Topic: Space exploration thread - Unexpected Rapid Disassembly in the launch area.

[Red Beret]

Recoverable you say...

We buy any spaceship.com
We buy any spaceship.com
Any
Any
Any

Next Everton shirt sponsor?  Space Cazoo?

[farawayred]

Next Everton shirt sponsor?  Space Cazoo?

They are in negotiations with this sponsor:

[Red Beret]

They are in negotiations with this sponsor:

Would probably be a better deal for them...

[TepidT2O]

Starship test landing for SN5....

Wow.

https://twitter.com/spacex/status/1290854457136181248?s=21

[thejbs]

Impressive. One thing: why the fold out legs? Surely telescopic makes more sense - allows for uneven surface landings. Obviously, I’m no rocket scientist...

[farawayred]

Impressive. One thing: why the fold out legs? Surely telescopic makes more sense - allows for uneven surface landings. Obviously, I’m no rocket scientist...

I don't know why they chose that design, and that may be just for the test phase, but I don't think that there is a "best concept" when it comes to landing. The Phoenix and InSight Mars landers use the same design, but their predecessor the Mars Polar Lander was lost in 1999 because of fault caused by telescopic legs (or rather a poor solution to that fault). If you google images of the Europa Lander, you will see multi-jointed legs that are designed to lock upon hard surface contact. Every terrain comes with its own challenges and the mission architecture has to find a workable solution, which can take on a different shape.

What I like in the SpaceX design is the single activation for opening (they could use weight-driven locking, I don't know), the outswinging past the vertical for stability, the number of legs allowing for success with random loss of two, and the use of space in storage (what else can you put in a hot rocket engine compartment?). I like it. But the current design still has to prove viable for the mission, or it may change drastically.

[Red Beret]

Damn.  The Arecibo Observatory partially collapsed after a cable snapped. Yeah, worse things happening in the world but still sucks. 

EDIT: ah, it didn't collapse, but it did get a huge hole punched in it.  Not great but not bad either.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/4V3VCt24tkE" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/4V3VCt24tkE</a>

[CornerFlag]

It was never the same after 007 fucked about with it 25 years ago.

[PhilV]

Impressive. One thing: why the fold out legs? Surely telescopic makes more sense - allows for uneven surface landings. Obviously, I’m no rocket scientist...

I would imagine telescopic legs would cause a host more issues than a simple fold out, the more moving parts, the more chance of a problem.

It was never the same after 007 fucked about with it 25 years ago.

True that! Caused structural issues, all that dude cares about is banging birds so selfish.

PS: Was Goldeneye actually 25 years ago, fuck that makes me feel old and I am only 34!

[TepidT2O]

Elon Musk is an utter cock.

But starship is the most incredible space  engineering I’ve ever seen.  Literally transforming the future of Spaceflight before our eyes.  It’s incredible to watch each iteration develop small steps towards the final structure...

This is something I suspect we will talk about in 50 years time.  Not quite Zephrame Cochrane, but incredible none the less.

[PROPER crazyemlyn72]

NASA are making announcements about new names or something? Listening on Joe Rogan podcast but I might have heard it wrong. Joe made some joke about renaming black holes because of sensitivity? But yeah, I must have picked it up wrong.

In good news JWST passed another test and October 2021 isn't too far away!

[filopastry]

Starship test landing for SN5....

Wow.

https://twitter.com/spacex/status/1290854457136181248?s=21

SN6 successfully "hopped" yesterday as well

[TepidT2O]

SN6 successfully "hopped" yesterday as well

I love that it’s engine is off centre so they use thrust vectoring to keep it in the right direction.

Amazing flying grain silo.

[Red Beret]

Cracking interactive video from Scott Manley exploring the curvature of the Earth. Best viewed in full screen.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/xpUcZXiKtfU" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/xpUcZXiKtfU</a>

[[new username under construction]]

Are we getting life on Venus today or what?

[Ray K]

Are we getting life on Venus today or what?

Sure, why not?

BBC Four are doing a Sky at Night special at 10.30 breaking down whatever news is being announced shortly. I assume there's some developments, otherwise it'd be a pretty short show.

[Not that Gareth]

Live RAS press briefing is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1u-jlf_Olo&feature=youtu.be

[[new username under construction]]

Might as well add Alien invasion to the shite of this year

[CraigDS]

Are we getting life on Venus today or what?

Wonder if they are all female?

[FiSh77]

Wonder if they are all female?

Yeah, but they all look like this



Better get on the ale

[Ray K]

I always thought that there would be a nice higher chance of alien microbes on Venus than on Mars.  The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, after all.

[Butcher Knife Roberto]

Very interesting briefing, especially considering how much they felt they had to downplay it absolutely being caused by life. It's the big scientific 'elephant in the room' and regularly swerved for reasons of avoiding academic ridicule. So for this to be announced by an international team, having spent quite a few years trying to rule out life but so far not succeeding, means that either it is or it's something new that has never been observed. Reading between the lines (and speculatively!), I would not be at all surprised if they already deep down know that it is a form of life, but that they need to make absolutely certain. What that would mean for us, both philosophically and spiritually, could be profound, so the caution is entirely understandable.

[TepidT2O]

I have a colleague who used to work for NASA researching extremophiles...

I will be interested in his take on this


That being said, at the high pressure and temperature on Venus , I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a natural mechanism for Phosphine production.

[Not that Gareth]

That being said, at the high pressure and temperature on Venus , I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a natural mechanism for Phosphine production.

They addressed this in the briefing, venus is as gassy as a rocky planet can get but does not have the pressure required to produce phosphine like say Jupiter or Saturn. That's the mystery, all known ways to produce phosphine have been ruled out, so its some unknown way to produce it or its life. That's the gist I got anyway. Of course they could simply be wrong but I get the feeling they were very careful before publishing.

If it is life, did it get there from us? Or maybe life came to earth from venus? Did it arise independently? So many questions

[Butcher Knife Roberto]

I read through the paper earlier - fascinating that they have ruled out all of their current knowledge as to the production of the phosphine, this really is something absolutely new. While it does make sense to make the direct comparison to production from Earth-based life forms, the atmospheric composition is way more inhospitable than anything on Earth. So if it is life-based, it's not going to be from something that could have been accidentally sent there on any of the missions that have visited the planet. Of course, that could potentially mean a geological process could be at work, but in terms of it being a life form then it genuinely would be extraterrestrial.

If anything, it will hopefully widen horizons for exploration beyond simply sticking footprints on Mars. Europa, Enceladus, Titan, all come into play for investigation. Personally I'd love to see the balloon method being used - send some probes, armed with cameras, scoop some of it up and analyse it in situ over a period of several months. The 10 year old in me wants them to accidentally discover the cloud city while they're there of course...

Edit: link to the paper for the masochists among us > https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4

[Red Beret]

Just catching up with the Venus news.

It's very interesting.  They've clearly been at pains to rule out all known means of phosphine production if it's taken them three years to publish.  They must have had a lot of people looking into this.

The amounts are tiny though, something like 20 parts per billion?  If it's life it clearly had enough time to evolve and migrate as Venus became increasingly hostile to more conventional forms of life.

[farawayred]

I've only glanced through the article, I need to read it more carefully, but my first thought was here goes our fucking mission and my career plans before retirement...

Speculation about life on Venus is not anything new. There was an astrobiology paper about 20 years ago, which stated that the Venus clouds have ideal conditions for life in terms of temperature and chemistry (I believe it was published in Icarus). There were many other papers since. It seems like 30-40 years ago the prevailing opinion was that life doesn't exist anywhere but here, and that was replaced now with life can't be extinguished even in extremely harsh conditions. But the Venus one aspect is interesting. I was a part of a proposed NASA Discovery mission (SAGE) to Venus that lost to Osiris-Rex. That was a lander that was supposed to survive much longer than any of the Russian missions and explore the conditions in greater detail. That mission didn't materialize and as far as I know there are no serious plans for resurrection of a Venus Lander mission. Then I got involved with another Venus-related concept addressing the planetary formation science aspects through the abundance of the noble gases. It's still an idea under development, not yet a proposed mission, tentatively called Cupid's Arrow. The idea is to fly a small craft through the Venus atmosphere at ~100km altitude, collect a gas sample, remove all non-noble gases and measure the isotopic ratios of the noble ones. One of the concepts we are working on is a sample return (collect, return and analyze in a lab on Earth). That just got fucked up! If there is any potential for life on Venus, Planetary Protection will get involved and the return mission will be cost-prohibitive to us... We cannot currently design an in-situ analysis mission that can fit into the $50M cost cap... Ah well, unless something changes in the next year, I should rethink my retirement plans. I was hoping to get that Venus mission under my belt and fuck off somewhere in the boonies 10 years from now...

Having said that though, I'd be following these developments with great interest. There is a lot to be understood about the science, and even some of the lunar observations and theresulting conclusions are unproven beyond doubt and could easily  be wrong. So, the paper needs to pass scrutiny from all angles. I'm mostly thinking of exotic catalytic processes that do not occur on Earth and are therefore unknown.

[Butcher Knife Roberto]

Fascinating insight Farawayred. I think this is going to redirect a lot of research, if only to prove some unknown processes that could be used in a wider context. Exciting times to be involved in astrobiology though.

Cupid's Arrow, great name for a mission too.

[TepidT2O]

@farawayred.

Exotic catalysis where I’m at too. It’s a more likely explanation than life (soz all!)

[McrRed]

You just had to spoil the party, Tepid.

[Red Beret]

If nothing else it's REALLY important to figure out how this is happening, as either by life or another process it could prove critical in shaping the parameters of what to actually look for.

This whole exercise was part of a testbed for searching for life signatures on Exoplanets hundreds of lightyears away, where deducing life sources will be much more difficult. So whether it is actually life or some sort of exotic process we're not currently aware of, are equally useful.

But of course, even if it turns out that it IS life, how it came to be there would remain an open question.  The surface is sterile; I think nobody will argue that.  But who knows if what we're detecting isn't some form of cross contamination from the earlier phase of space exploration?

Probes have been sent to Venus since the 60s, and it's quite possible that clean room technology was not as stringent as it is today.  Given Venus' thick atmosphere, probes could spend literally hours slowly descending through the clouds on parachutes; it's feasible that microbes potentially survived the initial fiery descent and detached from a probe in the upper atmosphere, gradually pollinating it. Plus, balloons have also been set adrift in the Venusian atmosphere.

[WhereAngelsPlay]

This is a good evening read,I say evening because you end up going down the google rabbit hole & hours pass.


The weird space that lies outside our Solar System/link takes you to the Beeb.

[farawayred]

This is a good evening read,I say evening because you end up going down the google rabbit hole & hours pass.


The weird space that lies outside our Solar System/link takes you to the Beeb.

Great read, thanks for posting!

[liverbloke]

This is a good evening read,I say evening because you end up going down the google rabbit hole & hours pass.


The weird space that lies outside our Solar System/link takes you to the Beeb.

Cheers for that - great that 

I remember someone on telly discussing space and said something like (paraphrasing obviously) all subatomic particles are intrinsically linked and need to know what their neighbouring particle is doing as to react to that action so this would mean that EVERYTHING has an effect on EVERYTHING else because each particle would have to be 'aware' of its neighbour all the time

So it's a bit like the butterfly effect

If anyone on here can enlighten me more then feel free to post 

[farawayred]

Gravitational waves detected in May (by both LIGO and Virgo) attributed to the coalescence of the biggest two black holes detected to-date.
https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/a-bang-in-ligovirgo-detectors-signals-most-massive-gravitational-wave-source-yet

[Andy @ Allerton!]

Not sure if this has been posted, but this is really good

https://futurism.com/the-byte/hubble-star-explode-supernova

[Ray K]

Roger Penrose has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity. He shares it with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez who win the other half for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.

About bloody time. Penrose is one of the greatest minds of the post-war scientific world.

[kopite321]

This is something else, Curiosity landing on Mars, the landing footage has been cleaned up it is available here in 4k... just amazing to see a filmed landing on Mars. Yes, I have seen this before but not at this picture quality or aligned with the team's reaction at Houston.

https://youtu.be/sHJ6CSb8grw

[farawayred]

^^^ It's always fun to watch Adam pacing around...

Now, imagine the same type of landing on the snowy/icy surface of Europa, where the temperature is -160C. The Sky Crane will have 10m ropes instead of 7m as on Curiosity, but I don't think that this is the type of landing we want. See how much dist the Sky Crane blew off the surface, so much so that it bared the sharp underlying rocks that started damaging the wheels. A lot of dust was on top of the rover as well. The analog approach to Europa will result in blowing snow/ice, evaporating it into space at high rate and making a fresh crater where we land. The difference in spacecraft and surrounding temperature will continue the evaporation process for a very long time (even -100C surface touching the ice is way too hot for Europa!) I fear that we will be probing the environment we just made upon landing... It's a difficult fight to have...

[kopite321]

^^^ It's always fun to watch Adam pacing around...

Now, imagine the same type of landing on the snowy/icy surface of Europa, where the temperature is -160C. The Sky Crane will have 10m ropes instead of 7m as on Curiosity, but I don't think that this is the type of landing we want. See how much dist the Sky Crane blew off the surface, so much so that it bared the sharp underlying rocks that started damaging the wheels. A lot of dust was on top of the rover as well. The analog approach to Europa will result in blowing snow/ice, evaporating it into space at high rate and making a fresh crater where we land. The difference in spacecraft and surrounding temperature will continue the evaporation process for a very long time (even -100C surface touching the ice is way too hot for Europa!) I fear that we will be probing the environment we just made upon landing... It's a difficult fight to have...

Wow.. what a fantastic post and update on the potential of a landing on Europa, really appreciated the time and effort you put in to that.. Cheers.

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS—EXCEPT EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.