There are no neighborhoods in space, not even in quotation marks.

This is the direct result of corporations and governments not cleaning up after themselves, which is now just normal and depressing. They've all known what would happen if they didn't take action but they all made the decision to kick that can down the road multiple times and now here we are.

How long do we have before they start offloading the blame for orbital debris on rank and file citizens like they've done with carbon emissions?

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No, it's just for almost an entire decade they handled all transport to and from the ISS.

Because that's how the human brain is wired, it works best under competition, it's simply a matter of evolution.

If the first space race hadn't ended we would have seen Moon bases a long time ago.

Their flight to the ISS felt like a historical moment. Not only that, it all went so well as if they were showing off how calm and collected they were on a Sunday afternoon.

OK, thanks. It appears that my information must be out of date then. (I was taught about nuclear explosions being ineffective due to objects either re-coalescing (long range, rubble piles etc), or being too close to divert from earth (close range).

I was taught that the 'buckshot' effect of a bolide being destroyed via nuclear explosion would only be slightly, if at all (depending on size) preferable to the original impact, given that tracking so many fragments makes evacuation of specific cities/countries etc impossible. There's arguments involved about total kinetic energy transfer from impactor to earth, too.

(I was also taught that other options, propelling the object in a more controlled manner, are terrible in comparison to nuclear explosions, due to the age old limitations of the rocket equation. I'm sure you're familiar. )

However:
Now that we're discussing it, it might well be the case that I was being taught about interstellar objects, since the lecture grew out of a lesson about objects with an orbital eccentricity > 1.

Thanks for your post, I'll find some more recent opinions and info about solar system objects and educate myself further!
(If we have anything like the technology to propel even solar system objects I'll be super-impressed!)

Oh, the 'other thing' -

I certainly didn't mean that I disagreed that an impact could be disastrous. What I disagree with is: The idea that we have become as adept as we are at detecting asteroids and comets, out of a desire to survive.

If you read the other comments in this topic you'll see a few examples of this claim, and it's that I am challenging. (I'm really hoping this is clear now, because I'm trying really hard to state it clearly but it still seems hard to have it land. I really never said what you took me to mean, sorry.)

To clarify again: I believe that we have become as adept as we currently are because of an interest in astronomy, the general desire to understand physics, even geology and the origins of the universe etc! Not out of a desire to survive impacts.

I guess it's because the US VP is the Chair of the National Space Council. I'm guessing they want to compartmentalize and keep having the VP being the WH's lead for Space Activities.

The retriever won't have to trace any of Perseverance's journey, it will go directly to Perseverance and transfer the samples, or if there's a problem with that it will go directly to the depot as a backup.

Whats the vid, very interesting. Thanks for linking it.

Interesting! I'm satisfied when they come up with propulsion that emits blue-ish fire.

Lone dusty sample - Persy Bot ft. Snoop Dogg

that's totally manageable, or at least within reach once we sort out renewable food, necessities, etc

could go three threes. 3 to get there, 3 to stay do shit, 3 to return. i'm sure there's people who would sacrifice just under a decade of their life for that experience

Taking these in order:

>Agreed, but last I checked, any detection is happening way to late to do anything with current technology.

Simply not true; big ones are spotted and plotted years in advance, plenty of time to mount missions to deal with them.

>My thoughts are that, if we were truly motivated by the 'life or death' nature of a potential impact as some here implied (I disagree with this reasoning)

You disagree that a large asteroid would be an extinction level event? The one that wiped out the dinosaurs was a bit more than 6 miles in diameter- and it would do the same to humanity.

Apophis, the one that blew by here a few years ago, was discovered in 2004. Its diameter is only 600' but we know it comes close to Earth occasionally. If the probability of impact were high, we definitely would put together a mission to meet it...

>efforts would be going into means of stopping them (we have pretty much none), rather than detection.

..which leads to my last points; first, we have to detect them to know they're coming. Hell, we want to know about every chunk of rock flying around the solar system just because!

Second, between large boosters to get heavy payloads into orbit, high yield nuclear weapons, and precision guidance of the kind demonstrated by NASA's recent impactor mission, we definitely have the capability to do the job. It's a question of will, that's all.

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Looking good. 🛸🔭👽

Throw a net on it and drag it back down.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878218/space-junk-remove-debris-net-harpoon-collisions

Because president Biden has bigger fish to fry.

I wasn't necessarily assuming that Perseverance would be functional to hand the samples over; rather, I thought it might intentionally store the onboard samples in a fashion where another rover could easily grab them without direct intervention from Perseverance itself. Something like a tray or rack of tubes with each sample having exposed grips.

The comments made by others suggest that Perseverance does have onboard samples like this, and the dropped ones are secondary (in case something happens to Perseverance to destroy all its onboard samples -- I don't know, catastrophic damage to its radioisotope power generator? Or perhaps more realistically, it gets stuck in a sandy area which is too dangerous for other rovers to approach without also getting stuck), which makes more sense.

Machine learning algorithms are already being used in old astronomy datasets to find things the original researchers missed. AI is perfect for that kind of job, massive datasets and hard to find/model patterns.

It's not a great as the article seems to think, it's around 500 secs from hydrolox according to Scott Manley. A few pictures I've seen make it look like an aerospike which makes sense with an annular combustion chamber, so may well be good for a first stage or an SSTO. Another concept I've seen recently is a sort of nuclear thermal/ion hybrid with an ISP of a few thousand whilst generating serious thrust, this makes more sense for deep space.

Time lapse.

Gives me hope to know they can track something so incredibly small with at least a little bit of warning.

My boy!!! Doug Hurley went to my alma mater, I got to hang out with him for a bit senior year. Great dude, super laid back. Huge Pink Floyd fan

"When pondering the probability of discovering technologically advanced extraterrestrial life, the question that often arises is, "if they're out there, why haven't we found them yet?" And often, the response is that we have only searched a tiny portion of the galaxy. Further, algorithms developed decades ago for the earliest digital computers can be outdated and inefficient when applied to modern petabyte-scale datasets. Now, research published in Nature Astronomy and led by an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, Peter Ma, along with researchers from the SETI Institute, Breakthrough Listen and scientific research institutions around the world, has applied a deep learning technique to a previously studied dataset of nearby stars and uncovered eight previously unidentified signals of interest."

That’s true, but we don’t know enough to say it’ll ever happen again. We just don’t. People say “surely it MUST happen again” but basically the universe and other life is Schrödinger’s cat. Or… Schrödinger’s Alien?

Hall effect thrusters so far almost always use solar/battery power, but could also use nuclear. The Soviet Kosmos 1818 and 1867 had nuclear powered hall thrusters.