Probably a lucky shot, or maybe he’s just really good (astronomically!) with GPS and camera positioning? Or a combination of the two?
(I don’t think GPS et al have the necessary resolution to pull this off with any reliability.)
CraigM
3953
The problem wouldn’t be GPS reliability, in fact GPS wouldn’t be needed at all.
But this requires
A night launch
Clear skies
The moon in the east at the time of launch
To have the moon at the proper angle of inclination for the launch, there is an angle above the horizon at which point the rocket will never appear to cross from the ground due to the gravity turn.
The right launch time, since the moon travels across the sky at about .26° per minute, so the visual intercept point shifts over time, and even a 1 minute launch delay moves it out of that visual window
So if you have a low angle moon in the east at the time of launch, and if you know that time accurately, you can figure out the approximate angle of the moon at the time. From there if you have a decent idea of the flight path you can draw a line of the visual intercept area, the locations where the rocket may cross the moon. Simple geometry, and the line would be approximately like this:
Understand I didn’t do the actual calculation, I am just doing a very rough estimate based on latitude, time of year, and approximate angle of 20° above the horizon for the moon. But suffice to say it is all calculable with some basic trigonometry, and sufficient interest. However, as you can tell, the confluence of events to make it possible mean that there is only certain times and conditions where this is possible, so any given launch has a low probability of someone being along that line.
Matt_W
3954
I’d think if you’re very close to the rocket, it would be fairly easy to do this. The rocket is ~135’ tall and describes approximately the same angle as the moon in the sky, slightly smaller, so say 0.5°, which means that photo was taken from about 3 miles away.
Kennedy is at 28°N, so the moon’s lateral speed across the sky would only be about half of that, i.e. when low in the sky a significant part of the moon’s apparent path would be vertical. EDIT: Actually, for equatorial launches, I believe the launch window is arranged so that the ecliptic is as close to KSC’s inclination as possible, so there would be even less transverse motion.
Friday morning (UTC), there’s between a 1% and 20% chance of a 2800kg collision between two pieces of debris in LEO. One’s a former Soviet satellite, the other’s a Long March upper stage.
LASER Broom gets to seem like a less esoteric and more necessary project every year… Unless someone wants to pay to put up debris cleaner microsatellites which can work faster than new space junk is created.
MikeJ
3960
From the image, it looks like they are basically on opposite trajectories. Would it help if nations agreed on a general range of directions to launch stuff so that if there is a collision in the future it’s not as orbital velocity x 2?
Any one of these could lead to some pretty cool stuff.
jpinard
3962
Man I sure hope this one pans out in a scalable and affordable manner:
-
Sierra Nevada, $2.4M : Demonstrate a device using solar energy to extract oxygen from lunar regolith
I hope there is an actual remote chance that is possible. Otherwise it’s $2.4m for nothing.
jpinard
3964
There’s a lot of oxygen in lunar regolith, so adding enough heat may be enough to liberate the oxygen. Will have to see.
The bits of space junk missed each other, happily.
The company doing the tracking says they’ll put out a Medium post about the incident in a few days. (I guess it makes sense that we have private orbital debris tracking, what with having private space launch and all.)
jpinard
3966
What’s the situation with the 10,000 bits of debris the Chinese created when they blew up a satellite? Are they quickly de-orbiting, or is it a high hazard for the next hundred years? Also curious how many satellites are in the debris field’s path over the next decade.
I had the altitude a little off in my head, but Wikipedia says the Chinese ASAT test created about 3,440 trackable pieces of debris, of which 571 had fallen out of orbit by late 2016. Half of it has a mean altitude greater than 850km, which puts its lifespan on the order of decades.
Sort of like salting the earth I guess.
I recently read Mary Robinette’s The Relentless Moon and re-read Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - water/ice will be a huge factor too! The LTE network sounds interesting, but I’d also like to see more satellites around the Moon and Mars as well - GPS for underground/underdome facilities will be necessary!
Banzai
3970
There’s also a lot of radon, which can cause lung cancer, and was the subject of one of my publications in civil engineering graduate school. Don’t want to have a settlement on the moon and have everyone get lung cancer after all. But extracting oxygen in a way that would be renewable through solar power would be a big deal.
Anyone else like Emily’s tiktok updates - here’s the one on the Bennu project today:
Updated link as start of video was cut off in first link.
I loved her one on Perseverance studying Sound sound on Mars too:
