NASA's Juno_Mission Reaches Jupiter On The 4th Of July!

Here’s a Look at Kepler’s Second_Law of Planetary Motion.  

This image displays Kepler’s second law of planetary motion.

“A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time” (Meaning that each triangle seen there has equal area.)

The black dot represents a planet, the point where the black lines intersect represent the sun.

The green arrow represents the planet’s velocity,

The purple arrows represents the force on the planet.

(Image source: here)

Here is an FAQ Page about:  Dyson Spheres. 

Here's some more information on NASA's Juno_Mission.

Juno: Join the Mission!

Our Juno spacecraft may be millions of miles from Earth, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get involved with the mission and its science. Here are a few ways that you can join in on the fun:

Juno Orbit Insertion

This July 4, our solar-powered Juno spacecraft arrives at Jupiter after an almost five-year journey. In the evening of July 4, the spacecraft will perform a suspenseful orbit insertion maneuver, a 35-minute burn of its main engine, to slow the spacecraft by about 1,212 miles per hour so it can be captured into the gas giant’s orbit. Watch live coverage of these events on NASA Television:

Pre-Orbit Insertion Briefing Monday, July 4 at 12 p.m. EDT

Orbit Insertion Coverage Monday, July 4 at 10:30 p.m. EDT

Join Us On Social Media

Orbit Insertion Coverage Facebook Live Monday, July 4 at 10:30 p.m. EDT

Be sure to also check out and follow Juno coverage on the NASA Snapchat account!

JunoCam

The Juno spacecraft will give us new views of Jupiter’s swirling clouds, courtesy of its color camera called JunoCam. But unlike previous space missions, professional scientists will not be the ones producing the processed views, or even choosing which images to capture. Instead, the public will act as a virtual imaging team, participating in key steps of the process, from identifying features of interest to sharing the finished images online.

After JunoCam data arrives on Earth, members of the public will process the images to create color pictures. Juno scientists will ensure JunoCam returns a few great shots of Jupiter’s polar regions, but the overwhelming majority of the camera’s image targets will be chosen by the public, with the data being processed by them as well. Learn more about JunoCam HERE.

Follow our Juno mission on the web, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Driving Policy and Driverless Vehicles.

I Support The Use of Solar_Energy for The Generation of Electricity.

Donald Trump is trying to destroy solar energy in America.

As someone who has been using 100% solar energy to power everything but my apartment and car for nearly eight months, and frequently has too much energy and too little storage, I feel the need to comment on this.

So Trump put a 30% tariff on importing materials used to manufacture solar panels. More than 50% of the world’s silicon production (the element that best allows for the photovoltaic effect) is in China, whereas less than 5% of production is in the US. Not to mention other imported materials needed to make solar panels.

Before anyone says “then why don’t we just make this stuff in America,” we do, but in very small quantities, because the resources to create these materials are scarce in North America. It’s called GEOpolitics for a reason.

So, higher tariffs on imported materials required to manufacture solar panels means fewer American companies will be purchasing foreign materials, because foreign materials will be jump in cost to account for the tariffs. The countries trading the materials will also trade less material so as not to incur these tariffs at their own expense, which could stem the flow imported goods to a trickle. These same countries will begin trading with other countries that don’t have as high a tariff and whose governments actually encourage renewable energy and solar production (unlike, obviously, the shitty assholes in our government whose paychecks come from the Koch Brothers and Big Oil, all of who don’t give a damn, because only socialist countries use renewable energy, afterall).

More solar production in America = less cost to consumers (free energy for immediate purchasers and long-term users)

More production = overproduction

Overproduction = manufacturing and innovating better storage

Better storage = longer usage, more energy to drive more industry and innovation in technology

More industry and technology + cheap/free energy = more money in individual pockets, more job creation, boost in economy

Boost in economy + more money to individuals + high skill job creation = better education and rise in quality of life for lower and middle classes

Better education and rise in quality of life = better social values and more intelligent citizens entering workforce and entreprenurial sector.

So why discourage solar production? Why not lead the charge and prioritize solar production, instead of speaking out against it and making it more difficult to obtain solar in America? Why not make it more difficult to import oil to encourage a transition to cleaner, more reliable, and cheaper if not FREE energy? Why?

Transitioning to solar and renewable energy should absolutely be one of the highest priorities for our government, but it’s not. We have all these individual companies and cities saying they’ll phase out coal and oil and go all electric and renewable, and you’re going to see an increase in profits, an increase in the quality of life in those cities, better income, and more innovation. Oil companies know this is happening – and they are going to fight as brutally as a wounded animal, and they will fund campaigns of people who support coal and oil, even though they are dying.

Yes, oil isn’t just used as fuel. It’s in clothes, and soaps, and ink, and whatever else. Obviously. That’s completely beside the point. Because our transportation is the #1 source of our carbon emissions. We have heat islands in cities for a reason. You wouldn’t breathe in a tailpipe FOR A REASON. If we could completely eliminate transportation emissions in the next 10 years, and household and structure emissions in the next 20, why isn’t the government even voicing support for that? The government doesn’t have to regulate everything and lead the charge, but Trump and his cronies literally and forcefully OPPOSE renewable energy.

I have six solar panels and three large battery packs. I have been using these for eight months. Five hours of sunlight gives me more than a week’s worth of energy to use. If I had the resources to store ALL of the energy I could generate per day, I would be able to generate about two weeks of energy in a SINGLE DAY. In one week, I would have enough energy to use for more than six months. So don’t tell me solar doesn’t work. Don’t me it’s bad on a cloudy day, or during snowstorms, or at night, or when it’s raining. I have gone nearly two weeks without sunlight and been completely fine. Mine are just the small scale. I haven’t even used a wall plug for anything but my computer in eight months (and computer is just emergencies). But I don’t even put them out every day, because I just don’t have the storage capacity for the energy I *could* generate. Solar works. Solar is infinitely better than coal and oil ever will be. We need to be funding it. We need to be pushing ahead with it. We can’t be punishing it just to cling to some outdated way of thinking. If you claim to want a better America (let’s be real, Trump doesn’t give one single shit), you need to understand #1 that we NEED these materials and #2 they don’t magically appear in the ground where you put your shovel. The rest of the world, ESPECIALLY CHINA, for god’s sake, is pushing ahead with developing solar infrastructures. So why aren’t we even trying? And “because it’s not the government’s job” isn’t an excuse. Know why? Because the Donald Trump and the government is SUPPRESSING it.

Here’s Some_Thing really interesting to Look at.

A Soviet Arctic Exploration Vehicle with Tracks on it.

Arctic exploration vehicle Harkovchnka.

Project Blue for Alpha Centauri.

One Search for Planets in The Alpha_Centauri System is: Project Blue. https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/project-blue-aims-to-snap-the-first-picture-of-an-exoplanet-in-alpha-centauri/

Here's a Good Look at Alien Aerospace Engineering.  

This is part one of a Science Documentary about:  UFO Propulsion.  

Happy 4th of July!

@americanhumanist #humanism

Here are 10_Things that Einstein got right.

10 Things Einstein Got Right

One hundred years ago, on May 29, 1919, astronomers observed a total solar eclipse in an ambitious  effort to test Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity by seeing it in action. Essentially, Einstein thought space and time were intertwined in an infinite “fabric,” like an outstretched blanket. A massive object such as the Sun bends the spacetime blanket with its gravity, such that light no longer travels in a straight line as it passes by the Sun.

This means the apparent positions of background stars seen close to the Sun in the sky – including during a solar eclipse – should seem slightly shifted in the absence of the Sun, because the Sun’s gravity bends light. But until the eclipse experiment, no one was able to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity, as no one could see stars near the Sun in the daytime otherwise.

The world celebrated the results of this eclipse experiment— a victory for Einstein, and the dawning of a new era of our understanding of the universe.

General relativity has many important consequences for what we see in the cosmos and how we make discoveries in deep space today. The same is true for Einstein’s slightly older theory, special relativity, with its widely celebrated equation E=mc². Here are 10 things that result from Einstein’s theories of relativity:

1. Universal Speed Limit

Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² contains “c,” the speed of light in a vacuum. Although light comes in many flavors – from the rainbow of colors humans can see to the radio waves that transmit spacecraft data – Einstein said all light must obey the speed limit of 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second. So, even if two particles of light carry very different amounts of energy, they will travel at the same speed.

This has been shown experimentally in space. In 2009, our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected two photons at virtually the same moment, with one carrying a million times more energy than the other. They both came from a high-energy region near the collision of two neutron stars about 7 billion years ago. A neutron star is the highly dense remnant of a star that has exploded. While other theories posited that space-time itself has a “foamy” texture that might slow down more energetic particles, Fermi’s observations found in favor of Einstein.

2. Strong Lensing

Just like the Sun bends the light from distant stars that pass close to it, a massive object like a galaxy distorts the light from another object that is much farther away. In some cases, this phenomenon can actually help us unveil new galaxies. We say that the closer object acts like a “lens,” acting like a telescope that reveals the more distant object. Entire clusters of galaxies can be lensed and act as lenses, too.

When the lensing object appears close enough to the more distant object in the sky, we actually see multiple images of that faraway object. In 1979, scientists first observed a double image of a quasar, a very bright object at the center of a galaxy that involves a supermassive black hole feeding off a disk of inflowing gas. These apparent copies of the distant object change in brightness if the original object is changing, but not all at once, because of how space itself is bent by the foreground object’s gravity.

Sometimes, when a distant celestial object is precisely aligned with another object, we see light bent into an “Einstein ring” or arc. In this image from our Hubble Space Telescope, the sweeping arc of light represents a distant galaxy that has been lensed, forming a “smiley face” with other galaxies.

3. Weak Lensing

When a massive object acts as a lens for a farther object, but the objects are not specially aligned with respect to our view, only one image of the distant object is projected. This happens much more often. The closer object’s gravity makes the background object look larger and more stretched than it really is. This is called “weak lensing.”

Weak lensing is very important for studying some of the biggest mysteries of the universe: dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is an invisible material that only interacts with regular matter through gravity, and holds together entire galaxies and groups of galaxies like a cosmic glue. Dark energy behaves like the opposite of gravity, making objects recede from each other. Three upcoming observatories – Our Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, WFIRST, mission, the European-led Euclid space mission with NASA participation, and the ground-based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope — will be key players in this effort. By surveying distortions of weakly lensed galaxies across the universe, scientists can characterize the effects of these persistently puzzling phenomena.

Gravitational lensing in general will also enable NASA’s James Webb Space telescope to look for some of the very first stars and galaxies of the universe.

4. Microlensing

So far, we’ve been talking about giant objects acting like magnifying lenses for other giant objects. But stars can also “lens” other stars, including stars that have planets around them. When light from a background star gets “lensed” by a closer star in the foreground, there is an increase in the background star’s brightness. If that foreground star also has a planet orbiting it, then telescopes can detect an extra bump in the background star’s light, caused by the orbiting planet. This technique for finding exoplanets, which are planets around stars other than our own, is called “microlensing.”

Our Spitzer Space Telescope, in collaboration with ground-based observatories, found an “iceball” planet through microlensing. While microlensing has so far found less than 100 confirmed planets,  WFIRST could find more than 1,000 new exoplanets using this technique.

5. Black Holes

The very existence of black holes, extremely dense objects from which no light can escape, is a prediction of general relativity. They represent the most extreme distortions of the fabric of space-time, and are especially famous for how their immense gravity affects light in weird ways that only Einstein’s theory could explain.

In 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope international collaboration, supported by the National Science Foundation and other partners, unveiled the first image of a black hole’s event horizon, the border that defines a black hole’s “point of no return” for nearby material. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope all looked at the same black hole in a coordinated effort, and researchers are still analyzing the results.

6. Relativistic Jets

This Spitzer image shows the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) in infrared light, which has a supermassive black hole at its center. Around the black hole is a disk of extremely hot gas, as well as two jets of material shooting out in opposite directions. One of the jets, visible on the right of the image, is pointing almost exactly toward Earth. Its enhanced brightness is due to the emission of light from particles traveling toward the observer at near the speed of light, an effect called “relativistic beaming.” By contrast, the other jet is invisible at all wavelengths because it is traveling away from the observer near the speed of light. The details of how such jets work are still mysterious, and scientists will continue studying black holes for more clues. 

7. A Gravitational Vortex

Speaking of black holes, their gravity is so intense that they make infalling material “wobble” around them. Like a spoon stirring honey, where honey is the space around a black hole, the black hole’s distortion of space has a wobbling effect on material orbiting the black hole. Until recently, this was only theoretical. But in 2016, an international team of scientists using European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and our Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NUSTAR) announced they had observed the signature of wobbling matter for the first time. Scientists will continue studying these odd effects of black holes to further probe Einstein’s ideas firsthand.

Incidentally, this wobbling of material around a black hole is similar to how Einstein explained Mercury’s odd orbit. As the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury feels the most gravitational tug from the Sun, and so its orbit’s orientation is slowly rotating around the Sun, creating a wobble.

 8. Gravitational Waves

Ripples through space-time called gravitational waves were hypothesized by Einstein about 100 years ago, but not actually observed until recently. In 2016, an international collaboration of astronomers working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors announced a landmark discovery: This enormous experiment detected the subtle signal of gravitational waves that had been traveling for 1.3 billion years after two black holes merged in a cataclysmic event. This opened a brand new door in an area of science called multi-messenger astronomy, in which both gravitational waves and light can be studied.

For example, our telescopes collaborated to measure light from two neutron stars merging after LIGO detected gravitational wave signals from the event, as announced in 2017. Given that gravitational waves from this event were detected mere 1.7 seconds before gamma rays from the merger, after both traveled 140 million light-years, scientists concluded Einstein was right about something else: gravitational waves and light waves travel at the same speed.

9. The Sun Delaying Radio Signals

Planetary exploration spacecraft have also shown Einstein to be right about general relativity. Because spacecraft communicate with Earth using light, in the form of radio waves, they present great opportunities to see whether the gravity of a massive object like the Sun changes light’s path.  

In 1970, our Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that Mariner VI and VII, which completed flybys of Mars in 1969, had conducted experiments using radio signals — and also agreed with Einstein. Using NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), the two Mariners took several hundred radio measurements for this purpose. Researchers measured the time it took for radio signals to travel from the DSN dish in Goldstone, California, to the spacecraft and back. As Einstein would have predicted, there was a delay in the total roundtrip time because of the Sun’s gravity. For Mariner VI, the maximum delay was 204 microseconds, which, while far less than a single second, aligned almost exactly with what Einstein’s theory would anticipate.

In 1979, the Viking landers performed an even more accurate experiment along these lines. Then, in 2003 a group of scientists used NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft to repeat these kinds of radio science experiments with 50 times greater precision than Viking. It’s clear that Einstein’s theory has held up! 

10. Proof from Orbiting Earth

In 2004, we launched a spacecraft called Gravity Probe B specifically designed to watch Einstein’s theory play out in the orbit of Earth. The theory goes that Earth, a rotating body, should be pulling the fabric of space-time around it as it spins, in addition to distorting light with its gravity.

The spacecraft had four gyroscopes and pointed at the star IM Pegasi while orbiting Earth over the poles. In this experiment, if Einstein had been wrong, these gyroscopes would have always pointed in the same direction. But in 2011, scientists announced they had observed tiny changes in the gyroscopes’ directions as a consequence of Earth, because of its gravity, dragging space-time around it.

BONUS: Your GPS! Speaking of time delays, the GPS (global positioning system) on your phone or in your car relies on Einstein’s theories for accuracy. In order to know where you are, you need a receiver – like your phone, a ground station and a network of satellites orbiting Earth to send and receive signals. But according to general relativity, because of Earth’s gravity curving spacetime, satellites experience time moving slightly faster than on Earth. At the same time, special relativity would say time moves slower for objects that move much faster than others.

When scientists worked out the net effect of these forces, they found that the satellites’ clocks would always be a tiny bit ahead of clocks on Earth. While the difference per day is a matter of millionths of a second, that change really adds up. If GPS didn’t have relativity built into its technology, your phone would guide you miles out of your way!

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