Tiller’s Folly – Panhandle Rag
An evening pause: Watching these three guys play together takes my breath away.
Hat tip Danae.
Year: 2015
SpaceX reviews its previous first stage landing attempts
In anticipation of tomorrow’s attempt to once again vertically land and recover the Falcon 9 first stage, SpaceX today released a review of its previous attempts, including new videos,
It sure looks to me like they have a pretty good shot of succeeding during Sunday’s Dragon launch.
The foolish petty Republican response to the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court rules that it has the right to ignore the actual words written in a law so it can provide support to a particular political position. The Republican response? Let’s force the judges to enroll in Obamacare!
The Supreme Court rules that the will of the electorate, which has rejected same-sex marriage in more than thirty elections, should be ignored because it wishes to support a particular political position. The Republican response? So far, a lot of bluster and toothless proposals.
What should they do to answer both rulings? They control Congress. The Constitution gives them the right and the power to impeach and remove judges. It is time for them to show they really oppose these decisions and move to fire the justices who ruled on these two cases.
Any other action will show us that they really do not have the courage to defend the will of the electorate.
I should add that I really do not expect the Republicans in Congress to do what I suggest. They are cowards, and have repeatedly shown that they will not stand up to leftwing attacks. They will fold here as well.
An update on Rosetta’s effort to re-establish contact with Philae
This update describes the status of the effort by the Rosetta science team to re-establish a stable communications channel with the Philae lander on the surface of Comet 67P/C-G.
Confirmed contacts between Rosetta and Philae have been made on 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 23, and 24 June, but were intermittent during those contact periods. For example, the contact on 19 June was stable but split into two short periods of two minutes each. Conversely, the contact on 24 June started at 17:20 UT (on board Rosetta) and ran for 20 minutes, but the quality of the link was very patchy and only about 80 packets of telemetry were received. Prior to this, on Tuesday, 23 June, there was a 20-second contact, but no stable link was established and consequently no telemetry data were received.
There are many reasons why the contacts have been so intermittent, much of it related to Philae’s position on the surface. To improve things, they are carefully adjusting Rosetta’s position relative to the comet while avoiding placing the spacecraft in a position where the coma’s dust will cause problems.
Art Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water
An evening pause: From the September 19, 1981 Simon & Garfunkel concert in Central Park.
Hat tip Danae for suggesting the song in this troubling time.
Lois Lerner’s hard drive failed because of “impact”
Working for the Democratic Party: It appears that the reason Lois Lerner’s hard drive crashed initially is because of “an impact of some sort.”
So, how often have you seen a hard drive fail because something got thrown at it, or it got thrown at something? And if such a thing happened, how often do you think it happens by accident?
And of course, the IRS immediately did its job and had that hard drive shredded and destroyed, so that no one could look at it and determine precisely how it failed.
Black hole awakes after 26 years
For the first time since 1989, the black hole in V404 Cygni, a system comprising a black hole and a star, has reawakened, suddenly emitting high energy outbursts beginning on June 15.
First signs of renewed activity in V404 Cygni were spotted by the Burst Alert Telescope on NASA’s Swift satellite, detecting a sudden burst of gamma rays, and then triggering observations with its X-ray telescope. Soon after, MAXI (Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image), part of the Japanese Experiment Module on the International Space Station, observed an X-ray flare from the same patch of the sky.
These first detections triggered a massive campaign of observations from ground-based telescopes and from space-based observatories, to monitor V404 Cygni at many different wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum.
The outbursts are probably occurring because the black hole is gobbling up material that has fallen into it.
While the 1989 outburst helped astronomers gain their first understand of the behavior of a black hole in a star system, this outburst will help them understand how such systems evolve and change over time.
House leadership reinstates conservative lawmaker
Only days after stripping him of his chairmanship, the moderate House leadership has reinstated the lawmaker who is a member of the House Freedom Caucus and who had voted against the leadership during the fast track trade debate.
It appears the pressure coming from the conservatives in the Freedom Caucus forced the leadership to back down. Good! More pressure should be brought to bear, as the voters elected these guys to pass conservative legislation, not negotiate with the Democrats to get the liberal agenda passed.
Finding Pluto is really New Horizon’s biggest problem
As New Horizons speeds towards its planned fly-by of Pluto on July 14, the biggest problem faced by its engineers is making sure the spacecraft actually finds and photographs the planet.
Because astronomers discovered the dwarf planet in 1930, they have seen only part of its 248-year path around the Sun, and they don’t know exactly where Pluto is. And New Horizons is so far from Earth that it takes 9 hours to send and receive a signal, making the spacecraft hard to direct in real time. “Everything is pushed to the extreme,” says Bobby Williams, an engineer at KinetX Aerospace in Simi Valley, California, who heads the mission’s navigation team.
This fact, which has not been mentioned previously as far as I remember, suggests that there is a good chance that New Horizons might fly through its planned window and aim its cameras at the wrong spot in the sky, missing Pluto entirely. It also explains partly why the images released so far have been so fuzzy: They are focused mostly on doing navigation work, and are taking wide angle shots to make sure they catch Pluto in their picture frame. Zooming in too close might actually miss Pluto as they don’t exactly know where it is.
All this only makes the July 14th fly-by even more exciting. Let us hope they do due diligence and get the pictures we all want!
OneWeb awards major launch contracts
The competition heats up: OneWeb today announced it had raised a half billion dollars in investment capital, and has also awarded two major launch contracts, one to the Arianespace/Russian Soyuz partnership and the other to Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne.
The Soyuz gets 21 launches while LauncherOne gets 39. For Virgin Galactic this contract might save the company, as their effort to fly tourists on SpaceShipOne has badly stalled. The effort to build LauncherOne, however, seems to be gaining steam.
The world launch market embraces launch reusability
The competition heats up: After years of resistance, rocket companies the world over are now shifting to the holy grail of reusability, pressured by the effort of SpaceX to land its first stage vertically and recover it.
While the article gives a nice overview of the efforts of ULA and Airbus to recover the engines from their first stage, its summary of SpaceX’s effort is especially complete, and is excellent background for anyone interested in that company’s next recovery attempt, set for Sunday’s Dragon launch.
Hawaii governor halts TMT construction again
In a very vague statement the governor of Hawaii has once again stopped construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) while he reassesses the situation after protesters yesterday blocked the road to the mountain summit with boulders.
“We are disappointed and concerned that large boulders were found in the roadway leading to the summit of Mauna Kea,” McCartney said in the statement. “This action is a serious and significant safety hazard and could put people at risk. “Because of this, we are making an assessment to determine how to proceed,” he said. “We will be working to clear the roadway tomorrow. Therefore, construction is on hold until further notice.”
The statement implies that he is trying to figure out a way to prevent the protesters from blocking the road, without causing more conflict. I instead suspect he sympathies with the protesters, and is looking for a way to stop construction, which he legally cannot do.
If the road is not reopened by the end of this week and construction is still blocked, I think the TMT managers, as well as the operators of the other telescopes on the mountain, should seriously consider moving from Hawaii. I also repeat that a boycott of Hawaiian tourism might also be appropriate now. This is what these nativist activists want, no more outsiders. We should give them what they want.