[Space Bites+] Spying on Spy Satellites // Official NASA Budget Cuts // Dragonfly Milestone
The official NASA cuts are here. Several missions reach big milestones. The Solar Gravitational Lens will be challenging to use, and in our special bonus version on Patreon, [Space Bites+] an additional story about New Horizons scanning the clouds of hydrogen around the Solar System.
Watch the video here (with no ads) or on YouTube: https://youtu.be/M96tqKyVx_Q
Comments (6)
16:00 Ah yes the famous couple Pluto and Sharon, her name is even written in the subtitles!
Bonus story at 15:51 about New Horizons looking for hydrogen just outside the solar system.
Somewhere in your various messages to us, could you answer a question I cannot figure out--Isn't a solar lens collector 55 AUs away, limited in what it can see to only what is directly behind the sun? Or can the collector move around a little so the field of view is bigger? Obviously I haven't got a clue how this all works. Please explain.
Correct, because the telescope is so far from the sun its focal length is enormous and angle of view tiny, they being inversely proportional to each other. I estimate the angle to be less than a millionth of a degree. It would be like looking at a needle in a haystack the size of a mountain. The mirror can't be tilted, it needs to be pointing at the sun, but as the craft drifted very slowly, in its long orbit around the sun, it would describe a very tiny viewing arc so it would be impossible to view more than one or two adjacent distant objects before operational failure.
Seems like binary and contact binary objects are very common. Stars, asteroids, planets. Just like gas coalesce into stars, if it's less gas it coalesce into a planet or a binary planetary system. So why are astronomers surprised to see so many? Is there a reason this should not be so common?
Great video!