Year: 2023

January 27, 2023 Quick space links

6:23 pm

Courtesy of Jay, BtB’s stringer. Sorry this is posted late, but Diane and I were celebrating our wedding anniversary hiking and then going to a nice Italian restaurant for dinner.

 

 

 

 

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Today’s blacklisted American: Jesus painting at U.S. Merchant Marine Academy covered to avoid offending others

11:28 am

USSMA Superintendent Vice Admiral Joanna Nunan
USSMA Superintendent Vice Admiral Joanna Nunan

They’re coming for you next: A painting showing Jesus walking on water in a room at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in New York has now been covered with a curtain because eighteen “midshipmen, faculty, staff and graduates” signed a letter of complaint.

Calling the artwork a display of “sectarian Jesus supremacy,” [Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation who represented the complainants,] noted the room in which the painting is hung is used for various administrative meetings, disciplinary hearings and other events. “The outrageousness of that Jesus painting’s display is only further exacerbated by the fact that this room is also used regularly for USMMA Honor Code violation boards where midshipmen are literally fighting for their careers, and, often even more, as they face the shameful ignominy of potential expulsion with prejudice if found guilty of USMMA Honor Code violations,” wrote Weinstein.

Weinstein told The Christian Post his clients “quite correctly believe that the display of the ‘Jesus painting’ is totally violative of the clear time, place and manner requirements of the No Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”

The problem is that the painting was not created by the federal government. Its history is much more profound.
» Read more

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Glaciers or taffy on Mars?

10:11 am

Glaciers of taffy on Mars?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 28, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It was released on January 4, 2023 as a captioned image, with this caption by Alfred McEwen of the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory in Arizona:

The floor of the Hellas impact basin, the lowest elevation on Mars, remains poorly explored because haze often blocks it from view. However, we recently got a clear image, revealing the strange banded terrain. These bands may be layers or flow bands or both.

At first glance, these bands reminded me of the many glaciers found on Mars. McEwen however is being properly vague about the nature of these features, for a number of reasons illustrated by the overview map below.
» Read more

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The twin asteroid Janus probes, stranded by Psyche delay, might go to Apophis

9:20 am

Apophis' path past the Earth in 2029
A cartoon showing Apophis’s path in 2029

The science team that built the twin Janus spacecraft, designed to fly past an asteroid but stranded when its launch got canceled, are now considering the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis as a new target.

If the Janus spacecraft can find a ride by early 2028, scientists could use one or both of the spacecraft to scout out the large asteroid Apophis before its super-close approach to Earth in April 2029. (If only one spacecraft visits Apophis, scientists would see only about half of the asteroid but could send the second spacecraft elsewhere; if both spacecraft fly past the same object they can be arranged to reveal the whole surface.)

Initially the entire Janus mission had been designed on the assumption it would launch as a secondary payload when the Psyche mission to the asteroid Psyche launched last fall. When that launch had to be canceled because Psyche was not ready, Janus lost its mission. The science team has since been struggling to find a replacement, handicapped by the fact that it must go as a secondary payload.

There is a serious issue however with arriving ahead of Apophis’s close approach in 2029. The science community has discouraged such missions, because they fear a spacecraft arriving then could shift Apophis’s trajectory and actually increase the chance it will hit the Earth during a later close approach. Instead, all planetary probes presently going to Apophis in 2029 are planning to arrive after the flyby.

The risk is extremely small, but it must be considered before sending Janus to Apophis.

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January 26, 2023 Quick space links

4:47 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

 

 

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Pushback: Two reporters sue ESPN for terminating them for not getting jabbed

12:35 pm

ESPN-opposed to religious freedom

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Two former ESPN employees, sports reporter Allison Williams and producer Beth Faber, have now sued the network and its owner Disney for religious discrimination when it refused to recognize their religious reasons for refusing the COVID shots and thus terminated them.

You can read their complaint here [pdf]. The thuggish, unreasonable, and irrational attitude of the company to both employees — typical of all pro-jab organizations during the Wuhan panic — is well illustrated by this quote:

Despite offering to test regularly and wear a mask, work remotely or in-studio, and claiming she had already had COVID-19 and “had natural immunity,” ESPN denied her exemption request and terminated her contract a week later, according to the suit.

Nor is this lawsuit the only one against ESPN by a sports reporter. » Read more

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A Martian bear!

10:24 am

A Martian bear!
Click for original image. Full image here.

Silly image time! Today the science team for the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter posted the photo to the right, which I have cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here. It was taken on December 12, 2022, and was rotated so that north is to the right in order to make its resemblance to a bear’s face obvious. As noted in the caption by Alfred McEwen of the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory in Arizona:

There’s a hill with a V-shaped collapse structure (the nose), two craters (the eyes), and a circular fracture pattern (the head). The circular fracture pattern might be due to the settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater. Maybe the nose is a volcanic or mud vent and the deposit could be lava or mud flows?

Maybe just grin and bear it.

If you have red-green glasses you can see a 3D anaglyph of this image here. The feature itself is located in the southern cratered highlands of Mars at 41 degrees south latitude, so the presence of near surface ice that would cause a mud volcano is definitely possible.

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NASA and Russian engineers meeting to discuss status of leaks on ISS’s Zvezda module

9:40 am

According to Russia’s state-run press, NASA and Russian engineers have been reviewing the status of the repairs on the cracks in the Zvezda module on ISS.

Repairs to the various cracks in Zvezda’s hull, done by Russian astronauts in ’20 and ’21, have reduced the leakage from 1,140 grams per day to 300 grams per day. Normally ISS is expected to lose 325 grams per day, across the entire station, so the Zvezda leak doubled this loss, even after the repair. Thus, the hatch to Zvezda is kept closed in order to maintain the atmosphere of ISS at its normal levels, and opened only when there is need to enter it. In addition, its port is no longer used for dockings.

The engineering review is also looking into the cause of the cracks, which are believed to be stress fractures caused by the age of Zvezda (ISS’s second oldest module) combined with the many dockings that had occurred at its port. The review is also discussing ways to reduce the problem, until ISS’s retirement in 2030.

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German rocket startup Isar Aerospace gets first American customer

9:28 am

The German rocket startup Isar Aerospace, which hopes to complete the first launch of its Spectrum rocket this year, has signed its first launch contract with an American company, the satellite broker and space tug company Spaceflight.

U.S.-based launch services provider Spaceflight said Jan. 25 it has booked a dedicated launch in 2026 from Isar Aerospace, the German rocket developer aiming to perform the first test flight of its Spectrum vehicle this year. The mission is slated to lift off from Isar’s launchpad in Andøya, Norway, to sun-synchronous orbit (SSO).

Their agreement also includes an option for an additional dedicated launch in 2025, which Isar chief commercial officer Stella Guillen told SpaceNews could also use a launchpad it is developing at the Guiana Space Center near Kourou, French Guiana.

Spaceflight has been scrambling to find rockets for its tugs, since SpaceX announced in March 2022 it would no longer carry them. It signed a deal with Arianespace to fly on its Vega rocket, but launch failures have delayed its launch.

Isar is one of three German rocket startups vying for business. The race to be the first to launch remains very tight.

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Lucy team adds 10th asteroid to the spacecraft’s tour

9:17 am

Lucy's route through the solar system
Lucy’s route through the solar system

The Lucy science team has now added a tenth asteroid to the spacecraft’s tour of the solar system, planning its route so that it will pass within 280 miles on November 1, 2023.

The Lucy mission is already breaking records by planning to visit nine asteroids during its 12-year tour of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, which orbit the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. Originally, Lucy was not scheduled to get a close-up view of any asteroids until 2025, when it will fly by the main belt asteroid (52246) Donaldjohanson. However, the Lucy team identified a small, as-yet unnamed asteroid in the inner main belt, designated (152830) 1999 VD57, as a potential new and useful target for the Lucy spacecraft.

The asteroid is about 2,300 feet wide. The primary goal of this visit however will be engineering, testing Lucy’s new method of tracking an object as the spacecraft flies past. On the map to the right the dots along Lucy’s path indicate the asteroids to be visited.

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