The Astronomy Thread

Pretty amazing picture of Pluto.

What is Pluto Made Of?

-Pluto is %50-70 rock, and the rest ice.
-It does actually have that orange coloring to it along some peaks and valleys.
-As it gets closer to the Sun it partially melts and releases gasses and has a cloudier appearance.
-It basically exists in that definitional space between a planet and a comet. It is like a planet it many ways, but it is also very comet like and if its orbit brought it closer to the Sun it would have a tail.

Fair enough.

Are you sure

Yeah man, he's played a bunch of Kerbal Space Program. He's an expert.

Well if he plays KSP with the RSS and realistic mods from the NASA and spaceX guys then there might be something to that since they get pretty close to a legit sim. The stock simulation doesn't even have the planets revolving along their orbits though.

The real space mod is no fun for Mars shots tho lol.... 3 month launch date changes can bankrupt your campaign.

So, PBS Spacetime on Youtube, is really well done. I'm sure its been said before.

Political will not management. Apollo was a triumph of management and logistics as much as engineering---but it was only possible because the political will was there.

khorum_sl said:

Political will not management. Apollo was a triumph of management and logistics as much as engineering---but it was only possible because the political will was there.

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Right, and the will dissipated pretty fast after we launched a few missions there.

Big Phoenix_sl said:

Well obviously none of us are rocket scientist.

I just dont see how we built a rocket capable of going to the moon and back 50+ years ago when we knew practically nothing about rocketry but today its some massive undertaking that is tantamount to doing it all over gain. We still build rockets today capable of sending probes to the edges of the solar system. To me that screams management/bureaucratic issues, not design issues.

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The US in the 60s probably had superior prowess in many stages of rocketry (engineering, manufacturing, procurement, qa/qc) than today. By Elon Musks description everything has stayed the same excluding gains from the soviets pulling off a closed loop setup. Aside from pure rocketry, the plants that could actually make some of this whacky shit closed down 40 years ago and everyone that learned 25 years of the caveats of rocket cone manufacturing got dementia last week.

All the political football nonsense that happens to NASA is the reason we should invest our interest in space elsewhere, like SpaceX. NASA is important and useful, but the private sector is where a stable spacefaring economy will manifest. I don't know when colonies will become financially beneficial, but asteroid capture has an obvious return on investment. Once SpaceX can reduce their launch expense envelope sufficiently everything is going to blow up. The most expensive part of space travel has been the one-use launch apparatus. I expect in the short-term that sufficiently cheap launches will usher in satellite based resorts, and with that $$ the launch companies can start to focus on larger risks. NASA has never had a plan for a space travel business model. If they were able to develop income from patents and data perhaps they wouldn't be so boom/bust with political will, but that isn't the reality and wasn't the intent.

Tuco_sl said:

Fuck going to the moon. And mars. Who cares. Billions of dollars to go grab your dick and plant a flag?

This is one of the real bridges to space exploration:

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The asteroid re-direct is fine for a proof of concept, "lets try it with a small one", but eventually you need to travel to where the "gold" is.

RE: Moon/Mars, If it is just to plant a flag, I agree to a degree. However, the Moon could be very resource lucrative (Helium-3 especially if we ever get Fusion power up and running). If Fusion power plants became a realty tomorrow, every country with the means to have fusion power would instantly start a race to get to the Moon to start harvesting that sweet, sweet Helium-3.

Mars...at the moment it would be mostly scientific curiosity, especially in regards to determining if life existed there or still does. However, Mars is closer to the Asteroid belt and eventually it may become an important base for Asteroid related mining activities.

Dandain_sl said:

So, PBS Spacetime on Youtube, is really well done. I'm sure its been said before.

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Thanks for sharing. These are extremely interesting.

Going to Mars to merely go is the first step in creating a Martian colony. It has to happen if Humanity will ever inhabit more than this one place. We already understand the universe well enough to know that there are many reasons our species doesn't have an automatic ticket into the future. The one and only way to safeguard against the kind of one of extinction events is to colonize the stars. To not go to Mars would be the kind of stupid only Humanity could justify, and seems a reasonable answer to one possibility of the Fermi Paradox. If you don't have a long term view of the species beyond your own life all cutting edge space science is virtually irrelevant to the actual concurrent day to day lives of random human_01.

Society has a problem of viewing high level science as generally irrelevant right this moment. The Moon landings were driven by nationalist political will more than anything so society never had to view it as relevant in a daily life context. Trying to capture nationalistic supported space exploration is long past when it comes to planetary exploration. In many ways society has to keep getting smarter about the facts of the world. If every person on the planet had enough understanding of math, science, geology, history, chemistry, biology, astronomy, physics etc, I don't think its a struggle to convince such a society to explore space in as many ways as it can safely and reasonably support simultaneously. There is little reason this planet couldn't have many concurrent interplanetary missions being planned and designed, and I think in some ideal world we would. If Humanity is to ever explore even our own stellar neighborhood, Mars becoming Earth II is pretty much a required step in the process. Either biodomes or terraforming or both. There isn't exactly any other choice is there?