Nice of ESA/JAXA
To give all space enthusiasts in the Netherlands a Sinterklaas present in 2025. Looking forward to it. Fingers crossed for a successful launch and journey
BepiColombo, the first mission to Mercury for the European Space Agency (ESA), is due to lift off tomorrow morning at 0145 UTC on an Ariane 5 rocket. The spacecraft is named after Professor Guiseppe (Bepi) Colombo, who suggested to NASA that it might swing its Mariner 10 probe by Venus in order to visit Mercury in 1974 and …
To give all space enthusiasts in the Netherlands a Sinterklaas present in 2025. Looking forward to it. Fingers crossed for a successful launch and journey
Stories like this always make me want to fire up my copy of KSP.
I've caught the bug again. Been deploying a fleet of landers to tackle Jool's moons. Got to design my recovery craft and then wait for my launch window.
Also recovering a stranded Kerbal from the Mun for my son...
Go, Jeb! Go!
Once we've got over the one in twenty probability of failure during launch and boost, it ain't over.
The thrusters on the MTM aren't due to be switched on until a month after launch, so there's going to be a very large bunch of people turning very blue holding their breath over the next few weeks.
No, I assume they mean that the spacecraft will be down to 1.15kg by the time it reaches Mercury from all the bits it keeps dropping off and the fuel it's burned in order to get there.
So the 1st stage weighs something like 190 tonnes + 2 x 277 tonne solid rocket boosters + an upper stage, normally used to get to geostationery transfer orbit with 10 tonnes of propellant. All to get about a 10 tonne payload to GTO. But I assume it'll be different on this mission, using most of the payload weight as fuel in order to get to Mercury. We're talking nearly 700 tonnes of stuff, to get just over 1 tonne to orbit Mercury.
> "If the universe is expanding, that implies an edge which implies a centre of mass."
Current theory says that it's space itself that is expanding, and there is no "outside" for it to expand into. I gather that if you could travel long enough in a "straight" line you'd find yourself back where you started, but even that is impossible because space is expanding faster than light speed. In fact we can only ever observe a small portion of the whole thing.
Basically the universe is very weird, but we knew that.
Basically the universe is very weird, but we knew that.
Then it should damn well stop being weird and behave normally! And it should get a bloody good haircut and stop listening to that awful music. You can't hear the words, and you don't know if the singer is Martha or Arther.
In my day universes had to make their own entertainment...