Space

ZRod said:
GM_Tood said:
NASA captures footage of enormous solar flare

And so it begins.....

While solar flares are a common occurrence on the sun, it's not everyday that we get an X-class flare.

However, sun watchers were given a treat this week when the star let off a huge solar flare, according to NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The flare peaked around 5 p.m. PT on Monday and NASA published a video (see below) of the event on Tuesday.

Solar flares are bursts of radiation propelled off the sun. This latest flare was classified as X4.9, which means it was an incredibly significant burst of light and one of the largest of the solar cycle.
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So when's the Aurora coming?
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Tonight.

 
I watched Moonraker movie several months ago. In the last scene, James Bond encountered with a brunet chick in zero-gravity space. I was wondering......hanky-panky secret affair or experiment sex on ISS or MIR or Space Shuttle missions? Just wondering.

Guaranteed astronauts/cosmonauts horny as hell after one month mission.

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Probably half the people never heard of Buran program. Watch youtube 3:00 mark. I think out of control wheelie (almost crashed).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikxwNCcKREY

Buran looked similar to ours but completely different design and I think, fatter. Also, "boxie" shape.

Brief story:

It was lifted into orbit, on an unmanned mission, by the specially designed Energia rocket. Unlike the NASA Shuttle, which was propelled by a combination of solid boosters and the Shuttle's own liquid-fuel engines fueled from a large fuel tank, the Energia-Buran system used thrust from the rocket's four RD-170 liquid oxygen/kerosene engines developed by Valentin Glushko and another four RD-0120 liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen engines.

Even though the program was delayed by several years, Buran was the first space shuttle to perform an unmanned flight, including landing in fully automatic mode. The Buran automated launch sequence performed as specified, and the Energia rocket lifted the vehicle into a temporary orbit before the orbiter separated as programmed. After boosting itself to a higher orbit and completing two revolutions around the Earth, ODU (engine control system) engines fired automatically to begin the descent into the atmosphere. Exactly 206 minutes into the mission, the Buran orbiter landed, having lost only five of its 38,000 thermal tiles over the course of the flight.[10] The automated landing took place on a runway at Baikonur Cosmodrome where, despite a lateral wind speed of 61.2 kilometres per hour (38.0 mph), it landed only 3 metres (9.8 ft) laterally and 10 metres (33 ft) longitudinally from the target mark.[10] Specifically, as Buran approached Baikonur Cosmodrome and started landing, spacecraft sensors detected the strong crosswind and "the robotic system sent the huge machine for another rectangular traffic pattern approach, successfully landing the spacecraft on a second try."

The project was cancelled after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this never took place. Several scientists looked into trying to revive the Buran program, especially after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Eventually, Buran was totally destroyed due to hanger collapse (plus 8 people killed).

 
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Big Bang breakthrough announced; gravity waves detected

(CNN) -- There's no way for us to know exactly what happened some 13.8 billion years ago, when our universe burst onto the scene. But scientists announced Monday a breakthrough in understanding how our world as we know it came to be.

If the discovery holds up to scrutiny, it's evidence of how the universe rapidly expanded less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

"It teaches us something crucial about how our universe began," said Sean Carroll, a physicist at California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study. "It's an amazing achievement that we humans, doing science systematically for just a few hundred years, can extend our understanding that far."

What's more, researchers discovered direct evidence for the first time of what Albert Einstein predicted in his general theory of relativity: Gravitational waves.
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Hi Everyone,

Exciting news—the rumors have proved to be correct.

Here is a quick summary of what the excitement is all about:

The dominant scientific approach to cosmology, called the 'inflationary theory,' predicts that that just after the birth of the universe, space experienced a tremendous burst of expansion, causing it to swell from far smaller than the size of an atom to perhaps even farther than we can now see with our most powerful telescopes, all within a minuscule fraction of a second.

Tiny variations in the original space would have been stretched out in the expansion—and much as a pulled piece of spandex reveals the pattern of its weave, these stretched “quantum jitters” would be imprinted on the residual heat from the universe's earliest moments, and would be detectable as a pattern of subtle temperature variations in the night sky. We’ve been finding and mapping these variations—a specific pattern of hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background radiation -- with ever-greater precision since the early 1990s, a triumph of modern cosmology.

Today, researchers at Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, leading a team of researchers using a facility at the South Pole, say they’ve found, for the first time, a long-predicted second kind of fluctuation: ripples in the fabric of space itself, set down in the universe’s earliest moments. Believed also to be generated by quantum processes, these spatial vibrations are inferred from a delicate twist they impart to the cosmic background radiation.

If the results stand, they are a landmark discovery. They provide our first look into energy scales that are perhaps a million million times larger than that of the Large Hadron Collider, and will greatly sharpen our theoretical understanding of events that happened perhaps a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. The results also affirm, once again, the astounding power of mathematical analysis to lead the way into the most remote corners of creation.

--BG
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Anyone watching the new Cosmos series? It's sort of an update/remake on the old Carl Sagan series and is hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The first episode was mehhh, but I really enjoyed episode 2. Probably just me being a biologist
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