Preferably powerful enough to make make some nice northern lights, but not so powerful it fries the electric grid and take us all back to the stone age
It’s not. The photos with the horizon visible are photos taken during the descent, whereas the photos with only ground visible were taken as landing was imminent (or after landing).
There is a photo on the page that shows the horizon from a landed position, that's the one he's referring to.
It links to, and is displayed, here; with no indication that it's an artist's take on what it would look like. It seems to be D. Mitchell's stitching work from this Venera-13 clear-filter panoramic transmission with added perspective from the color-filter panoramic transmissions.
Hm. Had a skim through the article and I hit this:
And it is unclear whether a spacecraft could even be launched successfully through the debris shell to enable travel to other planets. Humans would effectively be trapped on Earth by space junk, with multiple tonnes of vaporized metal being added to the upper atmosphere every day through re-entry^12.
This is a common misunderstanding of the scale of space and the scale of how much debris a "Kesseler syndrome" would entail. I checked the article referenced at the end and it was only in support of the "vaporized metal being added to the upper atmosphere" part of this statement, not the "trapped on Earth" line.
We would not be "trapped on Earth" by Kessler syndrome. The debris is only a problem for something orbiting within it, exposing it to continuous risk of collision for months or years on end. Simply passing through is very unlikely to damage a craft.
So an alarmist misunderstanding was inserted into the middle of this article without any reference backing it up, which makes me dubious about the rest of the article as well.
I’d have to read it more throughly, but the biggest annoyance with starlink is right after launch when they’re all clustered and super bright because they haven’t hit their normal positions. When you’re doing really long exposures, a satellite screaming through your field momentarily is easy enough to filter out those noisy frames.
Is light pollution from satellites great for earth based astronomy, no. Are they ruining astronomy like so much click bait leads you to believe, not in my opinion.
Different telescopes will have different impacts and separate from the direct trails general light pollution is absolutely a problem. The don’t build these things in the middle of no where for fun.
This isn’t a random science writer relaying a sci-fi conversation they had, it’s a respected astronomer with multiple publications in Nature.
I would love to see the cost/feasibility of boosting to a stable/graveyard orbit. The ISS is massive and not built for that kind of maneuver, but it would be great to be able to preserve it for the future.
It’s too old to be retrofitted and it wasn’t designed to last forever.
The computer systems on board controlling all the essential systems, I’d have to assume given the age of the station and when everything was designed, they’d have used 32 bit computing tech because that was what was prevalent when the station launched.
A lot of people say “boost it into graveyard orbit” but another problem is that physically it was not designed to last forever, and just over general wear and tear, it will begin to disintegrate and rain fragments, so it is much safer to deorbit and decomm.
Just unfortunate that it can’t be preserved as a space-tourism destination or something of the sort. Would be neat if it was made into a museum something
Using a high-temperature plasma tunnel, scientists have discovered what it might be like to plumb the depths of Uranus.
Sure, we know it would be smelly; but there are other considerations that need to be taken into account when designing a probe that can withstand the rigors therein.
Now that the experiments have been successfully performed, researchers can use the information acquired to develop the sensors that will measure the ice giants’ atmospheres as they plunge into the mysterious depths. Of Uranus.
I say give it to them, billionaires today have no class, just take it and give it to our fellow nerds. Problem solved! Elon was going gamble it away anyway.
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