Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
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Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
I haven’t been excited for much recently, but I’m excited for this!
This test image is already a bit mind blowing and it’s unfiltered, uncalibrated, and never meant to be seen by humans. Taken by the fine guidance sensor these images would normally never get sent back due to bandwidth limitations, once used to keep track of a target they would be trashed.
This with its hundreds/thousands of galaxies, some literally invisible to the human eye, is a garbage image compared to the full sensor sweet:
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
Woo NASA scooped themselves and released the first of a set of images today with the rest tomorrow. I can’t seem to hotlink to NASA… eta: Found a link.
To give a comparison of how much brighter and sharper this is, Hubble’s first deep field image was a total of 140 hours of exposure time over ten consecutive days, Hubble’s extreme deep field was 23 days of exposure time composited from 10 years of observations. I don’t know the exact exposure time for this image but it’s magnitudes less.
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ari
To give a comparison of how much brighter and sharper this is, Hubble’s first deep field image was a total of 140 hours of exposure time over ten consecutive days, Hubble’s extreme deep field was 23 days of exposure time composited from 10 years of observations. I don’t know the exact exposure time for this image but it’s magnitudes less.
12 and a half hours.
Quote:
This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks.
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
I watched the big reveal live and I probably won't be doing that again. The production quality was just painful. I was very forgiving since that isn't their primary mission, but next time I will just head straight to the image gallery on their site.
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
I downloaded the full resolution Webb images and pull them up on my 4K monitor and zoom in all around. Looking at the full size image it looks quite a bit better than Hubble, but zoom in and you can really see how much more improved the images are. Zoom in on those faint red-orange dots and you will see what the early universe looked like.
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
SpaceX may have just punched itself in the face, but it’s hard to say what the fall out will be.
Deciding to go with high strength concrete instead of a more complex and costly launch pad, the most recent launch not only turned it into a crater, but debris spewed up into the rocket damaging engines almost immediately on take off, dooming the test from the start. Also smashing up a van and spraying tiny peddles onto the neighbors.
Despite the giant crater and destroyed rocket this is all still being considered a success as the rocket itself performed quite well, especially after taking a blast of concrete to the under body, and it does make the flight more impressive once I learned it basically blasted a shotgun at it’s engines and then still took off.
To be fair to Musk, he knew this could be an issue and tweeted that not building a proper launch pad could be a mistake, but that also means this was a known problem, and managements attempt to cut corners was the real failure here.
While seemingly having multiple Starships ready to go, this will probably halt the program for quite some time while they develop a real launch pad with flame diverters and vibration dampening systems, or a more complex launch system that pulls the rockets away from the base more before hitting full throttled.
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
They want to eventually land and takeoff from the moon and Mars. Maybe only the upper stage with fewer engines?
The lower gravity will make it easier, but they probably can't build even a concrete launchpad - much less a steel one with flame-diverting trenches, in advance of the landing.
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
Indeed, part of the reason they went with concrete is at least there’s a chance they could mix and pour concrete on mars, but things like the water deluge suppression system are just impossible, although I think they’re getting ahead of themselves, Musk seems to be aiming for a 1950s style vision of traveling to Mars and back, when the reality is we’ve never launched off Mars before. They may be trying to solve launch problems that don’t exist on Mars while ignoring ones that do because they don’t have enough data to know any better.
Luckily Starship seems to be Musk’s playground area and hasn’t impacted any of their orbital launch abilities.
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
I always hoped that by now, we would have actually realized some of the cool Sci-Fi gear that guys like Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein wrote about in the 60s.
Rail Guns, "Space Elavator", shit like that.
We are still making rockets. Big, noisy, polluting, and difficult to do round trips, and, did I mention "noisy"?
We lived a few miles from Redstone Arsenal when I was a kid, and they were testing various Rocket engines there - Restone, Atlas, Saturn.
Used to shake and rattle the house when they fired them off.
And, I've been to a number of launches over the years down at Cocoa Beach. The Shuttle launches made the Saturn and everything before seem almost quiet.
A friend in Texas says that Elon's big bruiser topped them all. Seems like after 70 years of doing this, we should be able to come up with something more efficient and quiet.
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Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
A Japanese Lunar lander decided to fly by the seat of its pants and performed a perfect landing on the moon, 5km above the surface, after which its fuel ran out and it fell those 5km to its doom.
It appears that as it went over a crater ridge it’s radar spiked triggering an error at which point it assumed the radar was broken and stopped listening to it, choosing to do the landing based on assumed position instead.
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
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