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from the water+solar+electrolysis=rocket-fuel-and-oxidizer dept.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which "arrived" at the asteroid Bennu on December 3 but has been slowly approaching it for weeks, has found evidence of Bennu's interaction with liquid water in the past:
In a conference today, scientists announced that OSIRIS-REx has found evidence of hydrated minerals on the surface of Bennu using its on-board spectrometers - tools used to determine the exact chemical composition of a specific spot.
That means "evidence of liquid water" in Bennu's past, according to Amy Simon, the scientist overseeing OSIRIS-REx's spectral analysis.
"To get hydrated minerals in the first place, to get clays, you have to have water interacting with regular minerals," says Simon. "This is a great surprise."
And they're abundant, too. There's "strong convincing, evidence that the surface is dominated by these hydrated minerals," according to Dante Lauretta, leader of OSIRIS-REx's sample return mission, leading the team to believe Bennu is "water rich".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @07:19PM (3 children)
The Epicycles of Mars an a powerfully predictive tool; they work. Yet, they're wrong.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday December 11 2018, @11:52PM (2 children)
Why do you say "They are wrong."? They are correct. They're just quite difficult to compute with, so nobody uses them anymore. But Newtonian physics, which is wrong in exactly the same way (to a smaller degree), is used all the time.
Most people don't bother to remember that the heliocentric model is wrong. Even the galaxy center isn't fixed in position. But for most calculations, most of the time, it's "good enough". Expecting "absolute truth" is expecting something that the universe is very chintzy about providing.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12 2018, @04:48AM (1 child)
Newtonian physics is used because it is simple to compute. Epicycles are not used because they are annoying to compute. They are used/unused for exactly opposite reasons. Just like people use MOND which is simple algebra instead of lambda-CDM whenever it matters.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday December 12 2018, @11:55AM
For centuries, the epicycles were just as accurate as any other functional decomposition to within the errors of naked-eye measurement with the clocks of the day - often the observer's own pulse - and a hand-made transit.
While Copernicus proposed that the orbits were all circular around the sun, he wasn't actually correct and he had little or no observational evidence.
Copernicus hired Kepler because he had uncommon sharp eyesight as well as the patience to measure transits for decades. It was only Kepler that was able to determine the orbits were actually elliptical.
And while I haven't actually tried it, Kepler's measurements could likely have been predicted by an extensive enough epicyclic functional decomposition.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]