Space and Astronomy in general

That ain't nothing.

Damn.

Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus

The original paper is surprisingly readable.

Jennifer Mau is alive!

fangblackbone wrote:

Jennifer Mau is alive!

Julie

Juliette Andromeda Mao. The second best Mao in the series

Or, as many people on twitter have pointed out, this finally vindicates the band Europe's lyrics in the second verse of their Magnum Opus "The Final Countdown"

Delta IV Heavy launch tonight at 2354 EDT (about 15 minutes from now).

Woah! May have to pop downstairs to watch that!

Well, it's just been scrubbed for the night (just a few seconds before liftoff), sorry.

Unfortunately the launch schedule at the Cape is very busy right now. There are two other launches competing for launch slots, and all three of them have already had scrubs this week due to bad weather. One of them is mine (GPS III SV04). It is currently scheduled for Friday, but they might bump it again if this NROL-44 launch takes priority for that slot.

Rank by coolest patch.

Mixolyde wrote:

Rank by coolest patch.

I don't know what our patch looks like yet. We have not received our patches yet from our last launch in June!

Both the ULA launch and the Starlink launch have scrubbed in the last day. We get to try tomorrow night.

Damn, even today's Cygnus-14 launch from Wallops was scrubbed.

Hope you didn’t drive all the way out there lol.

Robear wrote:

Hope you didn’t drive all the way out there lol.

No, although I have been there before.

In this case, it was my wife asking me "what's that noise" because I was watching the countdown on youtube with my phone while eating dinner.

For Mix's benefit, this is apparently the SpaceX patch for this mission:

IMAGE(https://www.spacex.com/static/images/patches/GPS_III_4_Patch.png)

Launch window opens at 21:43 EDT. Weather is 70% GO.

Hrdina wrote:

For Mix's benefit, this is apparently the SpaceX patch for this mission

Not bad! Not bad. It's no NROL-39. But, then again, what is?

Mixolyde wrote:
Hrdina wrote:

For Mix's benefit, this is apparently the SpaceX patch for this mission

Not bad! Not bad. It's no NROL-39. But, then again, what is?

Nope, it will be a long time before anyone tops that one.

Good thing I bought an ultra-wide monitor recently. I have both the Cygnus-14 (Kalpana Chawla) launch from Wallops (21:16 EDT) and the GPS launch (audio) from CCAFS (2143 EDT) up at the same time.

Cygnus is still go at T-11 minutes:

GPS is just doing propellant load.

^&%^%*&$%*(%%$*

NROL-44: scrubs on Wednesday at T-7 seconds

GPS: Hold my beer

My wife came into the room with about a minute to go, saw my screen, then said "since it says the computer has taken over that means it's definitely going to launch, right?"

Our launch window is only 15 minutes long, so once there's a hold that's a guaranteed scrub since the SpaceX launch clock rolls back to T-15:00.

I thought things would go well since Cygnus-14 broke the streak of launch scrubs.

OSIRIS-REx made its grab. Pictures should be released tomorrow morning. Now it needs to make it back with the samples.

GIF below from a rehearsal attempt:

IMAGE(https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/thumbnails/image/osiris-rex-matchpoint-samcam-gif-web.gif)

Awesome

Osiris-Rex: Nasa asteroid mission confident of success

TFA has a nice series of stills from the actual TAG smash-and-grab.

...or, you could watch the briefing (images start a little after 16:00).

Pretty cool. I think they could use an audio engineer on their briefing.

I found this really fascinating:

- the same galaxy appearing multiple times in the sky due to gravitational lensing and giving temporal differences of 20 years.

Veritasium is the coolest. His video on gravity melted my brain.

BadKen wrote:

Veritasium is the coolest. His video on gravity melted my brain.

Mine too, i love a video that literally changes the way i look at the world like that video does.

i also appreciate: "I got a bunch of sponsor money so.. uh i built a rocket!"

It seems that OSIRIS REx may have collected too much material!

Yeah, I just saw that. Amazing! Hopefully they can lock it down soon and prevent more loss.

Just curious why it will take 3 years to get back?

fangblackbone wrote:

Just curious why it will take 3 years to get back?

Possibly because Bennu's orbit is tilted 6 degrees from the ecliptic relative to Earth's. From watching this video of the return trajectory, it looks like it's a matter of timing to catch Earth just as its orbital plane crosses the plane of Bennu/OSIRIS REx.