There are actually two Super Heavy boosters in the shot.
SpaceX’s Super Heavy rocket looks big, even from space.
On Aug. 9 Maxar Technologies’ WorldView-3 satellite snapped a great shot of SpaceX’s “Starbase” facility in South Texas, where the company is building and testing its Starship deep-space transportation system.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3zLFLotBFbA
Do you remember the Zuckerland metaverse? (Yes, I know he borrowed the word, but when you are president of a digital country, does anyone dare challenge Zuck the First, Le Roi Numérique?)
Palantir Technologies (the Seeing Stone outfit with the warm up jacket fashion bug) introduced a tasty bit of jargon-market speak in its Q22021earnings call:
Continue reading “Silicon Valley Neologisms: The Palantir Edition” »
SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are involved in about 1,600 close encounters between two spacecraft in low Earth orbit every week. That’s about 50% of all such incidents. As the constellation grows, that proportion is expected to rise up to 90%, experts say.
When SpaceX deploy batches of Starlink satellites they drop them off in lower orbits and expect the satellites themselves to navigate towards their final operational orbits. This is quite a complex process and one that’s worth discussing, the satellites need to be able to reach the target orbital plane, raise the orbit to operational altitude, and then finally maneuver to a specific slot within that plane before they become operational.
Satellite Orbital Maps by Celestrak.
https://celestrak.com/
Continue reading “How Do Starlink Satellites Navigate To Their Final Operational Orbits” »
Deep below the ground, radioactive elements disintegrate water molecules, producing ingredients that can fuel subterranean life. This process, known as radiolysis, has sustained bacteria in isolated, water-filled cracks and rock pores on Earth for millions to billions of years. Now a study published in Astrobiology contends that radiolysis could have powered microbial life in the Martian subsurface.
Dust storms, cosmic rays and solar winds ravage the Red Planet’s surface. But belowground, some life might find refuge. “The environment with the best chance of habitability on Mars is the subsurface,” says Jesse Tarnas, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the new study’s lead author. Examining the Martian underground could help scientists learn whether life could have survived there—and the best subsurface samples available today are Martian meteorites that have crash-landed on Earth.
Tarnas and his colleagues evaluated the grain sizes, mineral makeup and radioactive element abundance in Martian meteorites and estimated the Martian crust’s porosity using satellite and rover data. They plugged these attributes into a computer model that simulated radiolysis to see how efficiently the process would have generated hydrogen gas and sulfates: chemical ingredients that can power the metabolism of underground bacteria. The researchers report that if water was present, radiolysis in the Martian subsurface could have sustained microbial communities for billions of years—and perhaps still could today.
Russia, China and other adversaries are launching attacks designed to damage or destroy US satellites and interfere with that critical infrastructure. CNN’s Jim Sciutto gets an exclusive look into how Space Force is fighting every day to defend against these technologies.
#CNN #News
SpaceX is reportedly partnering with Canadian tech startup Geometric Energy Corporation to launch a billboard into orbit around Earth.
The download speed is 100 Mbps and the upload speed is 13.89 Mbps.
“Starlink” is a satellite internet project of SpaceX. From 2,019 to 2,024 SpaceX plans to use five years to send thousands of satellites needed for networking into low-Earth orbit to form a “Starlink” network to provide internet services. Currently, there are 1,650 satellites on the “Starlink” network.
The Speedtest report shows that in the second quarter of this year, the average download speed of Starlink satellite internet services in the US market was 97.23 Mbps. This is not far from the average download speed of fixed broadband in the US, which is 115.22 Mbps.
Continue reading “SpaceX starlink allows users to download a movie in less than 1 minute” »
The space-faring firm’s satellite internet service promises connections with high speed and low latency — and data suggests the rollout pace is now increasing.
