Joan Baez – Diamonds And Rust
An evening pause: Recorded live in France, 1977.
Year: 2014
Engineers have until Saturday to reposition Philae before its batteries go dead
Sitting in the shade under a cliff and on its side, engineers have until Saturday to nudge it into brighter territory before Philae’s batteries go dead.
One of Philae’s major scientific goals is to analyse the comet for organic molecules. To do that, the lander must get samples from the comet into several different instruments, named Ptolemy, Cosac and Civa. There are two ways to do this: sniffing and drilling. Sniffing involves opening the instruments to allow molecules from the surface to drift inside. The instruments are already doing this and returning data.
Drilling is much riskier because it could make the lander topple over. Newton’s third law of motion says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the minuscule gravity of the comet, any movement on Philae will cause motion. The drill turning one way will make Philae want to turn the other. Pushing down into the surface will push the lander off again. “We don’t want to start drilling and end the mission,” said Bibring.
But the team has decided to operate another moving instrument, named Mupus, on Thursday evening. This could cause Philae to shift, but calculations show that it would be in a direction that could improve the amount of sunlight falling on the probe. A change in angle of only a few degrees could help. A new panoramic image will be taken after the Mupus deployment to see if there has been any movement.
New Horizons to wake up on December 6 for its July Pluto flyby
Planetary exploration without end! New Horizons is set to come out of hibernation for the last time on December 6 to begin preparing for its July fly-by of Pluto.
Japanese investor sues Excalibur Almaz
The billionaire investor in the company Excalibur Almaz is suing the lawyer in charge for fraud.
Using the $49 million the billionaire invested, the lawyer purchased several Soviet-era capsules and a Almaz space station module from the Russians, claiming they would use this equipment, once refurbished, to establish a commercial space company. What the lawyer, Art Dura, did not tell anyone was, as the lawsuit explains:
“The purchase contracts had to be approved by the Russian government, and unbeknownst to plaintiff … expressly excluded the right to modify the Russian hardware, thus relegating it to display uses only! The items were only museum pieces, a secret Dula would keep until well after he acquired control of plaintiff’s investment.”
Dula’s vehicle for the scheme was Excalibur Almaz Limited, an entity he set up in the Isle of Man, into which he transferred Horie’s $49 million investment, according to the complaint.
What I find amazing is that the company, Excalibur Almaz, also put out a lot of press releases describing how they were going to use this Russian equipment as part of their space effort. I reported on these releases myself. That Dura was able to keep the contract terms secret, that even the Russians didn’t publicly protest his false statements, is most interesting. Apparently, the Russians were glad to take his money and even help with the fraud, by not revealing the truth when Dura made public claims that were impossible according to the contract.
This story illustrates one of the less obvious investment risks inherent in a new industry such as commercial space. Not only can vehicles crash and burn, there are also a lot of con artists out there willing to take advantage of naive individuals who are so passionate about space exploration that they don’t look closely at what they are doing.
Philae’s status on the surface
European engineers have released an overall status update on Philae’s generally good condition after its landing on Comet 67P/C-G.
Later on 12 November, after analysing lander telemetry, the Lander Control Centre (in Cologne) and Philae Science, Operations and Navigation Centre (SONC, Toulouse) reported;There were three touchdowns at 15:34, 17:25 and 17:32 UTC; in other words, the lander bounced. The firing of the harpoons did not occur. The primary battery is working properly. The mass memory is working fine (all data acquired until lander loss of signal at 17:59 UTC were transmitted to the orbiter). Systems on board the lander recorded a rotation of the lander after the first touchdown. This is confirmed by ROMAP instrument data, which recorded a rotation around the Z-axis (vertical).
The lander did receive some power from the solar panels on Wall No. 2 (technical description of the lander’s solar walls here), but it appears that parts of the lander were in shadow during the time that last night’s surface telemetry were being transmitted.
An additional update here.
Philae is between a rock and a hard place. More specifically, it’s on its side, one leg sticking up in the air — and in the shadows of a looming crater wall a few meters away. Solar panels are receiving only about 1.5 hours of light a day, when the goal was for 6 or 7 hours per day to recharge the lander’s batteries. Drilling into the subsurface would have to wait until the very end of Philae’s 60 hours of battery life — for fear that it could upset the lander. Yet mission leaders were largely upbeat about being alive and doing science. Most of the lander’s 10 instruments were taking data, and engineers were exploring options to use the spring of the lander legs or other ground-poking instruments to jostle the lander into a more favorable position.
Even more here, including the first image from the surface.
Tim Conway – Dentist sketch
An evening pause: I’ve posted pieces from the Carol Burnett Show before, but it has been a long while. Time for more.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Philae might have bounced
Data from the Philae lander suggests that, when the spacecraft’s harpoons failed to fire, the probe might have bounced and then settled to the surface.
[T]elemetry from the craft suggested it might have drifted off the surface after landing and started to turn. This subsequently came to an end, which the German Space Agency official interpreted as a possible “second landing” on Comet 67P. This “bounce” was always a possibility, but had been made more likely by the failure of the harpoons to deploy, and the failure of a thruster intended to push the robot into the surface.
More than 200 colleges slash work hours to avoid Obamacare
Finding out what’s in it: More than 200 colleges have capped student and faculty work hours below 30 hours per week to avoid the costs of Obamacare.
Those who have seen their paychecks shrink as a result of the Affordable Care Act include students who work on campus at restaurants, bookstores or gyms, teaching assistants, Residence Advisers, officer workers, student journalists, and a variety of other workers, such as part-time maintenance crews and groundskeepers. Educators’ work hours have also been cut due to the mandate, including part-time instructors and adjunct professors.
I guarantee that 70% or more of these individuals voted for Obama and the Democrats, as the political beliefs of the academic population is almost all partisan liberal. I wonder if they now have the intellectual honesty to assign blame for their woes to Obama and the Democrats .
A comet picture taken by Philae on the way down
I am not sure if the actual landing site is visible in this image. I don’t think so as nothing seems to match what was on the earlier close-up. Moreover, the Rosetta website does not say.
No images on the surface have yet been released. There are also issues that could prevent a full success.
However, while the lander has touched down on the comet using its harpoons, scientists said that it had not yet deployed its anchors which meant that it was not completely attached to the surface. The surface was much softer than they expected, so there were some concerns that it was not securely fixed on the comet – although from a software point of view things seemed to be fine. Engineers will attempt to fire the anchors again soon in order to keep Philae attached to the surface of the comet.
More penalties from Obamacare
Finding out what’s in it: The Obamacare penalty for not having health insurance is about to triple.
Uninsured Americans who decide not to enroll will face a penalty of $325 per person, more than tripling the $95 penalty those who did not enroll had to pay the first time around. Children under the age of 18 will be fined $162.50. The maximum amount an uninsured family will be penalized is $975 under the flat-rate method. “The penalty is meant to incentivize people to get coverage,” Laura Adams, senior analyst of InsuranceQuotes.com, told CBS News. “This year, I think a lot of people are going to be in for a shock.”
Nor is this the end. According to how the law was written, the penalties will continue to rise in the coming years. Just in time for the next election in fact!
When the law first passed I had said that Obamacare was going to be an election millstone around the necks of Democrats for years, and that is definitely turning out to be true. Expect more Democratic election losses in future elections, unless they change course and join the Republicans in getting this law repealed.
Philae has landed successfully!
Philae has landed successfully on Comet 67P/C-G.
Philae is on the surface, its harpoons have fired and the landing gear has been moved inside, and Philae is in contact. It’s incredible! Massive smiles on everyone’s faces. The room went mad. Twice — when we first had the hint, and then when Stephan Ulamec and Andrea Accomazzo confirmed it. Unbelievable.
More information and data will be coming in a few hours. Stay tuned.
More crushing Obama regulation to come
Despite the just completed elections, where the voters clearly indicated their disinterest in the additional environmental rules supported by Democrats, Obama is gearing up for an “onslaught” of new regulations.
The Obama administration is set to roll out a series of climate and pollution measures that rivals any president’s environmental actions of the past quarter-century — a reality check for Republicans who think last week’s election gave them a mandate to end what they call the White House’s “War on Coal.”
Tied to court-ordered deadlines, legal mandates and international climate talks, the efforts scheduled for the next two months show that President Barack Obama is prepared to spend the remainder of his term unleashing sweeping executive actions to combat global warming. And incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will have few options for stopping the onslaught, though Republicans may be able to slow pieces of it.
If anyone has any doubt left that this president, and the left, doesn’t care what the American public wants, this story lays that doubt to rest forever. Barack Obama dislikes the idea of democracy, of following the will of the people. Instead, he wants to rule as a dictator, dictating the rules that he thinks are right. And the left that supports him supports this tyrannical approach.