Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Another missed opportunity for Jamie Dimon to just shut the fuck up.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

It’s not hopeless, and we’re not helpless.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

It’s easier to kill a dangerous animal than a man who just happens to have different thoughts/values than one’s own.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

Motown is Joe-Town!

The lights are all blinking red.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

You are here: Home / Nature & Respite / Nature / Cool Space Stuff Afternoon Respite

Cool Space Stuff Afternoon Respite

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I got nothing to add to the daily parade of tragicomic horrors that constitutes our media diet these days. (Actually, I do, but can’t get to posting anything of much substance in my current state of work and life craziness.)

But this little video caught my eye and tweaked my “ooooh…space is cool” button:

.
Yup: an extraterrestrial has been brought down to earth. Admittedly, it’s not exactly sentient, but still, everything about this mission is satisfying. I love “slow” science. I don’t know how long the design and engineering of the spacecraft took, but it’s been 7 years since this little vehicle was sent on its way, and now it’s back. It takes a special kind of focus and deferring of gratification to enter into projects like this, and I admire and am grateful to those who do such work.

Cool Space Stuff Afternoon Respite

And damn! Chips from the port-planetary disk!  You just don’t get that every day, do you.

Totally open thread. Enjoy, my fellow space cadets.

Image: Vincent van Gogh (but you knew that), Starry night on the Rhone, 1888

Reader Interactions

32Comments

  2. 2.

    randy khan

    That was a way cool mission.  Like the Webb telescope, more proof that we can do great things.

    (By the way, I just finished Newton and the Counterfeiter.  It was fascinating.  I knew the bare bones of Newton and the Mint, but getting a more complete picture was great.)

  4. 4.

    narya

    @randy khan: IIRC, there’s a whole bunch in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle about Newton and the mint and counterfeiting. I don’t remember any of the details, though.

  7. 7.

    SpaceUnit

    It’s like the engineers at NASA never watched a sci-fi movie.

     

    Trust me, this doesn’t end well.

  8. 8.

    artem1s

    The ‘mother ship’ that dropped off this little guy and it’s Bennu samples is already heading out towards another near earth object  that will pass close to earth in 2029.

  10. 10.

    Kristine

    The NOVA episode about the project is available in various locations (PBS Passport, IIRC Amazon Prime). The planning. The moment they realized that the surface of Bennu was not like they thought it was…

  11. 11.

    NotMax

    Not to in any way minimize the achievement, kudos also due japan.

    While these are NASA’s first samples collected and brought back from an asteroid, they are not the first in history. Japan’s Hayabusa mission in 2010 delivered to Earth a few micrograms of material from an asteroid called Itokawa. A second mission, dubbed Hayabusa2, delivered to Earth a small sample from an asteroid known as Ryugu in December 2020. Source

    Onward to Apophis! (same link)

    The $1 billion OSIRIS-REx spacecraft may have completed its high-profile delivery, but the probe is not yet finished with its journey. After releasing the sample capsule, the spacecraft fired its thrusters to take it beyond Earth and on a course to investigate another asteroid known as Apophis. This space rock, which measures about 1,200 feet across, is projected to come within 20,000 miles of Earth in 2029.

    20,000 miles is really, really close — ~1/12th the average distance from Earth to Moon.

  12. 12.

    bjacques

    Ooh! I was on that shore a few days ago! By that bell tower on Rue 4 September. Me and the missus treated my pop to a trip to Provence for his 90th, and we spent a few days in Arles. The LUMA foundation has an ongoing show of the work of Diane Arbus. It’s got a baby picture of Anderson Cooper.

  13. 13.

    gwangung

    I’ve taught my first class in Asian American theatre. Both I and my students survived.

    (I may have to make more use of my show videos than first intended…)

  14. 14.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Leto: Immature youngster’s take: She’s definitely excavating something.

    A twisted person might recall also that many of the paintings on the walls of Pompeii were advertising diagrams for what was on offer in certain houses. The girl’s contemplative look thus may reflect…varied thoughts.

     

    ETA: I see that some of the commentators at the link are also twisted, immature youngsters. :)

  16. 16.

    randy khan

    @narya:

    One reason I wanted to read Newton and the Counterfeiter was to find out what really happened and what was made up, since I was pretty sure that no counterfeiter ever escaped the executioner quite the way that Jack Shaftoe did.

  20. 20.

    Tom Levenson

    @narya: There is. But I had to tell Neal that I couldn’t read his work until I’d finished my Newton–it was too great a distraction to have his guy sounding off in my head while I was trying to get inside my version.

    He was gracious about it (and I read the Baroque Cycle after Newton and the Counterfeiter came out, and enjoyed it thoroughly).

  21. 21.

    Roger Moore

    @narya:

    Stephenson spent a lot of time researching the background for The Baroque Cycle, so he knew all this stuff.  Part of the fun of any historical fiction like that is including all kinds of weird and amazing details the typical reader probably never knew about.  Newton leaving physics to run the mint and then acting as a detective to chase down counterfeiters is just so fantastic it’s hard to believe even with all the evidence proving it happened.

    Just as an aside, the cases of Newton and Leibniz are interesting because they’re part of a broader trend of mathematical prodigies not achieving as much as expected based on their early work.  It’s amazing how many of them either died young or got sidetracked into other fields, as both Newton and Leibniz did.  I suspect some of this is because until quite recently pure mathematics was seen as too abstract, and anyone who wanted to be taken seriously had to get into a more tangible field.  Even Gauss, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians ever, felt the need to get involved in astronomy rather than remain a pure theoretician.

  22. 22.

    Jeffro

    This was exciting news – thanks Tom!  I love most anything about the Webb telescope, long-range probes, all of it.  =)

    This also caught my eye earlier in the week: Mammals’ Time On Earth Is Half Over

    Pangaea Ultima is coming...in a quarter billion years…and, well, go long on dinosaur futures, peeps!

    It’s been about 250 million years since reptile-like animals evolved into mammals. Now a team of scientists is predicting that mammals may have only another 250 million years left.

    The researchers built a virtual simulation of our future world, similar to the models that have projected human-caused global warming over the next century. Using data on the movement of the continents across the planet, as well as fluctuations in the chemical makeup of atmosphere, the new study projected much further into the future.

    Alexander Farnsworth, a paleoclimate scientist at the University of Bristol who led the team, said that the planet might become too hot for any mammals — ourselves included — to survive on land. The researchers found that the climate will turn deadly thanks to three factors: a brighter sun, a change in the geography of the continents and increases in carbon dioxide.

    “It’s a triple whammy that becomes unsurvivable,” Dr. Farnsworth said. He and his colleagues published their study on Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
    Pangea Ultima will also influence the climate thanks to its topography, which will include vast stretches of flat land far from the ocean. On today’s Earth, rainwater and carbon dioxide react with minerals on the sides of mountains and hills, which then get carried out to sea to fall to the sea floor. The result is that carbon dioxide is steadily pulled out of the atmosphere. But when Earth becomes home to Pangea Ultima, that conveyor belt will slow down.

    If Pangea Ultima behaves like previous supercontinents, it will become studded with volcanoes that belch carbon dioxide, the model found. Thanks to the turbulent movements of molten rock deep in the Earth, the volcanoes may release vast surges of carbon dioxide for thousands of years — blasts of greenhouse gases that will make temperatures rocket up.

    Currently, humans are heating the planet by releasing more than 40 billion tons of carbon from fossils fuels each year. If global warming continues unabated, biologists fear it will lead to the extinction of a number of species, while people will be unable to survive the heat and humidity in large swaths of the planet.

    On Pangea Ultima, Dr. Farnsworth and his colleagues concluded, things will probably get far worse for mammals like us. The researchers found that almost all of Pangea Ultima could easily become too hot for any mammal to survive. They might disappear in a mass extinction.

    Dr. Farnsworth granted that a few mammals might eke out an existence in refuges on the fringes of Pangea Ultima. “Some areas in the northern and southern peripheries could be survivable,” he said.

    (whew)

    (but still pretty cool!  reverse pun NOT intended!)

  24. 24.

    Seanly

    No one in Piedmont Arizona cracked open the canister before the Air Force arrived?

    Still, think I’m going to grab some sterno on the way home…

  25. 25.

    narya

    @randy khan: Hah! Yeah, probably not. It was also interesting to learn that malaria can cure syphilis, of all things.

    @Tom Levenson: @Roger Moore: I’m a big fan of his–I’ve actually slogged through the Baroque Cycle twice. As with Dorothy Dunnett, of all people, I like learning about historical people from the fictional people the authors put around them; it sticks better in my brain, somehow

    ETA: Now if I could only get through Braudel . . .

  26. 26.

    Freemark

    I actually sis my undergraduate research for my physics degree at Arecibo observatory modeling Bennu using Blender and the Doppler radar scans of Bennu obtained at Arecibo. Arecibo’s radar was pretty awesome for near-Earth asteroid research.

  27. 27.

    Hoppie

    Had the great privilege in 1990 to see the huge Van Gogh exhibition in Amsterdam and Otterlo.  Hard to believe it was a third of a century ago.  Some of my own (modest) collection is expressionist realism of the inspired-by-Van Gogh variety.

  28. 28.

    Bill Arnold

    @NotMax:

    20,000 miles is really, really close

    Around 20000 miles is around 110 milliseconds. (The unit that matters. :-) 220 ms ping time.) Around 2.5 Earth diameters.

  29. 29.

    lowtechcyclist

    @NotMax:

    20,000 miles is really, really close — ~1/12th the average distance from Earth to Moon.

    I think that’s even a little closer than geosynchronous orbit.

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