Inspired by @maddeningscientist‘s shitpost about throwing things into the Sun via gravity-assist, I thought I’d infodump spaceratblr on the subject of GTOC, “The America’s Cup of Rocket Science” and the most hardcore math contest in the solar system!
Basically it’s a yearly competition of ridiculously unconstrained orbital mechanics optimizations. You need to get [spacecraft] to do [thing] with a minimum amount of fuel, a minimum amount of time, both, or something else entirely.
The first year’s competition, for example, was to deliver the most momentum to a particular asteroid within 30 years (say, to prevent it from hitting Earth), given that you have a spacecraft weighing 1500kg initially, with a low-thrust, high-efficiency nuclear-electric engine. So you want to use as little fuel as possible to maximize your mass when you hit the asteroid, but still hit that bad boy like a Rod from God. The winning team from @nasajpl came up with THIS SHIT:
Their spacecraft toodles around the inner solar system for a couple years, banks off Jupiter, TURNS ITSELF AROUND on Saturn, and hits Jupiter again on the way back in towards the target. If you’ve never played KSP, turning a spacecraft around relative to the Sun is virtually impossible. It’s roughly twice as hard to do as just throwing something into the Sun. Humans have literally never put anything in a retrograde heliocentric orbit, and the space wizards from JPL (and their poor, beleaguered supercomputing cluster) found a trajectory that uses the fuel-budget equivalent of two tin cans and a piece of string. The final trajectory output was so badass that the trophy given out for winning the contest is literally a picture of it:
Anyway, the winning team gets to define the next year’s competition, so you’ve basically got the world’s raddest steely-eyed missilepeople challenging each other to optimize-offs every year or two. Man, I wish I’d taken second-level orbital mechanics in college.
To celebrate the 38th anniversary of the liberation of Da Nang, the government of Vietnam has constructed the world’s largest dragon-shaped bridge over the Han River. Not only is it the steel bridge the largest of its type in the world, but it is covered in over 2,500 LED lights also it breathes fire. Construction on Vietnam’s massive 545-foot dragon bridge began in 2009. Now, four years and $85 million later, the eye-catching bridge is complete. More info about this here
“the worlds largest dragon shaped bridge”
how many other dragon shaped bridges am I missing out on
Tags:
#awesome #this kind of seems like it belongs in the #love the decor fandom #tag #it’s not really decor but it goes well with the stuff in that tag
Hundreds of ancient papyrus scrolls that were buried nearly 2,000 years ago after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius could finally be read, thanks to a new technique.
The X-ray-based method can be used to decipher the charred, damaged texts that were found in the ancient town of Herculaneum without having to unroll them, which could damage them beyond repair, scientists say.
One problem with previous attempts to use X-rays to read the scrolls was that the ancient writers used a carbon-based material from smoke in their ink, said study co-author Vito Mocella, a physicist at the National Research Council in Naples, Italy.
“The papyri have been burnt, so there is not a huge difference between the paper and the ink,” Mocella told Live Science. That made it impossible to decipher the words written in the documents. Read more.
I’ve drawn a few creepy twisty Odos before, but I really wanted to explore what it might’ve been like in the show aand I wanted to draw more Odo being twisty. So this little comic sprung out of that!
This was a fun exercise and I learned a lot while putting it together. Like how much I love drawing Quark.
I mistook this for an excerpt from an official comic and was wondering where I could buy it.
Tags:
#Star Trek #DS9 #Odo #comic #fanart #awesome #fun with shapeshifting
Brinens and Things 