ISRO completes engine burn
The competition heats up: India’s ISRO space agency successfully completed a 20 second engine test of its new home-built cryogenic rocket engine.
Month: March 2015
Curiosity moves on
After six months and a short pause in work while engineers analyzed a short circuit, Curiosity has finally left the Pahrump Hills are on the slopes of Mount Sharp.
The rover has begun driving away from the Pahrump Hills outcrop where it had spent the last six months. On Thursday, March 12, it drove about 33 feet (about 10 meters) southwestward. The rover team plans on taking Curiosity through a valley called “Artist’s Drive” to reach higher geological layers of Mount Sharp. Curiosity is currently heading towards a rock outcrop known as “Garden City.”
The link has a nice image showing Curiosity’s recent travels as well as its future route.
Arkansas SWAT team kidnaps a family’s seven kids
Theft by government: The Arkansas SWAT team kidnapping of seven children from their parents continues, with the hearing that was supposed to settle the issue and get the children home postponed for six weeks for no reason.
It will be at least “6 more weeks of kidnapping” for the 7 homeschooled, homebirthed Stanley children, according to their father. Hal and Michelle Stanley were given no warning that their court hearing scheduled for February 12 would be abruptly postponed until March 23. They say they were not given any explanation as to why the hearing was postponed.
They had been under the impression that their children would be coming home after the hearing, and had held onto the hope that the crazy situation would be resolved, and their family would be reunited. The pain in their voices was palpable as they expressed their disappointment and grief over the postponement.
The father explains to Health Impact News that they are only allowed to visit with their children a few hours a week, under strict supervision. There has to be two observers, and if they talk about things they are not supposed to discuss with their children, the visit is cut short. As a condition to these supervised visits, Hal and Michelle must attend “parenting classes,” even though they have homeschooled their children for many years. Hal Stanley is also a 73 year old ordained Southern Baptist Minister.
As said back in January when I first reported this horrifying story, read it all, it will terrify you. The parents have been charged with no crime and there is no evidence at all of them abusing their children. The whole issue was supposedly prompted because the Stanleys used a legal water purifier for their garden that the has not been approved by the FDA.
Yet, the state now claims the power to steal this family’s children, with no legal justification.
Life is beautiful
Link here. Just go and look. It is worth it.
Aerosmith – Livin’ On The Edge
An evening pause: Good music, but this video reveals a great deal about the future in how it portrays an adolescent view of the present. Even more important, the view is very typical of modern culture.
Another American expresses his anger
The rage builds: “So I’d like to ask the Fed, is it that you just hate the working class here in America and thus like to torment them or are you truly that stuck up your own asses that you just cannot see the light?”
Read it all. I don’t agree with his perspective entirely, but I do agree that the elite of this country are increasingly ignoring the wishes of the general public, for their own gain and to the detriment of everyone else. If they don’t stop this behavior soon, they are going to find this rage coming back to bite them, and that bite is going to hurt everyone very badly.
The history of Pluto, in images
Link here.
And the best images are yet to come, this July, when New Horizons makes its fly-by.
Russia abandons super-rocket designed to compete with SLS
The competition heats up: Russia has decided to abandon an expensive attempt to build an SLS-like super-rocket and will instead focus on incremental development of its smaller but less costly Angara rocket.
Facing significant budgetary pressures, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, has indefinitely postponed its ambitious effort to develop a super-heavy rocket to rival NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System, SLS. Instead, Russia will focus on radical upgrades of its brand-new but smaller Angara-5 rocket which had its inaugural flight in Dec. 2014, the agency’s Scientific and Technical Council, NTS, decided on Thursday, Mar. 12.
For Russia’s space industry, it appears that these budgetary pressures have been a blessing in disguise. Rather than waste billions on an inefficient rocket for which there is no commercial demand — as NASA is doing with SLS (under orders from a wasteful Congress) — they will instead work on further upgrades of Angara, much like SpaceX has done with its Falcon family of rockets. This will cost far less, is very efficient, and provides them a better chance to compete for commercial launches that can help pay for it all. And best of all, it offers them the least costly path to future interplanetary missions, which means they might actually be able to make those missions happen. To quote the article again:
By switching upper stages of the existing Angara from kerosene to the more potent hydrogen fuel, engineers might be able to boost the rocket’s payload from current 25 tons to 35 tons for missions to the low Earth orbit. According to Roscosmos, Angara-A5V could be used for piloted missions to the vicinity of the Moon and to its surface.
In a sense, the race is now on between Angara-A5V and Falcon Heavy. It shall be quite exciting to watch this competition unfold between big government and private enterprise over the next few decades.
Magnetic field science satellites launched
An Atlas 5 rocket successfully launched four NASA research satellites Thursday night designed to study the behavior of the Earth and Sun’s magnetic fields at high resolution.
The quartet of observatories is being placed into an oblong orbit stretching tens of thousands of miles into the magnetosphere — nearly halfway to the moon at one point. They will fly in pyramid formation, between 6 miles and 250 miles apart, to provide 3-D views of magnetic reconnection on the smallest of scales.
Magnetic reconnection is what happens when magnetic fields like those around Earth and the sun come together, break apart, then come together again, releasing vast energy. This repeated process drives the aurora, as well as solar storms that can disrupt communications and power on Earth. Data from this two-year mission should help scientists better understand so-called space weather.
The neck of Comet 67P/C-G in color
Rosetta’s high resolution camera has taken a color image of Comet 67P/C-G’s narrow neck, the area where the most plume activity has taken place.
When seen with the human eye, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is grey – all over. With its color filters Rosetta’s scientific imaging system OSIRIS, however, can discern tiny differences in reflectivity. To this effect, scientists from the OSIRIS team image the same region on the comet’s surface using different color filters. If, for example, the region appears especially bright in one of these images, it reflects light of this wavelength especially well.
“Even though the color variations on 67P’s surface are minute, they can give us important clues”, says OSIRIS Principal Investigator Holger Sierks from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. In a recent analysis performed by the OSIRIS team, the Hapi region clearly stands out from the rest of the comet: while most parts of 67P display a slightly reddish reflectivity spectrum as is common for cometary nuclei and other primitive bodies, the reflection of red light is somewhat lower in this region.
They as yet do not know exactly why the smooth area at the neck has a very slight blueish tinge, though they suspect it is because of the presence of a higher percentage of frozen water.
Yutu reveals a complex lunar geology
The uncertainty of science: The Chinese lunar rover Yutu has uncovered a much more complicated geology history than previously predicted at its landing site on the moon.
Those data paint a detailed portrait of the Chang’e 3 landing site, which sits just 165 feet (50 m) away from a 1,475-foot-wide (450 m) crater known as C1. C1 was gouged out by a cosmic impact that occurred sometime between 80 million and 27 million years ago, the study authors said.
Yutu studied the ground it rolled over, characterized the craters it cruised past and investigated an oddly coarse-textured rock dubbed Loong, which measures about 13 feet long by 5 feet high (4 by 1.5 m). Overall, the rover’s observations suggest that the composition of its landing site is quite different from that of the places visited by NASA’s Apollo missions and the Soviet Union’s Luna program.
The rover found 9 distinct layers, suggesting numerous and different past events that layered the surface.
Privately built module for ISS unveiled today
The competition heats up: Bigelow Aerospace today unveiled the inflatable habitable module it is building for ISS that will launch in September.
The total cost for this module was $17 million, compared to the billion that NASA routinely spent to build its own modules.
The Refreshments – Let It Rock
An evening pause: Who says the world doesn’t love American culture? Watch a Swedish band and an English guitarist play classic rock.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Curiosity has resumed science work
Engineers have decided they know enough about the short circuit produced by Curiosity’s drill two weeks ago that they can resume science operations while they figure out how to handle the issue.
Be prepared for more electrical problems in the future. This issue is unfortunately not going to go away.
Archeologists discover the world’s oldest pretzel
Archeologists have uncovered a pretzel 250 years old, as well as bread roll and a croissant, at an excavation in the eastern Bavarian city of Regensburg.
A peek into the world’s largest underground mine
Link here.
Obama learns of existence of mysterious ‘‘Hillary Clinton’’ from news!
President Obama was reportedly shocked and stunned to learn from simply watching the news on Wednesday of the existence of this formally unknown yet very important “Hillary Clinton” person whom not only had been his Democratic primary opponent in 2007 and 2008, but had also been his Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.
Ganymede’s underground salt water ocean
By measuring the interaction of Jupiter and Ganymede’s magnetic fields, scientists have been able to estimate the size of the salt water ocean in Ganymede’s interior.
A team of scientists led by Joachim Saur of the University of Cologne in Germany came up with the idea of using Hubble to learn more about the inside of the moon. “I was always brainstorming how we could use a telescope in other ways,” said Saur. “Is there a way you could use a telescope to look inside a planetary body? Then I thought, the aurorae! Because aurorae are controlled by the magnetic field, if you observe the aurorae in an appropriate way, you learn something about the magnetic field. If you know the magnetic field, then you know something about the moon’s interior.”
If a saltwater ocean were present, Jupiter’s magnetic field would create a secondary magnetic field in the ocean that would counter Jupiter’s field. This “magnetic friction” would suppress the rocking of the aurorae. This ocean fights Jupiter’s magnetic field so strongly that it reduces the rocking of the aurorae to 2 degrees, instead of 6 degrees if the ocean were not present. Scientists estimate the ocean is 60 miles (100 kilometers) thick — 10 times deeper than Earth’s oceans — and is buried under a 95-mile (150-kilometer) crust of mostly ice.
That’s more water than contained in all of Earth’s oceans.
Family flees home due to death threats
Modern American freedom: The parents of one of the Oklahoma fraternity students caught on video making a racist chant have fled their home due to death threats.
As vile as the racist chanting was, it was not threatening anyone with death. Moreover, we have something called the first amendment, which protects all speech, even the vile kind. Threatening the parents of someone who says something you don’t like is hardly standing up for righteous principles.
In related news, Christians at George Washington University in the District of Columbia face punishment because they refuse to participate in gay sensitivity training sessions.
A conservative student group at The George Washington University faces punishment, including the loss of its funding, for refusing to engage in LGBT sensitivity training on campus. The students are now being condemned and attacked on campus by those who claim they’re committing an “act of violence” for standing up for their members’ individual rights and Judeo-Christian values. The Young America’s Foundation chapter at the Washington, D.C.-based academic institute has refused to participate in LGBT sensitivity training recently made as a requirement.
Amanda Robbins, vice president of GW YAF, told The Christian Post that their objection to the training “stems not only from many of our members’ Judeo-Christian values, but also from our organization’s commitment to defending the individual rights of every student on campus. We firmly believe that there should be no such preconditions for any student organization to be able to operate freely on campus,” said Robbins.
The closest exoplanet is Earth-sized
Having detected an exoplanet circling Alpha Centauri B in 2012, astronomers have now narrowed its mass to one to three times that of Earth, making this closest exoplanet an Earth-sized planet.