What's happening in space (that's interesting)

[Woolen_Horde]

New high-res image of Ultima Thule: Quest for the Avatar
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Galleries/Featured-Images/image.php?page=41&gallery_id=2&image_id=586

[gruntled]

Earth's Oldest Rock Found on the Moon – Solar System Exploration: NASA Science

[abidingdude]

RIP little dude 😢

‘This Could Be the End’ for NASA’s Mars Opportunity Rover

[Woolen_Horde]

Don’t worry. Matt Damon will dig the little guy up when we have to rescue his ass off of Mars.

[Klaatu]

Dude! Spoiler alert!

[kerzain]

Dude! Spoiler alert!

Relax, we’ve all seen Saving Private Ryan Interstellar by now.

[Djscman]

There was an incident on the ISS.

ISS toilet leak dumps two gallons of 'water' on crew

[Matt_W]

European Mars Rover Named for Crystal Scientist Rosalind Franklin

The agency chose to commemorate Franklin for her work as an X-ray crystallographer during the 1940s and '50s. Franklin captured structural images of substances like viruses and coal, as well as the crucial biological compounds DNA and RNA, which both carry genetic information.

James Watson and Francis Crick used her research without permission and with little credit when publishing their model of the structure of DNA in 1953. In Watson’s book “The Double Helix,” which shaped the narrative around the discovery of the structure of DNA for decades, he painted a vituperativepicture of Franklin, whom he referred to as “Rosy.” She died in 1958 at age 37, and her work went mostly unacknowledged until the 1990s.

[Rod_Humble]

Wow, to my shame I didnt know about her. Good for ESA.

[RichVR]

That was a Big Bang Theory episode.

[Woolen_Horde]

Well, they can still name the mobile lab they use to investigate the hungries after her.

[ineffablebob]

InSight's Seismometer Now Has a Cozy Shelter on Mars

On Earth, seismometers are often buried about four feet (1.2 meters) underground in vaults, which helps keep the temperature stable. InSight can’t build a vault on Mars, so the mission relies on several measures to protect its seismometer. The shield is the first line of defense.

A second line of defense is SEIS itself, which is specially engineered to correct for wild temperature swings on the Martian surface. The seismometer was built so that as some parts expand and contract, others do so in the opposite direction to partially cancel those effects. Additionally, the instrument is vacuum-sealed in a titanium sphere that insulates its sensitive insides and reduces the influence of temperature.

But even that isn’t quite enough. The sphere is enclosed within yet another insulating container — a copper-colored hexagonal box visible during SEIS’s deployment. The walls of this box are honeycombed with cells that trap air and keep it from moving. Mars provides an excellent gas for this insulation: Its thin atmosphere is primarily composed of carbon dioxide, which at low pressure is especially slow to conduct heat.

With these three insulating barriers, SEIS is well-protected from thermal “noise” seeping into the data and masking the seismic waves that InSight’s team wants to study. Finally, most additional interference from the Martian environment can be detected by InSight’s weather sensors, then filtered out by mission scientists.

Measuring stuff on Mars is hard. Who knew?

[jpinard]

The design and engineering of that thing is mind boggling.

[ineffablebob]

SpaceX seeks FCC approval for up to 1M Starlink satellite earth stations

“Could go live in the 2020 time frame”…maybe in extremely limited areas.

[jpinard]

Would this be faster and with lower latency than Hughes or Dish satellite type of feed?

[antlers]

Would this be faster and with lower latency than Hughes or Dish satellite type of feed?

Much faster, since the satellites would be in low earth orbit, a hundred times closer than geosynchronous. It would provide internet at 5g speeds. Coverage would be global, capacity would be limited by the number of satellites they put up there.

What’s neat about this is that they could provide access all over the world-- like China-- and bypass national filters like the Great Firewall.

[CLWheeljack]

What’s neat about this is that they could provide access all over the world-- like China-- and bypass national filters like the Great Firewall.

I’m pretty sure that’s how you get space-wars, though.

[jpinard]

Would this be faster and with lower latency than Hughes or Dish satellite type of feed?

Much faster, since the satellites would be in low earth orbit, a hundred times closer than geosynchronous. It would provide internet at 5g speeds. Coverage would be global, capacity would be limited by the number of satellites they put up there.

What’s neat about this is that they could provide access all over the world-- like China-- and bypass national filters like the Great Firewall.

Whoa - that would be awesome.

[Menzo]

What’s neat about this is that they could provide access all over the world-- like China-- and bypass national filters like the Great Firewall.

Yeah, except where’s the money coming from? China isn’t going to let its citizens pay for an unfiltered internet, and there’s no organization that can cover the vast costs of such a system just for philanthropy.

Not to mention it would greatly inflate costs if customers in the rest of the world were subsidizing coverage for entirely other parts of the world.

Seems unlikely to me.

[Fishbreath]

Beyond that, you also need a fairly sophisticated ground station to hook into Starlink, at least as currently conceived—a phased array antenna to do beam-steering to track a moving satellite overhead. That’s a conspicuous and easily-controlled piece of equipment.