fun fact
Because of the planet HATS-72 b being officially named Zembretta in 2023, there is now at least one planet for every letter of the alphabet

There are also two planets that start with X, their names being Xólotl and Xolotlan respectively

and theres a planet named Indépendance

I found a cool website that has a full 3d map of the moon with real terrain taken by years of satellite data

https://quickmap.lroc.asu.edu/layers?camera=-337370.552%2C537687.756%2C2125663.865%2C1.298%2C-0.561%2C6.283%2C2218416.976%2C60.000&id=lroc&showTerrain=true&queryOpts=N4XyA&trailType=0&layers=NrBsFYBoAZIRnpEBmZcAsiEIHYFcAbAyAbwF8BdC0yioA&proj=22

the graphics are kind of low quality, but most of these pictures were taken hundreds of miles above the ground so its actually crazy how detailed it is
also the controls are very finnicky so if you dont know how to move around on the moon ill help

it has come to my attention that my last post did not in fact contain the smaller screenshot of the mariner valley image like i wanted but in fact was the full 23,000x11,000 pixels

out of all the websites for that picture to work why planet minecraft

anyways don’t look at my last post it’ll lag your computer really badly (i can’t delete it for this reason it keeps lagging i’ve tried like 3 times)

level 40 i am
hooray

this is honestly one of the funniest things i’ve seen in a while

so there’s a company called AstroForge that is planning to launch a spacecraft called Brokkr-1 to a near-earth asteroid

they want to go to the asteroid to mine it, to see if mining asteroids for valuables is possible (and profitable)

the thing is, they aren’t telling the public which asteroid they’re going to
and by doing that they’ve annoyed a lot of space nerds with too much free time (including me)

so we’re gonna find their asteroid
we already know a lot about it
-the company has said it’s less than 100 meters wide, and is classified as a near-earth object (NEO)
-it’s an M-Type (metallic) asteroid
-they want to launch their mission in April 2024
-Brokkr-1 will take 11 months to get there

using this launch date and time itll take to get there, we can eliminate a large majority of the other NEOs because they’ll be behind the sun or other annoying places that make them hard to get to in april 2024
so, we’re looking for a small m-type asteroid that will be in a good location to launch to in april 2024 with an 11-month travel time

that leaves just 33 asteroids the company could be trying to go to, and we’re gonna individually research each of them to figure out the most likely target

we are gonna reveal company secrets and it’s so funny to see dozens of space nerds all working together like this

The Inner Solar System - To Scale


This is an image I made showing every major object in the Inner Solar System to scale.
The Solar System is divided into two categories: Inner and Outer. The Inner Solar System includes Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt, the largest member of which is the dwarf planet Ceres (the smallest object in this image)

All of the images you see are in true color, and what these worlds would actually look like if you were to visit them.

They're also accurately sized

Fun fact about the Inner Solar System: Earth is the biggest member by far. You could combine Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Ceres, and the entire asteroid belt and you wouldn't get a planet as big as Earth. Most people don't consider Earth to be that big in comparison to everything else in space, but it actually is pretty big.

This is a picture I made of the 51 Pegasi system, which was the first star similar to the Sun found to host an exoplanet (a planet outside the solar system). It's a real star system, and the planet actually exists.
51 Pegasi b (which has been officially named Dimidium) is about half the size of Jupiter, making it a gas giant. But it orbits its star, Helvetios, every 4 days.
Dimidium's year is 4 days long
For comparison, Mercury's year is 86 days long.
Because of this, Dimidium is extremely close to Helvetios, making diagrams like this possible. This is to scale, and is what the 51 Pegasi system would actually look like if you were to visit it.

(Keep in mind that the picture of the star and planet are not real, there is no telescope in the world powerful enough to get that much detail. It's just my interpretation of what Helvetios and Dimidium might look like)

DISCLAIMER: I am a space fact guy not a politics guy. This is a space fact that relates to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which I am absolutely NOT getting involved in the politics of, this is just a fact I find interesting

The first ever combat to take place in space just happened today
Israel has reportedly (altitude not confirmed yet) shot down a Yemeni missile that was above the Karman Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space. This marks the first time in all of human history a war has been fought in space.

We are truly in the space age now

damn havent posted in a while
anyway


DINKINESH HAS A MOON!!!!!



just a few days ago, NASA's Lucy spacecraft flew by the first of it's 12 asteroid targets, a small, (less than a mile wide) asteroid named Dinkinesh.
But instead of just one asteroid, there were two. This was totally unexpected, but turns out Dinkinesh has another, smaller asteroid orbiting around it like a moon. This is an asteroid binary, and it's estimated that about 15% of the asteroids in our solar system are binaries like this.

Dinkinesh is just the first of Lucy's targets, and it'll arrive at its next one, an asteroid named Donaldjohanssen, in 2025.

As you can see in the picture, Dinkinesh is a rubble pile asteroid, which is an asteroid that's more like a loose pile of pebbles than a coherent rock, which is seen in the many boulders on its surface. Spacecraft have actually visited several of these "rubble piles" before, which are seen in this image. These asteroids are Bennu, Ryugu, Itokawa, Dimorphos, and Didymos.

QUARTZ CLOUDS ON DITSO???
Ditsö̀ what a great exoplanet
thags it’s official name too so it’s not just WASP-17b
but yeah we might have found clouds made of quartz on it because it’s a hot jupiter that orbits way too close to its star and so is way too hot for its own good

a collision of planets in another solar system might’ve been detected

so there’s a star called ASSASN-21qj which suddenly brightened and then dimmed over a period of a few years, and we have no idea why. But recently there was a new theory that explains everything, and that’s two planets both about 25x the mass of earth hitting each other and being destroyed
The brightening was caused by the explosion as the planets hit each other, and the dimming was caused by debris from the impact covering the whole system. If this is true, this is the first time we’ve ever spotted a collision of planets actually happen.

Fun fact: sharks are older than the north star
I mean that literally

Polaris, aka the north star, is about 70 million years old. Sharks evolved 400 million years ago. Sharks are older than some stars in our sky.
They’re also about the same age as Vega, the fifth-brightest star in the night sky