Space Science and Astronomy thread



Theres a comet heading up through the constellation of Orion at the moment (easy constellation to find) but I think you will need a scope or binoculars to really see anything.
 
spitfire said:
Theres a comet heading up through the constellation of Orion at the moment (easy constellation to find) but I think you will need a scope or binoculars to really see anything.
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Heavens Above report it as mag 9.1 at the minute which is way too dim for the eye.

There is another one slightly brighter near Saturn and Jupiter:

Where do you go to for news of comets? I check here occasionally, but missed Neowise until it hit mainstream media.
 
starting to hot up over in Boca Chica.

The first sections of superheavy have been moved into the stacking facility.
https://twitter.com/x/status/1325479927060180992

So for those unaware, SpaceX are developing (quite publicly) a new super heavy lift vehicle call starship as a follow up from their dependably Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. This is the demo of how it is going to work


The idea is that it is completely reusable, massively reducing the cost of travel to space. Imagine a plane that was thrown away after every flight, how expensive would flights be compared to what we have? That's the difference between previous heavy lift vehicles like a Saturn 5 that took men to the moon and Starship.

So because this vehicle is so big they can't really built it all in secret, instead doing it on test stands in Boca Chica. Annoyingly the naming is a bit crap, 'Starship' refers to the whole vehicle and just the upper stage, while the booster bottom section is called superheavy. Therefore Starship plus Superheavy makes Starship. Makes sense? No, it doesn't to me either. Anyway they are currently onto the 8th iteration of the 'starship' upper stage.

They have already done some 150m hops with previous versions, SN5 for example
Which are basically testing the tanks and a single engine.
SN8 will be going one step further in the next week and testing a 15km flight using 3 engines. This will include turning the engines off and free-falling using aero dynamics to control it back to site before the engines kick back in to slow it to land. Very similar to what they do with the Falcon 9.
https://twitter.com/x/status/1325170500667060227
This is quite a good animation of what they want from SN8

Superheavy is just a stretched out Starship. The same engines, the same tanks, just more of them and bigger. So the fact they have started to make the first superheavy iteration means they are quite happy with how starship is going so are going to start scaling up. It will have 28 engines version the final starship version having 6.

Elon Musk comes in for some shit, and rightly so. But this is vehicle is so much further into development than anything else of similar capabilities. It won't make living on Mars a thing for most of us, but there is a good chance it will start to deliver the payloads that can take first men there and make it survivable.
A minor additional point is that the engines powering this thing were a new designed aimed at burning Methane rather than the usual RP1 rocket fuel. The reason is Methane can be make from resources on Mars. Therefore they don't have to carry fuel all the way to Mars that they need to get back, they just make it when they get there.
 
I was given a telescope by a mate who moved away a few months ago, but I've never been able to get it to work, can't seem to get it to focus. I might be doing something stupidly wrong.

Even just aiming at the moon as a starting point is just a large bright blur.

Started to take more of an interest in the planets and night sky in general more in recent years. Think it's just an age thing, and starting to appreciate just how small we are in the grand scheme of things.
 

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