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To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, well worth your time, go here.
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An evening pause: Pachelbel’s Canon in D is one of the most beautiful short pieces of music ever written, which of course is why it has been an evening pause a half dozen times before. I’ve posted a version of musicians jamming it at 3 am when they have nothing better to do, singing it a capella in a stairway, spectacularly on a guitar, as heavy metal, by a chicken (you have to watch it to understand), and played as a tango, bluegrass, gypsy, and practically any musical style you can imagine.
The rant below gives us the perspective of someone who has played the piece, and it is a perspective that might surprise you. After watching it enjoy all the other versions above, but above all make sure you watch the last one. You will then understand best what the cello player is thinking.
Click for full image.
Astronomers and engineers have now successfully completed the alignment of the eighteen segments in the primary mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope.
On March 11, the Webb team completed the stage of alignment known as “fine phasing.” At this key stage in the commissioning of Webb’s Optical Telescope Element, every optical parameter that has been checked and tested is performing at, or above, expectations. The team also found no critical issues and no measurable contamination or blockages to Webb’s optical path. The observatory is able to successfully gather light from distant objects and deliver it to its instruments without issue.
The picture to the right shows that alignment, focused on a single star. As noted in the caption:
While the purpose of this image was to focus on the bright star at the center for alignment evaluation, Webb’s optics and NIRCam are so sensitive that the galaxies and stars seen in the background show up.
After many years delay and an ungodly budget overrun, thank goodness Webb appears to be working better than expected.
It will still be several months before actual science observations begin. Further more precise alignment adjustments need to be done for all its instruments and mirrors.
R.I.P. Solar scientist Eugene Parker, whose research revolutionized solar science in the 20th century and for which the Parker Solar Probe was named, has passed away at the age 94.
As a young professor at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s, Parker developed a mathematical theory that predicted the solar wind, the constant outflow of solar material from the Sun. Throughout his career, Parker revolutionized the field time and again, advancing ideas that addressed the fundamental questions about the workings of our Sun and stars throughout the universe.
Parker belonged to the past generations of scientists who followed the principles of the Enlightenment and believed that science was fundamentally the search for truth. He understood he could always be wrong, which brought a certain muscular strength to any ideas he proposed. He could not be lazy in any way, or his work would fail. Instead, it shone, and made what little we know of the Sun today possible.
Sadly, such men are one-by-one going from us. I wonder if the new generations will understand his mindset.
University of Illinois: run by clowns
Jason Kilborn, a tenured law professor at the University of Illinois who had been suspended and forced to undergo sensitivity training because several unnamed students objected to an exam question that referenced racial slurs and that Kilborn had been using in his tests for a decade, has now sued a number of officials at the university.
University of Illinois Chicago law Professor Jason Kilborn’s recently filed lawsuit accuses administrators of violating his Constitutional rights, as well as defamation, false light and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It seeks damages in excess of $100,000.
Kilborn has been described by students as “top notch.” As his lawsuit against the University of Illinois Chicago moves forward, Kilborn maintains campus leaders engaged in performative retribution against him.
The lawsuit can be read here.
The named officials in the lawsuit are Michael Amiridis, the university’s chancellor, Caryn A. Bills, its associate chancellor, Julie M. Spanbauer, the law schools dean, Donald Kamm, the director of the school’s Office for Access and Equity, and Ashley Davidson, the school’s Title Ix & Equity Compliance Specialist.
I had described Kilborn’s blacklisting back in November 2021, describing in detail how Kilborn’s exam question had been in use for ten years with no objection, and was designed to help his law students uncover facts that would help lawyers defend minorities against racial abuse. I also noted that:
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For full images go here and here.
Cool image time! Today the science team for the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) released images showing a very recent avalanche, or slumping, on the interior slopes of what looks like a small three-mile-wide crater inside the easternmost reaches of the giant canyon Valles Marineris.
The comparison above, reduced and rotated to post here, is their close-up showing the change, which occurred sometime between March 2021 and February 2022. The wider comparison on the right, cropped, reduced, and annotated by me, shows a wider view to help place this slumping in the context of the crater.
Calling this an avalanche is not really accurate, as it isn’t really the fall of boulders and rocks, but the quick slumping downward of an entire section of what looks like dust or sand. As Alfred McEwen of the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory in Arizona writes in the caption:
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Link here. The summary focuses on the major aerospace regions in the Ukraine, Dnipro and Kharkiv, outlining how they have so far been untargeted by the Russian invasion.
“In Dnipro, Yuzhmash and Yuzhnoye have not been bombed or targeted by missile attacks so far. One of the possible reasons is that Russia’s plan is to take them over as part of their invasion, so they intend to keep these facilities intact,” Usov said. “Because of the Russian attacks in the Dnipro region, these facilities are not operating at full capacities, and they were forced to halt work on their projects. But a share of their employees ensures their operations continue.”
The situation is the same in Kharkiv. No aerospace facilities have been directly targeted, but the war has shut down some operations, while others — especially those partnering with western nations or companies — have gone almost entirely virtual.
The article also describes a Ukrainian startup, Orbit Boy, that is trying to develop an air-launched smallsat rocket in partnership with companies in Poland and Italy. The war is making this development difficult, if not impossible.
China’s state-run press today revealed that a full duration test has been successfully completed of the rocket engine that will be used by the core first stage of the Long March 5B rocket that will launch the next two modules for China’s Tiangong space station.
Developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, the engine is designed for the core stage of the Long March-5 carrier rocket series, which will be used to launch two lab modules of China’s orbiting Tiangong space station this year.
The long-range test, lasting 520 seconds, has verified the reliability of the engine, and there will be more than 20 experimental tasks that the rocket engine will undergo to further test its performance, the company disclosed.
Though this short press release does not say, it implies that this new engine is restartable, something that on previous launches of the Long March 5B was not possible for the core stage. This lack meant that once the core stage lifted and deployed its payload into orbit, it no longer had an engine that could control it. It would within weeks crash to Earth, threatening many habitable areas around the globe. This lack also resulted in a lot of very bad press for China.
If this new engine is restartable, it means that China will be able to de-orbit it in a controlled manner, over the ocean. If so, hallelujah! It means China will finally be honoring its obligations under the Outer Space Treaty.
If not, than China will continue to prove that it is an unreliable and dangerous player on the world stage.
Click for interactive map.
NASA yesterday officially extended Ingenuity’s flight operations on Mars at least through September 2022, outlining in detail the helicopter’s hoped-for flight targets.
The map to the right shows the helicopter’s present location with the green dot, with its two possible future routes proceeding from this location indicated by dashed lines. The red dot indicates Perseverance’s present location, with its planned route from this spot indicated by the dashed lines.
Scheduled for no earlier than March 19, Ingenuity’s next flight will be a complex journey, about 1,150 feet (350 meters) in length, that includes a sharp bend in its course to avoid a large hill. After that, the team will determine whether two or three more flights will be required to complete the crossing of northwest Séítah.
Once Ingenuity crosses the rough terrain and reaches the delta, it will then be used to do more route scouting for the rover.
Upon reaching the delta, Ingenuity’s first orders will be to help determine which of two dry river channels Perseverance should take when it’s time to climb to the top of the delta. Along with routing assistance, data provided by the helicopter will help the Perseverance team assess potential science targets. Ingenuity may even be called upon to image geologic features too far afield (or outside of the rover’s traversable zone), or perhaps scout landing zones and caching sites for the Mars Sample Return program.
This ambitious plan exists because both the helicopter and its engineering team have far exceeded expectations. At the moment, there is no obvious reason why Ingenuity cannot continue to operate for years, an expectation that no one predicted.
Glenn Reynolds and Leigh Outten have just co-written a short paper advocating the use of “pulsed nuclear space propulsion” to launch rockets. You can download it here.
The concept, as first described in the 1950s, is described in the paper as follows:
It is not a tremendous surprise that when you set off an atomic bomb next to something, that something will move. That it could also remain essentially intact, however, was considerably more surprising. The challenge for the Orion team was to produce a spacecraft that could function after being subjected to not one, but many, nearby nuclear detonations, and that could be steered and navigated by an onboard crew.
This turned out to be easier than it sounds. The Orion spacecraft design that resulted involved a large steel “pusher” plate, behind a rather large spacecraft with a total weight of over 4,000 tons. That sort of design is very different from the spaceships we’re used to today.
The bulk of their paper reviews the legal obstacles to launching such rockets, as both the Outer Space Treaty and the Limited Test Ban Treaty put limits on the use of nuclear weapons in space. The paper argues that these limits would not apply to rockets propelled by atomic explosions, since the explosions would not be used as weapons.
The paper also argues that the technical obstacles for building such rockets are also solvable, and might even be easy to solve. This particular quote stood out starkly to me:
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Persecuting Christians, even little children, is once again cool!
They’re coming for you next: A second-grader at North Hill Elementary School in Des Moines, Washington, has been regularly harassed and punished by the teachers and administrators because she likes to talk about her Christian religion to her playmates.
The harassment has included searching her backpack each morning to confiscate any Christian materials before she entered school. The punishment included sending her to the principal’s office ten different times since January 1st for daring to mention the Bible and her Christian beliefs to others. From the press release of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which is threatening to sue the school and its district if this Soviet-type censorious behavior does not stop:
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Capitalism in space: With the cancellation of the last six Soyuz-2 launches for OneWeb and Arianespace due to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, the two companies are struggling to find an alternative rocket to launch the remaining 216 satellites that would complete OneWeb’s satellite constellation.
OneWeb has already paid Arianespace for the launches, so the responsibility to get the satellites in orbit is at present Arianespace’s. The problem is that its flight manifest for both the Ariane-5 (being retired) and the new Ariane-6 rocket are presently full.
Going to another rocket provider is problematic, even if a deal could be negotiated. The flight manifest for ULA’s Atlas-5 and Vulcan rockets is also filled. Though SpaceX’s Falcon 9 could probably launch the satellites, that company’s Starlink satellite constellation is in direct competition with OneWeb, which makes it unlikely the two companies could make a deal.
There have been negotiations with India to use its rockets, but it is unclear at present whether this will work.
One other option is to buy a lot of launches from the smallsat rockets of Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbiter, and Astra. This will likely cost more because more launches will be required, and that would required a complex negotiation between all parties.
The new colonial movement: India yesterday successfully completed a ground test of the solid rocket booster to be used in its Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV).
SSLV was originally scheduled for launch in 2020 but was put on hold for two years when India panicked over the Wuhan flu. ISRO, India’s space agency, hopes now to complete the first launch in the next two months.
The two-year delay cost ISRO significantly in the international smallsat market. While American private companies like SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit, and Astra continued to launch throughout the epidemic and thus garner business from the smallsat market, India’s market share shrunk. Whether it can recover that share once SSLV begins flying remains to be seen. India’s willingness to shut down so easily will I think make satellite companies hesitate before buying its services.
Mark Vande Hei today set a new record for the longest American space flight, exceeding the 340 days flown by Scott Kelly on ISS in 2012-2013.
Since Vande Hei is scheduled to return to Earth on March 30th, his total record flight time should end up being 355 days, just short of a full year.
Vande Hei arrived at the space station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on April 9, 2021, knowing at the time that he would be there for at least for the five to six months that is typical today for expedition crew members. His mission was extended by NASA in September to allow for a Russian movie crew to visit the orbiting complex and, more importantly, protect against a crew rotation schedule that could leave the station without any Americans on board.
Vande Hei’s record will be the fifth longest, behind four other Russians on Mir. Musa Manarov and Vladimir Titov were the first to complete a year long flight in 1987-1988. Valery Polyakov holds the record for the longest flight, 437 days in 1994-1995. Sergei Avdeyev’s flight of 381 days on Mir in 1998-1999 is the second longest.
Capitalism in space: After a February 10, 2022 launch failure, the rocket startup Astra today successfully completed its second orbital launch and first in 2022, putting its first commercial payloads into orbit.
Unfortunately the separation and deployment of a payload platform from the upper stage had not been confirmed as of this posting. While the payloads can still function attached to the upper stage (they are not fully functional satellites), if this deployment turns out to be a failure it will put a stain on the launch. Astra confirmed the successful deployment of the payloads about an hour after launch.
That the company could investigate a launch failure, fix the problem, and resume launches in just over a month however speaks well for its future. If the deployment failed fixing it should proceed as quickly. Meanwhile, the company announced yesterday a new multi-launch contract through 2025 with Spaceflight, which finds launches for smallsats and also provides a small tug to move them into their preferred orbit.launches.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race remain unchanged:
10 SpaceX
5 China
2 ULA
2 Russia
The U.S. now leads China 16 to 5 in the national rankings.
Because almost all Russian communications satellites rely on western components, the sanctions imposed on Russia due to its invasion of the Ukraine will likely prevent the future launch of any such satellites.
The overwhelmingly wide sanctions against the Kremlin left practically no chance for Russia to complete any of its communications satellites in the development pipeline at the time due to their dependency on Western payloads.
Conceivably, Russia could turn to China for necessary components or/and Moscow could try again developing necessary competencies inside the country, but given little signs of progress on both of those fronts in the past, it could probably take years if not decades before all the technological gaps could be closed and it would be even more difficult to do under much harsher economic conditions and export controls. It is also a question whether China would be interested in boosting strategically important industries in Russia with potential military implications or whether it would want to challenge the Western sanctions regime by putting at risk its far more important trade relations with the United States.
The article at the link also notes the generally low quality of Russian communications satellites, which for example generally last only five to six years, compared to the 10 to 15 year lifespan of western satellites. This low quality has meant that Russia has been unable to sell this technology to anyone outside Russia.
My regular readers know about my utter contempt for Microsoft and its terrible Windows operating system. Any company that treats its customers like dirt, as Microsoft routinely does, does not deserve the business of anyone. I realized this reality two decades ago, and successfully switched to Linux back in 2006. I have never regretted it.
Moreover, the increasingly intolerant behavior of big tech companies like Microsoft to free speech increases the need for people to free themselves from them. The willingness of these companies to also treat your privacy and personal data as a plaything for their use, without your permission, is another rational reason to stop depending on them.
Linux accomplishes this, in that its open source software structure is really controlled by no one. There is also no software company using the operating system to gather your data for its own purposes.
In 2016, after seeing a number of my posts noting the advantages of Linux (or anything) over Windows, one of my readers, James Stephens, offered to write a series for Behind the Black describing step-by-step the process by which one gets and installs Linux on either a desktop or laptop computer. Below are the links to this series. I have since used it myself as a guide to convert two used Windows 7 notebooks (purchased for $35 and $80) to my favorite flavor of Linux, both of which I use regularly as my travel computers.
I wish more people would do the same, which is why I am reposting the links to this series again. Though six years have passed, James instructions still apply perfectly, as I can attest as I used this series to convert the second laptop only a year ago. Nonetheless, James has added an addendum to Part 2, which brings the entire series up to date.
I am sure almost everyone has an old computer they don’t use anymore. It will work like new with Linux. Dig it out, follow James’ instructions below and free yourself from Windows. I guarantee you will not be disappointed.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on February 2, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and shows a mesa sticking up on the relatively flat and featureless northern lowland plains in Utopia Planitia, the second largest impact basin on Mars.
The full image shows three such mesas. Though pictures taken in the northern lowlands of Utopia tend to show evidence of buried ice or glaciers, the impression I get from this picture is one of dryness. If there is any ice here, it is below ground. And even that seems unlikely. The surface surrounding nearby craters does not have that squishy and slushy look that is seen in the north when an impact occurred on near surface ice. Instead, the ground looks solid.
The overview map below reinforces this impression.
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This is apparently what Kansas school administrators think
Don’t comply: Pamela Ricard, a teacher at Fort Riley Middle School in Kansas, has sued the local school board there for suspending her for three days for refusing to call a female student by the male pronouns demanded.
Ricard was suspended for three days and issued a formal reprimand in April 2021 for addressing a biologically female student by the suffix “Ms.” and the student’s legal last name, according to the Herzog Foundation. Ricard alleges that she received an email from the school’s counselor informing her that she must use the pronouns “he/him” to describe the biological female, though the student had never made a direct request.
At the time of Ricard’s three-day suspension, the complaint alleges that neither the district nor the middle school had a formal policy regarding student preferred name and pronoun usage and that Ricard was suspended under the “Bullying by Staff” policy. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted words strongly suggest that this demand was not coming from the student, but from the counselor and school administration, and that there was a very good chance that this counselor and the administration were grooming the child sexually.
When the school then released a policy requiring teachers to to use the pronouns demanded, Ricard then requested a religious exemption, which apparently the school refused to give. From another report:
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As expected, Russia today confirmed in its state-run TASS news agency that NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei will come back to Earth in its Soyuz capsule on March 30th, as planned.
The Soyuz MS-19 space capsule with Anton Shkaplerov, Pyotr Dubrov and Mark Vande Hei is expected to land on March 30. Dubrov and Vande Hei arrived on the ISS in the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft together with Oleg Novitsky. This descent module brought back to Earth the two feature film crew members – actress Yulia Peresild and film director Klim Shipenko, who had arrived on the ISS together with Anton Shkaplerov in the Soyuz MS-19 on October 5.
There had been a number of stories in the mainstream press suggesting the Russians would leave Vande Hei behind in response to the international sanctions being imposed on Russia because of its invasion of the Ukraine. All were based on a single comment by Roscosmos’ head Dmitry Rogozin, who had simply noted visuals from a Russian news source and aired in the U.S. that showed the Russian half of ISS separating away and leaving Vande Hei behind. Rogozin was only noting that the U.S. press was worried about this possibility.
There was no chance the Russians would separate its half of ISS now. Zero. To do such a thing will require several months of preparation. For example, the Russian half has at least one module, Zvezda, that is failing. If Russia ever creates its own new space station using part of ISS, it will have to launch some new modules first.
Also, for Russia to leave Vande Hei behind would be a public relations disaster that would only make worse the disaster of its invasion of the Ukraine. Russia might end its partnership at ISS in the near future, but it won’t do it in a way that might threaten the lives of any astronauts, from any nation.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! In reviewing a December 2021 image of the Cartwheel Galaxy taken by the New Technology Telescope in Chile, astronomers noticed something that was not there in earlier images, a new supernovae.
The photo above, reduced to post here, compares a 2014 image, taken by the Very Large Telescope, with the 2021 photo. In the lower left of the new image is a bright object not in the previous photo.
This event, called SN2021afdx, is a type II supernova, which occurs when a massive star reaches the end of its evolution. Supernovae can cause a star to shine brighter than its entire host galaxy and can be visible to observers for months, or even years — a blink of an eye on astronomical timescales. Supernovae are one of the reasons astronomers say we are all made of stardust: they sprinkle the surrounding space with heavy elements forged by the progenitor star, which may end up being part of later generations of stars, the planets around them and life that may exist in those planets.
Cartwheel is about 500 million light years away, and because of its bright outer ring is one one of the more unusual nearby galaxies.
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To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, well worth your time, go here.
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I did a short nine minute segment with Robert Pratt of Pratt on Texas today, discussing the Biden administration’s apparent effort to block SpaceX’s Starship operations in Texas. If you want to listen the podcast can be found here. My segment begins at 22:50 minutes, though the rest of Robert’s show is definitely worth listening to as well.
Click for interactive map.
According to a tweet today from JPL, the Mars helicopter Ingenuity has successfully completed its 21st flight on Mars, traveling 1,214 feet in two minutes and nine seconds at an average speed of 12.6 feet per second.
The red dot on the map to the right shows Perseverance’s location as of today. The green dot indicates Ingenuity’s position before the 21st flight. Since neither the Perseverance nor the helicopter teams have posted any updates describing the 21st flight, it is difficult to indicate a precise location for its landing site. All we know is that the helicopter is supposed to fly to the northwest, cutting across the rougher region while the rover follows the tan dotted line around that rough region, with both targeting the delta to the northwest.
As a guess, I have placed a black dot about 1,200 feet to the northwest.
The new dark age of silencing: Today’s blacklist story is interesting in that it proves the blacklist culture that is engulfing what was once a free America is not simply attacking those on the right. The level of intolerance has grown so pervasive that people are being blackballed for saying practically anything.
In this case, Collin College in Texas has now been sued by three different teachers because each had had the audacity to express a public opinion that the college administrations disagreed with. The list is quite intriguing because the teachers fired expressed opinions from the left side of the political aisle:
The on-going dark age: NASA yesterday released a statement announcing the completion of an email test project at the Goddard Space Flight Center that allowed employees to include their preferred gender pronouns in email display fields.
NASA’s short statement, quoted in full below, illustrates where the space agency’s real priorities lie.
Through an effort to create a more inclusive workplace, NASA recently completed an IT project at Goddard Space Flight Center that allowed approximately 125 employees to test the option of including their gender pronouns in NASA’s email display fields — which currently includes each employee’s name, center, and an organizational code. The learnings from this test will be used to inform the advancement of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
NASA is fully committed to supporting every employee’s right to be addressed by their correct name and pronouns. All NASA employees currently have the option and flexibility to include their gender pronouns in their customized email signature blocks. This option remains unchanged and is supported by NASA leadership so that employees can share their gender identities and show allyship to the LGBTQIA+ community.
To put this in honest language, NASA’s management is gearing up the legal process to give the power of one group of people (the “LGBTOIA+” community) to impose their beliefs on others, and to force others to promote those beliefs in writing, whether they agree with them or not.
What this has to to with NASA’s core mission, to explore space, I have no idea. But then I am rational and our government today is not.
This article at Space News today provides a nice summary of the number of launches that Russia’s Roscosmos will likely lose in the next three years due to the break off of commercial operations against that country because of its invasion of the Ukraine.
According to the article, Russia will lose sixteen launches. The list however misses one South Korean satellite scheduled for launch on an Angara rocket later this year. The total breakdown of this lost business is therefore as follows:
13 launches lost in 2022
3 launches lost in 2023
1 launch lost in 2024
The entities impacted are as follows:
Government launches:
Europe: six launches in ’22 and ’23, totaling eight satellites
South Korea: two launches in ’22
Sweden: one launch in ’22
Commercial launches:
OneWeb: six launches in ’22, totaling 199 satellites
Axelspace: one launch, totaling four satellites
Synspective: one launch
If the Ukraine War were to end today, it is possible that most of the government launches would be reinstated. The commercial companies however are almost certainly going to find other launch providers, no matter what. OneWeb for example is hardly going to trust its business to Russia after that country cancelled the launches and (at least at this moment) has confiscated the already delivered satellites.
If the war continues for another two or three months, then all this business will vanish for good, as alternative rocket companies will likely be found.
This list however does reveal one interesting fact. It appears that very few private companies have been interested in buying Russian launch services, with or without the Ukraine War. Most of Russia’s international customers have been other governments. Even OneWeb falls partly into this category, as it is half owned by the United Kingdom.
This fact suggests that Russia’s product has simply not been competitive against the new commercial market. The governments meanwhile probably had political motives in addition to economics to throw their business Russia’s way. Those political motives are now gone.
