Exeter's space thread!

This stuff makes me wonder if our yellow sun is part of anybody's constellations.

 

Your daily space update:

Some music currently travelling through space on a golden record. There's a good chance it will outlive the rest of our civilization.

 

There was an eclipse this week visible in the North Atlantic and this, some of Europe, here's a really neat photo of the International Space Station, which soars by in low Earth orbit, crossing the disc of the sun. It's a composite image made with a lot of patience and luck and really something incredible to see. You can even see ejecta coming out of the sun!



Here's a photo of Earth in the umbral shadow of the Moon back in 2006. This shadow travels at 2000 km/h.

 

The Mars Opportunity rover has been operating since 2004. It was planned to run for 3 months and then dwindle down its operation.

Then it was like NAW I'M GOOD and is still going 11 years later.


We all remember those famous first words spoken by an astronaut on the surface of Mars: "That's one small step fo- HOLY SHIT LOOK OUT IT'S GOT SOME KIND OF DRILL! Get back to the ... [unintelligible] ... [signal lost]"

It made headlines again recently when it completed a literal marathon. Yes it took 11 years but at the speed of a robot driving on another planet while stopping to examine rocks and explore, I'd say it's still impressive. It's the record for the farthest travelled by any machine on another world.

 

Look at this cutie :3

 

It's a little dusty after all these years on the dusty red planet but those solar cells work just fine

 

Got a few shots of the 'Blood Moon' this morning.
I wish I had better equipment to do a better job, but not bad, considering it's just an automatic point and shoot.
Did a bit of enhancement as well, with the program that came with the camera.

 

The Star Cluster M46, containing two planetary nebulae!



The first is the colourful disc just right of centre, which is NGC 2438



The second is highlighted by the box, and is PK231 +4.1

 

Yay Space!! <3
All this stuff is absolutely fascinating

 

Hubble has been operating for 25 years!

Here's a photo of a field of hot young stars glowing red in their dusty shells, 20,000 lightyears away. High-energy light and radiation coming from this stellar nursery is carving and hollowing out the immense cloud of dust and gas which condensed to form the stars in the first place. Blue stars are in the foreground. The cloud and glittering jewelry box are about 10 lightyears across.

 

My contribution ;3
Also note, this is the sound of specifically the Vela Pulsar, which spins at around 11 times a second.
This is a star the size of Manhattan and more dense than the sun

 

Also I'm currently watching this and it's hella dope <3

 

New Horizons is getting closer and closer to Pluto! The flyby is coming up in about 4 weeks!

You can see in this gif how Pluto's moon Charon is so close that their barycenter (the point at which their gravitational pulls meet and they orbit around together) is very close to the surface of Pluto!


We're so close!

 

A Falcon 9 rocket belonging to SpaceX exploded yesterday due to a problem with one of the liquid oxygen fuel tanks.

 

I watched it explode on live stream yesterday. Shame, but it happens more often than we think.

 

Better it happen for an unmanned rocket, carrying nothing but replaceable science experiments and supplies.

If the James Webb doesn't make it.... I might faint.

 

Don't say that.

On a related note, did the animation of "what happens if the skycrane for Curiosity doesn't work", that they played over and over during the landing make anyone else queasy?

 

I dunno about that video but I mean, the plan that actually worked was scary enough. This video illustrates why they didn't go with traditional landing technology, maybe this is what you meant?

 

No, those failures hurt to watch too, but the one I was talking about was the one where one of the cables fails to disconnect, and the skycrane tries to do its escape maneuver while dragging curiosity on the ground.

 

That sounds hysterically horrifying