All told, this study has already cost the taxpayers almost a billion dollars for the enrollment of only 4,000 children, not the 100,000 envisioned. That’s about $250,000 per child, an amount that seems incredibly high.
In addition to the above problems, it appears there are scientific ones as well: (more…)
The financial foolishness in Congress, by Republicans this time, continues. In making its budget recommendations for NASA, the report [pdf] of the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee also demands that NASA immediately choose one commercial company for its commercial space program. (Hat tip to Clark Lindsey for spotting this.)
The number of ways this action is counter-productive almost can’t be counted. (more…)
A new study by astronomers has found a vast structure of satellite galaxies and star clusters aligned perpendicular to the Milky Way and extending outward above and below the galaxy’s nucleus by as much as a million light years.
In their effort to understand exactly what surrounds our Galaxy, the scientists used a range of sources from twentieth century photographic plates to images from the robotic telescope of the Sloan Deep Sky Survey. Using all these data they assembled a picture that includes bright ‘classical’ satellite galaxies, more recently detected fainter satellites and the younger globular clusters.
“Once we had completed our analysis, a new picture of our cosmic neighbourhood emerged”, says Pawlowski. The astronomers found that all the different objects are distributed in a plane at right angles to the galactic disk. The newly-discovered structure is huge, extending from as close as 33,000 light years to as far away as one million light years from the centre of the Galaxy.
An animation illustrating this galactic distribution is posted below the fold. You can read the actual preprint paper here.
The problem with this polar alignment with the Milky Way’s core is that the theories for explaining the distribution of dark matter do not predict it. (more…)
Mexico has passed its own very strict climate change law.
The new law contains many sweeping provisions to mitigate climate change, including a mandate to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 30% below business-as-usual levels by 2020, and by 50% below 2000 levels by 2050. Furthermore, it stipulates that 35% of the country’s energy should come from renewable sources by 2024, and requires mandatory emissions reporting by the country’s largest polluters.
The uncertainty of science: A new study has found no evidence of dark matter within 13,000 light years of the Sun, something that had not been expected.
According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighborhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit the observational facts. This may mean that attempts to directly detect dark matter particles on Earth are unlikely to be successful.
These findings will be as controversial as the now abandoned faster-than-light neutrino results last fall. Here, however, the new data is likely going to be more robust, which will cause the entire astrophysical community some real conniptions. (more…)
A Senate panel today proposed shifting the responsibility for building weather satellites from NOAA to NASA.
It is very unclear from this article why the Senate panel proposed this shift. They claim it will save money but I don’t see how.
What I can guess is that there is probably a turf war going on in Congress over this money. For example, shifting these weather satellites to NASA almost certainly means that the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland will get more money, which is almost certainly why Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) is for it.
One thought however: NASA generally focuses on individual missions, not long term operational stuff like weather. I suspect it probably is not a good idea to give this work to NASA.
The same article above also outlined the panel’s proposals for other areas of NASA’s budget. To me, the key issue is the budget for commercial space. The White House requested $830 million. The Senate panel has instead proposed $525 million. (more…)
There are really only two important stories today concerning space exploration. The story that is getting the most coverage is the big news that the space shuttle Discovery is making its last flight, flying over Washington, DC, as it is delivered to the Smithsonian for permanent display.
Of these stories, only Irene Klotz of Discovery News seems to really get it. This is not an event to celebrate or get excited about. It is the end of an American achievement, brought to a close probably three to five years prematurely so that the United States now cannot even send its own astronauts to its own space station.
The other news, actually far more important, has gotten far less coverage, and includes three different stories all really about the same thing. (more…)
Though I am a bit late in covering this story (due to moving, unpacking, Passover, and an unexpected visit to the dentist), NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center on April 9 released its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. The most recent graph is below the fold.
In order to understand the context of this new graph, however, it is necessary to make a correction and clarification. (more…)
New observations from the new ground-based submillimeter ALMA telescope in Chile have given astronomers a clearer picture of the ring/disk of debris orbiting the nearby star Formalhaut. Moreover, the data suggests that two planets that are shepherding that ring are smaller than previously thought, no larger than a few times the size of the Earth. (more…)
For the next two days posting will be light. I am in Chicago visiting family for Passover, the annual Jewish holiday celebrating the release of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. During the Seder meal, Jews read the Haggadah, which retells the story of the Jewish slavery in Egypt and their escape, with the idea of reminding each person what is like to be a slave, and then to be free. As it says in the Haggadah,
In every generation each individual is bound to regard himself as if he had gone personally forth from Egypt.
Tonight, this is what Jews do. It would be nice if all people reflected on this and did the same.
In writing this short post on the efforts of Lockheed Martin and Orbital Sciences to launch rockets for the small satellite market, Clark Lindsey made this comment:
It costs around $50 million to launch a Orbital Sciences Minotaur 4, which can put 1,730 kg into LEO while the Lockheed’s Athena 2 will cost around $65 million to put 1,712 kg into LEO. SpaceX currently posts charges $54M – $59.5M for launching to LEO 10,450 kg (equatorial) and 8,560 kg (polar). If SpaceX is able to sustain these prices in routine operation, it will obviously result in some disturbance to the launch industry.
Let’s deconstruct these numbers again, this time listing them by the cost per kilogram: (more…)
Want to see where the wind is blowing? Check out this website, which shows an animated map of the wind patterns blowing across the continental United States, continually updated.
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently celebrated its 1000th day of imaging in orbit around the Moon, snapping images and cataloging the Moon’s geology.
Only a week before the science team posted a spectacular oblique view of Ryder Crater. The image is visible below the fold, along with a close-up of the crater’s strange hump-backed boulder-strewn floor. (more…)
A report issued today illustrates once again to me that those running our space program in both Congress and the Obama administration have a profound lack of common sense or basic intelligence:
The NASA Advisory Council (NAC) – a body that provides the NASA Administrator with counsel and advice on programs and issues of importance to the Agency – has insisted a human exploration plan, or at least a destination, should be selected as soon as possible.
This request specifically applies to the Space Launch System (SLS), the heavy-lift rocket mandated by Congress that will use the Orion capsule. SLS is also the same rocket system that is costing the taxpayers $3 billion per year, and is expected to cost between $18 to $60 billion total by the time it flies its first operational mission in about nine years. The advisory council also noted that
While the vehicle hardware development is now moving forward at full speed, specific destinations – or a roadmap – is still lacking from NASA’s exploration plan.
It took nine different committees plus a central committee formed from the original nine committees to come to this Earth-shattering conclusion.
To put it in plain English, Congress and the Obama administration have committed billions of taxpayer dollars to the construction of a rocket and manned capsule without ever putting much thought into the specific mission they want to send that rocket and capsule on. (more…)
In hearings Wednesday, several members of Congress suggested that NASA force the new competing commercial space companies to combine their efforts in order to save money.
Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) asked NASA Administrator Charles Bolden during a March 21 hearing on the agency’s 2013 budget the same question he asked of the White House’s chief science adviser last month: would NASA’s partnership with commercial companies to develop astronaut transports be cheaper if the companies competing for NASA funds combined their efforts into a single “all for one and one for all” project?
Similarly, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) made the same stupid argument in her continuing effort to keep the funding of the Space Launch System, the rocket-formerly-called-Constellation, as high as possible, at the cost of cutting everything else in NASA if necessary.
If you needed any evidence that members of Congress are ignorant idiots, you only need read the comments of these elected officials at these hearings to get your proof. Wolf or Hutchison as well as several others from both parties very clearly haven’t the slightest idea what these various space companies are building. Nor do they have the faintest notion of the difficulties entailed in building these manned space vessels. (more…)
Late last week NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center released its monthly update of the ongoing solar cycle sunspot activity, covering February 2012. Though I am slightly late in posting it, as I do every month, you can now see the full graph below the fold. I have also created a close-up of the graph’s relevant area, shown on the left, because it is hard to decipher what is happening on the full graph.
Since the Sun began it ramp up to solar maximum back in 2009, the pattern has been consistent, two steps forward, one step back. First there are several months in a row in which the number of sunspots show a steep rise, followed immediately by several months in which the sunspot numbers decline just as steeply, though by not as much. All told, since 2009 we have seen this pattern repeat four times.
February’s numbers have continued that pattern. (more…)
The director of Russia’s manned program told the press today that the Russians do not have that a signed contract with NASA to fly astronauts to ISS after 2015, despite NASA’s announcement that such an agreement exists.
If true, NASA’s management has committed a very serious error which will cost the U.S. a great deal of money in the coming years, especially if there are significant delays in getting the new commercial companies online to provide the U.S. an American capability for ferrying humans to orbit. (more…)
One year ago today Japan was hit with one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history, followed almost immediately by one of the most powerful tsunamis in recorded history. Since then, that nation and its people have done an incredible job recovering from that disaster, proving once again that there really is no limit to what humans can do.
The video below is their thank you to the rest of the world for the help and support brought to Japan by people everywhere. As they say, “Arigato.”
Kepler today released an updated catalog of candidate exoplanets observed during the space telescope’s first sixteen months of observations. In this release, they list more than a thousand new exoplanet candidates, almost two hundred of which are Earth-sized. Among the new exoplanet candidates, twenty-five are in the habitable zone!
Climate scientist Richard Lindzen of MIT spoke before a public meeting of the House of Commons in Great Britain yesterday. You can read his entire speech here [pdf]. Please do. He know his stuff. More important, he begins his presentation by immediately accepting these points:
Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere.
There is a greenhouse effect.
There has been a doubling of CO2 in the past 150 years.
There has probably been a warming of about 0.8 degrees Celsius in the past 150 years.
Increasing CO2 alone should cause some warming.
He then notes that while none of these points are controversial among serious climate scientists, none of these facts are a cause for alarm.
The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest. [emphasis mine]
Updated and bumped: I will be discussing this story on the the John Batchelor Show tonight, February 17, Friday, 12:50 am (Eastern), and then re-aired on Sunday, February 19, 12:50 am (Eastern).
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Someday, humans will be traveling far from Earth in large interplanetary spaceships not very different than the International Space Station (ISS). Isolated and dependent on these ships for survival, these travelers will have no choice but to know how to maintain and repair their vessels whenever something on them should break.
And things will break. Entropy rules, and with time all things deteriorate and fail.
Each failure, however, is also a precious opportunity to learn something about the environment of space. Why did an item break? What caused it to fail? Can we do something to prevent the failure in the future? Finding answers to these questions will make it possible to build better and more reliable interplanetary spaceships.
ISS is presently our only testbed for studying these kinds of engineering questions. And in 2007, a spectacular failure, combined with an epic spacewalk, gave engineers at the Johnson Space Center a marvelous opportunity to study these very issues. (more…)
Unfortunately, the Marshall scientists don’t archive their previous predictions, merely changing the text of their webpage periodically. However, I have archived most of these predictions as they have changed. Here they are: (more…)
There will be a lot of screaming and howling in the coming days about the proposed 2013 NASA budget [pdf], released today by the Obama administration. Though I have many bones to pick about this budget proposal, a longer view of the budget suggests it is merely a reflection of the transitions going on both in NASA and the federal government.
In a preprint paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph website and accepted for publication in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Norwegian scientists have found a strong correlation between the length of the solar sunspot cycle and the Earth’s temperature during the following cycle. From the abstract:
Relations between the length of a sunspot cycle and the average temperature in the same and the next cycle are calculated for a number of meteorological stations in Norway and in the North Atlantic region. No significant trend is found between the length of a cycle and the average temperature in the same cycle, but a significant negative trend is found between the length of a cycle and the temperature in the next cycle. This provides a tool to predict an average temperature decrease of at least 1.0 ◦ C from solar cycle 23 to 24 for the stations and areas analyzed. We find for the Norwegian local stations investigated that 25–56% of the temperature increase the last 150 years may be attributed to the Sun. For 3 North Atlantic stations we get 63–72% solar contribution. [emphasis mine]
The man duped is Fritz Vahrenholt, a former global warming advocate and leftwing environmentalist in Germany. The words were spoken in a long and detailed interview in Der Spiegel. Read it all, as it demonstrates without question that Vahrenholt has done his research about the complexities of climate research as well as the flaws and dishonesty contained within the IPCC reports. However, he gets to the nub of the matter when he is asked why he has taken on the role of a climate skeptic with such passion. (more…)
It is that time of the month again. Today NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center today released its monthly update of the ongoing solar cycle sunspot activity, covering January 2012. I have posted the graph below the fold.
For the second month in a row the Sun’s sunspot activity plunged. The drop in activity has been so steep that it has cancelled out almost two thirds of the activity rise that occurred during the last half of 2010. In fact, the drop brings the Sun’s sunspot count back to numbers comparable with March of last year, hardly a sign of a fast ramp up to solar maximum, which is what solar scientists have come to expect the Sun to do. Instead, the Sun’s activity during this ramp up has fluctuated wildly, going up strongly for several months and then dropping precipitously for another few months. These wild swings have now repeated themselves four times since the fall of 2010. (more…)
Behind the Black officially premiered July 1, 2010, and has been up and running now for twenty months. I make it a point to post often and regularly on issues of space, science, technology, politics, and history, subjects that interest me personally. Except for one short period a year ago when family matters kept me away from the computer for several days, I have managed to update the webpage frequently every day during that entire time.
Because of this, traffic to the site has steadily grown. For this I thank you, my readers, especially those who love to add their own two cents to the webpage in the comments. While I certainly do not agree with all those who comment, I very much appreciate the open and intelligent nature of the discussion.
During that time I have resisted begging for contributions. Though I added a tip jar link to the webpage about three months ago (located in the right column below the search box), I have made very little note of it because shilling for dollars seems crass, and I feel that if I am doing a good job people will naturally look for it in order to donate to the webpage to keep it going.
However, today is my birthday, so I feel I have the right to do some self-promotion. Moreover, for the past fifteen years I have made my living as a freelance science writer. The business, however, is changing, and I am finding that I am becoming increasingly reliant on the income I make from at my own website over that earned by selling articles to magazines.
Thus, if you are a regular reader of Behind the Black, please consider giving the website a donation, no matter how small. Not only would I appreciate it greatly, it will help make it possible for this website to continue and grow.
Radio: every Tuesday and Thursday at 11:30 pm (EST), and Sunday at 11:50 pm (EST), the John Batchelor Show, syndicated nationally. The weekday show appearances are sometimes 30 minutes long. Appearance times and days may vary, depending on events, with these changes shown below.
Shut it down
Our government in action: An NIH nationwide study to track hundreds of thousands of children from birth to age 21 is wracked with budget and management problems.
All told, this study has already cost the taxpayers almost a billion dollars for the enrollment of only 4,000 children, not the 100,000 envisioned. That’s about $250,000 per child, an amount that seems incredibly high.
In addition to the above problems, it appears there are scientific ones as well:
(more…)