2024-10-15: First Daily

Table of Contents

• Preface
• From Tom Scott
• Europa Clipper Trajectory

Preface

Long I’ve been thinking about collecting and sharing things that I find interesting.

I’ve been doing this in various forms for years, but never in a consistent way –  I tried Telegram channels and saved notes, I made a few thematic blogs, but nothing stuck.

I think the main reason why it floped each time was that I was trying to perform for an audience more than for myself. And then it got boring, and I stopped.

Now I’ll try a different approach: I’ll just write a short note every day about something that caught my eye.

I’ll try to keep it short and simple, and I’ll try to do it every day.

Let’s see how it goes.

From Tom Scott

Another week, another great newsletter from Tom Scott.

Somehow today I was fascinated by the things rock-themed:

• The amazing video, accompanying the new paper on how climate change resulted in mountain peak falling in Greenland, which in turn caused 9-day long vibrations in the Earth’s crust.
• The list of individual rocks on Wikipedia. I mean, the list of individual rocks.

Europa Clipper Trajectory

Short series of toots on the trajectory of the recently launched Europa Clipper mission.

Long story short: I would expect that the trajectory would be complicated in the beginning, to get the spacecraft to Jupiter using all the gravity assists available, but then it would be a simple elliptical orbit around Europa.

Turns out, it’s not that simple due to the radiation environment around Jupiter. Putting it simply, the Jupiter radiation would fry the spacecraft too fast for it to be useful.