Large objects like the ISS are deorbited in a controlled fashion which ensures they burn up over the ocean away from populated areas.

Still a ridiculous idea. It takes far less energy to just de-orbit debris and let it burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

You're basically saying that instead of throwing your trash into the bin by your house, you should put each piece on a plane and fly it to the Australian Outback to throw out.

You can't just "send something towards the sun". You need to cancel out Earth's orbital velocity which takes a massive amount of energy. It's easier to send something to Pluto than it is to send something to the sun.

They were founded in NZ and have their primary launch site there but the company relocated their headquarters to California several years ago. They've launched multiple payloads for both NASA and the US military.

This week's episode was a really wonderful love letter to Phil Tippett's work (he actually did some stop-motion work for the episode too which was really cool!)

That was very much a deliberate part of what made Breaking Bad so great. It perfectly balanced its more serious moments with a bit of over-the-top pulpiness.

The MASH finale was 2 hours which was notable for a 30 minute sitcom.

Edit: And the Sense8 finale was 2.5 hours.

Good lord, the mods need to add a rule banning ChatGPT crap.

The end date for the space shuttle was set during the Bush administration.

Nope. The Partial Test Ban Treaty bans atmospheric testing. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996, while it has never entered into force, has been signed and de-facto adopted by all nuclear powers except for India, Pakistan and North Korea. It "bans nuclear weapons test explosions and any other nuclear explosions, for both civilian and military purposes, in all environments".

You answered your own question. The Nuclear Test Ban treaties would apply for a gun as well.

Eh different strokes for different folks I guess. I'm definitely enjoying The Last of Us but so far it hasn't worked for me nearly as well as Station Eleven did (last night's episode did come close though!)

Yes they did. Maxar and Planet both privately develop, build, and operate their own constellations of satellites. Maxar's satellites are called WorldView, Planet's are called Dove. All are privately funded and operated.

They're sourcing the images from private imagery sources like Planet and Maxar. Images from publically funded satellites like Landsat and Copernicus are already freely available for download. It would be nice if Planet and Maxar made it easier for people to buy their images directly but this seems like an okay solution for now.

I wouldn't count her since the Mercury 13 were never selected as astronauts.

Obviously I researched before I commented. I'm not going to call someone out on something I'm not confident on.

The primary source of radio static is artificial (other electronic devices in the environment, as well as heat from the radio itself). The natural component (atmospheric noise) is mostly a result of lightning. The cosmic component is mostly solar activity with a small component coming from the Galactic core, the Cosmic Microwave Background and other extragalactic events (Source 1, Source 2).

While Jupiter does emit some radiation that's useful in radio astronomy, it makes up a negligible component of the environmental noise that the average radio picks up.

>The technical reasons are complicated and you have to try to find explanations you can grasp that are more in depth than I have time to explain.

Translation: You made it up.

You should follow your own advice and use Google before you spread misinformation.

You have a source for that radio static fact? If it were true, wouldn't that mean that the noise would go away for half of each day when the earth is between the observer and jupiter?

While there has been civil conflict in the country for decades, the current civil war is generally recognized to have begun in the aftermath of the February 2021 military coup.

Wouldn't work. There are tons of probes and satellites around the solar system that could be used to relay a message.

The dataset includes both civilian and military casualties. Conflicts that are currently active are typically undercounted since fatalities are only added to the database when they can be documented by a third party (i.e. not one of the participants in the conflict). In the case of Russia and Ukraine, most of the casualty reports are coming from the Russian and Ukrainian governments. The database currently lists approximately 65,000 confirmed fatalities up to November 2022 which are shown in the chart.

For the Rwandan genocide, the chart shows approximately 550,000 fatalities which is in line with the general scholarly consensus. Note that the bright spot indicates a large number of overlapping events that occurred at roughly the same time.

Data Source: Uppsala Conflict Data Program

Tools Used: Blender, Python, Illustrator, Photoshop

This visualization shows documented conflict fatalities since 1989 as recorded by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. Each point represents a single event in the dataset with at least one fatality plotted by date and longitude. The size of the points corresponds to the number of fatalities. The brightness corresponds to the density of points (ie. the number of events occurring in roughly the same time/place) A couple of notes about this visualization:

• Exactly what counts as a "conflict death" is inevitably quite fuzzy. Do you count conflicts between police and criminal organizations? Political assassinations? The definitions that the UCDP uses can be found here: definitions, methodology
• Since this visualization only accounts deaths that could be verifiably documented, it likely undercounts the true death toll in many cases, particularly in areas where outside observers have limited access. Each event is assigned a range of casualties based on the different sources that were found. This visualization used the best estimate for each event.
• What constitutes an "event" varies throughout the dataset depending on how different conflicts were documented. In some conflicts fatalities were aggregated after the fact and appear as a handful of large points. In other conflicts the data is much more granular and is composed of a large number of smaller points.

I've also put together a variant that colours the points by continent (link), and one that plots each continent individually (link).

I've also put together a variant that colours the points by continent (link), and one that plots each continent individually (link).

Here's a good overview of how we track things on Mars.

Link.

Since the atmosphere on Mars is so much thinner than on earth, the wind has very little kinetic energy. It's not going to be able to move anything larger than particles of dust or sand. I am curious about how quickly dust might accumulate and cover it though, since it's going to be 8-10 years before the retrieval mission arrives.

There are a handful of comets and asteroids that orbit far off the ecliptic plane.