Agamemnon

I am sure Wikipedia has a list…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing#Late_20th_century–Early_21st_century_uncrewed_crash_landings

Aaand right. I think I remember a couple spent rocket stages and debris hitting it that isn’t listed, but there shouldn’t be much more that would classify as a ‘vehicle’.

Haha, in some parts of germany you can do that yourself. on foot. with a zipdisk.

That is identical to my observations from a data science perspective.

Yes! Agreed! Earthbound observatories in second line are in a constant struggle of acquiring proper funding. Which means, that they are operated by people with passion - for the science. The unfortunate side effect is, that everything that isn’t operations and academia takes second place again. Employing someone dedicated to just cybersecurity isn’t perceived as a priority - after all, ‘why would anyone hack an observatory?’

That is the kind of fallacy that can only be avoided if you already had an expert in house, unfortunately. I have been working with researchers, too, and I got the general impression that the appreciation for and crossover of ideas between departments has a lot of room for improvement. So that could also be a factor.

Ngl… the press release and article reeks like their IT department was a shitshow to begin with and the only method they could think of defending was to rip out ALL the cables.

I bet it wasn’t even a targeted attack, but they have to frame it that way to save face.

edit: Also… sympathies for everyone being stalled in their research for … 25(!) days now. This for sure could have been prevented with better risk management and damage control.

Everyone should be aware that the final say is provided by Putin. And is a foregone conclusion - for purely tactical and propaganda reasons, the official version will be that Prigozhin is dead. And nobody will contest that - least of all Prigozhin himself.

I do agree with the conclusion. - A new mission dedicated to answering the question of life on Mars is warranted. Earthbound discoveries of extremophile microbial life in the past decades have broadened our definition of life-enabling environmental conditions and discoveries of new classes of only intermittently alive cells/spores have broadened our definition of life itself.

Plus, apart from satisfying our curiosity, we will very likely get some insights into our own biochemistry along the way.

A very important distinction.

water-based ice

Is that like regular water ice, but extra based? 😂

My point is that this kind of language padding (by the bbc) cracks me up.

(Yes, I know other kinds of solids are called ice - but they are also not ‘-based’, they just are [and also irrelevant in this context])

They did it.

What exactly is hard about it?

Not really. That probe was scheduled to go up 10 years ago - with collaboration from India. It’s more a case of India going “F that, we’re doing it ourselves now” - And russia lagging behind so much, they actually got lapped.

I’d like to remind all people to tone down the edge a little. Inflammatory quips and sarcastic remarks about the war have been done enough and any future ones will be removed, starting now.

Mainly, because the poles are always just barely within line of sight to Earth (and thus line of communications) if at all. So the probe has to either operate autonomously or you have to maintain coms via a relay satellite. Either isn’t exactly easy with hardware that must also be radiation-hardened and lightweight. Initiating the deorbit burn should (I am guessing this) be done from the backside or you’ll run into even more problems when you overshoot the landing site.

Not really a race (media just likes to frame it that way)

Main goal is prospecting for potential base locations, because the poles have the best chances of finding easily accessible water ice.

And yeah, prestige too, because landing from polar orbit is more difficult.

Murdered by words

~5x faster rpm than a similarly sized rotor could reach on earth.

Linked site does not load.

I looked and the common pattern I see is that conservative parties are actually several smaller parties stacked in a trenchcoat, pretending to have a common direction, but too scared of adressing inner conflict. They still hope they can continue to uphold a facade of unity by pandering to the rightwingers.

It’s not very effective. But I see that as a result of group-psychology and basic human incompetence, not as explicitly agreeing with fascist values.

That… is a very skewed way of looking at reality.