Thought For The Day

Orion Launch Abort System Attitude Control Motor Hot-Fire Test via NASA https://ift.tt/2Wk4fYE

NGC 3921, Spirit Galaxy

I’ll never tell 🤭

space edition - tag yourself

moonlight: sleep deprived af, genius ideas at 2:00 am, constantly underestimated, tangled earbuds, pretends like they don’t care but actually cares a lot, unscented candles

comet: will fight you for their friends, perfect eyeliner, doesn’t get angry but instead just fucking glares at you until you crumble, loves thunderstorms, cat person

stars: has no idea what they’re doing 167% of the time, artsy, likes halsey, string lights everywhere, loves fuzzy socks and blankets, probably wears space buns

alien: secretly is super good at makeup but doesn’t wear it often, lots of coffee, probably has a pet fish, reads young adult fantasy novels, closet conspiracy theorist, arms and papers always covered in doodles

black hole: 97% of their wardrobe is hoodies, professional procrastinator, can write, probably owns essential oils, eats ramen at 1:00 am, only writes in pen, actually really cool but doesn’t know it

spacedust: bath bombs, a+ insta feed, long flowy skirts and tops, city person, pretends to have their shit together, secretly loves kermit memes, probably dyed their hair at one point

Hayabusa2: Wide-angle navigational images of asteroid Ryugu, taken today as the probe descended temporarily to just 5km from the asteroid’s surface. These were originally posted to the probe’s Twitter feed.

NGC 7380, Wizard in Cepheus

🎃👻☠️ Skull Seen In Small Asteroid… Spooky As It Gets! 🎃👻☠️

2015 TB145 - 2000 foot wide asteroid.

🎃 Part Of Spinning Blue Ball’s Five Days of Halloween!! 🎃 

'Space Butterfly' Is Home to Hundreds of Baby Stars

What looks like a red butterfly in space is in reality a nursery for hundreds of baby stars, revealed in this infrared image from our Spitzer Space Telescope. Officially named Westerhout 40 (W40), the butterfly is a nebula — a giant cloud of gas and dust in space where new stars may form. The butterfly’s two “wings” are giant bubbles of hot, interstellar gas blowing from the hottest, most massive stars in this region.

Besides being beautiful, W40 exemplifies how the formation of stars results in the destruction of the very clouds that helped create them. Inside giant clouds of gas and dust in space, the force of gravity pulls material together into dense clumps. Sometimes these clumps reach a critical density that allows stars to form at their cores. Radiation and winds coming from the most massive stars in those clouds — combined with the material spewed into space when those stars eventually explode — sometimes form bubbles like those in W40. But these processes also disperse the gas and dust, breaking up dense clumps and reducing or halting new star formation.

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‘That was a quick flight’: How astronauts kept ice cool while their rocket malfunctioned at 4,970mph and plummeted back to Earth in harrowing 7G 'ballistic re-entry’ before hugging their loved-ones on the landing pad as Russia opens CRIMINAL probe.

Two astronauts kept ice cool as their rocket traveling at thousands of miles an hour malfunctioned on the edge of space while carrying them to the International Space Station, cockpit audio reveals.

Russian Aleksey Ovchinin and American Nick Hague made it back to Earth alive this morning after the booster on their Soyuz rocket broke at 164,000 feet and the rocket automatically turned back during a dramatic 7G 'ballistic re-entry’.

Ovchinin retained an enviable sang-froid as he realised what was happening, after they were rocked violently around in their seats by the force of the booster malfunction.

'An accident with the booster, 2 minutes, 45 seconds. That was a quick flight,’ he said in a calm voice in a streamed video of the incident.  

'We’re tightening our seatbelts,’ Ovchinin said on the video.

At that moment the two astronauts were experiencing weightlessness, when in an ordinary launch they should still have been pinned to the back of their seats by the force of the rocket surging upwards at 4,970mph.  

Russia says it has opened a criminal investigation and grounded all Soyuz flights. The accident comes weeks after a hole was discovered in the International Space Station amid talk from the Russian space authorities of deliberate sabotage.  

Video footage from the launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome shows a large plume of smoke coming from the rocket at the moment it failed and footage from inside the capsule shows the two astronauts being violently shaken about.

The accident bears similarities to the 1986 Challenger disaster when one of its boosters failed at lift-off causing an explosion that killed seven.

Astronauts have been involved in Soyuz malfunctions twice before, one in 1983 when a crew was forced to eject from a Soyuz rocket as it exploded on the launchpad. In 1975 a Soyuz capsule crashed back to Earth from 90 miles up after a rocket failure, but the crew survived.

The rocket, which was designed in the 1960s, has also had one booster fail in similar fashion to today’s malfunction. In 2002 a booster rocket malfunctioned and the rocket which was carrying a satellite crashed in Kazakhstan killing one person on the ground.

In total Soyuz rockets have been launched 745 times of which 21 have failed. Thirteen of those failures have been since 2010, calling into question the continued reliability of the rocket.

Search and rescue teams were scrambled to the touchdown location as NASA revealed the descent meant the Russian-built Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft had to take 'a sharper angle of landing compared to normal’.

The Russians have suspended Soyuz flights to the space station while they investigate the cause of the booster failure.

The Soyuz is the only way to get people to the space station at the moment but officials insist the astronauts currently on the space station have enough supplies.  

NASA rookie Nick Hague and second-time flyer Aleksey Ovchinin of the Russian space agency were setting off for a six-month mission at the International Space Station Thursday, on a relatively rare two-man launch.

A spokesperson for NASA said that rescue teams have now reached Hague and Ovchinin and they’ve been taken out of the capsule and were in 'good condition’.

The craft’s landing engines and parachute system were said to have done their job as normal despite the enormous G-force acting on both the shuttle and crew during the landing.

Shortly after the incident rescue crews and paratroopers were rushed the emergency landing site in the barren Kazakh steppe to provide support for the crew.

NASA had issued a worrying tweet on Thursday morning saying: 'There’s been an issue with the booster from today’s launch. Teams have been in contact with the crew.’

'The capsule is returning via a ballistic descent, which is a sharper angle of landing compared to normal. Search and rescue teams are heading towards the expected touchdown location of the spacecraft and crew.’  

Cosmonaut Alexander Volkov commented: 'The guys are lucky that they remained alive. They had reached a good height so it was possible to descend in their capsule.’

More info, pictures, diagrams, videos at this link:  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6264339/Rocket-launch-booster-malfunction-forces-astronauts-return-Earth-ballistic-entry.html