#didymos

[littleouroboros]

Some light repairs

[brattytenshi]

>>>Didymos, Didymus: Ancient word meaning "Twins". We now know why it named itself that.

>>>Our Voladore contact identified it as "La Pulga" or "the Flea." As they oft reside within Blinkspace, research into this entity has been painfully slow.

>>>Twins. Fleas. There is never only one.

>>>//INFESTATION

>>>//SSLL

[unhingechronology]

you look pretty weird for a manticore… ah well im sure it’s nothing

:: funny

[vexwerewolf]

You are not a static thing. You have as many bodies as there are Planck instants stretching from the moment of your birth to the moment of your inevitable demise. You are not the body frozen in a Planck instant. You are the thing that flies between them.

-- DIDYMOS Prime

[high-noon-raccoon]

Finally finished reading Legionnaire but unfortunately it set me back on my bullshit and I'm trying desperately to spare my tabletop group from it.

I need to just sketch more, it helps me remember how to draw like an actual frigging adult.

[tac0tesseract]

Downtime

It was inevitable that sooner or later word got around proclaiming Emma “the computer kid” and she was absconded by the Karrakins for tech support. At least the diagnosis was simple enough: it's hot here, you idiots. Computers don't like heat. She got it, though; the printer was tied up making things more immediately important than air conditioning.

What concerned her more was that Sam wasn't there waiting for her when she got back. He'd been busy when she left, too, and for someone so insistent on being seen it was rare that he wasn't projecting. After a moment of peering down at his empty projection pad, she decided to pull the cord from her pocket, sit down against the wall, and plug into it directly.

She wasn't sure it would work without his invitation. He'd constructed this metaspace for them maybe a week ago using holographic and ontological tech “borrowed” from all their time with SSC. Much as he detested coding, he'd still done it purely of his own volition – carefully crafting it to bridge with her subjectivity suite and all her human senses. It wasn't lost on Emma how much research he had clearly put into this, and how it was for her as much as it was for him.

But the transition was as liquid as always. Today their virtual dimension took the form of the beachhead from where they'd launched toward the Velichye: neon blue sky, towering bergs of shock-white clouds, sands like sugar. There was a clock-like percussion to the waves. The breeze had that almost fishy tang that Emma was coming to learn was simply the scent of the ocean itself – perfectly, painstakingly recreated even though he himself could not smell it.

Sam sat on a rocky outcropping facing the sea with an old-fashioned paint set. The wind somehow did not reach him. His blue silk robes pooled around him in a placid mirror of the sea, and the nebula of his hair fell still along his back while his focus was elsewhere. That might have been the most curious detail of all – it meant that he, a Deimosian, was distracted by something. Emma paused a moment to send her consciousness back to her laptop, to check what programs were running. She'd pirated several digital art programs for him ages ago, but most of them had been made specifically for NHPs.

PixEL.exe was running. That one was made for humans. It meant that he was deliberately handicapping himself, painting strictly in linear time.

“Got tired of painting in MUSE, huh?” she asked as she approached.

He didn't immediately turn to look at her, but she caught the new split in his attention as he labored to maintain the illusion: paint suddenly manifested on his fingers and hands. Dream logic.

“It's more challenging this way,” he said. In here, his voice did not echo. In here, he pretended to breathe. “Creation is satisfying because it's difficult. It's an act of defiance.”

Emma grinned, taking a seat beside him. The rock was as uncomfortable as expected, but not overly so; Sam ran a considerate simulation. “And what exactly are you defying?”

“Serpent shit.” He smirked sidelong at her.

“God.” She laughed a little. “You know, I...I haven't really thought of RA, not since...everything.”

Sam gave an easy shrug, pausing to refill his brush with blue. “They're not going anywhere. Though I get the sense you haven't lost your faith.”

She hugged her knees to her chest. “Yeah, not really. It's not RA that was wrong, but how the Cousins were interpreting Them. I guess I'm just...making my own interpretations now?”

“What do you think I did?” Sam grinned, waving the brush around lazily. “ChakraChef kept coming to me, half the time with these kids not even as old as you were. And they'd kneel and make offerings, and – I won't lie, pretty nice on the ego.” The grin faded from his eyes. “And the stuff they asked me...I knew that if I slipped up, they'd run off and go kill themselves, or someone else, in my name. I couldn't explain to them that if I am some kind of angel, then RA made me just as clueless as the rest of you.”

“They liked you, though.”

“Everyone likes me. And I like to think that I kept them from being too stupid. But at the end of the day the Lessons are lost on me, too.”

“But you're still ruminating on Serpent shit?”

“Nah.” Sam turned back to his painting. “Well, maybe a little.”

“Baccara.”

“Yeah. And Radimir.”

The waves slowed, but maintained a rhythm. Somehow it sounded louder when they broke upon the shore now.

“...I think...I felt actual, physical pain back there,” came his quiet admission.

Emma stared. “But that's--”

“Yeah.”

“What the fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“Sam...” She reached for him without thinking about it, as she would for any human. Bless the simulation for being as thorough as it was, bless him for allowing her hand to actually connect with his arm, for finding warmth beneath the fabric as if he were...

“I'm fine. It's nothing permanent.” He smiled at her.

She watched him. “But you think it was targeted. That even though Baccara was attacking our enemies, they were also trying to hurt you, specifically.”

“Maybe.” Perhaps he saw the rage, the indignation igniting on her features, because he reached out to pull her into a hug. “Em. I'm alright. I promise.”

“You never hurt Baccara! It's bullshit!”

Bullshit, and...terrifying. The shock and confusion was the worst part about all of this. What in the galaxy could cause pain to an NHP? Even Legionspace slapfights didn't work that way.

The idea of anyone hurting Sam was...

He held her tighter, his hair falling around them both, his false heart ticking beneath her hands. He had a faint scent like a man. He was so warm. It was too perfect, too real. If only he'd been able to do this sooner. Emma balled her fists into his silken lapel and thunked her forehead against his chest.

“Would you like to see what I've been working on?” he asked. It was a deliberate change in subject, but a necessary one, perhaps; Emma knew that there wasn't really much anyone could do about Baccara, but maybe she could talk to Daughter later.

“You know I would,” she said with a half-smile, pulling away from him.

Sam chuckled and stood, sweeping his arm out such that all the canvases he'd been working on appeared around them in a semi-circle. He'd made dozens of works in the past few hours – almost all of them immersive depictions of the seascapes they'd encountered on the way to Radimir. Corals, fishes, leviathans, plants, the wrecked ship itself: once upon a time, thousands of years past, the rich detail in his work might have been described as 'Ghibli-esque' – but every subject had a sort of abstract realism to it as well, wreathed in what was best described as an aura and subtly textured with hundreds of tiny mandala fractals that could only be seen up close. It was a beautiful marriage of the real and the surreal, a hint at the way he naturally viewed the world, and that was the most valuable thing of all. Just as he worked in linear time to try and glimpse how she lived, his art allowed her to experience the same.

“Sam,” she breathed. “These are insane! You should show them to the others, I bet they'd really love them!”

“What, with the team?” He blinked. “Why?”

Emma laughed. “Because it's art, dummy. Art is supposed to be seen. Even I've put my terrible fanfics out there.”

“Hey, Solmates has done numbers,” he countered.

Her face grew hot. “I can't believe you've read that.”

“It was research.” He turned back to the canvases. “...You really think they'd enjoy it?”

“Why not? It's a beautiful reminder for those of us who went on the dive, and a lovely illustration for the folks who didn't. Besides, art is a really...humanizing thing. Maybe it'll make you seem a little less alien to our NHP holdouts.”

“Perhaps I will, then. But maybe only these. I think the ocean has become my new obsession.”

“Hyperfixating? It's almost like you're my twin.”

She grinned at him knowingly. His eyes flashed approval.

And then Sam did something he never, ever did.

He hesitated.

“...Are you busy, Emma?”

“No. Not until tomorrow, anyway. Baron Serious McFuckface wants...something from us. I'm sure he's keen to make use of all the Lancers that just miraculously fell into his lap.” She watched him. “Why?”

Sam smiled up at his paintings. The wind finally caught his hair. “I was just wondering if you'd stay here a while. I know I can't give you a real beach, but...”

Those words conjured an echo from what felt like a lifetime ago, when she was lost and terrified and he had first appeared to her, triggering in them both an uncanny feeling of familiarity. 'Stay with me...' she'd pleaded, as she felt Queen's eyes upon her back and resolved to spend the night inside what was apparently now her chassis.

Emma stepped forward, taking him by the hands and gently prying the paintbrush from his fingertips. “Always,” she said, echoing how he'd responded to her back then. “Will you show me how to paint?”

“You want to paint?”

“I mean obviously I'm not gonna be fuckin' Delgado.” She laughed, sweeping an arm out. “But we're right here! Surely even I can't fuck up the ocean. It's darker blue against lighter blue, right?”

He chuckled. There was such human warmth in his eyes as he looked at her then. “Yeah, alright. We can start with the basics and see how you feel.”

She was terrible at it.

But she painted with him for the rest of the night.

[head-post]

Hera spacecraft launched to investigate asteroid hit by NASA

The European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully launched Hera, its first planetary defence mission designed to assess whether future asteroids can be deflected from a collision course with earth.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on Monday from the Space Force Station at Cape Canaveral, Florida, sending the European interplanetary station Hera on a departure trajectory.

The spacecraft will visit the twin asteroid system of Didymos and Dimorphos to assess the impact of the DART kamikaze probe, which will help deflect dangerous asteroids away from earth in the future.

The DART mission ended in October 2022 when the 750-kg probe slammed into asteroid Dimorphos, which is about 160 metres in size. Dimorphos orbits the noticeably larger, 780-metre asteroid Didymus. The impact altered Dimorphos’s orbit, shortening the duration of one revolution by about 32 min to 11 h 23 min. If it was possible to do this with a test asteroid, it may work in the event of a deadly threat to earth from another asteroid. However, scientists lack the data to make accurate calculations and ESA’s Hera probe should fill that gap.

Hera was originally scheduled to fly with DART and take video of the collision. EU authorities delayed the adoption of the mission’s budget, and it will now take place years after the impact. However, this does not cancel its exceptional value. At the moment, scientists do not have data on the exact structure and even the topography of both asteroids. All they have are muddy images from the Italian cubesat, which was dropped from the DART probe minutes before its demise, as well as observations from telescopes.

In March 2025, the Hera probe will circle Mars for a gravity manoeuvre and take close up images of one of its satellites, Deimos. The station will reach the target asteroid system in October 2026. This will be the start of Hera’s six-month mission to study Dimorphos and Didymus. The greatest convergence of the station and Didymos should be about 1 kilometre. Some anxiety in scientists cause debris from the asteroid, which could linger in the system after the impact of the probe DART. But previous probe missions to the comet and other asteroids suggest that a serious threat is not expected.

Read more HERE

[netmassimo]

Five articles published in the journal "Nature Communications" report different analyses of data collected by NASA's DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency's LICIACube nanosatellite that accompanied it on its mission that ended with the collision with Dimorphos, a small satellite asteroid of Didymos, which occurred on September 26, 2022. Various teams of researchers with members in common offered possible reconstructions of the processes that led to the formation of the pair of asteroids and their characteristics. These studies are connected to the defense of the Earth from asteroid impacts.

[yronnia]

65 milion years of FEUD

The DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) just successfully slammed into Dimorphos, which is the moonlet of the asteroid Didymos (also affectionately called Didymoon). Over the next few days astronomers around the world will observe Didymos and Dimorphos to see if there has been a change in orbit from the latter. This is humanity’s first real attempt at altering the course of a “killer” asteroid, even if this one isn’t hazardous to us.

[spacenutspod]

Space Nuts Episode 471: HERA's Journey and the Light of Healing Join Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson in this enlightening episode of Space Nuts, where they explore the latest developments in Space exploration and the fascinating role of light in both astronomy and human healing. Episode Highlights: - HERA Mission Milestones: Discover the latest updates on the HERA mission, including critical trajectory corrections and its upcoming Mars gravity assist. Learn about its objectives, including a close encounter with Mars' moon Deimos, and its ultimate goal of orbiting the asteroid Didymos. - Black Hole Light Echoes: Delve into the intriguing concept of black hole light echoes and how light can be bent by gravity to create multiple observations of the same event. Understand the potential of using Very Long Baseline Interferometry to study these phenomena and what it could reveal about accretion discs. - Healing with Light: Explore the historical and modern uses of light in medicine, from ancient sun worship to contemporary phototherapy treatments. Hear Andrew's personal experience with radiation therapy and the importance of regular health checks. For more Space Nuts, including our continually updating newsfeed and to listen to all our episodes, visit our website. Follow us on social media at SpaceNutsPod on facebook, X, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok. We love engaging with our community, so be sure to drop us a message or comment on your favourite platform. For more Space and Astronomy News Podcasts, visit our HQ at www.bitesz.com. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/space-nuts/support. Stay curious, keep looking up, and join us next time for more stellar insights and cosmic wonders. Until then, clear skies and happy stargazing. 00:00 - Andrew Dunkley: Coming up on Space Nuts is the HERA mission 02:11 - I'm interested in two different stories about light about the hero mission 02:59 - ESA's HERA mission will make a close approach to Mars next year 11:07 - Andrew Dunkley and Fred Watson discuss light echoes in Space Nuts 13:17 - Measuring Black Hole Light Echoes with Very Long Baseline Interferometry 21:42 - Measuring black hole light echoes with very long baseline interferometry 22:39 - Even since ancient times, we've used light for medical purposes 27:55 - Fred has been receiving radiation therapy for prostate cancer for five weeks now 34:16 - Professor Fred Watson: Believe me, I'll be around for next episode ���️ Episode References European Space Agency https://www.esa.int Phys.org https://www.phys.org Universe Today https://www.universetoday.com Astrophysical Journal Letters https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/ 8205 5--- The Conversation https://theconversation.com Cancer Council New South Wales https://www.cancercouncil.com.au

[inkyvoids]

Last September, NASA purposefully smashed a spacecraft into Dimorphos, a 160m-wide space rock orbiting a larger asteroid named Didymos. The goal of the mission, called DART (the Double Asteroid Redirection Test), was to demonstrate humanity’s ability to redirect hazardous asteroids away from Earth. That part of the mission was a success above and beyond all expectations. But now scientists are also learning more about the origins of the two asteroids. A study conducted in the wake of the DART impact found that Dimorphos is made from the same material as Didymos, and that the pair of asteroids likely originated from a single body.

[littleouroboros]

A lich pilot... the last kind of person you wanna meet in the Long Rim. (He/him)

[unhingechronology]

Still reeling. It feels like a dream.

:: elaborate. dream: positive connotation?

I don't know yet.

[songsofbloodandwater]

Yay new tag to finally put everything Twin Cult related on it!

Who else is absolutely not surprised that it intersects so much with my Mater Lupina and Regina Lunae tags!

[high-noon-raccoon]

"From the perspective of others its actions usually seem to have no meaning in the present – it only later becomes apparent that they have retroactively caused events in the past, or set in motion a butterfly effect causing events in the future." --(Legoinnaire, p 61)