I'm more of a reader than a writer in 'Mastodon Space' but today I bring you something that those people I follow may not have heard of: what's likely to be the first attempt at a space suit, designed as early as 1936 in Spain. It was to be tested with a hot air balloon but unfortunately the whole thing had to be scrapped due to the Civil War. One piece of the original suit has now been found. In Spanish but Google Translate does the trick.
After years of searching, astronomers have finally detected an atmosphere on a rocky planet around another star.
But what a strange planet it is! 55 Cancri e seems to be blanketed in carbon dioxide gas bubbling out of a global ocean of lava. Like an image out of Dante's Inferno.
One of the great frustrations in the search for life in the universe: It's much easier to study extreme, hellish planets (huge, hot, etc) than to study the moderate worlds where life could plausibly exist.
Why don't we ever see the far side of the moon? From Earth, it appears as if the moon doesn't rotate at all, but it does spin on its axis, just like Earth does. However, the moon is tidally locked to our planet. That means it takes just as long for the moon to rotate about its axis as it does to orbit Earth — roughly one month.
This is definitely an interesting read about the moon getting its own time zone.
It actually makes perfect sense in so many ways. I really hope since the moon time zone won't honor DST(Daylight Savings Time) that this helps us here on Earth get rid of it as well and not honor it going forward.
@cliffwade the issue is, that I often write time-sensitive programs and apps - Android launchers, custom loggers, alarms, network stuff, etc.
moon TZ sounds crazy to me because from an engineering point of view
@bpavuk I totally get what you are saying. I work for a major Android launcher myself and have for 8 1/2 years. A timezone on the moon seems weird, but interesting.
@65dBnoise
Could that be an abandoned chain mail helmet beside it? Perhaps two warring factions realized the futility of battle, discarded their stuff and went off to the nearest pub together... 🍺 🍺
#PPOD: M51 (NGC 5194) lies about 27 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici and is trapped in a tumultuous relationship with its near neighbor, the dwarf galaxy NGC 5195. The interaction between these two galaxies has made these galactic neighbors one of the better-studied galaxy pairs in the night sky. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team
Bad news for radio astronomy AND optical astronomy. Not only is 'Supplemental Coverage from Space' (aka direct-to-cell) transmission unregulated at this point, but the 2nd generation of #BlueBird satellites will be monstrously large reflectors of sunlight.
"While there are still hurdles to overcome and challenges to solve before LSST can deliver on its extraordinary promises, thankfully, dealing with tiny bits of space junk likely won’t be one of them."
As the mentioned paper states that night sky brightness increased already approx. by 10 per cent: do you know if there's an estimate of the impact of, say, a 10 times higher number of satellites on sky brightness (compared to now)?
@silberspur That's a great question! The second paper I linked (by Bassa, Hainaut and Galadí-Enríquez) argues that intact satellites aren't the problem where diffuse night sky brightness is concerned. The smallest particles are the biggest contributor. If there were no small particles and only large satellites, the effect would be ~1% at most. But it could be considerably worse than 10% if, as Oli Hainaut said in presenting this work, the satellites"grind themselves into dust".
@liederbach
2 association I have: one hit wonder from music band Shiveree
And the new theater version "Good night and good luck" from George Clooney.😁 @space
"The sun produced its biggest flare in nearly two decades Tuesday, just days after severe solar storms pummeled Earth and created dazzling northern lights in unaccustomed places."
AP reports: "The good news is that Earth should be out of the line of fire this time because the flare erupted on a part of the sun rotating away from Earth."
#Perseverance drove 10m on Sol 1150, to RMC 52.2638. As mentioned earlier, this appears to be the most difficult part of the descent to the ancient riverbed of Neretva Vallis, on the way to Bright Angel, a rock formation of geological interest.
The maps were drawn with @QGIS, using data from #NASA's #MMGIS, imagery from #HiRISE and DTMs from #USGS
