We learned something about the distribution of dust grains in the solar system: there are shit loads.

Spearthrower wrote:We learned something about the distribution of dust grains in the solar system: there are shit loads.

Lagrange points gonna be infested. Only need a couple of rocks with different spins in that gravity null point, and the what nots to graze one another and the place will fill up with millions of bullet sized 'grains' . Should have put it on the dark side of the moon. What were they thinking?

Not so much as particulate entering a Lagrange point would have velocity, so would leave that Lagrange point at whatever speed it entered at.

Spearthrower wrote:Not so much as particulate entering a Lagrange point would have velocity, so would leave that Lagrange point at whatever speed it entered at.

They do tend to collect trojan asteroids though...and the moon as a alternative would allow for mirror repair...too late for this mission I guess?

Even proposed ideas of stationing man-made structures in Lagrange points accepts that on-board propulsion systems for corrections would be necessary as no Lagrange points are perfectly stable (to the best of my knowledge) due to following the radial velocity of their parent bodies, and those bodies themselves tend to have some eccentric deviation from an idealized orbit.

Even were some debris able to find its way in, it would soon find itself captured by the planetary body's gravity well. And it's very hard for something to just wander in. Debris entering is either part of the original proto-planetary disc, and thus has the same angular momentum as the rest of the system, or the debris would be from deep space and would be traveling fast and oblique, and wouldn't even slow down perceptibly.

Spearthrower wrote:We learned something about the distribution of dust grains in the solar system: there are shit loads.

Indeed there are. The asteroid count to 2018 is getting very silly and if we add comet-sourced dust and the interstellar contribution the object count is going to get astronomical very quickly. A source of the dust probably responsible for the "Zodiacal light" phenomenon was observed by the Juno probe as it passed by Mars on its way to scan Jupiter...

Space is mislabelled: it should have been called stuff with some gaps. Pithy.

Even the gaps contain about 6 times more of the still unidentified dark/invisible matter than baryonic and then there's whatever dark energy turns out to be. Space, not STP

Mark your calendar - July 12.

They did release this sample image from the miri instrument already, but I don't really understand it yet. It's for spectrometry https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/16/webbs-mid-infrared-spectroscopy-will-reveal-molecules-elements/
It's looking at " bright K giant star HD 37122" I think.


This graph illustrates that compared to Spitzer, it's fucking awesome. That's about all I can tell you.

I hope you don't mind me posting while having nothing to say except
The world needs this right now more than ever. Hopefully it will renew our faith in humanity, at least one aspect of it.

5 more days!

They did take the lens cap off, right?

List of targets for the first release at 10:30 a.m. EDT on the 12th in a live broadcast. The images will also be made available here.

Carina Nebula
WASP-96-b (spectrum)
Southern Ring Nebula
Stephan’s Quintet
SMACS 0723

Source.

They released another image recently, what they are calling a throwaway image to test the telescope's ability to roll to one side. It's also the deepest view of the universe ever taken. Most of the blobs are galaxies that have never been observed before.

19 minutes.
I'm currently watching at NASA's channel, linked below.

Exploding heads everywhere.

The shit's pretty awesome.

This meme wins

A seven Jupiter-mass exoplanet has been imaged with markedly better results than ground-based telescopes. Nice one. The sensitivity is there enough to perhaps detect clouds/weather and it could be possible to image planets down to the size of Neptune.

I really hope we (humans) don't blow ourselves up, because it's amazing what we're doing with astronomy nowadays.