so here’s two fun facts i learned about saturn today that just prove that this planet is the physical embodiment of chaos
1. saturn’s biggest moon, titan, is currently moving away from saturn. As it does, saturn’s obliquity (it’s axial tilt, which is just how tilted the planet is toward the sun) will increase. This increase then destabilizes titan’s orbit, which causes it to move away further, which causes the obliquity to increase more, in a feedback loop that will eventually -eject titan from the system entirely, flinging it off into space -cause saturn to flip on its side, like uranus is today we don’t know when this will happen but we know it will (it will probably be between 1-100 billion years from now)
and 2. Saturn’s moon Hyperion has a chaotic rotation. Earth takes 24 hours to complete one rotation, and it’s very stable. Hyperion is not
Hyperion’s day length and axial tilt constantly changes chaotically and unpredictably due to interactions with saturn and the other moons. This is so chaotic that it becomes physically impossible to predict where hyperion will be more than a month in advance Even with things like supercomputers, we genuinely have no idea how long a day on hyperion will be or how tilted it will be more than 1 month from today
Was built for big mountain ranges. Sharp, smooth peaks, sutle terracing, continued peaklines, huge bulging bottom terraces
Img 2: Alpines Gen 3
Iteration on gen 2 Better/More "single" peaks, dynamic shattering, warped erosion, increased terrain fragmentation, better global terracing, varying terracing, steeper valleys, bigger bottom, with sloping channels in a stylistic approach.
fun fact: there is an area on the Moon called the Sea of Moscow that was discovered by (who would’ve guessed) Russia in the 1960s
however, the rules for naming places on the Moon said that you couldn’t name them after anything political, and the city of Moscow fell under that category
but the soviet union was determined so they argued that the city of Moscow was “a state of mind” and so not political
your daily reminder that the United States Space Force has a classified “fleet” of space planes very similar to the Space Shuttle but with no crew and they only do military stuff
they’re called X-37s and every once and a while one will launch, stay in orbit for a few months, and come back down what they do up there is classified we have no idea what is on board
(it’s probably just spy satellites and stuff but i like to tell people this because as much as people like to joke about the Space Force, it’s a serious organization that actually does stuff)
so i’m sure you guys know boeing at this point the airplane company that keeps having doors fall off their planes and other wacky events
well a lot of people don’t know that Boeing is also a space company and has launched things into space
and now they’re working on the first crewed flight test of Boeing Starliner, which is a new vehicle meant to take people to the International Space Station
let’s go over a brief history of Boeing Starliner because it is the worst crewed spacecraft since Apollo 13
the first flight test of Starliner occurred in 2019, it didn’t have people on it and was just trying to get to the ISS It was almost ready to approach the ISS and then MISSED
the second test, also with nobody on it, went fine a few years later keep in mind that Boeing wanted people on Starliner in 2018. It’s now 2024 and a crewed flight test is just now about to happen
istg if Boeing kills a bunch of astronauts I think that’ll just be the end of the company the first company to kill someone in space let’s hope that doesn’t happen