Space

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

Saturn is beautiful.

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

26 Amazing Photos of our Solar System


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I16J4voZ5lA

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

This makes me insanely happy.

NASA on Monday landed its InSight probe on Mars after 205 days of travel and 301,223,981 miles.

Only about 40% of all missions sent to Mars are successful, according to NASA. The United States is the only country whose spacecrafts have survived a landing on the planet.

The tricky landing involved InSight slowing to 5 mph before it plops down on the surface of Mars, assisted by a parachute and rockets. This most dangerous part of the landing, the transition from rocketing into the Martian atmosphere to slowly landing on its surface, is referred to as "the seven minutes of terror" by NASA scientists.

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

This is the first mission dedicated to studying the inner core of Mars so hopefully we get some valuable data.

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

InSight's first picture, (lens cover isn't off yet)

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

NASA InSight lander delivers first clear image of Mars landing site

What a beautiful picture to start your day with

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

People may be used to such news but this is a massive achievement! Mars is a very difficult planet to land on (40% success rate) its thin atmosphere shows little resistance to falling objects and this makes slowing down acceleration a nightmare that one tiny delay between deploying parachutes and activating fuel rockets could cause the probe to literally bite the dust. A parachute needs to be 10x its size here on Earth to have the same effect on Mars, bigger parachute = more chances of it tearing and fail so we use special rockets to make a smooth landing.

I can't wait for the data to start coming. Some people were asking why we don't study Earth's core instead of paying millions to study Mars's core and the answer is Earth's core is very active and alive, tectonic plates and earthquakes of different magnitudes make such studies inaccurate and a waste of time and by studying Mars's core we can find out the circumstances which are needed to 'jump start' the life cycle on rocky planets and why it happened on Earth but not on Mars.

[Rod (126579776)]

This one is excitin

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

InSight landed on a very dusty area where the soil is too thin and the dust easily swirls, this is really bad because dust will get in the way of the Camera lenses and also may affect the solar panels ability to absorb energy. Astronomers have big hopes on InSight and the data which it will relay back to Earth but I feel like something is not right, the lander appears to be tilted although the surface which it landed on was picked to be as flat as possible, it would be insanely unlucky for one of the lander's arms to stand on a rock while the other on the surface. The ICC is mounted just below the deck and it can easily pick up dust from the ground, sand dust flies everywhere on Mars because, well nothing is there to stop it and also the atmosphere is too thin to tame it. The image I posted above is from the IDC on the robotic arm that's why it looks more clear. HD images should start coming soon but we don't expect anything unusual, the stuff we are looking for is ground deep not on the surface.

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

NASA’s InSight lander flipped open the lens cover on its Instrument Context Camera (ICC) on Nov. 30, 2018, and captured this view of Mars. Located below InSight’s deck, the ICC has a fisheye view, creating a curved horizon. Some clumps of dust are still visible on the camera’s lens. One of the spacecraft’s footpads can be seen in the lower right corner. The seismometer’s tether box is in the upper left corner.

NASA's InSight Mars lander has set a record for most power generated on the Red Planet's surface.

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

Planet with 30 huge rings discovered 420 light years away - and each one is tens of MILLIONS of miles wide




The massive rings were seen eclipsing the young sun-like star J1407
There are gaps in the rings, which indicate exomoons may have formed
Their diameter is more than two hundred times as large as Saturn's rings
If we could replace Saturn's rings with the rings around J1407b, they would be easily visible at night and be many times larger than the full moon

[Rod (126579776)]

Planet with 30 huge rings discovered 420 light years away - and each one is tens of MILLIONS of miles wide




The massive rings were seen eclipsing the young sun-like star J1407
There are gaps in the rings, which indicate exomoons may have formed
Their diameter is more than two hundred times as large as Saturn's rings
If we could replace Saturn's rings with the rings around J1407b, they would be easily visible at night and be many times larger than the full moon

This is really a cool discovery. Can't get enough of it.

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

If you like Space make sure you check out ISS HD LIVE app.



The application broadcasts live from the ISS in real-time, you can enjoy a live Earth sunrise and sunset as it happens.

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

The chain of events that represents the course of the entire history of the universe might be asymptotic. This means that as we approach this point that we’re calling t = 0, our ability to describe events is no longer defined because the continuity of causality itself asymptotes. The universe began as an infinitely fluctuating, infinitely dense, infinitely compact, infinitely energetic, infinitely sized, soup of energy. And it existed for an undefinable amount of time in this way, until it expanded enough that information of any kind could propagate longer than a Planck length, and causality came into clearer definition. This is what we have been effectively calling the Big Bang.

There’s a point, about 1043 seconds from this weird time we’re calling the “beginning,” where we can no longer even describe events anymore. During this first 1043 seconds, called the Planck era, information, travelling at the speed of light (the fastest anything can travel), will have only had the opportunity to travel one Planck length. One Planck length is the interval over which all points in space and time fluctuate enough that our entire coordinate system breaks down. This means not only can we no longer describe an object’s position effectively, but we can’t even describe whether an event preceded or followed another event.

To wrap your mind around all that it would help to learn or read more about Entropy. Learning entropy can teach you why everything around us decays, why we age, why time moves forward not backward, why substance erodes, buildings collapse and stars die.

[JustJo (106622274)]

tripppyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

I think I talked about the Parker Probe here before, it's supposed to study the sun from a very close range and it will be traveling at 430,000 miles per hour. (Crazy fast!)

This is the first data we got from it

First Light Data for NASA's Parker Solar Probe



This image shows the first-light data from Parker Solar Probe's WISPR (Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe) instrument suite. The right side of this image — from WISPR's inner telescope — has a 40-degree field of view, with its right edge 58.5 degrees from the Sun's center. The bright object slightly to the right of the image's center is Jupiter. The left side of the image is from WISPR’s outer telescope, which has a 58-degree field of view and extends to about 160 degrees from the Sun. It shows the Milky Way, looking at the galactic center. There is a parallax of about 13 degrees in the apparent position of the Sun as viewed from Earth and from Parker Solar Probe.

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

These two tiny chips contain the names of more than 2.4 million people who signed up to fly with InSight

[Nick Blade (187030201)]

I talked about this mission with Rowdy, so here's some more information. Gaia should have gotten MUCH more press than it did, this mission objective will help us really "Know our place" in the milky way and now we can travel back or forward in time using Gaia's data to find out where nearby starts are going and where they have come from.

The $1 billion (750 million euros) Gaia spacecraft launched in 2013 for a five-year mission to map the night sky with unmatched accuracy. The spacecraft is perched far beyond the moon's orbit, in the Lagrange-2, or L2, point, a gravitationally stable spot about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth. Unlike space telescopes such as Hubble that orbit the Earth, Gaia can scan the cosmos without Earth blocking a large chunk of its view. As it rotates in space, Gaia measures about 100,000 stars each minute and covers the whole sky in about two months. Each star is measured 70 times on average.



"Over the lifetime of five years of Gaia, we will actually get 29 independent measurements of whole sky," Günther Hasinger, the European Space Agency's (ESA) director of science, said at the ILA.

The Gaia spacecraft gathered observations for this all-sky view of the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies between July 2014 and May 2016, releasing the data on April 25, 2018. This image shows all the stars' colors and brightness (top), the total density of stars (middle) and the distribution of interstellar gas and dust across the galaxy (bottom).

The Gaia spacecraft has even made observations of our own solar system, mapping the positions of more than 14,000 known asteroids. And Gaia is still operating and collecting measurements. The final data release is expected for the 2020s, according to ESA.