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2016/09/02/425358.htm)

I'm not a rocket scientist either, just a guy who tries to keep up with this stuff, so take the following accordingly.

As I understand the process, the rocket has been static fired and pressurization tested already. This test was more accurately a pre-flight dress rehearsal,  where all systems were brought up to launch readiness together. Since the satellite connections and pre-flight programming are some of the things being tested, it doesn't make a lot of sense to not have the payload in place while doing it. At this point only small bugs should be remaining anyway -- the sort of things that could cause a short hold during actual launch, but might cause the launch window to be missed.

Clearly, something more than a small bug remained. But since the launch was going to be in less than two days whatever flaw caused the explosion now would have likely caused the explosion then.

I have no idea what de Selding is going on about. (He's with Spaceflight News isn't he? -- I couldn't find the article where he supported his tweet.) This is not Kerbal. You don't just snap the payload off the stack with a mouse. If you are going to do a pad test then you'll need to drop the rocket back horizontally, move it back to the assembly area, attach the payload, move it back and set back vertical. Then you'd need to test it again because moving it means things changed. Now what SpaceX *had* been considering was to skip this test altogether, since they figured they had the pre-flight pretty well nailed down by now.

Again, clearly not.

Insurance: Launch insurance does not kick in because there was no launch. (As an aside, if it had blown up on launch day it would still not kick in, since it blew pre-ignition.) However, standard accident and loss insurance does. There is a report that Musk does not insure his rockets, but the pre-launch payload insurance is actually (as far as I understand it) the responsibility of of the payload owner. I have no idea what their policy particulars are, but probably not as good as the launch failure payout, which normally includes time and service loss compensation.

Zuckerberg: Facebook had planned to lease some of the satellite's bandwidth for a few years, and thus Zuckerberg used the words "our satellite" in his own post on the matter. So some mainstream media has been reporting "SpaceX Blast Destroys Facebook Satellite." Yes, poor wording by Zuckerberg completely collapsed the media's factchecking ability. More News at Eleven (or not).

tl;dr version, IMHO the problem was not the test, but whatever screwup caused the blast, and that is where accusations of poor work practices have some validity. I don't know. I've got no inside view on SpaceX at all. Wish I did, even if it was just running the cafeteria. But personally I'm going to hold off joining the witchhunt until some more information comes out revealing just what exactly went wrong.

Oh, postscript I guess. If it had happened with actual crew onboard (assuming launch day, they would not have been onboard during the test), then the crew safety system would have lifted them and the capsule away from the blast. Assuming it worked right of course, but hey, at least they have one designed in, unlike the Shuttle where we flew it in deathtrap configuration for decades and just got used to the fact that if anything went wrong it was just going to be a full party wipe.

Yes, he is the Spacenews Paris Bureau chief.

SpaceX used to perform the final static fire tests without the payload attached, then - if successful - lower the rocket, wheel it to the integration building, attach the payload, and erect it again for final launch.

As seen below:

(http://i.imgur.com/h6kNqWI.jpg)

The image is from the static fire test for the SES-8 sat launch (3 days before scheduled launch), taken on the same launchpad (SLC-40) as yesterdays rocket. As can be seen there is no payload fairing on top.

Some time ago SpaceX started doing the tests with the satellites already on board, thus avoiding one work step. Which now backfired...

Okay found it. Yeah they changed their procedure in 2014, although saying it was done solely to save money and time is arguable.

In any case, I imagine SpaceX is re-examining that decision now...

The fact that they ever did vertical testing without the payload is the weird thing.

Pretty much all other horizontal integrators flip the rocket upright once when it reaches the pad and don't tilt it back down to avoid additional stress on the rocket. Also, it makes no sense to test the systems in a non integrated state and give it a green light for the launch as tilting it down and adding things changes the configuration/loading.

The 'entire rocket hotfire test' is an SpaceX speciality. Neither ULA, Arianespace nor the Russians do it.

For Ariane5 I know the main engine will be fired twice as part of acceptance testing before delivery, but that's before it's part of the rocket stack.

Since this test had not gotten near the point of ignition, the saying their plan to do this integrated to cut time off the window is moot anyway.

None of those guys are shooting for reusability and rapid turnaround either.

Unfortunately, Thursday's very loud and flashy anomaly shows that SpaceX hasn't quite reached that goal yet either.

From what I've heard, they decreased the temperature of the LOX fuel recently, which I'd consider a probable cause. Not just for the "because they changed something, then it exploded" but because material properties can vary over a thermal range, and it just takes missing a single part, weld, or stress to have it suddenly fail in colder conditions. (Admittedly, I'm biased -- my job is making software tools for materials properties, fracture control, and failure analysis, and the engineering department I work with does that sort of thing for spacecraft and airplanes for a living. So I'm reaching to what I'm familiar with).

There was an American automaker that had a raft of recalls back in the 70s or 80s because they made diesel engines by modding their gasoline ones, and the higher temps ate the engine fairly quickly.

In Other News:

Remember the EM/Cannae Drive? The reactionless one NASA was testing?

They're releasing a paper, and translated from Science to English, the synopsis reads something like: "It keeps producing thrust, and we don't know why. We've tested it and tested it, but it produces thrust outside our error bars." (30 to 50 pico-Newtons per kilowatt, I think. Would scale up to about ion-drive thrusts at half a megawatt) With an implied "Surely someone can find out how we messed up a year's worth of tests, because we can't figure it out and also we can't really believe this works".

NASA's only real explanation of thrust (virtual particle ion drive) is at odds with the inventor's own, and there's a few other weird theories floating around as well. Everyone's really loathe to believe it, because in terms of space holy grails, reactionless drives rate just below "working FTL" and "artificial gravity".

So now we just need some kind of space-worthy power system that puts out a half-MWe over a very long time. Too bad there aren't any--the closest the US has ever done was the SAFE-400 fission heatpipe system intended to deliver 100KW electricity for 10 years, and it was scrapped some number of years ago (2002?). There may be some comparable work done by a Russian company as recently as 2011 (http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/transport/nuclear-reactors-for-space.aspx) but even if it hasn't been cancelled it's still many years away, and that wasn't even a half-MW. Apparently there are serious materials considerations that make it hard to just scale up fission heatpipe designs.

Maybe NASA can get Pons and Fleischmann to revisit their rule-breaking power supply to match with the rule-breaking engine.  :grin:

You don't really need a half newton of force. I mean the more the better, but it all adds up. That half-newton thrust is NASA's NEXT Ion engine, their 'strongest' yet.

ION engines generally measure thrust in mN. NSTAR ran at 20 to 92 mN. I think Dawn (using NSTAR) pushed it's delta v up to 10 km/s. Lacking reaction mass, an EM drive or equivilant would be more efficient -- 200kg of fuel can only be used once, but 200kg of solar panels or RTG can fire continuously. There's a reason NASA is putting so much money into ion drives for probe missions.

I'd also say that, if this thing actually works, that it's really unlikely that 1MW to 1N is anything resembling max efficiency, simply because nobody is entirely sure how it works -- much less have engineered for the most efficient mechanism.

Latest WAG I heard for explaining it was essentially that it is generating Tesla waves (two matched and mutually inverted photons), which shows you how desperate they are a getting for an explanation that doesn't require junking the Standard Model.

--Dave

50 pico Newton is nine orders of magnitude lower than what NSTAR puts out, so if the Cannae drive scales linearly and is at 50 pN per KW now, it'd need on the order of terawatts of power to match what Dawn's ion engine does now.

I would be more than slightly surprised if it turns out that optimizing something involving unknown principles results in a billion-fold increase in performance.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say--a Cannae drive-equipped cubesat is going to be launched in the near future (http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a22678/em-drive-cannae-cubesat-reactionless/), if they can get funding.

If it works, and generates more thrust than, say, a laser pointing into vacuum, not only do we have a nifty propulsion system, but we also have a working perpetual motion machine (http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.00494)!

I have no idea how they derived their scale factor, since as Mahrin points out, everyone's really confused over the mechanism with multiple competing theories. (Mahrin: I read one that had some sort of weird modified concept of inertia and Unruh radiation, which I've never even heard of).

What NASA tested was made by an American based on the rough EM drive specs by the inventor, and that the Chinese have reported different thrust numbers and nobody understands how this stupid thing produces momentum. People aren't testing the exact same engine and not with the same power inputs. Nobody knows what's causing it --  Tesla waves, virtual particles, whatever that inertia thing is, whatever the inventor claims it is). So I have no idea the scaling factor, I have no idea how the few sources I got rated it at about 1N per MW, but I do really suspect that whatever design they've got is not optimal.

Because nobody knows what's going on, only NASA finally got annoyed enough to shove it in a vacuum chamber and it still works and it shouldn't at all. I think the best description is "It's like standing in a box, pushing on both sides of the box, and having the stupid thing move".

Yes, propellant densifcation, used in the latest iteration of the rocket.

- 207° C for the LOX. I don't have numbers on the what temperature they used before, but logic dictates it must have been below boiling point, so < -183° C.

- 7° C for the Kerosin, compared to (I am guessing) ambient temperature beforehand.

Another source for issues could be the Helium COPVs which that are used to pressurize the other tanks. The CRS-7 accident was caused by one of those bottles breaking free and in 2014 a launch had to scrubbed due to a helium leak.

They used to be a supplier manufactured item, but SpaceX (possibly as response to the 2014 issue?) now produces them in-house. Overall not a trivial component, even NASA had worries regarding the Shuttle COPVs, although there there issues were mostly due to age and degradation over time.


I guess we'll know more in a few weeks.  :-)

Rocket science is harder. Rocket engineering is quite possibly harder. :)

There was talk it was possibly the payload's fault for the mishap.  Given where it seemed the flash originated from, that's a tough sell.  Sadly, this will set a bunch of projects behind schedule (including my division's).  We were supposed to fly on a falcon-heavy.   :uhrr:   If it turns out to be the upper-stage's improved fuel system, they'll potentially lose 30% thrust and the ability to backburn during  a geosync insertion.

Work on Tuesday should be interesting at the water cooler.

That said, I'd rather have a SpaceX induced delay than a NASA or JPL one.  And this kind of thing is why a lot of tech. is moving away from the ginormous, expensive space platforms.  Cheap nanosat swarms get more and more en vogue every year (blow em up all you want).  The tracking is the problem (so the AirForce hates em for obvious reasons).

Honestly, most physicists I read would be happy to junk the Standard Model -- they'd just rather it be cracked by something like the 9 billion dollar LHC than somebody rattling an old tin box!

There are standards to be kept, no pun intended....

Well, there are SM explanations. Some barely even stretch it a little (the QM stuff). I think everyone would be simultaneously pleased and annoyed. Pleased that we found a crack, a place where weird stuff happens so we can poke at it and find more interesting stuff. Annoyed that it was a guy with a tin box, and not focused research. I think the physicists, at least, felt they were pretty far past someone accidentally discovering something weird.

I keep suspecting there's a magnetic or thermal component, but some weird magnetic interaction (say with the Earth's field) is easy enough to test for (you know, you point it different directions, for one. Also, magnetic shielding) and thermal stuff is also generally possible to account for. (Thermal radiation was what was boosting Voyager's speed -- took them a long time to figure that out). Plus, I think Eagleworks did break down and do some vacuum chamber tests (not sure if they had it running a vacuum, but I know they dropped the temp really low) -- which means they can generally measure that.

Ghambit:

NASA's problem has always been Congress and public opinion. They're simply not allowed failures, and trying to design anything when Congress randomly changes your budgets and goals is a PITA. Don't even get me started on the weird way they've budgeted Orion and the new heavy lift vehicle. it's killing in-house tool development, and it ain't because the directorate chiefs don't see the problem.

ISS was a nightmare. They kept changing designs over and over and over, and yanking in and out partners. It's a freaking miracle it's up there. At this point. I'm willing to bet half the total cost -- minimum -- of ISS was because of endless redesign cycles. Someone in Congress would get a bug up their ass, declare they wanted 6 people instead of 4, and then NASA would have to chunk hundreds of millions in designs, prototypes, and the like, and start mostly over. Then three years later, it'd be 5 people.

Honestly, I think NASA would work a heck of a lot better if Congress would basically say "We'll assess programs and large project budgets every 5 years". Heck, NASA's on what -- the third or fourth attempt to replace the Shuttle, because Congress keeps cancelling the program then restarting it again a year later, when they realize magic hasn't created rockets? Do you know how many billions were tossed down that rathole? NASA's reused what it could, and finally just started claiming that whatever Congress wanted, they  needed a new manned rocket and a new heavy lift vehicle to do it. (Want to go to Mars? We need a new manned rocket and a new heavy lift vehicle. The moon? Same? The underwater city of Atlantis? We'll need those rockets to launch the magic Atlantis finding stuff and man it)  and got away with (as best I can tell) just renaming it. It still involved rebidding congrats and some more tear-down and redesign, but they've at least kept some forward momentum.

(Fun random space fact: You know how capsules use parachutes when coming down from orbit? Like multiple sets? You know how they make sure the are severed at the right time? EXPLOSIVES. Yeah, when you need a parachute cord cut, you use two chunks of metal and wad of explosives o slam the sharp chunk of metal into the flat one at high speeds, with the cable in between. Simple is sometimes best. And also awesome. That mechanism dates back to Mercury, IIRC. I know Apollo used it).

Phliae has been found!  :-)



(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CrmNvekXYAA5NZN.jpg:large)



Labeled close up, spoilered for size:

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Philae_found


Edit: If one considers how bright the surrounding area is Philae was really unlucky to get stuck at that one particular spot...

Well, sort of. It's very likely that big outcropping is the thing that stopped it from bouncing. Otherwise who knows where it might have ended up.

True, good point...

---

Guessing game:

Which one of those potential locations turned out to be the real Philae?


(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CrmnVRnXgAAD7HT.jpg:large)

Wow that really shows how rugged that rock is in that area.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsKBCT2WIAAFHSi.jpg)

Jeff Bezos announced his new rocket "New Glenn". Conveniently 2 weeks before Elon Musk's presention of BFR on the next International Aeronautical Congress.


This is starting to be a dick waving context...

Edit: Just look at that:

Stage diameter: 7 Meter
Height New Glenn 2: 82.3 Meter
Height New Glenn 3: 95.4 Meter
Thrust first stage: 17,125 kN
Engines First Stage: 7x BE-4 CH4/LOX
Engines Second Stage: 1x BE-4 Vac.
Engine Third Stage: 1x BE-3 Vac LH2/LOX

First launch: Before 2020.  :ye_gods:

Musk is building BFRs now? Holy shit! That is what really fucked up Planetside.  :why_so_serious:

AND he's teasing out info on the next size up planned that would be able to make lunar orbit, the New Armstrong!

Bezos' slow and steady might just end up winning the space(X) race.

As a humorous point, some poster on another site got a spit take from me by mentioning in reply to the question what would Bezos name a conjectured Mars capable rocket, --"Anything but New Musk."

I think the Mars rocket would be "New Watney".

As a note, size is a bit deceptive here as Methan is a less dense fuel compared to Kerosin. Performance wise the rocket seems to be 20-30% above Falcon Heavy for Low Earth Orbit and ~ 50% above for Mars injection (in the 3 stage version).

I am sort of skeptical regarding the development timeline: first launch before 2020. Again taking Falcon Heavy as comparison, Musk initially talked about first launch in 2013. And see where he is now...

Second issue is the business case.

Bezos "New Glenn is designed to launch commercial satellites and to fly humans into space".

For this the rocket is way overized, typical GTO satellites weight 3 - 5.5 tons, with the heaviest topping out somewhere at 6.7 tons.  Of course some of the nominal performance will be spent/wasted for re-usability, but even factoring in that it's still too big.

The large fairing diameter is going to be his big selling point.

One of the reasons commercial launches are all in the same weight range is that they are all limited in physical dimensions in the same way. Allow them to build a bigger box that they can fill with more electronics and bigger/better inertia wheels and the weight will go up as a consequence.

Not, really no. Current satellites don't even use the width offered by widest flying now:

Ariane 5 uses a 5,4m diameter fairing (same as stage width). Aerodynamically it would have been easily possible to increase to 7 meter, (same as the New Glenn), if there was customer desire, but there was no pressure by the market.

Ariane 6 will receive a longer fairing, but diameter stays the same.

Falcon 9 uses a 5,2m diameter fairing and apparently SpaceX doesn't see this as a drawback.

Proton uses a 4,35 m fairing.

Edit: I queried about GTO performance, the answer was ~ 30 tons, according to Dr. Zubrin.


Edit 2: I did not mean to sound rude, just tired.

Sitxy Symbols does a pretty good job talking about Lisa Pathfinder:

Golden Cubes and Gravitational Waves - Sixty Symbols (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzPPnP9FQeI)

6m39 sec video.


NASA is very likley to rejoin für eLISA btw:


NASA moves to rejoin sped-up gravitational wave mission (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/nasa-moves-rejoin-sped-gravitational-wave-mission)

SpaceX just posted an anomly updated regarding the Falcon 9 explosion:


(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CtDj6qMWAAEaLDc.jpg:large)
http://www.spacex.com/news/2016/09/01/anomaly-updates


Which ties in to something I posted earlier:

First thought: So it's Helium again. Either a) they didn't find the root cause in CRS-7 and it happend again or b) their revised Quality Assurance and production changes post-accident weren't enough to avoid or catch another critical manufactuing error just 10 flights after the last disaster. Edit: or c) there is another unconnected design flaw in the same sub-system.

Both is bad.

Don't forget, they swapped to deeper cryo for this launch. There's also the possibility of failure due to change in the thermal regime -- someone's safety factor on a part or inspections procedure might not have been properly adjusted to fit the new temperature profiles.

SpaceX wouldn't be the first company to have a fuck-up due to changing operating temperatures.

It's amazing the little shit that can break something. I watched a breakdown analysis at work -- someone had subbed in kevlar straps for nylon to add additional margin for a test. It didn't go well, because there was an initial force on the straps that the nylon cords stretched on (so the force was handled over a longer time span) and the kevlar...did not. I watched a video of metal bending like putty then snapping back as the kevlar layers broke.

They'd been doing that test for years with nylon, never realized the forces at the moment of initiation were that high. Not until they changed test parameters and wanted additional margin, and then that was months of analysis to figure out why it broke, to be able to model and test the break reliably, then put in a real fix that the test people would accept. (That test, the way it broke -- could have been really, really bad. Like fatalities bad. I don't blame the folks who own the equipment for saying "Not until you can explain this, model it, show physical tests, and basically make me certain it's not gonna happen again")

Tank weld QA/QC procedures were the thing I heard quite a bit of rumors about being pretty terrible at Space-X years ago. Which means I am not really surprised to hear that tank integrity might have been a cause, especially if it is true that they had recently re-insourced the production of the tanks. Welding pressure vessels properly is no joke, even with common materials like steel. When you use the crazy light-weight alloys that are used in rockets it is even more difficult to do correctly.

I've heard the same thing from some guys in the materials section -- they did some analysis work on tank welds, and the gist was "NASA wouldn't fly with that". (It was, I admit, a bit up in the air as to whether NASA was being too cautious or SpaceX too risky).

I know the guys that do weld analysis go bonkers doing lifetime calcs because welding itself can add in a lot of stresses, depending on a complex stew of variables (material welded, material used in the weld, weld technique, how good the welder was, dimensions of weld) that can be hard to factor in. That's before you get things like cracks in the weld, or impacting the weld....or god help you, thermal expansion of the weld and base material aren't the same....

This was not "being too cautious" kind of rumors. It was "the welds looked bad enough that a person welding like that on a certification exam would probably not pass" kind of rumors. And the fact that Space-X was (at least at the time) full of young fresh out of engineering school know-it-alls who scoffed at anything told to them by a guy with grey hair made it likely that they ignored advice because "it was strong enough in the tests we ran".

The bolded bit is a false assumption; for any given welding procedure certification, the weld is judged much more harshly for acceptance than a production weld because weld tests are welded under ideal conditions.

No weld going into space would ever be accepted with a crack in it.

A crack that you know is there. You can't go over every inch of a vehicle with the highest resolution scanners. It'd take forever and cost a fortune. And it's unnecessary.

Analysts (everything from guys doing lifetime analysis or setting inspection schedules to design work) basically take your material (and the shape of it), take the stresses into account, and work to find the critical crack size. That is, the size of the crack where stuff goes pear shape and it grows to failure.

In this case, you've got a guy who looks at the PV and the weld and works out the critical size --- it might be, say, any crack over 0.1mm in the weld will grow to failure in a single launch. So that'll determine inspection -- they'll use the tools and techniques to find cracks that small or larger (there's usually knockdown factor, so they'll really search for anything over 0.05mm). This is true whether it's a single-use item or a reusable one.

Airframe folks do the same thing -- that's how they determine flight hours between inspections and recerts.

(This is actually what I do for a living -- we provide tools to people doing this sort of thing).

So yeah, they won't fly with a noticeable crack. But if their inspection regime was looking for, say, 0.5mm (1mm being the "oh shit" crack size with a high chance to grow to failure with, so a safety factor of 2) and bigger on the weld but the change in thermal regime meant that the critical size was really 0.6mm or so, and suddenly their safety margins are jack shit. So some weird residual stresses from a weld or from fabrication might be enough to cause failure.

Fun fact: NASA trains inspectors to do this crap -- take a part and find all cracks, notches, or flaws of a given size or bigger. You don't get your cert if you miss even one, and the people that do them like to be sneaky. I work with a guy that was fabbing some test articles for the latest batch of inspectors -- it's apparently a massive PITA to make realistic looking cracks, notches, and flaws that have to be an exact size (where the smallest ones are REALLY small) without damaging the surroundings and making them more obvious than they'd be on a real part. It's not a good test if you have tool marks pointing to suspicious areas. He spent a lot of time working his ass off on those.

Full Steam ahead for Elon:

SpaceX released a Youtubeclip of it's Interplanetary Transport System

42 Raptor engines in the first stage, 127 800 kN thrust. Or just shy about 4x Saturn-Vs, refueling in Orbit, humans on Mars, the whole enchilada:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFAx

(http://i.imgur.com/UX2Atr9.png)

Here is an Imgur album (https://imgur.com/a/20nku) with all the slides from his presentation


(http://i.imgur.com/YxQiWqk.png)

Dick measuring contest

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/27/13058990/mars-mission-spaceship-announced-elon-musk-spacex

Here's some reading about his plans.

It's pretty charitable to call them plans. His plans on Mars are only a bit ahead of Theranos' plans for a magic blood-testing technology. The stuff that he's punting down the road to think about later is utterly fundamental, profoundly difficult. Plus he doesn't even have anything besides shopworn SF-fan fetish ideas about whether the entire idea of living on Mars makes even a lick of sense, even for the objective of putting our eggs in more than one planetary basket. I can buy that he might be able to manufacture a rocket that can get there, and maybe even a landing vehicle that can get humans to the surface. Maybe, maybe, one that can get them off the surface, though that's a different kettle of fish. But even with fueling in orbit, putting one hundred people in that rocket for an 80-day voyage and then just somehow having them build everything they need to survive indefinitely from the raw materials on Mars, since there's no way even with drops sent ahead to provide everything they'd need to become self-sustaining before they all starve, suffocate and die of thirst. Sorry, no way, no how, not with anything available in the next two or three decades even in the most optimistic funding scenarios. And doing it through funding just tossed into the project by aspirant travellers, other private companies, and public agencies alongside whatever he's going to contribute while keeping all of them totally out of the loop on any decisions related to the project? Also not going to happen no matter how much he thumbs through his copy of Atlas Shrugged.

Try saying that in a Space-related webforum  :awesome_for_real:

Edit:

And of course it's not easier arguing against this if serious outlets like Slate write articles titled "Elon wants to put a million people on Mars. He might do it." (http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/09/29/musk_reveals_spacex_plans_to_colonize_mars.html)

Which is the whole problem I have with SpaceX.

Musk is hero-worshipped by the "neckbeard" community so much that being critical of anything he says is like you killed their firstborn. They bring out the knives at any remotely critical comment about SpaceX, Tesla, or Musk himself. Then, on the flip side, you say anything positive about ANY other company building rockets and you are shouted down by the mob.

Taking the stuff he announced at anything close to face value is like watching the Jetsons in the 1960s and believing that was what 1975 America would look like.

Yes. Even if one disagrees with Khaldun and considers the idea workable in general, the presentation contains so many hair-raising details that should set of any bullshit detector:

Such as the planned 1000x (one-thousand) times re-use of the huge 42-engine first stage. Even 50 times would be a technical revolution...
The 200k/per person flight-price is calculated with the amortization over 1000 flights as well btw...

Or the price of colony ship for 100 people, departure mass 2250 tons. Will be able to land on Mars and Earth: 200 m $. In other words, less than a Boeing 777 or 1/10th of a Space Shuttle

How...?  :oh_i_see:


Change of topic:

Rosetta performed her collision burn, duration 208 seconds.

Next stop: Surface of 67P in about 13 hours from now. 12 years of operation are coming to end. :heartbreak:

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CtjUN1BWAAAkSRr.jpg)

Once upon a time... Rosetta's grand finale (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVKFyFbfpOI)

I actually think it's workable and I like the idea. Which is EXACTLY why I think everyone who agrees should be grabbing pitchforks and torches and going after Musk, because he's gonna fuck the whole thing over when it turns out in 2025 he's snuck off to a tax haven island with what's left of the $100,000 checks some possible passengers wrote him.

The thing that I should not have to tell an arch-capitalist like Musk who masturbates to pictures of Ayn Rand is you gotta have a profit motive. There is no profit motive to going to Mars. If it was easy to make Mars colonies, we'd already have pizza shops on Vinson Massif in Antarctica, a vastly more forgiving place. If Musk were serious, that is exactly what he'd do: take a prototype "Interplanetary Transport" into orbit successfully and land it with 200 colonists in interior Antarctica and test making a colony from scratch with the materials in the rocket, no assistance from anywhere. At least there's water and air and non-contaminated soil. If they can't do it and have to call home for rescue, it's not ready. If they can do it, it's probably still not ready, but you're close. But Musk just wants to go go go because he has this thing that says, "I am the savior of all human beings" in his head. It's dumb and the only people who fall for it are people with an equally dumb form of beta-male self-celebration thrumming through their brains. It's a con game at best, a lunatic religious movement at worst.

I want us to be out there in the galaxy as well. The fact is that we're only getting there, at least in our short-term future, via robotic probes. A real visionary understands that we're at the bottom of a well more fierce than gravity, it's a well called time. The things we want to do at our most visionary happen only at time scales that make the vanity of someone like Elon Musk irrelevant. The real visionaries might learn to accept their smallness in the big picture of things and do the small but wonderful things that put us on the road to being something more than they are. No one will remember us, if we do our job right, when the grand and beautiful things that might come to pass eventually bless us as a species.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CtjUN1BWAAAkSRr.jpg)

Digging the 20-year old UI/window manager they are using still.

Wasn't Musk the hyperloop guy too?

Because I admit, I don't know much about public transport, but I could spot some kinda big "Whats" in there, at least with the rough budget and speed/time estimates he gave. (Like I'm pretty sure purchasing the land, or the right of ways at least, wouldn't be nearly that cheap. And also, you can't maintain maximum speed between two endpoints unless those are the ONLY places the thing stops, which didn't jive with some of the hype. And no talk about recovering from errors or accidents, and a whole lot of engineering stuff kinda hand-waved away).

Too much hype, not even meat.

Same problem here.

"Yeah, that SEEMS like it works, but um....how are you gonna turn those stages around that fast? What are you doing about radiation -- solar flare possibilities and the like? How the fuck do you plan to live on Mars, which is about as inhospitable as the Moon. Hell, why aren't you going to the Moon which is just as killer, but has a lower escape velocity? Try stuff out right next door, you know?"

Not only that I imagine that the Moon could have a real profit motive with it for mining.

 :grin: :grin:

Since the Rosetta mission was designed in the early 1990 (start 1992) there is lot's of old shit...

Rosetta runs with a Dynex 16 Bit @ 25 Mhz CPU from the 80ies

Philea runs 2 RTX2010 @ 8 Mhz, plus another 8 of them for the scientifc experiments. The software is in Forth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)).

I saw a show that said that one of the keys to cheap nuclear fusion is mining Helium-3 on the moon as it is prevalent there but is insanely rare on Earth.

But these "visionaries" don't want to go to the Moon because men have been there before and you don't get as much recognition for "first guy in 50 years to land on the Moon".

Space tourism to the moon would be huge.

Completely. There's a genuine profit motive. Look what rich assholes will pay to be carried to the top of Mt. Everest, more or less. Offer them a chance to be one of a small number of tourists to go to the moon and they'd probably be willing to pay $100 million for it or more. Any technology for building a base there will work elsewhere in the solar system. If something goes actually wrong in the base and you have a regular pipeline for getting people up there and back, it might not be a death sentence. If you can learn to make water and air and food for a moonbase, you can do it anywhere. Helium-3 might have genuine value in our actually existing economy.

But yeah, Musk's not doing any of that because vanity. And he's got perfect California Ideology armor: you're just a second-hander if you try to pull the great visionary down, you're just a collectivist filled with jealousy for a man of vision!

No, we're just people who actually like the idea of human beings actually slowly expanding into the wider solar system and don't want to see a preening narcissist ruin it.

I missed it, sleepting until 15:00 :(

Rosetta's last image:
2.4x2.4 meter across, from a distance of 51 meters (new data suggest 23 meters), seconds before impact. Blurry because it's too close for the cameras to focus.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CtmaiDqXYAAyrY3.jpg:large)


Higher quality image , from 1.2 km, showing an area of 33x33 meters.

NASA Deep Space Network helped out at the end of mission as the 70-Meters antennnas allowed for a higher bandwith in the crucial phase.

For Chimpy Trippy, old-timey UI showing incoming packets:
Rosetta was programmed to turn off once a sudden shift in orientation, as caused by touching the surface, was detected, so that definitely was the last of it.

And here is the final update in the video series:
Once upon a time...Mission complete (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcYo-qQ5HbA)

Trippy commented on the UI, not me. I spend enough time living in 1990s IBM interfaces that I don't get that nostalgic for old school computers :drill:

Your names are too close!  :-P

If you want profitable "in our lifetime" space exploitation, you have to be looking at asteroid/comet capture. Anything else is a bid for the history books, not the bottom line, the costs of pulling it out of the gravity wells will make it nonviable.

--Dave

There's also the fact that a LOT of the engineers prefer simplistic UI's.

I did design work for Shuttle and Station, and their primary requirements were data flexibility (they wanted to be able to attach to a giant range of data types and sources) and display flexibility (they wanted to be able to do graphs, real-time numbers, dials, buttons, colors, alarms and to be able to customize it by group and even by individual).

And by and large, the more experienced they got? The simpler the displays. Mostly numbers, with the occasional small graph.

We had some we made for "visitors" (stuff like 2D outlines of the shuttle, where the wing leading edges and nose changed colors according to thermal measurements during landing, along with temperature readouts) but the folks using it? They often just made boxes, each with several readings (just numbers, colored by ranges sometimes). Sometimes hooked to audible alarms.  Admittedly some of them mimicked the layout of the control panels and such, so they could direct astronauts to the right area to double check the telemetry against onboard readings.

But mostly it was lots of numbers, in lots of colors, sometiems with flashing borders or background colors -- critical stuff easy to spot at a glance, warnings and problem areas jumping out, etc.

Managers often wanted fancy. Engineers wanted simple, modifiable, and without frills. They wanted a display they could pack with sensor readings in an order they liked, that reacted exactly as they liked.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ct2hiOCW8AATTqR.jpg)

The JWST main mirror becomes quite impressive when pictured besides humans for scale...

Sigh...  bananas!

Blue Origin update:

Blue Origin flew New Shepard today and tested the Launch Abort System (LAS) during midflight. It worked.

Surprisingly the first stage kept going as well and then performed a successful landing. Because the way the LAS is built - the solid rocket motor is on the downside of the capsule and shoots directly onto the first stage - this wasn't a given at all.
Impressive demonstration by Blue Origin.

But watch yourself: Liftoff is at 1:06:18 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqUIX3Z4r3k)


SpaceX update:

Gywnne Shotwell gave an interview today at the Asia-Pacific APSCC conference. Two intersting takeaways:

1) She specified the earlier investigation statement saying the pad explosion was caused "anomaly into the Helium system" into "We believe that the composite over wrapped pressure vessel [the helium bottle], known as a COPv, let go in the tank."

I believe I deserve a pat on the head for calling it!

2) SpaceX reduces the price discount for booking a re-used first stage to 10% (formerly 30%). She justified that by the higher reliability of an already-flown rocket.

Considering how much Musk was touting re-usabilty as a game-changer for the last years, a 10 % saving sounds rather underwhelming.


ESA Update:

The Exomars Trace Gas Orbiter is going to reach Mars on 19th and drop the Schiapperlli lander before starting it's science mission.

EDM Schiapperli (Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module) is basically a 600 kg testbed for the landing system of the 2020 Exomars rover. It's job ist just to land, really. It has a minor science suite that will work a few days, than batteries run out - no solar panels or RTG even.

Definitely not the cheapest way to do this, but very typical of ESA's careful, step-by-step approach.

Picture of both, EDM on top:
(http://i.imgur.com/NZ0BMuN.jpg)

Exomars, with Human and Mars Express for scale:
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1b/ExoMars_TGO_size_vs_Mars_Express.svg/1920px-ExoMars_TGO_size_vs_Mars_Express.svg.png)