Patty Loveless & Vince Gill – My Kind Of Woman/My Kind Of Man
An evening pause: Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Year: 2015
Ground-breaking for LSST takes place in Chile
The official launch of construction of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) took place today in Chile.
Today, collaborators from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Chile’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Technológica (CONICYT) and several other international public-private partners will gather outside La Serena, Chile, for a traditional Chilean stone-laying ceremony to celebrate the construction launch of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).
They did the same kind of ceremony in Hawaii for the ground-breaking of the Thirty Meter Telescope, but things have gone very sour since. In Chile, however, I expect no problems. I wonder which local community has more sense.
New Horizons takes another picture of Pluto
Getting closer: The New Horizons science team has released the spacecraft’s first color image of Pluto and its moon Charon, taken on April 9.
The image is to the right. Right now Pluto is really not much more than a blob a few pixels across. However, images like this, taken in conjunction with later images, are useful to help refine the spacecraft’s course.
Another successful Dragon/Falcon 9 launch
The competition heats up: SpaceX has successfully launched another Dragon freighter to ISS.
We await word on whether the first stage was able to successfully land vertically on a barge in the Atlantic.
Update: Musk reports that the first stage landed on the barge but “too hard for survival.” Expect some interesting video to follow. I have posted SpaceX’s video of the launch below the fold. Beginning at about 22:45, after first stage separation, you can see it maintain a vertical orientation as it begins its descent.
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A detailed look at ULA’s proposed Vulcan rocket
Link here. Not only do they intend to recover and reuse the first stage engines, the rocket’s upper stage will be designed with the ability to be refueled and function as a space tug once it has reached orbit.
Ah, the joy of competition. It accomplishes so much, so quickly. I hope we never return to the feel-good era of “international cooperation.”
Stratolaunch update
This article about Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch company notes that the payload the system will put in orbit is likely to be less than originally hoped.
Still to be determined are the manned and cargo craft Stratolaunch will eventually send to orbit or even the International Space Station, Beames said. Musk’s SpaceX, an initial partner, is no longer associated with the venture. The rocket produced by Orbital ATK Inc., which replaced SpaceX, will probably be smaller than the medium-lift vehicle with a 6,000 kilogram (13,000-pound) payload that Stratolaunch had initially planned, Beames said. “I think it’s more likely we’ll be targeting a smaller payload class,” Beames said. “We’re not announcing anything on that yet.”
Allen’s company, Vulcan Aerospace, is also demanding that ULA change the name of its new Vulcan rocket, just revealed yesterday.
More evidence found for liquid water on Mars
A new study suggests that a liquid but very salty water does appear on Mars, during the night in the winter and spring months.
The team used Curiosity’s weather-monitoring equipment to look for those conditions and found that they occur every day in months throughout winter and spring. They suggest that overnight and before sunrise, some of the frost that forms on the planet’s surface interacts with the strong salts and turns liquid, seeping into the soil. This lines up with previous studies, which have detected geographic features that suggest flowing water.
The results come from the Gale Crater, which is itself too cold to support microbial life — even with liquid water present. But the study authors believe this phenomenon could occur anywhere on the planet, and may actually be more common in areas closer to the polar regions. Still, Mars is a pretty desolate place, and the amount of water we’re talking about is minimal at best. “There’s so little water that you can’t even see it visibly,” Morten Bo Madsen said.
Comet 67P/C-G does not have a magnetic field
Data collected by both Rosetta and Philae has confirmed that Comet 67P/C-G does not have a significant magnetic field.
The data review also found that Philae touched the surface four times, not three, during its unintended bouncing descent.
Donna Summer – McArthur Park
An evening pause: I especially like the energy of the song and performance. Everyone is moving, all the time. Can you imagine this happening during a symphonic performance of one of Beethoven’s symphonies in Europe in the early 1800s?
Hat tip Danae.
ULA has dubbed its next generation rocket Vulcan
ULA has announced its plans for replacing the Delta and Atlas 5 rockets, dubbing its new rocket Vulcan.
They plan to develop Vulcan’s first stage first and use it initially on Atlas 5 rockets so they can replace the Atlas 5 Russian engines as soon as possible. Also, they plan to recover the Vulcan rocket’s engines by having them separate from the booster after use and then get captured in a mid-air before hitting the ground. (See the graphic at the link to see a launch profile.)
In watching the press conference, ULA officials made it very clear that they are focusing a lot of their effort on lowering the cost of the rocket.
Weather issues have scrubbed today’s Dragon/Falcon 9 launch
Today’s Dragon/Falcon 9 launch has been scrubbed due to weather issues.
They will try again tomorrow at 4:10 Eastern.
The distortion of the global surface temperature datasets
Link here. Goddard does a good job of illustrating the differences between the measured and reported climate temperature datasets, and how the reported numbers are consistently shifted to make the past cooler than measured and the present hotter than measured.
He often attributes this bias to dishonest tampering with the data to support the theory of global warming. He might be right, but it is important to remember that you shouldn’t necessarily assign malice to things that are just as easily explained by human error or stupidity. In this case he also notes that almost all the weather stations that have been decommissioned in the past few decades have been located in rural areas. To replace their data, global warming scientists average the data from nearby stations, most of which are in urban areas that exhibit warmer temperatures because city constructs tend to cause local warming. The result? The recent datasets tend to show a strong trend upward.
What is causing a cooling in the datasets from prior to 1970 however is not explained by mere error. The data hasn’t changed. Someone must be deciding to adjust it downward, for reasons that are simply not justifiable.