^Apology accepted.
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^Apology accepted.
Giant solar flare detonated mines during Vietnam War
New research from astronomers confirms that a solar flare in 1972 was behind the mysteriousdetonation of dozens of mines.
Magnetic radiation from giant solar storms caused the sudden and nearly instantaneous detonation of dozens of sea mines in Vietnam in the 1970s, research has confirmed.
At the time of the mysterious explosions, the US Navy attributed to the event to "magnetic perturbations of solar storms" - an attribution which scientists from the University of Colorado have confirmed.
In their paper, published in the journal Space Weather, the team established that the mine detonations - alongside widespread electric and communication-grid disturbances seen in North America, were due to an enormous solar flare which burst towards Earth.
Towards the end of the Vietnam War in 1972, the US military deployed 11,000 sea mines south of Hai Phong in northern Vietnam to blockade naval supply routes which were vital to the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Regular Army.
However, on 4 August, a few months after these sea mines had been sewn throughout those waters - dozens of them apparently spontaneously and almost instantaneously detonated.
A research team led by Dr Delores Knipp wrote that the solar storm "deserves a scientific revisit as a grand challenge for the space weather community, as it provides space‐age terrestrial observations of what was likely a Carrington‐class storm."
The Carrington Event is believed to be the largest solar storm ever recorded which, in 1859, hit Earth.
It left an aurora visible across the sky, even in latitudes much close to the equator, and was described in contemporary reports as even brighter than the light of a full moon.
It caused the failure of telegraph systems all across Europe and North America, and a similar storm today could cause trillions of dollars in damage globally.
The 1972 storm "fits the description of a Carrington‐class storm minus the low latitude aurora", wrote the researchers.
Two "significant" solar flares blasted out of the sun last year, one of which was the most powerful flare recorded since 2008.
These space weather events have become an increasingly important topic of study for scientists as humanity depends more and more on electrical networks and on satellites which are very exposed to their radiation.
https://news.sky.com/story/giant-sol...m-war-11549081
https://teakdoor.com/images/imported/2018/11/1062.jpg
Factcheck: Her team wrote it.
^ Could be in the Amazing Pics thread that.
Really amazing what humans accomplished without modern computers.
I dithered between the two.
https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...id=23090&stc=1
It's been a while since we've sat down in front of the TV to watch a good ol' Mars landing.
But clear your calendar because NASA said Tuesday it will broadcast its InSight Mars Lander touching down on the Red Planet on Nov. 26 on NASA Television and its website, as well as Twitter and Facebook.
The last time NASA broadcast a landing was six years ago, and it made for exciting viewing: The Curiosity rover executed a dramatic plunge to the surface.
InSight was launched May 5, and if it's successful, it will be NASA's first spacecraft to land on Mars since Curiosity in 2012. NASA says its mission is to study the "deep interior" of Mars. It's data will "help scientists understand the formation of all rocky worlds, including our own," the space agency said.
Another NASA craft set for Mars is the ExoMars rover, but it has to wait a little longer. That spacecraft is slated to touch down in 2020.
Its mission: search for signs of life.
For everything you need to know on how to watch how InSight goes on Nov. 26, head here.
https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-set-t...inkId=59627134
More on Monday's landing:
Quote:
NASA’s newest Martian lander is slated to do groundbreaking geologic research on the Red Planet. But first, it has to touch down this coming Monday. And landing on Mars is no easy feat.
Despite a string of recent NASA successes, the overall success rate for Martian landings is around 40 percent. The InSight lander will once again face the perilous Martian atmosphere and surface in its quest to study the ground beneath the Martian surface and hopefully detect “Marsquakes.”
“Any time you’re trying to land on another planet, it’s very exciting,” Tom Hoffman, InSight Project Manager at NASA, told Gizmodo. “For InSight, that’s no different. There are so many different challenges we have to overcome to successfully land.”
InSight, or the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, launched this past May from the west coast, and is slated to touch down on Monday at 3PM, US Eastern time. It’s equipped with three tools for studying the planet: a seismometer for measuring sound waves traveling through the ground (also known as Marsquakes), a heat probe that measures how heat flows beneath Mars’ surface, and a radio antennae to measure the changing location of the planet’s North Pole to indirectly study its core. Those instruments will arrive on a platform nearly identical to the previous Phoenix lander’s to transport the instruments to the Martian surface
The InSight lander will need to slow from several hundred mile-per-hour speeds to softly land on the Martian surface. Mars has a thinner atmosphere than Earth and therefore less atmospheric drag for the parachute to slow down with, and the planet still has weather like winds for the lander to contend with. Even if all goes according to plan, a robotic arm must move the heat probe and seismometer onto the ground—something that’s never been done before.
Scientists hope that InSight will arrive at the planned flat location like a “parking lot,” and not on a slope or on top of a large rock. “For me, it will be thrilling if it’s really flat and boring,” Suzanne Smrekar, Deputy Principal Investigator of InSight at NASA, told Gizmodo. “That’s so we can safely deploy our instruments and get started quickly.” The heat flow probe can hammer into the ground most easily when it’s level, and the scientists don’t want the seismometer to wobble by sitting on a rock.
The InSight team has worked hard to prepare the lander for these various challenges. InSight will land at a higher elevation than Phoenix and will thus have less time to slow down, so the team has strengthened its parachute—Hoffman told Gizmodo his team was unable to break the parachute in a wind tunnel, which is a good sign. It will then fire rockets in order to ease itself onto the surface. Once it lands, InSight will immediately take a picture of the Martian surface, and scientists will get to work deciding where to put the instruments. It will still be two to three months before the instruments are fully deployed, though. There’s a test bed at JPL, with a full mockup of InSight sitting atop fake rocks and gravel, for scientists to do test runs of placing the instruments with the robotic arm.
You might be aware that the last lander to fly to Mars, the European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli lander, crash-landed hard due to a miscalculation. The InSight team reviewed the lessons learned from Schiaparelli, and made some tweaks to the probe’s software in response, said Hoffman. NASA engineers will be listening for telltale radio signals from the probe, and will monitor it with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Odyssey. Two smaller spacecraft behind InSight will also attempt to monitor InSight’s progress and relay signals back to Earth, according to a NASA release.
But once InSight arrives, the science will be amazing.
“We want to understand the birth of rocky planets within the first tens of millions of years, while they form from a molten mass,” Smrekar told Gizmodo. “This sets up the evolution of the rest of the planet.”
NASA will air the landing on Monday, and we’ll be following along.
https://gizmodo.com/how-nasa-plans-t...ras-1830593599
In a video that looks like something a special effects shop would produce, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst has captured one of the most remarkable views of a rocket launch we’ve ever seen.
This extraordinary timelapse shows the launch of a Russian Soyuz rocket that took flight on November 16, 2018 from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. A Progress MS-10 spacecraft filled with 5,652 pounds (2,564 kg) worth of cargo sat atop the rocket, which is seen en route to the International Space Station.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouBfz...ature=youtu.be
https://gizmodo.com/iss-footage-of-s...rec-1830620616
A reminder of tonight's Mars landing for those that want to watch it:
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-w...n-mars-monday/Quote:
It's been awhile since we've sat down in front of the TV to watch a good ol' Mars landing.
But clear your calendar, because NASA will broadcast its InSight Mars Lander touching down on the Red Planet on Monday, Nov. 26 on NASA Television and its website, as well as Twitter and Facebook. The landing is expected to happen around noon PT, and we'll be broadcasting NASA's coverage of the touchdown live above starting at 11 a.m. PT.
The Mars Insight Lander is about to land on Mars, in about 20 minutes beginning. It is live on NASA TV.
https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/#public
Running commentary on the NSF Forum.
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/in...589#msg1880589
Landing confirmed. Celebtations in the NASA control room.
Status of the spacecraft still unknown. They are waiting for the dust to settle and then they will deploy solar arrays. But by then contact will be lost to the relay sats in Mars orbit. So we have to wait 5 hours until detailed data on the status will be availabe. Until then it is only a very low data rate directly from the lander to the large arrays of the Deep Space Network back on Earth.
But all looking good. A first image from the surface was received.
https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...id=23622&stc=1
Arrived back home just in time for this from our Thailand trip. Tired from the trip and the fact that it is 3 a.m Bangkok time.
Just finished watching the landing...Great stuff, indeed...
I hear this probe will be "boring" 16 feet into the surface, checking the temperature...(A far cry from the previous 1" probes)...
Looking for water, ultimately...
Solar arrays are deployed and charging the batteries. So it looks good for the mission. Deploying the science instruments will take weeks or a few months. The lander is nearly perfectly horizontal which is needed for deploying the instruments.
There are mainly 2 instruments. They will be deployed with a robot arm. You can see it on the left of the lander.
One is the drill, not actually a drill, the instrument is hammered into the ground. The purpose is to measure the temperature difference between near the surface and 5m down. this will enable to calculate heat flow from the Mars interior and provide data how hot the Mars core still is.
The second is a seismometer that will pick up any quakes. Likely coming from meteorite impacts. This will give data on the planetary crust. They expect to be able to detect larger impact waves going around the planet several times which will give plenty of data on the crust.
We will be able to learn a lot about Mars geology from this mission.
A mockup on how the instruments will look when deployed:
https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...id=23628&stc=1
The hammer probe
https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...id=23629&stc=1 https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...id=23630&stc=1
20,000 to 30,000 hammer strokes to send heat probe about 5 metres into the ground.
A British seismometer.Quote:
Originally Posted by Takeovers
:UK:
French. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by harrybarracuda
SEIS was produced by the French Space Agency (CNES), with the participation of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), Imperial College, Institut supérieur de l'aéronautique et de l'espace (ISAE) and JPL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seismi...rior_Structure
Ah fuck off the cheese eating surrender monkeys probably just did the painting or something.Quote:
Originally Posted by Luigi
:)
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/insight-mars-seis/
The French did build that seismometer. Be proud that Britain was not involved. They caused a 2 year delay in the mission because they were not able to make the case vacuum sealed.
Everyone knows it's better to do the job properly than quickly.Quote:
Originally Posted by Takeovers
InSight's first Selfie.
https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...id=23649&stc=1
You can see they got quite lucky. In a short distance a large boulder field where landing and operating might have failed. But the spot they landed in is perfectly smooth and level. Exactly what they need.Quote:
Originally Posted by harrybarracuda
A journey of 300 million miles which took 6 months...
Did you send your name to Mars?...
As part of its public outreach, NASA organized a program where members of the public were able to have their names sent to Mars aboard InSight. Due to its launch delay, two rounds of sign-ups were conducted totaling 2.4 million names: 826,923 names were registered in 2015 and a further 1.6 million names were added in 2017. An electron beam was used to etch letters only 1⁄1000 the width of a human hair onto 8 mm (0.3 in) silicon wafers.The first chip was installed on the lander in November 2015 and the second on 23 January 2018.
NASA Has Just Released 2,540 Stunning New Photos of Mars
NASA Has Just Released 2,540 Stunning New Photos of Mars.. | Beauty of Planet Earth
Today SpaceX is going to launch from Vandenberg into a sun synchronous orbit which is well suited for earth observation. It is a collection of over 60 small satellites.
One of the experiments is very interesting to me and I have waited for a while for it to launch. It is from DLR, the german aerospace research institute. I like it because of what it attempts to do, not because it is a german experiment.
The official mission logo.
https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...id=23971&stc=1
The satellite is to grow tomatoes from seed to seed. Meaning growing from a seed until it bears tomatoes, a dwarf variant. The satellite will rotate and have the tomatoes grow under lunar gravity. Once that experiment is completed the satellite will speed the rotation up and repeat the experiment under Mars gravity.
That sounds interesting, indeed...
Next crew for the ISS are going up in under two minutes
Well it didn't blow up on take off so that's nice.
Soyuz is now docked at the ISS. But in both the US forum NSF and the german forum I look into members were somewhat worried. Soyuz came in quite a lot off center, more than was ever observed before. Roskosmos terminated the life reporting before docking which did not increase confidence.
I did remind people in the comments that that's how The Andromeda Strain started.
Quote:
NASA probe arrives at asteroid that may CRASH into earth in 157 years
NASA's spacecraft OSIRIS-REx has arrived at tiny distant asteroid 101955 Bennu safe and sound.
The mission will collect samples from the distant asteroid and return them to Earth.
But Bennu has a sting in its tail, because it's classified as a medium risk of crashing into Earth some time between 2175 and 2199. The odds, apparently, are 1-in-2,700 that the asteroid will collide with Earth in around 157 years.
Bennu as a diameter of around 492 metres which means that if it did crash into our planet the damage wouldn't be too terrible. A land impact would generate moderate earthquakes and a sea impact would result in a tsunami.
However Bennu wouldn't end life on Earth, although if it hit a populated area the damage would be catastrophic. Asteroids of this size would crash into Earth roughly ever 130,000 years, scientists say.
NASA's mission, however, isn't really about the asteroid smashing into our planet, it's about understanding how our solar system works.
The hope is that NASA's probe will be able to collect dust from the surface that could date back to the birth of our solar system, ideally with pristine carbon.
Bennu was selected because it's large enough and spins slowly, which means it holds on to the fine particles that make up its surface. Smaller asteroids spin too quickly and throw off their surface dust.
Now OSIRIS-REx has arrived at Bennu it will spend around a year mapping it, looking for a safe place to extract a small sample of the asteroid's surface.
Once it has collected both data and the samples the craft will return to Earth where scientists will be able to study the collected material in far more detail than they would be able to on a spacecraft.
That won't happen until 2023 though, so we're in for a bit of a wait to see material from the early days of our solar system.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/nas...crash-13684307
https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...id=24082&stc=1
A Colossal and Colorful Lagoon. To celebrate its 28th anniversary in space the Hubble Space Telescope made this spectacular image of glowing clouds of interstellar gas in the Lagoon Nebula
The whole nebula, about 4,000 light-years away, is an incredible 55 light-years across and 20 light-years tall. This image shows only a small part of this turbulent star-formation region, about four light-years across
https://teakdoor.com/images/imported/2018/12/1296.jpg
SpaceX just launched a cargo Dragon to the ISS, it is the CRS 16 mission. Launch and Dragon deploymeht went well. The first stage was supposed to fly back to the launch site at the Cape Canaveral. But something was wrong. It started spinning and they were not able to control the spin. They diverted the stage to land in the water. The first loss of a first stage for a long time. Lastthey lost the central core at the experimental Falcon Heavy launch early this year. They will go through telemetry data to determine the cause of this failure.
Important is that the primary mission, getting a Dragon to the ISS goes as planned.
Edit: First tweet of Elon Musk
Of course undamaged does not mean it could be used again after the water landing. Surprising if it did not break up.Quote:
Grid fin hydraulic pump stalled, so Falcon landed just out to sea. Appears to be undamaged & is transmitting data. Recovery ship dispatched.
Looking wild.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...&v=-gYDHmcCztc
Onboard video of the landing released by SpaceX. It is on Twitter so you need to click the twitter link.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1070399755526656000
China’s bold mission to land a probe on the dark side of the Moon
China is about to be the first nation to land on the dark side of the Moon. But Beijing is being unusually secretive about the event — not even confirming its suspected launch date this weekend.
China’s National Space Administration is believed to be targeting the robotic lander at the Von Karaman crater, near the Moon’s south pole. It’s judged to be the oldest impact crater in the entire Solar System, making it an ideal collecting ground for water ice and a rare hydrogen isotope carried on the Solar wind.
Both have the potential to power future interplanetary missions.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/s...21aeae7caac49b
This is interesting. Though it is partly speculation and the source seems somewhat sensationalist. They don't know positively about the targeted landing site. A polar crater is an exciting target and very valuable for science but very demanding in many ways. I would be quite surprised if they chose one for this mission. I would guess a later mission after they are successful with some location less demanding. For one they would probably not be in permanent contact with the relay sat they placed in a L2 Halo orbit. Temperatures are also even more extreme than other lunar locations.Quote:
Originally Posted by bobo746
If someone has wondered about the term "Dark Side". It is a common term for the side of the moon we never see from earth. On the side of the moon that is facing the earth there is sunlight during the day and the earth gives some light during night. On the "Dark Side" there is no earth light during the night.
Some news on the water landing of a Falcon 9 core yesterday. The core remained in one piece and is now floating off the coast of Florida. They have salvage ships out there. Last evening they could not get it into port because of a cruise ship leaving. Now they have to wait until the morning to tug it to port.
A video on the landing and explanation of the failure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_co...&v=pHPCs9pahe8
The hydraulics of the steering grid fins failed. Hans Königsmann of SpaceX explained that they still declare landing experimental and the hydraulics are not redundant like most of the mission critical hardware. They will probably make it redundant now. It was also said the avionics worked as planned and kept the stage away from land so it would not cause any risk to humans or property.
In the post launch press conference one reporter remarked that he marveled at the performance of the avionics that kept the stage mostly under control despite the major failure. I am looking forward how the mainstream media will display the failure.
Here's what you need to know about the Chang'e-4 mission to the far side of the Moon
"China will launch the Chang'e-4 spacecraft on Friday, December 7, to make the first ever attempt at a landing on the far side of the Moon.
Here are the details on the launch, landing site, science objectives and more to provide what you need to know about the pioneering mission.
When will it launch
The lander and rover are due to launch atop a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in southwest China on Friday between 18:15-18:34 universal time/GMT (13:15-13:34 Eastern Time), which is 02:15-02:34 Beijing time Saturday.
Unfortunately it looks unlikely that China will be providing live coverage of the launch, in which case the first official news after liftoff may only come once the spacecraft have successfully entered lunar transfer orbit.
Relay satellite for communications
A lunar far side landing is unprecedented because, as noted above, that hemisphere cannot be viewed directly from the Earth, meaning innovative solutions are needed to facilitate communications for sending commands to the spacecraft and aiding landing, and receiving telemetry and the all-important science data.
The mission is ready to proceed following the May launch of the Queqiao relay satellite, which in June established its intended halo orbit at the second Earth-Moon Lagrange point, some 65,000-80,000 kilometres beyond the Moon.
From here will be able to simultaneously contact tracking stations on Earth and the spacecraft on the far side of the Moon and relay communications with its huge parabolic antenna.
https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...id=24147&stc=1
The 186-km-diameter Von Kármán crater is currently understood to contain the selected landing site, according to a papers published by Huang Jun et al in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, with other publications also analysing sections of this crater as potential sites.
https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...id=24148&stc=1
Chang'e-4 spacecraft
The lander and rover are very similar to the Chang'e-3 spacecraft which landed on Mare Imbrium five years ago, with the lander at around 3,800 kilograms and the rover at 140 kg. The rover will descend from atop the lander a few hours after setting down.
The lander will carry a Landing Camera (LCAM), Terrain Camera (TCAM), a Low Frequency Spectrometer (LFS) with three 5-metre-long booms, and the Lunar Lander Neutrons and Dosimetry (LND), with the latter developed in Germany
https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...id=24149&stc=1
A render of the Chinese Chang'e-4 lunar lander designed to set down on the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the Moon. CNSA
https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...id=24150&stc=1
A photo of Yutu (Jade Rabbit) taken by the Chang'e-3 lander in December 2013 on the surface of the Moon. Chinese Academy of Sciences
The article here on the dark side moon landing attempt:
https://gbtimes.com/heres-what-you-n...de-of-the-moon
The Chinese lunar mission has just launched. Going for the polar crater has been confirmed at CCTV/CGTN. This is an exciting mission, something new.
When's it supposed to land?Quote:
Originally Posted by Takeovers