Roy Clark & Johnny Cash – Orange Blossom Special
An evening pause: Performed live on television 1978.
Hat tip Blair Ivey.
Year: 2022
A “What the heck!?” crater on Mars
Click for full image.
Today’s cool image falls into what I call my “What the heck?” category. The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 31, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It was also picked by the science team as that camera’s picture of the day on July 12, 2022. From the caption:
This seems to belong to a class of craters in the Cerberus Plains that was flooded by lava, which was subsequently uplifted and fractured by an unknown process. This class of filled, uplifted and fractured craters is informally called “the waffle.” A combination of volcanic and periglacial processes seems possible.
In other words, the scientists only have a vague idea what created the broken up floor of this crater. For example, why did only the material in the interior of the crater get uplifted and fractured? Did this uplift occur before, during, or after the lava event?
The overview map below tells us a little about where that lava came from, and when.
» Read more
Universe’s most massive star is found to be less massive than previously believed
The uncertainty of science: Using data from the Gemini South telescope in Chile, astronomers have determined that the universe’s most massive star, dubbed R136a1, is actually less massive than previously believed.
By pushing the capabilities of the Zorro instrument on the Gemini South telescope of the International Gemini Observatory, operated by NSF’s NOIRLab, astronomers have obtained the sharpest-ever image of R136a1 — the most massive known star. This colossal star is a member of the R136 star cluster, which lies about 160,000 light-years from Earth in the center of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf companion galaxy of the Milky Way.
Previous observations suggested that R136a1 had a mass somewhere between 250 to 320 times the mass of the Sun. The new Zorro observations, however, indicate that this giant star may be only 170 to 230 times the mass of the Sun. Even with this lower estimate, R136a1 still qualifies as the most massive known star.
What astronomers are trying to figure out is the highest possible mass a star can possibly have. This new data suggests that this upper limit is smaller than previously believed.
Today’s blacklisted American: UC-San Diego to hold segregated events, excluding whites and Asians
Click for original.
“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” In its upcoming welcoming program in September for new students, the University of California-San Diego plans to hold racially segregated events that specifically excludes whites and Asian students and families from attending.
The flyer ad to the right, announcing the program dubbed Triton Weeks of Welcome, specifically includes two such events, as indicated in red. Both are exclusively for specific minorities, and those minorities only.
The group running the Black Surf week, Black Like Water, explains the purpose of its racially-segregated event as follows:
Through our research and practice, Black Like Water seeks to promote healing, restoration, and sovereignty in ways that do the liberatory work of combating anti-blackness and interrupting structural racism, but in manners that celebrate the Black diaspora, acknowledge ancestral practices and knowledge, and imagine Black futures.
August 18, 2022 Quick space links
As stringer Jay correctly noted to me in an email today, “Slow news day.” None of the stories below merit a full post, even though they are pretty much all of today’s space news.
- Chinese pseudo-company Space Pioneer tests its rocket strongback
- Sierra Space completes design review of system to extract oxygen from lunar soil
- Chinese pseudo-company StarSpace develops 600w Hall-effect ion thrusters
- NASA to announce this Friday the lunar landing site for the third Artemis/SLS launch in ’26
- Two upcoming Chinese launches announced for August, on August 19th and August 22nd
The company hopes to complete its first orbital launch before the end of the year.
The press release makes this sound more exciting than it is. All that has happened is the company has completed its first design review. Nothing has been built or tested.
Jay adds, “This company has currently raised ten million Yuan ($US 1.5M) in investments. Tiangong Space Station has these engines but I can not find any specs on it. [For context] the University of Michigan built a 100kw engine and NASA has built a 40kw engine and a 6kw engine that will be used on the Lunar Gateway.”
Wanna bet this doesn’t launch in ’26? Or ever?
However, the graphic NASA uses for its tweet, of Starship on the Moon, indicates that even NASA knows this, and is increasingly expecting its lunar program to shift away from SLS in the near future.
Both are launching from interior spaceports and will, based on the map of their launch paths at the link, dump their first stages on China. One will also fly over Taiwan.
Russian spacewalk ends earlier due to spacesuit power problem
A Russian spacewalk yesterday to continue the configuration of Europe’s robot arm for the Russian half of ISS was cut short after four hours when the power system in Oleg Artemyev’s spacesuit begin producing unexpected “voltage fluctuations.”
“I have a message, voltage low,” Artemyev radioed Russian ground controllers around 12 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT). An engineer at Russia’s mission control center near Moscow warned Artemyev he would lose communications if his suit ran out of power.
Russian flight director Vladimir Solovyov then jumped on the line to tell Artemyev to head back to the safety of the airlock. “Oleg, this is Solovyov,” he said. “Drop everything and start going back (to the airlock) right away. Oleg, go back and connect to station power.”
This problem occurred about two hours into the spacewalk. The second astronaut, Denis Matveev, continued working at the robot arm for another two hours before mission control ordered him to end the walk early.
According to Russian officials, Artemyev was never in any danger, though the urgency in which he was ordered to come inside suggests otherwise. According to another news report, a power loss could have also shut down the spacesuit’s “pumps and the fan.”
August 17, 2022 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, well worth your time, go here.
» Read more
ABBA – Waterloo
An evening pause: Performed live in 1974.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Get above 30 degrees latitude on Mars and you can find ice everywhere
Click for full image.
Today’s cool image provides further proof that there is ample near surface ice almost anywhere on Mars once you get above 30 degrees latitude, in either the northern or southern hemispheres. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken on May 26, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the interior slope of an unnamed 15-mile-wide crater that sits inside the much larger 185-mile-wide Newton crater, located in the cratered southern highlands of Mars.
The black cross on the global map of Mars above marks the location of this crater.
The photo was taken as part of the routine monitoring planetary scientists are doing of the gullies that flow down this crater’s interior rim, a monitoring program that goes back to 2007. It is thought that those gullies might be created by seasonal frost, either water ice or dry ice, that causes erosion.
What struck me about the photo however was the glacial features on the floor of the crater. Near the bottom of the interior slope those features look broken up, as if the pressure from above pushed the ice sheets apart. Farther from the interior slope the features more resemble a typical glacial flow, slowly inching downward toward the crater’s low spot. All these glacial features also lend weight to the theory that water ice somehow caused or contributed to the formation of those gullies.
The global map above shows that this crater, while well within the 30 to 60 degrees mid-latitude band where many Martian glaciers are found, is also far from the many regions on Mars that scientists have mapped as having high concentrations of glaciers. And yet, the glacial features are here as well.
Near surface ice will not be found at every spot on Mars. However, once you get above 30 degrees latitude, the evidence increasingly suggests that you won’t have to go far or dig down deep to find it.
Pushback: Doctor files $25 million defamation lawsuit against Houston Methodist for its COVID slanders
Dr. Mary Bowden, refusing to bow to the authorities
Bring a gun to a knife fight: Blacklisted Dr. Mary Bowden has now upped her game and filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas and its CEO, Marc Boom, for the slanders both published against her for her opposition to the COVID jab mandates.
You can read her lawsuit here [pdf].
Bowden had been suspended by Houston Methodist Hospital in November 2021 and was subsequently forced to resign because she publicly opposed COVID shot mandates and used ivermectin in treating her Wuhan flu patients. Both the hospital and Boom had accused her of “spreading dangerous misinformation which is not based on science” because she had successfully treated about 2,000 COVID patients, none of which ever needed hospitalization, with both ivermectin and monoclonal antibodies.
In February 2022 Bowden began her pushback when she sued Houston Methodist to get its own data on the success or failure of its own CDC-endorsed treatment of COVID, as well as its financial records to find out how much it had earned from that treatment.
» Read more
A detailed description of Rocket Lab’s private Venus mission
Click for full figure.
Capitalism in space: In partnership with scientists at MIT, the Planetary Science Institute, and others, Rocket Lab engineers this week published a detailed description of the company’s planned privately funded mission to Venus, presently targeting a launch in May 2023.
From the paper’s abstract:
The Rocket Lab mission to Venus is a small direct entry probe planned for baseline launch in May 2023 with accommodation for a single ~1 kg instrument. A backup launch window is available in January 2025. The probe mission will spend about 5 min in the Venus cloud layers at 48–60 km altitude above the surface and collect in situ measurements. We have chosen a low-mass, low-cost autofluorescing nephelometer to search for organic molecules in the cloud particles and constrain the particle composition.
The figure above is figure 6 from the paper. It shows the probe’s planned path through Venus’s atmosphere. If the mission launches in May ’23 the probe would enter the atmosphere in October ’23.
Redwire to launch first commercial and private greenhouse in space
Capitalism in space: The in-space 3D printing company Redwire announced yesterday that it will launch to ISS the first privately-built greenhouse, scheduled for a ’23 liftoff.
Redwire is developing this greenhouse for agricultural company Dewey Scientific.
During the inaugural flight, Dewey Scientific will grow industrial hemp in the Greenhouse for a gene expression study. The company collaborated with Redwire, contributing technical details about the 60-day experiment and describing its potential to demonstrate the capabilities of the facility, while advancing biomedical and biofuels research.
The long term goal is to prove that this technology can produce products of value on future space stations, products that can then be sold on Earth. That both companies appear willing to invest some of their own research and development capital in this project suggests they both believe there will be a strong viable market for these products.