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Astronomy General Space Discussion

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Lost in Space, well not quite, we'll find out soon if Butch and Suni are stuck in space.
arstechnica.com

Cards on the table: Are Butch and Suni coming home on Starliner or Crew Dragon?

On the eve of a fateful decision, we’re answering some frequently asked questions.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com

Added: NASA have announced Butch and Suni are having a stay over, a real long stay over until next year when they will return to Earth in a crewed Dragon. Starliner will be come back to Earth under remote control. More bad PR for Boeing.
www.nasa.gov

NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew - NASA

NASA will return Boeing’s Starliner to Earth without astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the spacecraft, the agency announced Saturday. The
www.nasa.gov www.nasa.gov
 
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Scientist have measured Earths global electric field for the first time. This has been suspected for a long time because there was evidence of ions escaping above the poles. Nice animation in the vid. The field has a strength of only half a volt but is able to fling ions into space.

science.nasa.gov

NASA Discovers a Long-Sought Global Electric Field on Earth - NASA Science

An international team of scientists has successfully measured a planet-wide electric field thought to be as fundamental to Earth as its gravity and magnetic fields. Known as the ambipolar electric field, scientists first hypothesized over 60 years ago that it drove atmospheric escape above...
science.nasa.gov science.nasa.gov
 
Who here thinks we’re close to finding alien lifeforms? Personally, I think we’re getting close to it. Reckon in the next 25 years, we’ll find alien lifeforms. The James Web Telescope has made some amazing discoveries. The next telescope will probably find life if the JWT doesn’t
 

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TheGoatBaron said:
Who here thinks we’re close to finding alien lifeforms? Personally, I think we’re getting close to it. Reckon in the next 25 years, we’ll find alien lifeforms. The James Web Telescope has made some amazing discoveries. The next telescope will probably find life if the JWT doesn’t
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I was at a ‘star party’ recently and a top Australian astronomer there was talking about the next two telescopes being built and they sounded awesome. We think jwt is amazing the next one which is land based I believe, is I think 6 times more powerful and will be able to probe deep dark space.
 
CD Xbow said:
My guess is simple life will be extraordinarily common, perhaps even elsewhere in the solar system.
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Agreed which was the basis for my question
CD Xbow said:
Larger life much less common and sentients very rare.
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I think the Goldilocks planets will be the best bet but the conditions must be a mirror of ours and I cant see that. Dont expect lung functioning beings as an example
 
GreyCrow said:
Agreed which was the basis for my question

I think the Goldilocks planets will be the best bet but the conditions must be a mirror of ours and I cant see that. Dont expect lung functioning beings as an example
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The way life got going so quickly on Earth, within 500 million years of it's formation suggests to me that planets in the goldilocks zone, if they have liquid water will nearly always form life. Ancient Mars, which was wetter and warmer may have formed simple life early on. That's probably one of the reasons it's of such scientific interest. Here it looks like the earliest life may have started around volcanic vents and they didn't need oxygen at all, in fact it was poison to them.

AC DC sang 'It's a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll', and that is certainly true of complex life, it took another 4 billion years to evolve folks who can make Fender guitars and along the way there was a lot of events that had to happen for Earth to support active, high energy organisms. I suspect this is uncommon. It's a wonderful story, though.
 
David Bowie wrote 'Blessed are the spiders from Mars' and here they are
1726229012498.png
​
I think the image is about 500m square - they are very naughty not to put a scale on the image. These have been named
araneiforms and appear only in the southern polar region of Mars in the planet's spring. Nasa has been able to recreate the effect in the laboratory.

During the cold winter on Mars, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere freezes on the ground. Then, when spring rolls around, and temperatures rise, this carbon dioxide ice returns to its gaseous state.

This, however, can happen from the bottom of a deposit of ice, with darker mars dirt beneath absorbing the heat. This traps the sublimated gas under the slabs of ice above.

With nowhere for the gas to go, pressure builds until the ice cracks in a small explosion; the carbon dioxide gas escapes through these cracks, carrying darker, dusty material with it. Once all the ice has disappeared back into the atmosphere, a dark, spider-like scar is left behind.

www.sciencealert.com

NASA Can Finally Explain Why Creepy 'Spiders' on Mars Keep Appearing

Just what we need. Mars spiders.
www.sciencealert.com www.sciencealert.com
 
This years Astronomy Photographer of the Year has be adjudicated. Nice range of pics both terrestrial and heavenly. I was a bit underwhelned by the winner, however that might just me not understanding what a great technical achievement it is. I thought this was a neat illusion, looking like the ISS is orbit around the sun.
1726388258876.png
www.abc.net.au

Solar eclipse image announced the winner of the 2024 Astronomy Photographer of the Year award

An awe-inspiring image of the progression of Bailey's beads during the 2023 annular solar eclipse has placed first out of 3,500 entries from 58 countries.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au
 

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Ars Technica have an interesting article about NASAs decision to fund both Boeing and SpaceX to develop crewed space craft in 2014. Boeing nearly won and it required one man, Phil McAlister to reframe the arguments, that resulted in NASA adding SpaceX. The reasons why the NASA engineers wanted Boeing looks rather flimsy after the companies last decade of terrible and very public failures.
arstechnica.com

In the room where it happened: When NASA nearly gave Boeing all the crew funding

"In all my years of working with Boeing I never saw them sign up for additional work for free."
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com
I'm always interested in why things fail or why they succeed. The story of the NASA crewed programs shows how spreading risk, sponsoring innovation and encouraging competition can work, but they only got there by a bit of good fortune. Boeing, on the other hand, makes an interesting study of failure.
 
CD Xbow said:
. Boeing, on the other hand, makes an interesting study of failure.
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Hopefully this isnt too much of a sidetrack

The Great Fail podcast examines a lot of businesses that were seen to be so strong and suddenly went under and the reasons why
Ironically the featured one is Challenger Disaster



While they dont profile Boeing I like it for the hubris some companies show
 
GreyCrow said:
Hopefully this isnt too much of a sidetrack

The Great Fail podcast examines a lot of businesses that were seen to be so strong and suddenly went under and the reasons why
Ironically the featured one is Challenger Disaster



While they dont profile Boeing I like it for the hubris some companies show
Click to expand...

Thanks for posting. So many reasons for the Challenger failure and in retrospect they were probably lucky they got away with as many successful launches. The fundamental technical one is it was too big and complex. The US military wanted it to have a big cargo bay for spy satellites, this mandated a larger craft, which needed the big solid fuel boosters along with the prone to failure O rings. There is no really good reason to mix huge cargo capacity for satellites with a manned craft, it just leads to a larger, more complex craft, which was prone to failure. Way more expensive, too. I think the Challenger disaster informed NASA recent decisions WRT Boeings Starliner.
 
Hi all just popping in here to post this article. Has the mystery of Saturn’s hexagon shaped storm on its North Pole been solved?

science.nasa.gov

Saturn's Hexagon in Motion - NASA Science

An enormous spinning hexagon in the clouds at Saturn’s north pole has fascinated observers since our first glimpse of it in the 1980s. The long-lived, symmetrical weather system – twice as wide as Earth – may have been spinning for centuries.
science.nasa.gov science.nasa.gov
 
Dwarf planet Ceres, located in the asteroid belt and featured heavily in The Expanse is now believed to be a water world, albeit a small, icy one.
cosmosmagazine.com

Dwarf planet Ceres, first asteroid ever identified, is an ancient water world

Astronomers have overturned long-held beliefs about the composition of dwarf planet Ceres and found it was an ancient water world.
cosmosmagazine.com cosmosmagazine.com
Nice video of the dwarf planet.

The knowledge there are brines and subsurface water might make this an earlier target for an exploration looking for life than the more distant Europa.
 
I find all of this so fascinating.

Quite often go to bed listening to "Isaac Arthur" "event horizon/John Michael Godier"

I'm not very intelligent 😔 so I don't understand alot of what is going on, but love it anyway.
 

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dirty2 said:
I find all of this so fascinating.

Quite often go to bed listening to "Isaac Arthur" "event horizon/John Michael Godier"

I'm not very intelligent 😔 so I don't understand alot of what is going on, but love it anyway.
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Dont knock yourself

That you are searching for knowledge indicates a keen intelligence
 
That old SciFi trope 'gravitational fluctuations' are occurring around our moon, suggesting something is shifting around inside our moon. Perhaps a bit of magma kept warm by some unexplained process?

futurism.com

Something Massive Is Shifting Deep Inside the Moon

NASA researchers believe that a layer of molten goo, which shifts and moves like ocean tides, sits between the Moon's mantle and core.
futurism.com futurism.com

This is all rubbish, because anyone who has watched Dr Who knows the moon is an alien egg and that movement is the embryo moving about before it's born in 2049 AD
 
CD Xbow said:
That old SciFi trope 'gravitational fluctuations' are occurring around our moon, suggesting something is shifting around inside our moon. Perhaps a bit of magma kept warm by some unexplained process?

futurism.com

Something Massive Is Shifting Deep Inside the Moon

NASA researchers believe that a layer of molten goo, which shifts and moves like ocean tides, sits between the Moon's mantle and core.
futurism.com futurism.com

This is all rubbish, because anyone who has watched Dr Who knows the moon is an alien egg and that movement is the embryo moving about before it's born in 2049 AD
Click to expand...

Isn’t the moon just made of cheese
 

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