Astronomy and space exploration

Looks like those heat-tiles didn't fare very well in the landing pad vid.

Some of them look OK. AFAIK there are a couple of mounting techniques being tested at the same time, that might be the difference.

Whats with the heavily oxidised welds? Just cheap welding for these tests or?

I think up to now the welding has been manual, though they've just recently taken delivery of some welding robots. Moreover someone on a YT vid said that the humidity in Texas isn't great for welding, especially stainless steel.
 
Eeee.... SN6 seems to have landed a little bit on the piss too. (not found a link to a still yet).
Yes, I watched that live. I think tweaked SN5 will perform the next hop. I don't know if the issue with the legs has already been addressed in these two prototypes or if we'll have to wait for SN8, to witness a straight standing rocket after the flight (well, I know that this other prototype will have 3 raptors and won't have to fly tilted, but this doesn't mean that the legs shouldn't do a corrective job of being equally unfolded).
 
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The Royal Astronomical Society are briefing the press at the moment. They've measured amount of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. It's either chemical process we don't understand or microbes floating around in the temperate part of Venus's atmosphere. Awesome discovery either way. The team are on the BBC's Sky at Night program this evening. They're having an AMA tomorrow.

 
Edit: hmm bit thats about 30deg?
I dunno, seems unlikely to evolve life 50-60km up in atmosphere :no:
 
Even if you do presume that it's impossible for life to evolve in the atmosphere, life doesn't have to have started in those conditions. Once created life adapts, evolves, and migrates. There is life present in many, many places on Earth, but it's unlikely to have been formed in-situ. It was formed elsewhere and moved in to that niche. For example bacteria inside rocks on Antartica. Sound like an obvious cradle for life? Not so much.

Conditions on the Venusian surface are thought to have been a great deal more hospitable in the past, around about the time that life appeared on Earth IIRC. As conditions on the surface deteriorated, extant life would be forced to evolve and migrate to less challenging environments.
 
Thunderf00t thinks little of this Venus thing.
Kinda missed the bit where he actually pointed out the more likely source between the ranting, was it volcanic vents?
 
Thunderf00t thinks little of this Venus thing.
Kinda missed the bit where he actually pointed out the more likely source between the ranting, was it volcanic vents?

I've only seen a couple of his videos and they were snarky garbage.* Response in the comments from Dr Becky (astrophysicist at the University of Oxford):

A lot of people have sent me this video over the past few days so I'm just going to jump in with my reaction, as an astrophysicist, for those who want it. Firstly, their detection of phosphine is definitely sound. The spectrum Thunderfoot showed in the video at 6:35 was the unreduced spectrum which contains what we call the "continuum" (or background) light from Venus - which is not flat, it does vary and some features get lost in that. You have to take that away to get at the signal so you can see the drop caused by the absorption due to phosphine - just because the noise is there doesn't mean the signal isn't. It's a very standard process and their observation is statistically robust - hence why you haven't heard any researchers contesting their observation of phosphine. Yes, it is a low concentration at 20 parts per billion, but consider the size of the Venusian atmosphere compared to the size of a human body (with 3 ppb Gold) and that amount of phosphine does add up. As for lightning - the authors of the original paper did consider lightning as an option when trying to explain their discovery of phosphine (free to read for all who want to: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4). The problem is that a lightning strike only creates a tiny amount of phosphine. So the number of lightning strikes needed to create the amount of phosphine they observed would have been completely unrealistic. Their best estimate is that lightning could have created a few parts per *million billion*. The researchers were very thorough - they spent three years doing the analysis ensuring that they had covered all the bases before announcing what they knew would be a surprising result of phosphine on Venus. Note that they never claimed they had detected life - here's a quote from the paper itself: "Even if confirmed, we emphasize that the detection of PH3 is not robust evidence for life, only for anomalous and unexplained chemistry." So "life on Venus" never needed "busting". I spoke to three astrobiologists on my channel this week and the majority believe that this discovery of phosphine will eventually be explained by currently unknown chemistry, and not life (although one remained slightly hopeful from his experience with how adaptable life is to its environment). It sounds as if Thunderfoot's quibble is with the media (and not with the scientists themselves), trying to sell a story by sensationalizing it. Getting the information directly from the paper, or by talking to scientists themselves, helps to put these kinds of results into context. P.S. This result wasn't a NASA result. The work was led by Prof. Jane Greaves from Cardiff University in Wales, UK using the JCMT, a telescope run by the East Asian Observatory, and ALMA, a telescope run by the European Southern Observatory. P.P.S. I know Thunderfoot is a chemist, so I imagine the authors of the paper might welcome his chemistry expertise to provide any ideas he might have to explain the production of phosphine on Venus through other means beyond those they've already considered

* I mean, I'd find them fun if they were nice and accurate, but they lose any punch when they're not.
 
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Which of his video's do you consider garbage ? (snarky absolutely)
i DO LOVE A GOOD NERD FIGHT ;)
 
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It sounds as if Thunderfoot's quibble is with the media (and not with the scientists themselves), trying to sell a story by sensationalizing it.
Yes that is an ongoing theme of his videos: stupid media ppl over-sensationalising stuff with wall to wall 'this is the greatest thing ever' coverage when the underlying science is vague or bad.
But also Universities & big name science ppl putting their name to said vague/bad science & putting out sensationalist quotes that feed the bad media coverage.

'Scientists discover probably currently unknown chemistry on Venus' doesn't quite have the same ring...
 
I've met Jane a couple of times and seen her speak a handful, she is a good scientist. I may even be a co-author on one of her papers, I can't recall. Sara I only by reputation and she is also highly regarded in the field. She is US-based, which kind of changes thins a bit when it comes to public stuff, and very much wants to be the one to discover extra-terrestrial life (it's kind of what drives her career). I watched the original press conference and they were very circumspect about the life implications of this result.

Trying to get across the subtle nuances of maybe/perhaps/possibly in a press release and have the media stick with that bloody line is virtually impossible though. Once a story is out in the the public domain you kind of lose control of it, regardless of how straight you play it in the original release and in interviews, etc. We are kind of buggered either way. We have to make our releases interesting enough to catch the eye of the media and the interest of the public. Public engagement is part of our job, and an implicit and in some cases explicit requirement of our funding. Having the media act as some unhelpful combination of food blender + agricultural muck spreader really doesn't help matters. It also doesn't help that it's not something we generally receive much if any training in (though there is access to that), and many scientists by their very natures just aren't very good at that sort of thing. Personally I am crap at it and I hate doing it with a passion.

What is sobering though is seeing what the media do with stories from my field, then pondering quite what that implies for stories from others which aren't my field.
 
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