A color CCD has 3 "buckets" for every pixel it collects. A reg, green, and blue one. Just like your eyes basically. But that means 3 sensors for every pixel.

It's easier to put a red filter in front, capture red, then green, then blue, then combine them in processing.

But if you care about non-visible wavelengths, and this picture is in IR, you'd need a 4th collector. Or a 5th, 6th, etc. So, you just add more filters on the wheel in front of the CCD.

It's pretty high res.You can click through. Looks good on a 43" 4k screen.

I'm on a Starlink program where I'm a low priority user so I get bumped to a lower service level if the network is congested. I haven't seen it drop below 20mbps down and 10mbps up.

I do get the occasional cut out during a video call, but I've only placed it in my yard and there are a fair number of trees in the area.

GPS was declassified and civilians were allowed to use it finally specifically to improve air safety. The old timey skills weren't up to avoiding mountains well.

Chaos reigned early on, that's for sure.

Odds are the Moon is formerly part of Earth but a Mars-sized planetoid smucked into Earth, tipped it 23.5 degrees, and tore off a good chunk while basically melting everything.

You are correct. Nobody can be on ISS without a craft ready to return them if needed. If a Dragon has to undock and move to another part the crew that would use it suits up, gets in, and rides it to the new port because if anything happened when it wasn't attached, they can't get off.

They do stick with whatever craft they came on though. A Russian that came up on Dragon would use the Dragon for escape, not Soyuz. Part of that is Soyuz capsule seats are molded to the cosmonaut, but also the suits are different.

Ok...new one on me, WTF is "neurodivergent people".

Catch all term for people who have a brain wired in a non-typical manner. Autism, ADHD, anxiety, depression, etc. All sorts of things that affect your manner of thought.

Do neurodivergent people have special pronouns too?

No, it has nothing to do with gender identity.

I ran across a water battery system recently. Similar idea to gravity battery, but put the water storage at ground level. Pump it up from an aquifer during the day, let it flow back down at night spinning a turbine.

Efficiency was supposed to be max 66% though I have no idea if that's workable. Seems simple enough to build though.

You're correct that apogee is the furthest from Earth and perigee is closest to Earth, but they both matter here.

Apogee was around 350km and perigee was 75km (I rounded). If the orbit was circular you'd have identical numbers, ideally 350km/350km. The perigee, closest it would get to Earth, is too close to Earth to work. Anything below 100km has too much air drag, although really 300km is about as low as you want to go if you plan to stay in orbit.

What you typically do is launch into an elliptical orbit like this, 'float' to the 350km apogee and light engines again to raise perigee to the desired altitude. It's the last step that seems to have failed.

64 sq meters (25'x25', size of the floor I'm sitting in right now) doesn't seem like a very large antennae for picking up signals 250-300 miles away. With only 20 sats on orbit I believe others are right in that the stats will be talking to base stations that the cell phones will communicate with.

Why not have each side just send their own? Why send each astronaut halfway across the world before sending them up? Just eat your own dog food.

There are US and Russian segments to the ISS and you want somebody from each side on orbit all the time.

You also cannot be on the ISS without a system to return to Earth and you go down on what you came up on. In the event of a medical emergency that requires an astronaut or cosmonaut to return to Earth the whole crew has to return. So, if the US astronaut has an emergency you'd lose 4 Americans, possibly all of them on orbit at the time.

Keeps balance in case of emergencies among other reasons.

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Ok, getting a bit silly that this isn't fixed yet. Can't somebody spend 30 minutes on the code?

Yeah, let's work on miniaturizing all those bricks and lumber that people are building their houses with.

It'd be much better if they were tiny and could fit in an ordinary car.

You should probably put a tape measure to a 2x4 piece of lumber.

The specs say that it can get 100kg to orbit or 25kg to a solar orbit. How does that compare to hitching onto a shared-payload launch of a Falcon 9?

In expended mode a F9 can get 15.6T into LEO when recovered at sea and 22.8T expended. You can pack a lot on there. Rough, but probably slightly high, cost is $3500/kg, so $350,000 in a rideshare is a decent ballpark.

Much nicer than the $2.5 million an Astra launch runs. There are very valid reasons for Astra to exist though, not everything can rideshare, and Astra is a quick setup go anywhere type deal. Handy for polar launches if you want to put up something small to gather intelligence.

The DoD wants something that can do what Astra does. They're the last company standing in a competition that was DoD funded.

A launch system small enough to be transported easy, set up quick, and get something into orbit.