Absolute nonsense #ESA plans for space generated solar power. IIRC, one of the studies was supposed to be delivered two years ago.
Such huge structures in space will be highly vulnerable to space debris or malicious attacks, to name just two apparently unsolvable security problems. It'll be interesting to see what the numbers say, when comparing the total cost for such a monstrosity with similar plans for solar power generation on the surface of the Earth.
These unofficial Mastodon accounts of space agencies are bots that merely share news items the agencies publish elsewhere, yet the accounts have quite a lot of followers:
The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft will makes its 3rd close flyby of Mercury on Monday at 19:34 UTC at an altitude of 236 km.
"This is the 3rd of 6 gravity assist flybys at #Mercury. The flybys, together with more than 15,000 hours-worth of solar electric propulsion, are needed to help the spacecraft overcome the Sun's massive gravitational forces and lose enough energy for capture into Mercury’s orbit in 2025."
It's launch day for the ESA Euclid space telescope.
Euclid will explore the dark Universe. It will make a 3D-map of the cosmos (with time as the 3rd dimension) by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky.
Objectives:
How did the Universe originate? Why is the Universe expanding at an accelerating rate? What is the nature of dark matter? What is dark energy?
This spring, #ESA launched the #Juice Mission to #Jupiter - but why does it need 8 years to get there when the Voyager space probes, many decades ago, needed under two? Well, because we don't want to just zoom past Jupiter but to hand around there for a while, doing cool science.
And once Juice reached Jupiter comes the even more complicated part - getting into the orbit!
Here is the much awaited video of BepiColombo's Mercury flyby #3 on June 19.
The 1st part of the movie is composed of 217 images taken by M-CAM3.
Start time:19:46:25 UTC, Jun 19 2023
Start alt: 1,789 km
End time: 20:34:25 UTC, Jun 20 2023
End alt: 331,755 km
Avg relative speed ~= 3.7 km/s
Music composed by ILĀ, with the assistance of AI tools developed by the Machine Intelligence for Musical Audio (MIMA) group, Univ of Sheffield.
Wenn ihr in der Gegend #Münster seid und Lust auf zwei Tage #Astronomie, kommt doch zum Astroseminar am 13. & 14. Oktober 💫
Ich stelle das Astrophysik Programm der #ESA vor, Kolleginnen sprechen über Neutrinos, dunkle Materie und vieles mehr. Niveau: zugänglich für alle interessierten, von echten Wissenschaftlerinnen vorgetragen (mit viel. Zeit für Fragen). Und einen offenen Tag am Institut der Kernphysik gibt es auch 😊
Did you know that it's actually NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope? Even though it is often referred to as "NASA" only.
European Space Agency #ESA has contributed the NIRSpec instrument, half of the MIRI instrument, and the launch (including the payload adapter & launch site services) and has 15 scientists working at the science and operations center. #CSA, the Canadian Space Agency, has contributed the NIRISS instrument.