Gerard Hoffnung – The Bricklayers Story
An evening pause: This is an old story, but he does it so well. And it is a nice introduction to the weekend. May your projects turn out better.
Hat tip James Street.
Year: 2022
Inverted Martian tadpole
Click for full image.
Cool image time! On Mars it is not unusual to see what scientists call tadpole features, craters with meandering canyons or channels either flowing into or out from the crater’s rim. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, is another example, though with one major difference. The channel and crater are inverted, with the channel instead a ridge and the crater a circular plateau. The picture itself was taken on April 16, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
Orbital images have found on Mars a lot of what scientists call pedestal craters, where the impact packed and hardened the ground under the crater so that when the surrounding terrain eroded away the crater remained, as a plateau.
Scientists have also found on Mars a lot of what they call “inverted channels,” places where the channels of a drainage pattern followed the same geological process, becoming more resistant to erosion so that over time it turned from a channel to a ridge.
Here we have a combination of both. The overview map below provides us the larger picture.
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Study: The Moon’s poles might not be the only places to find lunar water
Click for full image.
According to a new study published in June in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, while the lunar poles might contain water ice in permanently shadowed craters — based on detected hydrogen abundances — there is an even higher concentration of hydrogen found in the Aristarchus Plateau region in the lower mid-latitudes.
The map to the right is figure 9 from the paper, annotated to post here, showing the Moon’s hydrogen abundances globally, with lighter areas having higher concentrations. The boxes indicate five lunar regions that appear to hold higher levels of hydrogen and thus might contain higher amounts of water. From the paper’s conclusions:
The bulk hydrogen map also led to the first identification of bulk hydrogen enhancements within a pyroclastic deposit (Aristarchus Plateau), an identification that corroborates previous suggestions that hydrogen was among the volatiles involved in the eruption and emplacement of pyroclastic deposits. Further, with the understanding that there are enhanced bulk hydrogen abundances within at least one pyroclastic deposit and not just a surface enhancement, this leads to the implication that the hydrogen contained within just the Aristarchus Plateau may represent a significant fraction of the hydrogen that exists in the Moon’s near-subsurface, including that at both lunar poles. [emphasis mine]
It is important to note that finding high hydrogen abundances does not automatically mean you have found water. For hydrogen to exist on the Moon the atom must be bound in a molecule, and usually water is chosen as the most likely candidate. In the case of Aristarchus, however, the paper instead suggests that hydrogen was placed there as pyroclastic deposits, when active volcanism was occurring a long time ago. While water ice might not be present now in these regions, the data also suggests that water played a major role in its formation.
These hydrogen abundances however also signal the faint possibility of that water ice might be buried here, below the surface, left over from those early volcanic processes. The data also suggests even if the hydrogen is bound in other materials, mining and processing might be able to extract water from it.
Pushback: Teacher wins victory against Rhode Island school district that tried to blacklist her
Providence’s policy of segregating teachers by race.
In October 2021 Romana Bessinger, a teacher for 22 years at a school in Providence, Rhode Island, suddenly discovered she had been suspended without pay and transferred to a no-work desk job because she had publicly criticized the school district’s effort to segregate teachers by race (see graphic to the right) while also making the the history curriculum an anti-white, anti-American diatribe.
Bessinger has now won back her teaching job. Just days before the school district was going to have to defend its position at her grievance hearing, it backed down completely.
I have received notification that coming this fall, I will have a permanent classroom assignment at Classical High. I have been freed from the basement. I’ll be back in the classroom this September sharing literature about the Holocaust, American authors with universal messages to share, historical references and literature that reflects the greatness of America in all her flaws and perfection. I’ll teach universal themes that all children can relate to, my classroom will have characters and poetry free of harmful political activism and full of accuracy. I hope to instill critical thinking, freedom of thought, rigorous activities that promote lively discussion unprompted by curriculum materials filled with propaganda.
Bessinger considers this a victory but I am not so sure. She might be back in the classroom free to teach history properly, but it does not appear the school district’s segregation policy nor its official curriculum promoting hate and bigotry have changed. As Bessinger noted in July 2021:
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Update on status of first orbital Starship/Superheavy
Link here. The main focus of the article is the state of Superheavy prototype #7, which experienced an explosion and some damage during testing earlier this month.
The day after the anomaly, Elon indicated on Twitter that Booster 7 would roll back to the production site to work on repairs to the vehicle and assess the next steps. Rollback occurred on July 14, and in the following days, it’s been observed that several Raptor engines have been taken off from the vehicle, likely for further inspection and testing at SpaceX’s McGregor test facility a few hours drive up north from Starbase.
As of writing, repairs are continuing on Booster 7, and it will likely still be undergoing repairs for the next week or two. So while an early retirement for the vehicle could be expected, the current target by teams is still an orbital flight by Booster 7 and Ship 24 with a notional target date of late August for the flight.
If SpaceX decides to retire #7, it already is prepping #8 and #9, with #8 likely to be put on the launchpad for testing in the next week.
The target date for that first orbital launch is still in August, but that schedule appears increasingly unlikely.
Space Foundation: Global space economy grew by 9% compared to last year
Capitalism in space: According to its annual report, the Space Foundation has determined that the global space economy grew by 9% in 2021, totaling almost half a trillion dollars total.
Most of the money generated by the space industry came in the commercial sector, which saw a 6.4% boost in revenues, with more than $224 billion coming from products and services delivered by space firms and nearly $138 billion spent on infrastructure and support for commercial space enterprises.
The report also found a 19% increase in government spending on both military and civilian space projects, with India, China, and the U.S. leading the way.
Because of the shift to a competitive and independent space industry in the U.S. the government is also now getting a lot more bang for buck. The increased funding is not simply funding pork on the ground, it is actually producing results in space, and doing so more efficiently.
Long March 2D launches two military satellites for China
China today successfully launched two military reconnaissance satellites, using its Long March 2D rocket.
The launch was from an interior spaceport, which means the rocket’s lower stages, which use very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed to Earth inside China.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
33 SpaceX
26 China
9 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
4 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 46 to 26 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 46 to 42.
Long March 5B core stage crash window narrows to 12 hours
The Aerospace Corporation has now narrowed its predicted window for the uncontrolled re-entry of the core stage of China’s Long March 5B, launched on July 24th, to twelve hours, centered over southeast China in the early morning hours of July 31st.
The window still covers almost all inhabitable places on Earth. It will also narrow considerably in the next 24 hours, though not enough to make a reliable precise prediction until just prior to re-entry.
Just remember: China will repeat this farce in October, when it launches the next module to its Tiangong space station.
Earl Scruggs & all the great banjo players in 1971 – Foggy Mountain Breakdown
An evening pause: I posted a more recent version in 2015 when Scruggs was much older. This version is exhilarating because of the number of great players involved.
Hat tip Able Windsor.
The big storms at Jupiter’s poles are coherent and stable
Click for full image.
After four years of observations by Juno in orbit around Jupiter, scientists studying the storms at the gas giant’s poles have found that those storms are stable, long-lasting features. From the abstract of their paper:
These data have shown cyclones organized in snowflake-like structures. The Jupiter’s polar cyclones are long-lasting features, which did not disappear or merge during four years of observations.
The image to the right, posted by me earlier this week, shows several of these storms, or vortices, at Jupiter’s north pole. Previous work had documented the overall pattern, as described in the paper:
The observed vortices display geometrical symmetries around both poles: circumpolar cyclones (CPCs), organized in a regular pattern, surround a central one. At the north pole, eight circumpolar vortices form an octagonal structure, while at the south pole, five circumpolar vortices are arranged in a pentagonal pattern; both central polar vortices show some degree of displacements to the geometrical pole, about 0.5° for the Northern Polar Cyclone (NPC) and 1°-2° for the Southern Polar Cyclone (SPC).
While this research has found little change in these storms over four years, it is unknown what their long term evolution will be for an entire Jupiter year, twelve Earth years long.
New paper: Glaciers on Mars could have been extensive, despite the lack of expected subsequent landforms
Click for full figure.
According to a new paper published this week, scientists now posit that glaciation could have been much more extensive in the geological history of Mars than presently believed, despite the lack of the expected subsequent landforms as seen on Earth.
From the abstract:
The lack of evidence for large-scale glacial landscapes on Mars has led to the belief that ancient glaciations had to be frozen to the ground. Here we propose that the fingerprints of Martian wet-based glaciation should be the remnants of the ice sheet drainage system instead of landforms generally associated with terrestrial ice sheets. We use the terrestrial glacial hydrology framework to interrogate how the Martian surface gravity affects glacial hydrology, ice sliding, and glacial erosion. …[W]e compare the theoretical behavior of identical ice sheets on Mars and Earth and show that, whereas on Earth glacial drainage is predominantly inefficient, enhancing ice sliding and erosion, on Mars the lower gravity favors the formation of efficient subglacial drainage. The apparent lack of large-scale glacial fingerprints on Mars, such as drumlins or lineations, is to be expected. [emphasis mine]
In other words, on Earth the higher gravity causes glaciers and ice sheets to slide, with the liquid water at the base acting as a lubricant. On Mars, the lower gravity slows that slide, so that the water at the glacier’s base drains away instead, causing erosion and the formation of a drainage pattern in the ground beneath the glacier or ice sheet.
The image above, from figure 1 of the paper, shows on the left a graphic of the two types of drainage patterns expected, and on the right two examples found on Earth (D1: Devon Island; D2: Northwest Territories). Orbiter images of Mars have found variations of these types of drainage patterns in numerous places in Mars’ mid-latitude glacial bands, as shown below.
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Today’s blacklisted American: January 6th rally attendee commits suicide
Mark Aungst, murdered by the Biden Administration
Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em: Mark Aungst, a Pennsylvania man who attended the January 6th 2021 election rally in Washington DC and had been prosecuted by the Biden administration for “demonstrating or parading in a restricted building,” committed suicide on July 20, 2022, shortly before his sentencing.
And what was Angst’s horrible crime of insurrection on January 6th for which he was forced to plead guilty and which he was to be sentenced in September to as much as six months in prison and as much as $5,000?
Assistant U.S. Attorney Mona Furst said the prosecution had evidence showing Aungst and Bronsburg entering the Capitol through the Senate fire door by the parliamentarian’s office approximately 2:45 p.m. and leaving 30 seconds later. Twenty minutes later they re-entered the building through the Senate wing door, and took photos and videos on their cell phones as they walked through the Capitol and into Senate Room 145.
Bronsburg later posted a video she took in the Capitol on Facebook and when Aungst returned to the bus he showed others his pictures, said Furst.
Neither assaulted a police officer nor stole or damaged government property, the prosecutor had said at a previous court proceeding.
My god, what horrors! This guy walked into the Capitol (the doors being opened by security), took some pictures, and had the temerity to show those pictures to others! Clearly he was part of a coup. That he could only be sentenced to six months in jail was certainly insufficient. Democrats nationwide can now celebrate that this evil insurrectionist is now dead.
Moreover, Democrats must be further heartened because this is the second January 6th protester to commit suicide because of their persecution.
I found these paragraphs from his obituary especially heart-breaking:
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