Space

It took a long time but I finally finished my Apollo 11 metal earth model kit. These are no joke when it comes to difficulty!

I had been wanting to see the Space Shuttle Discovery for quite some time. I only live about 3 hours from the Udvar-Hazy Center in Washington D.C. This past weekend I finally got the chance and it was glorious! If you don't know, this was the shuttle that carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/11013846

Three Americans and one Russian astronaut have flown to the International Space Station for a six-month stint.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/fVnf0

T-58 minutes until the NASA/SpaceX launch of Crew-8 to the ISS!

Launch scheduled for 2024-03-04, 03:53 UTC.

Launch thread with more info has been posted over at [email protected]:

SpaceX Crew-8 Launch Discussion and Updates Thread

Come join us in that thread!

Individually doing atmospheric analysis for every planet in the galaxy is probably an impossible task for a civilisation confined to a single solar system. Listening for signals is something our civilisation already does. If we discover radio signals from a primitive civilisation in the next star system over there's a non-zero chance we'd panic and try to wipe them out.

That's the risk that dark forest theory is talking about. Maybe the threat comes from a civilisation dedicated to wiping out intelligent life that just hasn't found you yet, maybe it just comes from your nearest neighbor. Maybe there's no threat at all. The risk of interplanetary war is still too great to turn on a light in the forest and risk a bullet from the dark.

And while knowing this, why do we still not choose to just observe and be as quiet/ non existant as possible?

Scott provides a nice summary of the Intuitive Machines lunar landing.

When a star like our sun reaches the end of its life, it can ingest the surrounding planets and asteroids that were born with it. Now, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) in Chile, researchers have found a unique signature of this process for the first time—a scar imprinted on the surface of a white dwarf star. The results are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"It is well known that some white dwarfs—slowly cooling embers of stars like our sun—are cannibalizing pieces of their planetary systems. Now we have discovered that the star's magnetic field plays a key role in this process, resulting in a scar on the white dwarf's surface," says Stefano Bagnulo, an astronomer at Armagh Observatory and Planetarium in Northern Ireland, UK, and lead author of the study.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12344130

xkcd #2898: Orbital Argument

https://xkcd.com/2898

Alt text:

"Some people say light is waves, and some say it's particles, so I bet light is some in-between thing that's both wave and particle depending on how you look at it. Am I right?" "YES, BUT YOU SHOULDN'T BE!"

Houston-based Intuitive Machines landed its Odysseus robot near the lunar south pole.

It took some minutes for controllers to establish that the craft was down, but eventually a signal was received.

"What we can confirm, without a doubt, is our equipment is on the surface of the Moon and we are transmitting," flight director Tim Crain announced.

Staff at the company cheered and clapped at the news.

It was an important moment, not just for the commercial exploitation of space but for the US space programme in general.