Tuesday Overnight Open Thread - May 13, 2025 [scampydog]

Good evening, and welcome to the Tuesday ONT. Put your arms through the sleeves of your lab coat. It is time for some ONT space and science with our AoSHQ friend and commenter, publius. Open thread - feel free to run with scissors, talk about any topic, or be the rebel that opens the milk carton on the wrong side.

With an eye toward brains and tradition, we are leading off with a quote from Feynman - science street cred.

We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty-some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain. Richard P. Feynman

Failed Soviet spacecraft - Kosmos 482, launched in 1972 as part of the Venera Program, crashed into the Indian Ocean after 53 year of orbit.

Being built to survive passage through Venus' atmosphere means that if the 1,091-pound (495 kilograms), 3-foot (1 meter) lander is recovered it will likely be mostly intact. Under a United Nations treaty, any surviving debris from the spaceship will belong to Russia.

publius
Speaking of Kosmos 482, you may remember some Six Million Dollar Man episodes where Steve had to fight a rogue Russian Venus probe that accidentally crashed in the US and thought it was on Venus.

Don Pettit returned to earth on April 20th.

"A week ago, I was on station, and I was doing really heavy squats, I was doing dead lifts, I could float around with the greatest of ease, even though I had no trapeze," he said. "I was at the peak of my game. And then you come back to Earth, and it's like, God, I can't even get up from the floor anymore. It's humbling. But it isn't about the large muscle groups. It's about the little, tiny muscles that everybody forgets about because they're just there and they work. When you're in weightlessness, these muscles don't work anymore. And they take a six-month vacation until you come back to Earth. And now, all of a sudden, they start groaning and talking to you, and it takes a while to get all these little muscles tuned back up to being an Earthling."

publius
He returned on his 70th birthday, Russian time zone. Watching the Soyuz recovery, I noticed they didn't show Don at all. Turns out the reason was he was puking his guts out, poor guy. He's said he's one of the worst about returning to 1g; it messes him up big time, and it takes him several days to feel human again as he puts it. This was probably Don's last mission -- he hasn't mentioned retiring from NASA yet, and I imagine he'll continue to work for a good while, but on Earth, not in space.

Here's an article with a picture of Don being carried off from the Soyuz. You can see he looks a little rough.

publius shared this fun Don and Suni dancing video.

“Two Steppin on the Moon”; Country Western singer Josh Turner @joshturnermusic visited Houston Mission Control and sang us this song. Suni Williams and I decided to give it a try while Butch Wilmore filmed the effort. Here is “Two Steppin in Space”.

Big thanks to Josh Turner… pic.twitter.com/PVQJOYz0H1

— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) April 16, 2025

publius
There's a famous "dancing on the ceiling" scene with Fred Astaire.

It was filmed in a rotating set. A room was constructed inside a large drum, which rotated with the camera fixed to the drum.

Picture in the link below looks eerily similar to the Space Invaders. I'm not saying that Atari knows aliens, but aliens.

Lone Black Hole

Prior to this new finding, all the black holes that have been identified have also had a companion star-they are discovered due to their impact on light emitted by their companion star. Without such a companion star, it would be very difficult to see a black hole. The one identified by the team was only noticed because it passed in front of a distant non-companion star, magnifying its light and shifting its position in the sky for a short while.

publius
Now, the lone, or rogue black hole problem. It's a scary thought. If a black hole is quiet, it's not feeding on anything to give off light, one could be lurking out there and we wouldn't see it. So, you imagine what if a stellar mass one is on a collision course with the solar system. If it get too close, it would wreak havoc, planets, including earth, having their orbits perturbed or even ejected. Fortunately, the odds of this are very low, given what they think the black hole population is in the galaxy. Turns out the odds of this are 0.04% over the remaining 5 billion year lifetime of the Sun. Far higher, although still low in the absolute sense, is a passing star getting close enough to perturb the Oort Cloud a bit, and send a bunch of comets raining in the inner solar system years later.

ONT brings you Physics News!

Resonance, the amplification of waves at specific frequencies, underpins many everyday technologies, including smartphones, ultrasound imaging, and radio systems. However, conventional resonators gradually dissipate energy, requiring continuous input to sustain their operation.

Nearly 100 years ago, Nobel Prize winners John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner introduced a radical idea: under specific conditions, it might be possible for waves to remain confined indefinitely, without leaking energy. These so-called bound states in the continuum (BIC) are akin to whirlpools that stay fixed in place, even as a river flows around them. Yet for decades, scientists assumed such states could not exist within a compact, single-resonator system-until now.

Soon dilithium crystals.

Nuclear Powered Spacecraft

The Exlabs-Antares partnership "pairs two companies with an ambitious vision and pragmatic roadmaps to bring space nuclear technologies to bear," Will Madsen, Antares head of mission engineering, said in a statement. "For too long, space nuclear power has solely existed in conceptual studies - now it's time to build."

publius
Now, nuclear propulsion. The ultimate is something dubbed the Epstein Drive, after a fictional character on the sci-fi show The Expanse. Here's the scene showing how the inventor, Solomon Epstein, accidentally hit the mother load on fusion rocket efficiency. His test fusion hot-rod spaceship had a wonky voice interface, so he shut off the voice control. When he fired it up, the thrust was so great he was pulling too many g's to move, and so killed his fool self, strapped in under high g unable to turn off the engine:

If Elon figures that out, the solar system is now our backyard.

Big ONT thanks to publius for the knowledge and contributions.

Any of the Horde mastered curing/making homemade bacon?

There is some science behind the wet and dry methods of curing.

But salt also penetrates the meat. Salt (NaCl) is a very tiny molecule with only two atoms, sodium (Na) and chloride (Cl). It easily splits into sodium and chlorine ions when it gets wet and they get electrified and easily penetrate the pores and membranes.

Nitrite is also a small molecule, NO2, with three atoms, one nitrogen (N) and two oxygens (O). Nitrite breaks down into nitric oxide (NO) and binds to the iron atom (Fe) in myoglobin in the meat. Myoglobin is the protein that gives meat its red color. The chemical process is similar to the process that causes the pink smoke ring in smoked meats and it gives cured meat its characteristic pink color.

Scanned The Deplorable Gourmet cookbook for a homemade bacon recipe but the driNks section tripped me.

Not linking any recipes, but did find this amazing site:

Bacon Festival and Events Directory

Bacon Curing - a Historical Review. Long read, bookmark it for later.

Great clip!
You all ever ate vegan bacon? pic.twitter.com/1d3u4VqUEA

— YourFavWestVirginian (@WVfunnyguy) May 4, 2025

I used to see a tool. I'll never look at my staple gun the same way.

Physics. pic.twitter.com/imRbgh3hbv

— SULLY (@SULLY10X) May 4, 2025

It's science. Gary and Wyatt told me so.

Close enough to science, song does use the word sun. It's about drug use, not what many think it about.

This ONT brought to you by turning in foul balls and getting a snow cone in a thimble sized cup.

Send a hose nozzle sprayer (that does not leak), a vintage Swingline stapler, and a certificate for a chore free Saturday to: scampydog at proton dot me

posted by Open Blogger at 10:00 PM

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