Month: October 2014

India’s manned space program

9:20 am

This short article gives us a short but detailed look at India’s plans for manned space, describing both the first test flight of a engineering version of their manned capsule in a little more than a month and the program’s overall goals.

The test flight:

“The first test trial, that of the crew module, will be undertaken in November last week or December first week on the GSLV MK-III,” [Isro chairman K Radhakrishnan told Deccan Herald.] The crew module will be injected into orbit by the GSLV at a height of 110-120 km in space from where it will fall towards the earth and be recovered from sea. Isro will examine how the crew module and thermal shield around it handle the heat and temperatures during re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere.

Their eventual goal is to put two astronauts in orbit for seven days. To do that they will first have to complete at least four to six test launches of their new GSLV MK-III rocket, which has only completed one successful launch after literally two decades of failures. If successful, the test flight described above will be GSLV’s second successful launch.

Note that because of poor writing the article gives the improper impression that the test flight will be manned. It will not. Also, the article states incorrectly that the space shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry because “the thermal heat shields could not withstand the heat.” This is false. The heat shield would have worked fine, as it had done on numerous previous launches, except that there were gaping holes in it that were put there by pieces of foam during launch.

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Chinese lunar mission launches

5:36 pm

The competition heats up: The Chinese have launched their next lunar mission, a fly-by around the Moon to test their return-to-Earth engineering in anticipation of a future sample return mission.

Chang’e 5-T1, one of the test models for Chang’e-5, was developed using a Chang’e 2 type spacecraft (acting like a service module) featuring the Chang’e-5 return capsule. This return capsule is very similar to the Shenzhou manned return technology, so it is assumed that it was developed using the Shenzhou as a baseline model. The service module will be used for trajectory corrections, power supply using two solar panels and batteries, along with telemetry and commands transmission to and from the control center.

Following launch, Chang’e 5-T1 will be injected into a lunar free-return orbit, loop behind the Moon once and return to Earth to test the high speed atmospheric reentry of a capsule returning from the translunar voyage at 11.2 km/s.

This launch marks the start of this nine day mission. Stay tuned for updates.

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Comet 67P/C-G smells!

5:07 pm

Instruments on Rosetta have determined that the various molecules coming off Comet 67P/C-G have a strong aroma.

You might expect a rock that spends all its time in a vacuum to be fairly inoffensive, but in fact exposure to sunlight is causing it to give off quite an aroma: hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, and other caustic gases would make it smell “suffocating,” like a cross between a filthy barn, an embalming room, and a rotten egg.

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55,000 Connecticut citizens to lose their health plans

9:49 am

Finding out what’s in it: Because of Obamacare, tens of thousands in Connecticut are expected to lose their health plans this year.

For about the past week or so, health insurance broker Stephen Hunt has been getting phone calls from unhappy clients. “They just keep building up and up and up and up and up,” Hunt said.

The calls are coming from clients who have been notified by their insurer that their policy expires at year’s end and most will have to purchase plans with much higher premiums and much higher deductibles, he said. “We’re not talking about a minor difference in premium. We’re talking about a mortgage payment difference in premium for a lot of people,” Hunt said.

How can this be? Obama and the Democratic Party promised us that under Obamacare, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Period.” They couldn’t have been so stupid as to propose a law that would do exactly the opposite of what they promised, could they? They wouldn’t lie, would they?

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Problems at the National Weather Service?

9:29 am

According to this news report, since Tuesday the National Weather Service has lost access to some of its satellite data.

The story is very unclear and might not be accurate. For example, it does not state where the problem is. Has a specific satellite failed? Or is the problem on the ground, preventing the NWS from processing data from any of its satellites? It also seems puzzling for such a significant failure to occur on Tuesday and only now on Thursday does anyone notice. I have seen no other news stories about this outage.

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Next Angara test flight in December

9:23 am

The competition heats up: According to one Russian official, the next test flight of Russia’s new Angara rocket will take place before the end of December.

Another Russian news story says that the Angara test program will involve ten flights and that the target cost for the rocket’s most powerful configuration will be around $100 million. Depending on how much payload this configuration can put in orbit, this price makes it very competitive with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.

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Orion ready for launchpad!

9:15 am

Be still my heart! NASA has completed the assembly of the Orion capsule stack, prior to installing it on its rocket on the launchpad.

I remain decidedly unexcited by this upcoming test flight, which will send Orion up to 3,600 miles and then bring it back to Earth at about 20,000 miles per hour to test the spacecraft’s heat shield.

For example, the exaggerations and overstatements in this one short article tell you a great deal about how oversold the SLS/Orion program is.
» Read more

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Increasing activity at Comet 67P/C-G

8:49 am

Data from Rosetta in the past month has been showing a steady and gradual increase in dust emissions from the surface.

While images obtained a few months ago showed distinct jets of dust leaving the comet, these were limited to the ‘neck’ region. More recently, images obtained by Rosetta’s scientific imaging system, OSIRIS, show that dust is being emitted along almost the whole body of the comet. Jets have also been detected on the smaller lobe of the comet. “At this point, we believe that a large fraction of the illuminated comet’s surface is displaying some level of activity,” says OSIRIS scientist Jean-Baptiste Vincent from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany.

The last two images at the link compare the same location with one image overexposed to make the jets visible. What is interesting is that the source of the jet is not evident in the other normally exposed image. It is almost as if surface material is simply heating up and then using that extra energy to simply throw itself off the surface. Why that then forms jets however is puzzling.

More info here.

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Titan’s atmosphere is unexpectedly unbalanced

5:15 pm

The uncertainty of science: New data from the ground-based telescope ALMA suggest that certain organic molecules in Titan’s atmosphere are not evenly distributed through the atmosphere as expected.

At the highest altitudes, the pockets of organic molecules were shifted away from the poles. These off-pole concentrations are unexpected because the fast-moving, east-west winds in Titan’s middle atmosphere should thoroughly mix the molecules formed there. The researchers do not have an obvious explanation for these findings yet.

I would not take these results too seriously, as the data are very sketchy. With better data many of these questions will vanish, replaced by new questions that are better based on reality.

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Another failure for Russia’s Proton rocket?

5:10 pm

Unconfirmed sources today are suggesting that Tuesday’s Proton launch of a Russian communications satellite placed the satellite in the wrong orbit.

A report appearing on NASASpaceFlight (NSF) has indicated that while the initial phase of the launch of the Russian Ekspress AM-6 telecommunications satellite might have gone off as planned – the later stages of the mission were less than perfect. NSF’s Chris Bergin reported via Twitter that, although the spacecraft had been placed into the wrong orbit – it should be able to be placed into the correct orbit over time. How much time and what the exact cause as to why the satellite may have been placed into an improper orbit – have yet to emerge. In fact, officials within the Russian space industry have stated that the spacecraft is, in actuality, in the correct orbit.

If these sources are correct it will be a very bad problem for Russia’s aerospace industry, now consolidated into a single giant corporation run by the central government. Proton has had numerous failures in the past three years, all caused by serious quality control problems in Russia’s entire space industry. Another failure here will only add weight to this conclusion.

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Voter fraud in Colorado

9:13 am

A new undercover video reveals numerous Colorado Democratic operatives eager and willing to take advantage of the state’s new Democratically written and passed mail-in voter law to encourage voter fraud.

The law is so leaky that almost anyone can commit voter fraud, voting multiple times.

Colorado secretary of state Scott Gessler, along with several county election clerks, have raised warning flags that a new state law that automatically mails a ballot to everyone is an engraved invitation to commit fraud. “Sending ballots to people who did not even ask for them or have moved out of state is asking for trouble” he told me. For example, little can stop someone who collects discarded ballots from trash cans, fills out the ballots, and mails them in. Election workers are supposed to compare signatures on registration records with signed ballots. But if a person has a “witness” who signs the ballot on the witness line, then the signatures do not have to match and the vote is counted. … Gessler had futile arguments with Democratic state legislators last year who insisted on ramming a bill through that mandated Colorado become the only state in the nation with both all-mail balloting and same-day registration.

The new video shows numerous Democrat and liberal activists thrilled with the idea of using the law to vote multiple times for their candidates.

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India begins tests of larger rocket engine

8:45 am

The competition heats up: Indian engineers have successfully completed their first tests of a new more powerful upper stage engine for their biggest launch rocket.

Taking a big step forward in the development of bigger and more powerful locally-built rocket engines, the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC) on Monday successfully conducted the first ‘cold flow test’ on the CE-20 cryogenic engine, which will power the upper stage of the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle-Mk III (GSLV-Mk III). “It’s a milestone,” LPSC director Dr K Sivan told ‘Express’ here on Tuesday, confirming that the test had gone as planned at the LPSC facility in Mahendragiri, Tamil Nadu. The first ‘hot test’ – where the engine will be fired for a few seconds- will be performed in three weeks’ time, Sivan said.

In a cold test, the propellants are not ignited. On Monday, the fuel, Liquid Hydrogen (LH2), and the oxidiser, Liquid Oxygen (LOX), were injected into the chambers for the checking of various parameters.

In related news, Mangalyaan has taken another global view of Mars.

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California orders churches to fund abortions

8:34 am

Fascists: In a sudden change to its health insurance regulations, leftwing California is now requiring churches to fund abortions.

California’s Department of Managed Health Care has ordered all insurance plans in the state to immediately begin covering elective abortion. Not Plan B. Not contraceptives. Elective surgical dismemberment abortion. At the insistence of the American Civil Liberties Union, the DMHC concluded that a 40-year-old state law requiring health plans to cover “basic health services” had been misinterpreted all these decades. Every plan in the state was immediately ordered, effective August 22, to cover elective abortion. California had not even applied this test to its own state employee health plans (which covered only “medically necessary” abortions). But this novel reading was nevertheless quietly imposed on every plan in the state by fiat.

… Several other California churches have received similar notices from their insurers, and others will follow. While California (like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS) exempts churches from its contraceptive mandate, there is no exception to this bureaucratic abortion mandate. This leaves California churches in the illogical and impossible position of being free to exclude contraceptives from their health plan for reasons of religious conscience but required to provide their employees with abortion coverage.

This is clear proof that the left’s long claim that it is the champion of freedom and religious liberty is quite hollow, and if any speech or religion happens to believe something different than the left, the left is going to aggressively move to deny it its freedom.

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A Mandelbrot set zoom animation out-take

6:01 pm

An evening pause: The creator of this computer animation calls this an out-take and explains why:

What is a Mandelbrot zoom blooper? It’s what happens when you commit 6 months of computing time on three computers to create something that doesn’t turn out the way you expect! The color rotations that begin at 1:36 were unintentional. However, the side effect is that the animation is much more psychedelic than expected due to the color cycling and also brings out details that are not apparent with still images.

I just find it fascinating how this illustrates the endlessly deep and infinite complexity of existence.

Hat tip tdub.

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A citizen pulls over a cop and issues him a warning

2:20 pm

Watch the video below the fold. The citizen saw a cop on patrol in an unmarked car, which is illegal in Washington, and flagged him down to tell him that he was in violation of the law.

Seim then went through all the normal steps of a traffic stop: taking the officer’s name and asking to see his license. Then after a lengthy discussion about the law, Seim let him off with a warning. He urged the officer to speak with his bosses about their illegal patrol cars.

» Read more

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