Fogbow

Foggy wrote: ↑Mon Jan 24, 2022 4:37 pm I think Suranis is watching table tennis.

Reality Check wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 10:06 am So today NASA is holding a real news conference at noon EDT and is expected so show the first focused and aligned image of a star.
NASA to release new James Webb Space Telescope images in update today. Here's when to look.

As far as I can tell from the published schedule the team is several weeks ahead of where they had projected to be.

chancery wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 12:43 pm Reality Check, have you seen the "Where Is Webb" NASA site?

https://webb.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunc ... its=metric

It gives an astonishing amount of real-time information about the spacecraft.

Reality Check wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 10:06 am I have tried to follow the progress of the JWST mirror and instrument alignment. There are a number YouTube channels to do this but detailed information has been a little hard to find lately. There are also some YouTube channels that are flat out faking images or showing Hubble images that they pretend are from the JWST. Other channels make ridiculous claims that the JWST has already discovered alien life or wormholes.

So today NASA is holding a real news conference at noon EDT and is expected so show the first focused and aligned image of a star.
NASA to release new James Webb Space Telescope images in update today. Here's when to look.

As far as I can tell from the published schedule the team is several weeks ahead of where they had projected to be.

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: ↑Thu May 12, 2022 12:22 pm Cooooollll!

NASA picture of Mars appears to show a doorway carved into the rock - here's how it was made
Conspiracy theorists have suggested that image shows an actual doorway carved into the rock by an intelligent alien species.

The grainy image, captured by the Curiosity rover last week, clearly shows a rectangular gap in the rockface and has, perhaps inevitably, spawned conspiracy theories that point to it as evidence of alien life on the red planet.
And the simple explanation for the "door" on Mars is actually contained within the photograph itself if you look more closely, scientists have said.

It shows evidence that the feature was formed through "normal geological processes" as as Professor Sanjeev Gupta at Imperial College London explained to The Daily Telegraph.

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: ↑Fri May 13, 2022 8:40 am Let's start a conspiracy! Mars is Dune! Sorry can't post the photo.

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: ↑Fri May 13, 2022 9:46 pm

Record-Breaking Voyager Spacecraft Begin to Power Down
The pioneering probes are still running after nearly 45 years in space, but they will soon lose some of their instruments

By Tim Folger
July 1, 2022

If the stars hadn't aligned, two of the most remarkable spacecraft ever launched never would have gotten off the ground. In this case, the stars were actually planets—the four largest in the solar system. Some 60 years ago they were slowly wheeling into an array that had last occurred during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson in the early years of the 19th century. For a while the rare planetary set piece unfolded largely unnoticed. The first person to call attention to it was an aeronautics doctoral student at the California Institute of Technology named Gary Flandro.

It was 1965, and the era of space exploration was barely underway—the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, only eight years earlier. Flandro, who was working part-time at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., had been tasked with finding the most efficient way to send a space probe to Jupiter or perhaps even out to Saturn, Uranus or Neptune. Using a favorite precision tool of 20th-century engineers—a pencil—he charted the orbital paths of those giant planets and discovered something intriguing: in the late 1970s and early 1980s, all four would be strung like pearls on a celestial necklace in a long arc with Earth.

This coincidence meant that a space vehicle could get a speed boost from the gravitational pull of each giant planet it passed, as if being tugged along by an invisible cord that snapped at the last second, flinging the probe on its way. Flandro calculated that the repeated gravity assists, as they are called, would cut the flight time between Earth and Neptune from 30 years to 12. There was just one catch: the alignment happened only once every 176 years. To reach the planets while the lineup lasted, a spacecraft would have to be launched by the mid-1970s.

As it turned out, NASA would build two space vehicles to take advantage of that once-in-more-than-a-lifetime opportunity. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, identical in every detail, were launched within 15 days of each other in the summer of 1977. After nearly 45 years in space, they are still functioning, sending data back to Earth every day from beyond the solar system's most distant known planets. They have traveled farther and lasted longer than any other spacecraft in history. And they have crossed into interstellar space, according to our best understanding of the boundary between the sun's sphere of influence and the rest of the galaxy. They are the first human-made objects to do so, a distinction they will hold for at least another few decades. Not a bad record, all in all, considering that the Voyager missions were originally planned to last just four years.

Early in their travels, four decades ago, the Voyagers gave astonished researchers the first close-up views of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, revealing the existence of active volcanoes and fissured ice fields on worlds astronomers had thought would be as inert and crater-pocked as our own moon. In 1986 Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to fly past Uranus; three years later it passed Neptune. So far it is the only spacecraft to have made such journeys. Now, as pioneering interstellar probes more than 12 billion miles from Earth, they're simultaneously delighting and confounding theorists with a series of unexpected discoveries about that uncharted region.

Their remarkable odyssey is finally winding down, however. This year NASA plans to begin turning off some of the Voyagers' systems, eking out the spacecrafts' remaining energy stores to extend their unprecedented journeys to about 2030. For the Voyagers' scientists, many of whom have worked on the mission since its inception, it is a bittersweet time. They are now confronting the end of a project that far exceeded all their expectations.




https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ower-down/