Space News thread

[OhOh]

^Apology accepted.

[harrybarracuda]

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

[jabir]

Factcheck: Her team wrote it.

[Luigi]

^ Could be in the Amazing Pics thread that.

Really amazing what humans accomplished without modern computers.

[jabir]

I dithered between the two.

[harrybarracuda]

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

[harrybarracuda]

More on Monday's landing:

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

[harrybarracuda]

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://gizmodo.com/iss-footage-of-s...rec-1830620616

[harrybarracuda]

A reminder of tonight's Mars landing for those that want to watch it:

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.

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-w...n-mars-monday/

[Takeovers]

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

[Takeovers]

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.



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.

[BaitongBoy]

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...

[Takeovers]

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:




The hammer probe



20,000 to 30,000 hammer strokes to send heat probe about 5 metres into the ground.

[harrybarracuda]

The second is a seismometer that will pick up any quakes.

A British seismometer.

[Luigi]

A British seismometer.

French.

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

[harrybarracuda]

French.

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.




https://www.theengineer.co.uk/insight-mars-seis/

[Takeovers]

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.

[harrybarracuda]

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.

[harrybarracuda]

InSight's first Selfie.

[Maanaam]

[Takeovers]

InSight's first Selfie.

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.

[BaitongBoy]

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.

[Maanaam]

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

[Takeovers]

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.



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.

[BaitongBoy]

That sounds interesting, indeed...