Drive by science

[Ari]

Sometimes the youtube algorithm is kind and brought me this, a Soyuz launch to the ISS as seen from the station. The mission docked two days later.

Rocket Launch as Seen from the Space Station -...

[fragment]

TIL there is a wasp named Lusius malfoyi

Meet Lusius malfoyi, a parasitoid wasp | RNZ

[viscousmemories]

That works on so many levels.

[Ari]

TIL: Cyanide does not smell like almonds. It in fact smells like *bitter* almonds, which look like normal almonds but contain cyanide, which gives them their smell, making it a bit like saying cyanide smells like cyanide. Cyanide actually smells like a strongly chlorinated pool.

Cyanide containing bitter almonds are of course sold as an alternative medicine cure all.

Does cyanide actually smell like almonds? -...

[JoeP]

Voyager 2 has been unable to get messages from Earth since March this year. The only place capable of sending it messages, DSS43 in Canberra - the only part of the Deep Space Network that has line of sight to where Voyager 2 is - had to be taken offline for repairs. Data could still be received by other stations but they couldn't send commands.

On 29 October contact was reestablished! Hello Voyager 2!

NASA contacts Voyager 2 using upgraded Deep Space Network dish

NASA re-establishes contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft | Human World | EarthSky



Voyager 2 left Earth in August 1977 and is now 18,300,000,000km away or over 120 times as far away as the Sun. The round-trip communications delay is 35 hours.
It's in interstellar space, ie beyond the bubble of solar wind from the Sun. But still within the solar system - apparently has not even reached the inner edge of the Oort Cloud yet.

[slimshady2357]

I'm sure this will end well.

Spanish scientists are making human-monkey chimeras in China - Big Think

[JoeP]

We already have humans who enjoy throwing shit at visitors. What are they hoping to achieve?

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

4EB35E03-F1FF-4AC6-B593-02C53D7C58FF.jpeg

[ceptimus]

The iconic Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico has collapsed. A couple of the support cables had broken a few weeks ago, and it had been announced that there was no safe way to repair the telescope, so it was already scheduled for demolition. Now it's collapsed I suppose that removes one element of the demolition process. No one has been reported injured.



BBC article

[ceptimus]

Watch the Arecibo Observatory's catastrophic...

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

When up means down: why do so many video game players invert their controls? | Games | The Guardian

tl:dr Aircraft yoke habit. (But there is more.)

[JoeP]

Ooh. Vision for perception vs vision for action. Deep.

[JoeP]

Scientists find two new species of fungi that turn flies into 'zombies' | | The Guardian

Is something rotten in the state of Denmark? First covid-spreading mink, now new zombie insect fungi.

[Ari]

Recently I’ve managed to catch multiple rocket launches live thanks to the magic of youtube, I don’t think we’ve had a SpaceX mention recently and they just made a great fireball!

The plan:
Shiney metal rocket goes up and to the side a bit to a specific altitude where it belly flops and uses its wings to fall glide, reducing it’s fall speed and covering the horizontal distance to hover slam land back on to the pad.

The big challenges here are that rockets generally don’t like slowing down, they don’t like lateral movements, and they sure don’t like doing them quickly with liquid fuels sloshing around. The goal of starship’s wing design is reduce the need for heat shielding by entering the atmosphere at a nice long and potentially powered glide.

SpaceX Starship SN8 historic launch and landing...

What happens:
T-0 The rocket doesn’t immediately explode, one hurdle down!

At T 1:40 and T 3:12 we see engine cut off and stow to slow down to the target height. The fireball and burn away seen are because the engines are run fuel rich, and I believe use skin cooling where the mixture is even more fuel rich around the sides of the bell using the fuel to absorb and take away heat cooling the bell’s skin. The rocket then sits on a bit of this unburnt fuel, burning it away. A challenge here is keeping the rocket balanced and stable while all of these wights shift and the engine realign to the new center.

At T 4:30 the vapor from the engine preburners that power the turbines nicely shows the rocket reaching hover and side flying before the belly flop. The big vapor burst is condensation due to pressure changes.

And we’re falling and we’re falling.

At T 6:30 we get engine restart. One good, two good, ugh hard flip around, this right here is the big test, does moving all this non static mass around off balance and rip it apart? No! All good! Just need engine three and... green, I don’t think it’s supposed to be, BOOM! Nope, it wasn’t.

So why the boom.
Because we know so quickly and they aren’t going back to the drawing board I would consider this test 100% successful. As the fuel is pumped from the tanks something needs to take its place, a rocket tank going glug, glug, glug, is a soon to be exploding rocket, so a high pressure tank of helium is used to keep the fuel and oxidizer tanks at pressure. In pressure fed engines and pumps they are used to force the fuel into the combustion chamber. For some reason a tank on the fuel side of things was at too low a pressure leading to a very oxidizer rich mixture being pumped through the third engine. Now we get to learn why rockets run a little fuel rich as the oxidizer turns the engine itself into fuel, the green being from some copper. Two potentially under performing engines wasn’t quite enough and as the rocket people like to say and RUD or Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly occurred.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Legit drive-by:

One of the best animal videos of 2020: a termite trail running parallel to an ant trail, each protected by a column of soldiers. HT @Mehdi_Moussaid pic.twitter.com/qt9byNKFdk

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) December 22, 2020

[JoeP]

Pretty.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

History of the seatbelt

Thread by @ankithharathi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by JoeP

Pretty.

Nobody liked this?

Not going to guess what it is? You're supposed to guess.

[Crumb]

coffee dregs?

[JoeP]

I can see where you're going with that ... but no. A different scale.

[ceptimus]

Mountains on some planetary moon? ( I can see part of a crater up at the top ).

[JoeP]

Close enough. They're Striped Sand Dunes on Mars (APOD).

[JoeP]

Friday's is cool too



Ice mountains on Pluto. APOD: 2021 January 15 - A Plutonian Landscape

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

honestly do you blame it https://t.co/aiGfsBRJJj

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) January 9, 2020

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Astronomers have found a sextuple (six-) star system where, if you watch it for a few days, every star in it will at some point undergo an eclipse.

via @BadAstronomer
https://t.co/VOaLK3BfwX pic.twitter.com/sFuiQXU3Qq

— Barry Ritholtz (@ritholtz) January 30, 2021