Dominique Luchart's Blog, page 672

Deliveroo prices shares at £3.90 to £4.60 ahead of its London IPO, implying a market cap of £7.6B to £8.8B (Ryan Browne/CNBC)

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Test pilot Brian Binnie recounts his historic flight on SpaceShipOne and the future of private space travel in new book, ,

Brian Binnie is a former United States Navy officer and test pilot for SpaceShipOne, the experimental space plane created by aeronautical pioneer, Burt Rutan, and his innovative company, Scaled Composites. SpaceShipOne was the product of a joint venture between entrepreneur Paul Allen and Scaled Composites.

On Oct. 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne was released from its White Knight mothership, and with Binnie at the controls, he made the second suborbital flight in one week’s time to snag the $10 million Ansari X Prize flight purse. That pioneering passage of space and time marked a new era of commercial space flight.

Less than a year later, Sir Richard Branson and Rutan announced a joint venture between Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites called The SpaceShip Company. Jointly, they would go on to build SpaceShipTwo, now being tested to haul paying passengers on suborbital sojourns from Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Binnie recently authored the engrossing book, “The Magic and Menace of SpaceShipOne” (Black Sky Enterprise, Oct. 4, 2020, available at: https://brianbinnie.net/ and at Amazon.)

“Spaceships are dangerous things. There are no intentions implied to suggest otherwise,” Binnie writes, also noting his early copiloting experience in flying Rotary Rocket’s Roton vehicle, built to be a single stage to orbit spaceship.

Space.com recently talked with Binnie about his forty years of what he tags as “wrestling with recalcitrant machinery” – flying vehicles that are doing their best to be lethal, but proving to be useful training.

Related: How SpaceShipOne and X Prize Launched Commercial Spaceflight

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The Magic and Menace of SpaceShipOne by Brian Binnie: $55 at Amazon.
Test pilot Brian Binnie shares what it was like to fly the first privately built reusable spacecraft, SpaceShipOne, to win the Ansari X Prize in 2004 and recalls his decades of flying.View Deal

Space.com: Your X Prize winning flight moved the needle forward on the prospect for public space travel. But here we are in 2021 and it has taken time for that promise to evolve. Why so long?

Binnie: From Virgin’s perspective, Scaled Composite suffered two major accidents. In their wake, every anomaly or unexpected result was thoroughly scrutinized. Virgin really had no other option. With some 200 hundred astronaut founders already signed up after the X Prize flights, they needed the confidence that the ship was upright and not taking on water. I suppose it didn’t help that expectations were always misaligned with real progress and the number of “this will be the year” could cloud everyone’s judgment. I will say that under any other investor the program would likely have been cancelled. The fact that Branson presses on gives great credibility to their commitment of bringing space to the common man and woman. As they say, if it was easy …

How involved were you in the decision-making about designing and then flying SpaceShipOne (SS1)?

Binnie: Pilots and engineers are closely joined at the hip. Engineers, however, can be like lawyers. They can keep a program in development for longer than it should, with “better being the enemy of good enough.”

Burt Rutan had great judgment when looking at an issue or problem. His risk management skills, in my opinion, were rather extraordinary, and while others fretted, he would often suggest buttoning the vehicle up and go fly.

It remains in my mind a feat of such unlikely odds that in two-and-a-half years, the program developed and tested a mothership, rocket motor, avionics, simulator and a spaceship that went into that black sky on three of its six powered flights. And Burt was at the helm of all of it.

I believe the single most important attribute of Burt’s was that in his mind he wasn’t really building a spaceship, but rather another airplane that happened to have a rocket motor on it for part of the journey. Burt was very adverse to “bells and whistles” and that kept the program moving along. And since we didn’t handicap ourselves with detailed documentation of processes or paperwork, the team could make uncanny progress.

To your question, pilots come at the vehicle from the perspective of the cockpit. They want to know what can be affected, and by the same token, what cannot. From that standpoint, Burt was open to ideas and suggestions.

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SpaceShipOne pilot, Brian Binnie (Image credit: Brian Binnie)

Space.com: If trouble arose in flying SS1, how could you get out?

Binnie: There were two choices. One of those was a little hatch door at your left side. The other was, if you got into trouble, you’d feather the vehicle, assuming the feather worked, and that puts it into stable attitude and pitch. Then you could unlatch the nose cone, push it away, unbuckle your seat and roll forward. Then you’re free and clear of the vehicle. I thought that was pretty novel thinking. All you have to worry about then is making sure the parachute works.

Space.com: After your winning X Prize flight, there seemed to be shop talk about more SS1 flights, pushing the envelope of the vehicle. Why didn’t that happen?

Binnie: Burt had set up a sensible plan for the vehicle. There were 21 tasks and the first 20 tasks involved getting to the X Prize flights. After that, he had task 21. He wanted to fly the vehicle, something like once a week for 20 weeks. In doing that, he could get a really good baseline on the operational costs of utilizing the vehicle. Perhaps along the way, you could make modifications to enhance the vehicle’s handling qualities and actually get more than one person in the cockpit. When the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum chimed in, more flights came screeching to a halt. Paul Allen didn’t want to risk the vehicle he had funded.

The last time I was there [at the museum], SS1 remained in-between the Bell X-1 and Spirit of St. Louis, but in its feathered configuration.

In Pictures: Breaking the Sound Barrier

Space.com: Back in 1999, you were one of the two person crew that flew Rotary Rocket’s Atmospheric Test Vehicle (ATV), a unique craft using helicopter-style rotors for landing. What was that experience like?

Binnie: It was certainly a good experience and appealed to me. The Roton started out as an unmanned, small vehicle, but I joined when that concept was abandoned for a full-scaled manned demonstrator of a single stage to orbit design. Rotary did not lack for big dreams. My focus was on the cockpit and the flight controls, the simulator, and all the things that went into managing the propellant.

The other half of the company was designing a massive rotating engine with something like seventy six thrusters that would be spun up by centrifugal pumping of the propellants. You might say there were a lot of things spinning on that vehicle. But their effort was on building just one of these thrusters to be put on a whirl test stand. Alas, Rotary’s money ran out before it was demonstrated.

The ATV ended up making three flights with five takeoffs and landings. The first flight was rather frightening and I was certainly quite happy to hand it back over to Gary Hudson, Rotary’s CEO. But more money came in and two more flights were made with the last one having the vehicle fly down the runway at Mojave around seventy five feet and sixty knots. So we did what we said we were going to do… demonstrate control of the vehicle in the landing pattern.

Space.com: There’s always talk about having space vehicles demonstrate “airline-like” operation. How far are we from that often-said saying?

Binnie: I’ve heard that line several times too. I’m thinking I don’t see it. You look at the frequency of flight in general, manned or unmanned. They are onesie-twosies for the most part. Elon Musk is a kind of outlier in the business. I say good for him. Space is so demanding in terms of managing the power that’s required to get out of Earth’s gravity well. I don’t see any clever things that are going to change that. I keep waiting for the aliens to come back and show us how to do anti-gravity.

Photos: Amazing X-Planes from the X-1 to XV-15

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SpaceShipOne on public display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. (Image credit: Brian Binnie)

Space.com: Speaking of Musk, he recently encountered static from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) about his Starship flight program. How’d the FAA treat the SS1 program?

Binnie: I have a couple chapters in the book about this. It was tortuous. We were the pathfinder for commercial reusable spaceships. As Elon said, the FAA has the wrong kind of people managing these programs, those that are used to big boosters that launch and never come back. They don’t have the mindset about reusable spaceships, whether they are suborbital or orbital. For SS1, the FAA just drove Burt completely nuts. There were sparks flying all the time. They came up with a set of whacky rules and Burt practically rejected all of them. When it was all said and done, the bureaucracy won. What they wanted is basically what they got. I think there’s a long ways to go in terms of having a relationship with the government that promotes this kind of activity. It just raises the bar of entry for most people that they can’t get in. I’d hate to see it intrude much with SpaceShipTwo.

Space.com: In putting you back in the pilot’s seat for that winning X Prize SS1 flight, was there anything surprising given all the training?

Binnie: Three days before I flew that flight, we completely changed the way we were going to fly the vehicle. So all the simulator work we had done for the past year was pretty much out the window. A new maneuver was invented, and we basically crossed our fingers and hoped it was good.

That flight – not my words – people called it the perfect flight. In leaving the atmosphere, as I kept the motor running to 215,000 feet, the ship had zero roll, pitch, yaw rates. It was rock solid and continued on up past the X-15 altitude, Burt’s grand plan. Wow…the fact that it all came together in that one flight. We certainly got a pretty good apogee out of it…nearly 70 miles up. The reentry was smooth as butter. It was just noisy. It was a wonderful experience. If you consider that through most of the SS1 program we had trials and difficulties, it all came together in that one flight, the final flight.

Space.com: Any other thoughts regarding your piloting of SS1?

Binnie: I’m a single-seat pilot kind of guy. I flew A7 Corsairs for 10 years in the Navy, and then transitioned to Hornets for another 10 years – all single-seat flying. SS1 was single-seat and that’s an environment in which I am comfortable with and like and have gotten used to. The experience for me going to space, I didn’t have to spoil it by having passengers or a co-pilot or whatever to kind of defocus my attention at things that I wanted to soak up.

Also being out at the Mojave Air and Space Port, you are really spoiled by the views. You had the Pacific, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, the coast line, the Sierra Nevada mountains. You could see Edwards Air Force Base and all its history. That was all awesome to take in.

I don’t see any single-seat spaceships in the near-future. So maybe I am the last guy that has gone to space by himself.

Leonard David is author of the recently released book, “Moon Rush: The New Space Race” published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for SPACE.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us @Space dotcom, Facebook or Google+. This version of the story published on Space.com.

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The mysterious core of Mars is on the large side, NASA’s InSight lander data suggests, ,

NASA’s InSight lander has spent more than a full Martian year stationed on the Red Planet, and scientists are pleased with the spacecraft’s observations to date, despite the challenges Mars has posed.

Although the safe arrival of NASA’s Perseverance rover last month has captured huge amounts of attention, it’s worth remembering that the agency has two other robots successfully operating on the Red Planet — the Curiosity rover and the stationary InSight lander.

And InSight just made some intriguing discoveries about the innards of Mars.

“We have met our science objectives about the interior structure, we’ve looked from the crust to the core, and measured our Martian seismicity,” Mark Panning, project scientist for InSight at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said during a live presentation on Wednesday (March 17) at the 52nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), which was held virtually last week. “I’m just giving you the barest surface view.”

Related: This picture is from Mars. It’s probably not what you think.

Insight on Mars

The $850 million InSight lander touched down on Mars in November 2018 for a mission designed to help scientists understand the interior of the Red Planet. The lander was outfitted to conduct three different experiments: one focused on heat transfer, one on seismic waves and one on measuring the precise details of the planet’s spin.

Mars has not cooperated with the first experiment. InSight’s self-drilling heat probe, or “mole,” which was meant to bury itself up to 16 feet (5 meters) into the Red Planet, could never dig deeper than its own length. (Panning noted, however, that the instrument is gathering heat data for that much shallower section of crust.)

The other two experiments have gone more smoothly.

InSight’s seismometer was designed to scope out the internal structure of the Red Planet by feeling for seismic waves bouncing through and between the layers of Mars. The instrument had detected about 500 events as of March 1, according to instrument principal investigator Philippe Lognonne, a geophysicist at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics in France, who gave a prerecorded talk at LPSC this week.

The third experiment uses radio science techniques to track the precise location of the lander in space. Since InSight, unlike Perseverance and NASA’s other rovers, isn’t moving along the surface, that data tells scientists how the planet itself is moving, letting them trace the tiny wobbles of its rotation axis. Those wobbles to date suggest that the core of Mars is liquid, like the outer layer of Earth’s core, Panning said.

How big is Mars’ core?

Scientists are also using these observations to calculate the size of the core, with current best estimates ranging from 1,110 to 1,300 miles (1,780 to 2,080 kilometers) across. A second estimate of the same measurement produced by data gathered by InSight’s seismometer offers a narrower but complementary range, 1,120 to 1,160 miles (1,810 to 1,860 km), although this estimate isn’t final either, lead author Simon Stahler, a seismologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, emphasized in brief live remarks at LPSC on Thursday (March 18).

“That is a preliminary estimate that is not something you should build your own interior modeling upon, but at least it’s where we are landing,” he said. “And that is consistent with, if on the upper edge of, the pre-mission estimates.” Stahler also noted that until early this century, scientists thought that Mars’ core was closer to 930 miles (1,500 km) across.

That core estimate relies on measurements of seismic activity at a certain distance from the lander, with the seismic waves bouncing up to InSight’s instrument from the boundary where core and mantle meet. However, the team would like observations of 10 such quakes, Stahler said during a longer recorded presentation. Right now, InSight has only confirmed three such signals, although eight more candidates could join the dataset.

Closer to the surface, scientists are still puzzling over what the seismometer’s observations say about the interior of Mars. Two different models match the data the instrument has gathered; one model proposes a thinner crust with two layers, the other a thicker crust with three layers, Mark Wieczorek, a seismologist at the Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur in France, said during brief live remarks on Thursday. He and his colleagues hope that the observations InSight gathers during its extended mission will clarify the matter.

InSight is now in its extended mission, which will last for a second Martian year. (One Mars year is about 687 Earth days.)

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Interstellar object ‘Oumuamua is a pancake-shaped chunk of a Pluto-like planet, ,

The first known visitor from interstellar space, ‘Oumuamua, was likely a pancake-shaped chip off a Pluto-like world, researchers say.

These findings may shed on the stuff a new class of planet, an exo-Pluto, is made of, scientists added.

Astronomers first detected the mysterious visitor named 1I/’Oumuamua — meaning ‘scout’ or ‘messenger’ in Hawaiian — in 2017. ‘Oumuamua’s speed and trajectory revealed it originated outside the solar system, making it the first known interstellar object.

Related: ‘Oumuamua: Solar system’s 1st interstellar visitor explained in photos

The second known interstellar object, 2I/Borisov, was detected in 2019. Borisov was very clearly a comet, spewing out gases and possessing a composition much like comets long seen in the solar system.

An interstellar comet? Asteroid? Something else?

In a number of key ways, ‘Oumuamua resembled a comet. For example, scientists could not explain its movements through space by the force of gravity alone. This suggested ‘Oumuamua was jetting out gas from its sunlit side that was pushing it like a rocket, study co-author Steven Desch, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe, told Space.com.

However, if ‘Oumuamua was a comet, it was unlike any previously seen in the solar system. It lacked any detectable escaping gas, unlike the big tails typically spotted streaming from comets. In addition, its shape — resembling either a cigar or a pancake — was unlike any known comet. Moreover, the rocket-like push seen from ‘Oumuamua was stronger than what researchers expected from comets.

All these bizarre features ‘Oumuamua’s even led some researchers to speculate that it had alien origins.

“Everybody is interested in aliens, and it was inevitable that this first object outside the solar system would make people think of aliens,” Desch said in a statement. “But it’s important in science not to jump to conclusions.”

Now scientists find ‘Oumuamua might not be a piece of alien technology, but a chip off a Pluto-like world.

A strange new object

Researchers speculated that ‘Oumuamua was not made largely of water ice like known comets, but perhaps of other kinds of ices. They calculated how quickly such ices would sublimate — convert from a solid directly to a gas — as ‘Oumuamua flew by the sun, and the rocket-like push it would get from these escaping gases.

The scientists also noted some ices are far more reflective than often assumed. If ‘Oumuamua was made from these shiny ices, it might be smaller than previously estimated based on the light that astronomers detected from it. A tinier size for the interstellar visitor would mean any push from sublimating gases would have a larger effect than usually seen with comets, helping explain the unexpected speed with which it zipped away from the sun.

The researchers found one ice in particular — solid nitrogen — could explain all of ‘Oumuamua’s features and behavior. Solid nitrogen ice is seen on the surface of Pluto and Triton, suggesting this interstellar visitor could be made from the same material. “It was very satisfying to refine our calculations and see everything fall into place,” Desch said.

Any nitrogen gas escaping from ‘Oumuamua would have proven very difficult for astronomers to detect with the telescopes used to monitor it. “In essence, there was a tail like one would expect for a comet, it is just that because of what it is made of, we didn’t detect it,” study co-author Alan Jackson, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe, told Space.com.

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An artist’s concept of the ‘Oumuamua interstellar object as a pancake-shaped disk. A new study suggests it was once part of a Pluto-like exoplanet. (Image credit: William Hartmann)An interstellar flapjack

These new findings suggest ‘Oumuamua was shaped more like a pancake than a cigar. It may also be smaller than previously thought — just 147 by 144 by 24 feet (45 by 44 by 7.5 meters) in size when astronomers first detected it. In comparison, prior estimates suggested ‘Oumuamua was about 1,300 feet (400 m) long.

The researchers suggested that ‘Oumuamua likely wasn’t flat when it first entered the solar system. However, the light from the sun ultimately eroded it to a sliver, wearing away more than 95% of its mass.

“The same thing should happen with water-ice comets, but at a much smaller level,” Jackson said. Water ice sublimates much slower than nitrogen ice, Desch explained. In addition, Jackson noted ‘Oumuamua may have stayed together as one piece as it sublimated because it was made all of the same material — in contrast, most comets in the solar system are mixtures of rock, water ice and other ingredients, “so they tend to evaporate unevenly. This is partly why comets often break up when they pass very close to the sun.”

‘Oumuamua origin: How our mysterious interstellar visitor may have been born

These findings suggest interstellar objects such as ‘Oumuamua may give us our first view of a hitherto unknown type of planet — an exo-Pluto. All in all, ‘Oumuamua may be the first known sample of an exoplanet brought into the solar system, the researchers said.

“The thought that what we saw could be a chunk of an actual exoplanet is thrilling,” Desch said.

Piece of an exo-Pluto

Based on ‘Oumuamua’s speed and trajectory, the researchers suggested this fragment of nearly pure nitrogen ice was slung away from a young star system about 400 million to 500 million years ago, possibly from the Perseus arm of the Milky Way. When it comes to what to call this potentially new class of objects, Desch suggested exo-Pluto fragments or Pluto-like fragments, whereas Jackson suggested nitrogen-ice comets.

The scientists calculated the rate at which cosmic impacts would have knocked chunks of ice off the surfaces of Pluto and similar bodies over the course of the solar system’s history. They estimated such collisions might have generated 100 trillion fragments, about half of which are water ice and the other half nitrogen ice. All in all, “about 1 in 1,000 comets in our solar system must be objects like ‘Oumuamua,” Desch said. One such example may be the comet C/2016 R2, discovered in 2016, he noted.

The researchers also calculated the chances that a nitrogen-ice comet from another star would reach our solar system. Their findings suggested “the outer reaches of a lot of planetary systems look very much like our own,” Jackson said. “It is difficult to get information about the outer reaches of exoplanetary systems with the methods that we usually use to look for planets, so this gives us a unique way to get a sense of what exoplanetary systems are like.”

Future telescopes such as the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile could help regularly scan huge swaths of the sky and detect even more interstellar objects to learn more about them. In addition, “there has also been some work on concepts for space missions that could intercept a future object like ‘Oumuamua,” Jackson said. “That to me is an incredibly exciting prospect — an up close look at something that originated from outside our solar system.”

The scientists detailed their findings online March 16 in a study divided into two papers, which you can find here and here, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, and at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference.

Originally published on Space.com.

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Why Russian scientists just deployed a giant telescope beneath Lake Baikal, ,

Russian scientists have deployed a giant telescope into the frigid depths of Lake Baikal in southern Siberia to search for the tiniest known particles in the universe.

The telescope, Baikal-GVD, is designed to search for neutrinos, which are nearly massless subatomic particles with no electrical charge. Neutrinos are everywhere, but they interact so weakly with the forces around them that they’re hugely challenging to detect.

That’s why scientists are looking under Lake Baikal, which, at 5,577 feet (1,700 meters) deep, is the deepest lake on Earth. Neutrino detectors are typically built underground to shield them from cosmic rays and other sources of interference. Clear freshwater and thick, protective ice cover make Lake Baikal an ideal place to search for neutrinos, researchers told the news service AFP on March 13.

Related: The frozen north: Stunning images of Russia from above

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The Baikal Gigaton Volume Detector (Baikal-GVD) deep underwater neutrino telescope being lowered beneath Lake Baikal in southern Siberia. (Image credit: Alexei Kushnirenko/TASS via Getty Images)

The scientists deployed the neutrino detector through the ice about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) from the lakeshore in the southern part of the lake on March 13, lowering modules made of string, glass spheres and stainless steel up to 4,300 feet (1,310 m) into the water.

The glass spheres hold what are called photomultiplier tubes, which detect a particular kind of light that’s given off when a neutrino passes through a clear medium (in this case, lake water) at a speed faster than light travels through that same medium. This light is called Cherenkov light after one of its discoverers, Soviet physicist Pavel Cherenkov.

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Researchers have been looking under Lake Baikal for neutrinos since 2003, but the new telescope is the biggest instrument deployed there so far. All told, the strings and modules measure about one-tenth of a cubic mile (or half a cubic kilometer), Dmitry Naumov of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research told AFP. According to the scientific consortium that developed the telescope, it will also be used to search for dark matter and other exotic particles.

Baikal-GVD is about half the size of the largest neutrino detector on Earth, the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory, which consists of the same type of light-sensing modules as Baikal-GVD, embedded in 0.2 cubic miles (1 cubic km) of Antarctic ice. IceCube detects about 275 neutrinos from Earth’s atmosphere each day, according to scientists on the project. The Russian scientists and their collaborators in the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Slovakia plan to expand Baikal-GVD to the size of IceCube or larger in the upcoming years.

Originally published on Live Science.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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Watch this amazing footage of a drone flying right through an erupting volcano in Iceland,

Last Friday, the Fagradalsfjall volcano near Iceland’s capital of Reykjavik began erupting for the first time in 800 years after the island nation was hit by thousands of small earthquakes. Thankfully, the eruption was small and has not put anyone in danger. Instead, it’s gifted the world with some awe-inspiring views of lava flowing from the ground.

The sight has been best captured by Icelandic drone pilot Bjorn Steinbekk, who took the straightforward approach of flying right through the eruption. We spotted the footage from Steinbekk (above) via Twitter, and it seems he flew several sorties through the airborne lava — a daring feat that makes us wonder how his drone survived the high temperatures.

THad er bara ein fokking regla og thad er ad negla!!!!

Posted by

Bjorn Steinbekk

on Saturday, March 20, 2021

If the eruption of Fagradalsfjall looks relatively minor for a volcano, that’s because it is. “The eruption is considered a small one and the eruption fissure is about 500-700 metres (1640-2300 feet) long,” said the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) in a statement. “The lava is less than 1 square kilometre (0.4 square miles) in size.”

You can get a better sense of the scale of the thing in these images taken on Sunday below. They show crowds of hikers admiring the eruption, which is located around 40 kilometers west of the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik.

This video below also shows you a before and after of the eruption site, which is nestled in a small valley in an uninhabited region of the country. News reports say there’s been no ash fall created by the eruption, but residents living downwind of the volcano have been told to close their windows due to possible gas emissions.

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None of that has stopped Steinbekk from getting up-close-and-personal with Fagradalsfjall. And if you want to see more of his fantastic videos and images of Iceland from the air, you can check out his official Instagram. There are some truly wonderful shots to admire.

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Teardown: Apple’s HomePod mini has a sensor that measures temperature and humidity, which is currently disabled (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

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On This Day in Space! March 22, 1997: Comet Hale-Bopp flies by Earth, ,

On March 22, 1997, a super bright comet by the name of Hale-Bopp made its closest approach to Earth. It was bright enough for people to see without telescopes or binoculars for over 18 months.

Comet Hale-Bopp still holds the record for being visible to the naked eye for longer than any other comet, and it was probably the most-viewed comet in history. It passed by Earth at a safe distance of about 120 million miles before continuing its orbit around the sun.

As it got closer to the sun, Hale-Bopp’s two blue and white tails grew bigger and brighter. By the time it made it to the sun on April 1, it was shining brighter than every star in the sky except for Sirius.

Catch up on our entire “On This Day In Space” series on YouTube with this playlist.

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Still not enough space? Don’t forget to check out our Space Image of the Day, and on the weekends our Best Space Photos and Top Space News Stories of the week.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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Burberry designed character skins for China’s biggest video game,

Honor of Kings is among the biggest games in the world — and soon, it’ll be among the most fashionable as well. Today, Tencent-owned developer TiMi Studios announced a collaboration with fashion house Burberry on new character skins. The skins were designed by Riccardo Tisci, chief creative officer at Burberry, for the character Yao.

“Burberry’s signature gabardine, pioneered by founder Thomas Burberry and designed to protect the wearer against the elements, fits seamlessly with Yao, who personifies the role of a protector for her teammates,” the company says. The two skins were designed with the “spirit of nature” in mind and will be available to purchase for players in mainland China, though there’s no word on a release date. You can get a look at Tisci’s design process in the sketches below:

If you haven’t heard of Honor of Kings, it’s a competitive multiplayer game in the same mold as League of Legends or Dota 2 but for mobile devices. It’s so popular that Tencent has had to impose daily limits on players in the past; the developer says Honor of Kings averaged 100 million daily players during November 2020. A Western version, Arena of Valor, launched back in 2017.

The collaboration, meanwhile, is part of an ongoing trend of fashion infiltrating video games and vice versa. Final Fantasy XIII protagonist Lightning served as a model for Louis Vuitton, for instance, and the fashion house also designed in-game outfits for League of Legends characters. Meanwhile, streetwear brands like BAPE have designed skins for games like League and PUBG Mobile, and Complex even turned its annual streetwear convention into an interactive video game.

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Sources: Indian food delivery startup Zomato is planning to file for an IPO in Mumbai next month, which could raise about $650M (Baiju Kalesh/Bloomberg)

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The post Sources: Indian food delivery startup Zomato is planning to file for an IPO in Mumbai next month, which could raise about $650M (Baiju Kalesh/Bloomberg) appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.