Comet 67P/C-G fires its jets
New images from Rosetta show that the jets of material coming off Comet 67P/C-G’s nucleus come from specific locations.
Posted from Sedona, where we are off to visit some Indian ruins.
Year: 2014
Homeland Security settles lawsuit of reporter whose home they illegally searched
In a lawsuit settlement Homeland Security has agreed to pay $50,000 and promise to return everything they seized — including confidential files and paperwork that identified Homeland Security whistleblowers –during an illegal raid of a reporter’s home.
Audrey Hudson, an award-winning journalist most recently at the Washington Times, told The Daily Signal she was awoken by her barking dog around 4:30 a.m. on Aug. 6, 2013, to discover armed government agents had descended on her property under the cover of darkness. The agents had a search warrant for her husband’s firearms. As they scoured the home, Hudson was read her Miranda rights.
While inside Hudson’s house, a U.S. Coast Guard agent confiscated documents that contained “confidential notes, draft articles, and other newsgathering materials” that Hudson never intended for anyone else to see. The documents included the identities of whistleblowers at the Department of Homeland Security. The Coast Guard is part of Homeland Security.
The settlement requires the government to return all documents, destroy all notes made from these papers, and promise it did not copy anything. Does anyone believe this?
Posted from Sedona, Arizona, where Diane and I will be for the next week.
Itzhak Perlman – Theme from Schindler’s List
An evening pause: He plays this with the verge and style of the best bluegrass fiddlers.
Hat tip again to Phil Berardelli.
More IRS hard drives wiped to conceal evidence
Looks like a pattern to me: In a different legal case separate from its harassment of conservatives, the IRS has been accused of wiping more hard drives and destroying more evidence.
In its latest court filing, NetJets claims the IRS has been concealing evidence. Its lawyers say the computers of three key IRS employees were wiped clean, including the computer of “an excise-tax policy manager and a key decision maker regarding the application of the section 4261 ticket tax to whole and fractional aircraft-management companies.”
While the harassment of conservatives was a poltical act apparently instigated by the White House, this case has more to do with IRS managers interpreting the tax code, possibly improperly, so as to squeeze as much money from an American company as possible. That it is also possible that they were also willing to destroy evidence suggests a rampant corrupt culture that needs a major house-cleaning.
We can hope the next Congress will force this house-cleaning after the November election.
Posted on the road passig through Phoenix.
Delta 4 Heavy moved to launchpad for Orion flight
In preparation for a December test flight of the first Orion capsule, the Delta 4 Heavy rocket has been positioned on the launchpad.
The unmanned Dec. 4 mission, known as Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), is designed to test out Orion’s critical crew-safety systems, such as its thermal-protection gear. During the four-hour flight, the Orion capsule will fly 3,600 miles (5,800 kilometers) from Earth, then come speeding back into the planet’s atmosphere at about 20,000 mph (32,190 km/h) before splashing down softly in the Pacific Ocean, NASA officials said.
Forgive me if I remain decidedly unexcited. I still believe SLS to be an enormous waste of resources that would be better spent onother things.
Posted on the road south of Phoenix.
Harpo Marx – I Love Lucy (May 9, 1955)
An evening pause: A classic, and even better if you are familiar with the Marx Brothers movies.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli.
The upcoming cold and toxic winter on Titan’s southern hemisphere
Data from Cassini has found that the onset of winter in Titan’s southern hemisphere is coming on faster and colder than expected, with toxic clouds to boot.
The toxic cloud at the south pole is made up of hydrogen cyanide, and it could only form if the temperature there was colder than expected.
Candidate Mars landing sites for Europe’s ExoMars mission
Scientists have now chosen four candidate landing sites for the European/Russian ExoMars rover set to be launched in 2018.
Another moon for Earth
Astronomers have discovered an asteroid whose solar orbit is almost identical to Earth’s, and has it hovering so near the Earth that it is almost another moon.
Based on orbital data the scientists estimate that the asteroid, between 300 to 1000 feet in diameter, has been hovering near Earth for the past 775 years, and it will only drift away in about 165 years from now.
Correction: Engineer and regular reader James Fincannon emailed me to note that this asteroid really doesn’t have an orbit “almost identical to the Earth.” As he wrote, “Seems to go between Venus and Mercury and then all the way out to Mars! It seems to pass by Earth occasionally.” Thus, this recent period of closeness is only a temporary one.
India and NASA sign cooperative agreement
India and NASA have agreed to work together on several future science projects, including the construction of an Earth resources satellite and future Mars missions.
The space agencies of the two countries are going to set up a working group to plan this joint work.
Fixing the space junk problem of the new Japanese Epsilon rocket.
The Japanese space agency has now promised to make sure that future launches of its new low cost Epsilon rocket will not leave its upper stages in orbit as space junk.
Epsilon’s first flight, which was a success, left two large objects — the rocket’s upper stage and a smaller post-boost stage — in an orbit with a perigee of some 800 kilometers, meaning neither will fall into the atmosphere for a century or longer. In the meantime, they will add to the population of orbiting garbage that poses a threat to active satellites traversing this orbit.
Japan has signed international agreements requiring them to not create space junk, so on future launches they are promising to make sure the upper stages are released in low enough orbits that they will quickly decay and burn up in the atmosphere.
A decision in November on Orbital’s reliance on Russian engines in Antares
The competition heats up: Orbital Sciences has announced that it will make a decision in November on replacing the Russian rocket engine that it uses in its Antares commercial rocket.
In a presentation at the 65th International Astronautical Congress here, Orbital Executive Vice President Frank Culbertson said the engine decision is linked to the company’s proposal for NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS)2 competition. NASA issued the request for proposals for CRS2 on Sept. 26, with responses due Nov. 14. “We’ll make sure we’ll have a decision on that before we submit the proposal,” Culbertson said when asked about the status of the engine decision.
Orbital has been weighing for several months a replacement for the AJ-26 engines that Antares currently uses. Those engines, provided by Aerojet Rocketdyne, are refurbished versions of Soviet-era NK-33 engines originally designed for the N-1 lunar rocket developed in the 1960s.
The company is considering several proposals, including one from ATK, which is in the process of merging with Orbital at this very moment.
The article also notes that Orbital recognizes that the use of Russian engines will likely work against them in the competition to win the next ISS cargo contract, and that if they don’t have a plan to replace those engines it is quite possible that NASA will go with a different company, such as Sierra Nevada, when it awards that contract.
As I said already, oh how I love competition.