The impact of the DART spaceship was...harder than expected. In fact, we think it knocked a chunk off the asteroid.
This is both good and bad. Good, because it means we can probably use the technique for larger rocks than we thought it would work for.
Bad, because you want to make sure you don't break something up, but still end up with multiple impactors. That's not great...
Still, we are thinking this is looking like a successful test, and hitting too hard is a pure engineering/math problem.
Possibly! They moved the Artemis I rocket back into the VAB, a complicated and lengthy process, to avoid Ian.
And now there's been a fire in the VAB. No injuries and the rocket was not damaged, but NASA hasn't worked out what caused it yet.
It could now be December before Artemis goes up...while it in theory could launch next week they want to check some "limited life" items first. All of the launch windows in November are at night and, understandably, they don't want to launch a complicated prototype in the dark...
Europa, Enceladus, Earth?
Yes.
Earth has more water buried in the mantle than on the surface. And right now we don't know where that water came from. Was it trapped after a comet hit?
Or does it somehow cycle with our surface oceans?
Either way...knowing would help us work out how Earth became habitable. Does this water play a role in Earth's ability to support life.
The DART spacecraft hit right on target last night. While it will be months if not years before we can properly assess the success of the test, the part we can control went well.
Data will now be gathered to see how much we affected the orbit of the asteroid. But we are one step closer to avoiding the fate of the dinosaurs.
(I think the crows are laughing at me in dinosaur).
(I, meanwhile, was busy talking about my work to college students...yay!)
The DART spacecraft is scheduled to collide with asteroid Didymos at 7:14pm EDT (2314 GMT) tonight.
I'm going to be quite occupied at the time, but will be checking on the results as soon as we have them. Yes, there is a camera chasing it.
Succeed or fail, this test is a key element of developing a planetary defense system. We are going to learn something important tonight.
I hope the proof of concept works. A controlled impactor is probably the best way we currently have to deflect a dangerous asteroid from, say, turning Los Angeles into a crater.
The fueling test went well, but they haven't cleared for another launch attempt. The next window is September 27, but in addition to the fueling, tropical weather might push back the next attempt...and it takes three days to get the rocket under shelter.
Three days.
That's how huge this thing is. I want to see a technology that means we don't need this skyscraper sized rockets anymore, don't you?
This one is a binary of a sun-like star and...a black hole. The distance is about that between Mars and the Sun. (The star is orbiting the black hole, which is obviously the more massive object).
Had they formed together, the black hole would have eaten the smaller star during its red giant phase.
So, now we have to work out how the heck this happened. Was there a third star that did get eaten? Did the black hole capture the other star?
So much fun for people who enjoy math.
It's actually started. The Chinese have successfully done a sample return of a lunar mineral which contains helium-3.
If we develop the technology, this could be used to create a fusion reaction that doesn't produce any radioactivity.
If. It's hard to use and we're probably not going to get it done before 2050, but we may be about to see a new moon race...and this one won't be quite as symbolic.
Or the Chinese claims could be, to use an old phrase, cold fusion.
It was found in Northwest Africa, and it's a "bended" diamond that was partially converted from lonsdaleite, which can only produced at high temperature and moderate pressure...and as the pressure decreased some of it turned to a diamond. A hexagonal diamond.
That's even harder than regular diamonds.
That or it's going to wake up and turn into a Crystal Gem.
If we can duplicate this it might have some uses. But creating it appears to have required a collision between a dwarf planet and a "sizeable" asteroid so this might be hard.
Welp. Perseverance has found some very interesting samples. These are going to be returned to Earth by a future mission, and in the mean time have been cached.
Some of them contain carbon-rich compounds, although this doesn't necessarily mean life (there are other ways these compounds could exist). But it's going to take a lot of analysis to determine that for sure...
...some of which will require bringing them back to Earth. Which of course opens the can of whether we should bring carbon-rich material from another planet to Earth. Maybe we should study it in a space station where we can toss it out an airlock if we have to.
I mean, we've all seen that movie.
First of all, Saturn's rings are relatively young. In cosmological terms they're "new." They're only about 100 million years old.
And we have no idea how they formed. Saturn also has a ridiculous obliquity.
So, what happened? A clue is Titan, which has been rapidly migrating outward.
Saturn probably had another giant moon. Something happened to destabilize its orbit, it grazed the atmosphere and dragged material out (causing the rings) and then shot out...somewhere.
We'll probably never find it.
So, what caused that? Right now, we don't know. Something must have had an interesting gravitational effect on Saturn's system at some point.
It probably had stars in it.
Joking.
Mostly.
On September 26 we are going to deliberately ram an asteroid with a spaceship. It's a test of concept for our future planetary defense system.
We'll get a ringside view courtesy of an Italian cubesat that is basically the cameraman to watch the test.
In addition to testing the system, we will do some science...we'll learn more about binary asteroids. The test is Monday evening...I'll be busy, but hopefully will find out how it went soon enough.
It may be the most habitable planet for us because we evolved here. But scientists have done some math and shown that if Jupiter's orbit became a bit more eccentric, so would ours.
And counterintuitively, that would make Earth more habitable. Or would it? I'm actually not convinced, as their argument is that it would make cold parts of the planet warmer.
We're already seeing that's not a great thing. They are forgetting that the arctic holds a lot of biodiversity and our best fisheries.
Despite that, Earth is still probably not the most habitable planet in the universe. There are almost certainly exoplanets out there with gentler weather and seasons, or less radiation.
Here's the thing, though? I theorize that if you make a planet too habitable...too nice...it won't evolve intelligent natives. Intelligence is a form of extreme adaptability. If your planet doesn't change, you don't need it and won't develop it because it "costs" a lot in terms of energy.
What do people here think?
Hoping this won't be my last piece for them (They are now on hiatus and may or may not return). It's a little flash piece about, well...the nature of life and sentience.
https://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/biotech/jennifer-r-povey/life-is-information
Enjoy!
In fact, somebody didn't learn from grade school. Ice Giant Missions, an unofficial twitter account, asked people to make suggestions for what to name a probe sent to Uranus.
Really.
They.
Actually did that.
Yes, there were some good suggestions, including Tempest (to keep the Shakespeare theme going) and my favorite, "Bode," after Johann Elert Bode, who named the planet. Tempest appears to be "winning."
But yes there was Rocket McRocketface. There was somebody who went out of their way to make the initials spell K.L.I.N.G.O.N.
And the inevitable butt jokes. Pepper after a song by the Butthole Surfers, Acronyms for RIM and DILATE. Pegasus. Operation Butt Plug.
Think before you tweet people.
Unless, of course, this was their intended result.
Possibly...and possibly not.
We've now found evidence of higher growth of neurons in the frontal neocortex in modern humans compared to Neanderthals. This is caused by one amino acid change, one silly little mutation.
This does imply that we may in fact be smarter than Neanderthals (although they were plenty smart and clearly sentient and conscious).
It's long been theorized that a cognitive edge is what allowed us to outcompete them, although there are other strong theories (I personally like the one that Neanderthal cold adaptation meant they required a lot more calories than we do, resulting in a lower carrying capacity for territory. They were fine until we went and invented clothes).
The frontal neocortex is where we keep our executive function, which manages things like task switching.
If Neanderthals had weaker executive function than we do, then they would have difficulty with emotional regulation, planning, and seeing the bigger picture. Which would explain why we "won".
(Oh, and there's also a semi-joke circulating that autistic people think like Neanderthals and that's why we don't get on with anyone else).
But without a Neanderthal to talk to we can't be sure whether we were and are "smarter" than them. I still like clothes.
...as cheap as dirt.
This could become reality because somebody turned cheap plastic into diamonds.
They were very small diamonds, but they were nonetheless diamonds.
In addition to helping us understand how diamonds form on gas giants, this opens the door to turning, say, your discarded plastic water bottle into actual...actual...diamonds. It's done using lasers, and it makes diamonds that are normally made by, well, blowing things up. Or rather by highly contained explosions. On Earth, nanodiamonds are only formed by things like meteor strikes.
The nanodiamonds could be used:
* As antimicrobial agents.
* In vaccines and drug delivery systems, especially for cancer treatment.
* In tests for viral infections...this is already being done with HIV.
* In skin care.
* For after treatment of root canals and other really invasive dental stuff.
* To measure changes in weak magnetic fields.
* Other high performance sensor applications
* In optical computing
* In room-temperature quantum computing.
* In imaging systems.
If we really can make them out of plastic waste then we just discovered something really important.
It's the Diamond Age, folks. Maybe. Assuming it pans out outside the lab.
We've pushed back the origins of mammals by about 20 million years. The new oldest mammal is Brasilodon quadrangularis, which was about 8 inches long and kind of like a shrew.
It probably spent much of its life burrowing.
So, it turns out that the red giant Betelgeuse was still in main sequence only two thousand years ago. Well, plus the light years it is away.
We know this from observations made by Chinese and Roman astronomers in about 100 B.C. In fact, the Chinese court astronomer at the time, Sima Qian, used Betelgeuse as an example of a yellow star. An example. This means that he considered it to be the best yellow star out there.
In about 1AD, Hyginus also described the star as yellow-orange, about the color of Saturn.
We also know that it was red by the 16th century, and perhaps we'll find observations that pinpoint when the change became visible.
(My initial reaction was "Did it change at about ya know...a certain time...and was Betelgeuse the Star of Bethlehem, but it looks like the Roman observations make it too late")
I'm actually wondering if it didn't turn visibly red until the 16th century. Surely a known yellow star turning red would have been marked down as an omen by somebody. Even if it wasn't in Europe, the Chinese, Arabs or even the Maya would have made note of it. Just a thought.
Physicists have come up with a cost-effective way to predict coherent structures in a fluid. Earth's atmosphere behaves like a fluid and coherent structures are otherwise known as patterns of turbulence.
They might eventually be able to use this to dramatically improve weather forecasts, predict tornados with some actual accuracy, give better information about hurricane season and, of course, potentially make your next flight a little smoother.
Well, the vicinity of the moon anyway. The Artemis I launch has been rescheduled for Saturday. Don't hold your breath, it's a test launch and thus has a higher chance than normal of being scrubbed again.
The launch window is 2:17pm to 4:17pm ET with 60% favorable weather conditions.
NASA TV will start live coverage of preparations at 5:45am ET. I'm not getting up that early, but I will definitely be watching the launch if it happens.
We are going back to the moon. Decades late, but we are.
Dr. Avi Loeb thinks so. He's planning to retrieve fragments of what might be an interstellar meteor from the ocean floor in the South Pacific. Said meteor may be an interstellar object.
He thinks it's a probe.
It's a little bit bold. On the other hand, if it did come from interstellar space, retrieving it and studying it will be worth it any way.
(This is the same interstellar object that was hard to prove because half the data was classified).
