Astrotidbits-blog - Astrotidbits.info

Goodbye to M42 for this year.  But I’ll see you again in November.  Meanwhile I can look at this picture I took in January of this year.

www.astrotidbits.com

This is what a comet looks like, up close and personal.

PHOTOS FROM AN ALIEN WORLD.

I am so excited I can’t even. Source: ESA’s Flickr feed.

Lots of stuff like this at www.astrotidbits.com with explanations.

I'm curious about the physics of bottle rockets. In the novel I'm writing, my characters use bottle rockets as weapons. They tape sharpened sticks to the rockets and use them as projectile spears. What would be the velocity of a bottle rocket with a stick taped to it? What kind of damage would it inflict? Love your blog! Thank you!

The final velocity depends on a lot of variables, like the trajectory, weight, fuel being used, burn rate of the fuel, size of the bottle, etc. However, you can be assured that they can be harmful and with the right pointy sticks, they can be deadly.

Here’s one example:

Good luck with your novel!

Our planet seen from Saturn, captured by the Cassini spacecraft

Image credit: NASA / Cassini

European Spacecraft Pulls Alongside Comet “After 10 years and a journey of four billion miles, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft arrived at its destination on Wednesday for the first extended, close examination of a comet. A six-minute thruster firing at 5 a.m. Eastern time, the last in a series of 10 over the past few months, slowed Rosetta to the pace of a person walking, about two miles per hour relative to the speed of its target, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.”

Find out more from the nytimes.

Orbital Symphony