Space: The Final Frontier

[CaaC (John)+]

@nudge, how can we take the test without the link? 

[nudge+]

Just now, CaaC (John) said:

@nudge, how can we take the test without the link? 

Well shite I knew I forgot something  

https://www.astronaut-test.com/

[Mel81x+]

Thanks I too was wondering where the link was lol.

[CaaC (John)+]

I flunked... must be old age...hang on... I will get my coat  

 

 

 

[Mel81x+]

Not too shabby. Although I know it will never happen.

[Mel81x+]

4 minutes ago, CaaC (John) said:

I flunked... must be old age...hang on... I will get my coat  

 

 

 

Its okay sit next to me and you can copy my notes and the test as well.

[nudge+]

6 minutes ago, CaaC (John) said:

I flunked... must be old age...hang on... I will get my coat  

 

 

 

No worries if we get selected we'll just smuggle you in

 

5 minutes ago, Mel81x said:

Not too shabby. Although I know it will never happen.

Nice  What are you missing for the full 100%? And you never know; give it a go haha. I'd like to be able to boast I used to chat with an astronaut on a football forum  

 

Got this book recently and it contains loads of samples of actual tests used in astronaut selection; a nice brain workout at any case.

[CaaC (John)+]

5 minutes ago, Mel81x said:

Its okay sit next to me and you can copy my notes and the test as well.

I blame @Tommy and the Mafia they are out to get me and muddled my brain up 

[Mel81x+]

1 minute ago, nudge said:

Nice  What are you missing for the full 100%? And you never know; give it a go haha. I'd like to be able to boast I used to chat with an astronaut on a football forum  

That's what it says. I think the place i messed up was the IQ thing because I develop my own little theories about the pieces and this isn't anything new I knew I'd get poor scores there I have never been arsed with learning it.

[nudge+]

Just now, Mel81x said:

That's what it says. I think the place i messed up was the IQ thing because I develop my own little theories about the pieces and this isn't anything new I knew I'd get poor scores there I have never been arsed with learning it.

Haha exactly what I got plus my education score was lower  I think I messed up with that pattern matrix there.

[Mel81x+]

1 minute ago, nudge said:

Haha exactly what I got plus my education score was lower  I think I messed up with that pattern matrix there.

Never thought about that maybe the pattern matrix messed me up. Hmmmm. Either ways like I said space is fascinating but to be an astronaut is akin to being a ranger in the military and while I think I'd ace the SCUBA and the language learning I'd definitely have some issues with mission protocol learning at first.

[CaaC (John)+]

I tried it again and got %45 this time but when I read this I was happy a wee bit...

 

"You still have some things to work on before you meet NASA's requirements. But don't feel bad - the odds of you making it to space are pretty slim anyway. The agency received 18,300 applications in 2017 and only ended up selecting 12 candidates to take on for training at the Johnson Space Center."

[nudge+]

2 minutes ago, Mel81x said:

Never thought about that maybe the pattern matrix messed me up. Hmmmm. Either ways like I said space is fascinating but to be an astronaut is akin to being a ranger in the military and while I think I'd ace the SCUBA and the language learning I'd definitely have some issues with mission protocol learning at first.

Oh I can definitely relate to that haha. 

Astronaut sounds cool but these days I would prefer working on the technical side of things if I had a chance...

[CaaC (John)+]

13 minutes ago, nudge said:

No worries if we get selected we'll just smuggle you in

I'll sneak a ride  

 

[Mel81x+]

19 minutes ago, nudge said:

Oh I can definitely relate to that haha. 

Astronaut sounds cool but these days I would prefer working on the technical side of things if I had a chance...

You're right and I feel the same. Wouldn't want to be in space and I also prefer the technical side of things.

[CaaC (John)+]

29 minutes ago, nudge said:

 I think I messed up with that pattern matrix there.

I think that's where I came unstuck on 3 of them but...I did it again but I did a 007 and cheated a wee bit, I said I was 44 years old, 6ft tall and spoke fluent Russian and improved, cough, cough...        

 

 

 

 

[Bluewolf]

I don't think the likes of @CaaC (John) & myself are what they are looking for to be honest... They want young spring chickens not people that are unlikely to make it back alive.. Last thing @nudge & @Mel81x need is a couple of old dead dudes rattling about in the back of the shuttle because we passed away through old age before completing our mission.. We are the Robert Duvall's of NASA mate.. 

Need an asteroid on a collision course for earth blowing up?? Need a couple of expendables to go and meet with the hostile alien life form??? send them two old fellas that keep hanging about in reception... That's us mate.. 

I don't have the required degrees or speak Russian so that probably messed me up a bit.. Shame it does not have 'life experience' or we would be quids in.. 

 

Edited August 27, 2019 by Bluewolf

[Bluewolf]

12 hours ago, nudge said:

Well shite I knew I forgot something  

https://www.astronaut-test.com/

That has to be a NASA fail surely?? 

I can imagine us all coming in to dock with the alien Mothership  on an unknown hostile planet and someone says to Nudge "have you locked the docking co-ordinates in" and she is all... "er.. What?? I knew I forgot something.." 

[CaaC (John)+]

Pluto is a planet, Nasa chief says

Pluto’s status as a planet has once again been called into question after the head of Nasa said he believed the celestial body to be a planet.

Speaking at the FIRST Robotics event in Oklahoma, Nasa administrator Jim Bridenstine went against convention by placing himself firmly on one side of the Pluto debate.

“Just so you know, in my view Pluto is a planet,” he said. “You can write that the Nasa administrator declared Pluto a planet once again. I’m sticking by that, it’s the way I learned it and I’m committed to it.”

Pluto was first declared a planet in 1930 after it was discovered by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. At the time it was believed to be the ninth planet from the Sun, existing on the outer edges of the solar system in the Kuiper belt.

Its status as a planet was called into question 62 years later after other similarly-sized objects were discovered in the same region of space.

In 2005, astronomers discovered a dwarf planet called Eris that was 27 per cent larger than Pluto. A year later, the International Astronomical Union laid out its official definition for what constituted a planet. Pluto was not included.

Gallery: The most impressive photos from Nasa (Expresso)

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Since then it has been classified as a dwarf planet, though the icy object has attracted a dedicated following of people who claim Pluto should be considered a planet.

In 2015 Nasa’s New Horizons mission to Pluto made several major discoveries that added fuel to the debate.

Alan Stern, the Nasa scientist who led the New Horizons mission, subsequently co-authored a paper calling for Pluto to be reclassified.

 The planet Pluto is pictured in a handout image made up of four images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) taken in July 2015 combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view.

“Pluto’s status as a planet has sparked the human imagination for decades... Now is not the time to downgrade Pluto’s status.”

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/pluto-is-a-planet-nasa-chief-says/ar-AAGmthj?ocid=chromentp

[CaaC (John)+]

11 hours ago, CaaC (John) said:

@nudge, how can we take the test without the link? 

 

11 hours ago, nudge said:

Well shite I knew I forgot something  

 Bluewolf

That has to be a NASA fail surely?? 

I can imagine us all coming in to dock with the alien Mothership on an unknown hostile planet and someone says to Nudge "have you locked the docking co-ordinates in" and she is all... "er... What?? I knew I forgot something.." 

    

Edited August 27, 2019 by CaaC (John)

[CaaC (John)+]

Edit.

Forget this post, my spacings fucked up so I had to edit and delete. 

Edited August 27, 2019 by CaaC (John)
Spacing

[nudge+]

So SpaceX has successfully complete the final Starhopper test flight yesterday where the prototype launch vehicle lifted 150m into the air, moved sideways and then gently put itself back down onto the ground. One step closer to a manned Mars flight.

Beautiful capture:

 

Also an image showing the actual size of the vehicle:

 

 

More details: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2019/08/faa-spacexs-starhopper-hop/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

James Webb Space Telescope comes together

The successor to the Hubble observatory has reached a key milestone in its construction.

All the elements that make up the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have been brought together for the first time.

It sets the stage for some critical tests that will hopefully lead to a launch to orbit sometime in 2021.

JWST will use a colossal mirror and state-of-the-art instruments to try to see the glow from the very first stars to shine in the Universe.

It will also have the power to resolve the atmospheres of many of the new planets now being discovered beyond our Solar System and to analyse their atmospheres for the potential for life.

The telescope is a joint endeavour of the American (Nasa), European (Esa) and Canadian (CSA) space agencies.

• Hubble's $10bn successor delayed again
• Could Nasa's next big thing detect alien life?
• Scientists detect the legacy of first stars

It can be thought of as having three main parts - a telescope (mirrors and instruments); a big sun shield to shade its sensitive view of the sky; and a spacecraft unit that will manage the observatory's day-to-day operations in orbit.

These three segments have finally been bolted together at a Los Angeles factory facility belonging to the prime contractor, Northrop Grumman.

All the components that have gone into making JWST have been repeatedly tested - at both the individual and the integrated level.

That cycle of testing continues now that the three major segments are connected.

A vital test will be a demonstration that Webb can fully deploy its sunshield.

This tennis court-sized parasol is made up of five extremely thin layers of Kapton insulating film. Its job is to put the mirrors and four instruments completely in the shade when observing the cosmos. Stray light from our Sun would otherwise warm surfaces and swamp the faint infrared radiation coming from distant galaxies.

But to be effective, the shield must roll out properly without kinks and without tears.

"This is an exciting time to now see all Webb's parts finally joined together into a single observatory for the very first time," said Gregory Robinson, the Webb programme director at Nasa HQ in Washington, DC.

"The engineering team has accomplished a huge step forward and soon we will be able to see incredible new views of our amazing Universe."

Anyone who has followed the story of JWST knows it is running late - very late, by more than a decade.

The project has also gone massively over-budget. The cost after build, launch and five years of operations is estimated to be about $10bn. But this is a venture that astronomers fully expect to be a revelation.

The current Hubble telescope, for example, is restricted in how deeply it can see into space - and therefore how far back in time it can see. Its 2.4m-wide mirror cannot quite collect enough photons, and its instruments are not sensitive in just the right portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to be able to probe the era of the first-star formation - more than 13.5 billion years ago.

JWST, in contrast, has a 6.5m-wide mirror - seven times the light-collecting area of Hubble - and its instruments will be perfectly tuned in the infrared to pick up the light from these founding stars.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49504866

[CaaC (John)+]

'Space lift' could transport astronauts between Earth and the Moon, scientists claim

VIDEO  Scientists Want To Build A Space Elevator From Earth To Moon (GeoBeats)

Scientists have outlined a madcap plan to build an "elevator" between Earth and the Moon, claiming it could drastically reduce the cost of space travel.

Known as Spaceline, the elevator would consist of a giant lift shaft tethered to the surface of the Moon, which would dangle down into geostationary orbit around the Earth like a plumb bob.

Astronauts lifting off in rockets from Earth would only need enough fuel to reach the end of the Spaceline, where they would be free from Earth's gravity and atmospheric pressure.

After that, they would latch onto a solar-powered shuttle, which would transport them the rest of the way to the Moon.

The idea has been outlined by researchers from Columbia University and Cambridge University in a paper published to the preprint server ArXiv,

"The line becomes a piece of infrastructure, much like an early railroad," Zephyr Penoyre, one of the Columbia astronomy graduate students behind the Spaceline, told Futurism.

"The movement of people and supplies along it are much simpler and easier than the same journey in deep space."

In the paper, the researchers claim that the elevator shaft could not be built from any existing material, because it would snap before it could be completed.

The best material to use would be carbon nanotubes, the researchers claim, but these cannot yet be built to scale.

It would need to be extremely narrow at either end, so it didn't collapse under gravitational pressure but thickened at the middle to prevent snapping.

The researchers have not yet addressed the risk of space debris in near-Earth orbit colliding with the lift shaft, but claim that there may be ways to protect it.

If the space elevator ever becomes a reality, the researchers envision it being used to transport people to orbital telescopes and other man-made structures located between the Earth and the Moon.

These structures would hover around Earth at the Lagrange point - the altitude at which the Moon and Earth exert equal-but-opposite gravitational forces.

"The Lagrange point is the perfect place to build,” Penoyre told Futurism.

"We could (indulging in a little imagination) picture prefabricated panels being sent up the line, and assembled into an ever-growing colony.

"I was amazed to find that there are now thousands of people living a significant part of the year in Antarctica - eventually the same could be true of the Lagrange point.”

Gallery: Spectacular photos from space (Picture Services)

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https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/space-lift-could-transport-astronauts-between-earth-and-the-moon-scientists-claim/ar-AAGBQv2?ocid=chromentp

[CaaC (John)+]

Weird 'whiplash' planet is unlike anything astronomers have ever seen

Astronomers have discovered a giant planet whose extreme orbit makes it, unlike anything they've ever seen.

Dubbed HR 5183 b, the exoplanet is at least three times as massive as Jupiter, and it takes a long, looping path around a star that lies about 100 light-years away in the constellation Virgo. If the exoplanet were in our own solar system — in which Earth and the other planets move around the sun in nearly circular orbits — its extremely elliptical orbit would take it from beyond Neptune to within the orbit of Jupiter (see video below).

The discovery shows that "our universe is full of lots of weird solar systems totally unlike our own," Sarah Blunt, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and one of the scientists behind the discovery said in an email. "It seems like every time we think we've found the weirdest solar system, something else totally strange is discovered."

Blunt, the lead author of a paper about the discovery, called the exoplanet "a wacky object" and likened its movements around its host star, HR 5183, to "whiplash," speeding up as it swoops near the star's intense gravitation, slowing as it moves away and then beginning the cycle all over again.

She said other exoplanets with highly elliptical, or eccentric, orbits have been observed but HR 5183 b is the only one known to orbit its host star at such extreme distances.

"Something must have interacted with the planet to pump up its eccentricity," she said in the email, adding that one possible scenario was that HR 5183 b once had a neighbouring planet whose gravitation deflected the exoplanet. But it could have been a star that deflected the exoplanet — or "something we haven't thought of yet."

The astronomers didn't observe HR 5183 b directly but inferred its size and orbit by observing tiny "wobbles" in light from its host star caused by the changing gravitational pull of an orbiting planet (a technique known as the radial velocity method). The data that led to the discovery came from observations made at the Lick Observatory in Hamilton, California; the Keck Observatory in Waimea on the Island of Hawaii; and the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas.

Brendan Bowler, a University of Texas astronomer who wasn't involved in the new research, hailed the discovery, saying the exoplanet's extreme orbit around its star "is telling us something about the outskirts of planetary systems." He called the discovery "a stepping stone" on the path toward "understanding how planets form and to understand their statistical properties."

The astronomers behind the discovery aren't done yet with HR 5183 b. Blunt said it might be possible to determine the exoplanet's absolute mass using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory, which aims to produce a detailed census of about 1 million stars. In addition, she said, astronomers might simulate the formation of HR 5183 b to learn more about the conditions that led to such an exoplanet.

"There's a lot of next steps for this planet!" she said.

Gallery: An exploration of the planets in our Solar System (Photos)

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https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/weird-whiplash-planet-is-unlike-anything-astronomers-have-ever-seen/ar-AAGGNsa?ocid=chromentp