If you’ve been moved & inspired by Artemis, NASA needs your help. Literally during A2, the president proposed cutting NASA science 47%, canceling 54 missions, including many already in-flight. To help stop these cuts, check out @planetarysociety.bsky.social www.planetary.org/save-nasa-sc...
The FY 2027 NASA budget request hides its science cuts by omitting mission names instead of explicitly zeroing them out.
We did the work and found 54 missions cancelled in this proposal.
This is another extinction-level event for NASA science.
Full list: planetary.org/save-nasa-science
This is possibly the most incredible tracking video of a rocket launch that I have ever seen, and Shuttle had some really incredible videos too!
Just look at those gorgeous flame dynamics and then the booster separation... 🔭🧪 #Artemis
Awesome view of @NASAArtemis II, as viewed from NOAA weather satellite. Note the dark (warmer) dot launching off from Cape Canaveral and off to the northeast! #flwx #artemis
Genuinely just bonkers to watch the USA do this to one of the most successful and innovative hubs of scientific research the world has ever seen. All those years of Free Speech On Campus debates and it turns out they actually wanted less cancer research. Absurd.
This is the entire budget of NASA's Planetary Science Division for *four years*
A picture of PEW poll on global attitude survey, saying the % who rate the morality and ethics of people in their country as good vs bad, where the US has the worst rankings and Canada the best
Americans: we live in a fallen state—embroiled by sin, cheating, lying, and evil. You cannot trust anyone, not even those who claim to know you best
Canadians: I love my neighbors and my friends!
Publication day for our paper on the T2.5 brown dwarf/exoplanet analog SIMP0136! We find cloud formation appears to drive upper atmospheric temperature and chemical structure. We also debut a new, novel method for vertical mapping extrasolar atmospheric dynamics.
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
I present the most interesting graph ever made.
HUMAN ON BICYCLE beats every other living thing.
www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-hu...
The US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government every year from 1994 to 2023.
The Cato study provides the first-ever 30-year analysis of the fiscal effects of immigration on government budgets.
https://ow.ly/jy8a50Y8kM3
Great article on the cosmic shoreline. I was fortunate to have an office near Kevin’s for my 20 years at NASA Ames. He is the most creative planetary scientist I know.
They're going to *throw out* one-of-a-kind NASA archives?!
Not even a year since the Inauguration & we're already at the 2nd-time-as-farce version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥
Why is this written as if that statement is just another opinion? What does the actual law say about the matter?
Image of the front entrance of a house, showing bright northern lights above: a green layer of aurora beneath a red aurora
we had spent much of the (chilly) evening in the countryside away from any lights, but my favorite image of the night ended up being the aurora just casually, majestically, filling the sky above our homes
yeah - tear drop shape, and I think the heaviest was 2.5 oz (I have them first weigh in g) Screening out pebbles and smoothing sand surface is better and have them measure rim-to-rim "as self-consistently as possible" Powder is a good idea -or with something like alternating layers of colored sand
one of the things I want to them to see is the effect of kinetic energy in impact geology and conversion of these high energies into (effectively) the violent excavation of the target surface
I have a short class activity exploring the mechanics of impact crater formation and crater morphology. First they drop small weights (fishing sinkers work well!) from various heights into sand beds and record crater diameters as a function of m,g,z, etc. Then end with lighting some firecrackers...
slow-motion capture from a student's phone:
Still image of sand bed with firecracker explosion starting to spread out an ejecta blanket
Teaching some comparative planetology, it turns out that lighting half-buried firecrackers in a bed of sand does a pretty nice job of simulating the formation of impact craters ; ) 🧪🔭
nist.gov and its associated subdomains: incredibly useful and important data, at risk of being lost...
it's something that existed in the population long before widespread recognition - so better diagnosis (and hopefully removal of stigma) would make it seem like there's a huge increase in its occurrence (whether or not that's actually the case...)
Classic plot of the occurrence of left handedness by birth year. The plot starts at 5% in 1890, dips to near 3-4% around 1910 then rises until leveling off at 12% in 1960 onward
I think about this plot all the time, and especially with respect to things like autism. If you’d lived in 1940 and had access to this data, would it feel like an “epidemic” of left-handedness?
To conclude, it looks like the Moon was moved around to give a nice backdrop(s) for the bridge scene ; )
A silly activity but a fun way to review some of the concepts we've been exploring in intro astronomy in order to better understand the relative motions of the Earth, Sun, and Moon!
Belly from TSITP on the padlock bridge on the Seine, with the full Moon above the river in the background.
But in the next scene we see our main character(s) on or near what appears to be the "padlock bridge" on the Seine. We again see the Moon roughly aligned with the river. But the river runs SE-NW here(!) The timing and geometry therefore make it impossible to have the full Moon in this scene.
A picture of the Eiffel Tower at night, with a bright full Moon in the background.
Next, we have a nice shot of the Eiffel Tower with the bright gray full moon in the background. I'm not sure exactly where this is taken from, but the placement of the river suggests from somewhere around the Galeries area(?) That would put the Moon low in the ~southern sky - which is good!
BTW, in these scenes the Moon appears very bright whitish-gray (the way it looks when it's high in the sky), showing essentially no yellowish or reddish coloration from the atmospheric scattering that might be expected at relatively low altitudes (on the order of ~5 degrees here?)
Image of a bright white-gray full Moon hovering above the River Seine and buildings in Paris
The next scene where we see the Moon has to be sometime between 130am and 4am. Here the Moon is relatively low in the sky - a more realistic altitude, but a huge shift in position compared to the previous scene - when when the maximum distance the Moon could have moved is roughly ~45 degrees.
Belly from TSITP looks high into the sky at the Moon
The Moon shining from a partially cloudy sky, looking up from the perspective of a Paris street
Okay: the first issue is that of the Moon's altitude. It is 130 am, and suggested to be midsummer. Belly looks (very) high into the sky and notes a full moon. But at Paris' 48.9N, the highest altitude the Moon could be (near solstice) is about 23 degrees above the horizon ~[90-(48.9+23.5-5)]
The Summer I Misplaced the Moon... #TSITP 🔭
Watching the finale last night I happened to notice a few oddities regarding the placement of the Moon, so I wrote a quick set of review slides to work through with my intro astro class ; )
(other than times/locations, this should be spoiler free)
