Astronomy & Space Exploration

It is not like anyone believed they had actual photos of a planet 40 lightyears away.

Many people did - especially half the people on social media who get those fancy graphic illustrations along with a breaking news story that new planets have been discovered.
 
Just makes the launch of the James Webb telescope even more exciting. If we find molecular oxygen on on one the planet's it really would change everything.
JWST better bring back some spectacular images, it's been so delayed and talked about for years.
 
JWST better bring back some spectacular images, it's been so delayed and talked about for years.
Imagine if the launcher explodes. Going up on an Ariane as well, Europe will blamed.
 
It is not like anyone believed they had actual photos of a planet 40 lightyears away.
I'm with SwansonsTache, or at least, no one on the caf thought they had pictures of the exoplanets.

But either way, here is a useful animation of exoplanet discovery

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Important to note that we started off finding a lot of exoplanets with 100+ earth masses, because it's much easier to find a big exoplanet that a small one (whether using radial velocity or transits or anything else).

Then we get that sudden explosion of exoplanets being discovered with 0-10 earth masses, because we have the capability of looking for them. Suggesting they are probably everywhere
 
Imagine if the launcher explodes. Going up on an Ariane as well, Europe will blamed.
I, I don't want think about that.

All I can say is that I think they'd build the second one a little bit quicker... :lol:
 
The "ease of discovery" point is also relevant to Trappist-1 - a small, dim star with its planets making very quick orbits is going to be much easier to find and analyse than something more like our own system.
 
The "ease of discovery" point is also relevant to Trappist-1 - a small, dim star with its planets making very quick orbits is going to be much easier to find and analyse than something more like our own system.

Yes, once that new James Web telescope goes up, I think we are going to see a lot more discoveries much closer to systems like our own.
 
Can someone recommend a book about space/astronomy stuff? I'm not looking for something that goes deep into astrophysics, merely some sort of encyclopedia with informations about our solar system, galaxy etc.
 
50th Anniversary of Apollo 8.

Will anyone be brave enough to land in 2019???
 
Fairly bold. Scarily bold.

50th Anniversary of Apollo 8.

Will anyone be brave enough to land in 2019???
I know you're kidding, but how much extra stuff would they need to get a Dragon2 onto the surface and back home?
 
Fairly bold. Scarily bold.


I know you're kidding, but how much extra stuff would they need to get a Dragon2 onto the surface and back home?
I've seen the estimates of the delta v budget for Dragon 1 and Dragon 2 vary widely. Someone on Quora did some back-of-the-napkin calculations and said if the Dragon and Trunk were full with fuel, it could land on the Moon. I actually think that's underestimating it's Delta V budget a bit... The Dragon v2 could probably land on the moon, just (with the trunk full of fuel).

But then you need someway of getting off the moon. So either way, this isn't how they'd be doing things.

At the very minimum, I think you'd need some sort of new third stage to do the bulk of the work, but really I think you need a completely redesigned module. I mean the Dragon has lots of stuff on it you don't need to take with you to the moon; a heatshield for one thing. Probably the Dragon is the bit you leave in Lunar Orbit, and you build a lunar decent/ascent module to go with it...

Probably. I don't know
 
I think you're right, for a Moon lander you'd want something that's basically all fuel and rockets in terms of mass. Guessing a theoretical ITS ship could do it, question would be how much fuel it would need for the trip compared to a Mars one.

Wonder who it is that's bought the trip.
 
I mean the one good thing about the moon, is your thing doesn't need to be aerodynamic or pretty. This is what we landed last time

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Then only the top bit returns to the Command module
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So really, someone just needs to design a 2018 lunar lander to slap onto the Dragon Command Module.
 
If the price is $300mn for both of them, that's only like $75mn between four of us.

Can anyone contribute?

But seriously, I wonder if any other rich feckers will book some tickets.
 
Scott Manleys video is a nice overall of SLS and SpaceX

 
The Paradox of the Fermi Paradox - Discussing the likelihood of life elsewhere with rules invented by humans.
Always agreed with that. Which is why I cannot stand too much it's promoters (like Nick Bostrom).
 
Chilean scientist Carlos Muñoz Ferrada predicted the planet 9 (Hercolobus, Nibiru) in 1940, among other things.

check this video, it's pretty cool. Awesome his predictions can be proved nowadays.



i hope he is not right respect of what's going to happen when it arrives our system again....
 
Can't believe much from that video. Looks extremely speculative, googling the name of that scientist doesn't give you much (bar speculative articles with that video), he doesn't exist in peer review papers, so a bit like Zacharia Sitchin.

Saying that, there is a lot of evidence that this mysterious planet might really exist.
 
Nibiru and the hypothesised Planet 9 (From Outer Space) are really, really different things.
 
I think the likelihood of their being a large, dull planet out there is very unlikely. More likely the way the minor planets orbit can be explained by something else.

Probably.
 
Dunno about a large, dull planet out there being unlikely, to be honest - unless, we're restricting ourselves to the Kuiper belt. For reference, the inner Hills cloud part of the Oort Cloud is theoretically supposed to extend to ~0.3 lighyears - at that distance, you'd need a body with the diameter of ~450,000 miles to fully resolve the image using Hubble (in terms of comparison - the diameter of Jupiter at its equator is ~87,000 miles). There could be a scary huge planet or a Brown Dwarf out there beyond the Bow Shock, and we might not known about it because the WISE catalog is incomplete and Spitzer/WISE haven't scanned everything in our immediate neighborhood - so it's slightly disconcerting that in terms of observation, we're more geared towards resolving deeper space than distances of sub-1 lightyear until more powerful telescopes are built, or we do a full infrared scan for the faintest of traces.

Also intrigued by the apparent transit of known WISE Brown Dwarves (like Scholz's Star in the past) or proposed transit of Gliese 710 in the future (projected closest approach of only 77 light days - uncertainty of about 50%). Though as a species, we could be gone by then and inhabiting other systems (hopefully), so the 'strongest disrupting encounter in the future and history of the solar system' would be inconsequential.

pepe_zps800e090f.jpg
 

They're also apparently developing a lunar (cargo) lander, which goes some way to addressing our ponderings of a couple of weeks back.

Fingers crossed the manned New Shepard test flights go to plan, could be looked back on as the beginning of a new era of manned space travel (I know it's only suborbital tourism, but with private companies proving able to get people up there with reusable systems that can be scaled up to orbital and beyond, it'll be a step change.)
 
My big criticism of New Glenn is that we haven't see a version with a reusable second stage yet. Now maybe that's because they aren't ready to announce it yet, or don't know what form it will take, but maybe also it just won't have one.

Which I think would be a huge waste. Re-usability is what we need to work towards. By the time New Glenn is ready, the Falcon 9 will have been around for over a decade. New Glenn is much larger than a Falcon 9 of course, but I think it will be a huge waste if it isn't designed with a reusable second stage.

Because the future has to have rockets which are as reusable as planes. Launch, land, refuel, launch again.

Even assuming the ITS will only be ready in 2028, if they get that right, that could put 100 people into LEO. Then land, and be refuelled, and put another 100 people into LEO.

As soon as we have rapid-re-usability, space is here. The costs for a seat will plummet from tens of millions to tens of thousands.
 
My big criticism of New Glenn is that we haven't see a version with a reusable second stage yet. Now maybe that's because they aren't ready to announce it yet, or don't know what form it will take, but maybe also it just won't have one.

Which I think would be a huge waste. Re-usability is what we need to work towards. By the time New Glenn is ready, the Falcon 9 will have been around for over a decade. New Glenn is much larger than a Falcon 9 of course, but I think it will be a huge waste if it isn't designed with a reusable second stage.

Because the future has to have rockets which are as reusable as planes. Launch, land, refuel, launch again.

Even assuming the ITS will only be ready in 2028, if they get that right, that could put 100 people into LEO. Then land, and be refuelled, and put another 100 people into LEO.

As soon as we have rapid-re-usability, space is here. The costs for a seat will plummet from tens of millions to tens of thousands.
Reusable second stage is tough, though. I know SpaceX originally intended to do it for Falcon, but when you start having to add a heatshield, landing legs, guide fins and enough fuel to deorbit, it starts eating into your mass-to-orbit quite a bit. They've solved it quite nicely for ITS by having the second stage combined with the spacecraft itself, and I wonder if New Glenn could end up with something similar for moonshots.
 
Reusable second stage is tough, though. I know SpaceX originally intended to do it for Falcon, but when you start having to add a heatshield, landing legs, guide fins and enough fuel to deorbit, it starts eating into your mass-to-orbit quite a bit. They've solved it quite nicely for ITS by having the second stage combined with the spacecraft itself, and I wonder if New Glenn could end up with something similar for moonshots.
Quite right, it's a difficult problem, and solving it reduces your payload capacity and adds extra difficulty. In many ways the ITS and Space Shuttle Orbiter were/are quite similar. They look fairly similar (partly because of the black bottom), they need to solve the same problem (landing from orbit), and they are even quite similar in dimensions (38m length for the Space Shuttle, 50m height for the ITS).

But I just think it's silly to be not going for full re-usability in 2017. Any new launch systems should be an improvement on what we already have (and not just in payload capacity).

If SpaceX get the ITS right, then they will be pushing us into that sci-fi future. If they can launch 100 people to an orbital Space Station, land the thing, then take another 100 people to a space station next week... that's insane. That's Star Trek stuff right there. There are things you can criticise the ITS for, including it's lack of a launch escape system, but to not pursue that goal seems strange.

Having said that, maybe Blue Origin are working on it. They have extremely intelligent guys (many of whom they pinched from SpaceX) and they've been working for complete re-usability right from the off. It could just be they aren't ready to show us yet.

SpaceX are only circumnavigating the moon, fellas. No landing.
I'm not even sure if they are going to be doing that, technically. It seems like the 400,000 miles wasn't a miss spoken word, right now they seem to planning to skim the moon at 400,000km, and watch it as it becomes smaller and smaller, until finally reaching a apogee 650,000km from Earth and being pulled back.

I think if I was paying for it, I'd rather do the Apollo 13 route, although I guess there is something to watching the moon slip away (and breaking all previous crewed records) that would be quite awesome
 
Quite right, it's a difficult problem, and solving it reduces your payload capacity and adds extra difficulty. In many ways the ITS and Space Shuttle Orbiter were/are quite similar. They look fairly similar (partly because of the black bottom), they need to solve the same problem (landing from orbit), and they are even quite similar in dimensions (38m length for the Space Shuttle, 50m height for the ITS).

But I just think it's silly to be not going for full re-usability in 2017. Any new launch systems should be an improvement on what we already have (and not just in payload capacity).

If SpaceX get the ITS right, then they will be pushing us into that sci-fi future. If they can launch 100 people to an orbital Space Station, land the thing, then take another 100 people to a space station next week... that's insane. That's Star Trek stuff right there. There are things you can criticise the ITS for, including it's lack of a launch escape system, but to not pursue that goal seems strange.

Having said that, maybe Blue Origin are working on it. They have extremely intelligent guys (many of whom they pinched from SpaceX) and they've been working for complete re-usability right from the off. It could just be they aren't ready to show us yet.


I'm not even sure if they are going to be doing that, technically. It seems like the 400,000 miles wasn't a miss spoken word, right now they seem to planning to skim the moon at 400,000km, and watch it as it becomes smaller and smaller, until finally reaching a apogee 650,000km from Earth and being pulled back.

I think if I was paying for it, I'd rather do the Apollo 13 route, although I guess there is something to watching the moon slip away (and breaking all previous crewed records) that would be quite awesome
ITS would be revolutionary from just about every angle, which is why I'm refusing to get too comfortable with the idea it's likely to happen. New Glenn is far more reachable in scope and Bezos looks willing to self-fund, it would still represent a huge drop in the cost of bringing mass to orbit, and they have a clear target of making regular travel to the Moon a thing within the decade.

They also hinted at New Armstrong when they unveiled New Glenn, which you'd guess would be a larger Moon rocket, and you might get your wish of full re-use with that.

Either way, you look at SLS these days and just think "why?"