The competition heats up: Hindustan Aeronautics has completed construction and handed over to ISRO the orbiter structure of India’s next lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2.
The mission will include an orbiter, lander, and rover, and is aiming for launch sometime after 2017.
The competition heats up: Arianespace’s Vega rocket successfully completed its fifth launch on Tuesday, placing a European Earth resources satellite into orbit.
The European Space Agency has accepted the proposal of the Rosetta science team to extend the mission until September 2016, when they will then consider attempting a landing on the surface of Comet 67P/C-G.
Rather than fly a different tourist on the September ISS flight that Sarah Brightman has backed out of, Russia has instead given the seat to an astronaut from Kazakhstan.
The article suggests that Russia might be doing a barter deal with Kazakhstan, saving money on its lease for Baikonur in exchange for the astronaut flight.
The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 today that a 66 year old program that allowed the federal government to confiscate the crops of farmers in order to manage the supply and demand was unconstitutional.
Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts said the government must pay “just compensation” when it takes personal goods just as when it takes land away. He rejected the government’s argument that the Hornes voluntarily chose to participate in the raisin market and have the option of selling different crops if they don’t like it. “‘Let them sell wine’ is probably not much more comforting to the raisin growers than similar retorts have been to others throughout history,” Roberts said. “Property rights cannot be so easily manipulated.”
The Constitution on property rights is very clear. The government has to pay for any property it takes. That it required a Supreme Court decision to enforce this plain language should distress us all.
Link here.
This is a beautifully written and thoughtful analysis of the state of climate science, and why intelligent and educated citizens should continue to remain skeptical of the claims coming from the global warming activist community (which now includes the Pope).
He gives a dozen different reasons for remaining skeptical of the claims of the global warming community, based both on the science as well as how they sell their position. Number 10 — “When [the claimed consensus] it is being used to justify dramatic political or economic policies” — is probably the most important:
Imagine hundreds of world leaders and nongovernmental organizations, science groups, and United Nations functionaries gathered for a meeting heralded as the most important conference since World War II, in which “the future of the world is being decided.” These officials seem to agree that institutions of “global governance” need to be established to reorder the world economy and massively restrict energy resources. Large numbers of them applaud wildly when socialist dictators denounce capitalism. Strange philosophical and metaphysical activism surrounds the gathering. And we are told by our president that all of this is based, not on fiction, but on science — that is, a scientific consensus that human activities, particularly greenhouse gas emissions, are leading to catastrophic climate change.
We don’t have to imagine that scenario, of course. It happened in Copenhagen, in December 2009. It will happen again in Paris, in December 2015.
Now, none of this disproves the hypothesis of catastrophic, human induced climate change. But it does describe an atmosphere that would be highly conducive to misrepresentation. And at the very least, when policy consequences, which claim to be based on science, are so profound, the evidence ought to be rock solid. “Extraordinary claims,” the late Carl Sagan often said, “require extraordinary evidence.” When the megaphones of consensus insist that there’s no time, that we have to move, MOVE, MOVE!, you have a right to be suspicious.
Cool image time! In a new press release, the Dawn science team has unveiled a new close-up of Ceres’ double bright spot, shown on the right.
At least eight spots can be seen next to the largest bright area, which scientists think is approximately 6 miles (9 kilometers) wide. A highly reflective material is responsible for these spots — ice and salt are leading possibilities, but scientists are considering other options, too.
In other words, they still have not confirmed through spectroscopy, that these bright spots are ice.
Note also that they have reduced the image’s brightness so that the bright spots do not over expose as much as in past images. This not only allows more details to come out, but it portrays Ceres’ very dark surface more accurately. Even so, the image still shows that surface as brighter than it actually is.
The press release also described a second image, showing a single lonely mountain on the planet’s horizon, rising up three miles from the planet’s surface, shown in the cropped image to the left. Overall this image, as well as the others, suggest that the surface of Ceres is generally far less rough than we should expect.
Another science mystery to unravel!
Fascists: Another Christian business forced to close because the owners refused to host a homosexual wedding.
If the trend continues as it has, expect the homosexual community to soon demand the imprisonment of some Christians for their beliefs, and expect some to go to prison as a result. And expect this to happen even though no one is preventing any homosexuals from having homosexual relations.
And we all know that the gay agenda has everything to do with tolerance, don’t we?
The managers of the Thirty Meter Telescope project have announced that they will resume construction of the telescope on Wednesday.
Since the state of Hawaii has refused to remove the protesters, who have been camping illegally on the road up to the mountaintop, expect some conflict come Wednesday when the first construction vehicle tries to drive past.
Using the first color images sent from New Horizons, scientists have assembled a short movie of the orbital dance between Pluto and its largest moon Charon.
An evening pause: I especially like the simplicity of the music, combined with the interplay between the guitarist and the singer.
The federal court of appeals today ruled in favor of the pro-Israel organization Z Street in its lawsuit against the IRS for specifically harassing them because their positions disagreed with the Obama administration.
To review:
Z STREET filed its lawsuit against the IRS in August, 2010, on the basis of statements made to its counsel by the IRS agent reviewing Z STREET’s application for 501(c)(3) charitable tax exempt status, filed in 2009. That agent revealed that the IRS has an “Israel Special Policy” which gave differential treatment to tax exemption applications from organizations holding views about Israel inconsistent with those espoused by the Obama administration, scrutinizing such applications differently and at greater length, than those made by organizations which did not hold such views. [emphasis mine]
As I like to say, the IRS, rather than doing tax enforcement, has been instead very specifically working as a lobbying agent for the Democratic Party and Barack Obama. The Z Street case documents it, and is now going to document it far more thoroughly than any Democrat or Obama can imagine.
The organization says it looks forward to the discovery phase of litigation in which it will seek to learn the nature and origin of the “Israel Special Policy” which the IRS applied to Z Street’s tax exemption application. Z Street will seek to learn how such a policy was created, who created it, who approved it, to whom it was applied, as well as all other information regarding this policy.
What Z Street learns will be directly useful to the conservative organizations that the IRS also harassed illegally. It might also do great political harm to a number of prominent Democratic Party elected officials.
