COPUOS operates by consensus, requiring approval of all of its more than 100 member states to move forward on any issue, and thus allowing even a single nation to block action
That’s a shitty way to get anything done. Unanimous approval should only be for really big issues. Otherwise just let it be a majority vote.
It feels like the title should be “uninhabited”. Life on earth doesn’t survive because we continue to be bombarded with nutrient carrying asteroids, it just needed them to kick it off. That few nutrients are likely to make it from the surface to the ocean means the genesis is unlikely to occur, but it doesn’t seem to make a decision about whether an unlikely genesis could survive, even if only in a small pocket of the ocean.
I always thought of our universes as just a bubble, with dark matter all around us. It’s not the edge of the existence as much as the edge of our bubble.
We might not be the only bubble, but it’s impossible to interact or even observe them. Could be millions, could just be us. No way to every know.
Our bubble keeps expanding, until the edges aren’t dense enough to displace whatever’s out there. And we’ll either slowly fade and future civilizations will assume the universe has always shrunk. Because that’s all they’ve ever seen. Like if the human lifespan was a single minute, people would freak out everytime it approaches dawn or dusk. Not understanding that it’s a cycle.
In an update posted on Sunday (Feb. 18), ESA said that the rentry ERS-2 is expected to take place on Wednesday (Feb. 21) at 10:19 a.m. ET (1519 GMT), plus or minus around 19 hours. This uncertainty is due to the “influence of unpredictable solar activity, which affects the density of Earth’s atmosphere” and can therefore change how much drag pulls on the satellite on its way down, ESA wrote.
Plus or minus 19hrs due to the sun’s effect on the density of the atmosphere. Mind blown.
I don’t know all of the details of this mission, but it seems like they’ve just lowered the lowest point in its orbit - called periapsis - until it sits low enough in the atmosphere to get enough drag that the orbit slowly decays over a decade.
The lowest part of the orbit would only drop a little bit, but the highest part of the orbit woukd reduce more with each orbit. If you do it slowly enough, the orbit would circularise and then it would begin to decay more evenly. As it falls deeper into the atmosphere the orbit would decay faster and faster until it can no longer sustain orbit, and then it falls deeper into the atmosphere and burns up in just a few minutes.
The reason for this I can only guess at - it wouldn’t take a whole lot more fuel to just deorbit all at once. My best guess is that it has something to do with reentering at the lowest possible speed. If you fall from a high orbit and reenter, you have a lot more speed and have to dissipate more energy all at once. It’s possible this increases the risk that the satellite will fail to deobrit, and break up and send pieces off in less predictable orbits. If it breaks up from a low circular orbit, there’s no chance of any parts escaping back into orbit.
There will be millions of applicants for this. They’ll get the cream of the crop for this experiment. If we ever end up actually going to mars then these people will be in every history book.
astronomy
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