http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37355154Gaia space telescope plots a billion stars
Astronomers working on the Gaia space telescope have released a first tranche of data recording the position and brightness of over a billion stars. And for some two million of these objects, their distance and sideways motion across the heavens has also been accurately plotted.
Gaia's mapping effort is already unprecedented in scale, but it still has several years to run. Remarkably, scientists say the store of information even now is too big for them to sift, and they are appealing for the public's help in making discoveries.
To give one simple example of the scope of Gaia: Of the 1.1 billion light sources in Wednesday's data release, something like 400 million of these objects have never been recorded in any previous catalogue.
"You're imaging the whole sky in basically [Hubble] space telescope quality and because you can now resolve all the stars that previously maybe looked as though they were merged as one star at low resolution - now we can see them," explained Anthony Brown from Leiden University, Netherlands.
Gerry Gilmore from Cambridge University, UK, was one of the mission's proposers. "Gaia is going to be a revolution," he said. "It's as if we as astronomers have been bluffing up until now. We're now going to see the truth."
A web portal has been opened where anyone can play with Gaia data and look for novel phenomena. When a group of schoolchildren showed the BBC how to do it last week, they stumbled across a supernova - an exploded star.
The European Space Agency (Esa) launched its Gaia mission in 2013. Its goal was to update and extend the work of a previous satellite from the 1980s/90s called Hipparcos. This observatory made the go-to Milky Way catalogue for its time - an astonishing chart of our cosmic neighbourhood.
It mapped the precise position, brightness, distance and proper motion (that sideways movement on the sky) of 100,000 stars. Gaia, with its first release of data, has just increased that haul 20-fold.
- As the Earth goes around the Sun, relatively nearby stars appear to move against the "fixed" stars that are even further away
- Because we know the Sun-Earth distance, we can use the parallax angle to work out the distance to the target star
- But such angles are very small - less than one arcsecond for the nearest stars, or 0.05% of the full Moon's diameter
- Gaia will make repeat observations to reduce measurement errors down to seven micro-arcseconds for the very brightest stars
- Parallaxes are used to anchor other, more indirect techniques on the 'ladder' deployed to measure the most far-flung distances
- Gaia will make a very precise 3D map of our Milky Way Galaxy
- It is the successor to the Hipparcos satellite which mapped some 100,000 stars
- The one billion to be catalogued by Gaia is still only 1% of the Milky Way's total
- But the survey's quality promises a raft of discoveries beyond just the star map
- It will find new asteroids and planets; It will test physical constants and theories
- Gaia's sky map will be the reference to guide future telescopes' observations
Astronomy & Space Exploration
- Thread starter MrMarcello
- Start date
I've been meaning to post this for days:
'Out of control' Chinese space station to crash to earth in 2017
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...nese-space-station-to-crash-to-earth-in-2017/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...nese-space-station-to-crash-to-earth-in-2017/
Knowing my luck it will probably miss Rooney.
Blue Origin have announced their next rocket, New Glenn (to the left of Saturn 5 below), the first stage of which will be reusable. It's bloody massive, watching it land is gonna be a trip:
In the looks department, big Saturn takes the win as well. Oh my, what a difference to others...
Falcon 9 looks like a rectal thermometer
http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/n...-on-evidence-of-surprising-activity-on-europa
Finally some E.T activity for us. I guess the guys that made the Europa movie was right.
Finally some E.T activity for us. I guess the guys that made the Europa movie was right.
Isn't Titan/Europa's subsurface ocean and primordial life potential kinda old news, though?
http://www.space.com/22207-jupiter-moon-europa-water-ocean-infographic.htmlHidden Oceans on Jupiter's Icy Moon Europa May Explain Strange Terrain
They have some new stuff caught with Hubble this time around. I am guessing it is some geysir activity since they have been speaking about that for some time.
Oh ok, good. The Galilean moons, and infact a lot of the moons of the gas giants are really intriguing from a biological standpoint. 
And as an aside, Neptune's moons aren't talked about as often, but Triton could also have subsurface oceans:
And as an aside, Neptune's moons aren't talked about as often, but Triton could also have subsurface oceans:
Looks like like medical instruments or sex toysBlue Origin have announced their next rocket, New Glenn (to the left of Saturn 5 below), the first stage of which will be reusable. It's bloody massive, watching it land is gonna be a trip:
That was it? What a bunch of teasing cnuts.
Was this:
If Europa is just full of fish. Our whole world would change overnight knowing that.
We'll be able to give things a closer look in just a few years time.
http://www.nasa.gov/europa/overview/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/europa/overview/index.html
I have a question concerning that landing booster: What's the big advantage of having it land so complicated opposed to just having it come down with parachutes and hoisting it back up with a giant crane?
(My knowledge of rockets is really limited, and slightly History Tvish, so bear with me, but the way I understand it that first booster takes it to a certain height at which point the 2nd stage booster takes over... Surely one could design a good enough parachute to bring back down safely?)
I understand that it would take giant parachutes and giant cranes, however that must still be simpler than landing a rocket backwards?
That's basically what they did with the old Shuttle solid-rocket-boosters (the ones each side of the orange tank), they'd parachute back into the sea, pick them up on a barge and refurbish them for future flights. These rockets though use liquid fuel (as opposed to the solid fuel of the SRBs), have far more complicated engines and the tanks themselves would be more fragile, so you wouldn't want them just falling over on the floor even with a parachute. Plus, parachutes aren't very accurate, whereas with a rocket you can aim for a spot and land within metres of it. It's just a matter of good guidance software and control surfaces really.
Thanks for the quick answer!
"No camera has taken a picture of the whole earth since the Apollo missions"
I reckon the pale blue dot photo counts.
The human conquest of space isn't moving at light speed.
Anyone following. Here is the video by space x of how their Interplanetary transport could work
Literally just turned on the webcast and I hear "is Mars just going to be a waterless shitstorm?". High quality audience here.
The question part is a fecking waste of time. Bunch of idiots in this crowd. That question was actually one of the better, although it was very poorly phrased. The presentation was great though, I love listening to Elon Musk speak. It's clear he's not some PR-guy here to sell you something for X company - his speech is very stop-and-go because he actually thinks about what he says rather than memorise it.
Someone put together an album of all the technical slides from the SpaceX presentation
Fair to say if this ever gets off the ground (boom boom) it'll be the most revolutionary thing in spaceflight in...well, ever. That timeline seems unbelievably optimistic, though. First actual Mars flights in 2022? I was thinking early 2030s when I saw that vid.
He talked about starting sending (unmanned) ships already during the next window (early 2018). It's a very optimistic timeframe obviously, but I suppose it's motivation.
The imgur album cuts off bottom half of the images for me at least, open the album in a separate window if you have the same problem.
Code:
http://imgur.com/a/20nkuYeah I managed to get there with the options button at the top, first Mars mission is supposedly end of 2022. If it's even close to that, NASA is going to have a lot of questions asked about it having fecked around so much since 2004.
It won't be anywhere near that I don't think, they've not even brought humans into space yet.
The big thing they've got down which NASA haven't is propulsive landing/reusability. NASA are still using parachutes to land on earth and Mars. Without that, landing on Mars is hard and returning from Mars is harder.
Also, NASA deal with nitty gritty of living in space and living on the moon and Mars. SpaceX build a big rocket
But you're right. It's crazy how useless they have been in the last 20 years
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So who wants to go to Mars?
All you have to do is sell your house.
All you have to do is sell your house.
I think the answer for it, in regards to NASA, is pretty easy - there was no political motive or ambition for it. The guy behind waitbutwhy.com did a series on Musk (him as a person, Tesla and SpaceX), which is a quite interesting read although very long if you want the whole deal. He wrote a long piece about cutting down the prices (the aptly named "ULA is a Dick Blue Box" is great (ULA = United Launch alliance, Boeing and Lockheed Martin joint venture)), which has been one of NASA's big problems really. The TL;DR-version is that NASA has been forced to use American companies (SpaceX can only hire American workers or workers with green cards for this same reason, I believe). There hasn't really been many US companies doing this until now, so NASA and the US military relied on Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and their joint-venture, to get the job done. They were only in it for the money though, and with no competition they had no reason to find ways to cut down the cost. According to the article SpaceX does launches for NASA for a third of the price ULA does ($133m rather than $380m), and even goes down to $60m for other companies that don't have as many requirements as NASA. With more optimisation and what-not SpaceX will probably be able to do it for close to a tenth of the price ULA has been charging NASA - that is just insane.
Basically, it's a clusterfeck of political shit. Musk doesn't give a shit about that and just wants to go to Mars, so he's finding a way. I think in a lot of ways NASA's hands have basically been tied. They're relying on government funding and they've been forced to use expensive contractors, which limited what else they could do.
So, the thing I want to know the most: We know they are thinking there will be thousands of these things going between earth and Mars. We know they can dock with each other. I wonder if they are thinking that these will be the ascend/descend ships to an even larger interplanetary ship that just remains in space. That would be seriously forward thinking. Maybe even the cycler...
The earth to earth trips will be really useful in cinema over the next few years. I can see jack boeur needing too get to the other side of the earth in 20 minutes to prevent a nuclear explosion, so he gives Musk a call...
So much to sort out. Martian soil is full of salt, so that's great. No magnetic field, no atmosphere. We can do it though.
I bet we finally terraform Mars and Venus, only for the whole system to get wiped out by a passing GRB
The earth to earth trips will be really useful in cinema over the next few years. I can see jack boeur needing too get to the other side of the earth in 20 minutes to prevent a nuclear explosion, so he gives Musk a call...
So much to sort out. Martian soil is full of salt, so that's great. No magnetic field, no atmosphere. We can do it though.
I bet we finally terraform Mars and Venus, only for the whole system to get wiped out by a passing GRB
It'll all be clearly explained in the next Avengers instalment. Just chilll Winston!