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simonbp
@simonbp@social.linux.pizza
mastodon 4.7.3Linux, Railway, Beer dork; Astrophysics PhD; occasional interplanetary explorer
566 Followers
394 Following
50 Posts
Joined October 31, 2022
Minor Planet:
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Most typical location:
Colorado Front Range
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Ooof. Things not going well for the commercial reboost mission to Swift space telescope.
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/2026/07/28/commissioning-update-for-spacecraft-to-boost-nasas-swift/
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@geekysteven@beige.party I had a colleague who works on astronomical x-ray scintillation detectors describe it as "building crystals that glow with ancient invisible cosmic energy".
I appreciate living in a small town that is so excited for its new bike parking (occupying what was two on street parking places outside a pizza joint) that they are having a full ribbon cutting ceremony for it next week.
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They were able to do the very close flyby because of an excellent orbit fit using a stellar occultation.
(Same as for Arrokoth!)
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Also, most of the science data is yet to come, as they can't downlink with the ion engines on, and the spacecraft needs them on for a bit to get to the next asteroid.
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This was when we got the first good image of Nix, I'm in orange, everyone crowded around my Thinkpad. Picture by Henry Throop.
I've seen a lot of stupid space startups over the years. A lot. @KO6YQ@pnw.zone can attest that at least half the ideas at Space Access circa 2010 were extremely dumb (and that was part of the fun!).
But believe me when I say this is the second* dumbest space startup idea I've ever heard.
*Number one was a one way trip to Mars in a modified Curiosity rover
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@ajh@indieweb.social @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social And I should say we first tested it with dwarf planet named after Manwë, the Zeus analog in Tolkien's pantheon. Once we saw that ë propagate, we got ambitious.
Obligatory Canada Day Avro Arrow posting
#avgeek
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@vicgrinberg@mastodon.social The tonal dissonance between the suits proudly saying they have fixed the problem and questions saying it's still catastrophe is hilarious.
Yup.
Boeing thought they could (because they were taught they could) submit a half baked design and NASA would throw infinite money at it to make it work. Dragon was a life-or-death program for SpaceX, so they put the effort into making it work from the start.
And now one might argue that SpaceX is now in that position, expecting that NASA will throw infinite money at them to get Starship to work...
https://spacenews.com/report-links-starliner-problems-to-overconfidence-and-unrealistic-schedules/
The problem of making a decent refreshing lager in the summer and having it on keg is that it's easy to drink a bit too much.
If you're an #avgeek, I'm sure you've heard that the reason the F-117 Stealth Fighter was so angular was that computers couldn't calculate the radar signature of complex shapes. This the guy who wrote that code and ran those simulations in the 1970s, creating the modern stealth aircraft from seemingly unrelated maths developed by Maxwell in the late 1800s.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/denys-overholser-stealth-pioneer-whose-work-led-to-the-f-117-dies-at-86/
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@michael_w_busch@mastodon.online @Perrin42@mastodon.social @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org That's what you schedule for the 3 AM wake up
This is the most important thing that so few outside the space industry seem to understand: Low Orbital Constellations Are Not Permanent Infrastructure.
They cost an awful lot to launch and only last a few years. This is not a problem that SpaceX solved, they just spent absurd amounts of money launching a constellation so they could sell it off to to suckers for more the the launch cost before the depreciation kicks in. It's just old fashioned shady business.
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@stefanlindbohm@mastodon.social That's a close competitor to the (3 ft narrow gauge) Hawaiian Railway, which stops for whale watching and a half hour ice cream break.
Time to update the sign:
It has been 0 days since I last had to use some weird astrophysical quantity measured in centimeters.
#astrodon
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@michael_w_busch@mastodon.online @reedmideke@mastodon.social @sundogplanets@mastodon.social God do I want to corner one of these bros and have them explain SSO Eclipse Season to me...
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@SecureOwl Leveraging blockchain and metaverse synergies to create a full agentic business.
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@maggiejk@zeroes.ca @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org Cats are heat seeking missiles. Our old former Tucson street cat would spend Colorado winters as close to the space heater as he could without catching on fire.
Not bad for municipal fireworks, a week early to deconflict with the neighbors.
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@AkaSci@fosstodon.org That dark core and bright streaks were also seen for the S-IVB impacts imaged by the later Apollo missions that had mapping cameras. It's some sort of particle size effect, but it decays pretty rapidly (gone after a year or two).
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@beka_valentine@kolektiva.social @joe@f.duriansoftware.com Technically, none. BeOS/Haiku architecture is rather different.
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@flipper@mastodonapp.uk @ajh@indieweb.social @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social Only used Manwë (satellite Thorondor) and Varda (satellite Illmarë) so far, but obviously can can fill in the rest of the Valar.
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@ikluft@avgeek.social IIRC Lockheed got a not-small contract to develop a stealth pole because the pole's radar return was several orders of magnitude greater than the Hopeless Diamond
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@andreaswiedenhoff@rail.chat Hells yeah shovelnoses! GE exported them all over the world, but they only ran in North America on the White Pass. Cool locos for a cool line.
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@bud_t@m.ai6yr.org Down in Denver for the afternoon, deployed the umbrella when everyone was cowering from the rain
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@ajh@indieweb.social @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social My PhD advisor's wife studies African click languages. So he officially named a few Kuiper Belt objects with names that include click sounds to see what parts of the Minor Planet Center's system were Unicode noncompliant.
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@cmconseils@mastodon.social definitely a Japanese tram. They all have very standard interior
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@allrite@masto.allrite.at The California Greek accent is a thing to behold (but not necessarily understand). Just don't confuse them with the Armenians.
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@ikluft@avgeek.social IIRC they also use the A330s for cargo when there isn't a need for VIP transport.
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@helle @Pepijn The Canadian federal parliament is relatively easy; I was milling around outside when when a tour guide asked if we wanted to take a tour, and so we got to go in. That was before the construction started, to be fair.
But yeah, it's way more common in the US to visit state capitols, and you're way more likely to meet a legislator that way.
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@meltedcheese@c.im I briefly worked in a plastics factory one summer (rebuilt their Access database). They did a ton of post-industrial plastic recycling, e.g. turning carpet trimmings into pellets into fibers. That was easy and profitable. The post consumer recycling was a mess and they could only resell it for the lowest quality products.
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@michael_w_busch@mastodon.online @sundogplanets@mastodon.social Kinda. Launching to GEO ain't cheap, and launch providers are increasingly upcharging for it, since most of their business is LEO now.
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@reedmideke@mastodon.social If there's a random place in the USA that an 18 wheeler can't reach, I don't know it. And every military base is on the Interstate network.
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@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org Something like that in the transport museum in Lucerne, Switzerland. The machine picks a car off the rack every so often and puts on a display area with a little presentation
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@atax1a@infosec.exchange @mos_8502@studio8502.ca That's true. But it's also true that local models, simply by their very existence, completely destroy the entire business model of both the "labs" selling model access and the data centers running their models. Even Nvidia doesn't come off clean, considering their power hungry chips are far from ideal for local models.
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@spacelizard@aus.social @sundogplanets@mastodon.social The equation in question takes things in AU, cm (2x), micron, g/cc, unitless flux, and m/s, to produce a result in kg/s. The paper was published in 2024.