The Space Thread

[Anubis]

[ratcatcher]

It was the final countdown. Unfortunately, they had several goes at it before they scrubbed it for the day.

[PestiRed]

It was the final countdown. Unfortunately, they had several goes at it before they scrubbed it for the day.

We have different definitions of final

[ratcatcher]

We have different definitions of final

 

Then yours doesnt meet the reality.

[PestiRed]

In this context, final means last to me, ie there will not be another one tomorrow. Possibly this is a symptom of my poor grasp of reality but I'm willing to live with it

[ratcatcher]

In this context, final means last to me, ie there will not be another one tomorrow. Possibly this is a symptom of my poor grasp of reality but I'm willing to live with it

 

Then just wait for the last one. Its not hard.

[TheHowieLama]

[razor]

Yep, just come to the thread tomorrow around noon.

 

Great.  Thanks.

[ratcatcher]

You're welcome.

[RoboRiise]

"woooah i'm an alien"

 

[ratcatcher]

Get ready.

 

Orion on internal power, Launch Director has cleared for launch.

 

Launch in 2.00 minutes.

[ratcatcher]

Lift off!

[ratcatcher]

Awesome sight. Breaking the speed of sound.

[PestiRed]

Hurray! For the third, last and, dare I say, final time on this thread, it's.....

 

[Dr Nowt]

[ZonkoVille77]

ratcatcher, on 05 Dec 2014 - 12:03 PM, said:

 

Get ready.

 

Orion on internal power, Launch Director has cleared for launch.

 

Launch in 2.00 minutes.

This sounds exciting. What is it?

[ratcatcher]

Orion begins re entry phase in anticipation to splashdown in the Eastern Pacific.

 

Telemetry data lost due to re entry process.

 

Awesome pictures now re captured from Orion.

 

Passing 60,000 feet, 5 miles from splashdown.

 

UAV drone captures picture of Orion falling like a stone.

 

Drogue shutes out.

 

Mains deployed.

[TheHowieLama]

Sounds bad.

[ratcatcher]

Splashdown!

[ZonkoVille77]

Orion begins re entry phase in anticipation to splashdown in the Eastern Pacific.

 

Telemetry data lost due to re entry process.

 

Awesome pictures now re captured from Orion.

 

Passing 60,000 feet, 5 miles from splashdown.

 

UAV drone captures picture of Orion falling like a stone.

 

Drogue shutes out.

 

Mains deployed.

 

Fucking awesome

[Rico1304]

Splashdown!

I'm on the shitter reading this and without a word of a lie I achieved splashdown at precisely the same moment.

[Dougie Do'ins]

New Horizons probe rouses from hibernation for Pluto mission

After nine years and a journey of 3bn miles, Nasa’s New Horizons robotic probe awoke from hibernation on Saturday to begin an unprecedented mission to study the icy dwarf planet Pluto and sibling worlds in its Kuiper Belt home.

A pre-set alarm clock roused New Horizons from its electronic slumber at 3pm EST (8pm GMT), and ground control teams received confirmation just after 9.30pm (2.30am GMT on Sunday). New Horizons is now so far away that radio signals travelling at the speed of light take four hours and 25 minutes to reach Earth.

The scientific observation of Pluto, its entourage of moons, and other bodies in the solar system’s frozen backyard begins on 15 January, programme managers said.

Pluto lies in the Kuiper Belt, a region of icy mini-planets orbiting the sun beyond Neptune that are believed to be leftover remains from the formation of the solar system 4.6bn years ago. It is the last unexplored region of the solar system.

“It’s hard to underestimate the evolution that’s taking place in our view of the architecture and content of our solar system as a result of the discovery … of the Kuiper Belt,” lead researcher Alan Stern said.

Since its discovery in 1930, Pluto has been a mystery. Scientists struggled to explain why a planet with a radius of just 740 miles – about half the width of the United States – could come to exist beyond the giant worlds of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. “We wondered why Pluto was a misfit,” Stern said.

In 1992, astronomers discovered that Pluto, located about 40 times farther away from the sun than Earth, was not alone in the far reaches of the solar system, prompting the International Astronomical Union to reconsider its classification as a planet.

In 2006, with New Horizons already on its way, Pluto was stripped of its title as the ninth planet in the solar system and became a dwarf planet, of which more than 1,000 have since been discovered in the Kuiper Belt.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/07/new-horizons-pluto-mission?

[ratcatcher]

Hopefully, New Horizons probe will come out of hibernation fully working. Is this just going to be a fly by rather than go into orbit?

[ratcatcher]

Comet dust found on Earth's surface for first time: Microscopic particles discovered 58 feet under ancient Antarctic ice

• Japanese scientists discovered comet particles at Tottuki Point, Antarctica
• They found more than 40 spherical fragments which contained glass-like material, iron, magnesium, potassium, sulphur, calcium and nickel
• Dust is similar to comet fragments collected by Nasa's Stardust mission
• Comet particles were not thought to be able to survive on Earth's surface 

By Richard Gray for MailOnline

Published: 11:09, 8 December 2014 | Updated: 11:22, 8 December 2014

 

Dust from a comet has been discovered on the Earth's surface for the first time, locked inside the ancient ice sheet that covers Antarctica.

The discovery is expected to reveal new clues about how our solar system formed as scientists study the tiny comet particles more closely. 

Researchers found the comet dust after drilling almost 58 feet (17 metres) into the Antarctic snow at a place called Tottuki Point, around 10 miles north of the Japanese Syowa Research Station.

Scroll down for video 

 

Electron microscope images of meteorite particles found in the Antarctic ice around Tottuki Point, which were found to contain the same minerals, metal compounds and structures that have been found in comet dust

After melting the ice they discovered thousands of particles measuring from the size of a grain of talcum powder to the width of a human hair.

They were initially thought to be the remains of meteorites that have broken up in the Earth's atmosphere in the past.

However, when scientists examined 40 of the particles more closely, they found they were identical to the kind of material that has been gathered from comets, known as chondritic porous interplanetary dust particles.

The discovery is considered to be particularly surprising because the highly porous fragments are extremely fragile and were not thought to be able to survive Earth's weather.

To find them on one of the harshest environments in the planet is perhaps even more surprising, but it was probably the extreme cold that helped to preserve them, trapping them in the ice.

 

Professor Takaaki Noguchi, lead author of the study and a meteorite researcher at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, said: 'In this paper we report the discovery of more than 40 chondritic porous micrometeorites in the surface snow and blue ice of Antarctica, which are indistinguishable from chondritic porous interplanetary dust particles.

'It is therefore considered that chondritic porous micrometeorites are chondritic porous interplanetary dust particles that have fallen to Earth and have survived the terrestrial environment.'

Comets are some of the oldest objects in the solar system and are thought to be made from the material left over from when our solar system first formed.

Composed of a combination of ice and rock, some scientists believe they may have been responsible for first bringing water and organic molecules to Earth that led to the formation of life.

 

Fragile comet particles were not thought to be able to survive the environment here on Earth but the cold temperatures in Antarctica locked them inside ancient ice, helping to protect them from the environment

 

Comets leave behind a distinctive tail of dust and gas, which is produced as they heat up and become unstable

 

Comet ISON passed close to the Sun in November 2013 and Russian scientists have been searching in Antarctica for dust particles that may be carried to Earth by the solar wind - the latest findings will raise hopes

By studying them, researchers hope to gain an insight into how our solar system evolved and perhaps even unlock how life first began on our planet.

 

Until now scientists have only been able to obtain comet dust by flying missions high in the Earth's atmosphere, where tiny particles left behind from the tails of passing comets can be collected.

However, this can be painstaking work, with several hours of flying yielding just one particle of dust.

Already the Japanense scientists, whose work is published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, have found dozens of particles from comets and with thousands of others in their sample still to be identified, the haul could be huge.

The dust in Antarctica is also cleaner as it can be filtered from the melted ice, while dust collected in the atmosphere becomes coated in oils used to trap the particles, making them difficult to study.

Recently Nasa flew a mission to the comet Wild 2 (seen in the gif to the right) where its Stardust spacecraft collected samples of dust and returned them to Earth.

The Japanese scientists found features in their comet dust samples from Antarctica that are almost identical to those seen in the dust collected by Stardust and those collected in the atmosphere.

They have yet to determine the age of the ice where the particles were found, which may help to reveal when they fell to earth. 

The particles they found were spherical and measured between 10 micrometres to just over 60 micrometres. 

These were composed of a glass like material with metal and sulphides embedded in them. They also featured whisker like crystals of the mineral enstatite.

Professor Noguchi said: 'They also contained low-iron–manganese-enriched and low-iron–chromium-enriched ferromagnesian silicates, kosmochlor-rich high-calcium pyroxene, roedderite and carbonaceous nanoglobules. 

'These components have previously been discovered in primitive solar system materials such as the cometary particles recovered from the 81P/Wild 2 comet. 

'The most outstanding feature is the presence of kosmochlor-rich high-Ca pyroxene and roedderite, which suggest that they have building blocks in common cometary dust particles.'

The results have excited planetary scientists around the world as it offers a rich source of comet material for study and checking against the results from dust collected in the atmosphere. 

 

The comet dust was found among thousands of meteorite particles in ice 58 feet deep at Tottuki Point, where several glaciers meet 10 miles north of the Japanese Syowa Research Station in Antarctica

 

The scientists found 'whiskers' of the mineral enstatite (shown above) similar to those found in comet dust

Speaking to the journal Science, Dr Larry Nittler, from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, said: 'It’s very exciting for those of us who study these kinds of extraterrestrial materials, because it opens up a whole new way to get access to them. 

'They’ve found a new source for something that’s very interesting and very rare.”

Earlier this year Russian scientists announced they hoped to collect fresh dust particles in Antarctica from the comet ISON that may fall there after it lit up the sky in November 2013 when it had a close encounter with the Sun.

Although they have still to announce any results, the latest findings will raise hopes that they will be able to survive the fall to Earth.

 

The Japanese work builds on work by French scientists who reported finding unusual comet-like fragments in the snow in Antarctica.

Dr Cécile Engrand, a meteorite researcher from Paris-Sud University in Orsay who led that work, said: 'The study of these cometary particles will help shed more light on the material that served for planetary formation.

'They are the best witnesses that we have of that period of time.' 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2865197/Comet-dust-Earth-s-surface-time-Microscopic-particles-discovered-58-feet-ancient-Antarctic-ice.html#ixzz3LJswt5ar

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[Russ Atmosphere]

See a spaceship on clear evenings using only eyeballs.

 

http://www.meteorwatch.org/uk-iss-passes-december-2014.html