I think the point is that they aren't assuming the planet in question is tectonically activie, as that's one of the unlikely steps needed for life as we know it.
Stars are dim. Earth and the Moon are bright. If you exposed the shot such that stars would be visible, the Earth and the Moon would be horrendously overexposed.
If you look at this one of the moonlit nightside of the Earth they took on the way out, you can see stars. The website has EXIF-data on the bottom with more info on the exposure.
You are thinking of perfectly elastic collisions. That's a fantasy and not applicable to the real world. A human body isn't a beach ball and cars have crumple zones (although I believe pickups suck in this regard as well).
And your comparison isn't applicable in terms of masses either. Both a sedan and a pickup are way heavier than a person.
Edit: Without getting too deep into the math, let me put it this way: The energy of the impact is equal to the energy that the car loses during that impact. The car doesn't lose mass, so it depends instead on how much the car loses velocity. That depends on how the mass of the other object stacks up against the mass of the vehicle. Car hits something much heavier than itself? It stops and all of it's kinetic energy is expended. Car hits something much lighter? A bug on a windshield. A human obviously isn't quite as neglibly light as a bug and the mass of both the human and the vehicle do factor into this, but with both a sedan and a pickup truck, the speeding vehicle never expends more than a fraction of it's kinetic energy on the impact itself. The rest of it is dealt with via breaking, and a pickup will have a harder time slowing down due to it's kinetic energy.
Not all of that energy is transferred. The car doesn't stop as if it hit a wall. Usually it barely slows down. The human on the other hand gains at most the kinetic energy corresponding to their body mass and the speed of a human bouncing forward off the car at around the same speed as the car was going, so a tiny fraction. Of course impact geometry will determine the specifics and pickups suck there too.
The important thing about kinetic energy is that it's dependant on the square of the velocity. That's why speed kills. The mass is just a linear relation.
I'm betting that we get a vast majority of the pictures after the splashdown. They aren't even at the moon yet, so the most important pics of the trip are yet to be snapped.
That being said, I really really really like this one because it's showing the moonlit nightside of the planet with auroras, airglow and zodiacal light in the background. A picture like that has never been taken before.
Oh damn, took me a moment to realize that first image is showing the night side of the planet. Much more interesting than what it seemed at first, with the moonlit planet, the aurora and the zodiacal light!
Assuming that this is referring to the same study as that earlier post (I'm not paying for popsci to find out), there was already a good breakdown of why that study was bad: https://lemmy.ca/comment/22499339
Indeed, not a specific field for it. That's why people use the body of the post (the part where one would write an essay if they did a text post) for it.
When an impact happens, the next one becomes much more likely with all that shrapnel flying around. If the biggest starlink layer becomes a minefield of shrapnel, passing it to reach the ISS becomes much more dangerous. Same goes for any other launch, including GEO.
All these megaconstellation plans have big plans of scaling up exponentially, and that means the clock is constantly creepinc closer. At some point a strong enough solar flare could cause a long enough comms blackout.
But the main thing with the clock is that it also displays how often corrective maneuvers are needed. The more maneuvers are being made, the higher the chance of errors. I think that's the real danger here. Starlink is scaling up massively and they have numerous competitors, including China. All it takes is a miscommunication and the snowball of kessler syndrome might start rolling.
Quality shitpost