Running SERIOUSLY behind on my Space updates!
The biggest news: on the weekend, SpaceX launched the first (unmanned) test flight of their Crew Dragon space transport capsule. With a flawless liftoff, Crew Dragon has since been docked to the ISS to begin a weeks worth of testing until it will be released for return to Earth. So far, so good!
The primary excitement around Crew Dragon is not only will NASA reduce its reliance on expensive Soyuz seats from Russia, but there's now another flight-capable orbital spacecraft available run by a private company with opens up all sorts of opportunities.
How are SpaceX's finances? Are they in the shitter like Elon Musk other company Tesla?
From the ABC News website:
"Black hole image released by Event Horizon Telescope team in world first
Scientists have glimpsed the event horizon of a black hole for the very first time. Until now, every image of a black hole you have ever seen has been an artist's impression."
Read the full story here.
It is absolutely amazing. The lead researcher who I understand "took" the photo (using that word really cheapens how complicated the process was) gave a TED talk about doing this around 2 years. Looks like she followed through as planned. Can't wait to see this develop as I am sure in the near future we will get even better images.
55 million light years away? That's something else. The distance alone bends the brain
That distance is huge and is really hard to actually comprehend. Think about it this way, Neptune is around 4 light hours from Earth and it took Voyager around 12 years to get there.
I think I read somewhere that they needed something like 55 petabytes to take the picture.
1 light year is something like 6 trillion kilometers
Multiply that by 55 million and its... i don't think I have enough zeroes on my phone
I was reading that too. They couldn't use the internet and had to transport hard drives around. Wow.