Other Than Mars Thread

February 8th, 2017 at 1:54:12 PM permalink
rxwine
Member since: Oct 24, 2012
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Unless my info is wrong, the two trivia are related.

Quote:
Earth is the only planet not named after a Roman god or goddess, but it is associated with the goddess Terra Mater (Gaea to the Greeks). In mythology, she was the first goddess on Earth and the mother of Uranus.


Uranus is the Greek god.

U R welcome.
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February 15th, 2017 at 5:50:22 PM permalink
rxwine
Member since: Oct 24, 2012
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Quote:
At 9:28 a.m. Tuesday morning, a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) built by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the Bay of Bengal, carrying 104 satellites from seven countries. By 10 a.m., all had successfully been inserted into orbit, and India had surpassed a bar previously set by a Russian launch of 37 satellites in 2014.


One other interesting bit of info
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Quote:
Ramabhadran Aravamudan, former director of the ISRO Satellite Center in Bangalore, attributed India’s low launch prices to “cheaper labor costs and a state-led model that doesn't involve ‘industries with their own profit margins,’ ” CNN reported.

This approach runs counter to the United State's current strategy of turning orbital spaceflight over to private firms as a means to bring costs down.


3 million per satellite. Space X had a charge of 50 million for one satellite.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/Spacebound/2017/0215/How-did-India-launch-104-satellites-all-at-once
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February 15th, 2017 at 6:20:13 PM permalink
Nareed
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Quote: rxwine
3 million per satellite. Space X had a charge of 50 million for one satellite.


How massive a satellite? To what kind of orbit?

Those two factors determine much of the cost. Orbiting a 1 lb satellite to 150 km up costs much less than orbiting a 3-ton satellite to 36,000 km up. I doubt anyone can put up the latter for $3 million.
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April 5th, 2017 at 6:07:56 AM permalink
rxwine
Member since: Oct 24, 2012
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Quote:
Participants in a citizen science campaign hosted by the crowdsourcing program Zooniverse, and the BBC pinpointed four previously unknown objects in the outer solar system that could be candidates for Planet Nine, according to researchers at the Australian National University.

...

In just three days, about 21,000 volunteers sifted through more than 100,000 images and classified more than 5 million objects - work that would take an astronomy PhD student four years, ANU astronomer Brad Tucker wrote in the Conversation. They surveyed vast swaths of the southern sky and managed to rule out the possibility of an unknown Neptune-size object in about 90 percent of it.


http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/space/go-for-launch/os-citizen-scientists-may-have-located-candidates-for-planet-nine-20170405-story.html
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April 6th, 2017 at 12:08:55 AM permalink
rxwine
Member since: Oct 24, 2012
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We're using telescopes around the Earth in a combined project to look at the event horizon of a black hole.
Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI)

http://www.ibtimes.com/photographing-supermassive-black-holes-earth-size-event-horizon-telescope-starts-2521548
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April 6th, 2017 at 2:41:42 AM permalink
Pacomartin
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The Metonic cycle was discovered by the Greek astronomer Meton of Athens (in the fifth century BC). The difference between the two periods (of 19 years and 235 synodic months) is only a few hours, depending on the definition of the year.

Quote: Ayecarumba
As we have very little information on how the observations were actually collected, I think we move too quickly to give credit to an individual. It is possible that observations were collected by a number of "scientists", over the course of several generations. The clay tablet could be the Babylonian equivalent of an encyclopedia or textbook that was part of an advanced higher education system.


The clay tablet almost certainly represented generations of observations, but it is still remarkable. Although one metonic cycle of 19 years is within a lifetime, there was no measurement systems at the time to see how many cycles of the moon (within a few seconds) had passed. We can see cycles of the moon that are accurate to a few days, but not to a few seconds.

You would essentially have to set up an "order" that would pass down the observations over generations in a manner that would be intelligible to future generations. It's like the problem of nuclear waste which could be dangerous for a period of time that exceeds not only the English language, but all of civilization and written language period. You need to set up a near religious order that will recognize the symbols for a thousands generations.

Longitude is a good book about how it took generations of study on a problem until a solution was reached. If you think about it, Marco Polo was travelling across many degrees of longitude in the 13th century, and the problem of how to measure longitude was only solved some 5 centuries later. The problem of measuring latitude was solved by the ancients, although sailing ships required much more precision.
April 27th, 2017 at 12:42:26 PM permalink
rxwine
Member since: Oct 24, 2012
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Cassini made a successful dive through Saturn's rings, also snapped a photo of Saturn's surface.

Looks like it's populated by clams.

blurry image, more like Rorschach test



Cassini launched when Bill Clinton still had a few years left as President.
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June 10th, 2017 at 2:43:22 AM permalink
odiousgambit
Member since: Oct 28, 2012
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Tidbit from an episode on Planet 9 on "Space's Deepest Secrets" [Science Channel] :

To even suspect the existence of it, first the erratic orbits of various objects in the Kuiper belt had to be calculated. The remark was made that it takes a supercomputer 3 weeks to pump this all out. So it seems that not so long ago any speculation about such a thing would have had to be done without any real data to base it on.

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October 29th, 2017 at 3:17:32 AM permalink
odiousgambit
Member since: Oct 28, 2012
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We had a visitor from outside our solar system. Seems to me it can't be too unusual, but it was going really fast! Too fast to start orbiting the Sun, even elliptically it seems.

Things escape their systems due to the way distinct objects interact, for example one star can fling the other out into space. It's the slingshot thing. Even a black hole could be headed our way by this method, undetectable since the way they are spotted is by the way matter interacts with them, and being flung out, there could be nothing there to interact.

Why mention that? Hey, well, Halloween is coming up!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/science/interstellar-object-solar-system.html

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November 7th, 2017 at 9:21:41 PM permalink
rxwine
Member since: Oct 24, 2012
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If a probe can reach Alpha Centauri in 20 years, why haven't we launched one already? I mean unmanned of course. Is there some technology still lacking?
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