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Exploring Arsia Mons

2:01 pm

Master index

In November over a period of two weeks the Mars Odyssey team posted ten images of Pavonis Mons, the smallest of the aligned three giant volcanoes just to the east of Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the solar system. I then made all of those images available in a single link, with some analysis.

They have now done the same thing for the southernmost (and possibly the most interesting) of those three aligned volcanoes, Arsia Mons. From the first image below:

Arsia Mons is the southernmost of the Tharsis volcanoes. It is 270 miles (450km) in diameter, almost 12 miles (20km) high, and the summit caldera is 72 miles (120km) wide. For comparison, the largest volcano on Earth is Mauna Loa. From its base on the sea floor, Mauna Loa measures only 6.3 miles high and 75 miles in diameter. A large volcanic crater known as a caldera is located at the summit of all of the Tharsis volcanoes. These calderas are produced by massive volcanic explosions and collapse. The Arsia Mons summit caldera is larger than many volcanoes on Earth.

In other words, you could fit almost all of Mauna Loa entirely within the caldera of Arsia Mons.

The image on the right above is the master index, annotated by me to show the area covered by each image. The images can accessed individually below.
» Read more

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All charges dismissed in Bundy case

11:58 am

The law is such an inconvenient thing: The federal judge in the Cliven Bundy case has dismissed all charges against Bundy and three others, citing “flagrant prosecutorial misconduct.”

I think the article provides a fair and good summary of the history behind these events, which are complex, with no one entirely innocent. Overall my sympathies tend to favor Bundy, as the problem began with the take-over of his family’s traditional grazing lands a long time ago by the federal government.

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Conscious Choice cover

Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!

 

From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of founder of the Mars Society.

 

All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.

The corrupt and power-hungry Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

11:11 am

Link here. The CFPB was established under the Dodd-Frank law signed by Obama under a framework that one court has already ruled is unconstitutional.

[A]s is common in Washington, the vague language used to craft that law gave regulators wide latitude and the bureau emerged in the Obama administration as a powerful force in the regulatory state.

“There’s strong evidence that the CFPB was pursuing Obama administration tactics and priorities, even if it was not directly coordinating with other Obama-run agencies,” said John Berlau, a scholar with the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute. As an example of such connections, Berlau pointed to Operation Choke Point, a 2013 Justice Department initiative during which the CFPB pursued payday lenders while prosecutors focused on banks dealing with those businesses or gun retailers. “Like other Obama regulators, the CFPB attempted to make law through administrative maneuvers,” Berlau told RCI. “Yet the CFPB’s abuses of process exceeded even those of other Obama administration bureaucracies due to the bureau’s unique lack of accountability.”

That lack of accountability was one of the reasons a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the CFPB an unconstitutional entity in October 2016 – a decision that awaits an en banc ruling from the Appeals Court.

The article outlines how the CFPB has used its vague regulatory powers during the Obama administration to begin open investigations into numerous businesses, not based on any suspected crimes but as a weapon of the Obama administration against businesses it did not like.

The bad part of this story is that there appears no effort by the Trump administration to shut down this out-of-control agency. Instead, it is trying to “rein” it in. Meanwhile, this agency, which according to the law that created it, can spend money without Congressional approval, and is doing so at rates that would make billionaires like Trump blush: A New CFPB Scandal – Cost Overruns for Its New Lux Headquarters

Original cost estimates for the CFPB’s renovation were estimated at $55 million, but the bureau ran up the proposed cost to $216 million. The Federal Reserve Inspector General rejected the proposal in 2014, saying there was no “sound basis” for the figure.

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The utter childishness of modern intellectual discourse

10:01 am

The world is faced with threats of nuclear and chemical attacks from North Korea. Iran is hit by protests that might escalate into all out civil war. Islamic terrorist attacks have now become almost routine. And in the U.S. there appears to be corruption at the highest levels of the FBI and the Department of Justice, while at the same time the federal government has produced a national debt exceeding $20 trillion, with more debt on the way.

Have any of these significant stories been the primary focus of our American media, from either side of the political spectrum?

An objective look at the culture of today’s press says no. Even as the leftist American mainstream media continues to focus its energies on petty and ineffective attacks of Donald Trump, too many journalists on the right unfortunately appear to be diving right in to join them with their own petty counter-attacks. The result is a press that spends the bulk of its time on irrelevant stories of partisan bickering that have little substance or importance.

In the last week of 2017 we had one particularly acute example of this. First a mainstream liberal news source pushed an absurdly trivial story in a shallow effort to discredit Donald Trump. This was then followed by a frenzied and as-shallow response from the conservative press. I want to showcase both, not merely to illustrate how weak the original story was (which is obvious on its face), but to also point out the childishness of the response.

I must add that everything written in every one of the news sources that I will cite below appears to be 100% accurate. My point here isn’t to highlight examples of error-filled news reporting — which these days mostly comes from left leaning sources overwhelmed by their blind hatred of Trump — but to illustrate reporting from both sides that hardly rises above the level of a five year old, and is thus completely inconsequential.

From CNN: Truck blocks cameras from filming Trump on golf course.

Apparently the day before CNN had managed, by peering through some bushes on the edge of the Trump International Golf Club in Florida, to videotape President Trump playing some golf. When they came back the next day a white truck now blocked their view. This then became a big scandal for CNN, with the cable network then spending gobs of time every hour for the next few days investigating the truck and following up on this terrible act of corruption, obviously part of the evil Trump administration’s effort to cancel the First Amendment and to silence the press! Much of the leftwing media piled on as well. Below are some of CNN’s coverage, as well as a bit of that liberal news pile on.
» Read more

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Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

Republican leadership works to renew FISA rules that violate 4th amendment

9:32 pm

The Constitution is such an inconvenient thing! The House Republican leadership has attached new FISA rules into a bill that will allow the National Security Agency to once again seize the phone records of Americans, without a warrant, in direct violation of the 4th amendment.

The rules would allow the National Security Agency to restart collecting messages Americans send to foreign intelligence targets barely a year after ending the practice. The bill is promising lip-service to the Fourth Amendment by saying “The Attorney General, in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, shall adopt querying procedures consistent with the requirements of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States for information collected pursuant to an authorization…” but CATO Institute policy analyst Patrick G. Eddington called the language complete make-believe.

“It’s meaningless because the AG and DNI are allowed to make up the rules and decide what the phrase “consistent with” means vis a vis the 4th Amendment,” the former CIA analyst told me. “If it isn’t one person/one warrant/probable cause only standard, it’s a sham.”

Americans must continually remind themselves that almost no one in Washington, from either party, is working for the interest of the nation. No, what they are working for to increase their own power, at everyone else’s expense. This is only another example.

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Leaving Earth cover

There are now only 3 copies left of the now out-of-print hardback of Leaving Earth. The price for an autographed copy of this rare collector's item is now $150 (plus $5 shipping).

 

To get your copy while the getting is good, please send a $155 check (which includes $5 shipping) payable to Robert Zimmerman to
 

Behind The Black, c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

Leaving Earth is also available as an inexpensive ebook!

 

Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.

 

If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.

"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke

Curiosity images small tubelike rock features on Vera Rubin Ridge

12:24 pm

tubes on Mars

During Curiosity’s extended science observations in the past month on Vera Rubin Ridge the rover has found a number of rocks with strange tubelike features that remind some scientists of fossils. The image on the right, taken by the rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) and cropped and reduced to post here, shows some of these weird tubes.

The origin of these odd features — geological or biological processes — is in TBD limbo at the moment. Regarding trace fossils on Mars, “we don’t rule it out,” Vasavada said, “but we certainly won’t jump to that as our first interpretation.”

Close-up looks at these features show them to be angular in multiple dimensions. That could mean that they are related to crystals in the rock, perhaps “crystal molds” that are also found here on Earth, Vasavada added. Crystals in rock that are dissolved away leave crystal molds, he said.

Still, that’s just one of a few possibilities, Vasavada explained. “If we see more of them … then we begin to say that this is an important process that’s going on at Vera Rubin Ridge,” he said.

The article outlines a number of other possible explanations, including fossil remains. None are convincing at this time, based on the limited data. Nor does Curiosity have the equipment to clarify things much.

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R.I.P. John Young 1930-2018

8:33 pm

John Young, the ninth man to walk on the Moon and the only man to fly a Gemini capsule, an Apollo capsule, and the space shuttle, passed away yesterday at the age of 87.

Young was the only spaceman to span NASA’s Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs, and became the first person to rocket away from Earth six times. Counting his takeoff from the moon in 1972 as commander of Apollo 16, his blastoff tally stood at seven, for decades a world record.

He flew twice during the two-man Gemini missions of the mid-1960s, twice to the moon during NASA’s Apollo program, and twice more aboard the new space shuttle Columbia in the early 1980s.

His NASA career lasted 42 years, longer than any other astronaut’s, and he was revered among his peers for his dogged dedication to keeping crews safe — and his outspokenness in challenging the space agency’s status quo.

Young captained the first shuttle Gemini flight and the first space shuttle flight, and also flew twice to the Moon, landing once.

God speed.

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Is Iran on the edge of collapse?

10:23 pm

Link here. This short essay outlines a range of financial, economic, and fundamental problems facing Iran’s government that might lead to that country’s entire collapse.

Before we wax too eloquent about the democratic aspirations of the great Iranian people, we should keep in the mind that the most probable scenario for Iran under any likely regime is a sickening spiral into poverty and depopulation. Iran has the fastest-aging population of any country in the world, indeed, the fast-aging population of any country in history. It has the highest rate of venereal disease infection and the highest rate of infertility of any country in the world. It has a youth unemployment rate of 35% (adjusted for warehousing young people in state-run diploma mills). And worst of all, it has run out of water.

We might be observing the birth of Iranian democracy in the protests of the past few weeks, but it is more likely that we are watching the slow-motion train wreck of a once-great nation in all its gory detail. As I noted in an Asia Times analysis this morning, the most violent protests, e.g. the burning of a police station near Isfahan captured on this video, happened in the boondocks where water has run out. The river that runs through Isfahan, a legendary city of gardens in the desert, literally has run dry. Some Iranian officials warn that tens of millions of Iranians will have to leave their homes for lack of water. The country has used up 70% of its groundwater and its literally drying up major rivers to maintain consumption. It’s the worst ecological disaster in modern history.

If this analysis is even close to correct, things are going to get deadly interesting in the coming years. And it might not be just Iranians who face death. Iran will be like a cornered animal. The world, the Middle East, and especially Israel, will be in great danger because this particular cornered animal will have nothing to lose by doing very evil and violent things.

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U.S. freezes $125 million grant to UN agency that funds Hamas in Gaza

5:01 pm

This is probably related to my previous post: The Trump administration has frozen the payment of a $125 million grant to the UN agency that supposedly does refugee work in Gaza but has been found in the past to help Hamas with its terrorist activities.

The amount frozen is one-third of the annual funding the United States provides the organization, according to the report.

The three diplomats, who asked to remain anonymous because of the political sensitivity of the issue, told Channel 10 the grant had been frozen until the end of the reexamination of U.S. aid to the Palestinians, which began in recent days. According to the diplomats, officials in the administration have informed UN officials in the past two days that President Donald Trump is considering cutting this amount completely and could even increase the cut to $180 million, which would be half the total U.S. funding for UNRWA.

From the article it appears that there are conflicting opinions about this action in the Israeli government.

UNRWA has been caught using its schools for Hamas anti-Semitic propaganda as well a place to store missiles. Let me repeat that: The UN and Hamas think there is nothing wrong with using schools to store weapons.

But hey, let’s give them millions so they won’t get upset at us!

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Trump administration suspends at least $900 million aid for Pakistan

11:52 am

The Trump administration, unsatisfied with Pakistan’s actions against Islamic terrorists, has suspended at least $900 million in military and security aid.

The U.S. State Department announced the decision, saying it reflected the Trump administration’s frustration that Pakistan has not done more against the two groups that Washington says use sanctuaries in Pakistan to launch attacks in neighboring Afghanistan that have killed U.S., Afghan and other forces. The department declined to say exactly how much aid would be suspended, saying the numbers were still being calculated and included funding from both the State and Defense departments.

It is unclear from the article whether this suspension includes or is in addition to the $255 million suspended last week.

These actions against Pakistan are essentially the Trump administrations version of a shot across the bow to every nation in the world. What the administration is telling everyone is that they meant it when they said they were “taking names” and would punish those who took actions that were in opposition to the United States interests.

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Atlas 5 man-rated upgrades approved by NASA for Starliner launches

11:17 pm

Capitalism in space: ULA announced this week that its Atlas 5 rocket has passed a NASA review that now approves the design changes necessary to allow that rocket to launch Boeing’s Starliner manned capsule.

“Design Certification Review is a significant milestone that completes the design phase of the program, paving the way to operations,” said Barb Egan, ULA Commercial Crew program manager. “Hardware and software final qualification tests are underway, as well as a major integrated test series, including structural loads. Future tests will involve launch vehicle hardware, such as jettison tests, acoustic tests, and, finally, a pad abort test in White Sands, New Mexico.”

Launch vehicle production is currently on track for an uncrewed August 2018 Orbital Flight Test (OFT).

The schedule to make that August flight happen still remains tight, but this approval brings it one step closer.

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Orbital ATK gets its second contract for its satellite repair robot

11:09 pm

Capitalism in space: Orbital ATK has signed a second contract to build another Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV), designed to robotically extend the life of old but usable satellites.

The vehicle was ordered by Intelsat S.A. to provide life extension services for an Intelsat satellite. Orbital ATK is now producing MEV-1, the industry’s first commercial in-space satellite servicing system, for Intelsat with launch scheduled for late 2018. Under this new agreement, Orbital ATK will manufacture, test and launch MEV-2 and begin mission extension services in mid-2020. The production of the second MEV is part of Orbital ATK’s longer-range plan to establish a fleet of in-orbit servicing vehicles that can address diverse space logistics needs including repair, assembly, refueling and in-space transportation.

“Work on MEV-1 is progressing rapidly toward a late 2018 launch with system-level testing beginning this spring,” said Tom Wilson, President of Orbital ATK’s Space Logistics, LLC subsidiary. “With the launch of MEV-2, Orbital ATK will continue to pioneer in-space satellite servicing for commercial operators. Intelsat’s commitment to a second MEV demonstrates not only the market demand for our servicing vehicles, but also the customer’s confidence in our product.”

Through its Space Logistics subsidiary, Orbital ATK will introduce in-orbit commercial satellite servicing with MEV-1 late this year. The MEV is based on the company’s GEOStarTM spacecraft platform, and controlled by the company’s satellite operations team. The MEV uses a reliable, low-risk docking system that attaches to existing features on a customer’s satellite, and provides life-extending services by taking over the orbit maintenance and attitude control functions of the client’s spacecraft. Each MEV vehicle has a 15 year design life with the ability to perform numerous dockings and repositionings during its life span.

What Orbital ATK here is doing is creating a entirely new cottage industry with the satellite industry, providing satellite companies an inexpensive way to maintain their satellite networks without building and launching a whole new communications satellite. Once Orbital has placed a number of these in orbit, they will be available to move from satellite to satellite. Once their first repair job is finally finished, they will then move on to another at relatively little cost.

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Park Ki-Young – Nella Fantasia

6:01 pm

An evening pause: The music is by Enrico Morricone from the film The Mission (1986). There it is entitled Gabriel’s Oboe, a musical piece I have posted previously here as an evening pause. Here it is sung to lyrics written by Chiara Ferraù, celebrating the joys that freedom brings. “I dream of souls that are always free,/Like the clouds that fly.”

Hat tip Jim Mallamace, who notes that this song is written by an Italian and sung by a Korean about the American aspiration of freedom. Seems to me that this illustrates two aspects of that American aspiration, one of which is freedom, the second of which is that freedom is something all people from all cultures aspire to.

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This week in bigoted academia

3:20 pm

Since October of last year I have been posting weekly reports listing the variety and frequency of intolerant actions by college administrators, facility, and students on American campus. This week, I want to highlight the bigotry that now runs rampant on these campuses, all centered on the bad idea to create entire departments and fields of study focused expressly on race, ethnicity, or gender, rather than ideas.

The last story highlights how the hate and bigotry against whites has gotten so bad at colleges that minority students and teachers are now frequently faking hate crimes against themselves in order to prove how evil whites are.

As I said above, the problem here is the focus on race, ethnicity, and gender rather than ideas. Any one from any race, ethnic group, or sex, can come up with a great idea. In fact, it is irrelevant what their race, ethnicity, or sex is. What matters is the idea. Unfortunately, colleges have become obsessed not with ideas but with race and gender diversity, and so the teachers teach students to see everything in that light, and that light only. It is bigotry and hate, at its worst. And it is poisoning the American intellectual community, preventing it from doing what we need it to do, to think deeply, thoughtfully, and maturely, and to do it without hate or rancor.

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Nigeria signs deal with China for two communications satellites

9:16 am

China has agreed to build for Nigeria two communications satellites, with the $550 million fee paid entirely for Nigeria through an arrangement with China’s EXIM Bank.

The China EXIM Bank and a Chinese firm, the China Great Walls, have agreed to pay the entire $550m to procure two new satellites for the Nigerian Communications Satellite Limited. The Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, disclosed this in an interview with State House Correspondents on Wednesday shortly after a meeting he had with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

Shittu explained that the initial arrangement was that Nigeria would provide 15 per cent counterpart funding for the two satellites, while the bank and the firm would provide the balance. He said Nigeria, however, decided to renegotiate the deal when it became obvious that the country could not afford the counterpart funding. The minister explained, “Because we could not afford this 15 per cent, we have renegotiated with the China EXIM Bank and the China Great Walls, who are the manufacturers, and they have happily agreed to pay the entire $550m to procure two new satellites.

Essentially, this is foreign aid from China to Nigeria, and follows a pattern China has used recently in providing space-related foreign aid in other circumstances.

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Justice Dept to provide House Russian probe documents

9:25 pm

This could get very interesting: The Department of Justice has reached an agreement with the House to provide a variety of long requested documents connected with the department’s investigation on whether the Russians interfered with the 2016 election.

The deal was reached after FBI Director Chris Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made a surprise visit to House Speaker Paul Ryan It was announced by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who had sought the information and threatened more drastic action if his panel continued to be denied access to the information. “After speaking to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein this evening, I believe the House Intelligence Committee has reached an agreement with the Department of Justice that will provide the committee with access to all the documents and witnesses we have requested,” Nunes said in a statement. “The committee looks forward to receiving access to the documents over the coming days.”

Nunes has in recent months lashed out against the DOJ over its failure to respond to requests for the documents, suggesting the department was doing so deliberately. “At this point it seems the DOJ and FBI need to be investigating themselves,” Nunes wrote in a letter to Rosenstein last week.

What puzzles me is how long the Trump administration allowed the Trump Justice department to stonewall House investigators. Trump is legally in charge. The people at Justice work for him. Either Trump was involved with the Russians somehow and was stonewalling to protect himself, or he allowed Obama appointees to run things there for way too long. This agreement suggests the latter, assuming it is what the article says it is.

Either way, should House investigators get the documents they want, it could very well blow apart the Mueller investigation, based on everything I have read recently. There really does not appear to be anything of substance in the “Russian” scandal, except what appears to be a conspiracy in Justice by those who opposed Trump, a legally elected president, to harm him enough to get him overthrown.

And that could be the biggest scandal we have seen in Washington ever, even worse than Watergate.

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A faint seasonal fluctuation of methane on Mars?

8:23 pm

The uncertainty of science: Data from Curiosity during its two Martian years on Mars have revealed a faint but distinct seasonal fluctuation in the amount of methane in the local atmosphere, a fluctuation that scientists do not have a good explanation for.

Since landing in 2012, Curiosity has on 30 occasions opened a few valves to the martian night and taken a sniff of the thin, frigid air. In a small, mirrored chamber, it shines a laser through the air sample and measures the absorption at specific wavelengths that indicate methane. At the meeting, Webster reported vanishingly small background levels of the gas: 0.4 parts per billion (ppb), compared with Earth’s 1800 ppb.

Where that whiff comes from is the heart of the mystery. Microbes (including those that live in the guts of cows and sheep) are responsible for most of Earth’s methane, and Mars’s could conceivably come from microbes as well—either contemporary microbes or ancient ones, if the methane they produced was trapped underground. But methane can also be made in ways that have nothing to do with biology. Hydrothermal reactions with olivine-rich rocks underground can generate it, as can reactions driven by ultraviolet (UV) light striking the carbon-containing meteoroids and dust that constantly rain down on the planet from space.

Now, add to the methane puzzle the seasonal variation Curiosity has detected, with levels cycling between about 0.3 ppb and 0.7 ppb over more than two martian years. Some seasonality is expected in an atmosphere that is mostly carbon dioxide (CO2), says François Forget, who models the climate of Mars at the Laboratory of Dynamical Meteorology in Paris. In the southern winter, some of that CO2 freezes out onto the large southern polar cap, making the overall atmosphere thinner. That boosts the concentration of any residual methane, which doesn’t freeze, and by the end of northern summer this methane-enriched air makes its way north to Curiosity’s location, Forget says. Seasonal variations in dust storms and levels of UV light could also affect the abundance of methane, if interplanetary dust is its primary source.

But, Webster said at the meeting, the seasonal signal is some three times larger than those mechanisms could explain. Maybe the methane—whatever its source—is absorbed and released from pores in surface rocks at rates that depend on temperature, he said. Another explanation, “one that no one talks about but is in the back of everyone’s mind,” is biological activity, says Mike Mumma, a planetary scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “You’d expect life to be seasonal.”

They have a lot of theories, from asteroids to alien life, but none really explains this adequately.

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Was the solar system formed inside a giant bubble?

10:28 am

Don’t bet the house on this! Astronomers have come up with a new theory for the formation of the solar system, that it was formed inside a giant bubble inside a Wolf-Rayet star, in order to explain the known ratios of certain isotopes here.

The new theory for how the solar system formed starts with an extremely massive star known as a Wolf-Rayet star. Of all the stars in the universe, these stars burn the hottest. Because they are so hot, they also have exceptionally strong stellar winds.

As a Wolf-Rayet star sheds its outer layers – a normal end-of-life process for a giant star – its strong stellar winds plow through its loosely held cloak of material, forming densely shelled bubbles. According to the study, the solar system could have formed inside of one of these bubbles.

While this theory would explain a number of mysteries about the ratios of aluminum-26 and iron-60 in our solar system, which correspond closer to those in a Wolf-Rayet star than the galaxy itself, it is quite far-fetched. More hard data is necessary, including real evidence of such things actually happening in such stars, before it can be taken very seriously.

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New data from Tabby’s Star suggests that dust, not alien megastructures, is the cause of its dimming

8:39 am

New observations of Tabby’s Star now suggests that it is dust, not alien megastructures, that has caused the star’s erratic fluctuations in dimming over the past century.

“Dust is most likely the reason why the star’s light appears to dim and brighten. The new data shows that different colors of light are being blocked at different intensities. Therefore, whatever is passing between us and the star is not opaque, as would be expected from a planet or alien megastructure,” said [LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy Assistant Professor Tabetha Boyajian].

Though the data appears strong, it still leaves astronomers a bit baffled about how dust could cause the particular dimming they have seen.

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A short dose of ultraviolet light might save North America’s bats

8:24 am

Researchers have found that the fungus that has been decimating bat populations in the eastern United States for the past decade is easily killed by a short dose of ultraviolet light.

Upon being compared to six non-pathogenic Pseudogymnoascus species, it was found that P. destructans lacks a key enzyme that allows it to repair DNA damage caused by ultraviolet light. When samples of the fungus were exposed to a low dose of UV-C light from a handheld source, the survival rate was only about 15 percent – this dropped to less than 1 percent when the dose was moderate. In both cases, the duration of exposure was a matter of no more than a few seconds.

Next comes a control group experiment. If this proves true, than it might be possible to safely sterilize both bat populations and caves of the fungus. To work, however, the task will likely require repeated yearly visits to bat hibernation sites to kill the fungus before it causes the bats to wake up in the winter. Such visits have their own problems, and would be difficult to pay for. However, I am sure the caving community across the U.S. would be glad to volunteer for this effort, and could handle it.

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China aiming for more than 40 launches in 2018

8:18 am

The new colonial movement: As part of China’s continuing effort to establish itself as a major space power the country plans to launch more than 40 times in 2018, more than doubling its previous average yearly launch rate.

The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), announced at a conference on January 2 that its 2018 work model includes 35 launches, underlining the return to flight of the heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket, the Chang’e-4 lunar far side mission and launches of Beidou navigation satellites as the major activities.

In addition CASIC, a defense contractor, missile maker and sister company of CASC, will carry out a number of missions through its subsidiary EXPACE, including launching four Kuaizhou-1A rockets within one week and the maiden flight of the larger Kuaizhou-11.

Landspace Technology, a Beijing-based private aerospace company, is also expected to debut its LandSpace-1 solid propellant rocket this year.

The existence of even one private rocket company in China surprises me.

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Two for a Penny – The Grapes of Wrath

6:01 pm

An evening pause: To help start out a new year, a scene from the 1940 John Ford classic, The Grapes of Wrath, based on John Steinbeck’s novel. While the movie tended to make government a saintly hero, which bothered me from the first time I saw it, it also captured the heart and generosity of the American spirit, as certainly existed in the previous century. Even if you are poor and desperate, if you insist on paying your fair share and don’t ask for a hand out, Americans immediately rally around you, in a quiet unassuming way, without wishing credit or accolades.

Hat tip Wayne DeVette.

Note that I am in need of suggestions for evening pauses. If you have made suggestions before, you know where to send them. If you haven’t and want to, leave a comment here and I will email you. Don’t include the link to the pause, however, as I want to schedule it, and that will blow the punchline.

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Sea Launch aims to resume flights by the end of 2019

8:42 am

Capitalism in space: S7 Group, the Russian company that now owns Sea Launch, has published a planned launch schedule beginning the end of 2019 with twelve launches planned through 2022.

They have also set up a permanent office in Long Beach, California, where the Sea Launch platform is based.

We shall see if this schedule holds. The successful launch last week of a Zenit rocket indicates that the company’s rocket is viable. The question is whether they have any customers yet.

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