Astronomy and space exploration

That landing video is wild.
Its like one of those endless loop fractals/procedural generated terrains where you have essentially the same level of detail constantly as it zooms/pans around, absolutely no indicator of scale.
Then suddenly bam landing pad so that boulder/mountain is actually a pebble

I love that China is getting into the space exploration game in a decent way & leaving traditional Western space agencies looking like they're really not doing much.
Hopefully instead of the recently traditional public 'expressions of concern'/disparaging bullshit, our governments will try competing by fucking getting off their asses and giving our space agencies decent budgets so they can get back to doing some stuff.

 

NASA does have a healthy budget. It just needs permission to ditch the billions spaffed up the wall on SLS and go full commercial for launch. Put that cash into expanding CLPS and accelerating HLS and they'd be shooting past China's moon timeline.

I'd hope that the Biden administration will enable cooperation with China instead of shutting them out though. China will land people on the Moon in 2030's with or without West's help. An international Moon base would be a lovely thing.

 

Is that wise?

 

Being shot into deep space is a bit of a downside but on the plus side, everyone gets groovy outfits. Overall, a win I think.

 

Here's the video:

https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/arecibo/

 

I just started re-watching the show. The Eagles were awesome. Loved the episode where universe revolving around an alien species coming into another form and Koenig was destined to allow that species to transcend to another dimension. Few captains in any SF show get to do that you know.

 

I had the toy eagles when i was a kid

 

We had a dinky toys one. Somehow anything dinky toyish ended up in a shared. Other stuff was always very definitely owned by someone.

As much as I love Brian Johnson's design, the windows of the eagle always annoyed me, in the way these things to. The windows are flat, but painted like a slanted cockpit. Make up your mind Brian!

 

I'm Guessing you know about this but in case you dont another great 1970's scifi show
UFO

 

More of an 80's than '70s child, but saw the odd rerun. Stingray and Thunderbirds were more likely to be on.

Again with the gear grinding design elements. The single missile! Although given the Lightning Interceptor only had two missile guess it was reflecting the RAFs actual aircraft.

 

Holy cow they actually had a drone looking at the cable as it broke

That would be nice yes but did you miss the entire Presidential campaign & 8 years of Obama/Biden admin? Biden will probably escalate the anti-China BS.

 

Tbh, I wasn't really playing much attention to US space policy during the Obama era. The Biden adminstration will engage in some actual diplomacy, so a little hope at least, depending on how the winds blow.

 

OK so this is going to be a bit super-nerdy, but the GAIA mission (https://sci.esa.int/gaia) has been one of those that are quietly and understatedly utterly transforming the way modern astronomy is done. Put simply the purpose of GAIA is to measure the distances to stars, and their space velocities in 3-dimensions. That probably sounds like the sort of thing that you'd think astronomers already know, but in reality it's incredibly hard to do even on a handful of objects, never mind at a Galactic scale (ie. billions of stars).

So much in modern astronomy research ends up relying heavily on the distance estimate as a key part of any conclusions drawn. From the study of exoplanets to distant quasars, and everything in between, if you don't know how far away it is it's really tough to draw any firm conclusions about what it is or how it works. GAIA is delivering that and honestly I think it will be the cornerstone of professional astronomy for the next fifty years if not longer. I work with a bunch of people who are involved in the data processing side of the mission, and honestly the stuff they are achieving is nothing short of mind-blowing.

It's the sort of science that Europe does so well, but doesn't really get funded in the US because it's so hard/time-consuming/not-sexy. (That's why I get a bit pissy when people quote NASA press releases that read like NASA is the only game in town. It demeans transformative work being done by missions like GAIA that NASA could not / would not / cannot do for whole combinations of reasons).

Anyway the GAIA project made a pre-release of the third version of their data catalogue a day or two ago. Here are couple of videos showing what you can know and predict about the stars that are our very closest neighbours.

 

What method is it using to measure distance ?

 

Parallax.

Simplest way to think of it is how stereoscopic vision works for your eyes. You look at the same scene from two slightly offset positions, and that allows you to perceive depth.

GAIA is constantly scanning the sky, and as it moves with the Earth around the Sun it views the objects from slightly different positions. So if you combine the survey data in the right way (take two images of the same patch of sky separated by six months) you basically have a pair of eyes separated by twice the radius of Earths orbit.

 

So not standard candles or redshift...

 

This.
I remember when there was the first issue of a star age estimated older than the known age of the universe back in the midish 90s, looking into how they were calculating both & being shocked at how basically everything was based on the Hubble constant even though it was known that its not a constant & the error margin on any particular value of it is quite large.

Getting a bunch of really accurate star distance measurements -> narrowing the range of Hubble constant has been the main reason why I've been excited for the upcoming really big telescopes & James Webb.

Didn't think it would be possible to get such a large amount of accurate measurements as rapidly as this from such a small scope

 

Chang E's sample return has docked with the orbiter. Just return to Earth and reentry to tick off. I believe that's the first autonomous docking in Luna orbit? Top stuff.