Excellent news: as hoped for, JAXA’s upside-down moon lander, SLIM, has woken up again now that the Sun has shifted in the lunar sky, allowing light to fall on its solar panels.
Update on the status of JAXA’s SLIM moon lander: an image taken by its small LEV-2/SORA-Q “ball”, relayed to Earth by the LEV-1 hopper rover.
SLIM landed within 55 metres of its planned touchdown, but on its “head” rather than its side as planned, meaning its solar panels could not receive light.
It ran on batteries for 3 hours before being turned off. However, as the Sun moves across the lunar sky, light could reach the panels & revive SLIM.
Our colleagues from the Japanese space agency JAXA are currently attempting the soft landing of their SLIM spacecraft on the Moon & you can watch live online 👇
I've been listening to Planetary Radio, but it was a bit tiring with all the super upbeat hype atmosphere, I liked Orbital Mechanics and plan to get back to listen to it, and I now I will be trying out Off Nominal.
Excited to (finally!) announce that my artwork FAREWELL TO BENNU is on the back cover of The Planetary Society’s December 2023 issue of THE PLANETARY REPORT!
Das Starship erreichte 148 km Höhe bei einer Geschwindigkeit von 24.124 km/h, bevor offensichtlich das Flugabbruchsystem aktiv wurde. So sehe ich das im SpaceX-Stream. Was mich fasziniert ist, dass das die Kommentierenden erst mal gar nicht anficht ...
Ils l'ont fait !!! Succès du booster #SuperHeavy de #SpaceX qui a parfaitement rempli son rôle en propulsant dans l'espace le vaisseau #Starship 🚀
Malheureusement le Super Heavy et le Starship ont été perdus ensuite, mais c'est un énorme pas en avant !
Crédit : John Kraus
#OTD nine years ago: ESA’s Rosetta deploys Philae towards the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko 🛰️☄️
It remains one of the greatest honours of my life to have been involved with the mission & to work with so many amazing people spanning science, engineering, operations, outreach, & communications 🙇♂️
I have thought a bit about the old concept of a generation ship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship): Who would want to live on such a ship? Which people would consent to be its first crew?
You live in a small community, and after the ship has started and the contact to Earth breaks down, nothing at all happens at the outside of the ship. If you belong to the first generation(s), you will not even be able to see the destination of your journey. So everything you can do is to live in this restricted place, keep the systems running and educate your children who might live to see the destination. (Or their children will reach it.) Who would like to live this way?
One possibility I could think of are members of fundamentalist religious communities, who would like to have a chance to organise their life in their own way. But they would need to be affine to technology and science in order to run their ship efficiently.
Or maybe people from developing countries that have a good education but no chance to an appropriate job: They might view a life on a generation ship as an improvement to their current situation. (Or maybe not, as long as they still expect a chance to improve their life on Earth?)
Between 2010 and 2022, the number of satellites in orbit more than doubled. In the decade prior, the increase (from a smaller starting point) was just 17%. Ultimately, what goes up, must come down, and these satellites will all eventually crash and burn in the atmosphere - and indeed most countries legally mandate that their satellite operators to ensure this in a timely manner, rather than leave them in slowly decaying orbits for decades, causing a collision hazard.
However, when incinerating batteries, electronics and other metal rich objects in the open atmosphere, it appears we've finally stumbled across the fact that this produces aerosolised metal pollution. This supposedly unforeseen problem is also one that is set to worsen massively as we launch more and more expendable "swarm" satellites, thanks to galaxy brain geniuses like #ElonMusk and his #SpaceX billionaires toy.
Maintaining the current orbital free-for-all, where we delude ourselves into believing, once again, that we can sling as much junk out into the world as we want, with no consequences will never end well. There is undoubted use and value in being able to place objects into orbit, but we need to ask what is essential to us, given the resources consumed and negative impacts of our obsession, and what is just billionaires chasing fantasies and delusions of grandeur and immortality.
Today’s #SpacetoberChallenge is #Launch! STARSHIP SPECTRUM is a #watercolor#painting of the first SpaceX Starship launch on April 20, 2023, based on a spectacular photo by Trevor Mahlmann 🤩🚀🌈
Today’s #SpacetoberChallenge is Historic Launch Vehicles! REACHING FOR THE STARS is an #ink#illustration of SpaceX Starship 24 mating with the Falcon Super Heavy booster.
The NASA Psyche mission to the metal-rich asteroid Psyche will now launch on Friday the 13th 👻
Stormy weather has caused the launch date to move from Thursday to Friday at 10:19 a.m.
Launch window is instantaneous.
Launch site: Launch Complex 39A at KSC in Florida.
Launch vehicle: Falcon Heavy
@AkaSci ISRO is also wary of number 13. It is not a coincidence that launches with that serial (PSLV-C13, GSLV-F13) and satellite name (GSAT-13) were simply skipped over. Their countdowns are also initiated to avoid 'inauspicious' period.🙃
• When you’re in #microgravity, all those systems still work to push fluids to the upper body, unopposed by gravity, so you get this #swelling of tissues in the head 🤯
• In some crew members, in addition to mild visual changes, there have been findings such as optic nerve swelling, retinal changes, changes in the shape of the eye 👁️ and a suggestion that there might be an increase in intracranial pressure
• Up to a third of muscle 💪 from particular muscle groups being lost 〽️ within seven to 10 days of flight. This also includes deterioration of heart ❤️ muscle
• Lack of gravity also has the effect of causing bone 🦴 to, almost literally, dissolve away
• With a new dawn 🌅 every 90 minutes, #astronauts struggle to adapt to artificial night times 😴
• There is growing evidence that #spaceflight has a detrimental effect on the immune system ⚕️.
• Astronauts often report “seeing” bright flashes ⚡ of light, which are caused by cosmic rays passing through their brains 🧠 https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140506-space-trips-bad-for-your-health