zeeblecroid

zeeblecroid t1_jail3qv wrote

I think they were expecting Dimorphos to be a lot less squishy than it turned out. Instead of hitting a rock, the spacecraft struck a rubble pile, and was able to penetrate enough to dump most of its energy into Dimorphos rather than just dumping it onto Dimorphos.

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zeeblecroid t1_jaicv8h wrote

To head off the usual flood of identical comments that seem to come up every single time this mission's mentioned: no, there is no possibility, zero, none whatsoever, that Dimorphos will somehow fly out of its orbit and hit Earth (or any other planet). It ain't gonna happen, that's known for certain, stop reflex-fretting about it.

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zeeblecroid t1_jaa36hv wrote

Pretty much. It's a black hole into which VC dollars fall and no useful product will escape, at least with any of the startups claiming to be working on the problem. They're always talking about direct physical rendezvous with some gimmicky method of capturing one single piece of debris, which isn't ever going to so much as dent the problem.

It's laser brooms or nothing, and none of the startups are looking in that direction - again, because none of them have any real intention of following through anyway.

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zeeblecroid t1_j2x1veq wrote

If that's the only thing you can think of I can only guess you aren't paying attention, given funds vanishing on those kinds of scales has been a thing for far longer than one new congresswoman has been doing the rent-free thing in peoples' heads. Unless you're saying she made those claims while Bush was in office too, I guess.

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zeeblecroid t1_j25oyry wrote

Zero - it's not burning the right elements to be near that point yet.

Stars on the road to supernovas go through a sequence of burning increasingly heavy elements for increasingly short periods of time, and Betelgeuse is still in the helium-burning phase. The following phases burn carbon, neon, oxygen and silicon in order, and once a star starts gnawing on its helium that gives observers about one thousand years' warning. Betelgeuse is 600-ish lightyears out; if it was most of the way through that process we'd be able to tell.

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zeeblecroid t1_j24699b wrote

That's actually been talked about quite a bit over the years. The general consensus is "schedule things based on the time zone you launched from, face towards the Earth's surface, and do your best to approximate the physical motions given you're in microgravity."

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zeeblecroid t1_j1vredc wrote

It's just a clickbait content-farm site.

Wouldn't be surprised if the posts were procedurally generated, since those sites do that more often these days since it's even easier than the traditional "steal other articles and throw a thesaurus at them" approach. We're going to see a pretty maddening amount of "news" "articles" in coming months that are just written by chatbots.

Pretty sure OP either owns or is working for that site, since they've posted nothing but links to it for months.

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