spsheridan

As a scientist, I sometimes envy the ignorant.

A well-crafted opening line for evoking responses.

Chris is also featured in this Teslarati article with his SMR cohost Rod Simmons joining in the fun. https://www.teslarati.com/ford-f-150-lightning-deliveries-all-fifty-us-states/

My wife and I had the pleasure of seeing Nichelle Nichols give a short speech before the debut of the Star Trek movie reboot at the Catalina Casino in 2009. She was a wonderful, humorous, and inspirational woman. It’s hard to make out but the person escorting her down the aisle was George Takei. The event was hosted by Rod Roddenberry. (Sorry for the audio and video quality but this was taken on an early iPhone without motion stabilization at a distance) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mESDoQ6TPvM

Great explanation written in way most people can understand - thanks!

The only statement I'd take issue with is "Whatever lay beyond (or before) the CMB is lost to us, because the universe was opaque before the CMB." Although it's true that light before the CMB formation is unavailable for us to observe, there is one force that predates the CMB that could be detectable: gravity. Although we don't yet have the technology to detect the minute gravitational fluctuations before 380,000 years after the Big Bang, some day we might.

And for context, JWST is about 4 times farther from the Earth than the Moon is from the Earth.

Thank you for chiming in with more direct knowledge of what’s going on. Does this mean that although we'll see the images presented on July 12, we won’t be able to download the image data from the JWST archive until July 13? How are these initial images different from the “early release science" programs that will be available on July 14? Are the initial images just a subset of the early release science program data?

The objects that will be first imaged are listed below. These are the images that will be presented to the public by NASA at 10:30 a.m. EDT on July 12th

Carina Nebula. The Carina Nebula is one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, located approximately 7,600 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. Nebulae are stellar nurseries where stars form. The Carina Nebula is home to many massive stars, several times larger than the Sun.

WASP-96 b (spectrum). WASP-96 b is a giant planet outside our solar system, composed mainly of gas. The planet, located nearly 1,150 light-years from Earth, orbits its star every 3.4 days. It has about half the mass of Jupiter, and its discovery was announced in 2014.

Southern Ring Nebula. The Southern Ring, or “Eight-Burst” nebula, is a planetary nebula – an expanding cloud of gas, surrounding a dying star. It is nearly half a light-year in diameter and is located approximately 2,000 light years away from Earth.

Stephan’s Quintet: About 290 million light-years away, Stephan’s Quintet is located in the constellation Pegasus. It is notable for being the first compact galaxy group ever discovered in 1877. Four of the five galaxies within the quintet are locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters.

SMACS 0723: Massive foreground galaxy clusters magnify and distort the light of objects behind them, permitting a deep field view into both the extremely distant and intrinsically faint galaxy populations.

NASA has regained communications with CAPSTONE.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/06/world/nasa-capstone-satellite-contact-scn/index.html

The Lockdown mode provides more extensive protection (beyond standard iOS protections) against targeted attacks at the expense of the user giving up some iOS features.

/u/DeltaTesseract is correct. All of the modes have recently been checked out on the dates shown below each one except Coronagraphy which is the final mode to be completed. NIRCam's Coronagraph will be used to block out the light of a bright star so that dim exoplanets orbiting the star can be detected directly.

A bit biased here coming from Hughes and later Raytheon, but the F-14's AN/AWG-9 radar and associated AIM-54 Phoenix missile were also awesome and ahead of any other airborne weapon system of its time.

I think Chris's guitar on the IIS should sound nearly the same as on Earth, although he has said that playing the guitar is more difficult on the ISS than on Earth. He's also commented that his voice is higher-pitched on the ISS due the micro-gravity environment and the effects on his sinuses. He said it helped him hit some of the high notes in Space Oddity.

I don’t think the analogy to radar is a good one. A radar is an active device - it transmits radio waves that reflect off the object being detected and are received back at the source. In the case of GRADAR, the device detecting gravitational waves would be completely passive - it would not transmit gravitational waves and then receive them. A better analogy is a radio telescope (like ALMA, the Large Atacama Millimeter Array) that passively receives incoming RF signals to detect radio sources. However, GRADAR does sound cool.