27. Astrophysicist, writer, artist. Michigan. Business inquiries: kaijunobiz@gmail.com
ALTSorry I gotta call out of work I have to go mourn the bestest little robot there ever was
I CANT DO THIS AGAIN ITS TOO MUCH
Can we talk about the Valentine’s Day cards NASA made?
Today marks 25 years since NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft saw Earth as “a pale blue dot.”
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” -Carl Sagan
The victims of the 1986 Challenger Shuttle explosion likely did not die on initial failure of the rocket, but instead were probably alive and conscious until their fuselage crashed into the ocean some time later. Six astronauts and one civilian schoolteacher died.
The failure was due to malfunctioning O-Rings, a known problem to both NASA and the contractor hired to build the shuttle. Several NASA engineers warned against the launch and were concerned about the integrity of said O-Rings. Several chief engineers, most notably Roger Boisjoly, pleaded for the launch to be rescheduled, but was ignored by the administration.
NASA astronaut films lightning from ISS
Astronaut Reid Wiseman posted a Vine from the International Space Station today showing lightning over Houston.
Tornado warnings were issued in the Houston area earlier this afternoon but have since expired.
got me having goosebumps
he. he posted a vine. from space.
To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before
Whether and when NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, humankind’s most distant object, broke through to interstellar space, the space between stars, has been a thorny issue. For the last year, claims have surfaced every few months that Voyager 1 has “left our solar system”.
Voyager 1 is exploring an even more unfamiliar place than our Earth’s sea floors — a place more than 11 billion miles (17 billion kilometers) away from our sun. It has been sending back so much unexpected data that the science team has been grappling with the question of how to explain all the information. None of the handful of models the Voyager team uses as blueprints have accounted for the observations about the transition between our heliosphere and the interstellar medium in detail. The team has known it might take months, or longer, to understand the data fully and draw their conclusions.
Since the 1960s, most scientists have defined our solar system as going out to the Oort Cloud, where the comets that swing by our sun on long timescales originate. That area is where the gravity of other stars begins to dominate that of the sun. It will take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly about 30,000 years to fly beyond it. Informally, of course, “solar system” typically means the planetary neighborhood around our sun. Because of this ambiguity, the Voyager team has lately favored talking about interstellar space, which is specifically the space between each star’s realm of plasma influence.
Voyager 1, which is working with a finite power supply, has enough electrical power to keep operating the fields and particles science instruments through at least 2020, which will mark 43 years of continual operation. At that point, mission managers will have to start turning off these instruments one by one to conserve power, with the last one turning off around 2025.
The spacecraft will continue sending engineering data for a few more years after the last science instrument is turned off, but after that it will be sailing on as a silent ambassador. In about 40,000 years, it will be closer to the star AC +79 3888 than our own sun. (AC +79 3888 is traveling toward us faster than we are traveling towards it, so while Alpha Centauri is the next closest star now, it won’t be in 40,000 years.) And for the rest of time, Voyager 1 will continue orbiting around the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, with our sun but a tiny point of light among many.
For more information about Voyager, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov.
Photos of Jupiter taken by NASA’s JUNO probe
God I’m so gay for Jupiter
[slides nasa $20] so, tell me about the aliens
aliens: [slide nasa $40]
nasa: lmao what aliens
nasa, with $60, holding back tears: we can finally afford some more space rocks
[doesnt slide nasa anything]
nasa: we’ll tell you everything we know because trump doesn’t want us to.
A Cosmic Necklace Larger than a Solar System
The “Necklace Nebula”, also called PN G054.2-03.4, is the exploded aftermath of a giant star that came too close to its Sun-like binary companion. The two stars that produced the Necklace Nebula live in a relatively small orbit about each other. They have a period of 1.2 days and a separation on the order of 5 times the radius of the Sun.
Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)
Been getting a lot of asks about “NASA finding a parallel universe” or whatever and let me break it down.
It’s 90% sensationalism. ANITA, a detector in Antarctica has recently picked up some strange signals. The signals indicate that a very high energy particle (the neutrino) had passed through the earth without interacting with anything, something unexpected of a high energy particle.
So, here come the weird ideas. Scientists try to come up with ways of modifying our understanding of physics to make these detections more plausible. SOME of these require bizarre beyond the standard model ideas, like the one in the news. However there are much more likely answers, such as a common function of how physics normally works (won’t go into details here, but here’s a paper on it https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.01737) or simply a systematic explanation, like the signals bouncing off weird features in the ice and distorting the signal. Here’s another article: https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.091102
Conclusion? The news relies on article clicks and outrageous claims get those clicks.
