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Physics and astronomy thread (2 Viewers)

El Floppo said:
Japanese imminently about to land hopping rovers on asteroid
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link to picture feed.

I can barely get my phone to work most of the time... and these are "live" pictures from gazillions of miles away.

eta:

more info... I love this stuff.

The two little disk-shaped robots that will soon separate from the orbiter are called MINERVA-II1A and MINERVA-II1B. Each one measures 7 inches wide by 2.8 inches tall (18 by 7 centimeters) and is packed with scientific gear, including temperature and optical sensors and a suite of cameras. (There are seven cameras spread across both robots, JAXA officials have said.)

Though the Hayabusa2 team calls them rovers, these little guys will hop, rather than roll, from place to place on Ryugu's surface, gathering a variety of data along the way.

And more landings are coming soon. Hayabusa2 is scheduled to deploy a bigger lander called MASCOT in the first week of October and another small hopper, MINERVA-II2, sometime next year. The mother ship itself will also make several forays to the surface in 2019, to grab asteroid material that will be returned to Earth in December 2020.
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El Floppo said:
I can't explain how much I'm amazed by this whole thing. really looking forward to more pics- and following along with the project's website (which has done a great job keeping everything current). I'm still not sure how hopping is better than rolling in terms of combatting low gravity- but I'm no rocket surgeon.
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In a low gravity environment on a very rough surface, you are going to hop whether you want to or not.  Hitting bumps and rough spots is going to send the rover upwards when it hits them.  With the low g, it doesn't take much for the rover to lose contact with the surface making rolling difficult.  If you hit uneven terrain, one side of the rover can be bumped upwards creating a torque causing the rover to flip and tumble.  Better to expect all this and design it to hop while appropriately protecting the body of the rover for such encounters.

 
El Floppo said:
I can't explain how much I'm amazed by this whole thing. really looking forward to more pics- and following along with the project's website (which has done a great job keeping everything current). I'm still not sure how hopping is better than rolling in terms of combatting low gravity- but I'm no rocket surgeon.
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germany lander on its way to the same asteroid from the mothership. :wub:

there are more scheduled, including the mothership itself- will eventually (and hopefully) grab some samples and come home to earth *

A tiny German asteroid lander is expected to touch down on its target late Tuesday, Oct. 2 (EDT). The craft is on a quest to send back data about the mysterious Ryugu's surface, whose precise composition continues to elude investigators more than three months after the Japanese Hayabusa2, which will deliver MASCOT to the surface, arrived at the space rock.

The lander, named MASCOT (Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout), is expected to separate from its carrier spacecraft Hayabusa2 at 9:58 p.m. EDT (0158 GMT) on Tuesday, officials from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) said in a statement. It will be the third lander dropped on asteroid Ryugu by Hayabusa2, which successfully landed two small MINERVA-II1 landers last month. MASCOT is a project of both DLR and the French space agency, CNES. 
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*... and will start the zombie apocalypse with alien bacteria.
 
Galileo said:
In a low gravity environment on a very rough surface, you are going to hop whether you want to or not.  Hitting bumps and rough spots is going to send the rover upwards when it hits them.  With the low g, it doesn't take much for the rover to lose contact with the surface making rolling difficult.  If you hit uneven terrain, one side of the rover can be bumped upwards creating a torque causing the rover to flip and tumble.  Better to expect all this and design it to hop while appropriately protecting the body of the rover for such encounters.
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After seeing the news of the German lander today, I started picking through some of the data known about Ryugu just for fun.  Based on its size and mass, the gravitational field strength ends up being about 10^-5g or about 0.0001 m/s^2 free fall acceleration.  At this value, you would have to fall for 10,000 seconds (about 2 h 45 min) and through a distance of about 5 km in order to reach a speed of just 1 m/s which just over 2 mph.  Of course, if you were 5 km away, I guess the free fall acceleration would be reduced by a another factor of 25, so those time and distance numbers are too small.  A 200 pound person on Ryugu would weigh about 0.002 pounds or about 1/3 of an ounce!!!  

 
My buddy that works at Goddard has a multi-year project that was supposed to launch from the Cape in November.  After the failed launch in Russia last week, looks like his project's launched has been sidelined.  :kicksrock:

Also, this doesn't help: Russia Cuts Off U.S. Access...

 
mission to mercury launches tonight-

The European Space Agency's BepiColombo mission, which launches Friday night from Kourou, French Guiana, will carry not one but two orbiters to the small, gray world. And while it has one of the world's most powerful launch vehicles in the Ariane 5 rocket, it will still require a seven-year journey to enter orbit around Mercury rather than the Sun. During that time, the spacecraft will make one flyby of Earth, two of Venus, and six of Mercury before finally reaching its destination.

Science at Mercury

Only in March 2026 will science activities begin in earnest around the planet Mercury. BepiColombo is Europe's first mission to the planet, and it is intended as a follow-on to NASA's Messenger spacecraft that spent a period from 2011 to 2015 at Mercury and studied its chemistry, geology, and magnetic field.

BepiColombo, named after the 20th century Italian scientist Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo who studied the planet Mercury, is a European-built spacecraft that will transport the European Space Agency's Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Japanese Space Agency's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter to their final orbits, which will bring them down to within a few hundred kilometers of the planet's surface.

Overall, the orbiters will investigate a number of important scientific questions, including how the planet Mercury formed in a stable orbit so close to the Sun. For example, Messenger found that Mercury's radius has shrunk by about 7km as the planet's interior cooled. BepiColombo will image the planet at a higher resolution and attempt to improve the scientific understanding of how a planet without plate tectonics cools. More information on the orbiters and their scientific objectives can be found in the mission's press kit.

The spacecraft and its orbiters are also outfitted with technology such as a sun shield and multilayered insulation to resist temperatures ranging from -100° to 450° Celsius. European engineers plan to use knowledge gained from the operation of BepiColombo to develop a future mission to study the Sun.

Arianespace, Europe's primary launch company, has already rolled the Ariane 5 rocket and its payload to a launch pad in South America. Launch time is set for 9:45pm ET Friday (01:45 UTC Saturday). A livestream of the launch will begin about 30 minutes before the scheduled liftoff time.
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Mjolnirs said:
My buddy that works at Goddard has a multi-year project that was supposed to launch from the Cape in November.  After the failed launch in Russia last week, looks like his project's launched has been sidelined.  :kicksrock:

Also, this doesn't help: Russia Cuts Off U.S. Access...
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Aiming this comment at the writer, not at you, Mjolnirs. Sorry to hear about your friend's project, hope it works out for him.

I get worked up at journalists who put out sensationalized headlines that his own article then goes on to contradict. No mention in the article that Russia "pledged to not carry Americans in 2019".   His article quotes Russian officials as just saying the current contract carrying US astronauts is up and "the next contract is under discussion".  And then going on to say we were looking to Boeing and SpaceX for our future spaceflight.  I don't get publications that let that kind of BS through.  Do they not even have editors anymore?

 
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GregR said:
Aiming this comment at the writer, not at you, Mjolnirs. Sorry to hear about your friend's project, hope it works out for him.

I get worked up at journalists who put out sensationalized headlines that his own article then goes on to contradict. No mention in the article that Russia "pledged to not carry Americans in 2019".   His article quotes Russian officials as just saying the current contract carrying US astronauts is up and "the next contract is under discussion".  And then going on to say we were looking to Boeing and SpaceX for our future spaceflight.  I don't get publications that let that kind of BS through.  Do they not even have editors anymore?
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I completely agree, it's one reason why I didn't put the full title as the link.  It's all about the clicks and "film at 11" mentality.

 
Other than Korea landing a man on the sun, NASA has now put a man-made object closer to the sun than anything else:

Parker Solar Probe: Nasa's Sun mission smashes records

The Parker Solar Probe passed the current record of 42.73 million km (26.55 million miles) from the Sun's surface on Monday.

The previous record was set by the German-US Helios 2 satellite back in April 1976.

That mission also set the all time speed record of close to 70km/s (43 miles/s). Parker will smash this, too.

The expectation is that it will eventually reach peak speeds around 190km/s (690,000km/h; 428,700mph).

Parker was launched from Earth in August. It's on a trajectory that will take it inside the Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona.

Information from this region promises to crack longstanding mysteries about our star's behaviour.

Parker's elliptical orbit will edge closer to the Sun over the coming years. At its closest approach, the probe will get to just 6.12 million km (3.83 million miles) from the star's broiling "surface".

***

Why is this mission important?

Parker will help us better understand how the Sun works.

The star is constantly bombarding the Earth with charged particles and magnetic fields. This perpetual flow, or "solar wind", is responsible for generating the beautiful auroral lights that appear in polar skies, but there are some interactions that initiate much more troubling effects.

The biggest outbursts from the Sun will rattle the Earth's magnetic field. In the process, communications may be disrupted, satellites can be knocked offline, and power grids will be vulnerable to electrical surges.

Scientists try to forecast these "storms" and Parker promises new and valuable information to help them do that.

 
Sinn Fein said:
Other than Korea landing a man on the sun, NASA has now put a man-made object closer to the sun than anything else:

Parker Solar Probe: Nasa's Sun mission smashes records

The Parker Solar Probe passed the current record of 42.73 million km (26.55 million miles) from the Sun's surface on Monday.

The previous record was set by the German-US Helios 2 satellite back in April 1976.

That mission also set the all time speed record of close to 70km/s (43 miles/s). Parker will smash this, too.

The expectation is that it will eventually reach peak speeds around 190km/s (690,000km/h; 428,700mph).

Parker was launched from Earth in August. It's on a trajectory that will take it inside the Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona.

Information from this region promises to crack longstanding mysteries about our star's behaviour.

Parker's elliptical orbit will edge closer to the Sun over the coming years. At its closest approach, the probe will get to just 6.12 million km (3.83 million miles) from the star's broiling "surface".

***

Why is this mission important?

Parker will help us better understand how the Sun works.

The star is constantly bombarding the Earth with charged particles and magnetic fields. This perpetual flow, or "solar wind", is responsible for generating the beautiful auroral lights that appear in polar skies, but there are some interactions that initiate much more troubling effects.

The biggest outbursts from the Sun will rattle the Earth's magnetic field. In the process, communications may be disrupted, satellites can be knocked offline, and power grids will be vulnerable to electrical surges.

Scientists try to forecast these "storms" and Parker promises new and valuable information to help them do that.
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My name is on a microchip traveling aboard Parker towards the sun!  Anyone else do this?

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/public-invited-to-come-aboard-nasa-s-first-mission-to-touch-the-sun

 
I keep hoping for the best with this. even though it far exceeded it's mission and expectations, still sad to think it might be gone. from space.com

The clock hasn't run out on NASA's Opportunity Mars rover after all.

On Sept. 11, NASA began a 45-day "active listening" campaign in an attempt to rouse the solar-powered Opportunity, which went silent on June 10 after a raging dust storm plunged its environs into darkness. 

The 45-day deadline passed late last week. But NASA will continue active listening — a strategy that involves both sending commands to Opportunity and listening for any peeps the six-wheeled robot may make — for several more months at least, agency officials announced yesterday (Oct. 29). [Mars Dust Storm 2018: What It Means for Opportunity Rover]

"After a review of the progress of the listening campaign, NASA will continue its current strategy for attempting to make contact with the Opportunity rover for the foreseeable future," NASA officials wrote in a mission update yesterday (Oct. 29). 

"Winds could increase in the next few months at Opportunity's location on Mars, resulting in dust being blown off the rover's solar panels," they added. "The agency will reassess the situation in the January 2019 time frame."

The change in strategy comes in the commitment to keep pinging Opportunity. Mission team members and NASA officials had previously said they would continue to listen for any signal from the rover at least through January.

Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004, a few weeks after its twin, Spirit. Both robots roamed around different parts of the Red Planet, looking for signs of past water activity — and finding lots of such evidence.

Spirit and Opportunity's prime missions were pegged to last just three months, but the duo continued exploring Mars for years. Spirit last communicated with its handlers in 2010 and was declared dead a year later. Opportunity had been going strong, roving along the rim of the 14-mile-wide (22 kilometers) Endeavour Crater, until the dust storm hit this summer. 

That storm grew to encircle the entire planet by June 20. But it began dying down about a month later, and the dust had cleared so much by Sept. 11 that mission managers thought Opportunity might be getting enough sunlight to recharge its batteries. So the active listening campaign began.

Opportunity has been through quite an ordeal, enduring bitterly cold Martian nights without a working heater to keep its electronic innards warm. So it's possible that the venerable rover, which has covered more ground on the surface of another world than any other vehicle, has frozen to death or fallen victim to some "fault mode" from which it cannot recover. 

But perhaps Opportunity lives still, and is just waiting for a strong, dust-dislodging November wind followed by a wakeup call from home. We shall see.
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Interesting theory mentioned on Space's Deepest Secrets regarding how the moon formed. It takes the Theia collision a step further saying that it obliterated both objects and that, when reforming, the moon formed first.

Here's how the moon formed as proposed by the new, synestia theory. A giant collision smashed into the proto-Earth, vaporizing about 10 percent of the rock and liquefying the rest. This created a synestia. Over time, a little bit of liquid rock condensed near the center of the cloud of material. As the molten structure lost its heat, rock continued to condense and rain toward the synestia's center.

"The rate of rainfall is about 10 times that of a hurricane on Earth," Lock said. "Over time, the whole structure shrinks, and the moon emerges from the vapor. Eventually, the whole synestia condenses, and what's left is a ball of spinning, liquid rock that eventually forms the Earth as we know it today."
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First the Moon, Then Earth: New Theory Reverses Formation Story

 
Galileo said:
After seeing the news of the German lander today, I started picking through some of the data known about Ryugu just for fun.  Based on its size and mass, the gravitational field strength ends up being about 10^-5g or about 0.0001 m/s^2 free fall acceleration.  At this value, you would have to fall for 10,000 seconds (about 2 h 45 min) and through a distance of about 5 km in order to reach a speed of just 1 m/s which just over 2 mph.  Of course, if you were 5 km away, I guess the free fall acceleration would be reduced by a another factor of 25, so those time and distance numbers are too small.  A 200 pound person on Ryugu would weigh about 0.002 pounds or about 1/3 of an ounce!!!  
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So you're saying I could dunk?

------

Looks like the Parker Solar Probe survived it's first Sun pass.  Very cool - I did some significant work on that one, so it's great to see it survive launch and start to send back good data.

 
"super earth" orbiting sun's nearest star

A "super-Earth" has been discovered orbiting the closest single star to our Sun, scientists said Wednesday in a breakthrough that could shine a light on Earth's nearest planetary neighbours.

Astronomers studied Barnard's Star, a red dwarf just six light years away -- practically in our back garden, galactically speaking -- and noticed the presence of a "frozen, dimly lit world" at least 3.2 times heavier than Earth.

The planet, known for now as Barnard's Star b, is the second nearest to Earth outside the solar system and orbits its host star once every 233 days.

"It's important because it's really our nextdoor neighbour and we like to meet our neighbours in general," Ignasi Ribas, from the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia and Spain's Institute of Space Sciences, told AFP.

Despite being relatively close to its parent star, the planet receives less than two percent of the energy Earth gets from the Sun, and the team estimates it has a surface temperature of -170 degrees Celsius (-274 Farenheit) -- far too cold to support life as we know it.

...
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