61–70 of 134 posts
"The SPHEREx mission will map the entire sky four times over two years, offering scientists a chance to study how galaxies form and evolve, and providing a window into how the universe came to be." So each object will be scanned ~6 months from the previous scan. How much evolving within the universe will be noticeable within that 2 year run? My gut response is not much, but that's why we do the science to see the cha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Notwithstanding what you said, it is worth noting that the US Space Force has been a long time in the making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force
Trump is the one who actually decided to go through with the creation of a distinct branch rather than having it as a command. I think it is fair to say he created it. There are all sorts of politicians and military members who advocate for a distinct Cyber branch of the military instead of Cyber Command. If a politician ends up doing that, then he should get credit for creating it even though it has been a long time…
It's not 'instead', it's adding a cyber branch to a different org chart. There are two major org charts in the US military:
The services, such as Army, Navy, Space Force, etc., which are generally defined by domain (land, sea, orbit) and whose role is to recruit, organize, train, and equip forces - to prepare them, but not to deploy or command them in operations.
The combatant commands, which are defined by geography - such as Africa Command, Indo-Pacific Command - and sometimes by geography-independent domains, such as as Space Command or Cyber Command. The combatant commands deploy the resources provided by the services in various combinations. Modern conflicts generally require resources from multiple services/domains working jointly.
It makes some sense - you want domain experts to train and equip them for their domain, then you must necessarily deploy them jointly. Who should organize, train, and equip sea-born forces? Probably you want the Navy to do that, not the Army. Who should organize, train, and equip electronic domain forces (I hate the term 'cyber')? Do you want your IT organization organized, trained, and equipped (think of the importance of each step) by the US Marine Corps, or maybe by some actual researchers, engineers, and experienced managers?
It always surprises me how my enthusiasm for scientific discovery is affected by fears of a dystopian future. My understanding is that with red shift calibration here we'll get a much better idea of the 'when' in terms of various galactic structures emerged, that might give us an interesting idea of where we are in the life-cycle of the Milky Way. But the observation of water signatures will be the most interesting t…
We actually have quite a good idea about the history of the Milky Way and all the smaller galaxies that it’s eaten (and will eat, such as our main current satellites the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds). We’re even pretty sure that the MW merged with another large galaxy about 11bil year ago, sometimes called “Kraken” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken_galaxy?wprov=sfti1. SPHEREx is not interested in any of that, and it looks like it’s galactic science will mostly be mapping out where clouds of ice crystals are in the Milky Way. SPHEREx has very low spatial resolution (about 6 arcsec), so it’s certainly not observing any exoplanets, but that’s the trade off with an all-sky mission like this.
One of the big drivers of the extragalactic science, though, is looking for signatures of cosmic inflation in the distribution of galaxies on large scales. IMO this is by far the most interesting science case, and will be genuinely exciting and novel. Its survey design doesn’t give it great resolution, but it’s amazing IR spectrophometry will let it map the rough distribution of galaxies at redshifts we haven’t been able to survey before. This is called intensity mapping
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Even a Dragon could bring enough hardware and a crew for a small upgrade or repair (to say nothing of the upcoming Starship).
Can dragon launch to a polar orbit and safely deorbit from a polar orbit?
"The SPHEREx mission will map the entire sky four times over two years, offering scientists a chance to study how galaxies form and evolve, and providing a window into how the universe came to be." So each object will be scanned ~6 months from the previous scan. How much evolving within the universe will be noticeable within that 2 year run? My gut response is not much, but that's why we do the science to see the cha…
To answer three of your questions: - It is passively cooled rather than using an expendable coolant- "SPHEREx relies on an entirely passive cooling system — no electricity or coolants are used, simplifying the spacecraft’s design and operational needs." - It is a Medium-Class Explorers (MIDEX) mission - Investigations characterized by definition, development, mission operations, and data analysis costs not to exceed…
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Dragon lacks a Remote Manipulator System (Robot Arm) and a airlock. things that make servicing objects in space a lot easier. Im sure somewhere at NASA or SpaceX there is rough set of specs on what a shuttle like starship would look like complete with payload bay, robot arm, and eva airlock.
The complete specs of the arm may now belong to a hostile nation.
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Dragon lacks a Remote Manipulator System (Robot Arm) and a airlock. things that make servicing objects in space a lot easier. Im sure somewhere at NASA or SpaceX there is rough set of specs on what a shuttle like starship would look like complete with payload bay, robot arm, and eva airlock.
The complete specs of the arm may now belong to a hostile nation.
Hardly hostile. Unless you poke the bear.
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Dragon lacks a Remote Manipulator System (Robot Arm) and a airlock. things that make servicing objects in space a lot easier. Im sure somewhere at NASA or SpaceX there is rough set of specs on what a shuttle like starship would look like complete with payload bay, robot arm, and eva airlock.
The complete specs of the arm may now belong to a hostile nation.
If you're alluding to China, they probably had the data from the Russians anyways.
Otherwise, I'm out of guesses to your vagueness.