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Post by gus on Feb 5, 2020 5:32:28 GMT
Tonight’s Trump’s State of the Union Address, Trump emphasized the Space Force. While the applause cut off his final comment on the Space Force, some feel like his last words were to the effect “very mysterious”. I did watch it but I couldn't see or hear it
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Post by gus on Feb 5, 2020 12:26:05 GMT
Just been enjoying the timeline of contact events. 1 1947 Roswell Crash 2 1954 President Dwight Eisenhower does not want agreement with Tall Whites See link "here"Jessie Roestenberg, 1954, in Staffordshire, UK sees Tall Whites. Interesting coincidence! 3 1957 The Antonio Vilas Boas case from Brazil 4 1961 Hill abduction from the United States After this it would seem that the Grey Abductions got out of hand. The list from UFOCasebook on Cases of Alien Abductions
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Post by swamprat on Feb 5, 2020 14:56:20 GMT
Here's a recap of the President's space remarks:Trump touts Space Force, moon and Mars plans in State of the Union address By Mike Wall | Feb. 5, 2020
And a gallery guest was a kid with Space Force ambitions.
Space exploration got a couple of shout-outs in President Donald Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday night (Feb. 4).
During the nearly 80-minute speech, Trump touted the recent establishment of the Space Force — the first new U.S. military branch to be stood up since the Air Force in 1947 — as one of his administration's key accomplishments thus far.
And one of the president's special guests for the State of the Union, which is held every year in the House of Representatives chamber of the U.S. Capitol building, was a kid with Space Force dreams.
"In the gallery tonight, we have a young gentleman," Trump said. "And what he wants so badly — 13 years old — Iain Lanphier, he is an eighth-grader from Arizona. Iain, please stand up. Iain has always dreamed of going to space. He was the first in his class and among the youngest at an aviation academy. He aspires to go to the Air Force Academy, and then he has his eye on the Space Force. As Iain says, 'Most people look up at space; I want to look down on the world.'"
President Trump also referenced NASA's Artemis program of crewed lunar exploration. Artemis aims to put astronauts on the surface of the moon by 2024 and use Earth's nearest neighbor as a training ground for crewed missions to Mars in the 2030s.
NASA originally targeted 2028 for the human lunar landing, which will be the first since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, but Vice President Mike Pence announced an accelerated timeline in March of last year. (Last month, the House Science Committee introduced an appropriations bill that would re-target 2028 for the lunar landing. But that bill has a long way to go before being enacted as law.)
"In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation. Now we must embrace the next frontier: America's manifest destiny in the stars," Trump said during last night's speech. "I am asking Congress to fully fund the Artemis program to ensure that the next man and first woman on the moon will be American astronauts, using this as a launching pad to ensure that America is the first nation to plant its flag on Mars."
We'll soon see what kind of funding he has in mind; the White House is expected to unveil its 2021 federal budget request on Monday (Feb. 10).
President Trump has made a fair bit of space news during his first three years in office. There's the Space Force, of course, and Space Policy Directive-1, which officially set the nation's human spaceflight program on its moon-to-Mars path. (President Barack Obama had directed NASA to get people to Mars, but to use an asteroid as a stepping stone.)
Trump has also signed two other space policy directives, which deal with space traffic management and the regulation of commercial activities in space, respectively. And in 2017, Trump resurrected the National Space Council (NSC), which helps steer American space policy.
Pence chairs the NSC, which had last been active in the early 1990s, during the presidency of George H.W. Bush.
www.space.com/trump-space-force-moon-mars-plans-state-of-the-union-2020.html
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Post by gus on Feb 6, 2020 9:55:01 GMT
That poor kid has no idea what he will be up against
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Post by gus on Feb 7, 2020 21:55:17 GMT
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Post by swamprat on Feb 9, 2020 15:26:16 GMT
The Night Sky Will Never Be the Same Elon Musk’s plan for worldwide internet has sent bright artificial, lights streaking through the dark.
Marina Koren
February 6, 2020
Starlink satellites streak through images captured by a telescope in Chile. NSF’S National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory / CTIO / AURA / DELVE
Last year, Krzysztof Stanek got a letter from one of his neighbors. The neighbor wanted to build a shed two feet taller than local regulations allowed, and the city required him to notify nearby residents. Neighbors, the notice said, could object to the construction. No one did, and the shed went up.
Stanek, an astronomer at Ohio State University, told me this story not because he thinks other people will care about the specific construction codes of Columbus, Ohio, but rather because it reminds him of the network of satellites SpaceX is building in the space around Earth.
“Somebody puts up a shed that might obstruct my view by a foot, I can protest,” Stanek said. “But somebody can launch thousands of satellites in the sky and there’s nothing I can do? As a citizen of Earth, I was like, Wait a minute.”
Since last spring, SpaceX has launched into orbit dozens of small satellites—the beginnings of Starlink, a floating scaffold that the company’s founder, Elon Musk, hopes will someday provide high-speed internet to every part of the world.
SpaceX sent a letter too, in a way. After filing for permission to build its constellation in space, federal regulators held the required comment period, open to the public, before the first satellites could launch.
These satellites have turned out to be far more reflective than anyone, even SpaceX engineers, expected. Before Starlink, there were about 200 objects in orbit around Earth that could be seen with the unaided eye. In less than a year, SpaceX has added another 240. “These are brighter than probably 99 percent of existing objects in Earth orbit right now,” says Pat Seitzer, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan who studies orbital debris.
For months, astronomers have shared images online of their telescopes’ fields of view with diagonal white streaks cutting across the darkness, the distinct appearance of Starlink satellites. More satellites are now on the way, both from SpaceX and other companies. If these satellites end up numbering in the tens of thousands, ignoring them would be difficult, whether you’re an astronomer or not.
In some ways, these satellites pose a familiar problem, a matter of managing the competing interests that scientists, commercial companies, and the public might have in a limited natural resource. But the use of outer space—particularly the part in close vicinity to our planet—has never been tested quite like this before. For most of history, scientists, particularly those who observe the cosmos on visible wavelengths, have had relatively little competition for access to the sky. Passing satellites were considered nuisances and sometimes wrecked data, but they were rare. Some astronomers are now calling for legal action, but even those who wouldn’t push that far describe Starlink’s satellites as a wake-up call: What happens when new and powerful neighbors have a distinct—and potentially disruptive—plan for a place you value?
For Harvey Liszt, the case of the Starlink satellites feels like déjà vu.
Liszt specializes in radio astronomy, a field that has experienced more than its share of satellite-related headaches. The first GPS satellites, launched in the late 1970s, spewed signals across the radio spectrum, including the bands that astronomers like Liszt use to scan the universe, and interfered with their observations. “Without very strict regulation, it’s all too easy for users of the radio spectrum to spill over into each other’s spectrum,” Liszt says.
So astronomers started pushing regulators to bring GPS technology in line. The United States has controlled use of the radio spectrum since the early 20th century, when it became clear that too much noise could garble emergency messages from ships in distress and other long-distance cries for help. The International Telecommunication Union, which coordinates global use of the radio spectrum, had been established decades earlier, in 1865. By the time radio astronomers had to worry about GPS satellites, the idea that satellite operators had to play by oversight rules was well understood.
Before Starlink launched, SpaceX coordinated with the National Science Foundation and its radio-astronomy observatories to make sure there wouldn’t be any overlap. Unfortunately for optical astronomers, there is no such framework when it comes to the brightness of satellites—no international body in Geneva, let alone a dedicated agency in the United States. The Federal Communications Commission’s regulatory realm spans communication networks across multiple industries, which means its oversight includes, oddly enough, both satellites and offensive Super Bowl commercials. But while American satellites need the agency’s permission to launch, the FCC does not regulate the appearance of those satellites once they’re in orbit.
From the ground, Starlink satellites appear as points of light moving from west to east, like a string of tiny pearls across the dark sky. (Some people have even mistaken them for UFOs.) You THINK?! The satellites are at their brightest after launch, before they spread out and rise in altitude, and are visible even in the middle of cities. They appear dimmer after a few months, when they reach their final orbit, about 342 miles (550 kilometers) up, but even then they can still be seen in darker areas, away from the glare of light pollution.
In the months since they first launched, the Starlink satellites have been essentially photobombing ground-based telescopes. Their reflectiveness can saturate detectors, overwhelming them, which can ruin frames and leave ghost imprints on others. Vivienne Baldassare’s work depends on comparing images taken night after night and looking for nearly imperceptible variations in light; the slightest shifts could reveal the existence of a black hole at the center of a glittering, distant galaxy. Baldassare, an astronomer at Yale, can’t see behind the streak of a satellite. “You can’t just subtract that off,” she says. Some objects, such as comets, are better viewed during dawn and dusk, when there’s just enough sunlight to illuminate them. But because they orbit close to Earth, the Starlink satellites can be seen during these hours, too; imagine missing a comet as it passes uncomfortably close to Earth because of too many satellites.
SpaceX is “actively working with leading astronomy groups from around the world to make sure their work isn’t affected,” says the company’s spokesperson, James Gleeson. To that end, one satellite in a batch of 60 launched in early January with experimental coating that might make it less reflective. Engineers won’t know how well it worked until the satellite reaches its final orbit.
As it waits for those data, SpaceX has continued to launch dozens of the original satellites. The company wants to deploy more than 1,500 satellites in 2020 alone, which means launches could come every few weeks. On top of those, the company OneWeb is scheduled to launch a batch of its own internet satellites this week; the proposed constellation of about 650 will fly at higher altitudes, which might have the paradoxical effect of being too dim to see from the ground but bright enough for telescopes to spot well into the night. And Jeff Bezos’s Amazon has asked the FCC for permission to someday launch a network of 3,200 internet satellites. In a few years’ time, three companies alone might transform the space around Earth, with SpaceX leading the pack.
Some astronomers say that SpaceX should stop launching Starlink satellites until engineers find a fix for their brightness, while others, including Seitzer—who is working with SpaceX engineers—say the optical-astronomy community could probably live with about 1,500 of them. Well beyond that, dodging bright satellites and capturing good, unblemished data would become harder.
“We can’t wait for the regulations, for new rules to be drafted, for the comment periods,” Seitzer says. “We have to work with the companies right now to try to convince them of the value of making their satellites as faint as possible.”
The FCC has approved the launch of 12,000 Starlink satellites so far, and SpaceX wants to launch 30,000 more. (The agency did not respond to questions about whether it should be responsible for controlling the brightness of satellites.) By the end of this year, the company’s operational satellites in orbit could outnumber all other satellites combined. That would be a tremendous, wholesale change to the night sky; one company in one country would have made an immense impact on a borderless piece of nature that everyone on Earth can access. But when SpaceX filled out its application to the FCC, it marked “No” on a question asking whether the project would have “a significant environmental impact”—which meant there was no review of the satellites’ potential effects. Perhaps the surprisingly bright appearance of the Starlink satellites in the night sky, which astronomers could argue counts as an environmental impact, could have been known before launch.
It might seem easy to wave away astronomers’ concerns as the hand-wringing of a small group. A couple hundred shiny satellites have little to no bearing on the daily lives of most people, who already can’t see the night sky as it truly is, because of artificial-light pollution. Aside from coordinating with commercial companies directly, it’s unclear what astronomers can do either. They doubt that average citizens are going to call their congressperson about Starlink satellites. They could sue the FCC and perhaps force the agency to consider environmental reviews, as the American Bird Conservancy did when it became apparent that the lights on communication towers could disorient migratory birds. As Jessica Rosenworcel, an FCC commissioner, said herself last year, when the agency approved the Starlink constellation: “This rush to develop new space opportunities requires new rules. Despite the revolutionary activity in our atmosphere, the regulatory frameworks we rely on to shape these efforts are dated.”
Stanek’s point, illustrated by his neighbor’s shed, is that mega-constellations alter the aesthetics and value of the night sky in an unavoidable way. “We can’t opt out,” he said. “If I get sick and tired of living in Columbus, Ohio, I could move out to a remote cabin and disconnect from the internet. But here, everybody on the entire Earth that ever wants to look at the sky has to look at the Starlink satellites.” Obviously not everyone can pick up and relocate to the woods to experience the unobscured beauty of the sky. But there still are, for now, places where you’d expect not to see artificial stars passing overhead.
www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/spacex-starlink-astronomy/606169/?utm
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Post by HAL on Feb 9, 2020 19:55:10 GMT
It's possible Betelgeuse is soon to go nova. That should draw everyone's attention.
See Spaceweather.com for latest.
HAL.
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Post by HAL on Feb 9, 2020 20:16:43 GMT
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Post by gus on Feb 14, 2020 5:21:54 GMT
Just in
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Post by swamprat on Feb 15, 2020 15:39:04 GMT
SpaceX Crew Dragon arrives at launch site for the 1st orbital crew flight from US soil since 2011 By Mike Wall | Feb. 15, 2020
Crew Dragon may get off the ground in early May.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft for the Demo-2 mission made it to Florida’s Space Coast on Feb. 13, 2020. (Image: © SpaceX)
The spacecraft that will fly SpaceX's first-ever crewed mission has made it to Florida.
A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule arrived on Florida's Space Coast on Thursday (Feb. 13), NASA officials said, completing a cross-country trek from the company's California headquarters.
"The spacecraft now will undergo final testing and prelaunch processing in a SpaceX facility on nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station," NASA officials said in an update.
Technicians at a SpaceX processing facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station can now start prepping the vehicle for the launch that will kick off Demo-2, a historic test mission that will send NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station (ISS).
That liftoff is targeted for early May from Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, which is next door to Cape Canaveral.
Demo-2 will mark the first crewed flight for Crew Dragon, and the first orbital human spaceflight to lift off from American soil since the final space shuttle mission in July 2011. But it won't be the first trip to the ISS for a Crew Dragon; one of the capsules aced the uncrewed Demo-1 mission to the orbiting lab in March of last year. (That vehicle was destroyed in April during a ground-test accident.)
SpaceX employees with Crew Dragon before it departed our Hawthorne factory for the launch site in Florida – one step closer to returning human spaceflight capabilities to the United States!
If Demo-2 goes well, SpaceX will likely be cleared to begin operational crewed missions to the ISS for NASA. In September 2014, the space agency awarded Elon Musk's company a $2.6 billion contract to finish development of Crew Dragon and fly six crewed flights to and from the orbiting lab.
NASA signed a similar $4.2 billion deal with Boeing, which is developing a capsule called the CST-100 Starliner. But it's unclear when Starliner will be ready to start flying astronauts. Boeing's vehicle suffered several software problems during its version of Demo-1 in December 2019 and failed to reach the ISS as planned.
www.space.com/spacex-crew-dragon-launch-site-arrival-demo-2.html
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Post by swamprat on Feb 21, 2020 15:11:34 GMT
How the universe could possibly have more dimensions By Paul Sutter | Feb. 21, 2020
Could the universe have more dimensions than we realize? (Image: © Getty)
String theory is a purported theory of everything that physicists hope will one day explain … everything.
All the forces, all the particles, all the constants, all the things under a single theoretical roof, where everything that we see is the result of tiny, vibrating strings. Theorists have been working on the idea since the 1960s, and one of the first things they realized is that for the theory to work, there have to be more dimensions than the four we're used to.
But that idea isn't as crazy as it sounds.
Dimensional disaster
In string theory, little loops of vibrating stringiness (in the theory, they are the fundamental object of reality) manifest as the different particles (electrons, quarks, neutrinos, etc.) and as the force-carriers of nature (photons, gluons, gravitons, etc.). The way they do this is through their vibrations. Each string is so tiny that it appears to us as nothing more than a point-like particle, but each string can vibrate with different modes, the same way you can get different notes out of a guitar string.
Each vibration mode is thought to relate to a different kind of particle. So all the strings vibrating one way look like electrons, all the strings vibrating another way look like photons, and so on. What we see as particle collisions are, in the string theory view, a bunch of strings merging together and splitting apart.
But for the math to work, there have to be more than four dimensions in our universe. This is because our usual space-time doesn't give the strings enough "room" to vibrate in all the ways they need to in order to fully express themselves as all the varieties of particles in the world. They're just too constrained.
In other words, the strings don't just wiggle, they wiggle hyperdimensionally.
Current versions of string theory require 10 dimensions total, while an even more hypothetical über-string theory known as M-theory requires 11. But when we look around the universe, we only ever see the usual three spatial dimensions plus the dimension of time. We're pretty sure that if the universe had more than four dimensions, we would've noticed by now.
How can the string theory's requirement for extra dimensions possibly be reconciled with our everyday experiences in the universe?
Curled up and compact
Thankfully, string theorists were able to point to a historical antecedent for this seemingly radical notion.
Back in 1919, shortly after Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity, the mathematician and physicist Theodor Kaluza was playing around with the equations, just for fun. And he found something especially interesting when he added a fifth dimension to the equations — nothing happened. The equations of relativity don't really care about the number of dimensions; it's something you have to add in to make the theory applicable to our universe.
But then Kaluza added a special twist to that fifth dimension, making it wrap around itself in what he called the "cylinder condition." This requirement made something new pop out: Kaluza recovered the usual equations of general relativity in the usual four dimensions, plus a new equation that replicated the expressions of electromagnetism.
It looked like adding dimensions could potentially unify physics.
In retrospect, this was a bit of a red herring.
Still, a couple of decades later another physicist, Oskar Klein, tried to give Kaluza's idea an interpretation in terms of quantum mechanics. He found that if this fifth dimension existed and was responsible in some way for electromagnetism, that dimension had to be scrunched down, wrapping back around itself (just like in Kaluza’s original idea), but way smaller, down to a bare 10^-35 meters.
The many manifolds of string theory
If an extra dimension (or dimensions) is really that small, we wouldn't have noticed by now. It's so small that we couldn't possibly hope to directly probe it with our high-energy experiments. And if those dimensions are wrapped up on themselves, then every time you move around in four-dimensional space, you're really circumnavigating those extra dimensions billions upon billions of times.
And those are the dimensions where the strings of string theory live.
With further mathematical insight, it was found that the extra six spatial dimensions needed in string theory have to be wrapped up in a particular set of configurations, known as Calabi-Yao manifolds after two prominent physicists. But there isn't one unique manifold that's allowed by sting theory.
There's around 10^200,000.
It turns out that when you need six dimensions to curl up on themselves, and give them almost any possible way to do it, it … adds up.
That's a lot of different ways to wrap those extra dimensions in on themselves. And each possible configuration will affect the ways the strings inside them vibrate. Since the ways that strings vibrate determine how they behave up here in the macroscopic world, each choice of manifold leads to a distinct universe with its own set of physics.
So only one manifold can give rise to the world as we experience it. But which one?
Unfortunately, string theory can't give us an answer, at least not yet. The trouble is that string theory isn't done — we only have various approximation methods that we hope get close to the real thing, but right now we have no idea how right we are. So we have no mathematical technology for following the chain, from specific manifold to specific string vibration to the physics of the universe.
The response from string theorists is something called the Landscape, a multiverse of all possible universes predicted by the various manifolds, with our universe as just one point among many.
And that's where string theory sits today, somewhere on the Landscape.
www.space.com/more-universe-dimensions-for-string-theory.html
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Post by gus on Feb 21, 2020 21:41:22 GMT
Yeah Man! I have looked into it as well Swamp and it blows my mind in a good way. Really cool to sit back at night looking at the stars, smoke my favourite cig and think about it. We are surround by such amazing unknowns.
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Post by gus on Feb 26, 2020 9:09:54 GMT
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Post by gus on Mar 2, 2020 6:52:53 GMT
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Post by gus on Mar 5, 2020 22:59:35 GMT
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