Tried searching but wasn’t having much luck. Can someone give me a sense of how many failed launches NASA had? Like failed without lives onboard?
Quick search without any verification/cross checking yielded this. Report from post Challenger incident. https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm “An estimate of the reliability of solid rockets was made by the range safety officer, by studying the experience of all previous rocket flights. Out of a total of nearly 2,900 flights, 121 failed (1 in 25). This includes, however, what may be called, early errors, rockets flown for the first few times in which design errors are discovered and fixed. A more reasonable figure for the mature rockets might be 1 in 50. With special care in the selection of parts and in inspection, a figure of below 1 in 100 might be achieved but 1 in 1,000 is probably not attainable with today's technology. (Since there are two rockets on the Shuttle, these rocket failure rates must be doubled to get Shuttle failure rates from Solid Rocket Booster failure.)”
We have new land based telescope that recently went online in Chile. NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory @VRubinObs Rubin will #CaptureTheCosmos in exquisite detail starting in 2025 Funded by @NSF and @DOEScience Para español: http://instagram.com/rubin_observatory The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), is an astronomical observatory in Chile. Its main task will be an astronomical survey of the entire sky every day, creating a kind of time-lapse movie of the universe, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (also abbreviated LSST).[2][3] The observatory is located on the El Peñón peak of Cerro Pachón, a 2,682-meter-high (8,799 ft) mountain in Coquimbo Region, in northern Chile, alongside the existing Gemini South and Southern Astrophysical Research Telescopes.[4] The Rubin Observatory base facility is located about 100 kilometres (62 miles) away from the observatory by road, in the city of La Serena. The observatory is named for Vera Rubin, an American astronomer who pioneered discoveries about galactic rotation rates. Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a joint initiative of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and is operated jointly by NSF NOIRLab and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.[5] The Rubin Observatory houses the Simonyi Survey Telescope,[6] a wide-field reflecting telescope with an 8.4-meter primary mirror[7][8] that can photograph the entire available sky every few nights.[9] The telescope uses a variant of three-mirror anastigmat, which allows the compact telescope to deliver sharp images over a very wide 3.5-degree-diameter field of view. Images are recorded by a 3.2-gigapixel charge-coupled device imaging (CCD) camera, the largest digital camera ever constructed.[10]
apparently it’s actually 33.8 billion light years away in true distance now since the universe has been expanding. the 13 billion light years is just the time the light took to get here. mind blowing
This is the central region of the Bullet Cluster, which is made up of two massive galaxy clusters. The vast number of galaxies and foreground stars in the image were captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in near-infrared light. Glowing, hot X-rays captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory appear in pink. The blue represents the dark matter, which was precisely mapped by researchers with Webb’s detailed imaging. Normally, gas, dust, stars, and dark matter are combined into galaxies, even when they are gravitationally bound within larger groups known as galaxy clusters. The Bullet Cluster is unusual in that the intracluster gas and dark matter are separated, offering further evidence in support of dark matter. (See the defined galaxy clusters within the dashed circles.) NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured the central region of the Bullet Cluster with its NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera). The scene contains two massive galaxy clusters that sit on either side of the large, light blue spiral galaxy at the center. Webb’s extremely precise images revealed many more distant galaxies and faint objects, allowing a research team to refine the amount of mass in the two galaxy clusters.
A report on the Dart mission. It worked but with complications. https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/ne...mission-complicate-future-asteroid-deflection
To be honest, light pollution doesn’t affect any type of astrophotography if you do it right. I get through my light pollution by stacking shots. You could even do narrow band in the heart of NYC if you knew where to point the telescope first.
Utterly insane that we were able to get to space and safely get back with this technology. Fascinating thread: We obtained a mysterious box of 1960s electronics. I reverse-engineered it, and with much effort, we got it running. It turns out to be a test unit for testing NASA's Up-Data Link, a system from the Apollo moon landing to control the spacecraft from the ground. Let's take a look inside... 1/n— Ken Shirriff (@righto.com) 2025-07-21T16:58:08.373Z
“Here’s how you can still enjoy the show” Cliffs from video: you fucked, watch a different shower full moon-free in December.
Yeah I looked at the best time windows last night and this morning, didn't see shit. Of course it was the one time in weeks that all the streetlights were functioning and all the houses had their lights on too, so I was double out of luck
Yeah, I’m at a dark sky campsite and the moon rose before it got going. But just the stars themselves were a great fucking show. Hopefully I can figure out this fucking camera I bought yesterday. I downloaded a bunch of tips today since I have no signal there. Apparently the automatic setting with the star on it doesn’t work.
really great so far, see if ship survives re-entry this time. Crazy how much we can see as opposed to the very early tests
Yeah that seemed to be a very successful test. Both pieces got their soft landings, very little burn-through on the flaps, etc. Not sure what caused the explosion on the skirt around the engines but otherwise it was pretty drama free and they appear to have achieved all their milestones (Starlink sim deployment, engine re-light, hot stage, etc).
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2514/ Spoiler Video: This sequence of images shows the evolution over several days of the gamma-ray burst GRB 250702B. This GRB was first observed with high-energy telescopes on 2 July, which detected several flares of gamma rays over the course of a day. Astronomers then used ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to pinpoint the exact location of the explosion and monitor how its so-called afterglow faded over several days. The images shown here were taken with the VLT’s HAWK-I infrared camera. For clarity, only the central area updates from one frame to the next. The explosion appears to be nested within an elongated galaxy, later confirmed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. . Astronomers have detected an explosion of gamma rays that repeated several times over the course of a day, an event unlike anything ever witnessed before. The source of the powerful radiation was discovered to be outside our galaxy, its location pinpointed by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most powerful explosions in the Universe, normally caused by the catastrophic destruction of stars. But no known scenario can completely explain this new GRB, whose true nature remains a mystery. This GRB is “unlike any other seen in 50-years of GRB observations,” according to Antonio Martin-Carrillo, astronomer at University College Dublin, Ireland, and co-lead author of a study on this signal recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Scientific paper https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adf8e1