Year: 2014

Problems with the European Gaia space telescope

7:43 pm

Shades of Hubble: The first data from Europe’s Gaia space telescope, launched to map a billion Milky Way stars, will be delayed 9 months while engineers grapple with several problems.

Gaia managers started taking test images early this year, but soon noticed three issues. For one, more light than anticipated is bending around the 10-metre sunshield and entering the telescope.

Small amounts of water trapped in the spacecraft before launch are being released now that the telescope is in the vacuum of space, and more ice than calculated is accumulating on the telescope’s mirrors. In addition, the telescope itself is expanding and contracting by a few dozen nanometres more than expected because of thermal variations.

Mission managers say the number of stars detected will remain the same even if these complications remain untreated, but the accuracy in measurements of the fainter stars will suffer.

Unlike Hubble, however, there is no way to send a shuttle and a team of astronauts to Gaia to fix it. And it sounds like these issues will have an impact on the telescope’s abilities to gather its intended data.

This story raises my hackles for another reason. Gaia was a very technically challenging space telescope to build, but it was far easier and less cutting edge than the James Webb Space Telescope. It also cost far less. What will happen when Webb gets launched later this decade? How likely is it to have similar issues? Based on a story I just completed for Sky & Telescope on the difficulties of building ground-based telescopes, I’d say Webb is very likely to have similar problems, with no way to fix them. The American astronomy community could then be faced with the loss of two decades of research because they had put all the eggs into Webb’s basket, and thus had no money to build anything else.

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Angara to fly July 9?

7:32 pm

The first test flight of Russia’s new Angara rocket is now tentatively scheduled for July 9.

The story confirms that the problem was a faulty valve, which it appears they can replace at the spaceport, rather than return the rocket to the manufacturer. The story also had this line, which tells us that Russia is still struggling with quality control problems: “The valve’s malfunctioning was a result of sloppy assembly.”

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Seven unjustified school suspensions

6:51 pm

Seven school suspensions that were insane and completely unjustified.

I’ve posted about most of these stories previously, but it is important to read about them again to see how completely ridiculous and oppressive they were. Each one of these actions was a good reason for everyone to pull their kids from these public schools, especially when the school officials who perpetrated these obscenities were not fired.

The first and third were especially egregious, but the third illustrates how best to combat the schools when they act this way.

Fourteen year old Jared Marcum wore a NRA “Protect Your Rights” t-shirt to school with a hunting rifle on it. Despite the fact that the shirt didn’t violate the school’s dress code, a screaming teacher demanded that he turn the shirt inside out. Marcum was then removed from class, suspended, arrested, and faced a year in jail for “obstructing an officer” because he wouldn’t stop protesting his innocence while he was being hauled away. In this case, 100 kids wore the same shirts to school as part of a protest without being challenged and the family lawyered up and got the charges dropped. [emphasis mine]

If one student is suspended for making his pop tart look like a gun, every student in the school should do the same. If one student is suspended for innocently using the word “gun” in conversation, then every student in the school should use the word repeatedly in conversation. If students and parents inundate the school with more examples of the behavior the school was trying to ban, the schools stop this insanity very quickly.

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ISIS demands a Jewish genocide

12:09 pm

The religion of peace: ISIS supporters are now demanding a new Jewish holocaust.

Facts remain facts. The world of Islam is poor, ignorant, bigoted, violent, and oppressive. Where there is wealth, such as in the Middle East, it is fueled entirely by oil that was found by Western capitalist companies and pumped to the surface using Western-developed technology. Without that help, the oil would still be underground and these Islamic countries would still be poor.

The oppressive nature of Islam, however, remains obvious and widespread. If we are intellectually honest we must ask: Why is that? What is it about Islam that results in this consistent cultural and social failure? An open-minded look at the language of the Koran and the history of this religion will give you a straight-forward answer, and that answer is not a pleasant one.

That the American intellectual community and many American politicians from both parties seem unwilling to take this hard look at Islam says a great deal about their lack of intellectual honesty. It also tells us something about their own attitude towards oppression. Maybe they don’t dislike tyranny that so much.

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Plastic bags do not kill birds and fill the oceans

9:49 am

Another environmental claim turns out to be vastly exaggerated: The scientist who claimed that islands of plastic bags were filling the oceans has found that his claim was bogus.

The scientist whose findings environmentalists used to shame us into bringing our own reusable bags to the grocery store now says that his estimate of one million tons of plastic floating in the ocean may have been off by a factor of perhaps 143. His latest estimate ranges from 7,000 to 35,000 tons, and even most of that has biodegraded into granules. …

Also doubtful: The environmentalist claim that 1.5 million marine animals choke to death each year on plastic bags that ran away from home for a life at sea. They’ve revised their estimates downward to 6.6 percent of that, but even the new figure has no empirical support.

But remember, Barack Obama says the science is settled, and that anyone who questions him or expresses any doubt is the equivalent of a Holocaust denier.

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How beautiful we were.

9:36 am

How beautiful we were.

An epitaph for American on its birthday.

And on its birthday, we should all make it a point to reread this document. Key quote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

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Space junk damages ISS coolant radiator?

9:09 am

According to the Russian Interfax news agency, a piece of space junk has hit a coolant radiator on the U.S. portion of ISS.

The source says that no coolant has escaped from the system and that NASA engineers are analyzing images to assess the damage.

Readers should be aware that I have tried without success to find the NASA website the story claims is the source for this information. Moreover, this story is reported nowhere in the U.S. press, and it is strange for a NASA website to report something like this and it not be quickly picked up by the U.S. press.

Thus, I am not entirely convinced yet that this story is accurate.

Update: a commenter below has provided this link to a subsequent post at nasaspaceflight about the impact.

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Corvette Museum preserves sinkhole

10:28 pm

Turning lemons into lemonade: The sinkhole that swallowed eight prized cars at the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky in February has become such an attraction that the museum intends to preserve it.

Attendance was up nearly 60 percent from March to the start of this week, compared to the year-ago period, museum officials said. Sign-ups for museum memberships are up sharply, as are merchandise and cafe sales at the museum. The museum sells sinkhole-related shirts, post cards and prints.

Museum board members considered three options for the sinkhole: fill it in, preserve the entire sinkhole or keep a portion of it. They opted to maintain about half the 40-foot-wide, 60-foot-deep sinkhole, Strode said. There’s a “strong probability” that one or two of the damaged cars will be put back in the hole, he said.

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ISEE-3 fires its thrusters for the first time since 1987.

4:57 pm

The private team resurrecting the 1970s space probe ISEE-3 successfully fired its thrusters for the first time since 1987.

It took several attempts and days to perform the roll maneuver because ISEE-3 was not responding to test commands. But this time, controllers got in touch. They increased the roll rate from 19.16 revolutions per minute to 19.76 RPM, putting it within mission specifications for trajectory corrections.

The spacecraft is now prepped for the big burn that will change its trajectory.

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Two exoplanets disappear

4:53 pm

The uncertainty of science: Two exoplanets orbiting Gliese 581, both thought to be in the habitable zone, have now been proven to not even exist.

“We’ve proven that some of the controversial signals from Gliese 581 don’t come from two proposed Goldilocks planets, but instead are coming from activity within the star itself masquerading as planets,” lead study author Paul Robertson, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, told Space.com.

This result should serve as a strong reminder: Though it is likely that many if not most of the so far discovered exoplanets are real, it is also likely that many will turn out to be false positives. We won’t have solid real knowledge about them until we can actually get a close look at them, which will require far better telescopes in space, and maybe even interstellar missions to them.

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Telescope teamwork produces spectacular galaxy image

11:55 am

M106

Combining images from a host of space and ground-based telescopes, astronomers have created a spectacular image of the galaxy M106.

This galactic fireworks display is taking place in NGC 4258 (also known as M106), a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way. This galaxy is famous, however, for something that our Galaxy doesn’t have – two extra spiral arms that glow in X-ray, optical, and radio light. These features, or anomalous arms, are not aligned with the plane of the galaxy, but instead intersect with it.

The anomalous arms are seen in this new composite image of NGC 4258, where X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory are blue, radio data from the NSF’s Karl Jansky Very Large Array are purple, optical data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope are yellow and blue, and infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope are red.

A new study of these anomalous arms made with Spitzer shows that shock waves, similar to sonic booms from supersonic planes, are heating large amounts of gas – equivalent to about 10 million Suns. What is generating these shock waves? Radio data shows that the supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 4258 is producing powerful jets of high-energy particles. Researchers thinkthat these jets strike the disk of the galaxy and generate shock waves. These shock waves, in turn, heat some of the gas – composed mainly of hydrogen molecules – to thousands of degrees.

The astronomers also used the Herschel Space Observatory to confirm the data from Spitzer.

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