For the other Astronuts out there

If that’s Earth and moon…where is the camera going?

 

After an initial failure, Perseverance collects Martian rock sample

After an initial failure, the Perseverance rover successfully drilled into a martian rock and collected a core sample, extracting pristine material from an ancient lakebed on the floor of Jezero Crater.

“The project got its first cored rock under its belt, and that’s a phenomenal accomplishment,” Jennifer Trosper, the rover project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “The team determined a location, and selected and cored a viable and scientifically valuable rock. We did what we came to do.”

Initial images captured 1 September by the rover’s Mastcam-Z camera clearly showed pulverised rock in the sample collection tube. The impact drill then was vibrated five times as planned to shake off any residual material at the tip. Because of the lighting, it was not clear the sample was still in place after the vibration procedure. But subsequent photos a few days later confirmed a successful collection.

 

SpaceX Inspiration4 mission, the first ever all-civilian flight to space, ready for take-off - ABC News

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And a curtain for the toilet...Would the two blokes be able to hold on, or would they/you risk a medicinal pull? Haha...funny cause its true...

Wonder what the flat earthers think is happening...

 

Debated whether to put this in the archaeology thread. It's amazing.
"Researchers have discovered 3,600-year-old evidence that the ancient city of Tall el-Hammam was destroyed by a 'cosmic airburst,' which may have inspired the Biblical story of destruction of Sodom, according to a new study.
Experts from around the world, including UC Santa Barbara, uncovered pottery shards that had their outer surfaces melted into glass, 'bubbled' mudbrick and partially melted building material in a 5-foot thick burn layer in the Jordan Valley.
These are indications of an anomalously high-temperature event, which the researchers say was 'larger than the 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia and significantly hotter than anything that the technology of the time could produce.
'We saw evidence for temperatures greater than 2,000 degrees Celsius,' said one of the study's co-authors, James Kennett, in a statement. "
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10010361/Researchers-3-600-year-old-evidence-Tall-el-Hammam-destroyed-cosmic-airburst.html

And this is the other place mentioned-
"An ancient human settlement was obliterated by a comet that exploded in Earth's atmosphere around 12,800 years ago, a study has found.
The event destroyed a village found in the Abu Hureyra dig site in Syria and splattered fragments of molten glass 'hot enough to melt cars' to the ground.
The impact is also believed to have contributed to the extinction of many large animals, including mammoths as well as North American horses and camels.
Experts believe the explosion helped bring about the demise of the North American Clovis culture and usher in an episode of climatic cooling.
The glass splatter found at Abu Hureya was found among the remains of bones, building material and plants from when the first nomads settled to cultivate crops.
'Our new discoveries represent much more powerful evidence for very high temperatures that could only be associated with a cosmic impact,' said paper author and geologist James Kennett of the University of California, Santa Barbara."
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8095923/Ancient-human-settlement-obliterated-COMET-exploding-Earths-atmosphere-12-800-years-ago.html

 

BepiColombo: Europe's mission to Mercury returns first pictures

BepiColombo: Europe's mission to Mercury returns first pictures

The mission's first pictures of Mercury were snapped by low-resolution monitoring cameras on the side of the probe. For the moment, these are all that are available.

Further passes in June 2023, September 2024, December 2024, and January 2025 should see Bepi in a regular orbit to begin full science operations in 2026.

The simple black-and-white photos started filtering back to Earth on Saturday. Once all are processed, Esa is expected to run them together to make a short film, most probably for release on Monday.

 

"Astronomers have seen some pretty weird things scattered across our vast universe, from exploding stars to colliding galaxies. So, you'd think that when they see a strange celestial object, they would be able to identify it.
But NASA's Hubble Space Telescope uncovered what appears to be a pair of identical objects that look so weird it took astronomers several years to determine what they are.
"We were really stumped," said astronomer Timothy Hamilton of Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio.
The oddball objects consist of a pair of galaxy bulges (the central star-filled hub of a galaxy) and at least three nearly parallel split streaks. Hamilton spotted them by accident while using Hubble to survey a collection of quasars, the blazing cores of active galaxies.
After chasing dead-end theories, soliciting help from colleagues, and doing lots of head-scratching, Hamilton and the growing team, led by Richard Griffiths of the University of Hawaii in Hilo, finally put together all of the clues to solve the mystery.
The linear objects were the stretched images of a gravitationally lensed distant galaxy, located more than 11 billion light-years away. And, they appeared to be mirror images of each other.
The team discovered that the immense gravity of an intervening, and uncatalogued, foreground cluster of galaxies was warping space, magnifying, brightening, and stretching the image of a distant galaxy behind it, a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Though Hubble surveys reveal a lot of these funhouse-mirror distortions caused by gravitational lensing, this object was uniquely perplexing.
In this case, a precise alignment between a background galaxy and a foreground galaxy cluster produces twin magnified copies of the same image of the remote galaxy. This rare phenomenon occurs because the background galaxy straddles a ripple in the fabric of space. This "ripple" is an area of greatest magnification, caused by the gravity of dense amounts of dark matter, the unseen glue that makes up most of the universe's mass. As light from the faraway galaxy passes through the cluster along this ripple, two mirror images are produced, along with a third image that can be seen off to the side."
www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/double-galaxy-mystifies-hubble-astronomers

 

Got interested in neutron planets or stars. In a document two of these collided and the explosion produced many heavy metals including more gold than the weight of planet earth...incredible...

 

Aye, BBC4 tends to show stuff like that. Some great documentaries/science programmes recently. Just finished a three-parter on the Holy Roman Empire in the West after Constantinople fell.

 

Do you know if it is available on cd/dvd? Sounds interesting. Kph