This Is So Sweet! What A Nice Way To Spend A Saturday Night.

SpaceX SES-10 Mission successfully Launch

SpaceX - Falcon 9 / SES-10 Mission patch. March 31, 2017

Falcon 9 carrying SES-10 satellite launch

SpaceX took a step into the future Thursday as it reused – for the first time – a recovered first stage of a previously-flown Falcon 9 rocket. Thursday’s mission, carrying the SES-10 communications satellite, lifted off from Pad 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center Thursday 30 March at 18:27 local time (22:27 UTC) and once again landed the booster.

Falcon 9 launch of SES-10

Thursday’s mission made use Falcon 9 the second orbit-capable rocket – after the Space Shuttle – to achieve partial reusability. The Falcon 9 flew from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, the same pad from which the Shuttle began eighty-two of its missions, including its first and final flights. Reusability has long been a key objective for SpaceX. Making the company’s first launch in March 2006, the small Falcon 1 vehicle carried a parachute system intended to bring its spent first stage back to Earth.

Falcon 9 first stage landed on drone barge

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket deliver SES-10, a commercial communications satellite for SES, to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO). SES is a world-leading satellite operator, providing reliable and secure satellite communications solutions across the globe.

SES-10 satellite

The SES-10 mission mark a historic milestone on the road to full and rapid reusability as the world’s first reflight of an orbital class rocket. Falcon 9’s first stage for the SES-10 mission previously supported the successful CRS-8 mission in April 2016. For more information about SpaceX, visit: http://www.spacex.com/ Images, Video, Text, Credits: SpaceX/SES. Greetings, Orbiter.ch Full article

Spacewalk complete and new astronaut record set! Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson of NASA successfully reconnected cables and electrical connections on an adapter-3 that will provide the pressurized interface between the station and the second of two international docking adapters to be delivered to the complex to support the dockings of U.S. commercial crew spacecraft in the future. The duo were also tasked with installing four thermal protection shields on the Tranquility module of the International Space Station.

 Having completed her eighth spacewalk, Whitson now holds the record for the most spacewalks and accumulated time spacewalking by a female astronaut. Spacewalkers have now spent a total of 1,243 hours and 42 minutes outside the station during 199 spacewalks in support of assembly and maintenance of the orbiting laboratory.

 Astronaut Thomas Pesquet of ESA posted this image and wrote, ’ Shane and Peggy on their way to their first #spacewalk tasks.’

 Credit: ESA/NASA

Binary star systems have come up a lot in the past 18 podcasts, and here is a perfect example of them!

As promised, here is a comic about the brightest star in the northern Hemisphere: Sirius! Sirius B will be shown in future comics as 2018 is year of the dog and since Sirius is the dog star, it is year of the Sirius!

Enjoy!

https://www.space.com/21702-sirius-brightest-star.html

This photo of Astronaut Charlie Duke’s family has been on the moon for the last 43 years.

via reddit

After spending a month attached to the ISS, the Dragon spacecraft succesfully lands in the pacific and is shipped back to land.

via reddit

Ep.17 Edmond Halley - HD and the Void

Edmond Halley was heavily involved in the establishment of modern astronomy, whether through his direct observational work or through the support he offered others in his field. Hear a quick overview of the man who's popped up so much throughout t...

I’m back! July was nuts! June was also nuts! I’ve missed this podcast, though, and have been thinking about it the entire time because I will never stop loving space. I was working my way through a very meaty book on Edmond Halley and I am here to report on my findings, and also compile some of the things I’ve already said about this cool guy and his cool contributions to science.

Below the cut are my standard glossary, transcript, timeline of people mentioned, sources, and music credits. I take topic suggestions from Tumblr messages, you can tweet at me on Twitter at @HDandtheVoid, or you can ask me to my face if you know me. Subscribe on iTunes to get the new episodes of my increasingly erratically updated podcast, and please please please rate and review it. Go ahead and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it, too!

(My thoughts on the next episode are Stephen Hawking and his theories or famous comets. The next episode will go up in August—hopefully August 20th!)

Glossary

sidereal year—the time required for the earth to complete an orbit of the sun relative to the stars.

tropical year—the interval at which seasons repeat and the basis for the calendar year.

Script/Transcript

Timeline

Julius Caesar, Roman (100-45 BCE)

Augustus Caesar, Roman (63-14 BCE) 

Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish (1473-1543)

Pope Gregory XIII, Italian (1502-1585)

Tycho Brahe, Danish (1546-1601)

Johannes Kepler, German (1571-1630)

Johannes Hevelius, Polish (1611-1687)

Giovanni Cassini (in French, Jean-Dominique Cassini), Italian/French (1625-1712)

Queen Christina, Swedish (1626-1689)

Isaac Newton, English (1643-1727)

John Flamsteed, English (1646-1719)

Elisabeth Hevelius, Polish (1647-1693)

Edmond Halley, English (1656-1742)

John Harrison, English (1693-1776)

Sources

Morse, Stephen P. “The Julian Calendar and why we need to know about it.” The Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly (March 2014). Accessed July 15, 2018.

Julian Date Converter via the Astronomical Applications Department of the U.S. Naval Observatory.

Hughes, David W. “Edmond Halley, Scientist.” British Astronomical Association (1985). Accessed July 27, 2018.

Cook, Alan. Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1998.

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

Light Echoes Used to Study Protoplanetary Disks : This illustration shows a star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. A new study uses data from NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope and four ground-based telescopes to determine the distance from a star to the inner rim of its surrounding protoplanetary disk. Researchers used a method called photo-reverberation, also known as light echoes.

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Tampons were packed with their strings connecting them, like a strip of sausages, so they wouldn’t float away. Engineers asked Ride, “Is 100 the right number?” She would be in space for a week. “That would not be the right number,” she told them. At every turn, her difference was made clear to her. When it was announced Ride had been named to a space flight mission, her shuttle commander, Bob Crippen, who became a lifelong friend and colleague, introduced her as “undoubtedly the prettiest member of the crew.” At another press event, a reporter asked Ride how she would react to a problem on the shuttle: “Do you weep?”

Astronaut Sally Ride and the Burden of Being “The First” (via dinosaurparty)

Escape velocities for every planet in the solar system

Ep. 15 Dark Energy Part 2 - HD and the Void

I've talked about dark matter, now it's time to talk dark energy. Learn why it exists as a theoretical (and maybe actual) object, how we see its effects manifest in the universe, and what it means for all our theories if it is or is not real.

(I broke the last link, whoops)

Another week of theory, but no fun new particles. Instead, hear me try to say a lot of names of scientists or their eponymous equations as I talk about dark energy in the universe! Learn what some astronomers think it is and why other astronomers think there are better explanations for certain nutty galactic phenomena.

Below the cut are my sources, music credits, a vocab list, and the transcript of this episode. Let your voice be heard and tell me what you think I should research next by messaging me here, tweeting at me at @HDandtheVoid, or asking me to my face if you know me in real life. And please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, rate it and maybe review it, and tell friends if you think they’d like to listen!

(If anything about dark matter or dark energy or cosmic microwave background radiation confused you over the past few podcasts, for sure send me your questions so I can ask someone more qualified than me—my doctorate student friend! My thoughts on the next episode are still the Voyager golden records, space race history, the transit of Venus, the Moon landing, Edmond Halley, or Dark Sky Preserves and it will be up on November 20th.)

Glossary

baryons - heaviest particles. Ex. Protons, neutrons. In astroparticle physics, electrons are included in baryonic matter.

cosmic microwave background radiation - the electromagnetic radiation left over from the time of recombination in Big Bang cosmology.

dark energy - a theoretical force made up of unknown, undetectable energy. It is used to explain why the universe is expanding more rapidly over time instead of slowing its expansion.

dark matter - a theoretical mass made up of unknown particles that have not been created on Earth. It is used to explain why galaxy clusters have 10x the mass that their light output suggests they would have; why distant stars on the edges of spiral galaxies orbit at the same speed as stars near the center of the galaxy; and the accretion of gases that created galaxies at the beginning of the universe.

fundamental forces - four fundamental forces in our current model of the universe: the strong and weak nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force, and gravity.

gravitational lensing - when light from more distant sources passes near a massive star, galaxy, or galaxy cluster and the object’s gravity bends the light like a lens to provide a warped angle view of space.

Transcript

Sources

Dark energy via NASA

Dark energy via Hubble

“The strangeness of dark energy is thrilling.”

Fundamental forces via Georgia State University

Dark energy via Science Magazine (April 2017)

László Dobos: “We assume that every region of the universe determines its expansion rate itself.”

Dark energy and the South Pole Telescope via Smithsonian Magazine (April 2010)

“Knowing what dark matter is would help scientists think about how the structure of the universe forms. Knowing what dark energy does would help scientists think about how that structure has evolved over time—and how it will continue to evolve.”

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Filler Music: ‘Even The Darkness Has Arms’ by The Barr Brothers off their album The Sleeping Operator

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught