Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
A robotic spacecraft has beamed home crisp videos and snapshots of Earth eclipsing the moon.
Though lunar eclipses generally aren't that unusual — stargazers can watch Earth's shadow obscuring the moon a few times a year — this was different.
Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander, a private spacecraft hired by NASA to take experiments to the moon, got a rare front-row seat of the spectacle in space. The phenomenon occurred when the blue marble came between the moon and the spacecraft.
Blue Ghost, named after an exotic species of firefly, captured the below footage while flying laps around Earth as it gears up for its first attempt at a lunar touchdown. Almost two weeks ago, the spacecraft witnessed another majestic moment when Earth eclipsed the sun.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Tuesday February 11, @02:32PM
There's a blue, possibly moonlike smudge near the top of the video, but when the crescent of the Earth has passed, it is still visible in in the part of the earth that is still dark.
Or is the entire background of the video part of the moon? In which case why does it appear so much larger than the earth, when the earth is both larger and closer than the moon?
Or is this really a video of the moon eclipsing the earth with poor colour fidelity?
(Score: 2) by HeadlineEditor on Tuesday February 11, @03:06PM (3 children)
Thanks for posting this. I was going to say the same thing, but felt that either I was being stupid, or just negative. The moon is actually a tiny little white dot visible in the exact center of the video for about the first second, then disappears behind the earth, and then reappears at around 7 seconds, just to the left of the diagonal arm of the spacecraft.
Would this be called an eclipse, or just "the spacecraft went on the other side of the earth from the moon and took a picture"?
I had to watch about 20 times before I figured it out. Yes, the lens flare is distracting.
(Score: 2) by HeadlineEditor on Tuesday February 11, @03:08PM
Apologies - this was intended to be a response to hendrikboom's first comment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11, @04:43PM
Technically that is called an eclipse.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday February 11, @04:52PM
Thank you. I can see it now. The moon sure is a tiny dot!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday February 11, @04:43PM (20 children)
Sorry, but eclipses from vantages in space aren't noteworthy. Some regions of space are always experiencing an eclipse. For instance, L2, where James Webb is parked. Permanent annular eclipse of the Sun by the Earth.
When confined to the Earth's surface, then, yeah, eclipses are rare.
So this story seems an excuse to talk about this private spacecraft. It being private is the noteworthy tidbit of news. Another entry in the ongoing debate of publicly funded vs private commercial. The biggest projects have simply not been possible through market mechanisms, though they certainly assisted. NASA put people on the moon. NASA, not Boeing or Lockheed, Raytheon, Bell Helicopter, or any other commercial organization. NASA figured out how to do it, planned it, and broke the project down into small steps that private enterprise could handle. A big project I find instructive was the Transcontinental Railroad that was completed in 1869. A central problem was that the estimates of the costs were way off, far too low, and partly that was deliberate, so as not to scare off interested parties. Nevertheless, the market would not and could not finance it, the government had to do that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Tuesday February 11, @04:51PM (14 children)
It's almost as if a simplistic economic ideology is not sufficient in the real world to achieve real things.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 11, @07:11PM (13 children)
In the GP post, consider the two examples given. The Apollo program is remarkable for how little of it remains. There's some bits of infrastructure leftover and 380 kg of lunar material. The rest of the program was scrapped after Skylab was launched (the last use of a Saturn V). SpaceX has already developed a Saturn V class vehicle, the Superheavy for far less and it has a business case for sticking around for decades to come.
Why laud the ability of government to burn vast eums on dead ends?
As to the continental railroad, privatized profit and socialized cost. Another thing that government is really good at. But why would the rest of us want that?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday February 11, @08:40PM (12 children)
Musk is organ grinder. Donald's the monkey. You won.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Wednesday February 12, @12:26AM (11 children)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12, @01:39AM (10 children)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 12, @02:08AM (9 children)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12, @02:20AM (8 children)
your choice of metrics. fortunately this is a site whose visitors know better.
you should have asked yourself that two posts ago.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 12, @03:31AM (7 children)
My take is that Apollo wasn't ever meant to be a flash in the pan. It was meant to be part of a long term development of space - lots of economic development, many people living in space, and a huge exploration and development of the Moon. That never happened. Instead, NASA refused to explore the Moon for two decades! After the last manned lunar mission in 1972, there wasn't a NASA mission that did significant study of the Moon until Clementine in 1994!
By a lot of metrics, Apollo failed.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12, @04:09AM (6 children)
lol, look at who you're parading out to make your point! "nasa didn't convince flat-earthers and a few people who don't understand that light bounces!"
you really should heed your own warnings about over-indulgence with hysteria.
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Wednesday February 12, @05:28AM (4 children)
And we have yet to hear of the metrics with no name which will somehow show "visitors [who] know better" that I'm somehow wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12, @11:56AM (3 children)
Quite the mental gymnastics.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 12, @12:53PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12, @08:10PM (1 child)
Chill out dude. Your blind devotion to your economic orthodoxy is amusing but also sad. There's more in Heaven and on Earth and all that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday February 14, @04:05AM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 12, @01:09PM
A growing number of young people believe in these hoax theories. It wouldn't happen if the US had continued to visit the Moon.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 12, @12:25AM (4 children)
FTFY. What's going on here is that government uses captive funding via taxes to overspend on ridiculous projects. Why should we consider it a bad thing that markets don't do that? And it's silly to suppose that because markets don't do something that they can't do something.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Tork on Wednesday February 12, @02:36AM (3 children)
We actually DO know when markets won't do something. They pursue profit. That is their blessing, and it is their curse. Can't, won't, and don't are functionally the same in this context. I mean, what argument are you trying to win? "Uhhh well a market could get to the moon if the right super-villain came along and wanted to ransom the world for infinity money!"
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Wednesday February 12, @03:15AM (2 children)
Not even in the least. Because you can always pay to make it profitable. Which is what everyone else does.
A super-villain like say the US government? The US government already contracts stuff out all the time (including most of the work on the Apollo program). Why not contract out a ride to the Moon? Somehow the US government has the resources to contract from the private world a ride to space via the Apollo program at enormous expense, but not the resources to contract out directly a much cheaper private ride to the Moon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12, @08:40PM (1 child)
Settle down Beavis. America isn't about to turn commie.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday February 14, @04:03AM
OTOH, NASA has been for 60+ years a centralized government program. Like the ones from the USSR.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12, @10:03AM
I get a photo of the Earth eclipsing the Sun every time I take a photo at night.