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Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

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Tiredretiredlawyer
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#51

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

Thanks!!! She has Bette Davis Blue Eyes! :biggrin:
"Mickey Mouse and I grew up together." - Ruthie Tompson, Disney animation checker and scene planner and one of the first women to become a member of the International Photographers Union in 1952.
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#52

Post by Dave from down under »

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: Mon Jul 26, 2021 9:31 am OIP.jpeg

I got to walk the tread in the Warrick Castle Treb...
then pull the release cord that sent the watermelon flying.. :oldman:
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#53

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

Cooooooooolllll!
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#54

Post by roadscholar »

Dinkum bonza!
The bitterest truth is more wholesome than the sweetest lie.
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#55

Post by Estiveo »

Awesome pic, worth zooming in on.

Image Image Image Image
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#56

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

:clap: :clap: :clap:

Those are my favoritest colors!!!!!!!
"Mickey Mouse and I grew up together." - Ruthie Tompson, Disney animation checker and scene planner and one of the first women to become a member of the International Photographers Union in 1952.
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#57

Post by Foggy »

I could literally stare at that for half an hour. It's so incredible, and that thing is real! :shock:
Out from under. :thumbsup:
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#58

Post by Maybenaut »

A slight quibble with the text, though…
One of the most detailed picture ever taken from Jupiter so far. (NASA)
This picture was taken of Jupiter, not from Jupiter.
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#59

Post by Uninformed »

D’uh ! It’s a selfie.
If you can't lie to yourself, who can you lie to?
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#60

Post by RTH10260 »

:rimshot:
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#61

Post by PaulG »

Strangely, it reminds me of a granite countertop I saw once that I absolutely could not afford. I still repine over the memory.
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#62

Post by RTH10260 »

:confuzzled: :think: what's the cost of a slab of Jupiter on the counter top, just asking for a friend...
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#63

Post by pjhimself »

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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#64

Post by RVInit »

There's a lot of things that need to change. One specifically? Police brutality.
--Colin Kaepernick
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#65

Post by pjhimself »

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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#66

Post by RVInit »

Way too many topics for my taste, so I'm just going to drop this here and hope lots of people see this. I really wish I had grown up during a time when I could read about so many amazing women blazing trails, making discoveries, leading the way in their field of work.

Short article about one such woman, with photos of the 3-D printed models of stellar nurseries she conceived to help her and her fellow astrophysicists understanding of the structure of these star forming regions. Pretty cool.
Astronomers create the first 3D-printed stellar nurseries

Astronomers can’t touch the stars they study, but astrophysicist Nia Imara is using 3-dimensional models that fit in the palm of her hand to unravel the structural complexities of stellar nurseries, the vast clouds of gas and dust where star formation occurs.

Imara and her collaborators created the models using data from simulations of star-forming clouds and a sophisticated 3D printing process in which the fine-scale densities and gradients of the turbulent clouds are embedded in a transparent resin. The resulting models—the first 3D-printed stellar nurseries—are highly polished spheres about the size of a baseball (8 centimeters in diameter), in which the star-forming material appears as swirling clumps and filaments.
https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/09/touching-stars.html
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#67

Post by johnpcapitalist »

RVInit wrote: Fri Sep 03, 2021 3:44 am Way too many topics for my taste, so I'm just going to drop this here and hope lots of people see this. I really wish I had grown up during a time when I could read about so many amazing women blazing trails, making discoveries, leading the way in their field of work.
I agree. But it's still good to see the march of progress in my dotage. We went to an airshow last week, and both the the #5 pilot for the Thunderbirds (the lead solo, an especially prestigious role) and the F-18 demo pilot (who's normally an instructor pilot when she's not flying demos on the weekends) are women. The USAF is still below the ~10% females flying commercial, but progress is ongoing. The 4-star general in charge of Air Mobility Command (transport/tankers/training) is a woman.
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#68

Post by PaulG »

Planetary Radar Observes 1,000th Near-Earth Asteroid Since 1968
On Aug. 14, 2021, a small near-Earth asteroid (NEA) designated 2021 PJ1 passed our planet at a distance of over 1 million miles (about 1.7 million kilometers). Between 65 and 100 feet (20 and 30 meters) wide, the recently discovered asteroid wasn’t a threat to Earth. But this asteroid’s approach was historic, marking the 1,000th NEA to be observed by planetary radar in just over 50 years.

And only seven days later, planetary radar observed the 1,001st such object, but this one was much larger.

Since the first radar observation of the asteroid 1566 Icarus in 1968, this powerful technique has been used to observe passing NEAs and comets (collectively known as near-Earth objects, or NEOs). These radar detections improve our knowledge of NEO orbits, providing the data that can extend calculations of future motion by decades to centuries and help definitively predict if an asteroid is going to hit Earth, or if it’s just going to pass close by. For example, recent radar measurements of the potentially hazardous asteroid Apophis helped eliminate any possibility of it impacting Earth for the next 100 years.

In addition, they can provide scientists with detailed information on physical properties that could be matched only by sending a spacecraft and observing these objects up close. Depending on an asteroid’s size and distance, radar can be used to image its surface in intricate detail while also determining its size, shape, spin rate, and whether or not it is accompanied by one or more small moons.
The gist of this seems to be that radar scanning is the best way to examine asteroids, but they don't mention that there are tens of thousands of known NEOs. The 1001st asteroid to be scanned was spotted in 2016 so they knew it was coming. There is even a neat animated gif of it in the article. Gone are the days when NASA would shout "New Discovery!" and release a couple of muddy photos of tiny specks. Maybe they'll get more funding now.
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#69

Post by RTH10260 »

Success! Perseverance Mars Rover Finally Collects Its First Rock Core
The mission is living up to its name, drilling and storing a Martian rock after a misstep in August

By Alexandra Witze, Nature magazine on September 8, 2021

After a failed attempt last month, NASA’s Perseverance rover has successfully drilled, extracted and stored a sample of Martian rock — the first ever Mars sample destined to be flown back to Earth for study.

"This is a momentous achievement," said NASA administrator Bill Nelson in a statement.

When the rover first attempted the manoeuvre, on 6 August, the rock it was trying to sample crumbled into powder before making it into a sample tube. The second attempt, on 1 September at a different location several hundred metres away, went smoothly; the drill bit pulled a slim cylinder out of a 70-centimetre-long rock named Rochette. Engineers then paused the process so that they could photograph the core in its sample tube, to ensure it was intact, before sealing the specimen inside days later, on 6 September.

The core from Rochette now rests in Perseverance’s belly, hermetically sealed and ready to wait many years until future spacecraft can retrieve it and any other cores the rover manages to collect. The goal is to gather about 35 cores representing the geological history of Jezero Crater, Perseverance’s landing site — which was home to a river delta billions of years ago and might contain evidence of ancient Martian life.

How Rochette fits into that history isn’t yet clear. The rock comes from an area that mission scientists dubbed Citadelle, the French word for castle, because it stands high on a ridgeline like a citadel overlooking a valley. Some of the rocks along this ridgeline show layers that are geologically intriguing; such layers could have been deposited by wind, water, volcanic eruptions or other processes.

Early investigations by the rover suggest that Rochette is a rock type known as basalt, which might have been part of an ancient lava flow that makes up the ridge where Perseverance is parked, says Kenneth Farley, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the mission's project scientist. Rochette shows reddish patches and staining, as well as small cavities filled with salts, all of which suggest it interacted with water over some time — perhaps at the bottom of the ancient lake that once filled Jezero.



https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... -rock-core
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#70

Post by Tiredretiredlawyer »

🎶Who let the dog bone out?🎶

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-eso-captu ... -bone.html
ESO captures best images yet of peculiar "dog-bone" asteroid
by ESO


Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), a team of astronomers have obtained the sharpest and most detailed images yet of the asteroid Kleopatra. The observations have allowed the team to constrain the 3D shape and mass of this peculiar asteroid, which resembles a dog bone, to a higher accuracy than ever before. Their research provides clues as to how this asteroid and the two moons that orbit it formed.

"Kleopatra is truly a unique body in our Solar System," says Franck Marchis, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, U.S. and at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, France, who led a study on the asteroid—which has moons and an unusual shape—published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. "Science makes a lot of progress thanks to the study of weird outliers. I think Kleopatra is one of those and understanding this complex, multiple asteroid system can help us learn more about our Solar System."

Kleopatra orbits the Sun in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers have called it a "dog-bone asteroid" ever since radar observations around 20 years ago revealed it has two lobes connected by a thick "neck". In 2008, Marchis and his colleagues discovered that Kleopatra is orbited by two moons, named AlexHelios and CleoSelene, after the Egyptian queen's children.

To find out more about Kleopatra, Marchis and his team used snapshots of the asteroid taken at different times between 2017 and 2019 with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument on ESO's VLT. As the asteroid was rotating, they were able to view it from different angles and to create the most accurate 3D models of its shape to date. They constrained the asteroid's dog-bone shape and its volume, finding one of the lobes to be larger than the other, and determined the length of the asteroid to be about 270 kilometers or about half the length of the English Channel.
eso-captures-best-imag.jpg
eso-captures-best-imag.jpg (6.59 KiB) Viewed 2032 times
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#71

Post by Estiveo »

Image Image Image Image
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#72

Post by northland10 »

Probably BIden's fault.
101010 :towel:
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#73

Post by pjhimself »

Harvest Moon 9/20/21:

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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#74

Post by MsDaisy »

I never paid much attention to the Harvest moon until 1985. We were home visiting my parents with two small boys running wild through the house and my dad said to me, “Come on Doc I want to show you something”. (He always called me Little Doc, it was a Bugs Bunny thing). We went out on the back porch, he wanted me to see the full Harvest moon shinning bright in a clear starlit sky. We sat down on the steps and he just started talking about when he was young and lots of random things.

After a while I suddenly had a great pain in my heart thinking that I may never have another moment like that with him again, and I had a really hard time not busting a tear in front of him. And the really sad thing was that I was right. I did see him twice more after that, but he died the following June and every year since when I look at that moon, I bust more than just one tear, I’ve used 3 Kleenex just writing this post. My dad was very special :brokenheart:
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Re: Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

#75

Post by AndyinPA »

:bighug:
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies." -Octavia E. Butler
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