The Space Thread: Diablo's Home Planet Found

[CLR-GTR]

And they announced they want to bring people to Mars between 2030 and 2040... where have we heard that (''in 20 years time we'll land on Mars'') before.

 

NASA is developing the capabilities needed to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s – goals outlined in the bipartisan NASA Authorization Act of 2010 and in the U.S. National Space Policy, also issued in 2010.

 

Source: NASAs Journey to Mars | NASA

 

It's about freaking time though, I missed out on the moon landing so I hope this generation will witness a similar thing. Might also spark more interest in science again. We need something better than 10 space agencies around the world who can't stop wasting materials and resources in blindly tossing foil-covered cubes into space.

[Ryzza5]

If Mars has always been where Mars is, and that location doesn't support water, one wonders how it previously had it and what caused it to cease.

 

 

@CLR-GTR We had that CERN thing which "nearly" sucked us all into a black hole. :lol:

[CLR-GTR]

Many estimates of the goldilocks zone borders say Mars is on the outside regions of it, but still inside so still with chances.

 

In its earlier years I assume it had a denser atmosphere for higher atmospheric pressure and increased ability of trapping heat, partially thanks to its vulcanoes. Either gravity used to be a lot stronger in the earlier days, or maybe a large bombardement has thrown stuff up (currently only deep craters and basins have enough pressure to keep water there.

 

We had that CERN thing which "nearly" sucked us all into a black hole.

 

Ahhh, our tinfoil friends. :D

[CLR-GTR]

Must have already watched this 5 times and still can't get enough of it, an awesome ''I'm-actually-there'' trip through the solar system with your tour guide Alec Baldwin:

 

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

 

And now that I think of it, same goes for this one, about a spacecraft approaching Jupiter next year:

 

[Eudemon]

Damn C, those are some loooooooooooooong vids. Will give them a looksie over the coming days and week.

[CLR-GTR]

Ye they are. I don't have much with mere 5 minute videos. Especially the first one could have been an Imax movie (if it wasn't one). I think that's the more interesting of the two to watch for the ''general'' audience, the other one is really specific explaining on one mission.

[TIMELESS]

NASA is making a big announcement about Mars' atmosphere this Thursday - ScienceAlert

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v--IqqusnNQ

[Eudemon]

Calling it! The planet is actually a giant red tomato.

[CLR-GTR]

It's official: solar winds have blown away most of the old Mars climate. The planet somehow cooled down too quickly, lost its magnetic field and then had the solar wind strip it from carbon, oxygen etc. NASA did confirm though that the atmosphere of Mars is strong enough to deflect solar wind around the planet and to prevent it from ever reaching the surface. Important for future colonists. They've discovered all this through data collected by MAVEN in its first 6 months.

 

Source: It's official: NASA announces Mars' atmosphere was stripped away by solar winds - ScienceAlert

 

Also interesting: the magical EM Drive propulsion system is still producing thrust after having gone through many rounds of modifications to eliminate influences from outside and glitches in the system, and also after having been analyzed by independent scientists. EM Drive is ''radical'' as it doesn't seem to obey the action=reaction principle (to fly forward, you need propellant to be pushed out the other direction)

 

EM Drive is reportedly still producing thrust after another round of NASA testing - ScienceAlert

[Ryzza5]

Future colonists? Gotta love how they think repairing Mars is somehow going to be easier than preventing the ruination of Earth

[CLR-GTR]

Mars is still the best contestant for humans to build a base/settlement (even if it's just science or transport-hub), it's better than the moon which NASA also would love to build a base on but is more dead and too close to us.

[TIMELESS]

5400mph winds discovered hurtling around exoplanet

 

Weather! :panic:

[CLR-GTR]

And here we are, screaming for code yellow/orange/red/purple/black/platinum when there's just another gush of wind in just another autumn like all others...

 

I wonder what a sonic boom would be like there, considering those winds are up to mach 7 :eek:

[TIMELESS]

10/10 would not fly kite.

[TIMELESS]

[headline]Astronomers discover closest potentially habitable planet: Wolf 1061c[/headline]

 

The closest potentially habitable planet ever found has been spotted by Australian scientists, and it's just 14 light-years away. That’s 126 trillion kilometres from Earth, which sounds impossibly far, but when you consider that our closest planetary neighbour, Mars, is 249 million km away, that handful of light-years doesn’t seem so bad in the scheme of things.

 

Named Wolf 1061c, the newly discovered planet is located in the constellation Ophiucus, and its star is the 35th closest star from Earth - that we know about. The team behind the discovery says it's orbiting a red dwarf 'M-type' star called Wolf 1061, alongside two other planets. All three are suspected to be rocky like Mars, rather than gaseous like Neptune.

Sauce

 

Sounds good. Then I saw a Reddit member post the following:

 

To put it in perspective, the fastest spacecraft we have launched is New Horizons[1] , which is a relatively small satellite, currently travelling at 15.73 km/sec. That's pretty fast, a little over 35,000 mph.

At that speed, it will still take New Horizons 19,060 years to travel just 1 Light Year... or more than 4 times longer than the time between when the Pyramids of Giza were built in Ancient Egypt and now. If the ancient Egyptians in 2560BC had finished the Great Pyramid and immediately launched New Horizons, it would still only be a little less than ¼ of 1 Light Year away from earth.

And Wolf 1061c is over 58 times farther away from here than that.

 

Ouch. We're gonna' need a faster space boat.

[Eudemon]

Space is like the ultimate test to know that a civilisation has made it. Being able to travel at light-speed still means years of travelling to most places we have discovered, but I guess baby steps first and all. Just a shame religion and fighting on our own home is pulling us further away when we could be using that money, resources and combined intelligence to properly advance ourselves.

[TIMELESS]

Indeed. If we stopped killing eachother for a while, we could do something useful. Instead we're using half a century old tech and haven't sent a human past the moon yet. (right?)

[CLR-GTR]

We definitely could use some warp drive hax :nods:

[Ryzza5]

14 million light years eh? Should probably start looking after this planet a bit better then. :)

[TIMELESS]

14 million light years eh? Should probably start looking after this planet a bit better then. :)

 

Million? No, just 14. :p This is why it's so exciting, it's actually fairly close, though it's unlikely we'll ever get to it in our lifetime unless we come up with some better tech.

[CLR-GTR]

Our lifetime most likely not, if the time since the moon-commuting up until today is anything to go by, but in the future we have no choice. Other civilizations won't simply send a mobile Dyson sphere here to save earth and ship it to a new star or something, we have to figure it out on our own.

 

 

Some nice pictures of the earth and our moon, the first one by Hayabusa 2, the second by LRO.

 

 

 

 

Also check out >this page< to see how the image was made, and to find a massive resolution one that you can zoom in to see country-specific details. You can see some of the south western islands of the netherlands.... that says a lot about the zoom!

[CLR-GTR]

Short video on another Space-X attempt to land a Falcon 9 rocket booster on a launch pad. And guess what...

 

 

And here's a longer video:

 

 

 

:D

[Eudemon]

Video title kind of removes the need to guess. :cheeky: And that was again cool to watch, knowing the thing is automated and is able to do that just brings up images of many sci-fi scenes from many movies in my head.

[Ryzza5]

I haven't heard so many excited geeks since they revealed the price of the PS4 at E3 :lol:

 

 

Good on'em though.

[CLR-GTR]

Video title kind of removes the need to guess. :cheeky: And that was again cool to watch, knowing the thing is automated and is able to do just brings up images of many sci-fi scenes from many movies in my head.

 

I had that especially with the helicopter footage of this landing. Always saw rockets land like this in cartoons, sci-fi's etc, and now it's real :D