Space In General

[terminator363]

👍

 

[CodeRedR51]

Surprised that only got one comment. I find it highly fascinating.

 

[Stevisiov]

Surprised that only got one comment. I find it highly fascinating.

Well it's not the first grasshopper run that space X have achieved. It is the highest though and it is impressive.

I will be particularly impressed if and when they achieve it from re-entry. It will be a game changer for space travel.

Consider me excited.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Well it's not the first grasshopper run that space X have achieved. It is the highest though and it is impressive.

Yep, know that.

I've posted just about every launch video of it in this thread.

 

[Dan_]

I'm following it as well, though to be fair the major space related event of the week was Orbital's Antares maiden launch.

Speculation on the industry holds that SpaceX will do the first landing simulation tests with their new and improved v1.1 of the Falcon rocket, apparently the rocket will try to soft land at the sea so they might be able to recover the whole stage and study it, that alone would be mega. Elon himself has stated that they are expecting to fail at the first five or so attempts.

The Grasshopper tests might look impressive but are not much different from the Delta Clipper DC-X from the 90's, apart from being drastically bigger. Getting a flight hardware first stage, turning it around, transitioning it from supersonic speed to subsonic, pluging it in the lower atmosphere and still getting it in one piece to be recovered by a barge, now that will be a major breaktrough and one that could change the history of the space launch industry.

Godspeed SpaceX!

 

[Wardez]

Yeah! Very excited about all these experiments and tests!

Man, what a time to be alive, things are happening so fast.

Bigelow Aerospace is doing some awesome work too, supposedly getting close to finalizing their Moon colony prototypes.

 

[braunracing88]

Cassini recently captured some amazing images of a hurricane-like storm at Saturn's North Pole!
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/04/video-saturn-hurricane/

 

[Brett]

A little more information about the hurricane storm on Saturn can be found here: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/04/30/saturn_storm_incredible_photo_of_a_hurricane_at_saturn_s_north_pole.html.

For those of you with the equipment, apparently now is a very good time to look for Saturn in the sky.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Virgin Galactic ran it's first powered flight of their space plane yesterday. They're hoping to start suborbital flights by the end of the year and start carrying passengers for $200,000 per ticket into space sometime in 2014.

http://www.space.com/20884-virgin-galactic-spaceshiptwo-rocket-reactions.html

 

[eran0004]

I'm building a scale model of the solar system in a 3D software called Blender. Since it has a game engine, it allows me to make a camera object and control it to fly around in space, as well as having the planets rotate around their axis and orbit around the sun. One full day cycle of Earth takes 100 minutes to complete at the current rate.

One thing that really struck me is that space is huge. I mean, really huge! I set the speed of the camera object to the speed of light and I was expecting things to go really fast. So I pointed the camera towards Mars and pressed forward. And nothing happened. After what felt like an eternity I finally arrived at Mars. In the far distance I could see the four tiny pixels of Jupiter. I turned the camera around 180° to have a look at the Earth, and this is what I saw:

The big white circle is obviously the sun. The black dot is the Earth and Venus (the right half is Earth, and the left half is Venus). The orbits are all on the same plane at the moment, need to fix that...

Here is Mars (I haven't added color or texture to the model yet)

And here is Jupiter, as seen from Mars:

 

[Dean]

What scale are you building in? It looks gigantic, to me .

 

[eran0004]

What scale are you building in? It looks gigantic, to me .

1 unit = 500 000 km. And Neptune is 9 000 units away from the sun. So it's pretty big
The distance and sizes are all in scale, I was thinking about making the planets 10 or 100 times bigger just to make them visible, but I scrapped that thought because that would just look silly.

Edit: Wow, it's pretty accurate! Just made a voyage to Jupiter by the speed of light.

The journey from Earth to Mars took 4 minutes and 20 seconds. The journey from Earth to Jupiter took 35 minutes. If this time is accurate, then it's perfectly on time

Here is Jupiter after 20 minutes of travel from Earth:

And after 30 minutes:

And after 35 minutes (filling up the screen):

Here is the sun as viewed from Jupiter:

Next stop would be Saturn, but that's another 40 minutes away from Jupiter so that'll have to wait for another day...

Edit: Been working on the navigation interface. To make it easier to see where in space you are. Also added stars to the background.

 

[CodeRedR51]

I love these "what if" articles/photos that pop up every once in a while.

http://io9.com/if-earth-had-a-ring-like-saturn-508750253

 

[Dotini]

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/12/astronomers_may_have_found_the_oldest_star_in_the_universe/

In a truly amazing coincidence, the oldest star in the known universe, aged 13.2 billion, has been located only 186 Lyrs from Earth.

Do you think it's more likely that intelligent life would have evolved at such a star?

If you are a Mormon, do you think this might be God's home star?

 

[DK]

Correction: the oldest KNOWN star. That title's a bit misleading, and there are stars which have been theorised to have formed before this star, but have long since exploded.

 

[GTsail]

Gliese 667C: our next home?

Gliese 667C

Another Gliese 667C link

22 light-years away

Bring your sun-tan lotion....

Respectfully,
GTsail

 

[PeterJB]

I'm building a scale model of the solar system in a 3D software called Blender

My cousin runs Blender Guru!

 

[Dennisch]

Earth, seen by Cassini from it's orbit around Saturn.

 

[CodeRedR51]

I forgot to wave.

 

[Dennisch]

I forgot to wave.

20000 people did. But the article also tells that not even the continents are visible, so it would have been silly anyway.

But, Cassini was mooned:

 

[CodeRedR51]

20000 people did. But the article also tells that not even the continents are visible, so it would have been silly anyway.

Was joking.

 

[CodeRedR51]

 

[Keef]

Does this "hole in the sun" have anything to do with the unusually low temperatures we've had in my area for a week or more now? Yesterday we actually beat the lowest high temperature for that day at 71. Usually it's a solid 85 with sweltering humidity and no rain for weeks. Lately we've been getting the sort of weather we should have gotten in early June.

 

[CodeRedR51]

We've been about 8-10 degrees cooler than normal here. But we're also in monsoon season which is keeping the temps down a bit. Hovering around 102-105 most of the time. Would be interesting to know if there's a connection.

 

[Dotini]

Does this "hole in the sun" have anything to do with the unusually low temperatures we've had in my area for a week or more now? Yesterday we actually beat the lowest high temperature for that day at 71. Usually it's a solid 85 with sweltering humidity and no rain for weeks. Lately we've been getting the sort of weather we should have gotten in early June.

We've been about 8-10 degrees cooler than normal here. But we're also in monsoon season which is keeping the temps down a bit. Hovering around 102-105 most of the time. Would be interesting to know if there's a connection.

When solar activity is high and sunspots are plentiful, weather on Earth tends to be warmer.

When solar activity is low, and sunspots scarce, weather on Earth tends to be cooler.

This is explained by cosmic ray flux into Earth's atmosphere being reduced or increased by solar magnetic field strength. High solar magnetic field strength reduces penetration of cosmic rays to Earth, which reduces cloud cover, which means more solar insolation, hence warming. Low solar magnetic field strength allows more cosmic ray penetration into the atmosphere which builds more cloud cover, reducing insolation, hence more cooling. Cosmic rays cause nucleation of clouds, according to extensive research using cloud chambers by Henrik Svensmark and others.

All that said, it is more usual to associate solar activity with longer term climate changes rather than daily weather events.

 

[braunracing88]

This just in: Pluto may have 10 more undiscovered moons.
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/plut...s-problem-1C8851894?franchiseSlug=sciencemain

 

[PeterJB]

I'm surprised an object that small can have so many moons anyway. It's not far from outnumbering Pluto.

Does this "hole in the sun" have anything to do with the unusually low temperatures we've had in my area for a week or more now? Yesterday we actually beat the lowest high temperature for that day at 71. Usually it's a solid 85 with sweltering humidity and no rain for weeks. Lately we've been getting the sort of weather we should have gotten in early June.

Strange, cause we've been having record high temperatures (for the year at least) for the past couple of weeks (broken up by massive thunderstorms, and unsurprisingly, flooding that no one is prepared for). It peaked at 90 degrees in London, 84 where I am. It's normally around 65-70 around this time of year.

 

[eran0004]

Thought I'd share this astro photo blog. There's some really nice pictures of the sky there! Stars, the sun, northern lights, the moon... It's in Swedish, but there's not a lot of text anyway and the pictures are the main content.

http://rymden.wordpress.com/

The same guy also has this site where he publishes his photos of the sun:

https://solarphotography.wordpress.com/



And last but not least, did anyone here watch the Perseid meteor shower? Apparently it's that time of year right now but unfortunately I live in northern Sweden and the sky is too bright in the summer to see anything

My cousin runs Blender Guru!

Awesome! The tutorials there are pure gold

 

[Nicksfix]

Just took the dogs out for the evening and happened to catch a few moments of the Perseid meteor shower. Saw a few of them ..... pretty cool stuff.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Impressive stuff. 👍