Space Stuff

Robert said:
I suppose that makes sense. OTOH, the story of the paperweight sting in the linked article does not show NASA in a very good light either. Doesn't seem to have been any need for the over the top, heavily armed response to an old lady asking for help.
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Yes I did read that, it's a shocking way to deal with it but I feel a lot of that was down to federal and local law enforcement agencies, NASA could have certainly done better, but I don't feel the heavy handling of the "suspects" was completely their doing.
 
adz said:
A private citizen should have the right to be a custodian of lunar material, but as the mission to retrieve it was primarily funded with public money, they should not have the right to own it as it would be considered public property.
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But it wasn't stolen, it was a gift from an astronaut. Moon artifacts were also given out as gifts from the US to countries and individuals. If one of those want to gift it to someone else, there should be nothing stopping a private individual from owning it.
 
redrumloa said:
But it wasn't stolen, it was a gift from an astronaut. Moon artifacts were also given out as gifts from the US to countries and individuals. If one of those want to gift it to someone else, there should be nothing stopping a private individual from owning it.
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Was it the astronauts property to begin with? Or to put it another way, was the astronaut authorised to give the gift? A gift from the US itself is different again as that implies it was a public gift.
 
Supermassive black hole swallows star, lights up galaxy core
Star's death produces jets moving at nearly a quarter the speed of light.
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The galaxy merger, with an artist's representation of a star being drawn into a black hole.
The supermassive black holes at the center of mature galaxies tend to be quiet. Their activity will have blasted away most of the nearby gas and dust, and any stars that were in unstable orbits were likely to have been torn to shreds long in the past. But on occasion, the chaotic nature of complex orbital interactions should bring a star close enough to experience what's called a tidal disruption event—the star is ripped apart by the black hole's gravity.

We've done modeling of what a tidal disruption should look like, and it's clear that it ought to produce copious numbers of energetic photons. The problem is that we've not seen many events like this. Now, taking advantage of a decade of observations, researchers who recently published in Science have spotted what seems to be a black hole tearing apart a star and converting some of it into a jet of material traveling at a quarter of the speed of light. The reason we haven't seen it before? Rather than showing up at the wavelengths we expected, the event was visible in the infrared.
 
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Donald Trump Orders Pentagon to Create a Space Force

President Donald Trump announced Monday his intent to direct the Pentagon to create a military “Space Force” as an independent fighting force in the United States.

“It is not enough to have an American presence in space, we must have an American dominance in space,” Trump said.

Trump called for a “separate but equal” branch of the military dedicated to space, specifically directing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford to carry out his directive.

“General, got it?” Trump said.

“You got it,” Dunford replied.

“Let’s go get it General,” Trump said.
 
Huge wave in Venus’ clouds changes the length of a day
When we measure Venus’ rotation, we keep getting different answers.
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This bow-shaped wave forms only in the afternoon.

You wouldn’t expect a toy spinning top to be rotating at precisely the same rate every time you glance at it, but you probably would expect a planet to. Yet observations of Venus over the years have come up with slightly different numbers when calculating the length of a Venusian day based on its rotation.

Venus is weird enough that we have to be careful to specify what we mean by “a day.” Because Venus slowly spins clockwise as it orbits counterclockwise around the Sun, sunlight takes a lap around the planet faster than Venus itself does a 360. Sunrise to sunrise (metaphorically speaking, given Venus’ cloud-choked atmosphere), a day there is about 117 Earth-days long. Measurements by the Magellan spacecraft in 1990 and Venus Express in 2006 differed by about 7 minutes, though. That wasn’t slop in the measurement—it was a real change.
 
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Visitor from another solar system accelerated away from the Sun
Simplest explanation for the visitor's motion is heated jets of gas.
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The object's unusual approach suggests it came from outside our Solar System.

Last year, the Solar System was treated to its first known tourist. 'Oumuamua, an odd, cigar-shaped body, shot through our neighborhood at high speed, following an orbit that indicates it arrived from somewhere else. Although bodies ejected from other solar systems are expected to make regular visits, this was the first one that we'd imaged sufficiently to determine that its origins were elsewhere.

The imaging, however, didn't resolve a somewhat different debate: what, exactly, is 'Oumuamua? Its odd orbit had initially had it categorized as a comet, as these tend to have more extreme orbits. But imaging didn't show any indication of gas and dust being released, as is typical when a comet approaches the Sun. That imaging also revealed that it had an elongated, cigar-like shape. Combined with its relatively rapid rotation, this would indicate that 'Oumuamua had to be fairly robust, leading to the conclusion that it was probably an asteroid.

But now, a large international team of researchers is weighing in with another vote for comet. The argument, says the team, is based on the odd behavior of 'Oumuamua, which appears to have been accelerating away from the Sun.
 
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The miracle of New Horizons is not the science, but that it ever flew at all
"Why don’t we complete the job of exploring the Solar System?"

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New Horizons revealed Pluto as a mysterious world, with icy mountains and very smooth plains.

Three years ago, when the New Horizons spacecraft sped toward Pluto on July 4th and began sending humans their first clear images of the tiny world at the end of the Solar System, it all seemed preordained.

Of course NASA would fund and build a spacecraft to complete its initial survey of the Solar System and visit the only “planet” found by an American. (For the purposes of this article, we will set aside the debate over Pluto’s planethood.) But as ever in spaceflight, the end result almost invariably looks far simpler and smoother to the casual observer than the messy reality experienced by those actually doing it.
 
Astroboffins spy the brightest quasar that lit the universe's dark ages
The light has only taken 13 billion years to reach us
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An artist's impression of a radio jet plume emitted from a quasar.

Scientists have spotted the brightest ancient quasar formed when the universe was less than billion years old, according to research published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The newly discovered quasar, known by its not very catchy name PSO J352.4034-15.3373 or P352-15, also shoots out huge jets of plasma that appear extremely bright in radio telescopes. Scientists have been observing quasars for more than 50 years, but only ten per cent emit strong radio radiation.

Using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) telescopes in New Mexico, a team of researchers detected the light that has been travelling nearly 13 billion years to reach Earth.
 
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With further delays, Webb telescope at risk of seeing its rocket retired
"We will have the Ariane 5 for at least until the end of 2022."
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An Ariane 5 rocket launches in December, 2017.

The most recent slippage of the James Webb Space Telescope, which now will launch no earlier than March, 2021, has raised some questions about how it will get into space. This is because NASA's chosen rocket for the mission, the proven Ariane 5 launcher, is likely to fly for only a few more years before it is phased out in favor of a newer, less expensive booster.
 
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