The Astronomy Thread

Dandain

Dandain

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Cassini shots of Saturn's moon Atlas. Taken on the 12th, unprocessed.

News | Cassini Sees 'Flying-Saucer' Moon Atlas Up Close
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Jysin

Jysin

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5km thick ice crust sounds like it would be technologically impenetrable for the foreseeable future. Someone get Bruce Willis on the phone.

The best we could probably do is land a rover as near to one of the plumes as possible and pray for some microbial ETs to land on some sensors.
 
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iannis

iannis

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Jysin said:
5km thick ice crust sounds like it would be technologically impenetrable for the foreseeable future. Someone get Bruce Willis on the phone.

The best we could probably do is land a rover as near to one of the plumes as possible and pray for some microbial ETs to land on some sensors.
Click to expand...

You could do it with heat couldn't you? There's very little pressure on that ice, the application of heat would skip liquid and it would go straight to vapor wouldn't it? Presumably not very much of that vapor would recondense. Quarry down until you're low enough to drill?

Which means it would be technologically impenetrable for the forseeable future. Because that's more than you can do remotely or would even want to. The first layer of your quarry is like 400 km^2? That sounds stupid even as a science fiction plot. Get bruce willis.

Maybe you land near a vent and go spelunking.
 
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Oldbased

Oldbased

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Europa around Jupiter has a ice crust and oceans underneath it is thought. Obviously Europa moon is around Jupiter and this one is around Saturn which is what makes it interesting. 2 moons at the very least with potential for oceans and life. Starting to seem it isn't as rare as thought to have ocean worlds. Add in Mars once had atmosphere and oceans and it starts looking like life outside Earth is potentially very common. The question is intelligence and ability to make crappy jeans and have liberal thoughts and not have killed themselves off. What if it turns out our area is the exception that instead of being the only advanced species in our solar system, most others have multiple advanced species on a variety of planets with varied tolerances and comprised of more than just carbon based.

There could be a species sitting around right now shitposting about Earth going Fing Carboners.
 
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Dandain

Dandain

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The quote explains better than I.

This video shows the 2 057 050 stars from the TGAS sample, which was published as part of the first data release of ESA's Gaia mission (Gaia DR1) on 14 September 2016, with the addition of 24 320 bright stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue that are not included in Gaia's first data release. The stars are plotted in Galactic coordinates and using a rectangular projection: in this, the plane of the Milky Way stands out as the horizontal band with greater density of stars.

The video starts from the positions of stars as measured by Gaia between 2014 and 2015, and shows how these positions are expected to evolve in the future, based on the proper motions from TGAS. The frames in the video are separated by 750 years, and the overall sequence covers 5 million years. The stripes visible in the early frames reflect the way Gaia scans the sky and the preliminary nature of the first data release; these artefacts are gradually washed out in the video as stars move across the sky.

The shape of the Orion constellation can be spotted towards the right edge of the frame, just below the Galactic Plane, at the beginning of the video. As the sequence proceeds, the familiar shape of this constellation (and others) evolves into a new pattern. Two stellar clusters – groups of stars that were born together and consequently move together – can be seen towards the left edge of the frame: these are the alpha Persei (Per OB3) and Pleiades open clusters.
Click to expand...

 
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Big Phoenix

Big Phoenix

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Jysin said:
5km thick ice crust sounds like it would be technologically impenetrable for the foreseeable future. Someone get Bruce Willis on the phone.

The best we could probably do is land a rover as near to one of the plumes as possible and pray for some microbial ETs to land on some sensors.
Click to expand...
Nah. The general idea for getting into Europa or enceludus is to use plutonium 239s heat generating capability to melt a hole through the icy crust.
 
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Aaron

Aaron

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Big Phoenix said:
Nah. The general idea for getting into Europa or enceludus is to use plutonium 239s heat generating capability to melt a hole through the icy crust.
Click to expand...

Then, in time, the covering for the plutonium corrodes and cracks leaking radioactive material into the sea. The bacterial life mutates into super-intelligent and hostile alien life. They then fly over here in their UFOs and nuke Earth!
 
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Oldbased

Oldbased

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Aaron said:
Then, in time, the covering for the plutonium corrodes and cracks leaking radioactive material into the sea. The bacterial life mutates into super-intelligent and hostile alien life. They then fly over here in their UFOs and nuke Earth!
Click to expand...
Next thing you know they'll be materializing on space stations and walking the earth in nude sexy female form while souls are sucked up into space by a space job.
 
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Cybsled

Cybsled

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We need to keep these oceans for the belters, sa sa? No aqua for the Inners!!
 
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Tuco

Tuco

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ShakyJake said:
Serious question: could the U.S. alleviate it's heavy debt burden through external means? Asteroid mining is being laughed at in the politics thread, but could the U.S. exploit something external such as the moon or other off-planet resource?
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Technologically? No. Politically? Yes.

Thing about asteroid mining is that it's most valuable when you mine resources that can be utilized in space. In today's environment one can imagine parking a 10 ton brick of ice outside the ISS and scraping off ice cubes to sell like a cosmic lemonade stand.


But if NASA had the means to park a kiloton meteor of rare earth metals into the US and then sell it to private investors, yeah we'd make a lot of money. The cost of getting that kiloton meteor with our current resources would be more expensive than selling it at current prices though.
 
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khorum

khorum

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lol fucking asteroid mining again. Listen we can agree on one thing:

The minute SOMEONE drags a positive multiple of their return on investment into orbit---they don't even need to recover it on the surface---EVERYONE will want drag rocks into orbit.

It's the Columbus effect. Europeans knew there was a whole other continent there. The Church had assigned a fucking bishop to the viking colony on Greenland 300 years before Columbus arrived! But the moment Columbus came back with slaves and sugar and stories of easy pussy as far as the eye can see... we were off to the fucking races.
 
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Lambourne

Lambourne

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Some results from the Kepler follow-up mission K2, and the road ahead in exoplanet discovery. Actual talk starts 5 minutes in.
It's from the SETI Institute youtube channel. They have a ton of interesting content like this that's more in-depth than the average popular science show, but easy enough to follow if you take an interest in this sort of stuff.
 
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zombiewizardhawk

zombiewizardhawk

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I thought astronomy was the zodiac signs or whatever that people did their horoscopes and shit with... why is this thread all about space?
 
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