Scott Manley's view on this landing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muK6gFtv7_o

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

It's alive.

Japan's SLIM lunar probe regains power after nine days.

Japan's SLIM lunar probe has regained power more than a week after running out of electricity.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) re-established communication with its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) late on Sunday, nearly nine days after the probe's touchdown made Japan the fifth country to put a spacecraft on the Moon.

The probe, which lost power because its solar panels were at the wrong angle, was likely able to generate it again because of a change in the sunlight's direction, JAXA said.

SLIM resumed its operations to analyse the composition of olivine rocks on the lunar surface with its multi-band spectral camera, in search of clues about the origin of the Moon, the agency added.

SLIM touched down on the Moon within 55 metres of its target in a crater near the lunar equator on January 20.....

Cheers.

How will it go this time?

The sun’s poles are about to flip. It’s awesome — and slightly terrifying.

The sun is getting ready to flip.

Every 11 or so years, the sun undergoes an epic transformation: its magnetic poles reverse. Like on Earth, the sun has a magnetic North and a magnetic South. But unlike Earth, whose poles flip on the order of hundreds of thousands of years, the sun’s shuffle is a regular occurrence. The sun’s poles last reversed in 2013. So we’re just about due — likely starting some time this year.

The solar poles flipping is not, as it might sound, the sign of impending apocalypse. You won’t notice it when it happens. The solar cycle only minorly impacts the climate here on Earth. But it’s what happens before the flip that can cause trouble.

Leading up to the pole reversal is a time of increasingly intense magnetic activity on the surface of the sun. That’s what’s happening right now. “We are indeed seeing the sun more active than it’s been in probably something like 20 years,” says Paul Charbonneau, a solar physicist at the University of Montreal.

During these peak periods of solar activity, it’s the most extravagant fireworks display in the solar system. “When the magnetic energy content of the sun is a lot larger, that’s when you tend to get more solar flares, more [coronal] mass ejections — more fun stuff,” Charbonneau says.

Of particular concern are coronal mass ejections. These are explosions that hurl charged matter like shotgun shot across the solar system — aka a “solar storm.” If these storms reach our planet, they have the ability to disrupt communications satellites in space, of which there are an ever-increasing number, thanks to internet provider satellites like Elon Musk’s Starlink. If the conditions are just right, they even take parts of our energy grid on the ground offline......

Source of Fast Radio Bursts (FRB)

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland
Roll up, roll up. See Ouroboros-3 eating its own fuselage

The concept of a self-eating rocket is rearing its head once again as engineers showcase their work at the AIAA SciTech Forum.

Autophage engines – where the rocket effectively consumes itself – were first proposed and patented in 1938. However, it took until 2018 before boffins managed to design and fire one in a controlled manner. Nearly five years on, and more progress is being made: more energetic liquid propellants can be used, and the fuselage can be fed into the rocket without buckling.

The next step will be producing a flight vehicle, something Krzysztof Bzdyk, a postgraduate researcher at the James Watt School of Engineering, tells The Register could make a suborbital test flight as soon as 2027. Fingers crossed.

Houston, we have touchdown.

Incredible drama as Odysseus lunar lander arrives on the moon.

For the first time since the Apollo era, an American spaceship has landed on the Moon: an uncrewed commercial robot, funded by NASA to pave the way for US astronauts to return to Earth’s cosmic neighbor later this decade.

Odysseus, built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, touched down near the lunar south pole Thursday at 2323 GMT, after a nail-biting final descent where flight controllers had to switch to an experimental landing system and took several minutes to establish radio contact with the lander after it came to rest.....

Cheers.

Scientists are developing a 'Universal' Snake Antivenom:
Synthetic development of a broadly neutralizing antibody against snake venom long-chain "alpha"-neurotoxins
Full details in link above.

The Odysseus Lunar Lander reportedly tipped over on its side, upon landing, like the Japanese lander before it. This apparently explains the difficulty in establishing radio contact with it, and the compromised status of communications with it, since then. I have a suggestion: make landers wider than they are tall, thus much more stable.

The occupants of the Moon appear to have quite a liking for tipping Earthlings landing craft over....

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

An awkward family reunion: Sea monsters are our cousins

Stowers scientists uncover how sea lamprey brain development is remarkably similar to that of humans

“People thought that because sea lampreys lack a jaw, their hindbrain was not formed like other vertebrates,” said Krumlauf. “We have shown that this basic part of the brain is built in exactly the same way as mice and even humans.”

13-year-old has eureka moment with science project that suggests Archimedes’ invention was plausible

Brenden Sener, 13, of London, Ontario, has won two gold medals and a London Public Library award for his minuscule version of the contraption — a supposed war weapon made up of a large array of mirrors designed to focus and aim sunlight on a target, such as a ship, and cause combustion — according to a paper published in the January issue of the Canadian Science Fair Journal.

Well that didn't work.

Space One’s private rocket carrying satellite explodes seconds after launch.

A rocket has exploded seconds after its $7 million launch in a spectacular failure for the start-up company who made it and planned to put a satellite into orbit.

Tokyo-based Space One’s 18-meter Kairos rocket blasted off from the company’s own launch pad in western Japan, carrying a small government test satellite.

But seconds later, the solid-fuel rocket erupted into balls of flame, sending smoke billowing into the remote mountainous area, live footage showed......

Is there anyone from the U.S. on this forum who is planning to visit a select location in:

KY, ME, NH, VT, NY, PA, OH, IN, IL, MO, AR, OK, TX

around lunchtime on April 8th?

I can only recommend to do that. A once in a lifetime opportunity...

Is there anyone from the U.S. on this forum who is planning to visit a select location in:

KY, ME, NH, VT, NY, PA, OH, IN, IL, MO, AR, OK, TX

around lunchtime on April 8th?

I can only recommend to do that. A once in a lifetime opportunity...

I live in the Southern portion of Fort Worth TX meto area, right in the path of total darkness and will watch from the comfort of my back yard. There are all kinds of "watch parties" through out the metro area. The local high school has one in their parking lot & football stadium for the students & staff.

Blood test detects sleep deprivation with 99.2% accuracy

Using a machine learning algorithm, the researcher identified a suite of metabolites – a substance created when the body breaks down food, drugs, chemicals or its own tissues – that predicted sleep deprivation across 40 hours of wakefulness. When they tested the biomarker, they found that it detected people who’d been awake for 24 hours with a 99.2% probability of being correct when compared to their own well-rested sample. When the well-rested sample wasn’t used for comparison, the test’s probability fell to 89.1%, which is still high.

Bumblebees don't care about pesticide cocktails: Research highlights their resilience to chemical stressors

Bumblebees appear to be quite resistant to common pesticides. This is shown by a new study, the results of which have now been published by scientists from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in the journal Environment International.

Will it finally work? Or will it be yet another flop for the trouble prone company?

And lives are on the line this time.

After years of delay, Boeing to try again with Starliner space capsule.

Before a door-size panel blew out of a Boeing 737 Max, leaving a gaping hole in the side of an Alaska Airlines aircraft shortly after takeoff; before whistleblowers came forward to say they were threatened for bringing up safety issues at the company; and before the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the blowout incident, Boeing was struggling with another set of issues, on another high-profile vehicle.

Its Starliner spacecraft, designed to fly astronauts to orbit under a $4.2 billion contract from NASA, had suffered a series of problems that put its launch with astronauts years behind schedule. Its onboard computer had failed during its first test flight. A second test flight was scrubbed after valves in the vehicle’s service module stuck and wouldn’t operate. Then, after the craft finally flew a test mission successfully without anyone on board, Boeing discovered that tape used as insulation on wiring inside the capsule was flammable and would need to be removed. The parachute system also had problems, which forced the company to redesign and strengthen a link between the parachutes and the spacecraft.

Now, a decade after NASA awarded Boeing a contract to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, Boeing will finally attempt to fly its Starliner spacecraft with people onboard. If all goes to plan, at 10:34 p.m. on Monday, the company is set to fly a pair of veteran astronauts, Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, on a mission that will be one of the most significant tests for Boeing’s space division — and for NASA — in years......

Not yet...


Valve vexation: Boeing's Starliner grounded again
wrote:

Boeing's long-delayed Starliner crewed launch, which was scheduled for today, has been postponed yet again, this time due to a valve problem on the Centaur upper stage. Managers pushed back the next attempt to no earlier than May 10.

It is the closest Boeing has come to launching a crew in the Starliner capsule. The countdown was approaching the two-hour mark before the scrub call came in as managers worried about "anomalous behavior by the pressure regulation valve in the liquid oxygen tank of the Centaur upper stage of the ULA Atlas V launch vehicle," according to Boeing...

... Sunita "Suni" Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore, had boarded the spacecraft before the scrub was called. This launch was set to be the 100th flight of the Atlas V rocket, and notably the first carrying humans...

... It has taken nearly ten years for Boeing to reach this point. In 2014, it was awarded $4.2 billion and SpaceX $2.6 billion as NASA sought to reduce its reliance on Russia and launch its astronauts from US soil on American spacecraft. The goal was to end dependency on Russia by 2017...

Boeing = bad valves?...

Here's hoping that on this occasion, the Engineers are not to be brow-beaten by the Media or by any overly stressed Managers...


Fly safe!
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Valve vexation: Boeing's Starliner grounded again...

With all the problems Boeing has making aeroplanes fly safely, with their luck the spacecraft probably never gets off the ground.