Archive for the 'Space' Category
4 Mysterious Objects Spotted in Deep Space Are Unlike Anything Ever Seen
July 12th, 2020Via: LiveScience: There’s something unusual lurking out in the depths of space: Astronomers have discovered four faint objects that at radio wavelengths are highly circular and brighter along their edges. And they’re unlike any class of astronomical object ever seen before. The objects, which look like distant ring-shaped islands, have been dubbed odd radio circles, […]
Signal from 500 Million Light Years Away Is First Periodic Pattern of Radio Bursts Detected
June 28th, 2020Via: MIT News: A team of astronomers, including researchers at MIT, has picked up on a curious, repeating rhythm of fast radio bursts emanating from an unknown source outside our galaxy, 500 million light years away. … This new FRB source, which the team has catalogued as FRB 180916.J0158+65, is the first to produce a […]
‘Black Neutron Star’ Discovery: How Neutron Stars and Black Holes Form Will Need to be Rethought
June 27th, 2020Via: BBC: Scientists have discovered an astronomical object that has never been observed before. It is more massive than collapsed stars, known as “neutron stars”, but has less mass than black holes. Such “black neutron stars” were not thought possible and will mean ideas for how neutron stars and black holes form will need to […]
DARPA Wants Nuclear Thermal Propulsion
June 22nd, 2020Via: Ars Technica: There are many ways to get around space, but most of them are pretty slow. This is why, even when launching at an optimal time, a spacecraft leaving Earth requires about six months to reach orbit around Mars. For decades, many rocket scientists have looked to a propulsion system powered by a […]
SpaceX Boca Chica Drive-By
June 22nd, 2020This is quite a surreal scene. Tents, trailers, portapotties, solar panels, propellant tanks, pickup trucks, ground tracking equipment… Prototypes of parts of the largest rocket ever launched from Earth (Starship + Superheavy stack). Via: NASASpaceflight – bocachicagal: This drive past SpaceX’s Boca Chica facilities helps show how everything is laid out. Head down HWY 4 […]
Photos of SpaceX’s Starlink Prototype Ground Station Antennas
June 22nd, 2020Via: Reddit User darkpenguin22: Prototype Starlink terminals – Merrillan, WI More: SpaceX Starlink Antennas Spied at Starship Factory for First Time
SpaceX Hiring Staff to, “Design and Build an Operational Offshore Rocket Launch Facility” Sized for Starship and Super Heavy
June 19th, 2020Via: Teslarati: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that the company is going to build multiple massive “floating spaceports” to enable Starship launches to Mars and the Moon, as well as point-to-point travel around the Earth. First confirmed in job listings and later backed up by Musk himself, the goal of the nascent program is “to […]
As Many as Six Billion Earth-Like Planets in Our Galaxy
June 16th, 2020Via: PhysOrg: “My calculations place an upper limit of 0.18 Earth-like planets per G-type star,” says UBC researcher Michelle Kunimoto, co-author of the new study in The Astronomical Journal. “Estimating how common different kinds of planets are around different stars can provide important constraints on planet formation and evolution theories, and help optimize future missions […]
Starlink Will Cause Large Change in Seismic Oil and Gas Exploration
June 15th, 2020Oil companies use tape to store information collected from reflection seismology. A lot of tape. A lot of bulky, slow, expensive tape. Starlink will allow for the fast movement of terabytes of data from remote exploration vessels to cloud storage for analysis. Currently, the data moves by crates in helicopters and trucks. Via: BigMarker: For […]
FCC Has “Serious Doubts” that SpaceX Can Deliver Latencies Under 100ms
June 14th, 2020In the darkest days of my Internet connectivity hell in rural NZ, I had to use IPstar, which had latencies as high as 1000ms+. Yep. Not a typo. Over a second. How is SpaceX going to improve on that by a couple orders of magnitude? Operating the Starlink constellation in low earth orbit is part […]
