Next Cygnus/Antares launch to ISS set for October 27
Orbital Sciences has now scheduled the launch of its next cargo run to ISS for Monday October 27.
Year: 2014
55,000 Connecticut citizens to lose their health plans
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?
Comet Siding Spring flies past Mars, as seen by Hubble
Taking data from different Hubble images, scientists have created a cool composite image showing Comet Siding Spring as it flew past the red planet on Sunday.
Problems at the National Weather Service?
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.
Next Angara test flight in December
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.
Orion ready for launchpad!
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.
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Increasing activity at Comet 67P/C-G
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.
Composing Mozart’s “Requiem,” from Amadeus
An evening pause: From Amadeus (1984).
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, who described this as “a portrayal of divinely inspired genius.” Be sure to check out Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime.
Titan’s atmosphere is unexpectedly unbalanced
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.
Another failure for Russia’s Proton rocket?
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.
Voter fraud in Colorado
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.
India begins tests of larger rocket engine
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.