Explore The Moon

A blogger named Jatan Mehta curates pictures of different places around the cosmic neighborhood.

Take the tour: Luna Sights

Here's a lava tube:

Today's Nerd Stuff

May the fake lord bless you and keep you, you glorious nerds.

There's always a pretty good argument to be made against spending so much money on things like space exploration when there are so many pressing needs here on the ground. But these projects can actually make us focus our attention more on cooperative endeavors, and make us a little less intent on blowing each other up.

They can also make us more cognizant of our shared humanity, and the need to support crazy ideas like education as a way of lifting people out of the cycle of ignorance poverty and crime, because if we want civilization to continue, we need more folks concentrating on building things up instead of burning them down.

Making this amazing science-y thing work necessitates the development of new materials and new techniques, and that means that some of the engineering itself has to be invented &/or discovered as they go.

We won't know right away how the world will benefit from all of this, but we're bound to see some really astounding new things for everyday use in the not-too-distant future - assuming of course, we don't let our politics fuck it all up for us.

🤞🏻

Ed Note: Just the part about figuring out Lagrange Point 2 - I had no idea such things even exist. "Like little parking spots in space". Thank you, nerds.

The James Webb Telescope:

Today's GIF

via NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Gazing At The Sky

We must always dream of the day when we can knock off he shit, stop fucking with each other, and just lie back and count the stars.

Some day.

It's OK To Be Smart - Hubble

Today In Space

If, by "today", you mean 3 to 5 years ago.

LiveScience:

The Truth Behind This Amazing Video from the Surface of a Comet

Look at this amazing GIF. That snowy-looking scene wasn't captured on Mount Everest, or in some canyon in Antarctica. That's the view from a lander on the surface of a comet.

Remember Rosetta? That comet-chasing European Space Agency (ESA) probe that deployed (and accidentally bounced) its lander Philae on the surface of Comet 67P? This GIF is made up of images Rosetta beamed back to Earth, which have been freely available online for a while. But it took Twitter user landru79 processing and assembling them into this short, looped clip to reveal the drama they contained.

As several astronomers and casual observers pointed out in the replies to landru79's original tweet, the "snowstorm" depicted almost certainly isn't a true snowfall of the sort experienced on Earth and other planets. Instead, there are likely two or three different phenomena creating the snowy effect.

Up close to the camera, dust particles backlit by the sun are likely moving around, mimicking the look of snow on Earth. Cosmic rays may also be creating snow-like artifacts on the images. And those dots in the background, that appear to be falling straight down and disappearing behind the cliff? Those appear to be stars, which look like they're falling because the comet is rotating as it orbits the sun every 6.5 years.

Landru79 posted another GIF on Twitter, which freezes the starfield in the clip in place, making it clearer that the comet is moving but the stars are mostly staying still.

May the fake lord bless you and keep you, nerds. You know I love you guys.

Today's Super Nerd

Katherine Johnson - Aug 26, 1918 - Feb 24, 2020

We Ain't Goin' Nowhere

Jeff Bezos & Richard Branson have thrown 10 or 12 billion dollars (less than 2% of their wealth) at their hobby of "space travel".

That's like most folks spending a hundred bucks for 2 or 3 rounds of golf every month.

I guess dumping money into Horse Hockey and The Americas Cup just ain't what it used to be.

I'm not going to shit on the accomplishment - honest. I just think they could do a few things with that money that would be of much greater benefit.

1. Provide Medicaid for 3 million people

The number of uninsured Americans has plummeted since the Affordable Care Act, with 25 million more non-elderly Americans insured than before(elderly Americans are eligible for Medicare). But, 22 million Americans remained uninsured at the end of 2016.

At the program’s current costs, $10 billion could provide Medicaid – cost-effective, quality insurance – for 3 million Americans. That’s like giving free, quality health insurance to the entire state of Iowa.

2. More than quadruple federal spending on energy efficiency and renewable energy

Climate change is real, and it’s here. It’s depressing that the United States budget for energy efficiency and renewable energy is a paltry $2 billion.

3. Give the Environmental Protection Agency a 120% Raise

Continuing on the environmental theme, this federal defender for clean water, clean air, protection of endangered species, safe disposal of toxic waste, land conservation and even food quality and safety has been under assault by the current administration. A $10 billion raise would be enough to increase its budget by 120%, from $8.2 billion to $18.2 billion.

4. Increase federal aid to public K-12 schools by 60%

An additional $10 billion would be a 60% increase to this aid, and could make a big difference to our schools. U.S. schools are old, and many are desperately in need of updates, like expansion to accommodate growing enrollment, and energy retrofits to control spiking energy costs. The $10 billion spike wouldn’t be enough to solve the problems, but in a world where citizens launch GoFundMe campaigns to raise $75,000 for school heaters, it would be a good start.

5. Fund the National Endowment for the Arts for another 60 years

Since its founding in 1965, the NEA has spent just $5 billion in all, supporting more than 145,000 grants to artists, writers, and performers. NEA support helped create the Vietnam veterans memorial in Washington, DC; the Sundance Film Festival; and is currently partnering with the Department of Defense to implement creative arts healing programs for veterans with traumatic brain injury.

Want people to have a better overall attitude about things? Want more civility in our civil society? Try teaching folks about The Humanities - it's right there in the name, dummy.

6. Double heating assistance for low-income households

$10 billion for The Low Income Home Energy Assistance is a near-tripling  for a program that provides support to low-income households to help them afford heating and cooling costs.

With a $10 billion increase, LIHEAP could help 15 million families afford heat, and 3 million families afford cooling.

7. Resettle 11 times more refugees than we did in 2018

The U.S. helps to resettle anywhere from about 22,000 to about 85,000 refugees in our cities and towns. The cost of resettlement for those refugees averages under $3 billion.

Increasing the budget for refugee resettlement by $10 billion could allow the U.S. to accept 15-20 times more refugees - more than ½ a million desperate people, and half of those are kids.

8. Double (or triple) funding for substance use and mental health

With the United States facing a disturbing decline in life expectancy, experts have blamed both an opioid epidemic and a historically high suicide rate. Substance abuse and mental health should be near the top of the list for increased funding.

And yet the current budget for the main federal agency that handles both substance abuse and mental health, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), receives less than $5 billion in federal funds.

And BTW, there's no place else to go. Yeah, OK, there's another planet or two out there somewhere that could be less than totally hostile to human life, and we're never going to know for sure if we don't go look for them.

But we're finding those planets without ever having to leave this one. And like grandma said - "You gotta show me you can take care of the one you've got before you ask for another'n."

And the kicker? If we could figure out how to go 100 times faster than people have ever traveled before (which is 10 times faster than is believed to be survivable for humans), it'll take us about 6 million years to get to the nearest "possibly habitable" planet.

6. million. YEARS.

I guess we better get that whole Space Warp thing goin'.

Today's Video

The guy says he just fixed the camera on a spot in the sky and let the moon traverse thru it.

I dunno how you figure that out, and I'm not convinced I even know what it means - be there it is.

The Sky Is Falling - Again

Or more accurately - there's some more space shit about to fall out of the sky.

WaPo: (pay wall)

The largest section of the rocket that launched the main module of China’s first permanent space station into orbit is expected to plunge back to Earth as early as Saturday at an unknown location.

Usually, discarded core, or first-stage, rockets reenter soon after liftoff, normally over water, and don’t go into orbit like this one did.

China’s space agency has yet to say whether the core stage of the huge Long March 5B rocket is being controlled or will make an out-of-control descent. Last May, another Chinese rocket fell uncontrolled into the Atlantic Ocean off West Africa.

Basic details about the rocket stage and its trajectory are unknown because the Chinese government has yet to comment publicly on the reentry. Phone calls to the China National Space Administration weren’t answered on Wednesday, a holiday.

However, the newspaper Global Times, published by the Chinese Communist Party, said the stage’s “thin-skinned” aluminum-alloy exterior will easily burn up in the atmosphere, posing an extremely remote risk to people.

The U.S. Defense Department expects the rocket stage to fall to Earth on Saturday.

Where it will hit “cannot be pinpointed until within hours of its reentry,” the Pentagon said in a statement Tuesday.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki at a Wednesday briefing said the U.S. Space Command was “aware of and tracking the location” of the Chinese rocket.

The nonprofit Aerospace Corp. expects the debris to hit the Pacific near the Equator after passing over eastern U.S. cities. Its orbit covers a swath of the planet from New Zealand to Newfoundland.

The Long March 5B rocket carried the main module of Tianhe, or Heavenly Harmony, into orbit on April 29. China plans 10 more launches to carry additional parts of the space station into orbit.

The roughly 30-meter (100-foot) -long stage would be among the biggest space debris to fall to Earth.

The 18-ton rocket that fell last May was the heaviest debris to fall uncontrolled since the former Soviet space station Salyut 7 in 1991.

China’s first space station, Tiangong-1, crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2016 after Beijing confirmed it had lost control. In 2019, the space agency controlled the demolition of its second station, Tiangong-2, in the atmosphere.

In March, debris from a Falcon 9 rocket launched by U.S. aeronautics company SpaceX fell to Earth in Washington and on the Oregon coast.

"Zeh rocket goes up - who cares vhere it comes down?" -- Werner Von Braun

I remember in the 70s when Sky Lab's orbit had decayed enough, and was set to crash - they couldn't tell us where exactly it was supposed to land either. And there was quite the stir because there could be pieces the size of refrigerators crashing through your outhouse roof any day now!

Like most everything else humans have ever done, we take very little care for the adverse effects and unintended consequences of our colossally stupendous technological awesomeness.

I love the nerdiness of it all. I celebrate the achievements because it's all fucking amazing, but I'm getting more than a little tired of this whole foul-the-nest thing we got goin' on around here.

Love Those Nerds

NASA

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter took this shot, capturing its own shadow, while hovering over the Martian surface on April 19, 2021, during the first instance of powered, controlled flight on another planet. It used its navigation camera, which autonomously tracks the ground during flight.

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was built by JPL, which also manages this technology demonstration project for NASA Headquarters. It is supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, and Space Technology Mission Directorate. NASA’s Ames Research Center and Langley Research Center provided significant flight performance analysis and technical assistance during Ingenuity’s development.

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

They flew an RC helicopter on Mars -

on fucking Mars, man

Oops

On that whole commercial spaceflight thing: 

First, yes, it's just cool as fuck, and I love me some nerds no matter what, but let's just say we've got a ways to go yet - and I don't think I'll be scrambling for a ticket.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but notice how the government nerds are flying helicopters on Mars, and the privateers keep blowing their shit up.

Today's Nerds

On July 20, 1969, I made it home just in time to see Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon - we watched it on NBC, on our brand new RCA color TV.

Not quite a week ago, a brand new generation of Super Nerds at NASA showed us how they do it nowadays, after flying a rocket 132 million miles to a planet rotating at 500 miles per hour - and they landed that sucker on a dime - as planned. Stuck the fuckin' landing. Again.

Tango Delta, motherfucker.

I'm thinkin' these folks know what the fuck they're about, so I'm gonna go ahead and trust 'em on that Climate Science stuff too.

Now What?

cnet:

A previously unseen asteroid the size of a truck flew about 4,350 miles (7,000 kilometers) over the Pacific Ocean on Monday, making it one of the closest passes by our planet on record.

Astronomers had no notice of asteroid 2020 JJ's existence, as it was discovered using the Mt. Lemmon Survey in Arizona right around the time it reached its closest point to us.

NASA keeps an online database of close approaches by asteroids and other "near-Earth objects" going back to 1900, and 2020 JJ comes in as the sixth closest approach ever recorded. It should be noted that the top 10 close approaches have all come since 2004. This isn't because asteroids started attacking us in the 21st century. Rather, it says something about how astronomers and their technology are becoming better at spotting ever-smaller and closer asteroids.

I think I'm glad not to have known about it until after the fact.

Pandemic, then Murder Hornets, and then an asteroid - like we needed something to pass the time while we wait for the tornadoes, the hurricanes and the wildfires?

50 Years

Apollo 11 landed on the moon at 2:17 PM MDT. 

We pleaded with the boss to let us close the Rec Center Pool a little early so we could get home to a TV and watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon that evening.

I made it home just in time - about a mile and a quarter in under 8 minutes. I never peddled that little 2-speed bike harder.

Super Nerds

Scientists have (again) landed a spacecraft on the proverbial dime.

Starting from a planet which is traveling 67,000 miles per hour and rotating at 1500 feet per second, shooting at a planet which is traveling thru space at 54,000 miles per hour and rotating at 800 feet per second - and is 40 million miles away.

40,000,000 miles. 
Right on the button.

I think I'll go ahead and trust scientists on this Climate Change stuff.

hat tip = @ScottLinnen

Trashed

Knowing this is the state of our existence on Earth's surface...

...does it come as some kind of news that we'd have similar problems in our planetary neighborhood?

Is it really necessary to point out that we're headed for a bad end if we don't stop fouling the nest?

The Kessler Syndrome:

The Kessler syndrome is troublesome because of the domino effect and feedback runaway wherein impacts between objects of sizable mass spall off debris from the force of collision. The shrapnel can then hit other objects, producing even more space debris: if a large enough collision or explosion were to occur, such as between a space station and a defunct satellite, or as the result of hostile actions in space, then the resulting debris cascade could make prospects for long-term viability of satellites in low earth orbit extremely low.[6][7] However, even a catastrophic Kessler scenario at LEO would pose minimal risk for launches continuing past LEO, or satellites traveling at medium Earth orbit (MEO) or geosynchronous orbit (GEO)...
And if we're really serious about wanting to explore beyond our little cluster of cosmic dust particles, here's the kicker:

.. The catastrophic scenarios predict an increase in the number of collisions per year, as opposed to a physically impassable barrier to space exploration that occurs in higher orbits.

So, lemme see - if there's no chain reaction that kills all the tech shit that we have to have just to stay alive - much less go rocketing off into deep space - then the continued accumulation of space junk around the planet will constitute a barrier that we can't navigate thru as we try to rocket off into deep space.

For the one species with a big brain and all the smarts to rise above the other critters, we sure are pretty fuckin' stoopid sometimes.