This one ought to be good for a few dramatic moments, including the landing and launch from Mars caught on camera by the rover. https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/

This post will contain spoilers for the anime Madoka Magica, the 12 episode anime. I just recently finished watching the anime episodes of Madoka Magica, which gives a take on many philosophical questions, one of them being related to physics and I really thought it was worth exploring. The problem is as follows: In this universe, there's a civilisation of seemingly advanced magical creatures that are described as feeling no emotion (or those that do are considered mentally ill), and they wish to make 'progress'. They have sought means to harvest energy to make up for the rise of entropy for a long time, and their answer was to harvest the emotions of the human race. Their sadness, rage, happiness, their whole souls, basically. They do this by providing each person who makes a contract with them magical powers, turning them into a magical girl. Once they give up their soul, the human is subject to harvest energy from distorsions in reality that corrupt and cause the suffering and death of people. It doesn't sound too bad... does it? Later, it is revealed that the humans are eventually destined to return the good they've done for the world, in the opposite way. Because of giving up their soul, they are prone to losing themselves and becoming the very distorsions they used to destroy, only this time causing all the pain back that they once thought they avoided. The advanced civilisation creatures don't care, for their lack of emotions, and they've been thriving off of humanity's suffering for as long as history knows. My personal belief is that when the question comes up, 'what's the price of an eternal civilisation?', my firm answer is that there is none that are worth the exploitation of other beings. The exploitation of other planets, living creatures. I believe the universe should die at one point. Entropy does its thing, and that will be the end of it. If you were given the choice, would you accept to extend the life of the universe? If so, what's your purpose and reasons?

A new asteroid named "2022WJ1" was detected.. and just a few hours later detonates in the air over Niagra falls. Barely even enough time to say, "oh, shit!" Fortunately it was only a few feet across. The real news here of course is that it was detected before impact. This is only the 6th time we've managed to do that. As usual Scott Manley has some good coverage of it in this week's space summary.

“It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science. It is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of; furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposition. That is indeed difficult.” —Richard Feynman The Quotable Feynman (ed. Princeton University Press, 2015) - ISBN: 9781400874231

http://www.webbcompare.com/

"Here we present 4.5 yr, 16-band photometry of Betelgeuse between 2017 and 2021 in the 0.45–13.5 μm wavelength range making use of images taken by the Himawari-8 geostationary meteorological satellite." Cool stuff, at least for a space nerd like myself. (And yes, this is what I do for recreational reading these days. I might need professional help. ) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01680-5

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