Spacethread Episode 2: Attack of the UFO Guys

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Rappaport: Oct 2, 2013

Libluini posted:

"what the heck, this is just Broccoli-DNA, those fuckers!"

Look, buddy, the plant aliens are real, and they are our friends :colbert:

# ? Sep 15, 2023 19:40

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# ? Apr 30, 2024 06:40

cat botherer: Jan 6, 2022; I am interested in most phases of data processing.

neutral milf hotel posted:

they look real to me

# ? Sep 16, 2023 01:51

Shaddak: Nov 13, 2011

Footage from the parker solar probe flying through a CME:

https://youtu.be/FF_e5eYgJ3Y

# ? Sep 20, 2023 01:42

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Shaddak posted:

Footage from the parker solar probe flying through a CME:

https://youtu.be/FF_e5eYgJ3Y

What are the "sounds" that we're hearing in the video? Is it somehow translating the radio frequencies into noises?

# ? Sep 20, 2023 01:47

Shaddak: Nov 13, 2011

DrSunshine posted:

What are the "sounds" that we're hearing in the video? Is it somehow translating the radio frequencies into noises?

That, or charged particles from the solar wind, I'd guess.

# ? Sep 20, 2023 02:06

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

DrSunshine posted:

What are the "sounds" that we're hearing in the video? Is it somehow translating the radio frequencies into noises?

I remember seeing a similar probe video about the rings of Saturn (or Jupiter?) but the 'sound' was a lot more intense. It kind of ruled.

# ? Sep 20, 2023 02:38

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Nessus posted:

I remember seeing a similar probe video about the rings of Saturn (or Jupiter?) but the 'sound' was a lot more intense. It kind of ruled.

The current champion of this kind of thing is still the Titan lander, thanks to it sending honest-to-good audio of the descent through Titan's atmosphere.

Listening to that noise still gives me the chills.

# ? Sep 20, 2023 13:01

Rappaport: Oct 2, 2013

Hello space buddies, today is an :ohdear:

space buddy day as Osiris Rex (what a name) is about to poop its payload of asteroid sample material into our atmosphere.

BBC explains:

Auntie Beeb posted:

Nasa's Osiris-Rex capsule will come screaming into Earth's atmosphere on Sunday at more than 15 times the speed of a rifle bullet.
It will make a fireball in the sky as it does so, but a heat shield and parachutes will slow the descent and bring it into a gentle touchdown in Utah's West Desert.
The capsule carries a precious cargo - a handful of dust grabbed from asteroid Bennu, a mountain-sized space rock that promises to inform the most profound of questions: Where do we come from?
"When we get the 250g (9oz) of asteroid Bennu back on Earth, we'll be looking at material that existed before our planet, maybe even some grains that existed before our Solar System," says Prof Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator on the mission.
"We're trying to piece together our beginnings. How did the Earth form and why is it a habitable world? Where did the oceans get their water; where did the air in our atmosphere come from; and most importantly, what is the source of the organic molecules that make up all life on Earth?"

Bennu's looking pretty dusty, good job that NASA sent a vacuum squad over there, huh?

# ? Sep 24, 2023 07:18

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Rappaport posted:

Hello space buddies, today is an space buddy day as Osiris Rex (what a name) is about to poop its payload of asteroid sample material into our atmosphere.

BBC explains:

Bennu's looking pretty dusty, good job that NASA sent a vacuum squad over there, huh?

I wonder if, twenty years from now, some bored Italian director will take this as an inspiration for a cheap alien comet virus movie

# ? Sep 24, 2023 20:47

dr_rat: Jun 4, 2001

Libluini posted:

I wonder if, twenty years from now, some bored Italian director will take this as an inspiration for a cheap alien comet virus movie

I mean there's a lot of places on earth they could take the exact same inspiration from if your just talking visually. Turns out big balls of rock floating through space aren't always the most visually interesting! Just because of how many there are their probably are the odd exceptions, but yeah.

I feel sorry for all the space pirates who have ever been marooned on them.

# ? Sep 25, 2023 09:50

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

dr_rat posted:

I mean there's a lot of places on earth they could take the exact same inspiration from if your just talking visually. Turns out big balls of rock floating through space aren't always the most visually interesting! Just because of how many there are their probably are the odd exceptions, but yeah.

I feel sorry for all the space pirates who have ever been marooned on them.

how to tell someone you don't know how B-movie directors roll, without saying that you don't know how B-movie directors roll

alternate joke:

how do you not know that there are enough space rock virus movies by now that they're forming their own little subgenre?

# ? Sep 25, 2023 18:18

Gravitas Shortfall: Jul 17, 2007; Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.

Europa Clipper launches in a year*, JPL just put out a public talk about it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYjGLPUo8OQ

*theoretically

# ? Oct 20, 2023 07:26

Rappaport: Oct 2, 2013

Sort-of-space-news, Frank Borman, commander of Apollo 8, has died at the respectable age of 95 :rip:

CNN posted:

Apollo astronaut Col. Frank Borman, who commanded the first mission to orbit the moon, has died in Billings, Montana, NASA announced. He was 95.

�Today we remember one of NASA�s best. Astronaut Frank Borman was a true American hero. Among his many accomplishments, he served as the commander of the Apollo 8 mission, humanity�s first mission around the Moon in 1968,� said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson Thursday in a statement.

�In addition to his critical role as commander of the Apollo 8 mission, he is a veteran of Gemini 7, spending 14 days in low-Earth orbit and conducting the first rendezvous in space, coming within a few feet of the Gemini 6 spacecraft,� Nelson said.

In 1967, Borman was a member of the Apollo 204 review board, which investigated a fire that killed three astronauts on Apollo I, according to NASA�s short biography. Borman would later lead the team that reengineered the Apollo spacecraft.

Perhaps the most (pop-)iconic thing of the Apollo 8 mission is the 'Earthrise' photo

# ? Nov 10, 2023 07:42

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

Man, is it just me, or did a lot of the original moon landing astronauts end up living to incredible age?

... I wonder... If there's something up with that.🤔

# ? Nov 10, 2023 15:47

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

DrSunshine posted:

Man, is it just me, or did a lot of the original moon landing astronauts end up living to incredible age?

... I wonder... If there's something up with that.🤔

I imagine it was a mix of "selected for excellent health" and "having both access, and comfort in making use of, high quality health care." They were also all pretty disciplined and presumably willing to follow medical orders, and likely had a great baseline of fitness. So they already screened out most of the culprits for dying before 70-odd.

e: It would be incredibly funny if the answer was cosmic radiation though

# ? Nov 10, 2023 15:59

Bug Squash: Mar 18, 2009

Rappaport posted:

Sort-of-space-news, Frank Borman, commander of Apollo 8, has died at the respectable age of 95

Perhaps the most (pop-)iconic thing of the Apollo 8 mission is the 'Earthrise' photo

The Apollo 8 mission was regarded by the astronauts as being the most daring and the crew as supremely brave even by their own standards. (At least according to the space rocket history podcasts). So much of what they did were the big firsts, and it's a shame it's often overlooked by the public.

# ? Nov 10, 2023 16:20

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

In order to divert more funding to manned space exploration, I'm going to start an ivermectin-style conspiracy theory that cosmic radiation adds +30 years to your life span.

# ? Nov 10, 2023 16:31

Chicken Butt: Oct 27, 2010

Symbiotic dormant chestbursters give all astronauts an unusually long lifespan.

# ? Nov 10, 2023 16:33

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Bug Squash posted:

The Apollo 8 mission was regarded by the astronauts as being the most daring and the crew as supremely brave even by their own standards. (At least according to the space rocket history podcasts). So much of what they did were the big firsts, and it's a shame it's often overlooked by the public.

Apollo 8 I know mostly from the German SF-series Perry Rhodan, so I always take a minute to remember that Apollo 8 in real life didn't end catastrophically. :v:

# ? Nov 10, 2023 18:31

Chicken Butt: Oct 27, 2010

�Perry Rhodan� is such a great example of �this name sounds American�.

# ? Nov 10, 2023 22:35

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

DrSunshine posted:

In order to divert more funding to manned space exploration, I'm going to start an ivermectin-style conspiracy theory that cosmic radiation adds +30 years to your life span.

Hahahaha.

# ? Nov 11, 2023 17:03

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

Chicken Butt posted:

�Perry Rhodan� is such a great example of �this name sounds American�.

We added the "h" to make it sound more American

-Clark Darlton

# ? Nov 11, 2023 20:17

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/24/amaterasu-extremely-high-energy-particle-detected-falling-to-earth

quote:

Astronomers have detected a rare and extremely high-energy particle falling to Earth that is causing bafflement because it is coming from an apparently empty region of space.

The particle, named Amaterasu after the sun goddess in Japanese mythology, is one of the highest-energy cosmic rays ever detected.

Only the most powerful cosmic events, on scales far exceeding the explosion of a star, are thought to be capable of producing such energetic particles. But Amaterasu appears to have emerged from the Local Void, an empty area of space bordering the Milky Way galaxy.

�You trace its trajectory to its source and there�s nothing high energy enough to have produced it,� said Prof John Matthews, of the University of Utah and a co-author of the paper in the journal Science that describes the discovery. �That�s the mystery of this � what the heck is going on?�

Ok which of you guys just beamed a signal to Trisolaris

# ? Nov 24, 2023 16:03

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

DrSunshine posted:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/24/amaterasu-extremely-high-energy-particle-detected-falling-to-earth

Ok which of you guys just beamed a signal to Trisolaris

With this kind of distance involved, either that's their first attempt at contacting us , or our original signal was send by the dinosaurs

# ? Nov 24, 2023 16:21

I AM GRANDO: Aug 20, 2006

If there were a precursor civilization on the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, we would be able to tell because they would have used up all the oil and already mined a bunch of things interesting to us, right?

# ? Nov 24, 2023 17:08

OwlFancier: Aug 22, 2013

There would presumably be a quite interesting depositional layer in a lot of rocks, yes.

# ? Nov 24, 2023 17:17

Gravitas Shortfall: Jul 17, 2007; Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.

I AM GRANDO posted:

If there were a precursor civilization on the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, we would be able to tell because they would have used up all the oil and already mined a bunch of things interesting to us, right?

OwlFancier posted:

There would presumably be a quite interesting depositional layer in a lot of rocks, yes.

The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?

# ? Nov 24, 2023 17:31

Dameius: Apr 3, 2006

If they ever popped a nuke in the atmosphere we'd know it.

# ? Nov 24, 2023 18:03

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

I AM GRANDO posted:

If there were a precursor civilization on the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, we would be able to tell because they would have used up all the oil and already mined a bunch of things interesting to us, right?

Not if they were psionic. We don't have any way to detect the residue of magic spells, after all.

# ? Nov 24, 2023 19:45

I AM GRANDO: Aug 20, 2006

Libluini posted:

Not if they were psionic. We don't have any way to detect the residue of magic spells, after all.

I thought fairy screams left a unique phosphorus isotope when terror-based.

# ? Nov 24, 2023 19:50

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I AM GRANDO posted:

If there were a precursor civilization on the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, we would be able to tell because they would have used up all the oil and already mined a bunch of things interesting to us, right?

They would have likely made use of deposits of oil readily available to them, but what if you could have stuck a well in the ground in a bunch of other places and found oil -- and what came down to us was the dregs, with maybe a little restoration from seepage from neighboring strata? The Cambridge article also points out that the Cretaceous and Jurassic fossil shifts they identify would have been long enough for new oil to generate. It seems to me that so would this event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event

Similarly, on a long enough time frame, geological turbulence would mix up their artifacts and produce ore-bearing strata where it didn't all wash into the sea.

# ? Nov 24, 2023 20:06

Rappaport: Oct 2, 2013

Apparently I just can't deal with Google anymore :smith:

, so I pose my question to the thread: What is the projected life-time of Nixon's signature on the Moon? Presumably the solar wind will erode it at some time-scale, but how long is that?

# ? Nov 24, 2023 20:36

120123_3: Dec 2, 2023

# ? Dec 2, 2023 02:24

Dameius: Apr 3, 2006

Rappaport posted:

Apparently I just can't deal with Google anymore , so I pose my question to the thread: What is the projected life-time of Nixon's signature on the Moon? Presumably the solar wind will erode it at some time-scale, but how long is that?

space.com posted:

From past studies of moon rocks collected by astronauts during the Apollo missions, researchers have learned that the rocks erode at a rate of about 0.04 inches every 1 million years.

Depending on how much trust you want to put into the source, you're just some napkin algebra away on guestimating it. Though that's just for the raw material. You're probably looking at the tens of thousands of years for the surface of the plaques to be rendered blank short of a significant event acting upon it.

# ? Dec 2, 2023 20:23

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I suspect the plaque as a detectable manufactured object would last significantly longer -- I am guessing that sans meteor strikes, the Apollo landers and the handful of other robots we've thrown on the moon would be observable for a very long time, even if they would become much less obvious once, for instance, the gold foil poo poo gets porous and dusty.

# ? Dec 2, 2023 20:30

Dameius: Apr 3, 2006

Yeah it really is determined as what you mean by remain. Do you mean if something were to look at it with our approximate vision seeing what we would identify as Nixon's signature vs same thing but obvious artificial origins vs detectable at all.

# ? Dec 2, 2023 21:05

Rappaport: Oct 2, 2013

As Nessus said, the objects themselves probably will remain identifiable as artificial for quite a bit, I just find it funny that there's a time-line in a potential future where the hyper-intelligent octopuses who will rule the Earth after us will find Richard Nixon's autograph on the Moon. It's not exactly Contact, but hey.

# ? Dec 2, 2023 23:49

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

https://www.sciencealert.com/voyager-1-is-returning-a-mishmash-of-1s-and-0s-from-space-nasa-is-baffled

quote:

Voyager 1 Is Returning a Mishmash of 1s And 0s From Space. NASA Is Baffled.

Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object from Earth, is sending back a repetitive jumble of 1s and 0s that don't make any sense.

Scientists at NASA are desperately trying to fix the glitch from 24 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) away .

Goddamnit, Trisolaris, leave us alone wouldja??

# ? Dec 14, 2023 15:41

dr_rat: Jun 4, 2001

Oh I know this one. Obviously someone was accidentally on voyger when it launched, and after a long nap their finally getting around to sending a message back to earth in binary.

This is why you don't take naps when your working on space probes!

# ? Dec 14, 2023 16:12

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# ? Apr 30, 2024 06:40

Gravitas Shortfall: Jul 17, 2007; Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.

"NASA data experts have translated the stream to an image format, and .. oh god, what is that man doing to his anus?"

# ? Dec 14, 2023 16:46

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