Because of the problems Rosetta experienced during its last close fly-by of Comet 67P/C-G the engineering team has worked out a new approach strategy for future observations.
Essentially, they are postponing any close fly-bys for the near future. Instead, they will observe from farther away, while reassessing the situation and planing for later opportunities.
Meanwhile, on April 12 the next opportunity to listen for Philae begins.
The competition heats up: In 2014 more cubesats were launched than during the industry’s first ten years.
Without doubt the concept of cubesats is now taking the satellite industry by storm, mainly because of the advent of new electronic miniaturization. However, the most fascination part of this story was how the concept was born:
In 1999, Puig-Suari met with Bob Twiggs, at the time an aerospace engineer at Stanford University, to discuss ways of getting more student projects into space. “We had to do something to get more opportunities to launch these things,” recalls Twiggs, now at Morehead State University in Kentucky. They focused on slimming down the spacecraft, because weight drives up the cost of reaching orbit.
Over lunch at a sandwich shop in San Luis Obispo, Twiggs and Puig-Suari sketched out options on a napkin. They thought hard about the potential capabilities of a 10-centimeter cube with a mass limit of 1 kilogram—the size and weight of a liter of water. Clad in solar cells, the cube would eke out perhaps a watt of power, enough to power a small computer and a radio: “a Sputnik,” Puig-Suari says. Back at Stanford, Twiggs found the perfect life-size demonstration model: a plastic box used for storing the insanely popular stuffed animals known as Beanie Babies. A standard was born.
Read the whole thing. The low cost of these tiny satellites is about to revolutionize the entire unmanned space industry.
The competition heats up: In its next launch on Monday, SpaceX will once again try to safely land its first stage on an ocean barge, allowing it to reuse that stage on later flights.
Monday afternoon is certainly going to be an exciting day for space cadets. First, at 4 pm (Eastern) the head of ULA will reveal the design of that company’s new rocket. Then, at 4:33 pm (Eastern), SpaceX will launch Dragon to ISS while attempting to return the first stage safely.
The competition heats up: ULA has scheduled a press conference on April 13, during a space conference, to reveal their design for their next generation rocket to replace the Delta and Atlas 5 rockets.
It is clear that the company is not wasting time getting this new rocket underway. They recognize the competitive threat placed on them by SpaceX, and they are responding correctly.
An evening pause: Hat tip Danae.
The competition heats up: One of the heads of Airbus Safran that is offering to build Europe’s next rocket, Ariane 6, has said that they must have full control of the rocket and project or they won’t do it.
“We are now a few weeks from the submission of a bid, and of course at this stage everyone defends his camp,” Lahoud said. “It is said that industry needs to make a financial contribution. We have said it’s possible we will contribute, but on condition that [development] not be conducted under the former system.
“We want responsibility for the design, the production, the commercialization and operations to be in the hands of industry, and not in a sort of mixed-economy creation that borrows more from the United Nations than from what our competitors do. Under these circumstances, and only under these circumstances, will there be a business case that allows us to invest, and to defend before our boards of directors the fact that corporate cash needs to be spent.”
In other words, they will not build something that will be under the complex bureaucratic control of the many-headed European Space Agency. Under that framework, they don’t think they can compete, so why bother?
Link here, with lots of photos of the event.
Yeltin also wrote about his visit to this American supermarket in his autobiography, which I describe as well in my book, Leaving Earth. It unquestionably shattered his belief in communism and led him to become the upstart revolutionary who helped bring the Soviet Union out of communism in the 1990s.
A Michigan school district, strapped for cash, preferred demolishing an empty school building rather than sell it to a private charter school for several million.
The district eventually backed down to public pressure and made the sale, but this story is very instructive. You have to watch the video report at the link to find out who really led the opposition to this sale, and why. I wonder if you can guess.
Link here. The opening paragraphs should chill your bones;
“I can’t have you participate in class anymore.”
I was on my way out of class when my social welfare and policy professor casually called me over to tell me this. The friendliness of her tone did not match her words, and I attempted a shocked, confused apology. It was my first semester at the Hunter College School of Social Work, and I was as yet unfamiliar with the consistent, underlying threat that characterized much of the school’s policy and atmosphere. This professor was simply more open and direct than most.
I asked if I had said or done anything inappropriate or disrespectful, and she was quick to assure me that it was not my behavior that was the problem. No: It was my opinions. Or, as she put it, “I have to give over this information as is.”
I spent the rest of that semester mostly quiet, frustrated, and missing my undergraduate days, when my professors encouraged intellectual diversity and give-and-take. I attempted to take my case to a higher-up at school, an extremely nice, fair professor who insisted that it was in my own best interest not to rock the boat. I was doing well in his class, and I believed him when he told me he wanted me to continue doing well. He explained to me that people who were viewed as too conservative had had problems graduating in the past, and he didn’t want that to happen to me. I thought he was joking . . . until I realized he wasn’t.
Read it all. It cites numerous examples in academia where students with dissenting views are threatened with punishment and even expulsion if they dared express those views.
It will also raise the question: Why does anyone send anyone to these schools anymore? The last thing the students are getting is an education.
In September Russian hunters accidentally discovered the frozen remains of an adolescent whoolly rhinoceros.
Larger than modern-day rhinos and more suited to extreme cold and harsh environments, the woolly rhino first appeared about 3.6 million years ago. Weighing up to an estimated 4,000 pounds and equipped with 24-inch-long horns, these intimidating creatures co-existed with early humans and were often hunted. Yet for all their strength, the woolly rhino became extinct over 10,000 years ago. Unlike the woolly mammoth, little is known about this species since few specimens have ever been retrieved. Those that have were often mummified to a point where study was impossible, and up until now, no calf has ever been found.
RT reported that experts at the Yakutsk academy will attempt to extract DNA from the calf’s remains and try to come up with a more accurate date on when the creature died. Nicknamed “Sasha,” researchers say the calf died at least 10,000 years ago and may have been 18 months old when it perished.
The statements and data provided by advocates of human-caused global warming themselves provide strong evidence that their theory of human-caused global warming is wrong.
The article is detailed and includes a lot of hard but easy-to-digest data, such as the graph on the right, which shows how all the computer models predicting global warming have failed to predict the lack of warming for the past eighteen years. (The models predicted the rising colored lines. Actual global temperatures are shown by the black line.) This quote however is a nice summation:
Allow us to cite one more example out of many that could be brought to bear. On June 6, 2007, the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition published an analysis of seasonal climate predictions made by the New Zealand Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) showing that the Institute did not even achieve 50 percent accuracy. Director Dr. Jim Renwick’s response was telling. “Climate prediction is hard, half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don’t expect to do terrifically well,” he told the New Zealand Herald. Dr. Renwick, who is an IPCC lead author and a member of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Commission for Climatology Expert Team on Seasonal Forecasting, stated on New Zealand Radio, “The weather is not predictable beyond a week or two.”
This is huge! Phil Jones, a top AGW guru, admits “we don’t know what natural variability is doing,” and Judith Curry says that the climate models are “imperfect and incomplete” and natural causes “dominate” human effects on global temperatures. And IPCC/WMO bigwig Jim Renwick concedes his organization’s climate predictions are wrong more than half the time — and they can’t predict the weather more than two weeks out. Yet, we are supposed to empower national and international politicians and bureaucrats to completely regulate, re-engineer, tax, and regiment human civilization on a planetary scale, based upon the same faulty computer models that have universally, spectacularly failed — over and over again.
I hate to say this, but it appears that the only “deniers of reality” we have in this debate are the political advocates of human-caused global warming, people like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Al Gore, who continue to refuse to recognize the reality that there has been no warming during the past eighteen years.
The uncertainty of science: Three new studies on the mystery of the origin of the Moon all appear to better confirm the theory that it was created when the Earth collided with a Mars-sized planet.
It is important to be aware of the uncertainties here. All these studies were done to try to address problems with the impact theory, and though they kind of answer the questions, they leave behind some important doubts.
