Agreed. I’m not looking forward to it either. I’ll be at work, most people are probably going to call in, and there will be hours of traffic when get off.
Best chance I’ll ever have personally. Live in the path, work from home, good time. Plan is to just step outside for a bit, look at it (with protection) then back to work.
I'm glad the article mentions that in this case, it really doesn't matter; like, there seems to be nothing to 'pollute' on Mars (also 7 tonnes is not much at all). Bit of a strange headline to me.
You’re not wrong with your sentiment but i think it’s pretty safe to say that if we find life on Mars it’s gonna be trapped in ice somehow or deep below the surface. Besides having next to no atmosphere, it also has no magnetosphere which means it takes the full blast from solar radiation. Nothing living on Earth could survive outside on the surface of Mars.
we have quite a bit of life that thrives just under the surface… within nooks and crannies of dust particles… inside Chernobyl… in ocean volcanic vents…
i think mycelia are the only thing that can live off of just raw rock though (the vanguards of life)
but, spores are pretty small and everywhere…
personally i think we should get over looking for life on mars and seed it with whatever has the best chances…
a deep valley has a thicker atmosphere and more shade from the sun, btw…
I suppose so, but I believe they always make sure not a single trace of Earth life is left on the equipement they sent to Mars, for obvious reasons. So they already control for that.
Besides looking pretty messy, I'm not sure this does any harm.
nasa sure puts a lot of effort into it… can’t say i feel confident about other countries that crash into it…
on top of that, nasa has recently found that they’ve been breeding bacteria that lives off of their disinfectant, and so no they don’t already control for that.
Sad news for the tardigrades that were on board Israel’s Beresheet mission, which crash-landed on the Moon in 2019. Researchers have learnt that the microscopic animals, which can survive the vacuum of space and heavy-duty doses of radiation, wouldn’t have lived through the crash.
Wrong country and wrong outcome, I really nailed it. Given how hardy they are, I can’t say I’m convinced they’re all dead. Not that they’d actually be active without air and water
Elon is probably mad it launched on an Ariane 5 and it went so perfectly, we’ll get an extra decade of science out of it.
The Ariane 5 really was a reliable rocket. It had some failures early on, like basically all rockets, but then it had 82 successful launches in a row and then one partial failure before having another long perfect streak.
Obviously, more expensive than modern reusable rockets but JWST was important enough of a payload, that I’m glad NASA/ESA chose Ariane. (Plus, given JWST’s delays, I imagine when that decision was made, SpaceX was still iterating and having occasional explosions.)
Absolute size isn’t really in the criteria for a planet though. Pluto isn’t a planet because it shares its orbit with lots of other icy bodies in the Kuiper belt.
Do you mean the Trojans? They’re excluded from the mass calculation of ‘clearing the neighbourhood’ because they’re in a resonant orbit - their orbit is a consequence of Jupiter’s mass.
I don’t know. I don’t think we should make excuses for Jupiter just because of its size. Pluto’s doing the best it can. Could any of us do any better, so far out from the sun?
Thanks to your comments, I went looking at more about Jupiter’s influence on us and read that most of the other planets are more in line with Jupiter’s orbital plane than the Sun’s equatorial plane (which sounds impressive, but maybe only makes complete sense since the planets would have all initially formed from the same disk). Anyway, thanks
That’s really interesting!
I just discovered a theory about the cause of the ‘late heavy bombardment’, which is thought to have delivered water to earth via comets.
Essentially the gas giants all orbited much closer, but Jupiter and Saturn got into resonance and flung Uranus and Neptune way out (and Saturn too). Uranus and Neptune flew out into the path of a heap of ice, and their gravity pulled the ice into an orbit that collided with the terrestrial planets.
There are five confirmed dwarf planets in the solar system: Ceres, Haumea, Eris, Makemake and the ex-planet Pluto. All of these planetary pretenders, apart from Ceres, are located in or around the Kuiper Belt, a disk of comets and other small objects beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Pluto is so far from the sun and still has never seen such shade.
Na du push xidawang kaka felota shukumi ere milowda, mi beratna (o’ sésata), na! Milowda ge da kaka end fo da shetéxeting na materi keting fong da tumang, amash ye. 😱🙅🏽
An Einstein ring is an example of strong gravitational lensing,” explained study lead Conor O’Riordan of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. “All strong lenses are special, because they’re so rare, and they’re incredibly useful scientifically. This one is particularly special because it’s so close to Earth and the alignment makes it very beautiful.”
I would never pretend I can even remotely wrap my head around this, but anything that helps us understand how gravity works seems like a scientific gold mine.
The precise mechanism is beyond me, but suffice it to say that light is affected by gravity.
If you imagine throwing a ball in space in a straight line near a massive body (like a planet), the ball will curve and its new straight path will now be permanently deviated from its original straight line.
Now imagine instead of throwing a ball, you’re emitting rays of light in all directions near a black hole. Light you emit towards the black hole will be lost to it, but light you emitted at an angle to the black hole will swing around it, just like the ball. If you imagine all the light you emitted slightly to the right, left, up, and down doing this, you can imagine that an observer on the other side could see all that light, appearing as though you were slightly right, left, up, and down from the black hole at the same time. This is what creates the ring.
You know how telescopes often use glass lenses to bend light into your eye? A gravitational lens is just a naturally occurring telescope, except that the gravity of a large object is the one bending the light towards us. From what I understand, an Einstein lens is just a gravitational lens where the elements for the lens sit in a particularly good setup.
But people are still shilling for starlink. I was always downvoted for mentioning the kessler syndrome or light pollution. All for progress, I guess we really need that fast internet in the middle of the atlantic.
People down voting you for bringing up Kessler syndrome were correct to do so. It’s a complete non-issue for starlink-sized objects at that altitude.
Light pollution is a more reasonable objection, and the effects on the upper atmosphere of all those satellites burning up would be as well, but not Kessler syndrome
It’s a complete non-issue for starlink-sized objects at that altitude.
Yeah. The mass and altitude are too low.
The thing with Kessler Syndrome is that collisions create debris, which cascades with more collisions, until there’s too much debris. But each collision actually results in the loss of kinetic energy or gravitational potential energy overall, so that the subsequent pieces are less energetic and/or less massive. Start with enough mass and enough altitude, and you’ve got a real problem where it can cascade many, many times. But with smaller objects at low altitude, and there’s just not enough energy to cause a runaway reaction.
Fellow dark sky supporter. Between all the led billboards, sprawl, and all the attempts at education failing… I doubt our children will have any view of the stars at all.
Unless there’s a hurricane that’s wipes out power… Stargazing was excellent for a few nights then.
Apparent scale is inverse linear, i.e., proportional to 1 / distance. If we want the apparent scale of two objects to be about 90% accurate to their actual relative scale, their relative distances to the camera can’t be more than 10% different. Pluto being 40-ish astronomical from Earth, you’d want to shoot from about 400 AU. Voyager I should be in prime position circa 2140.
I drove 2200 miles for this solar eclipse. I booked a place here in Dallas last year, and now it seems like it’s going to be cloudy with rain and thunder. :-/
I convinced my dad to fly over and join the road trip.
At least we got to see some incredible stuff on the way! Maybe there will be a break in the clouds…
I was in the same boat, 2000+ mile drive. NE Texas isn’t looking too bad right now! But if you’re up to it, drive up to Arkansas. I did that today from Austin-ish. Clouds up here are looking much more optimistic!
I’ve heard that it’s still a surreal experience even when overcast. Though, that’s what I had to believe to actually book the hotel room and days off work as somene living on the north-atlantic coast.
I was able to see the one back in 2017 smack dab in the middle of the path of totality and it was such a surreal otherworldly experience. No amount of trying to explain it to other people helped them really understand. Things look a weird way and there’s a very unique feel to it all.
My advice, get things set up, get your shots, start your recordings, but don’t forget to take 30seconds or so and just soak it in and be in the moment!
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