Reblogged alexkablob
Chat is this anything?
Reblogged a-dauntless-daffodil
vernadskova-deactivated20230803
Ok so Haumea, a dwarf planet beyond Pluto, spins so fast it gets elongated like this. This is just what it looks like. Something deeply unsettles me looking at it. Terrifying.
spidereggs-deactivated20230413
this is so fucked up
Item: the bad news is there is a HUGE egg floating out in space. The good news is somebody has already scrambled it so it’s just a matter of bringing it down to our planet and cooking it to feed millions
the number of spacecraft failures recently has been absolutely insane and it all comes down to tech bros barging into the industry going "it's not that hard wtf is nasa so bad" and then completely skipping out on any testing
Recently, a privately funded asteroid mission failed immediately after launch. Here are some choice excerpts from the company's blog post about it:
they cost that much because they do integration testing
.....by skipping integration testing
"skipping integration testing was the right move actually"
come fucking on.
AND YOU FUCKING LAUNCHED ANYWAYS
it failed immediately you dipshits
or you could. i don't know. do integration testing?
Hey, Fuckchop: If you did it for 10% but you have to do it 10 times? You fucking failed AND didn’t save any goddamn money.
Even if you had the money to throw away, why would you launch with known problems? What are you possibly learning from this? Were they just hoping those wouldn't matter? "Yeah, whoops, blew up an expensive payload because we figured it was worth rolling the dice on problems we already knew about instead of waiting for a new launch window!"
Launching-as-part-of-iterative-design only makes sense for a kid's model rocket you don't have other testing methods for. Or for things that don't explode.
Reblogged vyrridiana
everyone knows that space is very very cold, and the sun is very very hot. so i assume there's a bit of space kind of near the sun which is just right. balmy space
Yes, that’s. That’s where we are.
no no no. those two boeing starliner astronauts are not stranded in space, that would be bad!
their ship just malfunctioned so badly they might have no way back to earth for over six months when their original plan was only to be up there for around a week.
see? completely different.
everything is fine. last month they said they like being up there and do not mind being there "a couple extra weeks". disregard how boeing launched another vehicle with all the confidence of sending it to space and still fucked up and those "couple extra weeks" is turning out to be several extra months. this is fine
Will they be okay because they're in the space station? IDK how many resources are already in the station.
Honestly seems concerning their return flight is in SpaceX's hands.
I mean, okay as in alive? yeah probably. they have food and water and are being told to do work as part of the crew while up there. much easier to shoot more supplies up to space than it is to get humans back down to earth. they just got a new shipment of clothes.
were they medically prepared for a 6+ month trip to space? no, probably not. being in space for that long can fuck with the body pretty bad.
Reblogged everythingfeelslike-themovies
Fun fact of the day
Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1
The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.
So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.
So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.
Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.
And the probe is working again.
From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.
this whole story is fucking awesome but the op actually slightly undersold one aspect: there was no single other location with enough memory to stick the affected chip's code in, so they had to rewrite the code to work distributed in multiple places AND all the other code that referenced anything in it!
Only about 3 percent of the FDS memory was corrupted by the bad chip, so engineers needed to transplant that code into another part of the memory bank. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety, NASA said.
So the Voyager team divided the code into sections for storage in different places in the FDS. This wasn't just a copy-and-paste job. Engineers needed to modify some of the code to make sure it will all work together. "Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well," NASA said in a statement.
additionally, THEY DID ALL THIS WITHOUT BEING ABOUT TO GROUND TEST, JUST LOOKING AT ARCHITECTURE DESIGN DOCUMENTS PRINTED ON PAPER
Newer NASA missions have hardware and software simulators on the ground, where engineers can test new procedures to make sure they do no harm when they uplink commands to the real spacecraft. Due to its age, Voyager doesn't have any ground simulators, and much of the mission's original design documentation remains in paper form and hasn't been digitized.
the whole story is awesome and speaks to exactly why it's important to fund science missions like this, big and small: the people running them are passionate, and tireless in their efforts to squeeze as much knowledge out of every single one as possible.
Reblogged a-dauntless-daffodil
NASA Data Sonification: Black Hole Remix
In this sonification of Perseus. the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time. The sound waves were extracted outward from the center. (source)
No, thank you. I did not need to hear the souls of a universe calling to me from the afterlife.
Someone needs to make a space thriller/horror/whatever with this mixed into the music
why does it sound exactly like what it feels like a black hole should sound like
But wait, if you think that sounds terrifying:
The planet Saturn makes noise. The planet emits signals through plasma waves, which can be converted into sound.
So, in 2017, after recovering the Cassini spacecraft that literally fell through Saturn, scientists recovered the recordings the spacecraft made of the planet.
And you know what it sounds like?
Reblogged aspiringwarriorlibrarian
Reblogged tumblingxelian
And they actually met 😭
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/04/09/solar-eclipse-new-york-teacher/
Reblogged a-dauntless-daffodil
nasa: we're going to shoot three rockets directly at the sun during the total eclipse. for study and research purposes.
me: oh cool
nasa: we have named the rockets apep. this stands for atmospheric perturbations [in the] eclipse path.
me: oh cool
nasa: apep is also the ancient egyptian deity of chaos and darkness, who ceaselessly seeks to extinguish the sun. we launch these rockets directly at the sun in the name of apep.
me: oh... cool?
if gods are kept alive by their followers then NASA is single-handedly the caretaker of SO MANY GODS
i am thinking abt this sooo muchh
This is 100% true.
Also having had to present a NASA mission plan to a panel of NASA engineers in order to get my degree along with doing an internship building robots for a JPL project I can tell you the main advice we were given is to come up with a cool acronym name and then figure out what it stood for later. Bonus points if you could tie it into something historical. Double points if it was an ancient space related God.
