Year: 2020

Confirmed: Martian glacial features are ice

10:12 am

Lobate glacial flows on Mars
Click for full image.

Scientists using the radar instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have now confirmed that the Martian glacial features that most resemble the glaciers seen on Earth are made of substantial amounts of ice, and were possibly active and growing only a few million years ago.

“Our radar analysis shows that at least one of these features is about 500 meters thick and nearly 100 percent ice, with a debris covering at most ten meters thick,” said Berman, lead author of “Ice-rich landforms of the southern mid-latitudes of Mars: A case study in Nereidum Montes” published online in Icarus at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2020.114170. PSI scientists Frank C. Chuang, Isaac B. Smith and David A. Crown are co-authors on the paper.

Global mapping of Viscous Flow Features (VFFs), a general grouping of ice-rich flow features in the southern hemisphere of Mars shows a dense concentration in Nereidum Montes, along the northern rim of Argyre basin. Located within a northwestern subregion of Nereidum Montes is a large number of well-preserved VFFs and ice-rich mantling deposits, the paper says, potentially the largest concentrations of any non-polar region in the southern hemisphere.

…Processed data from the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft were used to search for basal reflections across VFFs within the region. For one in particular, these observations and analysis indicate that it is composed of nearly pure water ice. Model ages obtained from crater counts and their associated size-frequency distributions (SFDs) on both ice-rich mantling deposits and small lobate VFFs suggest that the deposits stabilized several to tens of millions of years ago in the Late Amazonian Epoch, and that small lobate VFFs likely formed due to the mobilization of mantling deposits.

This data here reinforces the impressions from many other places within the 30-60 degree latitude bands on Mars where many such features are found.

Mars might be a desert, but it is a desert like Antarctica, not the Sahara. Any settlement there must use the Earth’s south pole as its guide for construction and design.

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Russia successfully completes second Angara rocket launch

9:46 am

The new colonial movement: After many delays, Russia today successfully completed the second launch of its new Angara rocket, placing a dummy test payload into orbit.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

33 China
24 SpaceX
14 Russia
6 ULA
5 Rocket Lab
5 Europe (Arianespace)

The U.S. lead over China in the national rankings remains 38 to 33. With this launch the total launches in 2020 now matches that achieved last year, something achieved despite the Wuhan virus panic.

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Antrim County election audit: Dominion machines unreliable, evidence suggests vote tampering

9:29 am

The computer audit of the Atrim County election Dominion tabulator machines has found [pdf] irrevocable evidence that these machines and their software is unreliable, that the evidence suggests significant vote tampering, and also suggests criminal activity to do it.

The preliminary findings including 24 points, all of which are shocking. The second sums it up:

We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that The Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified.

The audit also included data from two other counties as well, all of which confirmed the results from Antrim.
The audit found that the software for this election somehow failed to properly scan a “staggering” number of ballots, up to 81% in one case, requiring a manual unsupervised adjudication of the scan in order to record the vote. This failure rate — averaging 68.05% — was completely different than past election records, and exceeded the allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines, 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%), by many orders of magnitude.

They also found evidence of willful obstruction of justice to hide these facts. The files and adjudication logs are missing. There was also an attempt to zero out the machines before the audit could obtain its data. Finally, the software was updated just before the election, and then just afterward.

The only reason to change software after the election would be to obfuscate evidence of fraud and/or to correct program errors that would de-certify the election. Our findings show that the Central Lake Township tabulator tape totals were significantly altered by utilizing two different program versions (10/232020 and 11/05/2020), both of which were software changes during an election which violates election law, and not just human error associated with the Dominion Election Management System. This is clear evidence of software generated movement of votes. The claims made on the Office of the Secretary of State website are false.

Read it for yourself. More important, download it immediately and pass it to friends. I predict that many of your Democratic Party friends will dismiss it as fake. Some however will not. If just ten percent recognize these facts the election will likely get invalidated.

And make sure you pass it to your legislators. Any state that used these machines needs to review the results, and most likely must invalidate them. We need a new election.

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Data: Hospitals underwhelmed by 2nd COVID wave, as they were with 1st

9:19 pm

Chicken Little report: Federal government data now shows that hospital capacity has never been at full capacity or even strained during the first wave of COVID-19 in the spring, as well as the current spike now.

[F]ederal government data compiled from state-level reports suggests that hospitals nationwide have considerable space left to deal with both routine medical issues and COVID-19 patients. The Department of Health and Human Services offers on its website estimates of hospitalization rates across the United States.

…The HHS numbers belie forecasts of impending collapse of the U.S. medical system. As of Saturday, the department estimated that hospitals nationwide were at about 75% capacity. ICU beds were even lower, at 63.5%. Patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 occupied just under 15% of all beds nationwide. Even in areas that have recently posted huge surges in positive COVID tests, the numbers were largely similar to the national average: In New York, 76% of hospital beds (and 61% of ICU beds) were taken.

In California, where positive test results have skyrocketed, 76% of inpatient beds were likewise filled (though the ICU numbers were notably higher than New York’s, at 79%). Ohio, which has also seen a surge in positive tests over the last few months, has 71% of inpatient beds taken, and 77% of ICU beds.

Those numbers are not far out of line with national average occupancy rates seen in normal times and are, in some cases, lower than what are widely considered optimal rates.

There’s more at the link, but overall the data confirms what I wrote back in March, only two weeks after some states had declared statewide emergencies, imposed lockdowns, and destroyed their economies based on a panicked fear of a gigantic spike that would overwhelm their hospitals. The data then strongly suggested that these fears were unwarranted. This new data confirms that conclusion.

The lockdowns, mandates, and cancellation of the Bill of Rights were all entirely unnecessary. Worse, corrupt politicians (mostly Democrats) have morphed their so-called purpose from easing the sudden arrival of many sick patients (“flatten the curve”) to a vain attempt to prevent the spread of the virus, something that only six months ago sane people knew was impossible.

Under this new impossible mantra (“Stop the spread!”), lockdowns will never end. Which to these corrupt politicians is just fine, as it gives them the kind of absolute power they crave.

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Chang’e-5 on its way back to Earth

3:04 pm

The new colonial movement: Chang’e-5 today successfully fired four engines for 22 minutes to leave lunar orbit and begin its journey back to Earth, with a planned arrival date in China for its sample return capsule around December 15/16th.

The return capsule is expected to land in northern China in the Inner Mongolia region after separating from the rest of the spacecraft and floating down on parachutes. The material would be the first brought back since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 probe in 1976.

The rocks and other debris were obtained both by drilling into the moon’s crust and scooping directly off the surface. They may be billions of years younger than those brought back by earlier U.S. and Soviet missions, possibly offering insights into the moon’s history and that of other bodies in the solar system.

The landing sequence is the last major engineering challenge, though hardly as challenging as the autonomous rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit.

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SpaceX successfully launches commercial radio satellite

1:32 pm

Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully launched a new commercial radio satellite for Siruis.

The first stage was making its seventh flight, the fifth in 2020. It successfully landed on the drone ship. The fairings were also both previously flown.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

33 China
24 SpaceX
13 Russia
6 ULA
5 Rocket Lab
5 Europe (Arianespace)

The U.S. now leads China 38 to 33 in the national rankings. The U.S. has also completed the most launches in a single year since 1968. Unlike 1968, all the launches this year were flown by private companies, either for commercial customers or for the government, with rockets owned by the companies. In 1968 almost all the launches were for the government, and the rockets were controlled by the government, even if built by private companies.

Note that this very successful year occurred during a year when many businesses were forced to shutdown due to the Wuhan panic. It appears many rocket companies decided this was not a reason to cease operations.

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Virgin Galactic’s first Unity launch from New Mexico fizzles

3:54 pm

Capitalism in space: Virgin Galactic’s first attempt to launch its SpaceShipTwo Unity suborbital spacecraft from its New Mexico spaceport ended almost immediately after the ship was released from WhiteKnightTwo when its engines did not ignite.

All appeared normal during the flight’s early phases. VSS Unity was carried into the air by its twin-fuselage mothership, known as WhiteKnightTwo VMS Eve, and was released to fly free at an altitude of more than 40,000 feet.

A webcast provided via NASASpaceflight.com showed the flash of the plane’s hybrid rocket motor lighting up, but only for a second. After the flame-out, Test pilots Dave Mackay and C.J. Sturckow brought Unity back down to the spaceport for a gliding landing.

I wish Virgin Galactic well, but at this point consider the company a backwater in the drive to develop a commercial space tourism industry. It took them too long to get to this point. Even if they should start flying tourists next year, they will be competing with orbital tourist flights by SpaceX, and the contrast is stark. I simply no longer see a viable customer base for Virgin Galactic, unless they get a lot of government subsidies.

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Indonesia & SpaceX considering launchsite there

8:26 am

Capitalism in space: Indonesia has been in discussions with SpaceX and Elon Musk about establishing a SpaceX launch site in that country.

President Joko Widodo discussed the idea with SpaceX founder Elon Musk during a phone call on Friday, the Coordinating Ministry for Maritime and Investment Affairs said in the statement. Musk intends to send a team to Indonesia in January to study partnership opportunities, it said.

Makes sense for Musk to consider such a move, especially if the U.S. and Texas governments start to turn the screws on his Boca Chica launch site. Furthermore, it is his intention to eventually launch Starship/Super Heavy from a floating launch platform. Establishing arrangements with other foreign nations for putting it in their waters gives the company more flexibility.

People always migrate toward freedom. For two hundred and fifty years, that meant they moved to the United States. This now is changing, as the U.S. culture is signaling its increased hostility to this most important founding principle. Expect more stories like this in the coming decades.

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Supreme Court dismisses Texas suit on election

7:04 pm

The dead Constitution

The Supreme Court today dismissed the Texas lawsuit asking it to invalid the election results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia because of election law changes made by bureaucrats rather than the state legislatures as directed by the Constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday evening rejected the state of Texas’ challenge to the 2020 election results in four battleground states, extinguishing one of the last remaining hopes for President Trump’s campaign to reverse Joe Biden’s lead in those states.

“The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution,” the justices ruled. “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.”

No one should be surprised by this. It is not the court’s job to give permission to the state legislatures to do their job. It is their responsibility to act, and they have ample evidence that the vote has been, if not stolen, very unreliable and not trustworthy.

They are just too cowardly to do it. They’d rather have an excuse to cop out. They will now do so, saying that they can’t do anything because the Supreme Court told them they couldn’t. This is a lie, and a joke.

The election has been stolen. Do not expect there ever again to be a legitimate election in the United States. Expect Democrats to begin winning every race, in every battleground swing state.

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New data confirms and localizes uplifted lunar dust as seen by Apollo astronauts

1:11 pm

The uncertainty of science: In a paper released today, scientists reveal the detection of electrostatic dust events on the Moon similar to those observed by Apollo astronauts, and find that these events might not be global but instead confined to craters during twilight. From the abstract:

Lunar horizon glows observed by the Apollo missions suggested a dense dust exosphere near the lunar terminator. But later missions failed to see such a high‐density dust exosphere. Why the Apollo missions could observe so large number of dust grains remains a mystery. For the first time, we report five dust enhancement events observed by the Lunar Dust Experiment on board Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer [LADEE] mission, which happen near a twilight crater with dust densities comparable to the Apollo measurements. Moreover, the dust densities are larger on the downstream side of the crater and favor a higher solar wind temperature, consistent with an electrostatic dust lofting from the negatively charged crater floor. We also check the Apollo observations and find similar twilight craters, suggesting that the so‐called dust exosphere is not a global phenomenon but just a local electrified dust fountain near twilight craters.

The dust clouds the astronauts thought they saw near the horizon have been theorized to be dust uplifted by static electricity. However, all later missions had so far failed to detect this phenomenon, until now. That the result also pinpoints the location and ties it to twilight is important for future missions to the Moon. Astronauts can thus minimize any damage by this dust by shutting down operations during lunar twilight periods.

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