Recent content by Hevach

https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=63350 COSPAR ID is 2025-060A, NORAD ID 63350. 1019.1x1206.5 km orbit at inclination 63.4, 107.4 minute period. There's not really "stealth" in space. You can classify what a payload is and obfuscate what it's doing but where it is is easily trackable.

Making the RTGs bigger wouldn't have helped a whole lot unless the whole probe were made bigger and more robust. A lot of instruments just stopped being useful after Neptune. They've already passed far beyond the range of the low power antenna and even had to change how they communicate for the...

That's the power source, not the output. The output is 300kw, but as you say is not continuous.

I find a laser weapon extremely unlikely for two reasons: 1. Power. The Navy's anti-drone laser is 60 kilowatts, which is over 70% of the ISS's total solar panel power output, or three space shuttles worth of power cells, let alone the X-37b's systems. Which are technically classified but...

This isn't necessarily better. The mass and thermal energy is still released into the atmosphere. Tunguska is an example of an object completly burning up.

Being military and not NASA we can make some educated guesses and weigh what's more likely. Unmanned long term missions where the added cost and weight restrictions for returning to earth are acceptable. Small size substantially limits deployment and capture, and it hasn't been observed to do...

Most square roots are irrational. That does *not* mean all irrational numbers are square roots or can be represented by some function of square roots. They are turtles and tortoises. The square root of any integer which is not a perfect square is irrational. From 1 to 100 there are ten numbers...

You're not the first one to notice this, interestingly: https://oeis.org/A045546 There are more exceptions as you get higher, including increasingly long chains of exceptions. There's actually a lot of polynomial arrangements that frequently produce primes. For example x^2-x+1 looks quite...

Possible? Sure, at the far end of the Kardashev scale a lot of things might be possible. Practical and useful though? I doubt it. The problem with weaponizing sheer gravitational mass in this way is that this is about one of the lowest energy thing you can do with a given amount of mass...

We do have the parts we need to do this, they're just not all together and some aren't quite there yet. But it's close enough to be a definable problem with plausible solutions. Hubble has an IDA compatible docking plate left behind on its last service mission for the possibility of Orion or...

This is the fault of the mainstream (and even a lot of science and space media who should know better) calling these two trapped and stranded constantly, rather than what they are - a routine seat bump which happens every time there's concerns with a craft, they've been happening for a long as...

This is like saying Earth is no different than Venus so why look at it. Just the closest star to the sun is extraordinarily different from the sun. For starters it's three stars. One is of the same spectral type as the sun but larger and much brighter and more active. One is a different...

I don't think so. They did reuse one engine from flight 5 on this booster but so far the vehicles themselves are subjected to "destructive inspections" after flights to isolate any issues that would impact reusability. This landing seemed to go flawlessly, so if they were going to stop it...

I've always had a soft spot for the 2000 version. It sticks closer to the books than either of the others. The part I like the most is the handling of the Harkonnens. They are horrible people with gross habits. They betray one another and plot against everyone in sight. But they keep it in...

Anything official will have to wait for an announcement. However there's room for an educated guess. Flight 5 had a very similar fire on the booster - during the capture burn plumbing in one of the chines ruptured, blowing a hole in the side of the rocket and destroying at least one engine in...