Explore the International Space Station (Toilets and All) With This Interactive Map Kinja is in read-only mode. We are working to restore service. The following replies are approved. To see additional replies that are pending approval, click Show Pending. Warning: These may contain graphic material. InexperiencedQuestionableAegeancat. An Epic One-Kilometer Cliff On The Surface Of Rosetta's Comet. Tell her they also found a huge cache of mah jongg tiles. Flagged What does she care about?
What is she interested in. Give us parameters for the assault on her preconceived values. :-> That's not a hard thing to convince someone if you love science. Basically anytime we do things like this, we're furthering human knowledge, and advancing our own technical abilities for future generations to learn from and improve. I'm not sure how the ESA is funded, probably in a similar fashion as NASA, but I do know that NASA gets next to nothing in terms of the federal budget, less than .50%, and dropping, while the military budget is insanely high and outspends the next top 5 nations combined.
Oh don't worry you don't have to convince me of it, I'm 100% onboard with the missions. These incredible photos from the International Space Station make Earth look like a video game. That general glow you're seeing from Earth is actually a naturally occurring phenomenon called "airglow". Airglow is unrelated to human activity, and is the result of excitement of atoms in the atmosphere, leading to light emission. Airglow is responsible for a large majority of the nighttime light (moonless night) and is estimated as providing almost 10x as much light as background stars. Alex Rivest has a great break-down of air glow on his blog here: [www.auroranightglow.blogspot.com] Airglow is one of the coolest things about pictures from the ISS on the night-side, you'll always see that green-ish shell.
The light streaks from Earth-side are of course from humans, but again, not a major contributor to the overall glow from the atmosphere, that's all us. A gallery of sublime photographs from across our solar system. GLIMPSE. A Realistic Video of What You'd See Flying Through Deep Space. I've read that the sky contains 12.7 million times more area than the Hubble Deep Field, and I've always been amazed at that. So using the metaphor that is commonly used, that's a lot of eight-foot soda straws. And I'm inclined to ask: Even if we do develop FTL like an Albicuierre drive or something like that, would intergalactic travel be feasible? Would traveling to M31, millions of light years away, be as easy as going to Proxima Centauri, "just" a few light years away? Once we break the light speed barrier, can we go as fast as we want to other galaxies like in this video? It would seem that the distances involved would prohibit extragalactic travel, even at light speed it would take millions of years.
If FTL methods were even possible the speeds needed would be hundreds of times faster than light, to cut the travel time to with in a human lifetime. Sadly the math is not in our favor......unless the Asgard provide the gift of their hyper-drives. 2014 March 2 - Martian Sunset. Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2014 March 2 Martian Sunset Image Credit: Mars Exploration Rover Mission, Texas A&M, Cornell, JPL, NASA Explanation: What would it be like to see a sunset on Mars?
To help find out, the robotic rover Spirit was deployed in 2005 to park and watch the Sun dip serenely below the distant lip of Gusev crater. Colors in the above image have been slightly exaggerated but would likely be apparent to a human explorer's eye. Fine martian dust particles suspended in the thin atmosphere lend the sky a reddish color, but the dust also scatters blue light in the forward direction, creating a bluish sky glow near the setting Sun. Tomorrow's picture: open space.