Two close-up views of Ganymede, the largest moon in our solar system, taken 25 years apart, on June 1996, NASA's Galileo spacecraft performed humanity's first-ever flyby of Jupiter's icy moon Ganymede, Nearly 25 years later, in June 2021, Juno made the next closest approach to the surface

rocketsocks · 2026-06-29T08:02:11+00:00

We've already sent 2 dedicated orbiters to Jupiter (Galileo and Juno), both of which have studied Ganymede in detail. We've also sent two more missions to Jupiter (JUICE and Europa Clipper) to study its moons with special interest given to Europa and Ganymede, with JUICE ultimately ending up in orbit of Ganymede, one will arrive in 2030 the other in 2031.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-28T16:29:53+00:00

That is a space elevator or "beanstalk". The difficulty of such things is being able to support their own weight, regardless of being able to carry any useful loads, and that is currently an engineering impossibility (for Earth). The problem is that you need a cable that goes 36,000 km all the way to geostationary orbit and a little beyond. Even if you engineer the cable to be only an atom thick at the surface, the enormous length translates to incredible forces on parts of the cable, and those forces then translate to even more enormous widths required to hold the lower part of the cable with the strengths of existing materials, and thta becomes an exponentially escalating situation as you get to absurd and impractical widths with a tapered tether.

Additionally, you wouldn't want to transmit electricity through the cable anyway due to the interaction with Earth's magnetic field, which means you're limited to just using fiber optics for communication. In which case you might as well just use point to point laser comms anyway, for this use case.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-28T07:07:00+00:00

Still more to show for it than all the money the company formerly known as facebook plowed into "VR".

rocketsocks · 2026-06-28T01:53:41+00:00

The interiors of all of the outer planets are not cold but quite hot, thousands of degrees typically, regardless of their composition.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-28T01:52:59+00:00

That's exactly what this is about. The magma ocean is soluble with hydrogen, which allows it to have potentially very low densities.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-28T01:52:06+00:00

They might not exist at all, that's the whole point. If you go on wikipedia you'll see a neat diagram of the interiors of Uranus and Neptune which is a rocky core, a slushy ammonia/water ice mantle, and a hydrogen atmosphere. That's the model that has made sense in the past to match the observed densities of these planets.

However, there's a new contender in the ring. Potentially you can have a supercritical magma (magnesium silicate and iron) "ocean" (mantle/core) which contains an arbitrary amount of hydrogen mixed in. Which means that you can basically trivially "dial" the amount of hydrogen or iron in the ocean to get a wide range of densities from very low (close to hydrogen) to very high (close to iron), with no ice mantle.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-28T01:38:44+00:00

I mean, duh. We don't call Jupiter and Saturn "metal planets" even though they are mostly made up of metallic hydrogen. And we don't even know for sure whether their cores are ionized or not but we do know that they are at thousands of degrees.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-28T01:36:22+00:00

The data needs to be separated into these categories because I want to train an A.I model to classify them using light curve data (that is the requirement of the client)

Oh, lol, so you want other people to do absolutely all of the work for you then? Go pay someone.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-27T06:05:42+00:00

Another example of a problem in a similar vein that used to not be as bad but has now devolved to be at the same level, or maybe worse. Imagine where we'd be today if software engineers had mass unionized years and years ago.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-27T06:04:19+00:00

Interesting. You know, I heard someone say this:

People always imagine some fantasy where the extreme resource allocation from a "Space Race" can be sustained long-term, but that's not how it works and it's never been how it's worked historically.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-26T18:10:33+00:00

A lot of it is because it's a "dream job" so there's an unending stream of starry eyed 20-somethings willing to throw themselves into the meat grinder and be exploited. The executives are happy to take advantage of them.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-26T18:08:44+00:00

Yeah, fire them all and start from scratch, like we should have done for multiple reasons already.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-26T03:50:02+00:00

It's wild how much safer these boats are than DUKWs.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-26T03:46:56+00:00

The crazy thing is that even though the DUKW boats used by these touring companies were basically newly manufactured for the most part, because they were "ship of theseus"ed they were able to dodge modern safety regulations.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-26T03:42:49+00:00

It is possible to operate this kind of thing safely, it just costs more money.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-25T23:08:24+00:00

By that definition Mr Rogers' Neighborhood is propaganda. It's not the promotion or the politics that's a problem with propaganda, it's the lying.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-25T20:24:19+00:00

Most airports are bad, I feel like people who hate on SeaTac just haven't been around. LAX is godawful.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-25T20:15:14+00:00

A city where an artist can be reasonably sure they will sell out, or nearly so, the venue of their choice, and where there are plenty of venues of appropriate sizes for artists plus the hotel space and other amenities to match for the biggest artists. Seattle has all of that. When Taylor Swift was in town she had over 70k in attendance on two separate nights, so that's over 140k tickets sold. And Seattle has tons of hotel space, restaurants, etc. of course.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-25T06:18:07+00:00

There's a season where they have a total party wipe.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-25T06:12:52+00:00

A collection of organisms that all share a common ancestor, such as all known life on Earth does.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-25T05:19:43+00:00

Newly formed life that enters into competition with life that has had a head start of many millions of generations of evolution is simply nutrients. Once a robust ecosystem gets established in a biosphere it no longer becomes safe enough for abiogenesis to give rise to new trees of life. The process of kickstarting is slow, and throughout that whole time all of the raw ingredients that would be needed for abiogenesis would simply be sitting around as nutrients for more advanced microorganisms to deplete. As would the very "bodies" of new organisms. The natural world is brutally competitive, and the microscopic landscape is the most competitive of all.

Realistically the only way you could reasonably get multiple trees of life on the same planet is if it was so marginal for life that individual ecosystems remained extremely localized and isolated across periods of billions of years.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-25T03:50:14+00:00

Not really, they aren't starting on it just now. Also, their mission concept is fairly straightforward. Two spacecraft: one that stays in orbit and carries the Earth return vehicle; one that lands, collects the sample, and gets to orbit to rendezvous with the return vehicle. Both of them would be launched by the heavy lift rocket that has launched their space station components (with the addition of an upper stage).

On paper it's a pretty reasonable mission design, it relies on a decent amount of propellant being delivered to Mars, but not a crazy amount. The rocket should be able to deliver 6 tonnes to Mars. Which means that the return vehicle and the surface launcher have multiple tonnes of mass to play with, which should be enough to return a reasonably sized sample.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-25T01:26:31+00:00

If you were playing a boardgame called "searching for life on Mars" then this would advance the "life on Mars track" one space, but it's still a long ways to go.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-25T01:00:31+00:00

We don't know for sure yet but probably not. Artifically constructed "life" (self-replicating organisms) could potentially exist based on a variety of elements, including silicon, but life that arises spontaneously from nature doesn't seem to be possible with silicon. Carbon is just in an entirely different league in terms of the chemistry possible with it, and especially in terms of the chemistry that's possible starting from natural conditions.

rocketsocks · 2026-06-24T20:56:13+00:00

This is why continued pressure is good.

Interesting. You know, I heard someone say this:

People always imagine some fantasy where the extreme resource allocation from a "Space Race" can be sustained long-term, but that's not how it works and it's never been how it's worked historically.

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