'Purple Rain' Earth's atmosphere revealed by a Himawari satellite study of water vapor in the infrared, an extended look at the turmoil in the water-filled skies of planet Earth. Each minute covers one day. Each shot covers one month. The 7h15m40s 4K video is not looped. youtu.be/bjvmUL_A20A

Charon is the most Sci-Fi moon, with features named after Star Trek, Macross, Doctor Who, Alien, Firefly and so on.

Is there still hope for a 'Blindsight' movie, based on the Peter Watts book? It's been 20 years. The website for the short film is stunningly beautiful though: blindsight.space

There are four E-4B 'Nightwatch' Advanced Airborne Command Post planes, in continuous 24/7 service. They are designed to stay airborne for an entire week in the case of nuclear war, thanks to refueling operations like these: youtu.be/eO5RjCwCBo8

True colour drawing of pale Neptune with its rings faintly visible. #art by Voyager16751. www.deviantart.com/voyager16751...

On the left is a very strange noise suppressor for the JT3C engine of an early Boeing 707: www.707.adastron.com/gallery/vh-e... I can't imagine what it does to thrust efficiency...

Overview of the Rover nuclear thermal rocket engine program tests: ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19... It took two decades and testing designs ranging from the 44 MW NF-1 and 70 MW Kiwi-A to the 4100 MW Phoebus 2A, but all design challenges were solved and flight testing was next.

The US once tried developing a missile specifically to hunt Mach 3 MiG-25 Foxbats: the (X)AIM-97 Seekbat. With dual radar and IR seekers, it would hit targets 90 km away up to 24km altitude, but it weighed a massive 600 kg (1.33x an AIM-54 Phoenix).

A nuclear pulse Orion ship heads towards a periapsis burn near Jupiter, maximing the Oberth effect so it can insert into Callisto orbit. Realistic SF #space #art by William Black. www.deviantart.com/william-blac...

Nearly ever photon absorbed by 'antenna proteins' in a photosynethetic cell gets converted into electrons; that's near-unity quantum efficiency. What's more, disordered proteins randomly transfer energy *more* efficiently than an organized lattice! Paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Coal is far from gone. It's being burnt more than ever: 8.85 billion tons last year. Consumption growth has plateaued this decade but it's still climbing, past 2x the rate in 2000.

Climate change has a direct economic cost. On the current path, it's -10% global GDP per capita by 2100. In the worst SSP5-8.5 case, it's -24%. Hot countries get hit even worse. Compound that with population losses (-30 to -50% in some countries)... journals.plos.org/climate/arti...

F-104As at the USAF 83rd, the first Air Defense Command squadron to field them. #art by Saratoga233 www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/...

Supermassive black hole ID830 of 440 million solar masses is an order of magnitude brighter than it should be: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... Looking at its X-ray emissions, astronomers believe it's in a temporary Super-Eddington accretion state following a tidal disruption event.

Virgin Galactic's presentation of the Delta-class suborbital spaceplane, with some neat X-ray views: youtu.be/DOa9QroTyIQ

The M1210, a near-future wheeled Infantry Fighting Vehicle with heavy firepower and an extra-extra-wide armor package over its flanks. #art www.artstation.com/artwork/x3rz9Y

B-1B, full afterburner, in a high speed low pass, summoning clouds over AirVenture Oshkosh 2017: youtu.be/9nvWHzNc_0U

Interstellar vehicles with combined lightsail and antimatter-catalyzed fusion drives complete the braking burn into orbit of a distant exoplanet. Each is 3.6 km long. #space #art by HLHoffmann www.deviantart.com/hlhoffmann/a...

Callsign 'SMOKE-1': a B-47 taking off with the help of 11x JATO rockets and water-methanol injection in the jet engines.

This paper on the potential performance of ramjets has a great chart listing the density, energy density and volumetric energy density of burning fuels as unconventional as boron or magnesium hydride: pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1c56/6f7dc57...

Nimbus-B launched atop a Thor-Agena rocket in 1968, but it deviated and was blown up by the range safety officer. Aboard was a SNAP-19 RTG with ~1kg of Pu-238. It fell into the ocean...without leaking, allowing it to be recovered, reused and flown on Nimbus-3! www.smithsonianmag.com/science-natu...

MARSDROP, a study for how to land a microprobe on Mars by adapting a 3kg REBR: icubesat.org/wp-content/u... A Parawing is found to be the lightest aerodynamic decelerator, 9% the mass of a regular parachute, although it imposes a 65g 'kick' on deployment.

Mountains of shadow, on the C-ring. #space #art by Topaz172 www.deviantart.com/topaz172/art...

ICON is a €5m project to turn underground fiber optic cable networks into active sensors that detect damage, earthquakes, and more, by CONNECT at Dublin's @tcddublin.bsky.social: connectcentre.ie/news/new-e5-...

Lockheed's CL-1201, a crazy 341m wingspan, 5200 ton design powered by a 1.83 GW onboard reactor, gets the 3D treatment it deserves by Mustard: youtu.be/FXTR-QNGUt0

Cover image for "US Aviation Secret Projects Issue 3" for Scott Lowther, by Piotr Forkasiewicz. We see the B-47 Stratojet in its regular jet-propelled form and its turboprop prototype. #art www.artstation.com/artwork/EzdbJ8

High intensity femtosecond laser ablation bypasses heating, melting or vaporization: it simply adds enough energy to electrons to eject them, causing the target material to explode out of self-repulsion. That's great for spectrometry: www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11...

NASA research into using a flexible deployable wing to recover space capsules, aircraft or even rocket boosters, written by Rogallo himself: ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19... Remote-controlled models, climbing to crewed ultralights, were tested outdoors to prove the concept's viability.

Recording the magnetic and electric footprint of individual neuron, in-vivo: journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.... This was done using Giant Magnetoresistance sensors miniaturized down to 25 micrometer silicon tips, that can track single action potentials.

Colony on a new world, near some moons in very low orbits. Unless they're made of tungsten, they'd be inside the Roche limit! #space #art by Erik Stitt. www.artstation.com/artwork/EzeDkq

A comparison of gas-cooled SDI reactors for use in space: www.osti.gov/servlets/pur... It finds a Rankine-cycle design could deliver 10 MW sustained at 400 W/kg but 500 MW burst mode gets 2.7 kW/kg. More surprising is the wire-core concept that could deliver 3 MW/kg thermal at 1800K operating temp.

Boeing 737 vs 777: The 737's fuselage is around 3.7m in diameter. The 777's GE9X engines alone are wider than that.

NASA Langley's Scramjet Test Facility can simulate conditions ranging from Mach 2 to 8, up to 43 bar and 2890K conditions: ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citation... It's essentially a windtunnel placed in expanded rocket exhaust, with 20 MW arc heating.

A stellar lightshow: this moon, large enough to hold onto an atmosphere, orbits a ringed gas giant that's illuminated by pulsar-star binary system. #space #art by Iris Celestialis. www.artstation.com/artwork/gRGarK

The Cosmic Microwave Background is the white-hot glow of the Universe' first 379,000 years stretched into faint 2.73K temperature radiation. But is has an ancestor: the Cosmic Neutrino Background, from the first second after the Big Bang, now only 1.95K in temperature.

To turn it into a museum exhibit, the B-307 Tango-class was towed by tugboats for 2250 km then dragged 5 km over land by Armoured Recovery Vehicles, out of the Volga river to the AvtoVAZ Technical Museum.

Covert art for the Habitats Volume 2 kickstarter project, featuring a Bishops ring. #space #art by mateusz_urbanowicz www.kickstarter.com/projects/sam...

The Ground-Based Interceptor is a large 16.6m tall missile, 21.6 tons fully fueled, that serves as the longest-range anti-ballistic missile of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. It can deliver an exoatmospheric KKV out to 5300 km at 1770 km altitude. Costs $90m each.

The SupraMarine project (Air Liquide / CentraleSupélec / ITP Interpipe / Nexans/ RTE) want to connect offshore wind farms to the electrical grid using a nitrogen-cooled HTS subsea superconducting cable: www.nexans.com/press-releas... A demonstrator is planned by 2028.

Triton may have the strangest underground ocean of all the icy moons: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... Up to 25% ammonia concentration in a thin layer bounded up top by an eutectic mix that stays liquid even at -100°C, and at the bottom by a layer of frozen ammonia ice under >200 MPa

Combining Cyanobacteria cultures and anaerobic digestion of raw Martian regolith to turn it into a soil fertile enough to grow Lemnu duckweed: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... It had to be done in a concentrated CO2 atmosphere and yielded 50% less biomass but it did prove it was possible.

Lasers can be used to search and detect stealth aircraft, since it's difficult to avoid reflecting short wavelength beams, or even track the distortions created by turbulent air in their wake (also getting around Doppler Notching by doing so): geospatialworld.net/article/leve...

@kurzgesagt.org does some more spec-evo in this latest video: youtu.be/8qQW4LTWgtc They come up with Hestia, a super-habitable super-Earth with a thick atmosphere, shallow oceans and countless coastlines. The result is fascinating, and of course, beautifully depicted!

Intercepting KKVs in low Earth obit with a laser: youtu.be/9xpSHwWeM84 It's got all the right elements: radiators heat up as power increases, the laser itself is invisible but focusing optics do scatter it, targets are conical and gradually vaporize under fire...

Koenigsegg's 5L twin-turbo V8 is a marvel: -1280hp with gasoline, 1600hp on E85 -189kg dry -idle to redline in 0.213 s -20 bar compressed air reserves to keep the turbos spinning, eliminating lag *pneumatically* -Now used in the Kimera K39

The Lavochkin La-200 was a Soviet interceptor jet with a unique engine arrangement: tandem RD-45F/VK-1 centrifugal flow turbojets inside the fuselage, with exhaust nozzles behind the cockpit and in the tail. It could reach Mach 0.95.

A nuclear-propelled spaceship making a round trip to Mars, in this "concept animation" built for NASA Marshall Space Flight Center's 2025 space nuclear propulsion development program. #space #art by Lee Kolb www.artstation.com/artwork/vbORGE

Blender rendering of the RDS-220 'Tsar Bomba, a thermonuclear bomb designed for 100 Megaton yield, actually tested at 50 Mt by replacing its uranium tamper with inert lead. #art by Stipple Alpha www.artstation.com/artwork/mAG0v9

A Permit-class SSN fires its Mk.48 ADCAP torpedo. These can travel up to 120 km/h underwater. #art by Robert Bonchune. www.artstation.com/artwork/aYgNqR

Strike carbon with the Dipole100X laser then flash it with the European XFEL, and you'll get a few nanoseconds to witness its liquid state: www.hzdr.de/db/Cms?pNid=... Done first at the High Energy Density-Helmholtz International Beamline for Extreme Fields: www.nature.com/articles/s41...