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Space: The Final Frontier
- Thread starter Windu
- Start date
CF_Fighter
Member
So happy for SpaceX. Could barely make it out even at night. Not as brilliant as a shuttle launch, but I guess due to amount of thrust needed to get it up I shouldn't have expected as much.
Dragon is now in orbit!
EDIT: Wow, watching those solar arrays deploy was something else. I think I got something in my eye.
Dragon is now in orbit!
EDIT: Wow, watching those solar arrays deploy was something else. I think I got something in my eye.
CF_Fighter
Member
You can rewind the stream and watch it.
Seeing the earth in the background of the last shot with the solar array was just awe-inspiring.
Been trying but it's all janky, oh well.
I know what you mean. Just seeing the excitement of the crew and team was incredible. Absolutely amazing job by SpaceX! I am still thoroughly impressed with the fact that they had an auto-abort at 0.5 seconds, safed the rocket in a few hours, located the problem, fixed the problem, were re-certified for flight, and successfully launched in under 3 days. I think almost more than anything else about this flight, the speed and professionalism of the SpaceX team will be what impressed me.
a few random questions
- Our moon is in just the right position relative to the earth to give us tides (helping life evolve) but not too large, and helping us keep a nice tilted rotation to give us seasons. How critical is this, and is it factored into the search for intelligent life out there? I.e when looking for planets, do we need to also be looking for planets with helpful moons?
- We're made from elements shat out of dying stars right? So was there a first wave of stars that were born and died, and what we see out there now is the second wave? Or are most of those stars still from the big bang?
- How often does a star supernova? There are so many out there that it must be a fairly common occurence.
- Our moon is in just the right position relative to the earth to give us tides (helping life evolve) but not too large, and helping us keep a nice tilted rotation to give us seasons. How critical is this, and is it factored into the search for intelligent life out there? I.e when looking for planets, do we need to also be looking for planets with helpful moons?
- We're made from elements shat out of dying stars right? So was there a first wave of stars that were born and died, and what we see out there now is the second wave? Or are most of those stars still from the big bang?
- How often does a star supernova? There are so many out there that it must be a fairly common occurence.
I saw this on the same science documentary that showed how important the moon is to us being here (BBC 'do we really need the moon?'), the relevance being the closeness of the early moon giving us extreme tides, helping the evaporation of water in tidal pools.
They showed this experiment and I just thought 'how can something so simple create the building blocks of life?'. Its a pretty damn profound demonstration for someone not deep into science, and is simple enough to be taught at high school.
Agreed. I think learning about Miller-Urey and self-assembling lipid bilayers was as much of a paradigm shift as I have felt. Mentally, it starts to bridge the seemingly insurmountable gap between inorganic/organic molecules and life.
As for SpaceX, did anyone else catch Elon sitting back with his hands behind his head after the solar arrays deployed? A few hours before the launch, he tweeted that the Tesla Model S just completed its crash test rating (5 stars in every category) and they will now be about to start manufacturing them for public sales. With that news on top of a great launch, he must be on cloud nine right now.
Without our moon the seasons, weather and everything would be much more turbulent and ice-ages would happen very often, but for a much shorter time. The ice poles would shift just like on Mars etc. So life had a easier time to evolve because of the more constant seasons and therefore not only small organisms can survive (we are quite fragile compared to some bacterias etc.)
So a moon is not a requirement for life I would say, but our satelite sure helped and inspired us.
edit: on supernovae - I think they happen about every 60 years or so in our Milky Way (yikes)
edit2: I meant the size of the milky way, lol. They are happening every few seconds in the universe if I would have to guess.
So a moon is not a requirement for life I would say, but our satelite sure helped and inspired us.
edit: on supernovae - I think they happen about every 60 years or so in our Milky Way (yikes)
edit2: I meant the size of the milky way, lol. They are happening every few seconds in the universe if I would have to guess.
CF_Fighter
Member
A quick search on wikipedia lists a small number of stars as possible supernova candidates in the Milky Way in the next one million years.
Wikipedia said:
Our perception of a star going supernova is all dependent on it's mass, color, and it's distance from us. Calculating those things together we can get an extremely rough idea of when it might supernova, or if it has done it already. We might be seeing a star now that is only a few centuries old to us, but has already gone into supernova due to being so far away from it.
Can't believe it, I just checked that the cost of per flight for falcon 9 is estimated at £27 million per flight. fuel costing £200,000 per flight. < pulled from the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Development_funding
I will see if I can dig up some comparisons with other space vehicles later on tonight.
These guys are the stuff of legends.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Development_funding
I will see if I can dig up some comparisons with other space vehicles later on tonight.
These guys are the stuff of legends.
half a moon
Banned
Fuck, missed it, any video link?
CommonSense
Banned
So when I was in college we had a project on life potential in a binary solar system. Still the best project I ever had.
We estimated there was an .09% chance of a goldi zone......meaning there are probably over a hundred million chances of life in binary systems alone.....space is big yo.
We estimated there was an .09% chance of a goldi zone......meaning there are probably over a hundred million chances of life in binary systems alone.....space is big yo.
mclaren777
Member
Any idea when SpaceX will start using these return-to-earth designs?
http://www.spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=0
http://www.spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=0
PantherLotus
Professional Schmuck
Moon: It seems critical to our existence, considering it was the tides that might have led directly to water-to-land creatures evolving. But the abundance of life in the direst of relatively unchanging environments on earth (like deep sea ocean vents or mold growing beneath the surface in Death Valley) shows that tides and seasons aren't necessarily necessary.
That said, we can hardly isolate ourselves from our moon to see how life would have evolved without it. My guess is that the moon, in a larger perspective, represents only a part of what we really need to be looking for: geologically active planets. Moons certainly help that (see tectonic movement affected by the pull of the moon), so it wouldn't hurt to look for planets with moons. But I think the primary goal in every case is to first look for a planet in the goldielocks zone, then look for planets/moons with liquid water. We can worry about moons after that.
Dying Stars: Our sun is a 3rd or 4th generation star, born from the guts of a supernova or supernovae.
How often do stars supernova? Considering there are countless billions of stars, probably daily. Observable, though? I think someone above said every 50 years in the Milky Way, and I think I've read that before as well.
Sorry I don't have anything on your other questions (would simply be speculation on my part), but I can add a few points to this one. You're probably familiar with a lot of this, but I try to keep my posts well-rounded for others who might be reading.
It's important to remember that we don't just see stars in our galaxy, we also see stars in other galaxies. Naturally then, we can see supernovas in other galaxies. These occur quite frequently because there are a lot of galaxies out there. Here's a list of the ones we've seen: http://www.cbat.eps.harvard.edu/lists/Supernovae.html (this answers your question in observational terms)
Now, obviously, we're not seeing all supernovae and we've only been observing for ~100 years (not including those which occurred in our own galaxy of which we have records for). Interestingly, we've actually discovered supernova remnants*** in our galaxy which have matched up with historical observational records. E.g., SN 1006, which was widely observed on Earth back in 1006 CE, but the remnant was not discovered until 1965 when the region was observed using radio telescopes.
Now, to answer your question more directly, it's been estimated that one supernova occurs in the Milky Way every 50 years (source). Obviously, we're seeing less than that. It's possible that our numbers are off, we're overdue, or we're just not seeing all of them due to interstellar dust. For reference, the Milky Way has 300 ± 100 billion stars (source).
If we wanted to know how many are happening in the universe, we'd have to look at the number of stars in the universe, which is estimated to be somewhere between 3 to 100 * 10^22 (source). Obviously, not all of those are going to go supernova, but if we assume a distribution of supernova-typical stars similar to the Milky Way, then we can do the following:
Milky Way rate: 1 every 50 years in a pool of 3 * 10^11
Universe rate: 1 every x years in a pool of 3 * 10^22
This gives us 1 * 10 ^ 11 supernovae every 50 years.
There are certainly a lot of factors I'm not considering, but that's an idea of how often they're happening.
*** As a personal aside, supernova remnants are one of my favourite things ever. The remnants weren't detected until the mid-1900s because they don't emit much in the visual wavelength and thus, weren't observed until we had things like radio and x-ray telescopes. However, the corresponding supernovae themselves were commonly observed by historical naked-eye observations. So, from those historical records and our current multi-wavelength observational data, we can determine how fast those supernovae are expanding, along with other properties.
It's one of those fantastic connections between historical scientific data and current scientific research.
WeAreStarStuff
Member
Leeroy3101
Banned
Let's challenge these SpaceX guys to build a moon base.
Why?
Leeroy3101
Banned
It'd be a good training ground for an extended mars mission.
So NASATV will be covering the Dragon/ISS flyby starting at 12:30 AM PST if anyone is interested. Also, it sounds like Obama gave Elon a call earlier in the day (from Musk's twitter):
Elon Musk said:The President just called to say congrats. Caller ID was blocked, so at first I thought it was a telemarketer
We can pretty much do it here. I was hoping for an answer like helium 3 (not there yet harvesting wise), a rocket rail gun or something else plausible and possible helpful.
Why not?
exactly!
You all might just get your wish.
Sorta reminds me of NdGT, when he says that non US space agencies should leak some space travel project. Regardless if true or not just to leak something so the US starts doing something in response.
As soon as they build a moon base we can start the war between the colonies and earth!
Leeroy3101
Banned
I hope it starts another space race. Thanks Putin!
WeAreStarStuff
Member
I'd rather have a space relay.
