An evening pause: The video covers all launches through the beginning of this summer, when SpaceX paused for two months. Watch how the pace steadily picks up. If you watch closely you can also see boosters landing in the background.
I lot of people like to talk. Elon Musk likes to do. I’ll take his approach any day.
The song is Audionautix by Opus One.
Hat tip Martin Kaselis.
The instruction manual of today’s academia.
The new dark age of silencing: The news outlet The College Fix today released a new database it calls the Campus Cancel Culture Database, listing all the stories that it has covered in the past decade of blacklisting and censorship on college campuses.
To see the complete list, go here. They plan to update it regularly. As Jennifer Kabbany, editor of The College Fix writes,
At some point, I lost count of how many incidents [of blacklisting] we’ve documented. Earlier this year, however, we began to compile them systematically — and today The College Fix releases the Campus Cancel Culture Database. The detailed repository of information lists more than 650 successful cancellations. They include everything from statues hauled off campuses to renamed buildings to memory-holed mascots. The database also cites more than 750 attempted cancellations.
We define cancel culture as any effort by people or groups to identify someone or something as offensive or unacceptable and seek in some way to censor or punish the transgressor or item.
It includes professors who have been suspended or lost their jobs for saying or researching something unpopular, student groups attacked or barred for their conservative, pro-life or libertarian views, and guest speakers shouted down or disinvited.
Overall, the database documents the terrible state of academic thought in the United States. Across the country college administrators, teachers, and students have teamed up to silence any ideas or opinions they do not like, with the bulk of the attacks going against conservatives and the traditions and concepts of western civilization. Not only have people been fired and blackballed, even discussing openly the history of our nation has become verboten. You must either condemn the American dream as racist white supremacy, or you must shut up.
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Click for full image.
Click for interactive map.
The science team for the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have snapped a picture of Perseverance at its present location in Jezero Crater.
The first image to the right, cropped to post here, shows the rover as a white dot to the right of the two long sand dunes. If you look close image, you can see the rover’s tracks near the bottom of the image.
Ingenuity is likely also in the full image, but is likely too small for MRO’s high resolution camera to pick out.
The second image is a overview map. The green dot marks the rover’s position, with the red dot Ingenuity’s present position. The dotted white line shows the route the rover has taken so far. The light brown line indicates the flight paths for all of Ingenuity’s flights. The yellow dotted line indicates the future planned route of Perseverance.
With Mars about to slip behind the Sun, communications with both rovers, Perseverance and Curiosity, as well as all the orbiters, will shortly go silent for about two weeks.
When that pause ends, the question will be where Perseverance goes next. The original plan was to retreat back along its previous path, going to the southeast before heading north past the landing site. I strongly suspect that they will instead head directly to the landing site, going to the northeast across the rough terrain, both to see something new as well as further test the rover’s ability to travel tougher ground.
They avoided that area initially because they were still in the rover’s check out period. Now that they know it works, there is no reason to avoid that ground, especially because it will be ground they have not viewed before. They could even use Ingenuity to scout it out more thoroughly.
The European/Japanese BepiColombo probe will make its first of six fly-bys of Mercury on October 1, 2021, as it steadily adjusts its flight path to enter orbit around the planet in 2025.
The mission is made up of two Mercury orbiters, Europe’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and Japan’s Mio orbiter.
During the flybys it is not possible to take high-resolution imagery with the main science camera because it is shielded by the transfer module while the spacecraft is in cruise configuration. However, two of BepiColombo’s three monitoring cameras (MCAMs) will be taking photos from about five minutes after the time of close approach and up to four hours later. Because BepiColombo is arriving on the planet’s nightside, conditions are not ideal to take images directly at the closest approach, thus the closest image will be captured from a distance of about 1000 km.
The first image to be downlinked will be from about 30 minutes after closest approach, and is expected to be available for public release at around 08:00 CEST on Saturday morning. The close approach and subsequent images will be downlinked one by one during Saturday morning.
The cameras provide black-and-white snapshots in 1024 x 1024 pixel resolution, and are positioned on the Mercury Transfer Module such that they also capture the spacecraft’s solar arrays and antennas. As the spacecraft changes its orientation during the flyby, Mercury will be seen passing behind the spacecraft structural elements.
These will be the first close-up pictures of Mercury since the Messenger orbiter mission ended in 2015.
Capitalism in space: The United Kingdom yesterday released a new comprehensive space strategy that seems generally focused on encouraging the growth of a private aerospace industry.
You can read the actual strategy here [pdf].
Though most of the text is high-sounding but mostly meaningless political talk, the overall strategy is excellent. It is focused not on creating a “space program” that the British government will design and build — what had been the traditional but generally unsuccessful approach since the 1960s — but to instead find ways to encourage the private sector to achieve what it wants to do. The map to the right, taken from the strategy document, illustrates this. The focus is entirely in supporting the growth of a commercial private industry by either creating industrial centers for space manufacturing or spaceports for launching satellites.
In this context, the vagueness of the strategy’s goals makes sense. The UK government has properly concluded that it is not its place to set those goals, but to let the commercial sector do it based on where they think they can make the most profit.
All in all, this strategy bodes well for the UK’s future in space.
Capitalism in space: Blue Origin announced yesterday that it has scheduled October 12, 2021 for its next New Shepard suborbital tourist flight, carrying four passengers, two of which have been revealed.
The company has revealed two of the four crewmembers will be Chris Boshuizen, co-founder of Earth observation company Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, vice chair for life sciences and healthcare at French software company Dassault Systèmes. The remaining two crewmembers will be announced in the coming days, Blue Origin said in a statement.
The NS-18 mission, the 18th flight overall for the New Shepard rocket, will lift off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 9:30 a.m. EDT (8:30 a.m. CDT or 1330 GMT) on Oct. 12. In addition to the four passengers, the flight will carry thousands of postcards from Blue Origin’s foundation, Club for the Future, which aims to inspire future generations to pursue careers in sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
There have been rumors that William Shatner will be one of the other passengers, but this has not yet been confirmed.
Capitalism in space: The satellite company Terran Orbital announced yesterday it will build a large factory to manufacture more than a 1,000 small satellites per year.
At the Launch and Landing Facility, formerly known as the NASA Space Shuttle Landing Facility, Terran Orbital, the parent company of Tyvak and PredaSAR, plans to claim 10 hangars for what Space Florida calls “the world’s largest satellite manufacturing facility.”
“Not only will we be able to expand our production capabilities to meet the growing demand for our products, but we will also bring valuable space vehicle manufacturing opportunities and capabilities to the State of Florida, investing over $300 million in new construction and equipment,” Marc Bell, Terran Orbital co-founder and CEO said in a statement. “By the end of 2025, we’re going to create approximately 2,100 new jobs with an average wage of $84,000.”
It appears that Lockheed Martin is both a customer for these satellites as well as one of Terran Orbital investors.
Regardless, with that many smallsats in the pipeline for construction provides one explanation why investors have been flocking to finance new rocket companies.
China’s Long March 3B rocket successfully launched a military satellite yesterday, though the satellite then had an undisclosed issue which caused it to fail.
Though the satellite failed to function immediately after launch, it appears the launch itself was successful, which based on my criteria means this launch is counted in China’s 2021 launch totals. The leaders in the 2021 launch race are thus:
34 China
23 SpaceX
15 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
The U.S. still leads China 35 to 34 in the national rankings.
An evening pause: Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Click for original image.
Data accumulated from 2009 to 2020 by the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the outer winds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot have speeded up by about 8%, while the winds in the spot’s inner regions have slowed.
The change in wind speeds they have measured with Hubble amount to less than 1.6 miles per hour per Earth year. “We’re talking about such a small change that if you didn’t have eleven years of Hubble data, we wouldn’t know it happened,” said Simon. “With Hubble we have the precision we need to spot a trend.” Hubble’s ongoing monitoring allows researchers to revisit and analyze its data very precisely as they keep adding to it. The smallest features Hubble can reveal in the storm are a mere 105 miles across, about twice the length of the state of Rhode Island.
“We find that the average wind speed in the Great Red Spot has been slightly increasing over the past decade,” Wong added. “We have one example where our analysis of the two-dimensional wind map found abrupt changes in 2017 when there was a major convective storm nearby.”
The graphic above shows the different wind speeds between the spot’s inner and outer regions, not the increase in speed described in this press release.
To put it mildly, these results are uncertain. We simply could be seeing the long term random fluctuations in the storm, or the change could simply be a reflection of the data’s margin of error. Moreover, since the data covers only the top layer of the Great Red Spot, it tells us nothing about the storm’s deeper regions or its more fundamental origins.
Today’s cool image is another example of scientists finding cool things hidden within distant pictures. The small white rectangle on the overview map to the right shows us where we are heading, to the severely eroded lava plains to the southwest of Mars’ largest volcano, Olympus Mons.
The white spot is about 500 miles from the caldera of Olympus Mons. In elevation it sits about 58,000 feet below that caldera, more than twice the height of Mt. Everest. Yet, despite these great distances, the material at that white rectangle was almost certainly laid down during an eruption from Olympus Mons, thus illustrating the gigantic scale of volcanic events on Mars. Because of the red planet’s light gravity, about 38% of Earth’s, not only can lava flow farther, it does so much faster.
The second image below is a wide angle photo taken by the context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in January, 2012, rotated, cropped, expanded, and enhanced to post here.
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Rounding up the unclean unvaccinated: It is coming.
They’re coming for you next: Unvaccinated students at Penn State who fail to get a COVID test for three weeks in a row are now banned from the school, including a ban from even attending remote classes.
At Penn State University, 117 students have been placed on interim suspension for failure to comply with the university’s weekly COVID-19 testing requirement.
Students at University Park who are subject to required weekly COVID-19 testing and who have missed at least three weeks of testing have been notified by Penn State that they are out of compliance with the university’s health and safety policies and have been placed on interim suspension through the Office of Student Conduct, a statement from Penn State said.
Students on interim suspension may not participate in classes, in-person or remotely; are not allowed on university property; and may not attend any Penn State-sponsored events, programs, and activities, including football games. On-campus students on interim suspension also are temporarily removed from their residence halls.
The highlighted word prove the insanity and irrationality of this policy. » Read more
