Amazing we can see these things at all given how black they are…
Thank goodness it wasn’t vantablack, or Anish Kapoor would claim rights over this picture.
A fireball was caught in video blazing across the sky in several cities in the northwest of the state of São Paulo, in addition to other places in the country, on Tuesday night (15).
According to Bramon, the Brazilian Meteor Observation Network, it was a space rock that entered the Earth’s atmosphere at around 9:35 pm, local time.
US Government Accountability Office dumps sack of coal on NASA’s desk over Moon mission naughtiness
A frequent trend of aerospace projects is that the project is bid fairly accurately (as required under GAO and FAR rules) then the bidders are forced to take a “challenge” on the bid by management (maybe you guys could just be more efficient, right?), then the project ends up coming in right around the point originally estimated.
Wouldn’t that be a violation of those rules and/or the terms of tender?
(Not that I know anything about US rules for rewarding public aerospace contracts. I do have some experience in rewarding contracts for public building projects under EU rules. And changing anything after the call for tenders is published is a big no-no.)
Changing anything after the bid is generally forbidden unless to correct an error. The FAR requires that all bids have to be submitted with the methodology, assumptions, and known-actuals laid bare. But the fiddle-factor comes in with the risk-assessment and judgement portion for novel technologies. That part is what gets cut down frequently as a challenge.
ESA has published its report into the loss of the Vega VV17 mission and said the screwup was due to an “inversion of electrical connections” during integration.
Which, frankly, sounds a lot like someone plugged something in the wrong way round.
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The SKA will include around 3,000 15-metre dishes, plus hundreds of thousands of low-frequency aperture array telescopes for a total of over 130,000 antennas.
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There’s also the job of ingesting 8.8 terabytes of data per second from each telescope , then filtering out the noise to shrink it into something more manageable and worthy of being analysed. Final annual output is expected to be 130 petabytes a year, still a hard-to-wrangle quantity of data for the world’s astro-boffins.
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The planet’s current largest radio telescope is the 196,000m2 Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in China. The recently-destroyed Arecibo Observatory was a mere 73,000m2. As the SKA’s name implies, its total area will be one square kilometre - one million square metres.
Ska?
Operations will be run from our house, in the middle of our street.
This is apparently not a joke.
