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uhoh
uhoh
00:46
washingtonpost.com/history/2018/12/24/…
washingtonpost.com/podcasts/retropod/…
NORAD tradition of "tracking Santa" beginnings
 
2 hours later…
uhoh
uhoh
03:08
user image
I think this is going to look a bit tacky. Last time the "stainless steel" look was used for a vehicle was the DeLorean
teslarati.com/…
geoffc
geoffc
The initial speculation was they were building a landing tower. Then they attached legs and now have shown a nose cap. It seems likely it is the hopper for low altitude tests, basically to test Raptor engines out in flight. No way that is a really serious flight vehicle1
!
uhoh
uhoh
oh, that's a relief
PearsonArtPhoto
PearsonArtPhoto
03:25
But it will probably look something like that.
It's going to be interesting for sure...
 
9 hours later…
PearsonArtPhoto
PearsonArtPhoto
12:12
5 spacecraft flew by Halley's Comet. Huh.
 
2 hours later…
uhoh
uhoh
14:36
Now we have meta conspiracy theorists
@PearsonArtPhoto who said that? Haley's goes a bit past Neptune, so perhaps they just mean trans-Neptunian spacecraft? But is five the right number for that?
 
1 hour later…
PearsonArtPhoto
PearsonArtPhoto
16:06
Actually, I think more than that. Sakigake, Giotto, Suisei, Vega 1, Vega 2, ICE,
I thought there was another one or two, but I think I accidentally counted the Vegas twice.
All in 1985 or so.
The Soviet program for Venus was actually quite impressive, and featured GRB detection, among other things.
It's really hard to get good data out of the Soviet era, however...
Halley Armada
The Halley Armada is the name of five space probes sent to examine Halley's Comet during its 1986 sojourn through the inner Solar System, connected with apparition "1P/1982 U1". The armada consisted of one probe from the European Space Agency, two probes that were joint projects between the Soviet Union and France and two probes from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of Japan. == Main space probes == Probes involved (in order of closest approach): Giotto (596 km), the first space probe to get close-up color images of the nucleus of a comet. (ESA) Vega 2 (8,030 km), which dropped...
 
2 hours later…
Happy Koala
Happy Koala
18:43
Cool, I finally managed to find my way into the chat room
@uhoh thehappykoala.github.io/Harmony-of-the-Spheres/#/scenario/…
I never liked Saturn as most lay men give it love because of its rings, so I figured I'd accost Saturn with Earth and give its stupid rings a good rollicking
 
3 hours later…
Rory Alsop
Rory Alsop
21:41
@HappyKoala I like that simulation. But it really cranked up the temperature on my phone...
2
 
1 hour later…
Happy Koala
Happy Koala
23:06
@RoryAlsop Thanks! Yea, right now I'm drawing on the cpu for the gravity calculations, and with 40000 particles that quickly becomes expensive, even if they don't feel each others gravity - the only feel the gravity of the sun, saturn and earth in this particular scenario. Good news is that I'm commiting a change in the code tomorrow that will do the calculations on the gpu, instead, which is waaayyy more performant.
Having said that, I'm not sure smart phones were built to handle heavy duty gravity simulations, but I'm going to introduce a setting that will allow the user to decrease the quality of the graphics to increase the performance of the app on slower devices
uhoh
uhoh
23:24
@HappyKoala In this answer near the bottom there is a paragraph that mentions a Vimeo video. Have a look at the links, then try running your simulation with the Earth orbiting retrograde and see how different the results are
are you using WebGL?
btw I really really love it!
uhoh
uhoh
23:49
(just put a negative sign in front of the Earth's starting velocity, but keep the position unchanged)
possibly of interest, I can't remember how you are integrating now: 1, 2

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