Susan Boyle with Libera – In the Bleak Midwinter
An evening pause: For my Christian readers, a song for this Christmas season.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Year: 2016
Sunspot activity continues to drop
NOAA yesterday posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for November. Below is my monthly annotated version of that update.
The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.
In November sunspot activity dropped again, to the second lowest point seen since 2010. Essentially, activity today is about where it was in 2010 when the solar minimum was finally ending. Now, the solar maximum is ending and we are beginning the next solar minimum.
Throughout the entire just completed solar maximum, the Sun continuously under-performed all predictions. Even now, despite following almost precisely the prediction of the 2007 low prediction during 2014 and 2015, in 2016 the ramp down has begun to slip below that prediction. The trend continues to suggest the arrival of solar minimum will be early, possibly as early as sometime late next year.
SpaceX to delay December 16 launch
I have absolutely no details at this moment, but I have found out through sources at Vandenberg Air Force Base, where I have been scheduled to give a lecture next Wednesday, December 14, that the December 16 SpaceX launch there has been delayed.
If the launch was still on they wanted to delay my talk because too many people would miss it, working instead on the launch. My lecture is now on, as the launch has been cancelled.
This is not in the news yet. Stay tuned for more details.
Pentagon buries report documenting $125 billion of waste
Why the revolt? The Pentagon purposely buried a 2015 report that documented $125 billion in wasteful Defense Department spending because they feared Congress would use it to justify sequestration.
The report, which was issued in January 2015 by the advisory Defense Business Board (DBB), called for a series of reforms that would have saved the department $125 billion over the next five years. Among its other findings, the report showed that the Defense Department was paying just over 1 million contractors, civilian employees and uniformed personnel to fill back-office jobs. That number nearly matches the amount of active duty troops — 1.3 million, the lowest since 1940.
The Post reported that some Pentagon leaders feared the study’s findings would undermine their claims that years of budget sequestration had left the military short of money. In response, they imposed security restrictions on information used in the study and even pulled a summary report from a Pentagon website. “They’re all complaining that they don’t have any money,” former DBB chairman Robert Stein told the Post. “We proposed a way to save a ton of money.”
The corruption in Washington today runs very deep. It will take many years and a lot of change to fix it. Don’t expect a lot from Trump or this Republican Congress. They might be a start (maybe), but even if they worked entirely to get the federal cleaned up they couldn’t do it in the next four years. And no one should expect them to work entirely to clean this up.
NASA awards contract for satellite refueling mission
NASA has awarded Space Systems/Loral a contract for building Restore-L, a robot refueling mission designed by the Goddard Space Flight Center team that ran the Hubble shuttle repair missions as well as the recent robotic demo repair tests on ISS.
The brains behind this mission is 80-year-old Frank Cepollina, who headed those Hubble shuttle missions and has been pushing for satellite repair since the 1980s. He is still going strong. As he said to me during one of my interviews for several articles I have written about him, “One of the things that’s driven me is this concept of stretching your capital assets for as long as you can to get every dollar of return you can possible get from it. The American taxpayers have paid for those assets. We should use them.”
If only we had more such Americans working in the federal government.
Drill issues at Curiosity
The recent failure by Curiosity to drill has caused engineers to stop the rover in its tracks while they analyze the cause of the problem.
The rover team learned Dec. 1 that Curiosity did not complete the commands for drilling. The rover detected a fault in an early step in which the “drill feed” mechanism did not extend the drill to touch the rock target with the bit. “We are in the process of defining a set of diagnostic tests to carefully assess the drill feed mechanism. We are using our test rover here on Earth to try out these tests before we run them on Mars,” Curiosity Deputy Project Manager Steven Lee, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said Monday. “To be cautious, until we run the tests on Curiosity, we want to restrict any dynamic changes that could affect the diagnosis. That means not moving the arm and not driving, which could shake it.”
Two among the set of possible causes being assessed are that a brake on the drill feed mechanism did not disengage fully or that an electronic encoder for the mechanism’s motor did not function as expected. Lee said that workarounds may exist for both of those scenarios, but the first step is to identify why the motor did not operate properly last week.
Though they do not say so, the problem is almost certainly related to a fundamental design flaw in the drill’s design that causes intermittent short-circuits when they use it, and has the possibility of shorting out the entire rover if they are not careful.
“Researchers baffled by nationalist surge”
Clueless: According to this Nature article, researchers are completed baffled by the recent surge in nationalism in Europe and the United States, best illustrated by the UK vote to leave the European Union and the victory of Donald Trump in the U.S.
The cluelessness reeks throughout every word, but I can’t quote the whole article. The following quote will give you the flavor:
Some academics have explored potential parallels between the roots of the current global political shift and the rise of populism during the Great Depression, including in Nazi Germany. But Helmut Anheier, president of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, cautions that the economic struggles of middle-class citizens across the West today are very different, particularly in mainland Europe. The Nazis took advantage of the extreme economic hardship that followed the First World War and a global depression, but today’s populist movements are growing powerful in wealthy European countries with strong social programmes. “What brings about a right-wing movement when there are no good reasons for it?”Anheier asks.
In the United States, some have suggested that racism motivated a significant number of Trump voters. But that is too simplistic an explanation, says Theda Skocpol, a sociologist at Harvard University. “Trump dominated the news for more than a year, and did so with provocative statements that were meant to exacerbate every tension in the US,” she says.
They are like a someone throwing darts at a dart board from two feet away and missing continuously. For some reason, they can’t seem to conceive of any of these possibilities:
- Out of control budgets that are bankrupting entire countries
- Out of control regulation that is squelching freedom
- Incompetent and corrupt management that results in the failure of practically every government project or effort
- Out of control immigration that is overwhelming countries with unskilled workers as well as terrorists
- Foreign policy stupidity that has routinely and steadily worsened the international climate in the past three decades
- Elite arrogance that lazily uses the accusation of racism to explain everything
I could go on. You can also read this article: How We Got Trump II: 2008, 2009, 2010 to get a few concrete examples here in the U.S.
The last point above sums up this article quite nicely. Until our intellectual community stops fooling itself and starts to accept some of the responsibility for their own failures, things are only going to get worse. Their liberal policies are failing, and need to be rejected by them. And if they don’t do it, the voters will definitely do so, with increasing fury.
Billy Joel – Just The Way You Are
An evening pause: Performed live in Tokyo, 2006.
Hat tip Phil Berardelli.
Cassini makes its first close ring flyby of Saturn
Cassini has begun its last year at Saturn, making its first close fly-by of the gas giant’s rings yesterday.
Cassini’s imaging cameras obtained views of Saturn about two days before crossing through the ring plane, but not near the time of closest approach. The focus of this first close pass was the engine maneuver and observations by Cassini’s other science instruments. Future dives past the rings will feature some of the mission’s best views of the outer regions of the rings and small, nearby moons.
Each of Cassini’s orbits for the remainder of the mission will last one week. The next pass by the rings’ outer edges is planned for Dec. 11. The ring-grazing orbits — 20 in all — will continue until April 22, when the last close flyby of Saturn’s moon Titan will reshape Cassini’s flight path. With that encounter, Cassini will leap over the rings, making the first of 22 plunges through the 1,500-mile-wide (2,400-kilometer) gap between Saturn and its innermost ring on April 26.
On Sept. 15, the mission will conclude with a final plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere. During the plunge, Cassini will transmit data on the atmosphere’s composition until its signal is lost.
Now for a bit of reality: When Cassini’s mission ends on September 15, 2017, it will likely be a minimum of 20 years before another spacecraft returns.
Russian authorities locate Progress debris
Russian authorities in Siberia have located and identified several bits of wreckage from the Soyuz-U rocket and Progress freighter that failed to reach orbit last week.
Two pieces, including a large spherical object, were found by herders over the weekend, while another was discovered in the courtyard of a residential house on Monday, said the region’s head Sholban Karaa-ool, warning people not to touch any metal debris.
Regional sanitation officials “inspected the spot where two pieces of the spacecraft were found in the Ulug-Khem district, on the side of the mountain and near a yurt,” Kara-ool said on his official website. “Another small piece was found in the yard of a house in the Eilig-Khem village,” he said.
Whether this debris can help them pinpoint the cause of the failure remains unknown.
Another Russian Roscosmos official arrested
Russian authorities have arrested the chief operating officer from a Roscosmos aircraft division that apparently builds the MiG airplane.
Evdokimov faces up to 10 years of imprisonment under large scale fraud charges if found guilty. The investigation has found that Evdokimov has committed fraud, stealing more than $3 million from the Russian Aircraft Corporation MiG.
…Earlier, the investigators arrested Alexei Ozerov, a former CEO of MiG subsidiary, and deputy CEO of another Russian aircraft manufacturer Tupolev Yegor Noskov in connection with this case. The detainees are suspected of having illegally acquired a development site in northeastern Moscow that was later resold and then sublet to the subsidiaries of the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) among other clients.
I am increasingly surprised the Russians have been able to build anything that works. Their management teams generally appear more interested in robbing the company than making sure the company does what it is hired to do.
Vega launches a Turkish commercial smallsat
The competition heats up: Arianespace’s Vega rocket today successfully launched a Turkish commercial smallsat.
The satellite itself, at 1,000 kilograms or about 2,200 pounds, is at the large end of the smallsat range, which means Vega is not likely competitive with the newer smaller rockets now being designed by a host of new companies to lift even smaller payloads.