Questions tagged [weather]
Questions regarding effects of weather on space exploration and how it can be forecasted and managed on Earth and on other bodies with atmospheres.
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What would have happened if lightning struck the Orion LES instead of the umbilical tower?
Yesterday, a lightning struck the SLS' umbilical tower during a scrubbed wet dress rehearsal.
Is it normal for a lightning to strike the umbilical tower instead of the 3 lightning arresters around the ...
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Has an aircraft's flight ever been delayed on another planet? If so, who, what, when, where and why exactly?
For the benefit of future readers and our spaceflight-firsts tag:
Question: Has an aircraft's flight ever been delayed on another planet? If so, who issued the delay order, what spacecraft's flight ...
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How does the wind behave throughout the day in Jezero Crater? (worried about Ingenuity)
JPL tweet links to mars.nasa.gov's Flying on Mars Is Getting Harder and Harder which explains that seasonal changes are lowering the density of the local atmosphere, presumably due to warmer seasonal ...
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Is there an atmospheric pressure model for Mars that takes different temperatures and seasons into account?
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Above are the pressure data from Curiosity's REMS sensor for the first 200 sols at Gale crater.
At about sol 170 Mars was at perihelion and a month later it was southern ...
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How long would astronauts' footprints on Mars persist?
The Apollo astronauts' footsteps can remain theoretically forever on the Moon as it has no atmosphere. Mars does have an atmosphere but a very thin one. Its pressure ranges from 72 Pa (0.0104 psi) on ...
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Might Ingenuity tip over?
While Ingenuity patiently waits for its preflight checks to pass, how likely is it that a wind gust could tip it over? How strong and how rare a gust? Those rotors have plenty of area. (Surely NASA ...
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SN11 was launched in fog. Why not wait for better conditions?
The fog certainly frustrated the external observers, but it doesn't seem ideal from SpaceX perspective either.
All the external observers were very distant from the launch/landing site and would be ...
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How many planets have had their limbs scanned with radio signals?
This answer to When did planetary scientists realize Venus' surface pressure was almost 100x that on Earth? How did they find out? describes one example of scanning the limb of a planet using ...
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Perseverance individual sample collection post-mission; what stops them from blowing away or getting covered and hidden by dust?
I have been seeing videos that the plan after Perseverance is done collecting samples to distribute them in 'strategic' locations around Mars for another rover to drive around and pick up later. Why ...
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Are launch windows to Mars avoided if they result in landings during dust storm season?
This comment suggests that orbit before descent to Mars' surface allows a mission to delay the landing if the weather conditions are bad. I think that Tianwen-1 will be the first to put a lander rover ...
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Propulsion thrust vs high winds?
While I do understand that high wind speed is a risk for space launches (and all air flights), still, is it a physical constraint or a computational problem given we are not dealing with a hurricane/...
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Why did it take so long to notice that the ozone layer had holes in it? Which satellite provided the data?
Wikipedia says:
The discovery of the annual depletion of ozone above the Antarctic was first announced by Joe Farman, Brian Gardiner and Jonathan Shanklin, in a paper which appeared in Nature on May ...
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Does upper atmosphere rotate with earth?
Basic question that I should know the answer to but sadly don't.
The lower atmosphere must rotate with the earth because of friction---at least the very bottom of it.
But what about 30 miles up? There ...
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What if you tried to fly a kite on Mars?
I wonder what kite flying might be like on Mars, in one per cent the atmospheric pressure of Earth, about two per cent the Earth's atmospheric density and 38% the Earth's surface gravity. Are there ...
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Did any sounding rocket ever fly through a noctilucent cloud?
Noctilucent clouds are the highest clouds forming above the Earth, up in the mesosphere. They form in late spring / early summer and above latitudes closer to the poles. Was a sounding rocket ever ...
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