This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

You've been asked to submit a proposal for a space exploration mission of your own desire, to the New Frontiers spaceflight program. These missions have a cost cap of approximately $700 million to $1 billion, and have famously produced the following spacecraft:

• New Horizons, a flyby probe to Pluto.
• Juno, a polar orbiter of Jupiter.
• OSIRIS-REx, a sample return mission to a rocky asteroid.
• Dragonfly, a drone lander to Saturn's moon Titan.

These are medium-sized missions in both scope, and cost. You can't build the Mars 2020 Rover, or the James Webb Space Telescope. What do you send, and where? Things to consider:

Technology Readiness Level

Administrators are less likely to choose your mission if you choose to integrate risky or untested flight hardware, or novel concepts into the mission design. You're more likely to get selected with more conventional hardware.

Power Source

Your best bet is probably solar panels, maybe something commercial off the shelf like NG's Ultraflex panels? The downside is that these are only effective up to about Jupiter's orbit, and generate power according to the inverse square law. How much do these cost and weigh? How much energy do you generate?

If you go further out into the solar system than that, you'll need a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG). There aren't many of those around, in fact, after Mars 2020 has taken its RTG, there's two left. What makes your mission deserving of an RTG? Is there enough power in the MMRTG to power your mission?

Propulsion

Does your mission need in-flight propulsion? Either for orbit insertion, landing, or maybe a long coast with Ion thrusters like Dawn? If the latter, you can get some pretty good Xenon-powered thrusters, like NEXT, which gives you 236mN of force from 7kW of input power (this rules out an RTG as your power source).

Don't need long-term burn capability? Maybe a COTS bipropellant engine like LEROS is your thing. Watch your weight though, bipropellants aren't efficient! Often more than half the mass of large spacecraft can be dedicated to just propulsion alone.

Instruments

Go crazy. What are you looking to research? Do you need a long range camera, a wide angle camera, something outside of the visible spectrum, a spectrometer, ground-penetrating radar? Do you have a mass-budget in mind?

Launch Vehicle

Every dollar you save on your launch vehicle, you get to add to your mission profile. Your best bet in terms of performance and cost is probably Falcon 9, which retails for $62-90 million, depending on the amount of assurance for success you need. Of course, if you can find a cheaper launch vehicle, feel free to pick it if it fits into your mission weight.

Objectives

What scientific questions do you want to answer? What are you interested in exploring the most?

This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

I switched to the light theme the other day. I'm typically all-in with dark themes for everything, but there was some convincing research.

I started working on a light theme, but it's fairly basic.

• main feed
• thread view

I was digging through the old thread and found a few gems, but I'm wondering what everybody has been up to since. Time for some show and tell!

I would like a current active user Count for the whole site. I find them very useful for knowing when people are on I’m not a fan of group specific ones but one that said how many people where currently on I would like

I can mention many movies that influenced me in major ways.

• Stand By Me made me realize the importance of friendship
• High Fidelity helped me understand romance is not entirely about passion. It's also about respect, love, and care. There's value in something that's simply "good", and "good" is not something to brush off.
• Goonies and Godfather showed that, when shit hits the fan, family is everything.
• Manhattan taught me love is nothing without courage
• A Bronx Tale taught me that our parent figures can be imperfect and even downright criminal, but this doesn't mean they don't love us.

Ant the list goes on...