The competition heats up: The Google Lunar X-Prize has awarded $5.25 million to five teams for achieving significant milestones in their effort to build a lunar rover using private funds.
More information about the winners and what they had done to win here.
Some data produced by Dawn while it was in orbit around the asteroid Vesta have suggested to some scientists that liquid water might have helped create a handful of the surface features on the asteroid.
The theory is interesting and might be true. I also wouldn’t bet a lot of money on it, because this interpretation of the data is somewhat tentative and based on a lot of assumptions.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has dropped its lawsuit against the Air Force in exchange for the opportunity to bid on more military launch contracts.
“Under the agreement, the Air Force will work collaboratively with SpaceX to complete the certification process in an efficient and expedient manner,” the statement from the two parties said. “The Air Force also has expanded the number of competitive opportunities for launch services under the EELV program while honoring existing contractual obligations.” The statement did not make clear how many competitive launch opportunities would be available or when. The Air Force has committed to seven launch awards by late 2017, but has said that number could grow to at least eight.
Each additional launch contract the Air Force puts out for competition gives SpaceX or ULA another opportunity to win about $100 million or more in business.
This is a big win for SpaceX. It is also not a surprise. As much as some Air Force officials have wanted to maintain the ULA monopoloy, their position has been weak, for both political and economic reasons. SpaceX’s costs are just too much lower, and the company continues to demonstrate its reliability and competence in launch after launch. Thus, it was practically impossible for Air Force officials to justify maintaining the block buy non-competitive contract award to ULA.
Engineers at JPL have begun testing prototypes of a drone that would be used on Mars to aid future rovers.
The newest solution proposed by JPL is the Mars Helicopter, an autonomous drone that could “triple the distances that Mars rovers can drive in a Martian day,” according to NASA. The helicopter would fly ahead of a rover when its view is blocked and send Earth-bound engineers the right data to plan the rover’s route.
The religion of peace marches on: A Swedish reporter decided to walk through an Arab neighborhood in a Swedish city and found himself repeatedly attacked.
In one scene, Ljunggren — who, in addition to wearing a kippah was also wearing Star of David pendant — was filmed sitting at a café in central Malmo reading a newspaper, as several passersby hurled anti-Semitic insults at him. Elsewhere, one person hit his arm, the reporter said on camera, though this was not recorded. One of the people who cursed Ljunggren called him a “Jewish devil,” “Jewish shit” and another told him to “get out.”
One person on a scooter approached Ljunggren to warn him to leave for his own safety. In the heavily Muslim Rosengard neighborhood, Ljunggren was surrounded by a dozen men who shouted anti-Semitic slogans as eggs were hurled at his direction from apartments overhead. He then fled the area.
Recently in the U.S. there was a big to-do because a women leftwing radical feminist videotaped herself walking around New York to show how men treat women with disrespect. As usual, for the left this video demonstrated their childish focus on minor abuse when real violence and hate is going on worldwide, under their nose.
An evening pause: From the 1932 film Love Me Tonight, starring Maurice Chevalier. Stay with it, because it gets quite entertaining. And don’t you want to know what happens next?
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Link here. Honoring Winston Churchill on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
Finding out what’s in it: A new study has found that small businesses are increasingly not offering health insurance to their employees since Obamacare went into effect.
The survey, conducted by Assistant Professor of Economics Leslie Muller, focused on companies that have fewer than 50 employees. Companies of that size are not mandated by the ACA to offer insurance to employees. “Small firms have faced, traditionally faced, higher costs so they’ve been strapped for a while. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the ACA it just has to do with the fact that health care costs have been raising it’s been particularly hard on the small firms,” Muller said.
The Survey found that of small businesses that offered health insurance over the past two years, only 40 percent plan to offer insurance in 2015 and only 28 percent in 2016.
As its fuel supplies begin to run out, engineers have used a new trick to raise Messenger’s orbit around Mercury in order to extend its research life.
The spacecraft’s orbit will still decay, and is expected to impact the surface sometime in the early spring of 2016.
A National Research Council report has outlined a range of budget cuts in the field of ocean science, including significant cuts to infrastructure expenses, in order to focus the available funds more wisely.
Faced with rising costs of going to sea, the ocean-sciences division of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) should immediately slash what it spends on marine hardware, says a new report. It suggests making the biggest cut to the flagship US$386-million Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), which after years of construction is just months away from being finished.
The report, released on 23 January by the US National Research Council, is likely to guide US oceanography for years to come. It is the first formal attempt to address what many researchers have grumbled about for years — that basic ocean science at the NSF is losing out to the rising costs of infrastructure.
This report and the response of the ocean science community illustrates a pattern going on throughout the sciences. For years, their budgets had been rising so fast that they really didn’t know what to do with the money. (I know they would disagree with me.) This resulted in some laziness in how they spent it, including a great deal of feather-bedding and pork.
Now that budgets have frozen and are no longer growing, and in many cases shrinking back to more affordable levels, they need to figure out what is essential and what is not. This report is part of that effort.
I am seeing this same process happening in other fields as well. Santa, in the form of unlimited federal spending, has gone home, and is unexpected to return for quite some time.
Link here. These images are from Rosetta’s high resolution camera OSIRIS, the results from which have been kept very closely secret by the Rosetta science team. Today however they published a bunch of papers in the journal Science, so we are finally beginning to see some of their amazing images.
Take a look. Each one illustrates how alien a place Comet 67/C-G is.
More info on these papers can be found here and here.
Even more here, from the Rosetta team.
An evening pause; Hat tip Tom Biggar, who made me realize that I had never previously posted any Nanci Griffith on BtB. Shameful!
Climate change: Data from Rosetta has shown that the coma surrounding Comet 67P/C-G’s nucleus varies far more than had been expected by Earth-based observations.
“From a telescope, images of a comet’s atmosphere suggest that the coma is uniform and does not vary over short periods of hours or days. That’s what we were expecting as we approached the comet,” said Dr. Stephen Fuselier, a director in the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division and the lead U.S. co-investigator for the Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis Double Focusing Mass Spectrometer (ROSINA DFMS) instrument. “It was certainly a surprise when we saw time variations from 200 km away. More surprising was that the composition of the coma was also varying by very large amounts. We’re taught that comets are made mostly of water ice. For this comet, the coma sometimes contains much more carbon dioxide than water vapor.”
The variations might be seasonal, or even reflect a variation from day to night.
Expect more news stories about Comet 67P/C-G from Rosetta. The journal Science is today publishing a special section on results from Rosetta.
We’re here to help you: Arkansas county police have seized seven children from their parents, based merely accusations obtained from an anonymous phone call.
Arkansas sheriff’s deputies in Garland County have “stolen” seven homeschoolers from their parents in a home raid spurred by an anonymous caller who told authorities the family’s house contained a “poisonous substance” — which turned out to be a mineral supplement/water purifier that isn’t FDA-approved. It’s been more than a week since the officers and the Department of Human Services (DHS) seized the seven homeschoolers. They remain in state custody.
Michelle Stanley, the mother of the seven children, is still in shock that the police and DHS have gotten away with abducting her children — taking them into custody under what she calls false pretenses. “The DHS has come and stolen our kids from us under the guise of ‘protecting our children,” Stanley wrote in an email shortly after her home was raided by police and the DHS, according to Health Impact News.
Read the whole article. It will terrify you.
Astronomers have identified the first quasar to change its energy output.
Quasars are massive, luminous objects that draw their energy from black holes. Until now, scientists have been unable to study both the bright and dim phases of a quasar in a single source. As described in an upcoming edition of the Astrophysical Journal, Yale-led researchers spotted a quasar that had dimmed by a factor of six or seven, compared with observations from a few years earlier.
It is also believed that quasars are the central supermassive black holes at the center of these very distant and ancient galaxies. Knowing how these black holes change can tell us something about the behavior of Sagittarius A*, the generally quiet central black hole in the Milky Way.
Ukrainian space workers rallied this week in protest over lack of pay and work in the past year.
The workers build Zenit and Cyclone-4 boosters as well as the first stage of Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Antares launch vehicle and the fourth stage for Europe’s Vega rocket. They are also involved in Dnepr, a decommissioned ballistic missile that has been converted into a satellite launcher. The report indicates that since last July, employees have been working only three days per week and are pay $200 to $300 only once or twice per month. There’s also been a lack of new orders for their products.
The lack of new orders is mostly because Russia has been putting the squeeze on Ukrainian space businesses. Rather than continuing to use them, Russia has been focusing on replacing them with companies inside Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday strongly endorsed the decision by the Russian government to consolidate control of that country’s entire space industry into a single, government-run corporation.
Putin said the plan to unite the federal space agency, Roscosmos, with United Rocket and Space Corporation (URSC) in a new corporate behemoth that will retain the Roscosmos name was “the right proposal” during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, the TASS news agency reported. The union would meld the federal space agency’s strategic oversight function with the industrial might of state-owned URSC — which was itself created from the union of some of Russia’s key space firms in an effort to increase efficiency in 2013.
Shades of the cold war! Even as the U.S. space industry is shifting away from government control to private enterprise, Russia is returning to it. We shall see which model works best as the world competes to get to the stars.
Engineers are puzzling over the release of debris from two separate Iridium satellites last year, with each even suggesting the satellites were hit by very small pieces of space junk.
The U.S. Joint Space Operations Center detected 10 pieces of debris from the Iridium 47 satellite June 7, 2014. Some of the objects flew away from Iridium 47 at up to 80 meters per second — nearly 180 mph — into orbits almost 200 miles above the satellite, suggesting an explosion or collision triggered their creation. Another Iridium spacecraft — Iridium 91 — produced four debris fragments Nov. 30, according to U.S. military tracking data. “In contrast to the previous Iridium breakup, however, these pieces were produced with minimal delta velocity and remained in the vicinity to the parent spacecraft for some time,” NASA officials wrote.
In both cases, the satellites showed no signs of a breakup and remain operational, according to Iridium Communications, a Virginia-based company that uses a fleet of spacecraft nearly 500 miles above Earth for mobile voice and data services.
Space.com has provided a detailed look, with reactions, of President Obama’s prominent mention of space exploration in his State of the Union speech this week.
I didn’t even watch the speech, nor read it, nor really care much at all about what he said. It is garbage, political propaganda that has nothing to do with getting us into space. The speech’s only real purpose is to puff up Barack Obama and his political allies.
The article above mentions Obama’s April 2010 space speech. What I wrote about that 2010 speech in 2010 focused on this promise by Obama:
[A]s stated in the speech’s fact sheet, that he “will commit to making a specific decision in 2015 on the development of a new heavy-lift rocket architecture.” Somehow this commitment was supposed to convince us that, despite his cancellation of the Constellation program (which already has had six years of development under its belt), his willingness to postpone making a decision for five years more would somehow accelerate the program.
How stupid does Obama really think people are? [emphasis in original]
Five years later, does anyone remember this promise? And is Obama making this decision now, as promised? No to both. The only reason he is building SLS is because Congress required him to. And the purpose of that rocket program isn’t to build a rocket, but to pour ungodly amounts of money into congressional districts.
To me, the real news this week was the big money private enterprise is beginning to pour into real development in space. That will get us to the planets, not the egotistical blathering of politicians.
An evening pause: It might only be a Honda commercial, but trust me, it’s worth watching.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
