PakledHostage

My coworker suggested that the artifacts may be the wormhole that ISON disappeared into? They don't appear in every image, so maybe they are popping into and out of existence?

The Mun orbits at a speed that is consistent with it having zero mass. If you took the Mun's mass into account and used a kerbin centric coordinate frame, it should be moving about 5 m/s faster in its 12000 km radius circular orbit.

They aren't very spectacular, but there are some images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory on the original ISON thread.

Update: The first images are on the Solar Dynamics Observatory website now. There are four sets of images. I wasn't able to see very much in any of them. Am I interpreting them wrong? Here's the most recent of the "purple" set. There's a small artifact there. Is that it?:

For anyone who's interested, the Solar Dynamics Observatory's website is going to be posting near real-time images of ISON near perihelion, starting in just over an hour.

It is the end of the day for me, but we're now only about 13 hours away from perihelion. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory's website is posting images from its LASCO camera on a regular basis on their website: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/c3/512/

Trouble is that cooperating in space requires sharing technology. Even if it is only as simple as docking without interfacing with any ISS systems, it still requires sharing communications technology, specs for the docking ring, etc. That is difficult to achieve in an environment where neither country trusts one another. This is why the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was such a monumental achievement; so much more so than it appeared to be on the surface.

And you don't think these types of news stories have anything to do with it? BBC News: China's state-sponsored hackers renew attacks on US The Economist: China’s state-sponsored hackers are ubiquitousâ€â€and totally unabashed

And also because the light comes on when I open the fridge door...

A gravitational assist from a moon is one method. Another is passing through a Lagrange point at low energy. This is how J002E3, suspected to be the S-IVB stage from Apollo 12, was recaptured from solar orbit. Yet another mechanism is two objects orbiting each other passing close to a third much more massive object. If the trajectories are just right, one of the pair of objects may be captured while the second of the pair is flung away at higher speed. This is the mechanism that is believed to give hypervelocity planets and stars their incredible speeds.

I was wondering that too. Here's another image from the STEREO-A (Ahead) probe. According to the image caption at Universe Today:

It is too close to the Sun right now to see it anyway. Perihelion is at about 1800 UTC tomorrow. And mods, is there any chance that Lohan2008's new ISON thread could be combined with this one? I imagine that both threads will have some life left in them if ISON survives perihelion to fly over the Earth in late December.

Currently, the asteroid with the highest known impact probability is 1950 DA: a 1.1 - 1.4 km diameter rock with a mass greater than 2 x 1012 kg. Fortunately, the risk isn't for another 800 years. It is currently unknown whether the Yarkovsky effect will increase or decrease the probability of an impact. If impact ever does become a certainty, lets hope it isn't just (as K^2 once said on these forums) "a rude surprise for some future feudal kingdom" and that we've got the technology to do something about it.

November 25th update from the Comet Ison Observing Campaign group: Edit: I also found a GIF on the ISON observing group's website showing ISON and Encke as seen from NASA's STEREO spacecraft. Mercury is the bright fixed object at upper left and the Earth is fixed at centre right. ISON is the larger comet and Encke is the smaller one. [image Credit: Karl Battams/NRL/NASA/CIOC]

I had a look at chartsbin.com and found a chart showing the percentage of population that know something about global warming and believe that it is anthropogenic. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the data, but the plot seems to at least be consistent with another source (specific to Americans) at the Yale school of forestry and environmental studies:

On my stream, they are saying that the spacecraft is being recycled for a launch within the current launch window. Clock has been reset for T-13 minutes. Edit: Ninja'd by hawkinator

Livestream has just gone err... live... at http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/007/status.html Edit: Ninja'd by Kryten.

Today's XKCD seems somehow relevant...

I don't know... Some of us struggle to find trash entertaining. I went to see Gravity on the recommendation of some of you guys on this forum. It had one or two redeeming qualities, but I could have just as well skipped it. I didn't find it particularly entertaining.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, could you please provide us with a reference? Maybe a link to an example of such a paper in a reputable journal? I assume from your statement that you've come across one or two, and would therefore have an easier time finding an example than we would.

I agree. And I think a lot of other environmentally minded people would agree as well. And while we're at it, we should encourage our governments to support continued progress towards alternative energy. As I said in a previous post in this thread, money spent developing safer and more efficient alternative energy solutions pumps the economy and ensures that we will have options when the oil and coal eventually do run out. The best evidence we currently have suggests that it also helps protect a very valuable resource: biodiversity. It isn’t wasted. Development of alternative energy requires scientists, engineers and manufacturing jobs. Those are all things that, I'm sure, the members of this forum will benefit from.

Can you please provide some evidence of "some uncovered falsification cases"? Climate change deniers like the people at FOX News like to bang the "climategate" drum, but they always omit the detail that the UK parliament's Science and Techology Committee cleared the CRU scientists who were at the centre of "Climategate" of any wrong doing in their report on The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Between the original peer reviews and the inquiries that followed "Climategate", the CRU's work must be among the most heavily scrutinized body of scientific research anywhere. From the UK Parliament's Science and Technology Committee's website:

I thought I'd post a link to this Phys.org article here because some might find it interesting: World's largest particle detector "IceCube" detects first high-energy neutrinos from the cosmos

I don't know which media you are citing... I don't think I have ever read that anywhere in the mainstream media, and I am something of a news junky. In fact, I would be angry if I ever did read that in the mainstream media. It is just as irresponsible to fear monger about the end of all life on earth due to climate change as it is to dismiss climate change as merely "god's will". Both cost credibility. And the evidence that, even in the worst case, life will persist in some form is the existence of extremophiles. Life already exists in some of the harshest environments imaginable here on earth and there's no reason to believe that it won't continue to do so for many hundreds of millions if not billions of years to come. No I didn't. I said "rational people who believe in climate change". There may well be rational people who believe in other things as well, and there are certainly some irrational people who believe in climate change.

A lot of the time, the idea that it is "arrogant" to believe that humanity could change the climate comes from religious teachings. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), going to church on Sundays and watching Fox news aren't much in the way of credentials in the climate change debate. K^2's argument is a little better because it is at least based on scientific reasoning, but even it has serious flaws. He argues that climate models should account for factors such as energy balance, heat transfer, atmospheric temperature and density distributions, etc, yet nowhere does he provide evidence that they don't. Instead, he presents models that he himself describes as "toy models" that contradict what the atmospheric scientists (some of whom, even he admits, are competent) are predicting in their peer reviewed research, and expects us to draw some conclusions from there about the flaws in climate science. Rational people who believe the strong scientific evidence for climate change know that it does not result in the end of all life on earth. And that it does not necessarily result in economic catastrophe. Money spent developing alternative energy solutions pumps the economy and ensures that we will have options when the oil and coal eventually do run out. It also helps protect a very valuable resource: biodiversity. It isn’t wasted. It requires scientists, engineers and manufacturing jobs. It may ultimately result in a shift in the balance of political power away from the oil and coal industries, but life will go on.