https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA14033 https://www.vice.com/en/article/78kwjd/why-the-first-close-up-image-of-mars-was-hastily-painted-in-pastels

Just a concept at this point but wouldn't that be cool? The mission would even include a probe to drop into the planet's atmosphere. I'd want to see Triton close-up too, though with its orbit it might be difficult to get anything more than a few awkward flybys.

If this holds up it would be an amazing find!

(Been looking at latency numbers for the past couple weeks at work. Nice to see results.)

Interesting theory. Nice tie-in with string theory too. Is ST finally becoming useful?

Impressive explosion no doubt, but quite a lot of interesting science to be done as well. No doubt there will be more info coming out momentarily but as usual Scott Manley does a pretty good job of putting together a summary and initial commentary on the event..

And the cool video just keeps coming...

So, any geologists in the room? I'm not but I've been following this volcanic eruption in Iceland and I must say it has me hooked. Some very good stuff being posted on places like Youtube, including 4k video from drone overflights of the vigorously-boiling lava as it overflows the vent and flows out to fill the surrounding caldera. Very photogenic if nothing else. I'm in the habit now of queuing up the latest and just having it running as background while I'm doing other things. There's also cool stuff like this 3d/GIS model/dataset online if you want a more interactive experience.

So now there's at least two experiments that are hinting that there's something odd going on with muons. Still needs more supporting data - and a testable hypothesis about what's going on would be nice as well - but it already seems pretty solid.

What we know now, what we'd like to know, and some ideas for learning more about TNOs, KBOs, and dwarf planets in the outer solar system...

While I'm excited to see people working on these sorts of things I have to say, ESA, you need to work a bit harder on picking your names.

Not quite The Expanse but good practice for converting all those other dwarf planets in the outer solar system into habitats. If the field of such bodies extends out into the Oort cloud as well then we have a LOT of habitat-building to do. https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07487

This is painful to watch. I just hope this is the catalyst for building a new radio telescope that's even better.

Oh no!

That's being worked on too. A fully-fueled Starship in orbit is halfway to anywhere in the solar system. Speaking of which, there's currently something of a 24/7 watch on Elon's little Boca Chica project at the moment. They've done a number of engine test-firings with the Starship prototype (serial number 8 ) in the past couple weeks and the FAA has given clearance to 15km altitude for the next "hop", which is expected to happen any day now. Elon has said there's about a 1 in 3 chance of everything going smoothly. We'll see. Should be exciting either way. And after that there's SN9 already being built in the nearby high-bay.

I considered that actually when the Pluto flyby happened and we saw that Pluto had an atmosphere. That said, I think we should focus on getting established on Mars first before we dream too far ahead. Right now all eggs are in the Blue Planet's basket and a single planetwide extinction event will end us all. One colony at a time

"There is a case that habitability on Pluto may be just as good as on the closer icy moons. In fact, if Pluto is the standard for dwarf planets found in the Kuiper Belt generally there may be many more habitable worlds out there." https://youtu.be/GMIbZ2k_OtQ There's a lot of real estate out there in dwarf planets too. Even just in our Solar system there are hundreds of known dwarf planets, and probably hundreds more that we haven't seen yet. (Even Hubble couldn't see much further than the inner bit of the Kuiper Belt.) Yes, I said hundreds of planets in our own system, and each able to be the resource base for its own swarm of habitats. How about this for another thought.. If the Kuiper Belt isn't enough then there is also the Oort cloud. No reason to expect there not to be thousands of more planets - dwarf and otherwise - out in the Oort cloud, which some models say extends out to over 120,000 AU. 64,000 AU is 1 light-year. The nearest star system to our own is less than 4 LY away. If it is similarly constructed then by the time we're reaching the limits of our system we should be inside the outer edges of the next system over. Up the side of one gravity well and down the other. All accessible without having to resort to magic technology like "warp" drives, though building all those colonies and expanding the frontier that far might take us a while. Rome wasn't built in a day after all.

Looks like the cabling situation is more precarious than realized, meaning it is no longer considered safe to repair the antenna as was first hoped.

Ok, so not a lot of astrophysics or science in this one but I thought it was cool nevertheless...

“The TAGSAM head performed the sampling event in optimal conditions. Newly available analyses show that the collector head was flush with Bennu’s surface when it made contact and when the nitrogen gas bottle was fired to stir surface material. It also penetrated several centimeters into the asteroid’s surface material. All data so far suggest that the collector head is holding much more than 2 ounces of regolith.” So much in fact that the plastic flap that was supposed to close and seal the sample inside is stuck open, leaking the material that was collected inside the TAGSAM head. There was no hard deceleration on impact either. The surface material at least is extremely loosely bound together. Someone at work said it was like hitting a big, fluffy pillow full of gravel. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-osiris-rex-spacecraft-collects-significant-amount-of-asteroid

LIGO and Virgo gravity wave detectors detect biggest wave to date. “The new signal likely represents the instant that the two black holes merged. The merger created an even more massive black hole, of about 142 solar masses, and released an enormous amount of energy, equivalent to around 8 solar masses, spread across the universe in the form of gravitational waves.”

16 Psyche to be precise... “The Psyche mission will be the first mission to investigate a world of metal rather than of rock and ice. Deep within rocky, terrestrial planets—including Earth—scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachable below planets' rocky mantles and crusts. Because scientists cannot see or measure Earth's core directly, Psyche offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets.” This ought to be a cool mission.