If you find yourself bored after watching the first hour of this year’s State of the Union speech by Trump, you can always switch channels and listen to me on The Space Show with David Livingston. tonight! I will be on from 7 pm to 9 pm (Pacific), talking about a whole range of topics.
I would also encourage my readers to call in with questions and thoughts. The give and take of conversation makes things so much more fun.
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Cool image time! The photo on the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on October 27, 2019. It shows a dramatic lava flow coming off the flanks of the giant volcano Elysium Mons, a flow that has probably been frozen in place for somewhere between 600 million to 3.4 billion years.
If you look close you can see several craters on top of the lava flow. To my eye these impacts look like they occurred when the lava was still soft, which suggests they were debris thrown up by the volcano. This however would be surprising, as the eruption of Elysium Mons is not thought to have been explosive, but slow and steady. Either way, these crater impacts are one of the ways scientists have been able to estimate the age of this volcano and its long frozen flows.
MRO has taken a scattering of high resolution images in this area, all of which are aimed at similar frozen flows coming off the volcano. All are about 250 miles from the caldera, which gives you a sense of the size and extent of Elysium Mons. While it is the fourth largest volcano on Mars at 7.5 miles high, its grade is so gentle that if you were standing on the surface the peak would be hard to see from any point.
It was very strange to me to hear yesterday’s sad announcement by Rush Limbaugh that he had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. In the last six months or so my mind had actually been contemplating the fact that Limbaugh had been doing his show for more than three decades, was in his late sixties, and was not immortal. I had been trying to imagine what it would be like when he was no longer a fixture in the daily news reporting cycle, and I had been failing. I couldn’t imagine it.
Now it appears we might all be finally facing it. As they say, reality bites.
For those who have listened to him regularly these past three decades, the loss will be immeasurable. Without question Rush Limbaugh has been the best political analyst, from a conservative perspective, for the past half century. You might disagree with his opinions, but no one has been as correct and as pertinent and as thoughtful, consistently getting to the heart of every political battle, and doing it in an amazingly entertaining manner.
I first heard Rush Limbaugh back in 1988, when I lived in New York and was starving for a different and refreshing perpective on the news.
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The fantasy world of environmentalism: For the last seven years Baltimore County in Maryland has been throwing out its recycled glass, even though it still demands its residents separate it and put it in their recycling bins.
Over the weekend, news broke that the county—which does not include the City of Baltimore—has not been recycling the glass it’s been collecting as part of its recycling program. For the past seven years, the jars and bottles that residents dutifully placed in their blue bins have been being junked instead. “There are numerous issues with glass recycling, including increased presence of shredded paper in recycling streams which contaminates materials and is difficult to separate from broken glass fragments, in addition to other limitations on providing quality material,” county spokesperson Sean Naron told The Baltimore Sun.
Glass recycling reportedly stopped in 2013, the same year the county opened a $23 million single-stream recycling facility, according to the Sun article.
Meanwhile, the rest of the recycled garbage is almost certainly being trashed as well, as China no longer takes recycled paper, plastic and other scrap materials. With no one else interested in recycling this material, municipalities across the U.S. just throw it out — after making their citizens separate it.
Sadly this is very typical. Too often environmental regulations are structured to satisfy shallow emotions to make its participants feel good, while failing to accomplish what they claim they are doing.
New simulations of Pluto’s atmosphere, created using data obtained during the 2015 fly-by by New Horizons of Pluto, suggest that the planet’s thin atmosphere, mostly made up of nitrogen, generally blows in a retrograde direction when compared with the planet’s rotation.
Bertrand and his colleagues set out to determine how circulating air – which is 100,000 times thinner than that of Earth’s – might shape features on the surface. The team pulled data from New Horizons’ 2015 flyby to depict Pluto’s topography and its blankets of nitrogen ice. They then simulated the nitrogen cycle with a weather forecast model and assessed how winds blew across the surface.
The group discovered Pluto’s winds above 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) blow to the west — the opposite direction from the dwarf planet’s eastern spin — in a retro-rotation during most of its year. As nitrogen within Tombaugh Regio vaporizes in the north and becomes ice in the south, its movement triggers westward winds, according to the new study.
The press release is very badly written. It tries to make it sound as this work discovered the atmosphere of Pluto, and that this process is more unique in the solar system than it is. It also neglects to mention that we only have good information about one hemisphere of Pluto. The fly-by did not see the planet’s other half, and so any computer model based on New Horizons’ data is by definition guaranteed to be half incomplete, with gigantic uncertainties.
Still, it gives us another example of the unexpected complexity of the geological processes on Pluto, something no one expected for a place so far from the Sun where there is so little energy to drive such processes.
The Air Force has delivered to Congress the first of a regularly required series of reports on its organizational plans for creating the Space Force.
At first glance, the article makes it appear that both Congress and the Air Force under Trump are making an attempt to avoid the birth of a new bureaucracy that will coast billions of additional dollars. The following quotes highlight this:
The report delivered Feb. 3, a copy of which was obtained by SpaceNews, stresses that the Space Force will not have the traditional layers of bureaucracy that Congress cautioned it did not want to see in the new service.
…The Space Force in fiscal year 2020 is allotted a total of 200 people. The plan is to grow the staff over the next five years “within existing DoD resources,” says the report.
The article also outlines how the bulk of the Space Force’s staff will be taken from the Air Force.
One would think therefore that the overall military budget would not rise significantly. Hah! Fooled you!
The report says in the future the new service will not require more than $500 million annually over and above what DoD spends currently on space organizations. Total additional costs would not exceed $2 billion over the next five years, says the report.
Only in the government would spending an extra $500 million annually for an office operation taken from other parts of a company be considered inexpensive. For example, the initial capital funding for almost every single one of the new private smallsat rocket companies has generally been under $100 million, total. Later rounds of funding have generally only doubled or tripled that. The extra $500 million the military wants for the Space Force is actually a lot of money, and indicates that the Pentagon is definitely trying to pad the budget.
Our incompetent federal government grows again, and I guarantee we are getting less for our money than we should.
China’s Yutu-2 rover and Chang’e-5 lander have successfully completed their fourteenth lunar day of operations on the far side of the Moon, and have gone into hibernation.
The report from China’s state-run news agency is, as usual, decidedly uninformative. It is written to make it appear that Yutu-2 traveled 367 meters during this most recent lunar day, when in truth that is the total distance since landing. In comparing this total with the total at the end of the thirteenth lunar day, we find that Yutu-2 actually traveled only ten meters.
The report also provided no other information about where the rover went, or what it has been doing, other than saying the rover and its instruments operated as “planned.” The article did not even include a picture, either new or old.
It is a shame that China operates in this secret way. They are doing good stuff on the Moon. If they touted it proudly to the world, in as much detail as possible, they would do themselves far more good.
An evening pause: The song is Lost in the Rhythm, performed by Octavia Rose.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
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The science team for the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) today posted a nice lesson on what features to look for when you are trying to find glaciers on Mars.
To do this they used one of the earliest images of a Martian glacier, taken by MRO on June 12, 2008. The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows that entire glacier, coming off a mesa in the chaos terrain region of Protonilus Mensae, a region of mesas and glaciers that I highlighted in an earlier post in December, showing images of a mesa that had numerous glaciers flowing down from all sides.
The overview map to the right shows the location of both that earlier glacier-surrounded mesa (the red dot in Protonilus Mensae) and today’s image (the blue dot).
What the MRO science team has done with the image today however is to use it to illustrate the most important geological features that one will see when looking at a Martian glacier.
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On January 31, 2020 the Mars Society issued a press release touting its newest mock Mars habitat mission to its Mars research station in the high desert of Utah.
During this mission, one crew is operating at MDRS, while a second crew works out of the MAU habitat, which consists of a series of interlocking geometric tents that house crew quarters and a research area. The crew is made up of medical professionals who are testing how two teams on the same planet would collaborate on emergency medical procedures.
Located in southern Utah, MDRS serves as a home base for crews participating in Mars surface simulation testing and training. Depending on the individual crew’s specialization, its scientific focus ranges from geology to engineering, communications to human factors, robotics to microbiology. A wide variety of scientific and engineering research and educational outreach are typically conducted by crews at MDRS.
The newly-arrived MAU participants (designated as Crew 220) have set up their temporary second habitat close to MDRS, with part of the crew staying at the MDRS facility, while an additional crew is housed in the MAU-developed habitat out of sight of the main station. Halfway through the mission, the crews will rotate stations, thereby allowing each team an opportunity to experience both operational habitats.
While this simulated mission will certainly learn a few things about long term isolation by small crews, it does not appear to me to be a very real simulation of living on Mars. While the MDRS facility is quite sophisticated, it isn’t an entirely closed system. Moreover, the environment here, even in winter, does not come close to simulating the Martian environment. It is too warm and it has is a full atmosphere. And it certainly is not isolated. If someone gets seriously ill, or the facility experiences an irreversible failure, immediate evacuation is always an option.
Still, the Mars Society has been using this facility for simulating Mars missions since 2001, and has completed eighteen field seasons involving more than 1,200 participants. I am sure they have accumulated a great deal of useful data that can be applied on future Mars missions.
However, the U.S. has been running a much more realistic Mars simulation habitat since just after the end of World War II, and it appears that few realize it.
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Link here. This well documented essay outlines how federal government funding has poisoned American academic research, and if we do nothing to fix it, will only be another precursor of a coming dark age.
My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields.
Yet, more importantly, training in “science” is now tantamount to grant-writing and learning how to obtain funding. Organized skepticism, critical thinking, and methodological rigor, if present at all, are afterthoughts. Thus, our nation’s institutions no longer perform their role as Eisenhower’s fountainhead of free ideas and discovery. Instead, American universities often produce corrupt, incompetent, or scientifically meaningless research that endangers the public, confounds public policy, and diminishes our nation’s preparedness to meet future challenges.
The essay focuses on how the lure of tax dollars has warped and corrupted medical research, but anyone with any knowledge of almost all other fields of science that now depend on federal funding will recognize the same problems.
Many of the stories the author documents include major universities (Duke, Cornell, Harvard) that not only have been producing lots of studies have required retraction or included documented fraud, but have also not done anything to punish those involved.
Overall, this study, along with the many examples of totalitarian attempts to silence dissent on American campuses, proves that these institutions no longer any public funding. At a minimum, high school students should consider other colleges. At best, they should be shut down.
Hat tip reader John Jossy.
NASA has awarded the private company Maxar a contract to build a robot that will assemble a test large antenna dish in orbit.
The robot will fly as part of the Restore-L mission, whose primary robotic mission goal will be to refuel Landsat-7, originally launched in 1999.
Al Tadros, Maxar’s vice president of space infrastructure and civil space, said the NASA contract funds SPIDER through completion. It also funds a SPIDER demonstration with Tethers Unlimited’s MakerSat to build a 10-meter boom in space and attach it to Restore-L, he said.
Maxar’s demonstration contract calls for the in-orbit assembly of multiple antenna reflector dishes into one single reflector. Communications satellites use reflectors to beam television channels and internet connectivity to users. Maxar said SPIDER’s demonstration could show how commercial satellites and telescopes could carry fixtures currently too large to fit inside rocket payload fairings.
Restore-L was originally targeted for a 2022 launch, but this new contract implies that it might launch later to include this additional test.
The decision by the Trump administration to go all-in with the use of private space to get things done is bearing fruit. In the past, when NASA insisted that it build everything, it didn’t have the resources to do very much. Now that it is harnessing the skills of many independent companies to build many different things (from launchers to landers to rovers), suddenly more is getting done for less in less time. For example, Restore-L is a NASA built project that has taken more than a decade to reach orbit. NASA has now added a private component that it intends to fly in five years.
