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[Starver]

( ^^^ Pretty much... ^^^ )

( vvv Needs no additional comment... vvv )

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Philae_found

[RedKing]

You do gotta admit it's a little weird that all the mysteriously vanishing high-energy radio emissions we've found are all in similar ranges, though. Probably not aliens, but if it were aliens against all odds, it would probably look a lot like that.

Obviously jump drive signatures. High-energy and nonrepeating.

My takeaway from ESA's Philae mishap is that I will no longer feel bad when I fuck up a probe landing in KSP. Even if lands sideways and oriented such that the solar panels can't get light and the probe is doomed...I'm at least as good as a professional space agency. 

[Culise]

You do gotta admit it's a little weird that all the mysteriously vanishing high-energy radio emissions we've found are all in similar ranges, though. Probably not aliens, but if it were aliens against all odds, it would probably look a lot like that.

Obviously jump drive signatures. High-energy and nonrepeating.

My takeaway from ESA's Philae mishap is that I will no longer feel bad when I fuck up a probe landing in KSP. Even if lands sideways and oriented such that the solar panels can't get light and the probe is doomed...I'm at least as good as a professional space agency. 

Better, even. ^_^

[Egan_BW]

Space is hard.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Even that's better off than the Japanese mission that missed Mars. It's genuinely not hard to miss a whole planet in the void, but it's also impossible to say that and not think it's ridiculous.

[Starver]

Mars is a tricky beast.

And it's all done in hard vacuum! Not the easy kind of vacuum but the hard kind!

[martinuzz]

The NASA OSIRIS-REx probe is en route to the Bennu planetoid, to gather surface material, and return it to Earth.
"There is a small chance that Bennu will impact on earth in the next century. The impact would be strong enough to turn a country the size of France into a crater".

I guess if they're sending a probe, they must be pretty worried. I think they're quite certain it will impact Earth, or they wouldn't go through all the trouble of sending a probe to collect surface samples.

[Max™]

Could we find a better way to get people concerned about it than "so yeah, France might get turned into a crater" perhaps?

[hops]

It's the next century. The world can hardly garner enough fucks for global warming.

[Max™]

Well, parts of it certainly can, but they're small and unimportant in the long run, sorry Al.

Even that's better off than the Japanese mission that missed Mars. It's genuinely not hard to miss a whole planet in the void, but it's also impossible to say that and not think it's ridiculous.

I remember trying to get a sense of this with Celestia, so I got my controls set up where I could fly around and pretend I was a Xeelee.

Then I zoomed the view way out to the largest scale models I could find, the SDSS and CMBR maps, ramped myself up to like 100 megalights per second, flew way out into the universe, then stopped, zoomed back in to stellar scale view, and tried to find my way back home.

I was able to cheat at first since the SDSS surveys are hindered by the zone of avoidance, and thus make a sort of giant hourglass pointing back home, but when I dove into them it got a good deal more difficult.

Then I made it back to the local group and wandered around for a good fifteen minutes before I found Andromeda.

Then I managed to get turned and zoot over to the Milky Way and was able to cheat a little because there are more detailed models back towards home, which got me to the general vicinity of the Orion Spur.

It then took me half an hour before I could find a single star I knew to be within like 20 light years, Sirius.

Once I found Sirius I was able to look around and get a view of the background stars which I thought was the right direction and scooted around through that area for a good 30 or 40 minutes zooming past stars before I saw Alpha Centauri fly past in what I thought was the wrong direction, stopped, turned until I saw Cassiopeia with an extra star and went back over to the closest one, the Sun.

Space is so damn huge.

[Wolfhunter107]

The NASA OSIRIS-REx probe is en route to the Bennu planetoid, to gather surface material, and return it to Earth.
"There is a small chance that Bennu will impact on earth in the next century. The impact would be strong enough to turn a country the size of France into a crater".

I guess if they're sending a probe, they must be pretty worried. I think they're quite certain it will impact Earth, or they wouldn't go through all the trouble of sending a probe to collect surface samples.

The reason that Bennu was chosen has more to do with it's age, surface composition, and convenient location than anything else. The hope with the mission is to bring back some extremely old material, and it requires an asteroid with a lot of loose material on the surface. (The collection mechanism involves using a nitrogen jet to blast loose material away from the asteroid). Bennu just happens to be the most conveniently located asteroid with that age and composition.

[WillowLuman]

However, the additional data might help refine that impact probability estimate.

[Dorsidwarf]

However, the additional data might help refine that impact probability estimate.

I bet it's easier to get mission funding for, too.

[Dutrius]

Well, OSIRIS-REx is in Space! about 20 minutes of coasting before engines are restarted, then off to 101955 Bennu!

[Starver]

"There is a small chance that Bennu will impact on earth in the next century. [...]".

IRTA "There is a small chance that the probe will impact on Earth in the next century", which implied a longer-duration sample-return mission than I had expected. Then, as I read on, I got quite concerned as to how a simple probe might ever get to be so dangerous (without going through a wormhole, being borgified and coming back to find its maker, that is...)