Tod Lauer

I remember that from the time. It was spectacular and imaginative. And hey!! They discovered that Jupiter had rings by looking back on the night side! That was a real shock!

FOGS!? That’s like packing an umbrella with you when you go up to the mountain…

IIRC that was about the time of the Voyager flyby, so parallel ground observations would have been of value. I didn’t know that you ever did planetary astronomy, though!

Two weeks! That’s always his go to line when he needs an interval to forget about something.

A common solution to the Fermi Paradox is to say, "Hey, ETI is all over the place, but all will destroy themselves after a few 100 yrs. with 100% probability." The only non-depressing answer is that we are largely alone.

Remember a star.

What? Really?

NASA Announces Plan To Bring Wi-Fi To Its Headquarters By 2017 HOUSTON—NASA administrator Michael Griffin announced during a press conference Tuesday that the space agency is launching an ambitious mission to make Houston’s Johnson Space Center wireless-Internet ...

This remains one of my all time favorite Onion articles. theonion.com/nasa-announc...

Sorry - looks like I was flat out wrong about the centaurs...

Ahh... I need to go back to my texts! I had incorrect thought that the centaurs provided the final Delta-V.

What about the 4 pioneer/voyager centaurs?

I would be surprised if you can do it with pretty good accuracy. You know trajectory at the point of burnout,, and after that it's all ballistic.

Oh, my bet is you could get one. DSN would have good tracking over the burns, and after that it's all ballistic. Might even be in JPL horizons...

The 5 stages were complete functional spacecraft until they completed their burns - more than a "part." All had uncontrolled Jupiter flybys, and the two Voyages by Saturn as well. They are large artifacts - more massive than the probes, and are on separate paths out.

Depends on your definition. New Horizons, the two Voyagers, and the two Pioneers, all had high velocity final-stages on their boosters that are also leaving the solar system after Jupiter flybys. The Pioneers and Voyagers used Centaurs; NH used a Star 48B, so you have at least 11 craft.

I've been wondering about something like this for ages - particularly when I get a nasty referee...

I wish they would resolve to take jokes like this off the grid.

Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed

From my 64th, which was in 2021:

We always do binary birthday candles- for my 64th I had I lit candle and 6 unlit ones...

Image by Tod Lauer

Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed

Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed

I guess this is how Eloi came to be.

I don't understand this. In an elliptical orbit with maximal breaking at perigee, you're more efficient at losing E than L. The effect would be to preferentially lower the apogee and circularize the decaying orbit.

If it hits 80 km it’s already reentering

Youch!!!

There will be much time and little to do...

Umm… you misunderstood what I am saying. I think we need to fix things like right now. “We” refers to our collective society that’s blowing this off. Exploring space or not is irrelevant.

We can fix the planet any time we want to. Space exploration has nothing do with why we consistently choose not to fix it.

Leave the word exploration out of it and that covers a lot of the issues. Companies do commercial space activities that will earn them profits over what they invest. It will still be NASA or something like it that does the exploration, likely in league with companies it can buy services from.