An evening pause: The closing song and credits from one of the greatest musicals every put on film, The Music Man (1962).
It reminds us that there is always magic in the air, if only we look for it.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
A new study has found a correlation between the strength of the monsoon season in India and the number of hurricanes that make landfall in North America.
According to Kelly, La Niña and the Indian monsoon are correlated, but the strength of the monsoon influences the steering of hurricanes independently of La Niña fluctuations, which are responsible for changes in hurricane frequency. In other words, La Niña fluctuations may result in more Atlantic hurricanes, but strong Indian monsoons steer them further westward, making it more likely they will make landfall in the Americas.
It’s important to account for the correlation when studying hurricane steering and landfall probability.
In reading the article, ignore the propaganda promoting global warming, as the research has zero to do with that subject. It instead now provides meteorologists another clue to predicting the frequency and paths of hurricanes in the Atlantic.
Capitalism in space: The smallsat rocket company Vector has successfully raised an additional $70 million in investment capital.
The increased funds bodes well for the company, but I am becoming increasingly concerned the company is more sizzle than steak. From the article:
With this round of funding, Vector plans to expand its sales and marketing teams. And the goal is to double its footprint in Silicon Valley. Vector is also expecting to break ground on a new state-of-the-art factory in Tucson. And Vector is advancing towards a first orbital attempt set to take place from the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska soon.
Their original plan was to complete five test launches leading up to their first orbital try. Only two of those launches have flown, and it appears they are aiming to make the third launch orbital, with no clear schedule indicated. More significantly, it appears that they are not using the additional money for rocket development but for “sales and marketing.” Shouldn’t that come after the rocket is operational?
Link here. The article describes in detail SpaceX’s schedule of launches through the end of 2018, which appears now to be firming up. Several take-aways:
A look at the overall launch schedule shows that the two Falcon Heavy launches that have been pending and were originally set for the last quarter of 2018 are now set for “early 2019.” This full schedule also lists the first unmanned flight of the Dragon manned capsule for January.
Engineers have apparently pinpointed and fixed the issue that was causing the Hubble Space Telescope’s last back up gyroscope to operate incorrectly, making it likely that the telescope will return to full normal operations shortly.
In an attempt to correct the erroneously high rates produced by the backup gyro, the Hubble operations team executed a running restart of the gyro on Oct. 16. This procedure turned the gyro off for one second, and then restarted it before the wheel spun down. The intention was to clear any faults that may have occurred during startup on Oct. 6, after the gyro had been off for more than 7.5 years. However, the resulting data showed no improvement in the gyro’s performance.
On Oct. 18, the Hubble operations team commanded a series of spacecraft maneuvers, or turns, in opposite directions to attempt to clear any blockage that may have caused the float to be off-center and produce the exceedingly high rates. During each maneuver, the gyro was switched from high mode to low mode to dislodge any blockage that may have accumulated around the float.
Following the Oct. 18 maneuvers, the team noticed a significant reduction in the high rates, allowing rates to be measured in low mode for brief periods of time. On Oct. 19, the operations team commanded Hubble to perform additional maneuvers and gyro mode switches, which appear to have cleared the issue. Gyro rates now look normal in both high and low mode.
This is wonderful news, in that it means the telescope will once again be able to point accurately enough to continue to take sharp images across the entire sky. It also highlights how close we are now to the telescope’s demise, since it no longer has a back-up gyroscope. With the next failure, which will occur eventually, Hubble will descend into one gyroscope operations, holding off its second working gyro as a backup.
An Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket successfully launched the joint European/Japanese BepiColumbo mission to Mercury this weekend.
BepiColombo consists of two orbiters: Japan’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) and ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO), both of which will be carried together by the Mercury Transport Module (MTM).
While MPO will go into an approximately 400 x 1500 km mapping orbit around Mercury, MMO will enter a highly elliptical orbit to study the planet’s enigmatically strong magnetic field.
The leaders in the 2018 launch race:
28 China
17 SpaceX
8 Russia
8 ULA
7 Europe (Arianespace)
China still leads the U.S. in the national rankings 28 to 26.
One of the two MarCO cubesats launched with the InSight Mars lander has successfully taken its first picture of Mars, the first such image ever taken by an interplanetary cubesat.
The image itself is not that interesting, with Mars not much more than a dot. What makes this significant is that it proves that a small, inexpensive cubesat can be built with the capability to accurately point and take photographs during an interplanetary mission. This means that the entire field of interplanetary probes is prime for major changes, shifting from big expensive and rarely launched spacecraft to small inexpensive cubesats launching frequently and it large numbers.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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An evening pause: Hat tip Danae.
An evening pause: Listen to the words.
Hat tip Kyle Kooy.
I am off to the Grand Canyon again for a caving expedition. We drive up and hike in today, and hike out and drive home on Monday.
I am not bringing a laptop this time to post on the drives. Posting, except for evening pauses, will thus have to wait until I return.
There is one scheduled launch this weekend, the late lift-off tonight of BebiColumbo, a joint European-Japanese mission to Mercury, by a Ariane 5 rocket. I will catch up on this, and other news, once I return.
An evening pause: What I want to know is this: How did he get the baby to work on cue?
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
