Mission control, to everyone’s relief, ordered them to come home early. They buttoned up Salyut and climbed into the Soyuz, wearing only their leisure suits. Which became a problem when they prepared to disengage and a warning light began to blink. Sounding nearly hysterical at this point, Volkov shouted at ground control, “The hatch isn’t pressurized! What should we do? What should we do?” Obviously they couldn’t disengage if the hatch wasn’t completely sealed, unless they were in their spacesuits and helmets. They tried various procedures suggested by the techies on the ground. Nothing worked.
Ground control finally advised them to tape a piece of paper over the warning light and proceed. Read that sentence again. Nothing shouts “Soviet space program!” like that single sentence.
Kring and his colleagues used photogeologic mapping of the canyons, Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck, to reconstruct their catastrophic backstory. The team’s models suggest that they were forged by rays of rocky ejecta traveling at about 2,800 miles per hour, which violently tore gashes into the lunar landscape within ten minutes of impact. Ten minutes! Imagine blasting out two Grand Canyons in the time it takes to boil an egg. You have to hand it to space rocks: They know how to make a lasting impression.
"The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season, 404 Media has learned. These outages caused many farmers to fully stop their planting operations for the moment.Big solar flares do more than give you cool aurora photos to post on social media.
One chain of John Deere dealerships warned farmers that the accuracy of some of the systems used by tractors are “extremely compromised,” and that farmers who planted crops during periods of inaccuracy are going to face problems when they go to harvest, according to text messages obtained by 404 Media and an update posted by the dealership. The outages highlight how vulnerable modern tractors are to satellite disruptions, which experts have been warning about for years.
“All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now shut down because of the solar storm,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer in Nebraska, told me. “No GPS. We’re right in the middle of corn planting. I’ll bet the commodity markets spike Monday.”"
Tomato lost in space by history-making astronaut has been foundH/T to Kevin D. Williamson
"Cosmology is not like other sciences. It’s not like studying mice in a maze or watching chemicals boil in a beaker in a lab. The universe is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations."This feels like one of those scientific moments where they're either going to have to add ever more epicycles, or decide that maybe the Earth really does move.
Two visitors from India — a lander named Vikram and a rover named Pragyan — landed in the southern polar region of the moon on Wednesday. The two robots, from a mission named Chandrayaan-3, make India the first country to ever reach this part of the lunar surface in one piece — and only the fourth country ever to land on the moon.
Oops, I did it again! This time from Netherlands, during Steve Bowen & Woody Hoburg spacewalk. The full solar transit lasted 0.75 second 😎
— Thierry Legault (@ThierryLegault) June 10, 2023
Each frame is a single shot at 1/32000s with the OM-1 on the CFF200 apo: I never make ISS transits from stackings or assemblies! pic.twitter.com/94y644q4bI
