Ever wondered what it sounds like when you close the door of a 11 metre wide, 9 metre deep, & 16.4 metre high concrete chamber?
Wonder no more – my Test Centre colleague, Jan Demming, demonstrates the ~20 second reverb time of the Large European Acoustic Facility at ESA's ESTEC today 🙉
Normally used to test satellites under the enormously loud conditions of launch, we were in the LEAF today for quite a different purpose 😉
Just saw what looked to be a satellite, but it appeared to resemble two very closely packed dots instead of one. Like maybe twice the width apart than the xamidimura constellation. Checked, ISS isn't due to pass over for another half an hour, and it's on the other half of the sky.
Two craft undergoing rendezvous maybe? it was certainly something in orbit because it was going in a straight line at a constant speed. Probably a little slower than the ISS.
Roughly 6:14pm AEST, Hobart TAS, going south-westerly to north-westerly.
Here are the first engineering images from #ESAEuclid, our mission to study the dark universe.
Each shows the full Euclid field, with 36 CCDs for the visible camera, VIS, & 16 HgCdTe detectors for the near-IR imager & spectrometer, NISP, plus zooms to show more detail.
This is just the beginning 🖖🤘
Full story & links to the very large full-res zoom images:
Our colleagues from the Japanese space agency JAXA are currently attempting the soft landing of their SLIM spacecraft on the Moon & you can watch live online 👇
There's a lot of trash on the moon right now—including nearly 100 bags of human waste—and with countries around the globe traveling to the moon, there's going to be a lot more, both on the lunar surface and in Earth's orbit.
Listening to a status update on our ESA #JUICEmission to Jupiter & its icy moons from Project Manager Giuseppe Sarri.
The word “nominal” is repeated many times and it is a beautiful thing 🛰️
Still some instruments to be turned on & hardware to be deployed, but after the release of the stuck RIME radar boom, the team is feeling quite relieved 👍
You first go slow - less than 100m/s (360kph, or 220mph) for the first stage, up to around 30-40km. This gets you above the thickest atmosphere. Then the second stage can take over with an engine more optimized for vacuum.
Congratulations to our colleagues at the Indian Space Research Organisation on the successful soft landing of their Chandrayaan 3 probe on the Moon 🇮🇳🌕👏
#OTD in 2004: ESA’s Rosetta probe & its lander Philae started their ten-year journey towards Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko & spaceflight history 🚀🛰️☄️
Launched on an Ariane 5G+ at 04:17 local / 07:17 UT from Europe’s spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, Rosetta & Philae had three gravity assists at Earth & one at Mars ahead of them, plus two asteroid flybys & 2.5 years of deep space hibernation, before their rendezvous with the comet in August 2014.
Outstanding news from our ESA #JUICEmission to Jupiter & its icy moons, launched on 14 April 🚀🛰️
The 16-metre long RIME radar antenna, designed to probe up to 10 kilometres into the icy crusts of Ganymede, Europa, & Callisto, has now been successfully deployed, after earlier problems 👍
Excellent work by our project & operations team, & fantastic news for all of the scientists involved 🙇♂️
Excellent news: as hoped for, JAXA’s upside-down moon lander, SLIM, has woken up again now that the Sun has shifted in the lunar sky, allowing light to fall on its solar panels.
A pair of astrophysicists, one with Kindai University, the other the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, both in Japan, have found possible evidence of an Earth-like planet residing in the Kuiper Belt. In their paper published in The Astronomical Journal, Patryk Sofia Lykawka and Takashi Ito describe properties of the...
Transferring around 80GB of videos from my phone to a backup drive: lots of interesting things taken over the past three years or so.
Here's one: my view of Ariane 5 VA256 in the BAF at CSG Kourou in French Guiana on 23 December 2021, with #JWST on top, ahead of rollout to launch pad ELA-3 & their flight into space legend on Christmas Day.
In spaceflight news today, China is about to launch three of its astronauts on Shenzhou 18 towards the Tiangong space station: liftoff is in about 7 minutes from now.
Should be going on CGTN within the next hour to talk about the mission & international collaboration in space exploration.
The latter is certainly an interesting question given the current geopolitical context 😬
Fingers crossed for my friends in the ESA #BepiColombo mission operations team & colleagues from industry as they work to restore the solar electric propulsion system to full power 🤞
The SEP system is critical to adjust Bepi’s trajectory between the various Mercury flybys, slowing the spacecraft down ahead of entry into orbit around this enigmatic innermost planet in December 2025.
Could white holes actually exist? (www.space.com)
White holes are mathematically possible, according to general relativity. But does that mean they're actually out there?
A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams (arstechnica.com)
Let’s not send a few thousand people to Mars as a big experiment in survival....
Space junk in Earth orbit and on the moon will increase with future missions—but nobody's in charge of cleaning it up (phys.org)
There's a lot of trash on the moon right now—including nearly 100 bags of human waste—and with countries around the globe traveling to the moon, there's going to be a lot more, both on the lunar surface and in Earth's orbit.
First contact with aliens could end in colonization and genocide if we don't learn from history (www.space.com)
How humanity responds to the first contact with intelligent alien life could determine the very fate of our species.
Japanese astrophysicists suggest possibility of hidden planet in the Kuiper Belt (phys.org)
A pair of astrophysicists, one with Kindai University, the other the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, both in Japan, have found possible evidence of an Earth-like planet residing in the Kuiper Belt. In their paper published in The Astronomical Journal, Patryk Sofia Lykawka and Takashi Ito describe properties of the...
Something Just Smacked Into Jupiter And Amateur Astronomers Captured It (www.iflscience.com)
You come at the king, you best not miss.
Webb telescope spots water in a nearby planetary system | CNN (www.cnn.com)
The James Webb Space Telescope detected water vapor swirling around a planetary system 370 light-years away.