Planning the coming end of Rosetta

The scientists and engineers operating Rosetta have begun planning the mission’s spectacular finale, when they will spend several months orbiting within six miles of Comet 67P/C-G’s surface before very gently crashing the spacecraft on the surface.

Because of many factors, Rosetta is not expected to survive the impact, no matter how gently it lands. However, the data it will send back in its final months as it makes tighter and tighter orbits should be well worthwhile.

In related news, the science team has released an animation, posted below the fold, of their re-creation of the flight and crash landing of Philae on the comet.
» Read more

Ground-breaking for the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile

Even as construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii remains stalled because of protesters, ground has now been broken in Chile for the construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT).

The unique design of the telescope combines seven of the largest mirrors that can be manufactured, each 8.4 meters (27 feet) across, to create a single telescope effectively 25 meters or 85 feet in diameter. The giant mirrors are being developed at the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Laboratory. Each mirror must be polished to an accuracy of 25 nanometers or one millionth of an inch.

One giant mirror has been polished to meet its exacting specifications. Three others are being processed, and production of the additional mirrors will be started at the rate of one per year. The telescope will begin early operations with these first mirrors in 2021, and the telescope is expected to reach full operational capacity within the next decade.

Assuming TMT ever gets built, it will, unlike GMT, be made up of many small segments.

Earth-sized exoplanet found only 39 light years away

Worlds without end: Astronomers have discovered an exoplanet only slightly bigger then the Earth, and it’s only 39 light years away.

Berta-Thompson and the others estimate that GJ 1132b has a diameter of about 9,200 miles, slightly bigger than Earth. Its mass, however, is thought to be 60 percent greater than Earth’s. Its home star — GJ 1132 — is a red dwarf one-fifth the size of our sun. The planet circles every 1.6 days from just 1.4 million miles out, thus the heat wave. A slight dip in the starlight every 1.6 days was the giveaway for the observing team. “Our ultimate goal is to find a twin Earth,” said astronomer David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, one of the authors, “but along the way we’ve found a twin Venus.”

Stars in the Milky Way so old they predate it

Astronomers have discovered stars inside the Milky Way that are thought to be so old that they were formed prior to the existence of the galaxy, and that the Milky Way formed around them.

The stars, found near the centre of the Milky Way, are surprisingly pure but contain material from an even earlier star, which died in an enormous explosion called a hypernova. “These pristine stars are among the oldest surviving stars in the Universe, and certainly the oldest stars we have ever seen,” said Louise Howes, lead author of the study published in the latest issue of Nature. “These stars formed before the Milky Way, and the galaxy formed around them,” said Ms Howes, a PhD student at the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Not surprisingly, the discovery challenges theories that describe the early universe.

SpaceX successfully tests its Dragon capsule abort rocket thrusters

The competition heats up: SpaceX has successfully tested its abort rocket thrusters that will be used to speed a Dragon capsule away from any rocket during a failed launch.

Named SuperDracos, the engines are arranged in four pairs – SpaceX calls them ‘jetpacks’ – integrated around the outside of the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Firing all at once, the eight engines produce 120,000 pounds of thrust – enough power to accelerate a Crew Dragon from zero to 100 mph in 1.2 seconds. In the unlikely event of an emergency, that power means the ability to lift the crew a safe distance off the launch pad or far away from a booster failing on the way to orbit. That capability was demonstrated earlier this year in a pad abort test that confirmed the SuperDraco design in a flight-like condition.

A normal launch of the Crew Dragon atop a Falcon 9 rocket would not offer the SuperDracos anything to do during the mission since their only responsibility is to fire in an emergency to rescue the crew onboard. Eventually, SpaceX plans to use the SuperDracos in the place of a parachute during landing.

Congress revises law governing commercial space

The competition heats up? Congress this week passed a revision to the Commercial Space Act that they claimed will help encourage the growth of the new industry.

According to the Senate press release, the bill does the following:

  • Extend the liability waiver for private space launches until 2023
  • Extend ISS operations until 2024
  • Establishes a legal right for U.S. companies to mine resources in space
  • Demands a new more streamlined framework for the government’s regulation of the industry

The last item is probably mostly blather, since a close look at the bill itself [pdf] reveals that most of these demands are merely requirements that the executive branch write a report. The odious rules that will allow the federal government to regulate and restrict the industry all remain. And even though the bill makes a big deal about establishing these regulations in concert with the industry itself, that only means that today’s players can use the government to make it difficult for new players to get started.

The claim that the bill also establishes “a legal right to resources a U.S. citizen may recover in space consistent with current law and international obligations of the United States,” as noted in the Senate press release, is a very big overstatement. The bill’s wording does nothing to get the U.S. out of the UN’s Outer Space Treaty, which forbids any person or nation from claiming ownership of territory in space. All the bill does is express the desire that American citizens should have the right to own what they mine, while at the same time stating that these resources will be “obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States.’’ In other words, the Outer Space Treaty still applies, and you can’t own it.

For what it’s worth, the bill also renames the FAA’s space regulatory agency from “The Office of Space Commercialization” to “The Office of Space Commerce.”

All in all, the bill’s most important overall accomplishment is that it strongly emphasizes and encourages the development of a private space industry, and tries to focus the government’s regulatory efforts in that direction. This ain’t perfect, but it could be considered a step in the right direction.

One more thing to note: Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) appears to have been a major player in getting this bill written and passed.

Another new American rocket engine tested successfully

The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada has successfully tested a new rocket engine, dubbed Vortex, specifically designed to fulfill a wide range of uses. From the press release:

These tests demonstrate the ability to transition use of different propellant combinations in the same core rocket engine design with slight changes to accommodate a specific combination of fuel and oxidizer, including propane and kerosene fuels with nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and liquid oxygen oxidizers. This latest development offers customers a suite of engines scalable to higher thrust levels and customer-selected fuel combinations from a single core rocket engine design. ORBITEC’s patented vortex rocket engines utilize a unique swirling propellant flow to naturally cool the engine walls, allowing for the development and manufacture of simpler, low-cost, light-weight and more robust rocket engine systems.

What strikes me about this is that, until SpaceX built its Merlin engine in the mid-2000s, it had been decades since the American aerospace industry had developed a new rocket engine. After the development of the shuttle’s main engines in the late 1970s nothing new was created for the rest of the 20th century. Since Merlin, however, we have seen a string of new engines from several different companies, suggesting that the new renaissance I wrote about back in 2005 is on-going and accelerating.

Comments restored

The software problem with nested comments forced me to disable nested comments last week. Unfortunately, it appears that act made it impossible for many to comment at all. Shane Rollin of Amixa has looked into it and adjusted things so that comments should once again be possible, though nested comments remain disabled.

So, if you wanted to comment earlier you can now. Go for it!

Time to shut the universities down?

Link here. The article first provides a nice summary of the insanity occurring at the University of Missouri, where students and teachers teamed up to force the resignation of two administrators, including the school’s president. Why did they do this?

Wolfe was targeted, as one protest group put it, because he was “‘not completely’ aware of systemic racism, sexism, and patriarchy on campus.” I love the “not completely.” It reminds me of the old rule about totalitarian revolutions: first, you go after the counter-revolutionaries, then you go after the insufficiently enthusiastic. So Wolfe had to be removed for failing to show immediate and total compliance toward their political agenda.

This reaction makes sense only as a raw power play, as student agitators demonstrating that they can get rid of anybody they want to, that they run this place.

The article then summarizes the same madness occurring at Yale, where students are demanding other administrators to resign because they had the nerve to defend the concept of free speech. The author then notes:

This is higher ed’s time for choosing. If this is the new purpose of the universities—to nurture a crop of activists trained at whipping up angry mobs, and a generation of college graduates conditioned to submit to those mobs—then there is no longer any purpose served by these institutions. There is certainly no justification for the outrageous claim they are making on the economic resources of the average family, who sends their kids to schools whose tuition has been inflated by decades of government subsidies.

The universities have done this to themselves. They created the whole phenomenon of modern identity politics and Politically Correct rules to limit speech. They have fostered a totalitarian microculture in which conformity to those rules is considered natural and expected. Now that system is starting to eat them alive, from elite universities like Yale, all the way down to, er, less-than-elite ones like Mizzou.

Mob rule cannot be tolerated by any democracy. If that is all tyhe universities are only going to teach, we then have to clean house.

Ice volcanoes, spinning moons, and more proof of geologic activity

The New Horizons science team has released more results from the spacecraft’s July 14 fly-by, revealing the existence of what look like two giant ice volcanoes on Pluto, data that suggests the smaller moons spin like tops, and a census of Pluto’s craters that show them distributed very unevenly across the planet’s surface, suggesting that large parts of Pluto’s surface have been resurfaced and thus have been geologically active.

One discovery gleaned from the crater counts also challenges the most popular theory about the formation of objects in the Kuiper Belt.

Crater counts are giving the New Horizons team insight into the structure of the Kuiper Belt itself. The dearth of smaller craters across Pluto and its large moon Charon indicate that the Kuiper Belt likely had fewer smaller objects than some models had predicted. This leads New Horizons scientists to doubt a longstanding model that all Kuiper Belt objects formed by accumulating much smaller objects of less than a mile wide. The absence of small craters on Pluto and Charon support other models theorizing that Kuiper Belt objects tens of miles across may have formed directly, at their current—or close to current—size.

In fact, the evidence that many Kuiper Belt objects could have been “born large” has scientists excited that New Horizons’ next potential target – the 30-mile-wide (40-50 kilometer wide) KBO named 2014 MU69 – which may offer the first detailed look at just such a pristine, ancient building block of the solar system.

As always, the results here are significantly uncertain. They are giving us a glimpse into the geology of rocky planets far from stars, but only a glimpse. I guarantee that any theories formed from this data will be incomplete and will likely be proven wrong.

Republican claims of media bias supported by facts

Republican claims of media bias against conservatives is supported by new research that finds almost all journalists are Democratic and even donate money to Democrats.

[S]elf-proclaimed Democratic journalists outnumber Republicans by 4-to-1, according to research by Lars Willnat and David Weaver, professors of journalism at Indiana University. They found 28 percent of journalists call themselves Democrats, while just 7 percent call themselves Republicans — though both numbers are down from the 1970s. Those identifying as independent have grown.

Among Washington correspondents, the ones who dominate national political coverage, it’s even more skewed, said Tim Groseclose, author of “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind.” More than 90 percent of D.C. journalists vote Democratic, with an even higher number giving to Democrats or liberal-leaning political action committees, the author said.

Having been a journalist for years, I can tell you that these numbers are accurate. And the increasing numbers of journalists who claim to be independent are in large number merely hardcore liberals who wish deniability if asked where they loyaties lie.

Nested comments disabled

Because several commenters here reported problems replying to other comments with reCaptcha, my software guy at Amixa did some checking and found that there appears to be a conflict with nested comments and the google reCaptcha feature. Because of this I have disabled nested comments until the conflict gets fixed.

Commenters can still reply to other comments, but the comments will all be listed in chronological order, which means the replies will not necessarily follow each other. It will therefore be wise that if you reply to a comment, either quote it or provide a link to it in your own comment.

Thanks to all for the help and for participating in the discussion here.

Why cold fusion and NASA’s EM Drive are most likely frauds

Link here. The writer does a nice job of explaining why impossible engines that appear to defy basic laws of physics are almost certainly incapable of doing what they promise, and are likely frauds.

An extraordinary result has to come with extraordinary evidence. When someone claims they have come up with something that can do something that engineers have been unable to do for centuries — since the very beginnings of the Industrial Age — I get very very suspicious, especially when their evidence is scanty and their data is not open for study.

Two Mauna Kea protesters convicted but get minor sentences

Two protesters who blocked a road leading to the summit of Mauna Kea to block construction vehicles for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) have been convicted of misdeamenors and given very minor sentences.

The state requested six months’ probation, and that they stay off Mauna Kea Access Road for the period of probation. Prosecutors also requested 72 hours of community service in lieu of a $500 fine. Fujiyoshi [one of the protesters] asked for a jail sentence instead of community service, and was sentenced to five days. He will serve one day in jail, with credit for time served; six months’ probation; and was ordered to remain off the access road. Lindsey-Kaapuni [the other protester] argued against probation, and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service.

The state here has no easy solution. If it demands severe punishment the press will make the protesters martyrs. If it lets them off then the protesters will know they can protest as much as they want and face no consequences.

Right now I do not see TMT ever getting built on Mauna Kea. I also see the slow removal of the telescopes already there to be certain, given time. The protesters are in control, and they oppose this search for knowledge about the universe.

Yale students demand two administrators be fired for defending free speech

The coming dark age: Students at Yale University on Thursday demanded that two university administrators be fired because they refused to ban certain Halloween costumes that might offend some students.

On Thursday, the students surrounded Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway—a black man—in an outdoor space and chided him for failing to take action against a fraternity that had allegedly prevented black women from attending its party. (It’s not at all clear the allegation is true, according to The Daily Beast)

After giving Holloway his comeuppance, they moved on to Nicholas Christakis, master of Silliman College. What was Christakis’s crime? His wife, an early childhood educator, had responded to a campus-wide email about offensive Halloween costumes by opining that it was inappropriate for the college to tell students how to dress.

There are videos also showing the students attacking Christakis. Watch them, and then weep for the fall of western civilization. Key quote, by one of the students:

It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here! You are not doing that. You’re going against that.

In other words, going to Yale is not about going to a place where intellectual ideas of all kinds can be expressed. You go to Yale to feel safe and unbothered.

More Mexico commentary to come

It is late here in Mexico City and we are leaving early tomorrow to visit what I have been told is the first library ever established in the New World. So, a post on today’s visit to the Basilica of Guadalupe and the Teotihuacan pyramids near Mexico City will have to wait. Both are significant religious sites with bigger than life monuments, though from different time periods and of very different religions. The contrast and similarities were revealing. More in a couple of days when I have more time.

Competition for ISS cargo contract reduced to three

The competition heats up: With NASA once again delaying its decision on the next contract round for supplying cargo to ISS — this time to January — Boeing also revealed that NASA had eliminated the company from the competition, leaving only SpaceX, Orbital ATK, and Sierra Nevada in the running for the two contracts.

Earlier I had said that if the decision had been up to me, which of course it isn’t, I would pick Orbital and Sierra Nevada, since SpaceX and Boeing already have contracts to ferry crews to ISS. If you add Orbital’s Cygnus and Sierra Nevada’s reusable Dream Chaser, you then have four different spacecraft designs capable of bring payloads into orbit, a robust amount of redundancy that can’t be beat. When I wrote that I also noted that I thought it wouldn’t happen because Boeing’s clout with Congress and NASA would make it a winner.

With Boeing now out of the picture, it seems to me that the reason NASA has delayed its final decision again is that it wants to see what happens with the return to flight launches of Dragon and Cygnus in the next three months. A SpaceX Dragon success will cement that company’s position in the manned contract area, while an Orbital ATK Cygnus succuss will make picking them for a second contract seem less risky. In addition, maybe NASA wants Sierra Nevada to fly another glide test of its Dream Chaser test vehicle, and is now giving it the time to do so.

No sign of alien civilization at distant star

The uncertainty of science: Two weeks of targeted observations by the Allen Telescope Array in California have detected no clear signal of an alien civilization at the star KIC 8462852 where Kepler observations have seen variations that could possibly be caused by giant alien structures.

Two different types of radio signals were sought: (1) Narrow-band signals, of order 1 Hz in width, such as would be generated as a “hailing signal” for societies wishing to announce their presence. This is the type of signal most frequently looked for by radio SETI experiments.  (2) Broad-band signals that might be due to beamed propulsion within this star system.  If astroengineering projects are really underway in the vicinity of KIC 8462852, one might reasonably expect the presence of spacecraft to service this activity.  If these craft are propelled by intense microwave beams, some of that energy might manifest itself as broad-band radio leakage. “This is the first time we’ve used the Allen Telescope Array to look for relatively wide-band signals, a type of emission that is generally not considered in SETI searches,” said SETI Institute scientist Gerry Harp.

Analysis of the Array data show no clear evidence for either type of signal between the frequencies of 1 and 10 GHz.  This rules out omnidirectional transmitters of approximately 100 times today’s total terrestrial energy usage in the case of the narrow-band signals, and ten million times that usage for broad band emissions.

The data shows no sign of alien civilization, but it also does not eliminate the possibility. More detailed observations are required to do that.

A closer look at the fake sea level data

On Saturday I had posted a link to a very detailed article that strongly suggested that the alterations to the sea level rise data that scientists at the Colorado Sea Level Research Group were doing were either fraudalent or very very poorly thought out. One of the regular readers of Behind the Black, Edward, posted such a detailed and well-researched analysis of this story that I thought it worthwhile to promote it to the main page. Edward has given me permission to do so and so here it is:

It is reasonable for us to consider the possibility that a fraud is being perpetrated upon us.

1) Explaining data and the differences between the data taken and the data used is basic science; more basic than Science 101, it is middle school science. It is the first thing taught about data reporting in the first science class in which a student is required to collect data. Thus for the Colorado Sea Level Research Group at the University of Colorado to ignore the data discrepancy is a violation of basic science.
» Read more

Recreating the changing giant starspots on a distant star

Astronomers have recreated what they think is the evolution of the giant sunspots on a distant star, covering the period from 2006 to 2012.

More importantly, Künstler’s team measured the time it takes for starspots to decay and used that information to estimate properties of the star’s magnetic field. For example, the star’s activity cycle appears to last about 26 years, more than double the Sun’s 11-year cycle.

You can see a video of this recreation at the link.

Update to commercial space law stalled in Senate

Surprise, surprise! It appears that several Senate Democrats and the trial lawyer organizations that back them are objecting to passage of an update to the 2004 Commercial Space Act that would extend the period that companies would be exempt from liability while they experiment with new spacecraft.

Some Democratic members of the House Science Committee opposed those provisions when the committee marked up a version of the bill in May. “This really is quite an indefensible provision,” said Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) during discussion then regarding the federal jurisdiction clause of the House bill, arguing that the bill is “basically providing the launch industry with complete immunity from any civil action.”

The American Association for Justice, a legal organization formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, also spoke out against those sections of the bill in May. “Industries that lobby for immunity from accountability might as well hang up a sign saying they don’t trust themselves to be safe,” Linda Lipsen, chief executive of the association, said in a May 13 statement.

I really hate saying “I told you so!” but more than a decade ago, when the 2004 Commercial Space Act was passed, I opposed it because it gave the federal government far too much regulatory control over this very new and very experimental industry. Many industry people attacked me for doing so, saying that they needed this regulatory framework to raise capital.

Now the industry finds those regulations burdensome and is trying to get them eased, or waived temporarily. Not unexpectedly, there are vested interests in and out of Congress who don’t want those regulations eased. So, instead of focusing their energies on developing new technologies, the industry must instead spend money on lobbying and political dealmaking, which might get them some of what they want but will certainly also come with some political price that will be even more burdensome.

Experimental Air Force rocket launch fails

An experimental Air Force rocket, dubbed Super Strypi, failed seconds after launch today.

The rocket is launched from a rail track rather thabn vertically on a launchpad, and is intended to lower the cost significantly. From the video at the link, it appears that the rail track portion of the flight worked fine, but shortly thereafter the rocket lost control.

Posted from Mexico City.

Grizzly bear no longer endangered in Yellowstone

Good news! Federal wildlife officials have determined that the grizzly bear population in and around Yellowstone has recovered so well that they have the option of removing the species from the endangered species list.

The latest count of grizzlies in the Yellowstone region puts the estimated population of the hump-shouldered bruins at just over 750, well exceeding the government’s recovery goal of 500 animals, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That compares with just 136 believed left in the Yellowstone ecosystem – encompassing parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho – when grizzlies were formally listed as threatened throughout the Lower 48 states in 1975, after they were hunted, trapped and poisoned to near extinction.

Not surprisingly, the article notes how environmental and American Indian groups oppose changing the bear’s status. Want to bet that they win the day and the bear remains endangered? Science really has very little to do with the endangered species act these days. It is all politics.

A hybrid coyote/wolf prospers in the eastern U.S.

A new hybrid species, two-thirds coyote and one-third wolf with a little bit of dog, has spread throughout the eastern United States in the past century.

The animal’s range has encompassed America’s entire north-east, urban areas included, for at least a decade, and is continuing to expand in the south-east following coywolves’ arrival there half a century ago. This is astonishing. Purebred coyotes never managed to establish themselves east of the prairies. Wolves were killed off in eastern forests long ago. But by combining their DNA, the two have given rise to an animal that is able to spread into a vast and otherwise uninhabitable territory.

Called either the eastern coyote or the coywolf, it is estimated that their population could now be as high as a million.

Posted from Mexico City.

China unveils model of planned 2020 Martian probe

The competition heats up: China today unveiled a one-third scale model of its planned Martian lander/rover, scheduled for launch in 2020.

If they succeed in putting a lander and rover on Mars, China will have clearly demonstrated the capability to do almost anything in space that the United States can do. The competition in the coming decades should thus be most interesting.

Posted from Tucson International Airport.

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