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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 3rd, 2024

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  • It wasn’t even a trip into orbit. Their rather short voyage was a sub-orbital hop. A low orbit of Earth requires a speed on the order of 8 km per second - Blue Origin can make about Mach 3, from what I read, which is circa 1 km per second. You go up, you go down. That’s it. They don’t even go particularly high (~100 km), and the apogee doesn’t keep you “above the atmosphere” (LOL) for long. Given the risks, I’m not sure it’s worth it, personally.

    If we really want to inspire people by pointing out women’s accomplishments in spaceflight and space exploration, maybe we should be talking about people like Eileen Collins (astronaut on key shuttle/station missions), Lindy Elkin-Stanton (science lead for Psyche, the first to a metallic asteroid), Maria Zuber (lead the GRAIL mission to the Moon, co-discovered the rifts in the Ocean of Storms), or Mimi Aung (lead engineer for the Ingenuity 'copter on Mars 2020). And I’ve only mentioned a few Americans with recent work here; the rest of the world has plenty of enterprising female space scientists and aerospace engineers.

    I share the general distaste in this thread and on Lemmy generally for this sort of celebrity stunt, and I’m glad to see the criticism. I do sometimes think, however, that for a certain kind of person, Bezos and Musk are becoming associated or even synonymous with spaceflight/exploration generally, which is a dangerous association to make. People have many, diverse and very legitimate reasons for going to space - there’s a lot more going on than joyrides and ego trips.










  • AHHH the suspense! Come on relay network, send us the next ones ASAP! I know those sats are busy too, but this wait is killing me.

    I really wasn’t sure we’d abrade here. I mean, we skip past funky-looking darker caprock all the time (for months at a time when Ken Farley is in a hurry)! Even when the rover can physically reach it. Just look at this stuff, it’s craggy and lumpy as anything… but that flattish patch they’re grinding: yes.

    Even with all the evidence for volcanic deposits around here, I honestly wouldn’t guess what this abrasion patch might show us. Volcaniclastic rocks like tuff aren’t the hardest for sure, but this stuff forms the resistant layer here. We focus a lot on sampling with this mission, understandably, but I’d love to read more about the science team’s deliberations over whether we do (or don’t) stop and abrade stuff. We always abrade before we take a sample, so abrasions are just as important as samples in a lot of ways…

    Apologies for the word salad. Paul Hammond knows my pain.



  • In 2004, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity spotted so-called, “Martian Blueberries” at Meridiani Planum, and since then, the Curiosity rover has observed spherules in the rocks of Yellowknife Bay at Gale crater. Just a few months ago, Perseverance itself also spied popcorn-like textures in sedimentary rocks exposed in the Jezero crater inlet channel, Neretva Vallis. In each of these cases, the spherules were interpreted as concretions, features that formed by interaction with groundwater circulating through pore spaces in the rock. Not all spherules form this way, however. They also form on Earth by rapid cooling of molten rock droplets formed in a volcanic eruption, for instance, or by the condensation of rock vaporized by a meteorite impact.

    See also this recent Mars Guy episode.