Space Thread

[Ghambit]

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.

[Quinton]

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

[Chimpy]

Need.
More.
Input.

[Count Nerfedalot]

Wall-E? Is that you? 

[Vaiti]

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

[pxib]

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.

[Viin]

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

[Obo]

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

[Ghambit]

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.

[ghost]

It looks like the Warp Drive may be more feasible than previously thought. 

An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.

The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.

But recently White calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977.

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

[Ghambit]

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

[proudft]

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.  

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

[Ghambit]

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.  

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

[ghost]

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

[01101010]

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

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

[Lantyssa]

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

[ghost]

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

[Sky]

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!

[ajax34i]

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

[01101010]

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. 

[Ghambit]

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

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

[Mrbloodworth]

Streams Of Water Once Flowed On Mars; NASA Says Photos Prove It

Fascinating.

[MahrinSkel]

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.  

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

When the Alcubierre-driven ship decelerates from superluminal speed, the particles its bubble has gathered are released in energetic outbursts. In the case of forward-facing particles the outburst can be very energetic — enough to destroy anyone at the destination directly in front of the ship.

“Any people at the destination,” the team’s paper concludes, “would be gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for [forward] region particles.”

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

--Dave

[Lantyssa]

Yes.

[Ghambit]

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

[Signe]

Robot Pants!!! 

[cironian]

Robot Pants!!! 

Sorry, NASA. You lost to an earlier design from across the pond.

[01101010]

Robot Pants!!! 

So the Stormtrooper construction begins.

[Furiously]

Batman had those too...

[Signe]

I  The Wrong Trousers.

[pxib]

European astronomers found an Earth-sized planet orbiting Alpha Centauri 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!

[Ghambit]

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.

A q-Thruster would work using the same principles behind Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) thrusters. The virtual plasma is exposed to crossed fields which forces plasma in one direction at high velocity. Q-Thruster differ by using the quantum vacuum fluctuations as the fuel source eliminating the need to carry propellant. Not carrying propellant solves a host of problems plaguing designers of space propulsion drives, particularly ones intended for interstellar travel.

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.   

[Kail]

European astronomers found an Earth-sized planet orbiting Alpha Centauri using the doppler variation of the star's red shift.

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...

[Engels]

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

[Lantyssa]

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