It’s such a harsh message to propagate, though. A lot of these smaller countries have been really pushing their space programs, and they don’t need “LOL, lander upside-down” memes to accent their recent failure any further.
At this rate, Japan may be able to actually land on the moon in a few more years, take some great pictures, and shove Mashable’s “space photo of the decade” quote directly up their ass. Where it belongs.
I’ve been binging on For All Mankind and it’s been a great reminder of how difficult space exploration actually is and how quickly things can go wrong.
The fact that they accomplished their goal of pinpoint landing within 10 meters of their target should be the lede.
I bet people in the industry are amazed by this accomplishment.
It’s the sad part of science communication. The pop culture sees difficulties and failures as indictments of character. In science, failures are the fuel of progress. In this case, especially in scientific circles, this was a massive success and is being celebrated as such. The upside down part is laughed at as just the price of making the unimaginable, possible. But most publications who don’t belong to science journalism just don’t understand.
Why would that lead to shoving a quote anywhere? Much of the marvel of this photo is the unusual circumstances around it.
We’ve already got photos of the moon.
This, afaik, is the first photo we have a lander that suffered a significant complication in the landing but was still able to deploy a rover to take a picture.
Given that you aren’t the only audience to a response, even someone who recognizes that it’s a joke might add a little bit of context about, I don’t know, how melting the fastener might contaminate the sample or grinding the fasteners might cause dust and sparks that could also contaminate the sample, so on and so forth.
That all being said, are you okay? Kneejerk responses like that don’t usually come from good places.
I think it was fairly clearly a joke, and at least a little bit funny via absurdity, like suggesting nuking it to open it, or wrapping an elastic band around like a tight jar lid.
Not everything you read is serious unless otherwise stated.
As someone that uses Starlink due to nothing else being in my area, I hate everything about this. Sure the convenience of having internet wherever I want is nice, but this still sucks. Especially since I’m a huge space nerd so this shit just hurts my soul.
My favorite part is that bout 5 miles down the highway they have fibre optic. They’ve been “installing” it for about 4 or 5 years now. They’ve had the spool just sitting outside for half that time.
Knowing what I know, I am assuming this image was standardised and then normalised (fancy stats algos to keep things in the same visual range) while stitching it together, and the final product enhanced a lot of colouration (saturation). They’re subtle or undetectable to the naked eye, but they exist. They are reflected in the different minerals present. I’ve done this stuff (raster stitching) with different imagery. Op was active in the comments with info, but I didn’t read up on it.
The colors don’t match what a human eye would see, but without going into a philosophy tangent, color is extremely complex and a huge part of what a human sees is your brain doing representations and mapping that isn’t perfectly represented in the physical object being observed. In this photo the saturation has been increased (versus a human eye) because it helps show the geological differences on the lunar surface. The reddish areas are high in iron and feldspar, and the blue-tinted zones have higher titanium content. Instead of thinking of the color as “real” or “fake” it’s probably better to think of it as a tool, to simulate if you were a super human with the ability to adjust saturation and detect metal composition with your eye. Usually when a photo like this is shared by researchers and scientist all this nuance and exposition is included, but then journalist and social media get a hold of it and people start crying “fake” without an understanding of what the image is trying to accomplish. TL;DR - The image isn’t what a human eye would see but it isn’t just art to look cool, the color and modifications have physical meaning and serve a purpose.
This is where it starts to get exciting. Up to this point in human history, we have had no firm evidence of life on another world even though speculation runs rife. It is always just beyond our reach to detect it, but we may soon collect enough bio-signatures to infer its existence with reasonable confidence.
Life on K2-18 b is still pretty unlikely. Or at least what we would call life… There have been signs of Dimethyl sulfide, which would be one of those bio markers.
astronomy
Ważne
Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.