As promised, here's your who's who and what's what guide to #Inspiration4, the first privately crewed orbital flight. THREAD.
First up - who's who:
1) US technology billionaire Jared Isaacman - Commander and funder of the venture.
2) Physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux - survivor of childhood bone cancer and now employee of St Jude Children Research hospital, the very place that saved her life and the benefactor of this mission. Chosen to represent St Jude's. Will be first to space with a metal leg pin.
3) Geoscience professor Dr Sian Proctor - Mission pilot. She'll take over if anything goes wrong. Narrowly missed out on becoming a NASA astronaut in 2009. Excellent science communicator. Won her place through a competition.
4) Air Force veteran Christopher Sembroski - now works in the aerospace industry and won his place through a ticket raffle that reportedly raised $113 million for St Jude's.
Although they have undergone 6 months or so of training, including:
- zero gravity flights
- 12- and 30-hour mission simulations
- lessons in orbital mechanics
- stress tests (including g-force/centrifuge)
- emergency drills
no-one aboard is a fully trained astronaut. Huh.
This makes #Inspiration4 a unique experiment - how will civilians with minimal training cope? After all, if we are going to see hundreds or thousands living and working in space by the end of the century, they definitely won't all be astronauts. Gotta start sometime...
Next - why?
Isaacman always wanted to go to space - and hey, when you're a billionaire, you can make that happen. But he wanted his flight to mean something. So, he teamed up with SpaceX and through this venture, they are hoping to raise $200 million for the hospital.
But why not just donate the money to St Jude's? Although the mission will be costly, it will be less than the target goal. The launch itself costs $28-30 million, but then there's other factors e.g. training, modifications to the capsule, supplies etc but less than $200 million.
Next - where?
575 miles up, in orbit around the Earth (higher than the ISS at 400km). They'll take 90 minutes or so to complete each orbit. If they fly overhead at night, there's a good chance the capsule will be naked-eye visible.
They will be in Crew Dragon Capsule "Resilience" - just 8x4m for three whole days. But the ISS docking port has been modified with an enormous glass dome, so the team will get fantastic views of Earth.
Next - what will they do?
They'll be conducting science experiments on themselves (heart rate, sleep + cognitive tests). They will also be showcasing items for auction later, to raise funds. And having a butt-ton of fun.
Finally - how?
Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. They'll parachute back down into the sea.
It's being live-streamed on Youtube and Netflix - launch window opens 1am BST tonight (or tomorrow morning, if you want to be pedantic).
END
CORRECTION: It should be 575km not miles - I purposefully wrote the ISS height in km to have the same units. I'm not sure where miles came from 🙄
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Ok, I have to do a small thread about all the galaxies in that #JWST image - because if you turn up the brightness ... omg, they just POP out from everywhere. And as someone who's galaxies were mere blobs hidden in a sea of noise ... THIS IS AMAZING
First up is this spiral boy near the bottom of the image. Look at that defined arm, with a definite flocculent disk around it. Hints of a second too! Is that a colliding neighbour to its right? And a foreground edge-on spiral to the left?
Now, THERE's a beautiful face-on spiral if I ever did see one. Kind of like the mirror image of M74
So, Messier Marathon - what's that when it's at home?
In the 1970s, three American astronomers concocted a devilishly tricky observing campaign - see every Messier Catalogue object in one epic night of observing. Here's a short 🧵, with full details in my @FifthStarLabs article
The Messier Catalogue, a collection of the brightest and most accessible objects of the night sky, came about quite accidently in the late 1700s. Charles Messier (photo) was a comet hunter, but he kept coming across things decidedly comet like (fuzzy, nebulous) but stationary
on the sky. To stop himself getting confused, he and his assistant Pierre Méchain compiled a list of them. Since they used a small telescope by today's standards, with primitive optics, it means that today, many Messier Catalogue objects are visible even in binoculars.
Did you know that Ceres was the OG 9th planet of the Solar System? Discovered in 1801 by Italian Catholic priest and astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi (because astronomy was almost always a side-gig), this now-dwarf planet was originally described as a comet... Probably? (1/5)
In his own words: I have announced this star as a comet, but since it shows no nebulosity, and moreover, since it had a slow and rather uniform motion, I surmise that it could be something better than a comet. (2/5)
Observations at the end of 1801 confirmed this new object, and Ceres was designated a planet - particularly since it fit with the now-disproved Titius–Bode law, a mathematical oddity describing the spacing of the planets, indicating there should be one between Mars + Jupiter (3/5
Today is #InternationalDayOfWomenInScience. Here's my story. I hope it might inspire some of you to take up science, or maybe encourage you to support your female relatives in their pursuit of a career in STEM.
Thread...
I come from a town in South Wales called Barry. Never heard of it? It's where this show was filmed (pic).
I went to a typical primary and all- female secondary school. No fancy science academy. But I do think an all-female school helped encourage my love of science. (2/n)
My family is not sciencey or particularly academic. My cousin went to university before me to study PE and teaching. I have second cousins that did an art degree and music degree. My mother earned a diploma in Payroll finance with her job. Therein ends the list. (3/n)
So what's new this time?
- 23 cameras, including zoom AND we can make 3D images
- We're directly searching for signs of past microbial life
- New, stronger wheels (with JPL spelled out in morse code in the hole pattern!)
- Caching
- Experiments for human survival on Mars (1/n)
The journey to Mars takes about 7 months, we're looking at a mid-Feb 2021 landing.
It'll be the first time we get to see the sky crane in action, because there's now a camera attached! Although there will be a time delay, we'll actually see Perseverance land! (2/n)
Perseverance has an astonishing 23 cameras, to assist with rover operations and for mineralogy (figuring out what the surrounding rocks and area are made of). There is also a weather monitoring system on board (temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, humidity), (3/n)
OK, here's the answer to the question: did NASA just ruin the zodiac and invent a constellation?
Tldr: no, Ophiuchus has always been there, it was just ignored when the signs were drawn up 3000 years ago. And due to precession, it's all out by about one sign anyway...
1/n
To answer this, we have to go back 3000 years to those cool cats, the ancient Babylonians, the first astronomers and astrologers (because back then, the two were intertwined, which is not the case now).
These guys were smart. They had a 12 month calendar, and they had (2/n)
noticed that the Sun and planets always seem to move through the same constellations.
Today, we know that is this because all the planets in the solar system orbit in the same flat plane, kind of like a CD. The axis of the earth is tilted (23.5deg) and this is what makes (3/n)