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Spacey Thoughts

WesL

WesL

"Bill, I'm talkin' imminent rueage"
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A dedicated thread for random space comments that might not deserve their own thread.
 
Check this high resolution view of the sun. Each blob of plasma is roughly the size of TEXAS.

 
Elon Musk was spotted riding shotgun with Jay Leno driving one of the new Tesla trucks. Perhaps an upcoming episode of Jay's Garage will feature their endeavors.
 
Russians are playing chicken with our spy sats. What could go wrong.

 
China has successfully launched what has been described as "the world's first 6G satellite" into space to test the technology.

It went into orbit along with 12 other satellites from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in the Shanxi Province.
Here it was:

Does this mean that we will get a bunch of satellites in the sky in 10 years? Except those 57,000 already scheduled to launch by 2029?
 
TomaJo said:
China has successfully launched what has been described as "the world's first 6G satellite" into space to test the technology.

It went into orbit along with 12 other satellites from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in the Shanxi Province.
Here it was:

Does this mean that we will get a bunch of satellites in the sky in 10 years? Except those 57,000 already scheduled to launch by 2029?
Click to expand...

Looks like your link is broken. Might want to check it.
 
Didn't see this before -- what a good thread!

What an awesome image, too (maybe BepiColombo is in there somewhere, too):

 
I just went to take my trash out just before sunset and looked west (toward the city lights) and could still make out the comet. Incredibly bright. Can’t make out the tail from my location but the brightness is on par with Venus.
 
Haven't been following the asteroid news, but this is interesting:

 
This is better:

 
Following trends on this object, I do believe it will reach a 0% chance of collision in the next day or two. It's likely to be just another example of a potential impactor being overhyped by a good amount of news outlets - not to say that there was no reason to worry about it as it did reach a remarkable chance in its own right, but one thing that is very important to remember is that the calculations on the trajectory of the asteroid only get more and more precise as more attention is brought to it and more effort is put into modeling where it may end up, which means they become more accurate. This thing was never a cause for much concern in my eyes and I dislike the amount of "doomsday" -ish hype it brought with its discovery. It's pretty much all major news outlets, especially stuff like Fox, so I cannot really blame them for being clickbait-y, it's in their nature. Even if it did impact the Earth, there's also the chance that it would land in water as well.

The amount of uncertainty that goes into the orbital mechanics of these smaller objects is quite high due to how finicky orbital mechanics is in general. I'm sure we will find another couple asteroids that pose a nonzero threat of striking Earth until more calculations are run on them to show that they will, in fact, not impact the Earth. With the estimated size of this object it would have been a Tunguska-like event, maybe a good bit stronger than that, which statistically only occur about once every thousand years. For something of this size to strike so soon after Tunguska would be a statistical anomaly in its own right - not impossible, just unlikely.

Additionally, even if it was going to impact us with a 100% certainty, we have missions like DART that have displayed an effective effort at deflection of asteroids. There's absolutely no reason why we wouldn't attempt this, barring complete incompetence on the funding front - which is most certainly possible with how things are right now, lol.

My research in astronomy does not dabble in things like this, so I could be wrong or off about some of my assumptions - feel free to fact check me in the mean time if you wish. But this is what I have extrapolated to be the case in my time working in astronomy and it seems to make sense to me. It has overall been pretty cool to have us track this object in this way. I have not felt any level of fear from this object and I don't believe anyone else should either, as long as that number hits 0%, which I most certainly believe to be the case.
 
I wondered what it looked like from the other end but didn't know Firefly could image it.

 
Motivation :)

 
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