Other Than Mars Thread

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Though NASA announced the craft made the historic flyby on Christmas Eve, the probe will be in position to send a beacon tone to Earth on Dec. 27, which will confirm its safety.

To make this record-breaking pass, the nearly 10-foot-long probe has made 22 orbits around the sun, allowing it to swoop ever deeper into the corona. And while doing so, the spacecraft has been continually picking up speed. When you repeatedly swing by such a massive and gravitationally powerful object — the sun is a sphere of hot gas 333,000 times as massive as our planet — you accrue lots of speed. Out in space, there's nothing to stop this motion.

On this close flyby, the probe reached some 430,000 miles per hour (692,000 kilometers per hour).

Quote: rxwine

Planet with a proper magnetic field 7 trillion miles away.

Load up the station wagon kids, we're on our way.

Quote: DRich

If yoru station wagon can go the speed of light it will only take about 14 months to get there.

Quote: rxwine

It reminded my of my childhood friend when the parents put all 6 kids in the station wagon and drove from Indiana to Disneyland. 3 in the back seat, and 3 in the rumble seat. (not sure if that was what it was called then.) There was barely enough room for legs in that rear seat even if you were a small kid.

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NASA satellite emits powerful radio pulse after 60 years of silence

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On 13 February 2023, a small asteroid called 2023 CX1 entered Earth’s atmosphere and streaked across the skies of Normandy as a meteor. The event was one of only a handful of meteors that have been tracked before they enter our atmosphere, this one being seen about 7 hours before.

Examining footage of the asteroid’s descent, Auriane Egal at the University of Western Ontario in Canada and her colleagues have now spotted something unusual.

Most asteroids gradually break apart as they enter Earth’s atmosphere, but 2023 CX1 seems to have survived almost entirely intact until it reached an altitude of 28 kilometres, where it exploded in a single catastrophic event with an energy of about 0.029 kilotons, equivalent to about 29 tons of TNT, and lost about 98 per cent of its 650-kilogram mass in a fraction of a second (Nature Astronomy, doi.org/g93zjg).

“It was similar to a bomb,” says Egal, adding it was a “single blow that generated one spherical shockwave, not multiple detonations all along its trajectory”.

Asteroid 2023 CX1 was small, only about 72 centimetres across – around the size of a beach ball – so it didn’t cause any problems on the ground. But if a larger asteroid exploded in a similar manner, it could cause more damage than one that disintegrated more gradually in the atmosphere.