Space Talk One of the things which annoy me has to do with photos and their interpretation of what we are seeing. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. Recently a photo was taken by the rover on Mars. It showed what looked like some sort of puff of smoke with two dark eyes. The eyes were pointed out which excited everyone but what failed to be mentioned was the fact when the puff of whatever was gone and one looked carefully you could see two dark spots on the ground which appeared exactly where the “eyes” were. To me this means the photo was not examined carefully enough. The puff was only in two frames which did make it interesting to me as something which was not permanent. It could have been something on the lens of the camera which blew on and then off or it could have been something on the ground, but there was really no way to tell. NASA is scheduled to launch a mission to two asteroids which have been nicknamed Didymos and Didymoon. Didymos is much larger than Didymoon. It turns out these are binary asteroids and twenty-five percent of all asteroids in our solar system are binary meaning they travel in pairs, who knew? NASA has stated many times it wants to protect the earth from asteroid and meteor impacts and in 2022 it is stating it is going to launch the Dart probe. The probe will crash into one of the asteroids and the ESA will send its probe to the asteroids to see what effect the Dart crash had on altering the course. Will the impact be sufficient to alter the large and smaller asteroid enough so if they were headed toward the earth they would miss? Finding this out is the entire point of the second mission. A rich entrepreneur named Nathan Myhrvold has been arguing with NASA for a couple of years now. His argument is based on his belief the method used by NASA to hunt for space rocks is flawed. Could this be why NASA gets surprised so many times when a large rock appears undetected? He is particularly annoyed at the NEOWISE mission to hunt for them. He says we cannot trust the estimates of the diameters of the asteroids which are measured from the NEOWISE mission. “These observations are the best we’re going to have for a very long time and they weren’t really analyzed very well at all.” The problem is if the diameters are wrong and an asteroid is much bigger than thought the effort to move or destroy it has to be more powerful. He went on to say there are telescopes on earth would could do as good as the probe. One scientist stated he hoped the paper on this will be read since Myhrvold has presented some very important issues. An important question is now being asked and it is, is time the same for those in space as it is for us on earth. There is no doubt the perception of time will be different since those on the International Space Station get sixteen sunrises and sunsets in a twenty-four-hour period. But is there more to this than just that in the way of time? Some scientists believe perception in space is different and use the argument astronauts often underestimate distance in space and they also believe time moves faster for them. So, what do you do to check this? You conduct a time experiment of course. The experiment examines how long a visual target appears on a laptop screen and the reaction times to these prompts recorded to process speed and attention. I guess the next step would be to get the same people to do the same experiment on earth and see if there were any significant differences in the results. A lot of people got very upset when NASA killed the Lunar Resource Prospector mission. The mission was in development for over four years and it seemed like a sure thing, considering the fact President Trump was making sending humans back to the moon a priority. The mission would have put a lander on the moon which contained a rover. The idea was for the rover to drill in different areas of the moon in order to give scientists a better understanding of things like water crystals. It is believed today one of the most important things we have to know before setting up a base on the moon is where an adequate amount of water or water ice exists. Water is not only necessary for life but can be used for many other things, such as creating fuel. It is believed the mission cancellation was budget related. Scientists believe they have discovered the fact a planet might have existed in the early solar system which had a diamond core or at least enough diamonds to make an impression on us. They were not big diamonds but tiny ones. They got this idea when a meteorite hit the earth about a decade ago and they examined its interior. It turned out it was filled with diamonds which were each about the width of a human hair. It is believed this planet or almost planet was the size of Mars or a little smaller. They are calling this a diamond matrix. Diamonds can form in a few ways, including in the high-temperature and high-pressure environments similar to those found in the interior of our planet. They also can be formed by a shock wave impact that creates a temporary high-pressure and high-temperature environment. Interestingly the shock wave impact produces very tiny diamonds such as the ones found in the meteorite. I guess my question would have to be will we every find a meteor or asteroid which is rich in diamonds making all diamonds almost worthless? Even today their value is being kept high artificially. We really do not know how many galaxies there are in the universe because we can not see the entire universe. Some may think we can because we hear things like we can see back to within a few hundred thousand years of the Big Bang but maybe there were millions of Big Bangs far beyond our view. Anyway, scientists have discovered the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way is growing. New stars are forming at the outer edges. It is said the older stars are near the center and form the bulge in the center of the disc. It is shaped like a disc with swirling arms reaching out into space. It is very hard to know the exact shape of our galaxy since we are inside it, but we see plenty of other galaxies and we know the different shapes of galaxies and we think this has helped us discover the shape of ours. Scientists also believe our galaxy contains tens of thousands of black holes of different sizes. They believe most if not all are at the center of the galaxy. The problem is the figure was obtained by using a small sample and extrapolating the data from that. In other words, if there was black hole every thousand miles for three thousand miles we might say that means in ten thousand miles there would be ten of them. This could certainly be erroneous.
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