Month: December 2015

Success at last for Akatsuki

8:45 am

Five years after the Japanese Venus probe Akatsuki’s main engines failed while trying to put it into orbit, the spacecraft today fired its attitude thrusters and was successfully inserted into orbit.

This is a singular achievement by the Japanese engineers running the mission. They improvised a plan using the thrusters, which were designed to adjust the spacecraft orientation, not its course, and were able to get Akatsuki in an solar orbit that brought it back to Venus.

0 comments

Russia has another launch failure

8:37 am

In the heat of competition: Russia today confirmed that its Saturday launch of a military satellite failed when the satellite did not separate from the Soyuz rocket’s upper stage.

For most of the weekend Russian news sources were claiming that the satellite had been inserted into its proper orbit. One source however had correctly noted the failure. Because of the contradiction I had held off posting on this. Now that the failure is confirmed, it reveals again what seem to be chronic quality control problems within the Russian aerospace industry. They fix problem one place and another pops up somewhere else.

0 comments

The murder rate on U.S. islands with strict gun laws

9:32 am

A comparison of the murder rate on U.S. islands that have very strict gun control laws with the average U.S. murder rate finds that gun control has no effect on reducing violence, and in fact might help increase it.

The article finds that the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have far more murders per person than the U.S., while Hawaii has less. The research does demonstrate, however, that the argument used by places like Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC (that the access to guns in nearby communities causes their gun laws to fail) is bogus. It doesn’t matter if guns are available nearby, as shown above. Instead, as the author correctly notes,

A major problem with trying to lower murder rates with gun laws aimed at restricting the entire population’s access to firearms is that only a tiny number of guns are needed to supply those involved in violent crime. From an economic perspective, it does not matter much if you attempt to fill a bucket from a small pond or an ocean; filling the bucket is easy in either case.

3 comments

Western Muslim reformers to name extremists in their mosques

9:11 am

Good news! A group of western Muslim reformers, horrified by the violence being perpetrated in the name of Islam, have announced plans to name and shame the extremists within their religious communities.

Khader and other members of the group on Friday released a declaration of principles calling on Muslims to reject violent jihad and endorse religious freedom for all and secular government, and saying they will call out those who reject it. “We reject the idea of an Islamic state,” Khader said.

In imitation of Christian reformer Martin Luther, the group’s members plan to take copies of the declaration and post them on the doors of their local mosques. “If they reject them then we know they’re on the side of the problem,” said Zuhdi Jasser, president of the Phoenix-based American Islamic Forum for Democracy, at a news conference at which the declaration was unveiled.

It is this kind of reaction that has been sorely lacking within the Islamic community since 9/11. If western Muslims had done this then, then the accusations against them for celebrating on that horrific day would not now be so easy to justify. Still, better late than never.

Interestingly, the two groups expressing opposition to their effort are Muslims within their community, which is not surprising, and liberals here in the U.S. and in Europe. Read the article, as I don’t want to quote it all. It is clearly illustrates the fascist roots of modern liberalism, which seems more willing to forge links with the terrorist elements of Islam rather than fight it.

8 comments

New spectacular images of Pluto

3:01 pm

Pluto's mountainous shoreline

Many cool images! The New Horizons science team has today released new images from the spacecraft’s close fly-by of Pluto.

These latest pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 250-280 feet (77-85 meters) per pixel – revealing features less than half the size of a city block on the diverse surface of the distant planet. In these new images, New Horizons captured a wide variety of spectacular, cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains.

I have cropped and lowered the resolution of the image above to fit it here. Make sure you click on the link to see it and the other images. As they note,

In this highest-resolution image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, great blocks of Pluto’s water-ice crust appear jammed together in the informally named al-Idrisi mountains. Some mountain sides appear coated in dark material, while other sides are bright. Several sheer faces appear to show crustal layering, perhaps related to the layers seen in some of Pluto’s crater walls. Other materials appear crushed between the mountains, as if these great blocks of water ice, some standing as much as 1.5 miles high, were jostled back and forth. The mountains end abruptly at the shoreline of the informally named Sputnik Planum, where the soft, nitrogen-rich ices of the plain form a nearly level surface, broken only by the fine trace work of striking, cellular boundaries and the textured surface of the plain’s ices (which is possibly related to sunlight-driven ice sublimation).

Today’s release also includes a short animation of a faint distant Kuiper Belt object, assembled by four images taken by New Horizons. The images don’t show much more than a streak of light, but the feat of imaging this object by a spacecraft billions of miles away in this manner is breath-taking.

1 comment

India wins contract to launch private weather satellites

8:39 am

The competition heats up: The first two satellites in the first private weather satellite constellation will be launched on India’s PSLV rocket.

With 12 satellites on orbit, PlanetiQ will collect approximately 34,000 “occultations” per day, evenly distributed around the globe with high-density sampling over both land and water. Each occultation is a vertical profile of atmospheric data with very high vertical resolution, comprised of measurements less than every 200 meters from the Earth’s surface up into the ionosphere. The data is similar to that collected by weather balloons, but more accurate, more frequent and on a global scale.

“The world today lacks sufficient data to feed into weather models, especially the detailed vertical data that is critical to storm prediction. That’s why we see inaccurate or ambiguous forecasts for storms like Hurricane Joaquin, which can put numerous lives at risk and cost businesses millions of dollars due to inadequate preparation or risk management measures,” McCormick said. “Capturing the detailed vertical structure of the atmosphere from pole to pole, especially over the currently under-sampled oceans, is the missing link to improving forecasts of high-impact weather.”

This project is a win-win for aerospace. Not only will this weather constellation help shift ownership of weather satellites from government to private ownership, the company’s decision to use India’s PSLV rocket increases the competition in the launch industry.

0 comments

Beaver dams centuries old

8:28 am

Using a map from the first major study of beavers from 150 years ago, scientists have found that beaver dams can last centuries.

The researcher who produced the original map, Lewis Henry Morgan, had himself theorized that beaver dams were long-lived. This study proves it. Then again, it makes sense, since geography is going to limit the right locations for a dam. The right place is always going to be the right place, and thus the new study proves that generations of beavers go back to the best locations repeatedly.

3 comments

LRO finds lunar impact site for Apollo rocket stage

10:03 pm

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has located the impact site for the Apollo 16 rocket booster that, like four other boosters, had been deliberately crashed on the surface so the Apollo seismometers could use the vibrations to study the Moon’s interior.

The other impact sites had been found already, but Apollo 16 was harder to pin down because contact with the booster had ended prematurely so its location was less well known.

0 comments

Boxer cites California gun laws to stop California terrorist attacks

5:28 pm

The reality-challenged Democratic Party: Today Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California), in demanding new gun control regulations in response to yesterday’s terrorist attack in California, noted that “sensible gun laws work. We’ve proven it in California.”

You can’t make this stuff up. The so-called sensible but very restrictive gun control laws in California did nothing to stop the murderers yesterday, but they did do a good job of making sure the innocent people there were unarmed, helpless, and easy targets. (The attack also took place in a government facility that is a gun-free zone.)

So of course, Boxer and the Democrats want to disarm everyone else, so that these killers won’t have as hard a time at killing us.

37 comments

Oblique view of Ceres’s bright spots

3:58 pm

Occator Crater on Ceres

Cool image time! The image above is a newly released image of Occator Crater on Ceres, the location of the dwarf planet’s double bright spots, taken by Dawn in October.

I have cropped the image to focus on the crater and the bright spots. Unlike most previous images, this one is taken from an angle to bring out the topography, which also confirms what other data had shown, that the bright spots are not on top of any peaks. If anything, they appear to be located at low spots in the crater, as that previous data had suggested.

Though the spots are not really very bright, they are very bright relative to the dark surface of Ceres. This is why it is difficult to get a good image of them. Either you have to over-expose the spots to see the surface details around them, or under-expose the surface around them to see some detail in the spots. This image tries to find a middle ground.

Eventually they will move Dawn in very close to try to get higher resolution images of the spots alone. At that time we might finally be able to get a better understanding of what causes them.

0 comments

Syria’s only astronaut now a refugee

9:57 am

The uncertainty of life: Muhammed Faris, the only Syrian to ever fly in space, is now a refugee living in Turkey with his family.

Then in 2011, just as he was preparing to enjoy a life in retirement, it all went wrong – as it did for his country. In 2012, he defected from the Syrian Air Force and joined the armed opposition. He was deemed a traitor, had all his honours revoked and his belongings confiscated. He eventually had to flee his country, leaving almost everything behind.

Read it all. He says that his reasons for leaving the air force were because it was bombing its own citizens but I wonder if it might be more complicated than that.

0 comments

Arm yourself

9:38 am

As usual, yesterday’s mass shooting in California caused President Obama and the entire left to go into spasms demanding more gun control. A gunman shows up at a random site and begins shooting innocent unarmed people, and the first instinct of the left is to disarm more people so that vicious murderers will have more unarmed people to nonchalantly murder.

I say, it doesn’t matter whether yesterday’s killers were Islamic madmen, right-wing madmen, left-wing madmen, or plain-old madmen. What matters is that they had an easy time killing lots of people, because those people decided to remain unarmed and helpless in the face of violence.

I say, arm yourself. Get prepared so that if you find yourself in such terrible circumstances you can fight back and possibly survive, and in the process maybe save a lot of other lives as well. The likelihood that there will more such killers, most of whom will likely be Islamic terrorists because that is whom we are presently at war with, is quite high. To sit helpless and not prepared for battle is the height of foolishness.

You are personally responsible. You cannot depend on the police or government to defend you. You need to be prepared to defend yourself.

Arm yourself. The next time a killer shows up there should be ten free Americans capable of stopping him or her in their tracks, before anyone innocent dies.

22 comments

Russia’s ten-year space budget slashed again

9:03 am

The uncertainty of budgets: Russia has once again cut the ten-year budget for its space program, forcing its space agency Roscosmos to reconsider its ten-year plan running through 2025.

Russia’s federal space agency Roscosmos will receive just 1.5 trillion rubles ($22.5 billion) in government funding over the next ten years, less than half of estimated figures cited by space officials earlier this year, a Roscosmos statement said on Monday evening. The space agency was planning on receiving around 3.4 trillion rubles as part of the Federal Space Program 2016-2025 (FSP), a decade-long planning document that lays out Russia’s goals in space and allocates funding for them.

But Russia’s economic crisis and a broad readjustment of government spending across all sectors has forced Roscosmos to redraft its 10-year proposal several times over the past year.

This is not necessarily bad news for Russia’s space program. The cuts will force them to function like a private company, lean and mean, rather than a bloated wasteful government operation. They therefore might actually be more competitive as a result.

0 comments
1 … 3 4 5 6