KG3

17.8% Aluminum dioxide... The space shuttle solid rocket booster's fuel was about 16% aluminum. Is there any chance that a solid rocket fuel of some kind could be made mostly from Moon regolith? You would need an oxidizer too like ammonium perchlorate NH4ClO4 so you would need some ingredients like chlorine, nitrogen and maybe some hydrogen but you would have the aluminum, oxygen and that little pinch of iron covered.

The American Armed Forces Radio has a station in Puerto Rico. I spent a couple of months down there during the winter of 1987. I seem to recall the Cubans simply broadcasted noise at the same frequency as the AAFR. Or maybe it was the Americans broadcasting noise over the Cuban radio station (or both even). If you listened carefully you could hear the radio station but the random whirrs, screeches and growls gave you a headache rather quickly!

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, mmmm bacon. My favorite carcinogen.

I haven't seen the movie in quite a while but I seem to recall that they didn't know what the machine was supposed to do. I think they thought it was some sort of device for communication with aliens. Still, a space suite and helmet would have been a good idea. Safety first!

From the pictures I've seen so far it looks like there isn't any material smaller than pea stone. Will they be able go sample such chunky stuff? I thought their sampler was set up for very fine stuff.

Ah, well it was 1998. They didn't have on line calculators back then. Also they probably thought a tsunami would be more dramatic and cinemagraphic than people being incinerated and blown to bits. I seem to recall that New York City was hit by several tsunamis in the movies around that time. I think the parts showing the impact from space were way too fast. The shock wave should have been moving slower right?

Probably just a sound effect added when they edited the movie that you heard the bomb being dropped in. Luckily nobody has ever dropped a bomb on me so I'm probably no expert though.

Got to love yacht racing. Just owning a racing yacht gets you ranked in the worlds top 50!

It looks similar in size and construction to the "reproduction" of Noah's Ark built in Kentucky at the Ark Encounter theme park. I'm guessing that if you substituted animatronic animals for animatronic galley slaves you might have similar price tag. I don't know how sea worthy either project might be though! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_Encounter#Design_and_construction "The partners projected that the fully completed park would cost $150 million... AiG considered twelve different possible lengths for the biblical cubit, and AiG chose to use a length of 20.1 inches (51 cm); this produced plans for an ark measuring 510 feet (155 m) long, 85 feet (26 m) wide, and 51 feet (16 m) high.[45] The Ark Encounter consists of approximately 3,300,000 board feet (7,800 m3) of wood.[1] The framing of the ark consists mostly of Englemann spruce, while the exterior is made of pine; some of the logs were as long as 50 feet (15 m) long and 36 inches (91 cm) in diameter."

I would guess that the white dwarf would not explode if you took mass away. It's already fused all the elements it can with the mass it already has. It would probably become some kind of weird planet. The neutron star on the other hand might. Electrons in the neutron star have been forced into the nuclei of atoms turning protons into neutrons (ok bad explanation but I'm on the fly here). I would imagine that as you took away the mass that holds the neutron star together away neutrons would start to reorganize back into atoms and some kind of fusion would take place blowing the star apart.

For bringing up the density of the atmosphere and to compensate for the lack of a magnetosphere. I guess you would have to breathe it too.

What if you used a denser gas like Argon?

So It's not about the output of the star, it's about how much light the planet receives. So you would say that GJ 3323 has a stellar flux of 1.21, or 21%?

What is stellar flux? I'm assuming it's how variable the output of the star is.

It's an insect called the Cochineal that is used to produce crimson dye. It is a type of insect referred to as a scale. They are parasites of plants mostly. Lice are parasites of warm blooded animals. I can't imagine how you get enough of these scale insects to produce a dye!

Very cool stuff! I have read about the Red Paint People. I just watched about 25 minutes of the film. I looks like there is reenacted stuff but some of the footage is of actual excavations from the 60s or 70s. It's interesting to see them removing bones from the ground with bare hands. I guess they weren't worried about contaminating the bones with modern DNA back then. I think it's also more difficult today to get permission to excavate sites like this because there are people who prefer the sites be undisturbed. It's also interesting that some of the stone the tools were made from material that came from 1000 or so miles away. It's amazing how people got around!

What demographic would an ad on a rocket be targeting? It would probably be cheaper and more effective to just run an ad during the Super Bowl.

You can send a payload up to 300 km via a cable but you still need to get it up to orbital velocity. The space elevator does this just by taking the payload up to GSO.

Ok, right, I should have looked this up before I said anything, but anyway, this is what I was talking about. I was a bit wrong as to the why. They reduced the amplitude of the low frequencies to save physical space on the vinyl records. When they first digitized the music for CDs from these original masters it just didn't sound right. Science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_(audio)#Uses "...in the production of vinyl records, a filter is used to reduce the amplitude of low frequencies which otherwise produce large amplitudes on the tracks of a record. Then the groove can take up less physical space, fitting more music on the record. The preamp attached to the phono cartridge has a complementary filter boosting those low frequencies following the standard RIAA equalization curve."

I've heard that vinyl records are able to transmit certain frequencies better than others. Just something about how the groove is cut and how the needle works I guess. And to compensate for these deficiencies sound engineers would boost the signal for some frequencies and lower the signal for others when they made the original masters so that I would sound right on the vinyl after they were pressed. When CDs were made from the original masters they just didn't sound like the familiar vinyl versions. So they had to "Digitally Remaster" to get the music to sound right on the CDs. It sounds plausible to me. Does anyone known if I got this right?

I've heard that the space shuttle's windows got pitted and dinged on occasion by such strikes. I've never heard of one being breached by a strike. I know those windows were very thick bullet proof type glass but how thick and bullet proof are the walls of the ISS? What might have happened to the impactor? Would it have entered the ISS streaked across the crew compartment like a meteor and burned up? Could it have lodged in the opposite wall or bounced around for a while? What would have happened if a cosmonaut was leaning (er, floating) against that wall during impact? Are ISS inhabitants supposed to wear eye protection?

Basically the real problem with relativity isn't so much about traveling to another solar system and coming home to find your children have become old and gray. The real problem is figuring compounded interest. For instance: Credit card companies not only reserve the right to apply monthly payments to whichever balance pays them the lowest interest while leaving the higher interest portions to accrue for the longest time. They also reserve the right to accrue interest in which ever frame of time reference you might have been in. Making a cash withdrawal from an ATM machine on the surface of a neutron star is a mistake you are not likely to make twice! I'm nearly positive this is in the fine print on the contract. Who knows?

I remember when I was a kid that they said the Voyagers were good for around a billion years. I have no idea how they came up with this number, it might have just been hyperbole. I've wondered what it must be like to build something that will most likely out last civilization.

Messy, I see. Invariable plane is new to me! It looks like it should come with some sort of standard error... thing. If there were a single super Jupiter orbiting in a polar orbit the invariable plane might not be close to any of the objects in the system. Right?

How different is KSP?