Space news

the Russian space program has problems. StrategyPage has a long essay about it.

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Hayabusa 2 is going to land on an asteroid. LINK

 The Hayabusa2 mission has already deployed two small hopping rovers (MINERVA-II1A and MINERVA-II1B) and a German lander called the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT) on Ryugu within the past month. While the MINERVA rovers are still scouting Ryugu's surface, MASCOT's mission was short-lived, ending after only 17 hours and 7 minutes. MASCOT was designed to last only 16 hours on Ryugu's surface. "The mission focus is now on the successful retrieval and return of a surface sample," officials with the Planetary Science Institute, which is involved with the Hayabusa2 mission, said in a statement. To ensure that this phase of the mission will be a success, mission scientists had to pick a landing site that is not only interesting from a scientific perspective, but that is also safe for the spacecraft — something that proved to be more difficult than mission controllers initially expected.

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the WAGD podcast and trasncript on solar storms

and if you thought the Carrington event was scary, you should know about the Charlamagne event.

Jim Green: Are there other events like the Carrington Event even further back in the past?

Alex Young: There's one that's been talked about recently, called the Charlemagne Event because it's estimated to be within a period of about 774 or 775AD, somewhere in that period during the time of Charlemagne, and it was recorded in carbon-14 in tree rings. This event was 10 to 20 times bigger than the Carrington Event. And that's just massive. Jim Green: What would happen to our technological infrastructure if an event like that occurred today? Alex Young: It could be quite catastrophic. There have been studies by the National Academies that estimate that there would certainly be billions of dollars of damage, there are even estimates of up to trillions of dollars because it would have such a global impact on our technology infrastructure. We could see power outages across the globe and in interconnected power grids especially. There would also be impact to communications and we would possibly lose many satellites.

more here.on the Charlemagne event

WiredUK article on how to survive a solar event.

Of course, a hacker taking out the grid could do a lot of damage too, as can typhoons, floods, hurricanes etc.

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and David Reneke links to where you can download NASA ringtones.