Year: 2020

Terraced mesas in Martian crater

12:38 pm

Terraced mesa in Martian crater
Click for full resolution image.

The cool image to the right, reduced and annotated to post here, was a captioned photo released by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) science team earlier this week. Taken by MRO’s high resolution camera, it shows in color a beautifully stair-stepped mesa located in an unnamed 22-mile-wide equatorial crater in Arabia Terra, the large transitional zone between the lowland northern plains and the southern cratered highlands. As the caption notes,

Several craters in Arabia Terra are filled with layered rock, often exposed in rounded mounds. The bright layers are roughly the same thickness, giving a stair-step appearance. The process that formed these sedimentary rocks is not yet well understood. They could have formed from sand or volcanic ash that was blown into the crater, or in water if the crater hosted a lake.

If volcanic ash, the layers are signalling a series of equal eruptions of equal duration, which seems unlikely. Water is also puzzling because of the equatorial location. Like yesterday’s mystery cool image, water is only likely here at a time when the red planet’s rotational tilt, its obliquity, was much higher, placing this at a higher latitude than it is today.

Regardless, make sure you look at the full image here. This crater floor is chock-full of more such terraced mesas, some of which are even more striking than the sample above.

I have also posted below the MRO context camera photo of the entire crater.
» Read more

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Pennsylvania: zero or little evidence open gyms or restaurants spread COVID-19

10:29 am

Chicken Little report: Pennsylvania health officials in one county admitted today that they have found zero evidence that open gyms spread COVID-19, while with restaurants the only evidence of spread is among restaurant workers, not patrons.

[T]wo local government leaders confirm contract tracing shows these businesses had low incidence of spreading the virus. “We were not able to find transmission in gyms, and we had almost no transmission in restaurants,” Montgomery County Chairwoman Dr. Valerie Arkoosh said at a Wednesday press conference.

There is some incompleteness in the contract tracing, but all the tracing they have done has consistently found no justification for closing gyms or restaurants. This data also confirms other data from other states.

But facts don’t matter to Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party governor, Tom Wolf and his cross-dressing health secretary, “Rachel” Levine, a guy who makes believe he is a woman.

Last week, Wolf and Department of Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine issued new rules saying restaurants could no longer continue with in-person dining or alcohol sales, and “indoor operations at gyms and fitness facilities are prohibited.”

Those rules are set to expire on January 4, but that still amounts to three-and-a-half weeks of what the restaurant industry is calling a de facto shutdown. Restaurants are able to continue with take out and delivery services.

What difference the lock down will destroy lives and ruin businesses? The important thing is to demonstrate the power and majesty of these government officials.

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First flightworthy BE-4 engine delivery now expected in summer ’21

9:22 am

Capitalism in space: Tory Bruno, the CEO of ULA, revealed yesterday that Blue Origin will finally deliver two flightworthy BE-4 engines for ULA’s Vulcan rocket this coming summer.

ULA, the Pentagon’s top launch contractor for national security satellites, had initially expected the shipment in 2020 for a debut flight in early 2021, but this was delayed by development hurdles.

The installation of Blue Origin’s reusable BE-4 engines into ULA’s next-generation Vulcan rocket will keep it on track for the debut launch of a moon lander dubbed Peregrine at the end of 2021, ULA Chief Executive Tory Bruno said. The Vulcan rocket has won a slate of key U.S. defense missions through 2027.

“That is now our expectation, that Peregrine will go to space in the 4th quarter of 2021,” Bruno told reporters during a call on Thursday.

Peregrine is a commercial lunar lander being built by Astrobotic for NASA.

More information here.

It appears that ULA thinks the long delay in engine development and delivery from Blue Origin will not delay the planned first launch of Vulcan later in ’21. It appears their long range plan to recover and reuse these engines has caused them to design Vulcan so that they can easily swap out engines, which will allow them to complete that new rocket’s development with the test engines that Blue Origin has already provided, and then switch engines and launch within months.

During Bruno’s press briefing he also noted that they have done a thorough refurbish of the Delta launchpads and have instituted a new policy requiring regular launchpad dress rehearsals, in order to make sure the series of problems that delayed the launch of a Delta-4 Heavy earlier this year will not reoccur.

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ESA confirms cause of November Vega launch failure

9:09 am

The European Space Agengy (ESA) has now completed its full investigation of a Vega rocket launch failure in November, and confirmed that the initially announced cause of “human error” was correct.

Engineers had installed cables backwards causing the nozzle in the upper stage to go one way when it should have gone the other.

The press release at the link is a wonder of bureaucratic cover-your-behind gobbly-gook, saying much without providing any concrete information about the corrections imposed. For example, the upper stage structure is built by one company, Airbus, the engine is built by two Russian companies, Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash, while a fourth company, Avio, supervises the stage’s assembly. The press release makes it a point to not tell us where the error was made by which company, though by vague implication it suggests the error occurred during final assembly by Avio.

If I was a satellite company thinking of buying a Vega launch I would demand a much more straight-forward explanation. Otherwise I’d go elsewhere.

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Russia successfully launches another group of OneWeb satellites

8:43 am

Russia today successfully launched the first group of OneWeb satellites since that company entered and left bankruptcy, and it did it for the first time from its new Vostochny spaceport.

The Soyuz rocket’s flight path (see the map at the link) also took it for the first time northward over Russia, where it dropped its boosters and stages. No word on whether any villages or homes were hit.

The 36 satellites launched raises OneWeb’s constellation to 110 satellites total.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

33 China
24 SpaceX
15 Russia
6 ULA
6 Rocket Lab

The U.S. continues to lead China 39 to 33 in the national rankings. A SpaceX launch, originally set for yesterday, has been delayed until tomorrow due to an tank pressure issue with its upper stage.

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Astronomers detect radio signal from an exoplanet’s magnetic field

5:10 pm

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers using a Netherlands telescope have detected a radio signal coming from an exoplanet 51 light years away that likely comes from the planet’s magnetic field.

The new research actually began at Jupiter; the researchers had previously studied that planet’s radio emissions and then tweaked those measurements to reflect the effect they expected closeness to the host star and distance from Earth would have had on their observations of an exoplanet.

Then, the scientists consulted observations made in 2016 and 2017 by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands. In addition to the potential signal from Tau Boötes b, the researchers also report that they may have picked up a signal from the star Upsilon Andromedae or its planet, but that detection was even fainter than the one from Tau Boötes b.

Obviously, there are many uncertainties with this data. However, if scientists can begin to measure and characterize the magnetic field of exoplanets it will give them an important new data point for studying them.

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Lockdowns likely leading to an increase in suicides among the young

4:53 pm

According to new research, the lockdowns that have shuttered all school sports are likely leading to an increase in youth suicides, even as the death rate for young people from COVID-19 is virtually nil.

The article at the link refers to a Washington Post article, which stated:

A survey of high school athletes conducted by the University of Wisconsin this summer found that approximately 68 percent of the 3,243 teens polled have reported feelings of anxiety and depression at levels that typically require medical intervention — nearly 40 percent higher than past studies. The study, which also found that physical activity levels were 50 percent lower for kids than before the pandemic, was labeled “striking and concerning” by one researcher.

The lead researcher of the study at Wisconsin, Tim McGuine, said in an interview in August that “the greatest risk [to student-athletes] is not covid-19. It’s suicide and drug use.”

From the earliest available data in March it was clear that there was no medical reason to shut down the schools (some countries never did and their children did not suffer for it). Since then this early data has been confirmed repeatedly.

Thus, the only reason to shut the schools and youth sports was an expression of unbridled power and panic by elected leaders not interested in data but very much interested in having control over everyone’s lives. Furthermore, that expression of power was not really interested in saving lives in the least, because if it was by this time these corrupt leaders would have rethought their policy and not only opened up the schools but would have ended many of their irrational lock down policies. Instead, they have been doubling down.

And if you don’t think these shutdowns are irrational and merely an expression of power, consider this: In Ohio the government has ruled that high school wrestlers can grapple and fight, but if they dare shake hands after the match they will be violating social distancing rules.

But it’s “SCIENCE!” they scream! I say, they are liars, both to us and to themselves.

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A splat on Mars

2:23 pm

A splat on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on October 31, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labelled simply as a “Terrain Sample”, it was not taken as part of any specific science research but because the MRO science team need to regularly take pictures to maintain the camera’s temperature. When such engineering images are required they try to pick spots of some interest, but sometimes the resulting picture is somewhat bland.

If you look at the full image, you will see that blandness generally describes it. However, in the upper left corner was a most intriguing-looking crater, which I have focused on above. From all appearances, when this impact happened the ground was quite soft, almost like mud, and thus the ejecta splattered away not as individual rocks and debris but as a flow.

The map below gives a little context, but really doesn’t explain this crater fully.
» Read more

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Using origami to design spaceship fuel bladders

12:44 pm

Capitalism in space: Engineers at Washington State University have developed a new design for a collapsible fuel bladder for spaceships using as its basis the Japanese art of origami.

Washington State University researchers have used the ancient Japanese art of paper folding to possibly solve a key challenge for outer space travel – how to store and move fuel to rocket engines. The researchers have developed an origami-inspired, folded plastic fuel bladder that doesn’t crack at super cold temperatures and could someday be used to store and pump fuel.

The advantages of a fuel tank that will shrink as it empties are numerous. It appears that nothing that has been tried so far has worked as well as this new design. If proven viable, it will change radically how interplanetary spaceships are designed. It will also make interplanetary missions more practical.

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The audit in Arizona

11:34 am

My representative in the Arizona house, Mark Finchem, send out an email yesterday outlining in detail the demands of the two subpoenas the state senate has now served on the Maricopa County (covering Phoenix) board of elections. The requirements appear quite thorough:

The first calls for a scanned ballot audit, to collect an electronic ballot images cast for all mail-in ballots counted in the November 2020 general election. The subpoena is narrowly tailored to just Maricopa County. Using the ballot images, the Audit Team will likely utilize extremely sensitive optical scanning software designed to identify phony ballots from legitimate, machine completed versus legitimate voter completed. And. of those ballots that fall into the “suspect” category, the candidate can be identified from the ballot. This means that if a ballot is found to be illegitimate, a count can be made tied directly to the candidate who claimed the vote.

The second subpoena calls for a full forensic audit of ballot tabulation equipment, the software for that equipment and the election management system used in the 2020 General Election. This audit will go deeper than just the elections software written by Maricopa County that was used on the Dominion equipment, wit will include the source code and underlying software that runs the so-called tabulation system.

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors must answer the subpoena’s on or before 5:00 pm on December 18, 2020.

The first subpoena will make sure that fake ballots were not scanned, and if they were, they can be invalidated so that a new correct count can be done.

The second subpoena will next look at the Dominion tabulators to see if they were correctly tabulating the count. If it finds that they were counting the ballots scanned correctly, that will be wonderful news. If it is instead found that they were not, than a manual handcount will be required, and this evidence will further confirm the allegations in other states that these machines are unreliable and might even be designed to defraud the vote.

Finchem also noted in the email that if the audits find that any of the allegations are true, than the investigation will be expanded to cover other counties.

Based on this information, it appears that the Arizona state legislature is now serious about investigating the election count to make sure it was legitimate.

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