Astronomy & Space Exploration
- Thread starter MrMarcello
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Seems a bit like clickbait. Without Higgs’ boson (more correctly, Higgs field) the entire standard model was going to get invalidated (plus Higgs field might have been the cause of inflation). This new particle carrier of force if proven true, will be new physics and welcome, but the confirmation of Higgs field was monumental. Otherwise it would have invalidated half a century of research.
Well said. It could be possible that science may well have discovered something which might explain more about the vast majority of matter that we don't yet understand. Dark Matter and Dark Energy. These dominate the Universe and the way it both has and will continue to evolve.
It may be incredibly tiny, but if scientifically proven, will be massive.
I'll see you on the dark side of the muon
Let's keep aliens to the UFO thread, pretty please.
Very good. Are you a fan of Pink Floyd?
Sorry, that took over the thread a bit there, my bad
Steven Weinberg has died. Arguably the most important physicist since Feynman and Gell-Mann, and maybe the most important scientist in building the standard model. A dark day for humankind, but what a life he had.
Listened to a lecture of him on youtube just a couple of months ago. For someone who was almost 90 back then (when the video was made), he looked in an incredible shape.
Listened to a lecture of him on youtube just a couple of months ago. For someone who was almost 90 back then (when the video was made), he looked in an incredible shape.
Very sad. Susskind is getting on in age as well.
Don't want to think about that day coming. Love Susskind and one of my wishes when I was living in SV was to randomly bump on him.
Linde should be walking around there as well. Its always possible to bump into these guys
A remotely operated vehicle drills a hole in a rock on another planet, then takes a photo of its work and beams it back to Earth. Pretty cool.
Not sure why the image is so small. Full image is here.
A remotely operated vehicle drills a hole in a rock on another planet, then takes a photo of its work and beams it back to Earth. Pretty cool.
Not sure why the image is so small. Full image is here.
That really is pretty cool isn't it. Something that done here on Earth would be mundane. But done on another planet is quite remarkable.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58498676
After all the delays, fanfare and cost overrun, you just know this is going to explode half way to space, or something will go wrong with the sail.
After all the delays, fanfare and cost overrun, you just know this is going to explode half way to space, or something will go wrong with the sail.
Yeah, I'm fully expecting it to blow up on launch.
...less than 90 days from launch on December 18th.
How long after launch will it be operational?
Six months apparently, as it travels to its L2 position and gets calibrated.
Found this bit.
https://webb.nasa.gov/content/about/orbit.html
Timeline Of Events After Launch:
After launch, the telescope will deploy on its 30-day, million-mile journey out to the second Lagrange point (L2). This video shows the deployment procedure, timeline, and location of the satellite during deployment.
- In the first hour: The ride to space, solar array deployment, and “free flight.” The Ariane 5 launch vehicle will provide thrust for roughly 26 minutes after a morning liftoff from French Guiana. Moments after second stage engine cut-off, Webb will separate from the Ariane, which will trigger the solar array to deploy within minutes so that Webb can start making electricity from sunshine and stop draining its battery. Webb will quickly establish its ability to orient itself and “fly” in space.
- In the first day: Mid-course correction to L2. Ariane will have sent Webb on a direct route to L2, without first orbiting Earth. During the first day, we will execute the first and most important trajectory correction maneuver using small rocket engines aboard Webb itself. We will also release and deploy the high gain antenna to enable the highest available rates of data communication as early as practical.
- In the first week: Sunshield deployment. Shortly after we execute a second trajectory correction maneuver, we will start the sequence of major deployments, beginning with the fore and aft sunshield pallets. The next step is separation of the spacecraft bus and telescope by extending the telescoping tower between them. The tower will extend about 2 meters, and it is necessary at this point in the sequence so that the rest of the sunshield deployment can proceed. Next, the sunshield membranes will be unpinned and the telescoping sunshield midbooms will extend – first the port side and then the starboard side – pulling the membranes out with them. The last sunshield deployment step is tensioning of the membranes. In the meantime, other things like radiators will be released and deployed.
- In the first month: Telescope deployment, cooldown, instrument turn-on, and insertion into orbit around L2. During the second week after launch we will finish deploying the telescope structures by unfolding and latching the secondary mirror tripod and rotating and latching the two primary mirror wings. Note that the telescope and scientific instruments will start to cool rapidly in the shade of the sunshield, but it will take several weeks for them to cool all the way down and reach stable temperatures. This cooldown will be carefully controlled with strategically-placed electric heater strips so that everything shrinks carefully and so that water trapped inside parts of the observatory can escape as gas to the vacuum of space and not freeze as ice onto mirrors or detectors, which would degrade scientific performance. We will unlock all the primary mirror segments and the secondary mirror and verify that we can move them. Near the end of the first month, we will execute the last mid-course maneuver to insert into the optimum orbit around L2. During this time we will also power-up the scientific instrument systems. The remaining five months of commissioning will be all about aligning the optics and calibrating the scientific instruments.
- In the second, third and fourth months: Initial optics checkouts, and telescope alignment. Using the Fine Guidance Sensor, we will point Webb at a single bright star and demonstrate that the observatory can acquire and lock onto targets, and we will take data mainly with NIRCam. But because the primary mirror segments have yet to be aligned to work as a single mirror, there will be up to 18 distorted images of the same single target star. We will then embark on the long process of aligning all the telescope optics, beginning with identifying which primary mirror segment goes with which image by moving each segment one at a time and ending a few months later with all the segments aligned as one and the secondary mirror aligned optimally. Cooldown will effectively end and the cryocooler will start running at its lowest temperature and MIRI can start taking good data too.
- In the fifth and sixth months: Calibration and completion of commissioning. We will meticulously calibrate all of the scientific instruments’ many modes of operation while observing representative targets, and we will demonstrate the ability to track “moving” targets, which are nearby objects like asteroids, comets, moons, and planets in our own solar system. We will make “Early Release Observations,” to be revealed right after commissioning is over, that will showcase the capabilities of the observatory.
- After six months: “Science operations!” Webb will begin its science mission and start to conduct routine science operations.
I went past the Royal Academy today, incidentally and they've got a display of photos from space in their ccourtard, which was cool.
Aways amazes me how these high-tech satellites cost billions but look like someone knocked it up and wrapped it in tinfoil in their garage.
Aways amazes me how these high-tech satellites cost billions but look like someone knocked it up and wrapped it in tinfoil in their garage.
Wait they are launching with Arianne 5 
Wait they are launching with Arianne 5
Fingers crossed. Of all the launches to fail please, please, please, don't let it be this one.
Wait they are launching with Arianne 5
That, and it has to travel by boat through the Panama Canal to reach its launch site in the pacific.
I'm not prepared for the existential crisis the photos from this thing will give me.
The final proof we are all alone in this universe, the utter devastation of the realisation of the loneliness of our existence?
More the proof that we're fecking tiny and insignificant.
An overcomplicated school bus but the STS had its uses.
And that this tiny blue planet rotating around a fairly ordinary star is our only home. Our only home that we are in the process of making uninhabitable within the next few generations.
Would be interesting to see how many other civilizations have flamed out in other periods of space and time that we will never know about because of the distance and technology.
Yes. That may be right. But as you say, we may never actually find out before the human race makes its only home uninhabitable.
Or....we may really be alone. A unique instance of multicellular life in our galaxy that all too quickly flourishes before it destroys itself by trashing its home.
It's extremely unlikely we could ever make the Earth actually uninhabitable. We could definitely make some kind of post-apocalyptic dystopia, though.
Uninhabitable for 7bn+ people?
Just waiting for the first photos of a Borg cube heading our way.