Space

Becoming an astronaut is a fairly romanticized career path, but there are a lot of less-than-romantic aspects to working 50 miles or more above the Earth’s surface. Case in point: just being in zero G makes the human body do all sorts of embarrassing things.

A new story from the New York Times exhaustively points out that living in space comes with all sorts of “bodily indignities” which should give even the most eager potential space explorer pause. It turns out, it’s not just deadly radiation or muscle loss due to weightlessness astronauts traveling to spots in our own solar system will have to put with:

In microgravity, however, the blood volume above your neck will most likely still be too high, at least for a while. This can affect the eyes and optic nerves, sometimes causing permanent vision problems for astronauts who stay in space for months, a condition called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. It also causes fluid to accumulate in nearby tissues, giving you a puffy face and congested sinuses. As with a bad cold, the process inhibits nerve endings in the nasal passages, meaning you can’t smell or taste very well. (The nose plays an important role in taste.) The I.S.S. galley is often stocked with wasabi and hot sauce.

These sensory deficits can be helpful in some respects, though, because the I.S.S. tends to smell like body odor or farts. You can’t shower, and microgravity prevents digestive gases from rising out of the stew of other juices in your stomach and intestines, making it hard to belch without barfing. Because the gas must exit somehow, the frequency and volume (metric and decibel) of flatulence increases.

Other metabolic processes are similarly disturbed. Urine adheres to the bladder wall rather than collecting at the base, where the growing pressure of liquid above the urethra usually alerts us when the organ is two-thirds full. “Thus, the bladder may reach maximum capacity before an urge is felt, at which point urination may happen suddenly and spontaneously,” according to “A Review of Challenges & Opportunities: Variable and Partial Gravity for Human Habitats in L.E.O.,” or low Earth orbit. This is a report that came out last year from the authors Ronke Olabisi, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and Mae Jemison, a retired NASA astronaut. Sometimes the bladder fills but doesn’t empty, and astronauts need to catheterize themselves.

Source: Jalopnik

New York Times article (paywalled)

e: spelling

The spacecraft uses its thrusters to stay pointed at Earth, but after 47 years in space some of the fuel tubes have become clogged.

Engineers working on NASA’s Voyager 1 probe have successfully mitigated an issue with the spacecraft’s thrusters, which keep the distant explorer pointed at Earth so that it can receive commands, send engineering data, and provide the unique science data it is gathering.

After 47 years, a fuel tube inside the thrusters has become clogged with silicon dioxide, a byproduct that appears with age from a rubber diaphragm in the spacecraft’s fuel tank. The clogging reduces how efficiently the thrusters can generate force. After weeks of careful planning, the team switched the spacecraft to a different set of thrusters.

The thrusters are fueled by liquid hydrazine, which is turned into gases and released in tens-of-milliseconds-long puffs to gently tilt the spacecraft’s antenna toward Earth. If the clogged thruster were healthy it would need to conduct about 40 of these short pulses per day.

Both Voyager probes feature three sets, or branches, of thrusters: two sets of attitude propulsion thrusters and one set of trajectory correction maneuver thrusters. During the mission’s planetary flybys, both types of thrusters were used for different purposes. But as Voyager 1 travels on an unchanging path out of the solar system, its thruster needs are simpler, and either thruster branch can be used to point the spacecraft at Earth.

In 2002 the mission’s engineering team, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, noticed some fuel tubes in the attitude propulsion thruster branch being used for pointing were clogging, so the team switched to the second branch. When that branch showed signs of clogging in 2018, the team switched to the trajectory correction maneuver thrusters and have been using that branch since then.

Now those trajectory correction thruster tubes are even more clogged than the original branches were when the team swapped them in 2018. The clogged tubes are located inside the thrusters and direct fuel to the catalyst beds, where it is turned into gases. (These are different than the fuel tubes that send hydrazine to the thrusters.) Where the tube opening was originally only 0.01 inches (0.25 millimeters) in diameter, the clogging has reduced it to 0.0015 inches (0.035 mm), or about half the width of a human hair. As a result, the team needed to switch back to one of the attitude propulsion thruster branches.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/24946971

TL;DW:

Does It Make Sense To Put Data Centers In Space?

At some point in the future, yes.

Can They Really Cost Less To Operate?

In theory, yes.

Scott expresses concerns that current startups have not adequately addressed some of the practical challenges, such as cooling.

Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. SpaceX employees say they’re paying the price for the billionaire’s push to colonize space at breakneck speed.

Through interviews and government records, Reuters documented at least 600 injuries of SpaceX workers since 2014. Many were serious or disabling. The records included reports of more than 100 workers suffering cuts or lacerations, 29 with broken bones or dislocations, 17 whose hands or fingers were “crushed,” and nine with head injuries, including one skull fracture, four concussions and one traumatic brain injury. The cases also included five burns, five electrocutions, eight accidents that led to amputations, 12 injuries involving multiple unspecified body parts, and seven workers with eye injuries.

SpaceX, founded by Musk more than two decades ago, takes the stance that workers are responsible for protecting themselves, according to more than a dozen current and former employees, including a former senior executive.

Musk himself at times appeared cavalier about safety on visits to SpaceX sites: Four employees said he sometimes played with a novelty flamethrower and discouraged workers from wearing safety yellow because he dislikes bright colors.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19541930

Preferably a Holocene colander?

A consensus view was formally adopted by the IUGS in 2013, placing its start at 11,700 years before 2000 (9701 BC), about 300 years more recent than the epoch of the Holocene calendar.[6]

Some problems with Gregorian calendar

The Gregorian calendar improves the approximation made by the Julian calendar by skipping three Julian leap days in every 400 years, giving an average year of 365.2425 mean solar days long.[82] This approximation has an error of about one day per 3,030 years[s] with respect to the current value of the mean tropical year. However, because of the precession of the equinoxes, which is not constant, and the movement of the perihelion (which affects the Earth's orbital speed) the error with respect to the astronomical vernal equinox is variable; using the average interval between vernal equinoxes near 2000 of 365.24237 days[83] implies an error closer to 1 day every 7,700 years. By any criterion, the Gregorian calendar is substantially more accurate than the 1 day in 128 years error of the Julian calendar (average year 365.25 days).

In the 19th century, Sir John Herschel proposed a modification to the Gregorian calendar with 969 leap days every 4,000 years, instead of 970 leap days that the Gregorian calendar would insert over the same period.[84] This would reduce the average year to 365.24225 days. Herschel's proposal would make the year 4000, and multiples thereof, common instead of leap. While this modification has often been proposed since, it has never been officially adopted.[85]

On time scales of thousands of years, the Gregorian calendar falls behind the astronomical seasons. This is because the Earth's speed of rotation is gradually slowing down, which makes each day slightly longer over time (see tidal acceleration and leap second) while the year maintains a more uniform duration.

Calendar seasonal error Gregorian calendar seasons difference

This image shows the difference between the Gregorian calendar and the astronomical seasons.

The y-axis is the date in June and the x-axis is Gregorian calendar years.

Each point is the date and time of the June solstice in that particular year. The error shifts by about a quarter of a day per year. Centurial years are ordinary years, unless they are divisible by 400, in which case they are leap years. This causes a correction in the years 1700, 1800, 1900, 2100, 2200, and 2300.

For instance, these corrections cause 23 December 1903 to be the latest December solstice, and 20 December 2096 to be the earliest solstice—about 2.35 days of variation compared with the astronomical event.

Proposed reforms The following are proposed reforms of the Gregorian calendar:

Holocene calendar

International Fixed Calendar (also called the International Perpetual calendar)

World Calendar

World Season Calendar

Leap week calendars

Pax Calendar

Symmetry454

Hanke–Henry Permanent Calendar

All life is based on large quantities of Water. The same will be true on Mars. There has to be a major and reliable source of water on Mars.

What options are there? I read an interesting article yesterday that said "Our results show a two-order-of-magnitude diurnal variation of water vapor pressure, suggesting a strong atmosphere-regolith interchange", in other words, the soil on Mars extracts water out of the atmosphere in the nighttime and releases it in the daytime. This means that if we collect the soil and "bake" it, it would release water vapor in a controlled environment. We could then condense that water vapor to get useful/useable water.

Note: The title is a bit clickbait (they'll merely become invisible from our line of sight), but I'm not going to editorialize the article title.

Come March 2025, Saturn's majestic rings will become virtually invisible to earth-based observers. This phenomenon occurs due to the unique tilt of Saturn's axis, which will position the rings edge-on to our line of sight. [...] Saturn's axial tilt, which is the angle its axis leans compared to its orbit around the Sun, is about 27 degrees. As Saturn moves during its 29.5 year orbit around the Sun, this tilt means different parts of its rings and moons get sunlight at different angles, changing how they look. So, the rings are not really disappearing but rather playing a celestial game of hide and seek. At their reappearance, we can also enjoy an accentuated view of Saturn's moons.

Hear me out. This thought process requires a bit of knowledge of physics/chemistry.

On the martian poles, there are vast quantities of frozes CO2. This frozen CO2 exerts a certain "vapor pressure" - in other words, a certain partial pressure of gaseous CO2.

Now, if we convert this CO2 into O2 by removing the carbon out of it, the concentration of O2 in the atmosphere increases. And therefore, the concentration (and partial pressure) of CO2 decreases.

But since the frozen CO2 on the poles causes a certain partial pressure of CO2, a bit of the frozen CO2 will go into gaseous phase to refill the CO2 partial pressure.

So, by converting CO2 into O2, the concentration of O2 increases, but the concentration of CO2 stays approximately the same. As such, the total pressure (and density) of the atmosphere increases. This would happen if large-scale biological photosynthesis/growth took place.

geteilt von: https://programming.dev/post/18559379

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/16484

Does anybody have good data on what radiation exists in space?

I have found sporadic information, such as on Wikipedia but I wonder whether there's nicer, clear structured information on this topic?

Hopefully it'll be visible to us on the ground! https://heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=59588

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/40364465