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There is no dark side of the moon


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On 4/29/2020 at 9:24 AM, Toepoke said:

Watched a great Horizon last night about 30 years of the Hubble Space Telescope...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000hjpw/horizon-2020-hubble-the-wonders-of-space-revealed

 

The Space Shuttle was a flawed concept but it brought home how much it achieved and how badly it's missed. 

 

The next big space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, should be launched next year. The European contribution was led by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. There are four instruments on JWST, one of them was built mostly on the top of Blackford Hill in Edinburgh. 

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2 hours ago, biffer said:

The next big space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, should be launched next year. The European contribution was led by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. There are four instruments on JWST, one of them was built mostly on the top of Blackford Hill in Edinburgh. 

Is that the one that's being placed way out beyond Earth orbit?

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16 hours ago, Toepoke said:

Is that the one that's being placed way out beyond Earth orbit?

Yeah, it’s going to one of the Lagrange points. These are points where the sun / earth gravity balances out to the extent you can have a stable orbit so that you’re in the same position relevant to earth all the time.
 

Lagrangianpointsanimated.gif

JWST is at Lagrange2 which is about 900,000 miles further away from the sun than the earth is. The advantage there is that you’re permanently in the shadow of the earth, so the sun doesn’t interfere with the astronomy measurements. 

Edited by biffer
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55 minutes ago, biffer said:

Yeah, it’s going to one of the Lagrange points. These are points where the sun / earth gravity balances out to the extent you can have a stable orbit so that you’re in the same position relevant to earth all the time.
 

Lagrangianpointsanimated.gif

JWST is at Lagrange2 which is about 900,000 miles further away from the sun than the earth is. The advantage there is that you’re permanently in the shadow of the earth, so the sun doesn’t interfere with the astronomy measurements. 

Interesting cheers.

I'm guessing the fact it's not geostationary will introduce some challenges communicating with it?

 

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52 minutes ago, Toepoke said:

Interesting cheers.

I'm guessing the fact it's not geostationary will introduce some challenges communicating with it?

 

Nah. As I’m sure you know, Most satellites aren’t geostationary, and something of this scale will be tracked by multiple large stations globally to ensure uninterrupted comms. Or it could use geostationary networks as relays. There’s a few ways to do it, and I’m now intrigued by which way JWST is doing it, so I’m off to check.

edit - duh on my part, should have remembered NASA operates something it calls the Deep Space Network, which is a series of ground station used to make sure we have continuous comms with all deep space missions. If you think about it, the same problem applies to all of our interplanetary probes, so this network has been in place for decades. A form of it was used for the Apollo missions.

Edited by biffer
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Not only does a universal constant seem annoyingly inconstant at the outer fringes of the cosmos, it occurs in only one direction, which is downright weird.

 

Those looking forward to a day when science's Grand Unifying Theory of Everything could be worn on a t-shirt may have to wait a little longer as astrophysicists continue to find hints that one of the cosmological constants is not so constant after all.

In a paper published in Science Advances, scientists from UNSW Sydney reported that four new measurements of light emitted from a quasar 13 billion light years away reaffirm past studies that found tiny variations in the fine structure constant.

 

https://phys.org/news/2020-04-laws-nature-downright-weird-constant.html

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5 hours ago, phart said:

Not only does a universal constant seem annoyingly inconstant at the outer fringes of the cosmos, it occurs in only one direction, which is downright weird.

 

Those looking forward to a day when science's Grand Unifying Theory of Everything could be worn on a t-shirt may have to wait a little longer as astrophysicists continue to find hints that one of the cosmological constants is not so constant after all.

In a paper published in Science Advances, scientists from UNSW Sydney reported that four new measurements of light emitted from a quasar 13 billion light years away reaffirm past studies that found tiny variations in the fine structure constant.

 

https://phys.org/news/2020-04-laws-nature-downright-weird-constant.html

See, now this is cool and interesting stuff which challenges the theories of fundamental physics. Rather than some of the preschool stuff that’s been on this thread.

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7 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

Bit of an awkward day for the Flat Earthers

Was it though? I was out (twice, at 15 mins after launch, and also 10.15pm when i read i could see the rocket)....and saw NOTHING.

Also, the landing of the booster 'conveniently' lost signal during touchdown.

FLAT EARTH CONFIRMED. SPACE IS FAKE! :lol:

 

 

45044775-2055-45b4-84c1-b70a109b6dcf.jpeg

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