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.
Salad is good for you, generally speaking, so growing fresh greens in orbit seems like a winning way for space farers to stay healthy. New research suggests that as nutritious as space salad might be, it could pose something of a risk to astronauts.
The problem is growing leafy plants like lettuce and spinach in space can come with a side dish of bacteria, according to a new study from a team at the University of Delaware. In tests on plants grown in simulated microgravity, they were shown to actually be more susceptible than normal to the Salmonella enterica pathogen.
Sounds like not a big problem at all. Seems like they'll just have to use appropriate cleaning methods. Even in the worst case scenario they would probably just have to use food irradiation.
Thing is, I don’t think NASA and SpaceX compete. NASA is not a for-profit company and was happy to see successful private companies in the sector. They’ll happily be a SpaceX client so that they can focus on actual research and do things that are not profitable (yet)
But in terms of “I wanna cut waste, and make the government lean! So I am gonna delete the space part of the government and replace it with my own!”
Just sounds bad, like really bad. Even worse than the armored Teslas. I can’t imagine NASA is the top of people’s lists of “utter wastes of time” It’s not a regulator, it’s not in the “known enemies” list unless you’re a flat earther. I dunno how you spin it to be palatable.
I think that is probably the actual reason. Musk probably fired most of NASA, and then realized that the absolute carnage would in this case impact him personally, and it suddenly became an important issue and he needs to have them all rehired so that they can keep paying him his contracts. He still doesn’t give a shit about other people’s contracts / medications / intelligence operations / statutorily enforced payments / whatever.
Man, lots of people in this thread seem happy to accept any wild, physics-breaking idea rather than accept that there’s just a bunch of matter we can’t see.
I think it goes beyond not being able to “see” it and goes to we can’t detect it at all. Doesn’t dark matter just fill in the mathemagical holes with some numbers to make it all work?
We can detect its gravitational influence, as it interacts via gravity. The issue being that gravity is a weak force, and so there’s a lot of room for speculation.
But there is a lot of evidence backing up dark matter existing. But it’s not definitive yet.
I get that but it still sounds woo-woo since we can’t directly detect it. I’m not naysaying since I realize it’s the best we have and I’m not smart enough to come up with anything better.
I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by “directly detect”. We measure neutrinos by having photoreceptors in huge tanks of very pure water deep under old salt mines… which hardly seems more direct than looking at where galaxies and stars are moving and calculating the gravitational pull and noticing that something is missing…
Dark matter is matter that we infir to exist only on its gravitational effects. We’ve observed its existence by the fact that it seems to clump up in the middle of two massive super-solar structures following a collision.
We can indirectly detect dark matter thru gravitational lensing. That is how NASA created this map showing the actual locations of dark matter in tinted blue.
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