Space and Science BS Thread

I wonder if this will become the new norm for rovers? I'd put a couple bills on it being so. Some loss of pure science payload and the expense of R&D plus gound team to run it but suspect the potential is greater

 

For the titan mission - it's a quad. That said, ingenuity is super tiny and low mass, and adding mass to it would be pretty darned hard(tm), due to the really thin atmo.

Aerial scout missions seem to be a go, though, at least for mars.

 

I wasn't referring to adding mass to the aerial vehicles, just the overall payload at launch.

 

The asteroid belt is next out from Mars so I’d think some cherry picking there will happen with more old school probes geared for sampling along with probes to the Jovian moons. No atmosphere on the moons might call for a different form of hop capability, maybe some form of rechargeable jump jets for reconnaissance. You could even launch it with a sling shot a la The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Fire it off then go collect it with the rover or fire it up and use the jets to bring it back. Hopefully AI will have come farther by then.

 

I'd just be happy with some good images of the belt at this point.

 

There have already been landings so there certainly will be more. I doubt images would be spectacular, as numerous as they are the space between means that it’s not the same as the Saturn’s rings.

 

Yeah I was just looking and apparently the whole asteroid belt as a whole is less mass than our moon and there are 4 or 5 of them that make up 25% of the total mass of the belt. Really it doesn't sound like much of a belt... But I guess it's the best we got, for now...

 

It would not surprise me to hear that it’s more likely to hit space junk in earth orbit that to hit a random asteroid.

 

When they show you images like this it's easy to think that you should be able to get good images of the belt from afar. But my research has taught me that most the asteroids are tiny. Apparently the gravitational pull from Jupiter and Mars prevents the asteroids from sticking together when they collide, so we get smaller and smaller asteroids as time marches on instead of them building a dwarf planet.

 

It looks pretty dense on a 9 x 11 page but make the inner diameter of that ring ~150,000,000 miles and the outer 300,000,000 and the dots spread out a bit.

 

Groovy…
https://twitter.com/totalspace360/status/1430993309682618368?s=21

 

Would've been nice if it was a sharp video the whole time. What did they take that with? The broken Hubble mirror?

 

Yeah, I hear ya. I’d like a longer clip too.

 

So if they invested as much time in their BE-4 development, the Vulcan Centaur would be flying now....

https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-urges-fcc-to-deny-spacexs-plan-for-second-generation-starlink

 

That's something that can be explained with 2 things. 1 is scale. The universe is huge. Our Galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars and we have only one thing that has made it out of our own solar system.

The second is technology. The Hubble has 4mb of ram iirc. It was top of the line when we launched it nearly 40 years ago, but now we have calculators with more ram...

 

Here we all are.

Every

single

one

of

us…
https://twitter.com/nasahistory/status/1431047564246327303?s=21

 

That's just what the lizard people want you to believe!!

 

Melconians?

 

They say, if you have to say it, it’s true. I knew he was lying..

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-im-not-a-lizard-shapeshifter-2016-6

 

Nope, they're called Nazis. And they're mining helium 3 from their secret base on the dark side of the Moon!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmilvm3KIgw

Yeup, he's just one of many.