Space and Astronomy in general

Yonder wrote:

Sure, the rocket will be fine, I'd be surprised if you could tell the difference of anything more than 100 feet away, but doesn't the closer stuff right around you hurt the immersion? I haven't done too much VR stuff.

I'm not sure where the cut-off point is for stereo to matter. If you don't have much in the foreground, you can probably get away with it: if I remember correctly, the head tracking is a bigger part of the in-this-space feeling. (This also works in the real world: close one eye, and you still feel like things are real.)

You won't have anything coming out of the screen at you, and you'll miss the volumetric feel you can get with stereo and billowing smoke. But it'll still look pretty impressive in VR.

Someone who has worked with VR more recently than I have may correct me on this, of course. Then, too, there are 3D stereo cameras out there, though they had flaws last I checked.

Stele wrote:

New exoplanet 40 ly away, likely in habitable zone.

What really excites me about this news is that the detection methods are getting able to spot smaller and smaller planets. Not too long ago, just detecting a super-earth was big news. Now it takes a super-earth in a habitable zone in the nearby neighborhood. We're gradually getting better at detecting smaller planets, and at finding planets around more stars.

Gremlin wrote:
Stele wrote:

New exoplanet 40 ly away, likely in habitable zone.

What really excites me about this news is that the detection methods are getting able to spot smaller and smaller planets. Not too long ago, just detecting a super-earth was big news. Now it takes a super-earth in a habitable zone in the nearby neighborhood. We're gradually getting better at detecting smaller planets, and at finding planets around more stars.

+1

It's so cool that we're seeing news like this happen as often as it has been lately. Our detection technology is advancing rapidly.

Since we were talking about exoplanets, is this a picture of an endoplanet?

IMAGE(https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/images/largesize/PIA21445_hires.jpg)

It's another great image from our friends on the Cassini team.

I think a lot of the detection work has been around the use of multiple radio dishes to get higher resolution scans which can then be analysed for the tell tale wobble. They're now trying to get a picture of the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way using about 7 dishes/arrays iirc. Expected to be finished in about 8 months.

Cassini is the gift that keeps on giving. Saw a talk on Juno last night, which is a similar orbiter around Jupiter. Everything they have found from Juno so far has been completely surprising and thrown a ton of models and theories in the trash. There is a surprising amount of variability in the stuff below the surface, and not a big ball of uniform soup as was thought. It's really amazing. They still don't know if Jupiter has a core or not, or what's generating the immense magnetic field.

These featured images are amazing: https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/jun...

Hrdina wrote:

Since we were talking about exoplanets, is this a picture of an endoplanet?

IMAGE(https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/images/largesize/PIA21445_hires.jpg)

It's another great image from our friends on the Cassini team.

Pale blue dot, part 2.

Stele wrote:

Pale blue dot, part 2. :cool:

Part 3, actually. Part 2 is also from Cassini:

IMAGE(https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/162056main_PIA08329.jpg)

Hard to tell on a small screen. But the Earth is a pale blue dot right above the left most edge of the bright rings.

https://science.nasa.gov/science-new...

Mixolyde wrote:

Cassini is the gift that keeps on giving. Saw a talk on Juno last night, which is a similar orbiter around Jupiter. Everything they have found from Juno so far has been completely surprising and thrown a ton of models and theories in the trash. There is a surprising amount of variability in the stuff below the surface, and not a big ball of uniform soup as was thought. It's really amazing. They still don't know if Jupiter has a core or not, or what's generating the immense magnetic field.

These featured images are amazing: https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/jun...

Still sorry I couldn't get down to that Juno talk.

Jupiter is such a weird place. On the one hand, we had multiple flyby visits (notably Pioneers & Voyagers), and Galileo was there for the better part of a decade. On the other hand, the place is enormous, so it should be no surprise how many new things we find. I don't think any of the previous missions were designed to study the core.

Jupiter seems to have a minor version of the Curse that used to plague Mars probes. Galileo had the famous problem with its high-gain antenna, and now Juno has the issues that prevent the team from burning into the 14-day orbit they had planned. Fortunately, in both cases the missions are/were able to get a lot of good science data anyway.

Mixolyde wrote:
Stele wrote:

Pale blue dot, part 2. :cool:

Part 3, actually. Part 2 is also from Cassini:

I love that image from The Day The Earth Smiled.

"A "Message to the Milky Way" contest is being held by Porco's company, Diamond Sky Productions. It is a two-part contest: People can submit a digital photo taken on July 19 and/or a music composition. The winning entries will be beamed as a message to extraterrestrials"

I wish these nutters would stop trying to get the attention of the extraterrestrials. They're just going to get us all killed.

BadKen wrote:

"A "Message to the Milky Way" contest is being held by Porco's company, Diamond Sky Productions. It is a two-part contest: People can submit a digital photo taken on July 19 and/or a music composition. The winning entries will be beamed as a message to extraterrestrials"

I wish these nutters would stop trying to get the attention of the extraterrestrials. They're just going to get us all killed.

Well, there's nothing better than asking randos on the intrawebs to send you pictures. After looking at a few of those, her company is likely to lose all faith in humanity and decide that we deserve to have some extraterrestrials come stomp on us.

Hrdina wrote:

Jupiter seems to have a minor version of the Curse that used to plague Mars probes.

"Used to" seems optimistic, the ESA (mostly) failed a mission last year, and Russia completely failed one in 2011. Losing the Russia mission really bummed me out, as it was going to be a sample return!

Yonder wrote:
Hrdina wrote:

Jupiter seems to have a minor version of the Curse that used to plague Mars probes.

"Used to" seems optimistic, the ESA (mostly) failed a mission last year, and Russia completely failed one in 2011. Losing the Russia mission really bummed me out, as it was going to be a sample return!

You're right that it's optimistic, but I do think it's been a little better lately (as long as you're not Russian anyway). Since Mars Odyssey, we've only lost Beagle 2 and Fobos-Grunt. Actually, that Russia comment was unfair of me. Russia is part of ExoMars, which is doing very well.

I too was sad about Fobos-Grunt. That was a really cool mission.

20 years or so ago, I worked as a contractor on the first vehicle of the A2100 project (a comm-sat). This was with Martin Marietta (now part of Lockheed Martin) in NJ. That site was formerly GE Aerospace, and before that was RCA. A lot of the people on that job had worked on Mars Observer. MO failed in August 1993, and I started that job in May 1994, so it was fresh in everyone's mind at the time.

On-topic: Very cool! I noticed it yesterday but didn't realize that they'd be playing the series over and over.

Off-topic: I just noticed this message at the top of the chat.

Welcome to the Quiet Mode experiment! We're going to try to show you only higher quality messages. To opt-out and go back to unfiltered chat, type /crazy

I left it in "quiet mode" for a few minutes, then disabled it. While there are fewer messages displayed in quiet mode, the objective to "show you only higher quality messages" is a total failure.

Cool video. About halfway through I realized that its illustrating the Earth's orbit around the Sun as well as its spin on its axis. So I watched it again.

Gyroscope stabilized camera?

Robear wrote:

Gyroscope stabilized camera?

Nah, no need, because the Earth's rotation is predictable and simple. You can buy a little motor that you put in between the telescope legs and the telescope that do a constant small rotation to keep up with it.

Cassini has survived and is sending data after its first dip inside Saturn's rings.

Yonder wrote:

Cassini has survived and is sending data after its first dip inside Saturn's rings.

I am soooooo looking forward to seeing the data that comes back from this, especially ring images.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the first response in the twitter link you posted is some guy who felt the need to piss in everyone else's cornflakes.

Yeah, talking about Syria in the Cassini forum... come on! Like no one is talking about Syria right now?

fangblackbone wrote:

Yeah, talking about Syria in the Cassini forum... come on! Like no one is talking about Syria right now?

Like any amount of money would fix the Middle East?

It's almost disappointing how routine this is becoming.

The video doesn't work for me at that link, so here's SpaceX's own video.

Alz wrote:

It's almost disappointing how routine this is becoming.

That's okay. Pretty soon SpaceX is going to start gearing up to do Mars stuff. That will be anything but routine, but it will be built on technology that is just now becoming tried and true.

That was beautiful. Dont be discouraged from watching it because its 'another' successful launch and landing. Today's launch was just about 100% cloud-free and they had several cameras capture the entire descent, including one on board. We've never seen the process in this much uninterrupted detail.

That was some amazing footage. And the fact that they were not allowed to stream anything about the second stage made the first stage the king of the show.

I think that the next two big milestones will be their heavy rocket, and a manned mission.

MoonDragon wrote:

That was some amazing footage. And the fact that they were not allowed to stream anything about the second stage made the first stage the king of the show.

I think that the next two big milestones will be their heavy rocket, and a manned mission.

I think part of it was that they had to focus on the first stage, but I also suspect they had some better quality video equipment due to the customer for this launch.

That view of stage separation and the boostback burn was fan-frakking-tastic.

I shall just drop this off here and slowly back out.