What we have learned, 2022

In this annual tradition, we take stock of The Year That Was in astrophysics. A day late for Mars but we're on an 365.256-day sidereal plan here.

On a personal note my eyesight deteriorated, so in June I got readers. Lenses great; frames brittle, so I got another set last fall. Which turned out to be too strong. So that's what I use to read on the road. Also a few weeks after June this laptop died and

The biggest deal for my Venus project was the Jacobi Integral, stumbled upon last month but sussed only last weekend, giftwrapped best-I-can-tell by the sainted Myrene Bishop himself. I can also thank Gereshes' one example although I assert I have explained things better than he did. NO thanks AT ALL are due to the Wikipedians nor to the Wolframites who fell down on providing any useful code nor even the basic units we need; all Wolfram could do was to buttress Gereshes. Even Gereshes split his takes across multiple sites mainly posting hypnotic animated GIFs over explanation. This has led to updates of the SV-Hilda project.

Although I didn't study Molniya orbits I did find out about them. Expect a rethink of several pages here, like how Venus high-orbit interfaces with itself and with L4/L5.

As for material science I found that ramjets tend, er, to melt. That's intransitive, not just transitive. That affects the Pluto system for Venus and, indeed, potential uses for nonnuclear-heated systems of that sort (because Venus high-altitude might use solar, not plutonium). We also bought a book from 2020 which suggested balloons fit for spaceporting on both our worlds. We reconsidered the use of toxic Hg both for propellant (interplanetary only) and for solar-power.

As for general wellwalla, some news came out of Mars. I'll admit this blog isn't on that beat; hence why we didn't blow off fireworks yesterday. Although a beating was administered, to lazy Martian explorers. I refer my readers to Zim's BehindTheBlack for that beat overall. Progress has been incremental this next planet outward (despite the laziness) but, it is progress. I do believe we have uses for the Venus clouds and for the planet below Deimos... prison. Because interplanetary commerce between here and Psyche/Ceres is to focus on Venus' orbit and on the moon Deimos. Sorry.

Past the Belt I found (scattered) explanations of the Laplace equations, generalised past 4:2:1; first for mean-motion then for the longitudes. More-sincere thanks go out to Papaloizou and to Fei Dai et al respectively. I'd have preferred they all be in one easy textbook but, as with Jacobi, I couldn't find one so had to write that textbook, only possible due to their moron-readable explanations. As commonly noted it takes a genius to explain sh!t to morons, or ex-morons as the case may be. This helps a LOT in Newton-simulators where the bodies be in resonance.

Taking Laplace and Jacobi together we pondered using Amáltheia for shielding Jupiter's planet-sized moons especially Io; and maybe a manmade station betwixt Europa and Ganymede. The latter two moons, at least, might not need the shielding I'd assumed.

Now the para to what this blog DIDN'T WIN. In general iceworld news the ramjet was found in the process of understanding an Antarctic Ice Gun envisioned by some Pole back in the 1990s. This was worked in May when, as noted, my eyes weren't up to it. Requires more chemistry knowledge than I own. Took the L. Same goes for an even-more-abortive attempt at the constant-G Pursuit Curve - which I'd wanted from the new stations I'm putting up as interplanetary cyclers and, of late, for Europa/Ganymede. This, early July. Might try again later.

Evenfurtherout much of the Jacobi and Laplace stuff was found by looking into newly-found extrasolar planets with such parameters. We also found many more browndwarfs and a literal Soundgarden System. Although, this might be harder (or softer) SF than this blog prefers, so - no links. The Gaia 'scope keeps delivering; Webb, after much ballyhoo and expense... not quite there yet. And we lost some planets, mostly around Barnard's Star again but also Proxima Centauri.

On the data-analysis side we got a better algo for sussing the data. Can we nail down the Alpha Centauri worlds?

Back to a personal report some computer-science was done, pondering bithacking leading to vectors in a multicore. Some of the latter went toward fixing the Newton-sim I'd used 2007-2021 especially for performance. I also figured out longitude for a Keplerian ellipse; wiki was of actual help here. The elliptical circumference was also pondered although there, just enough to (vaguely) understand some (bad) cryptology.