Engineers will attempt one more try this month to revive one of Kepler’s reaction wheels so that the telescope can resume observations.
They admit that the odds are not good that the attempt will work, but they are going to give it chance anyway.
After a 5.5 hour drive we arrived at the south rim of the Grand Canyon and checked into our hotel. You can see the view from the window on the right. Not very spectacular, but then, you don’t spend much time in a hotel room on trips like this.
Tomorrow we take the shuttle bus to the North Rim, where will spend another night in the lodge there. On Saturday, we hike down on North Bright Angel trail, and will stay in a cabin at Phantom Ranch for the next three nights, doing day hikes from the bottom of the canyon on Sunday and Monday. We will hike then up on Tuesday, coming up Bright Angel trail to the south rim, completing our first rim to rim hike. Once we check out of our hotel tomorrow, we will be out of contact with the internet until we return to the south rim. I hope the world doesn’t fall apart in the interim.
This will be Diane’s third trip to the bottom, and my fifth. I can’t express how happy I am to be back. This is truly one of the grandest spots on Earth.
An evening pause: There are many intellectual fools these days who love to denigrate the United States and its history. These words, however, tell its true story, honestly and simply. Woe to us if we forget it.
We are off to the Grand Canyon. Though I will probably have a chance to post tonight and tomorrow, expect posting to be light, especially the first half of next week when we are at Phantom Ranch.
Violating the third amendment: Nevada police arrested a family for refusing to let officers use their homes as lookouts for a domestic violence investigation of their neighbors.
The Mitchell family’s claim includes Third Amendment violations, a rare claim in the United States. The Third Amendment prohibits quartering soldiers in citizens’ homes in times of peace without the consent of the owner.
The Russian investigation into the crash of their Proton rocket on Tuesday now includes a criminal prosecutor.
“The investigative department of the Russian Investigative Committee at the Baikonur complex has opened a criminal case on this incident over evidence of a crime, put forward in the Russian Criminal Code Article 216 Part 1. The Baikonur prosecutor’s office is overseeing the investigation,” the statement said.
There is also another story from this news service claiming that the crash occurred because the rocket launched a half second early, confusing its computer systems.
For July 4th: Legitimacy.
Want to land on an asteroid? Watch out, a gentle touchdown might cause avalanches everywhere!
The law is such an inconvenient thing: Among many other valid points about the disaster that is Obamacare, the Wall Street Journal notes the “lawless” nature of the Obama administration’s announcement yesterday that it will not enforce one legal requirement of Obamacare in 2013.
This selective enforcement of laws has become an Administration habit. From immigration (the Dream Act by fiat) to easing welfare reform’s work requirements to selective waivers for No Child Left Behind, the Obama Administration routinely suspends enforcement of or unilaterally rewrites via regulation the laws it dislikes. Now it is doing it again on health care, without any consultation from, much less the approval of, Congress.
Sadly, this contempt for the law is becoming rampant. Worse, though the Democrats have generally been the worst offenders, this contempt has not been a partisan affair. Republican politicians have participated as well.
And who will suffer? Not the politicians. It will be the ordinary innocent citizens, who merely want to live their lives freely without hindrance, who will pay the cost.
An evening pause: The British take on America and many American pop songs about our fair country.
I say, they still haven’t gotten over their defeat at Yorktown.
After more than eleven years, the sea-level tracking satellite Jason-1 has finally shut down.
The competition heats up: This week’s launch failure of the Proton rocket leaves two satellite communications firms in a quandary.
Luxembourg-based SES joins London-based Inmarsat among the commercial customers awaiting Proton launches later this year, a prospect that almost certainly disappeared in the fireball that engulfed Proton shortly after liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Inmarsat’s entire next-generation high-speed mobile communications product offer is booked on three Proton launches.
It appears that their only other launch options are Arianespace, which is booked up, and SpaceX, which is not yet ready to take on this much new business.
In other words, the launch industry has a need for more launchers from companies willing to compete for that business.
Update: Arianespace has said that if they get the orders quickly, they might be able to fit the launch’s into their 2014 launch manifest. That has the sound of a company that wants to make money, and is willing to do whatever it takes to capture the business.
A white dwarf star that has morphed into a massive pulsing crystal.
Leftwing civility: “I hope you’re raped.”
We’ve only just begun: A doctor with 5,000 patients is closing his practice because of Obamacare.
Watch the video. It begins with a mention of the expensive requirement, imposed by Obamacare, that all medical records be converted to digital, noting that this cost is one of the reasons doctors are giving up.
Mercury, world of fire.
The FBI has still not contacted any conservative group that was harassed by the IRS.
And we still don’t know who the lead investigator of the FBI investigation is.
This “FBI investigation” is a fraud. Obama might have expressed public outrage over the IRS scandal, but in private it appears he instead ordered that nothing be done and that FBI act as a shield for the guilty parties.
The lawyer for IRS official Lois Lerner is pushing to get her full immunity in exchange for her full testimony to Congress.
The article makes two very good points: One, it will be difficult to prosecute anyone at the IRS for its harassment of conservatives, and two, Lerner’s full testimony is likely not going to have any earthshaking bombshells. She will state that the White House had nothing to do with the harassment (whether that is true or not), and that the harassment was merely the result of some bad management decisions.
And thus, the government’s power over us will rise, and freedom will experience another cut in its continuing death of a thousand cuts.
Throw away those batteries! A fifteen year old has invented a flashlight that runs on body heat alone.
The competition heats up? NASA has revised their plans for the 2017 and 2021 flights of its Orion capsule, making both flights more ambitious.
[M]anifests have always pointed towards the first SLS/Orion launch being an uncrewed Exploration Mission (EM-1), which was baselined a validation flight that would send Orion on a 7-10 day mission around the Moon.
SLS and Orion would then endure a four year gap – again, mainly due to the advanced 2017 debut relating to ISS crew back up – before repeating a version of EM-1, this time as a CLO (Crewed Lunar Orbit) flight, with four astronauts spending three to four days orbiting our nearest neighbor, as opposed to heading directly home after passing around the Moon – a flight known as Exploration Mission -2 (EM-2).
Much to the surprise of some people deeply involved with SLS and Orion, the order came down from NASA HQ to realign EM-2, based around a 2019 mission tasked with hunting down and capturing an asteroid that would then be placed in the vicinity of the Moon within one to two years. EM-2 is also known as the Asteroid Redirect Crewed Mission (ARCM). [emphasis mine]
It has been my understanding that the plans for the 2017 unmanned test flight have previously described it as sending the Orion capsule into a high several thousand mile orbit, not to the Moon, in order to simulate a re-entry from lunar distances. Making that unmanned mission a lunar orbital mission makes it far more challenging. Similarly, it is incredibly risky to turn the next flight, the first manned flight for Orion, into a duplicate of this mission, or a flight to an asteroid. This will be the first time humans will have ever flown on Orion, and only the second time the capsule has been used. To then send those humans to the Moon or an asteroid seems downright foolish. Even the 1960s NASA, which was quite willing to run risks, would not have attempted such a plan.
It is my guess that the White House has recognized that SLS can’t survive politically with a launch rate once every four years and planned test flights that aren’t very exciting. They are therefore pushing NASA to accelerate the second mission (and first manned flight) from 2021 to 2019, while also making both flights more ambitious and therefore more salable to the public.
Whether this is possible, given NASA’s bloated bureaucracy, is the main question. Moreover, even at this accelerated pace SLS will be competing directly against the private sector, which I expect will continue to do things far faster and, more importantly, far cheaper. Against that competition SLS will be hard put to survive.
