Space Stuff

Robert said:
rocket snafu may have just violently dismantled 19 satellites
Launch blunder not the best start for new spaceport
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What goes up must come down ... Great launch, shame about the followup
Click to expand...
Putin took a personal interest? Someone will be getting a talking to.
 
The biggest and brightest full Moon of 2017 is coming this weekend, on Sunday night, Dec. 3rd.
It’s a perigee “supermoon,” almost 8% wider and 16% brighter than an average full Moon.

To get the most out of Sunday’s lunar apparition, catch the Moon just as it is rising or setting. This will activate the Moon Illusion and make the perigee Moon of Dec. 3rd look SUPER
 
SpaceX to try reusing both rocket and spacecraft for historic ISS mission
Launch delayed until Tuesday
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In a first for the company, SpaceX is planning to launch a supply mission to the International Space Station using both a pre-flown first stage rocket and a Dragon capsule that has already been in orbit.

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For the superstitious there's an extra worry, this is SpaceX's 13th mission to the ISS.
 
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Which distant Mars-alikes could we live on? Ask these Red Planet data-sifters
MAVEN probe observations shed light on atmosphere loss
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Scientists are applying knowledge gained from studying Mars to calculate how the atmospheres of theoretical exoplanets would behave.

David Brain, professor at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-investigator for NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union yesterday how his team used data gathered from MAVEN to estimate how a Mars-like planet might behave when in orbit around a different star.

Mars' atmosphere has been scraped away over four billion years since it lost its protective magnetic field (magnetosphere), which was likely caused by meteorite strikes. The MAVEN probe has been in Martian orbit since 2014, measuring the rate of atmospheric loss due to various causes and sending data back to Earth for the team in Colorado to analyse.

"The MAVEN mission tells us that Mars lost substantial amounts of its atmosphere over time, changing the planet's habitability," said Brain. "We can use Mars, a planet that we know a lot about, as a laboratory for studying rocky planets outside our solar system, which we don't know much about yet."
 
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Today's fun fact: Mars is smaller than Earth which caused it's core to cool and solidify which was the cause of Mars losing its magnetic field and turning it into a baron wasteland. Fascinating...
 
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