An evening pause: Make sure you watch this full screen. In many ways this video tour of ISS illustrates its magnificence and its failure. It is not an easy thing to build a house in space, and it is clear that we have done it here. At the same time, ISS hardly appears to be a comfortable vessel to live in during travel to other planets. Skylab was much more livable.
Hat tip Phil Berardelli and Tom Wilson.
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Betsy DeVos, a wealthy pro-voucher Republican activist, to head the Education Department.
Her record puts her dead center within establishment Republican Party circles.
In related news, Trump has chosen Elaine Chao as Transportation Secretary. Chao was previously labor secretary in the last Bush administration, and also happens to be the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Once again, someone deeply linked to the establishment Republican Party.
At the same time, both picks have strong links to the very conservative Heritage Foundation.
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen a conservative Republican congressman to be Secretary of Health and a businesswoman to be administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The congressman, Tom Price (R-Georgia), has been a big opponent of Obamacare.
Prior to the release of ESA’s preliminary report on the failure of Schiaparelli, the Italian space agency had claimed the problem was caused by the failure of a Romanian subcontractor to do sufficient simulations and testing.
ESA released the preliminary conclusions after the Italian Space Agency had accused that the decisive tests for the Sciaparelli lander simulations had been entrusted to an organization “which hadn’t enough expertize”. It’s about Arca Space Romanian company, based in Las Cruces, USA, as La Repubblica reported.
In retort, the Arca Space Corporation manager, Dumitru Popescu warned the Italian space agency to be more careful, as they don’t have proves to support their accusations. “They could pay the price. We are at ease that we did all we could do: to run a specific test we should have flown very closely to the Russian base in Sevastopol. Russia has just annexed Crimea and we risked generating a conflict between the Russian Federation and NATO,” the Romanian manager argued.
There is something fishy here, but I’m not sure what. That they didn’t do a test because they feared instigating an international incident with Russia does not seem right. In fact, this whole story suggests that the very management structure of ESA, designed to spread work to as many of its partner nations as possible, is the fundamental source of the problem.
Hat tip reader Local Fluff.
Using new drill technology scientists are now searching for the best place in Antarctica to obtain the oldest ice core ever drilled.
More than a decade ago, the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) drilled the oldest existing core, which contains 800,000-year-old ice, from an ice dome in East Antarctica known as Dome C. The core reaches only as far back as the latter part of the Pleistocene epoch, when Earth began cycling between warm and cold periods every 100,000 years. Before 1 million years ago, the cycle occurred every 40,000 years (L. E. Lisiecki and M. E. Raymo Paleoceanography 20, PA1003; 2005), so scientists want an ice core that is twice as old as EPICA to better understand this transition.
Digging such a core would cost about US$50 million and take several years, so researchers want to be sure that the location is optimal — with ice that is sufficiently deep but not melted at the bottom by geothermal activity. “It’s absolutely crucial to thoroughly investigate all options,” says Eisen. Enter a new breed of drill, designed to do fast, cheap reconnaissance instead of extracting a single, intact ice core, as previous deep drills have done.
One promising location, ‘little Dome C’, lies just 40 kilometres away from the EPICA site — and is where the £500,000 (US$620,000) Rapid Access Isotope Drill (RAID) will start boring this month, led by climate scientist Robert Mulvaney of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. A narrow drill, RAID will excavate to 600 metres in about 7 days — compared with 5 years for a 3.4-kilometre core such as EPICA’s. And rather than extract a core, RAID will measure the ice’s temperature and collect chips of ice. Scientists will then comb these for clues from isotopes as to the age and temperature of the ice at the bottom of the sheet.
There is competition here as well. Another more conventional drill operation, run by Chinese scientists, has already been drilling for several years and might actually obtain a core sample 1.5 million years old first.
The European Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), part of the ExoMars 2016 mission, has successfully transmitted its first images back to Earth.
I have posted a video they have assembled of the first images below the fold. It is quite spectacular. As for TGO’s future misssion:
In the next months, the team will be starting preparations for the prime mission. “The test was very successful but we have identified a couple of things that need to be improved in the onboard software and in the ground post-processing», says Thomas. “It’s an incredibly exciting time.” Eventually, TGO will use “aerobraking” (skimming into the atmosphere) to slow the spacecraft down and enter a roughly circular orbit 400 km above this surface. This process will start in March 2017 and take around 9-12 months. The primary science phase will start around the end of 2017. CaSSIS will then enter nominal operations acquiring 12-20 high resolution stereo and colour images of selected targets per day.
Madness: A nine-year-old autistic boy was denied a gold swimming medal in a special Olympics competition in Wales because he set a personal best time that was more than 15% better than his previous best.
Rory Logan, nine, was competing in the Special Olympics Regional finals in Bangor, north Wales, and won the 50 metres race in 53.15 seconds – a personal best and smashing his heat time of one minute and three seconds. However, when it came to the medal ceremony, Rory, from County Antrim, was simply given a ribbon for participating instead of the gold he was expecting.
Now mum Briony claims that officials told her that he didn’t get a medal because he was too fast for the race. She told Belfast Live: “Rory came to me and said, ‘Mum I didn’t do anything wrong, I won fair and square, what did I do?’. I was absolutely gutted for him. I went to speak to the officials and basically they said he had been disqualified because he swam too fast. No one can get over this decision. Apparently you can’t be more than 15% faster than the time you swam in your heats just in case you are trying to swim slower in your heat to be placed in a lower division’s final.”
The boy went on to win gold in two other races, for which he should be cheered, but that he was denied a medal because he did his best is beyond disgusting.The worst part of this story is that in the future this kid is likely going to sandbag his achievements in order to avoid getting punished for success.
Scientists think they may have located the cause of the vision problems experienced by nearly two-thirds of all astronauts after long missions in weightlessness.
Prof Alperin has been looking at another potential source of the problems – the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). This helps cushion the brain and spinal cord, and can accommodate the changes when a person moves from a lying to a standing position. “In space the system is confused by the lack of the posture-related pressure changes,” Prof Alperin explained.
The team performed high-resolution MRI scans before and shortly after spaceflights for seven long-duration astronauts. They compared the results with nine astronauts who flew into orbit for short stints on the space shuttle. The results showed that long-duration astronauts had significantly greater post-flight increases in the volume of CSF within the bony cavity of the skull that holds the eye, and also in the volume of CSF in the cavities of the brain where the fluid is produced.
The sample size is small, and the study has not yet been peer reviewed, so these results must still be taken with some skepticism.
An evening pause: To quote the youtube webpage, “In celebration of “The 50th Annual CMA Awards,” CMA has created the biggest music video in Country Music history. Titled “Forever Country,” the single and accompanying music video features 30 CMA Award-winning acts.”
Sadly, the one person who was not on this video who loomed over it as I watched was John Denver. He is still missed.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
This past Thanksgiving weekend I joined some caving and canyoneering friends in Death Valley to celebrate the holiday in the great outdoors as well as explore some of the park’s more inaccessible canyons. We did not camp in the park, since campfires are not allowed and the park has a size limit for groups. Instead, we camped on BLM land just outside the park, in what appeared to be an abandoned RV trailer park that canyoneerers call Slabby Acres.
First a primer. Regular readers will know that I have been doing cave exploration and mapping now for about thirty years. This recreational activity not only involves knowing how to use survey instruments in a cave, you need also to be trained in the vertical rope techniques required to reach some remote places underground, sometimes dropping multiple pits on the way in and climbing those same domes on the way out.
Canyoneering is somewhat similar to caving. Just like caving you need to know how to travel over boulders and rough terrain and also know how to rappel and climb ropes. Unlike caving the canyons are open to the sky, and you rarely climb the ropes to travel up the canyon. In canyoneering the goal is to find the head of the canyon and travel down its many drops to come out at the bottom safely, all the while getting to see some wild, majestic, and rarely seen places. In addition, modern canyoneering rarely involves virgin exploration. Most canyoneerers visit already explored canyons whose details are well documented so that they know what ropes to bring as well as how to find the canyons.
This was our goal this past weekend. Some of the western cavers who have joined my survey projects and learned how to cave survey are also active canyoneerers. While none of us had ever visited the canyons on our trip list, several were very experienced with finding and traversing places they had never been before. My plan was to follow them and enjoy the experience. Below are my pictures during one of this weekend’s canyoneering trips. The canyon is Scorpion Canyon. It was the first we visited and was relatively easy to do, only 4.6 miles long with only six rappels and only an 1,800 foot elevation drop. It would take us over one of the mountain ranges that form the eastern wall of Death Valley. In fact, this was how I was going to enter Death Valley for the first time. Rather than drive in, like most tourists, I would rappel in.
» Read more
It appears that SpaceX has definitely scheduled a launch of an EchoStar communications satellite for either January 8 or 9, and that this launch will follow the launch of 10 Iridium satellites in December.
If this schedule happens has now indicated, SpaceX will launch a lot of rockets over the next two months.
A new ESA report says that the ExoMars 2016 Schiaparelli lander failed because its navigation system thought the lander was on the ground when it was still more than two miles from the surface.
Europe’s Schiaparelli Mars lander crashed last month after a sensor failure caused it to cast away its parachute and turn off braking thrusters more than two miles (3.7 km) above the surface of the planet, as if it had already landed, a report released on Wednesday said.
Figuring out what caused this failure will be helpful for the design of the ExoMars 2020 rover, but the failure here is likely going to make it more difficult for Europe to raise the money needed for that next mission, including a 400 million euro cost overrun.
