The Astronomy Thread

Furry said:

I would assume a place like pluto is prone to sublimation, so hard to know if its truly comparable. The abundance of unexplainable bio-carbons we keep finding in space tells us there's something going on chemically we just don't understand yet.

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The issue is what is bio carbon. For small molecules, It's very hard to define what is part of "organic" chemistry and what is not.

What a bunch of bullshit cut proposals - fucking assholes. Pulls the plug on Juno and New Horizons as well, in additional to multiple Mars orbiters. Hopefully Congress pushes back on some of this - I could see a lot of industries lobbying to preserve the SBG mission since that benefits everything from mining to farming.

Roman Telescope and Dragonfly aren't listed as cuts thankfully

Big Phoenix said:

It looks like slow motion footage but the camera is wobbling too fast for it to be.

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It's almost the opposite of how movies fake large explosions by overcranking the frame rate on miniatures. That fireball was at least 800 feet high.

The wobble was probably the cameraman running, lol.

I had my cousin from SpaceX over for dinner on Monday. He said the next two Starships (after this one) will have the "fix" for some of these explosions, which is to increase tension on bolts that have been sealing pieces of a fuel vapor manifold together, which have failed due to thermal expansion and contraction cycles during use. Fuel-air mix gets into places where it's not supposed to be and... boom. In the future these parts will be welded. Those versions of Raptor should launch towards the end of the year, or early next year.

There are already 3-4 more Starships constructed waiting for launch, with more in the pipeline. Fixes are applied dynamically to existing models, as possible, as new data comes in from these failures.