The Astronomy Thread

Kiroy said:

Didnt watch yet cause on a trip. Whats the profit model of the mars portion of spacex? Just sending up nubs who buy tickets and get training?

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I do think private citizens who are rich will play into that, but I am guessing he will be hoping for government buy in, which he could then leverage to their other space business aspects to drive sales there.

Also super long term, but if economic opportunities present themselves on the planet itself, then it puts them in a key position to exploit them and essentially hold a monopoly.

Rosetta about to smash into a comet.

It should have touched down about 20 minutes ago. I was disappointed the comet didn't look like the one in Armageddon

This is no cave!

Rosetta's last image

Which they speculate from only 20m due to some sciencing. Ukkeric's image is from 1.2km, the second to last photo.

From 16km.


This is a pretty great summary of the mission in cartoon images.

Now I am both disappointed AND sad

I kind of expected a comet to look a bit less mundane.

That could almost be a dry wash in the desert somewhere

iannis said:

Now I am both disappointed AND sad

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The chemical composition and the density of the comet are wild though. Its 70-75% porous, it would float in water, it does not have a dense hard heavy core. There are a lot of organics, they have particle measurements of its cloud. There is a lot of crazy cool science coming out of this thing, you should let the missions scientists go crazy over the data in the finale presentation. If you have more than a cursory interest I don't think you'd be disappointed.

Oh, it's cool. The mundanity of it is, in itself, pretty damn interesting.

I just kinda wanted it to be a giant snowball

This article was too juicy of a headline to not link. I 0% vouch for anything in it, but take full credit if its ultimately true.

Washington Post

Implication of sabotage adds intrigue to SpaceX investigation

Curiosity's 14 drill holes and counting on Mars.

I think you are correct in this respect Kiroy. If a pure uranium comet/asteroid ramrods us that's a very different impact than being impaled by a snowball. Assuming Mass and Velocities are equalized you definitely want to pick the snowball. But the energy in any major collision is such I think its a pretty catastrophic event if the object is of a given size (as pharmakos mentioned). Its kind of like standing at the bottom of a mountain and deciding if you want to get murdered by a 300 ton granite boulder, or a 300 ton snowball. I think you are going to feel it either way, even if the boulder could be quantified to be worse than the snowball.