What's new
Fantasy Football - Footballguys Forums

Welcome to Our Forums. Once you've registered and logged in, you're primed to talk football, among other topics, with the sharpest and most experienced fantasy players on the internet.

Physics and astronomy thread (2 Viewers)

GregR said:
How was it?
Click to expand...
It went off great. I was able to watch on a live feed.
He had invited me to attend and I wasn't able to make it, but a couple of other friends did.   They took some great pictures.

He's coming through Charleston on his way back to MD, so we are going out to celebrate ... drink.

 
Was listening to Astronomy Cast podcast, Holiday Gift Guide episode, and one of the hosts suggested redbubble.com.  Some good stuff.  I particularly like this, and this.

 
Galileo said:
Just think, in another 30,000 years or so, it will actually get out of the solar system!
Click to expand...
At its current velocity, it will take Voyager 2 another 300 years or so to reach the inner boundary of the Oort cloud and possibly 30,000 years to move beyond it.

wow

 
jamny said:
At its current velocity, it will take Voyager 2 another 300 years or so to reach the inner boundary of the Oort cloud and possibly 30,000 years to move beyond it.
Click to expand...
....aaand about three weeks to make it's way back.  

 
jamny said:
Something I'm interested in and I know there are very knowledgeable people here on the topics. Plus there are so many random stories that barely get attention, so here's a place to put them.

NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto to illuminate mysterious reaches of solar system

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is whizzing to the outer reaches of our solar system, where it will perform the first close-up flyby of Pluto.



 



The piano-size probe took off from Earth in January 2006. It is on track to soar close to the dwarf planet and within the orbit of its five known moons on July 14 — after 3 billion miles.

“It’s an incredibly exhilarating and humbling experience to think this is civilization’s first step to see the Kuiper belt. It’s not going to happen, I think, in my lifetime again,” Hal Weaver, a New Horizons project scientist, said in an interview with Yahoo News.

Weaver, who works at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., says that a relatively small team of scientists has been working on the project at any given time. Right now, there are about 10, but that number will approach 50 as the probe reaches Pluto.

The groundbreaking journey could shed light on the Kuiper belt, a region of the solar system that we do not know much about.

For Earthlings, the reconnaissance mission is expected to transform this little pixelated blob into a vibrant world full of complexity and diversity, with new information vastly superior to what we now have.



 



“When future civilizations look back at the landmark things that happened, they will, if all goes well, see this as our first foray into this new zone that we didn’t even know existed until 1992,” Weaver said.

New Horizons, the fastest spacecraft ever launched, awoke from hibernation last month and will snap long-range photos of the Pluto system using the telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI).

Over the next few months, the spacecraft will beam hundreds of ever-improving images back to mission scientists. The images will help chart the course for the remaining 135 million miles.

“This is a mission of delayed gratification, but the gratification is about to come,” Weaver said, laughing.

Excitement surrounding the mission is rippling through the scientific community.

Denton Ebel, a geologist specializing in meteorites at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said there is so much about the Kuiper belt that we just don’t know because of the distance — 4.67 billion miles from Earth.

“What are the moons made of? Are they big ice balls? Are any rocky? We just don’t know. What these bodies are made out of is the most interesting part of what we are going to learn,” Ebel said in an interview with Yahoo News.

The extraterrestrial rock expert pointed out that we were not even aware of all of Pluto’s currently known moons when New Horizons launched.

Now we are on the cusp of a quantum leap forward in our understanding of the Kuiper belt, which could, in turn, shed tremendous light on the formation of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago.

“We live in exciting times,” Ebel said
Click to expand...
flew by ultima thule this morning... the farthest observed flyby in history.

I've been giggity over this (prompted by the onslaught of media in my news feed about it). watched the countdown at NASA when I woke up... the most hilariously anticlimactic moment in history. nothing like watching a bunch of nerds and families count backwards and then say "yay". we don't get any images of the flyby until 10:30 at the earliest (and maybe not any if it doesn't work). I"m giggity all over again for 10:30, but cautiously giggity.

 
El Floppo said:
This time for real. 
Click to expand...
I knew it.  We all live in a Minecraft universe...

Seriously though - very cool, and impressive considering that they had to essentially aim the camera from 6 billion miles away, and had a just a short window to capture images.  We easily could have been looking at nothing.

I do love that it will take until late 2020 for all the images to make it back to earth.

 
China is landing a rover on the moon imminently...hopefully we get coverage- should be really cool. No idea on what they'll be doing there.

 
El Floppo said:
China is landing a rover on the moon imminently...hopefully we get coverage- should be really cool. No idea on what they'll be doing there.
Click to expand...
Landed on the far side of the Moon

I thought this was pretty cool:

The success of the mission represents a landmark in human space exploration. The area where the probe has landed faces away from earth, meaning it is free from radio frequencies. As a result, it is not possible for a lunar rover to communicate directly with ground control. To overcome this hurdle, China launched a dedicated satellite orbiting the moon earlier this year that will be able to relay information from the rover to earth.

 
Sinn Fein said:
Landed on the far side of the Moon

I thought this was pretty cool:

The success of the mission represents a landmark in human space exploration. The area where the probe has landed faces away from earth, meaning it is free from radio frequencies. As a result, it is not possible for a lunar rover to communicate directly with ground control. To overcome this hurdle, China launched a dedicated satellite orbiting the moon earlier this year that will be able to relay information from the rover to earth.
Click to expand...
From that article...and makes me feel better about the previously mysterious "biological" experiments (clones!)

The lander carries a 3kg (6.6lb) container with potato and arabidopsis plant seeds - as well as silkworm eggs - to perform biological studies. The "lunar mini biosphere" experiment was designed by 28 Chinese universities.

 
I'd like to think these space missions are universal (at least in spirit), and not nationalistic...although the American flag waving and yay USA scene at the new horizons flyby countdown didn't help back that up.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Sinn Fein said:
Landed on the far side of the Moon

I thought this was pretty cool:

The success of the mission represents a landmark in human space exploration. The area where the probe has landed faces away from earth, meaning it is free from radio frequencies. As a result, it is not possible for a lunar rover to communicate directly with ground control. To overcome this hurdle, China launched a dedicated satellite orbiting the moon earlier this year that will be able to relay information from the rover to earth.
Click to expand...
another pic :wub:

 
El Floppo said:
Sinn Fein said:
Landed on the far side of the Moon

I thought this was pretty cool:

The success of the mission represents a landmark in human space exploration. The area where the probe has landed faces away from earth, meaning it is free from radio frequencies. As a result, it is not possible for a lunar rover to communicate directly with ground control. To overcome this hurdle, China launched a dedicated satellite orbiting the moon earlier this year that will be able to relay information from the rover to earth.
Click to expand...
another pic :wub:
Click to expand...
saw "360deg panorama picture" headline and got excited. cool pic, but not quite as cool as I had hoped or as cool as eariler pics pulled from it.... unless I'm doing it wrong and this thing is interactive? (it's not on my work desktop) 

I'm really hoping they share the findings along the way for their experiments "Scientists in China hope to use the Chang'e 4 mission to learn vital clues about the moon's formation, scout for water ice, scan the night sky for radio signals, and even grow silkworms in a self-contained ecosystem."

 
El Floppo said:
saw "360deg panorama picture" headline and got excited. cool pic, but not quite as cool as I had hoped or as cool as eariler pics pulled from it.... unless I'm doing it wrong and this thing is interactive? (it's not on my work desktop) 

I'm really hoping they share the findings along the way for their experiments "Scientists in China hope to use the Chang'e 4 mission to learn vital clues about the moon's formation, scout for water ice, scan the night sky for radio signals, and even grow silkworms in a self-contained ecosystem."
Click to expand...
Here is a 360 panorama you can interact with

 
El Floppo said:
I'm really hoping they share the findings along the way for their experiments "Scientists in China hope to use the Chang'e 4 mission to learn vital clues about the moon's formation, scout for water ice, scan the night sky for radio signals, and even grow silkworms in a self-contained ecosystem."
Click to expand...
sounds like we will...

from the south china morning post :nerd:

China’s lunar mission could bring that piece of science fiction a step closer to reality if it succeeds in growing the first flower on the moon in less than a hundred days’ time, an experiment that the China National Space Administration said it would soon broadcast.

When the Chang’e 4 spacecraft landed on the far side of the moon on January 3, its cargo included an airtight container known as a “moon surface micro-ecological circle”.

At 18cm high and 16cm in diameter, the aluminium alloy cylinder contains silkworm eggs and seeds for potatoes and a kind of cress.

It weighs only 3kg but cost more than 10 million yuan (about US$1.5 million) – the internal camera alone cost 600,000 yuan.

China plans to grow potatoes in space ... like Matt Damon did in The Martian

If all goes well, both plants will root and sprout in the container, producing the first flower on the surface of the moon towards the end of a 100-day experimental period, according to the space agency.

Meanwhile, the silkworm eggs will also complete the full life cycle, from hatching to turning into moths.

The plants would not be the first flowers grown in space though – on January 16, 2016, Nasa shared photographs of a zinnia in bloom in a plant system aboard the International Space Station, orbiting about 300km above the Earth.

Cultivating the plants won’t be easy – temperatures on the moon’s surface can go over 100 degrees Celsius (202 degrees Fahrenheit) in the day and drop to minus 100 degrees at night. Radiation from the sun and the lower gravity will also pose problems.

Professor Xie Gengxin, the Chinese scientist in charge of the lunar plant experiment, said that if successful, the project would signal that China was catching up in space exploration, state-run Beijing Youth Daily reported.

China’s Chang’e 4 mission goals accomplished; first panorama photograph of far side of moon revealed

Xie said it would lay the foundation for humans to live in outer space.

Xie said the team had designed the container to maintain a temperature of between 1 and 30 degrees, allow in natural light and feed the plants with water and a nutrient solution.

The silkworms would consume the oxygen released by the plants, emit carbon dioxide and fertilise the plants with their dung, he said.

Xie said a similar experiment would be conducted on Earth for comparison.
Click to expand...

 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Steeler
HR/Recruiter Guys - Salary Question
Replies
9
Views
366
zoobird
Z
[icon]
OFFICIAL - Buying / Selling / Moving Thread
2 3 4
Replies
154
Views
3K
Chadstroma
Chadstroma
B
Inherited IRA and RMD question
Replies
11
Views
350
Schmeabs
S

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 3 (members: 0, guests: 3)
Top