Pat Spillane: GAA committed a major own goal with TV fixture mistake
TV coverage lacked sound judgement and vision
When the Americans first went to the moon, they discovered that the ballpoint pen didn't work in space. So NASA got to work, spending billions of dollars to invent a biro that would work in zero gravity and on any surface imaginable.
When the Russians went to the moon, they used a pencil. And guess what? It worked. It was common sense in action. It's something my late mother always drilled into us. When faced with any problem, use your common sense. Wise words indeed.
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Irish Examiner
3 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Private Japanese lunar lander heads towards touchdown in the Moon's far north
A private lunar lander from Japan is closing in on the Moon, aiming for a touchdown in the unexplored far north with a mini rover. The Moon landing attempt by Tokyo-based company ispace on Friday Japan time is the latest entry in the rapidly expanding commercial lunar rush. The encore comes two years after the company's first moonshot ended in a crash landing, giving rise to the name Resilience for its successor lander. Resilience holds a rover with a shovel to gather lunar dirt as well as a Swedish artist's toy-size red house that will be lowered onto the Moon's dusty surface. Long the province of governments, the Moon became a target of private outfits in 2019, with more flops than wins along the way. Launched in January from Florida on a long, roundabout journey, Resilience entered lunar orbit last month. Deployment of @Firefly_Space's Blue Ghost lunar lander confirmed — SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 15, 2025 It shared a SpaceX ride with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost, which reached the Moon faster and became the first private entity to successfully land there in March. Another US company, Intuitive Machines, arrived at the Moon a few days after Firefly. But the tall, spindly lander face-planted in a crater near the Moon's south pole and was declared dead within hours. Resilience is targeting the top of the Moon, a less forbidding place than the shadowy bottom. The ispace team chose a flat area with few boulders in Mare Frigoris or Sea of Cold, a long and narrow region full of craters and ancient lava flows that stretches across the near side's northern tier. Once settled with power and communication flowing, the 7.5-foot Resilience will beam back pictures, expected several hours or more after touchdown. It will be at least the weekend, according to ispace, before the lander lowers the piggybacking rover onto the lunar surface. Made of carbon fibre-reinforced plastic with four wheels, ispace's European-built rover — named Tenacious — sports a high-definition camera to scout out the area and a shovel to scoop up some lunar dirt for Nasa. The rover, weighing just five kilograms, will stick close to the lander, going in circles at a speed of less than one inch per second. It is capable of venturing up to two-thirds of a mile from the lander and should be operational throughout the two-week mission, the period of daylight. Besides science and tech experiments, there is an artistic touch. The rover holds a tiny, Swedish-style red cottage with white trim and a green door, dubbed the Moonhouse by creator Mikael Genberg, for placement on the lunar surface. Takeshi Hakamada, CEO and founder of ispace, considers the latest moonshot 'merely a stepping stone', with its next, much bigger lander launching by 2027 with Nasa involvement, and even more to follow. 'We're not trying to corner the market. We're trying to build the market,' Jeremy Fix, chief engineer for ispace's US subsidiary, said at a conference last month. 'It's a huge market, a huge potential.' Mr Fix noted that ispace, like other businesses, does not have 'infinite funds' and cannot afford repeated failures. While not divulging the cost of the current mission, company officials said it is less than the first one which exceeded 100 million dollars.
Irish Times
13 hours ago
- Irish Times
Europa is our best bet of finding other life in our solar system
Does life exist elsewhere in the universe beyond Earth? Based on our knowledge of the nature of life on Earth and of how it arose about 3½ billion years ago and subsequently evolved to occupy almost every ecological niche on the planet, and on our knowledge of the vastness of the universe, the answer is an almost-certain yes. But what about life elsewhere in our own backyard – what about life in our own solar system besides Earth? We may well soon know a lot more about this because a spacecraft is speeding towards Europa, a moon of Jupiter, to investigate the suitability of a hidden ocean on this moon to harbour life. Nasa's Europa Clipper spacecraft was launched from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on October 14th, 2024. The mission is outlined by Nadia Drake in a recent edition of Scientific American. READ MORE Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and the fifth planet out from the sun, orbiting the sun at a distance of 5.2 astronomical units (1AU equals the average distance from Earth to sun; 149.6 million kilometres). It is a gas giant with a mass more than 2½ times the combined masses of all the other planets. After the moon and Venus, Jupiter is the third brightest natural object in the sky. Mars may have harboured life in the past but life on Mars today seems extremely unlikely. Europa is the best bet for a planet/moon in our solar system, apart from Earth, to harbour life. The goal of Europa Clipper's mission is to learn if Europa is habitable for life as we know it. [ Is there life on Europa? Nasa probe heads for moon with more water than Earth Opens in new window ] Most space scientists are convinced that an enormous ocean is packed beneath Europa's frozen surface, an ocean that may have brewed the raw ingredients of biology for billions of years. Perhaps life has already arisen there. Europa Clipper will arrive in Jupiter in 2030. Europa Clipper will loop around Jupiter on a course that will carry it by Europa 49 times over four years. Clipper carries nine instruments on board that will study Europa's chemistry, map the moon's icy surface, look for water – plumes rising from the surface and search by radar for lakes within Europa's frozen crust. Mission scientists are hoping Clipper's instruments, including world-class cameras and the best mass spectrometer ever flown (it ingests molecules and determines their composition), will survive the onslaught of the intense magnetic fields in this region for long enough to collect plentiful information about the life-harbouring potential of Europa. If the mission is extremely fortunate, Clipper will intercept a water plume and identify signature organic molecules of life. In 1609 when Galileo Galilei pointed his home-made telescope at Jupiter, he also noticed smaller spots of light. He studied the motions of these spots and deduced they were moons of Jupiter. He named the moons Europa, Ganymede, Io and Callisto. For a long time, scientists thought that the habitability of other planets for life depends on the planet's distance from the warming influence of a star. It was also assumed that our outer solar system was a frozen region with very little geological activity. But Nasa's 1979 Voyager and its 1995 Galileo spacecraft sweeps by Jupiter found gravitational interaction between Jupiter and its moons have warmed and made them all very geologically active. Io is extremely volcanic, and Europa seems to exhibit plate tectonics and a salty water sea of unknown depth trapped beneath a frozen surface shell of unknown thickness. It seems that a planet's or moon's biological potential does not depend solely on its distance from the sun, and possibly not even on the sun at all, as indicated by the existence of life on Earth around hydrothermal deep ocean vents. American astronomer Frank Drake wrote a formula in 1961 to estimate the number of civilisations in our Milky Way galaxy with which communication might be possible. Nadia Drake is Frank Drake's daughter. The Drake Equation includes several factors, including rate of star formation, the fraction of stars that have planets and the numbers of planets that potentially support life. The equation stimulates scientific thinking about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and Frank Drake is generally regarded as the father of SETI. Europa Clipper's mission will help to assign meaningful values to some of the SETI equation variables. William Reville is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC
Irish Independent
2 days ago
- Irish Independent
Eruptions from sun taking out SpaceX Starlink satellites, Nasa says
Anthony Cuthbertson ©UK Independent Yesterday at 21:30 Eruptions from the sun are causing SpaceX's Starlink satellites to fall to Earth 'faster than expected', according to Nasa scientists. A team from the US space agency's Goddard Space Flight Centre made the discovery after investigating the impact of solar activity on the lifespan of satellites in low-Earth orbit.
