March 13, 2024 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Year: 2024
Girl with the dogs – A cat on an emotional rollercoaster
An evening pause: This woman regularly posts videos of her grooming sessions with different animals. This particular session is quite entertaining. It also shows the necessity of regularly combing/brushing long-hair cats. If you own one, do it! Both you and your cat will be happier.
Hat tip Diane.
Defiance: Blacklisted Portland professor joins New College in Florida
Bruce Gilley of Portland State University
Bring a gun to a knife fight: Bruce Gilley, the Portland State University political scientist professor who was vilified, blacklisted, and threatened with death after writing a paper arguing that western colonialism was not all evil, that it also brought benefits to third world nations, has now taken a job as a scholar in residence at New College in Florida.
Left-leaning scholars have shown active disdain for both Gilley and New College, the latter of which is in the process of being remade from a poorly ranked campus heavily focused on social justice and critical race theory into one that prioritizes a classical liberal education.
“What they are doing there is of global significance, because this is a public university, it’s where the clearest democratic fight is,” Gilley told The College Fix in a telephone interview Friday discussing his new post. In a piece for the American Conservative, Gilley explained further: “New College is the first Reconquista of a publicly-funded venue. …Taking back power from the academic mullahs who have turned higher education in the West into little more than a madrassa system of leftist thought depends on storming the public institutions, not fleeing from them.”
Gilley’s paper on colonialism had made this quite reasonable historical statement:
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SpaceX announces launch time tomorrow for 3rd Superheavy/Starship launch
UPDATE: The FAA has now amended [pdf] SpaceX’s launch license to approve tomorrow’s Superheavy/Starship launch.
Original post:
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SpaceX has sent out email notices and now revised its Starship/Superheavy webpage to reflect a target launch time for the third Superheavy/Starship launch tomorrow, March 14, 2024, at 7 am (Central).
The third flight test of Starship is targeted to launch Thursday, March 14. The 110-minute test window opens at 7:00 a.m. CT.
A live webcast of the flight test will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff, which you can watch here and on X @SpaceX. As is the case with all developmental testing, the schedule is dynamic and likely to change, so be sure to stay tuned to our X account for updates.
I have not yet received a notice from the FAA, announcing the approval of a launch license, but SpaceX’s announcement likely signals that the approval has been given. As I noted yesterday, this approval was likely given as close to the launch as possible to help preclude any legal action by the various leftist activist groups that want to stop Elon Musk, stop SpaceX, and stop any grand human achievement. Their dislike and alienation with success is so deep that such tactics are now necessary to stymie them and allow such achievements to proceed.
A youtube live stream will also be available here. If the flight succeeds in getting Starship into orbit, it will attempt to open and close its payload door, attempt a propellant transfer test, and then attempt the first in-space relight of a Raptor engine in order to bring it down controlled in the Indian Ocean.
Scientists: Mars’ mysterious slope streaks and seasonal recurring lineae are caused by dust
A typical Martian slope streak.
On Mars there are two mysterious features that are somewhat similar but entirely unique to the Red Planet, and for years have baffled planetary geologists as to their origins.
One feature is called slope streaks, which appear randomly year-round as either dark or bright streaks on slopes. They resemble avalanches, except that they do not change the topography, have no debris piles at their base, and sometimes travel along that topography, sometimes even going uphill for short distances. Over time these streaks then fade.
The other feature is called recurring slope lineae, because though they look like slope streaks, they are not random but appear seasonally at the same places each year. Lineae are also always dark.
Scientists have proposed many theories to explain both, with most theories involving some form of water process, either the seepage of brine from below or water vapor causing the Martian surface dust to flow, like droplets on a car windshield. None of these theories has been confirmed, or entirely accepted.
Two studies at this week’s 55th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas have both concluded that water is not a factor in the formation of either phenomenon. Instead, both papers propose a much simpler explanation: Wind and blowing dust interact to cause small dust avalanches.
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Lucy’s first encounter with an asteroid produced surprises
At the 55th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference presently being held in Texas, the science team for the Lucy asteroid mission presented their first papers outlining what they learned during the spacecraft’s first asteroid encounter, flying past the main belt asteroid Dinkinesh on November 1, 2023.
To the right is the the best image taken at closest approach, at about 270 miles distance, annotated to include the analysis of Dinkinesh’s shape by scientists. As noted in the summary paper [pdf], the asteroid is about a half mile in diameter, and appears to have an equatorial ridge, similar to the ridges found on the near-Earth rubble-pile asteroids Bennu or Ryugu. Dinkinesh is not a rubble pile, however. Though boulder-strewn, it appears more solid, and even has what the scientists call a longitudinal trough, as indicated in the picture.
The ridge overlays the trough implying that it is the younger of the two structures. However, there is as yet no information to better constrain their relative ages, and thus they could potentially have formed in the same event. Indeed, Dinkinesh’s ridge and trough are likely the result of mass failure and the reaccretion of material, and may both be linked to the formation of Selam.
That flyby had produced one major surprise, the existence of a smaller satellite asteroid orbiting Dinkinesh, now dubbed Selam. It is shown in the lower left, as it appeared from behind the main asteroid as Lucy flew past. A later picture however revealed an even greater surprise.
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There likely is little or no ice in the Moon’s permanently shadowed craters
The floor of Shackleton Crater showing no obvious ice deposits,
as seen by Shadowcam. The black cross marks the south pole.
Click for original image.
This week the 55th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference is being held in Texas. The conference was originally established in connection with the Apollo missions to allow scientists to release their Moon research results. It quickly morphed into an annual event covering research from the entire planetary research community.
I have reviewed the abstracts for this year’s meeting, and culled what I think are the most significant new results from the conference, which I will report on in the next few posts.
We begin however with possibly the most important result from the conference, given by the science team for the ShadowCam instrument on South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter. That low-light camera was designed to take high resolution pictures of the permanently-shadowed craters of the Moon, to see if there was any visible or obvious ice hidden there. Though the science team presented a number of papers, the summary paper [pdf] by the instrument’s principal investigator, Mark Robinson of Arizona State University, gave the bottom line:
The data so far is finding very little evidence of water ice in these dark regions.
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The investors behind Space One, the Japanese commercial rocket company that had a launch failure yesterday
The explosion yesterday of the new Japanese-built Kairos-1 solid-fueded rocket shortly after lift-off immediately raised questions whether the new rocket company that built it, Space One, could survive that failure.
This story from CNBC suggests it will, based mainly on the nature of its principal investors.
Space One was set up in 2018 by a consortium of Japanese companies including Canon Electronics, IHI Aerospace and construction firm Shimizu, along with the government-owned Development Bank of Japan. Mitsubishi UFJ and Mizuho Financial Group, two of Japan’s biggest banks, also own minority stakes in Space One.
The story is focused on the declines in the stock values of these companies, following the failure, with Canon’s stock falling the most, 12.7%.
My takeaways from the article however are different. First, these are not small investors. Space One is backed by some of Japan’s biggest corporations as well as indirectly by the Japanese government. One failure should not cause them to back out of the project.
Second, that the company was formed in 2018 by these Japanese heavy-hitters and only now was able to finally attempt a launch — that ended in failure — suggests Japan’s heavy-hitters continue to do things slowly and poorly. Not only have these big companies been working much too slow to build this relatively small rocket, Mitsubishi’s effort to build the much larger H3 rocket for Japan’s space agency JAXA has also been fraught with delays and problems, from engine cracks to launch failures. It appears Japan’s space industry is building things with the same lackadaisical attitude of America’s modern airline industry.
Third, that this “startup” was created by a team of old space large companies suggests Japan still doesn’t get the basics of capitalism. This new company isn’t creating any real competition. It was instead apparently formed to keep these heavy hitters in control of the Japanese launch market. This partnership reminds me of the many projects put together for decades by American consortiums of old space companies, such as Boeing teaming with Lockheed Martin to create ULA. All such partnerships were designed not to create new companies and new innovative products that would compete, but to maintain the control these old companies had on the industry.
Space One will likely fly again, but until we begin to see completely new companies from Japan, backed by independent new investors, this country is going to continue to lag behind everyone else.
First launch of Japanese rocket startup fails
The first launch attempt by the Japanese rocket startup Space One failed today, when its Kairos-1 rocket blew up mere seconds after launch.
The launch took place from the company’s own launchpad in the south of Japan. The live stream shows the rocket appear to lift off cleanly, moving upward out of frame. When the video then switches camera to a more distant view, the rocket fails to appear from behind a nearby hill. Instead, a white cloud explodes upward. Shortly thereafter the live stream switches back to the launchpad, where there is a fire and smoke. Fire hoses then begin working to put the fire out.
Space One is the first independent commercial rocket startup in Japan apparently not working with that country’s JAXA space agency. We will have to wait and see whether it can recover from this failure.
Patsy Cline – Walkin’ After Midnight
An evening pause: Performed live 1957 on television.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
A Martian tadpole
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 28, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, with the rectangle in the inset marking the area covered by the picture. The science team labels this “inverted features,” a more vague way to describe the feature geologists dub “inverted channels.” The flow of a river or glacier acts to harden and increase the density of the channel bed. Later, the water or ice disappears, leaving just the canyon.
Even later, erosion begins to wear away the surrounding terrain. Because the canyon floor is now harder than that surrounding terrain, that floor is more resistent to erosion, and eventually becomes ridge following the exact same path as the long gone river or glacier.
This is what we have here, with this inverted channel, which is about five miles long, once draining into the deeper eroded valley to the south.
The location is at 38 degrees north latitude and inside the 2,000-mile-long mid-latitude region I dub glacier country, because almost every image shows evidence of glaciers or ice flows on the surface. This picture however is a rare exception. The features in this picture instead appear to be bedrock, something that is rarely seen in the canyons and craters in glacier country. It is beyond my pay grade however to explain why this spot lacks such features. Or it could be the near surface ice here looks so much like bedrock I am misinterpreting the picture.
Another United airplane makes an emergency landing
United Airlines: Run by bigoted clowns
As more proof that the United Airlines policies for hiring and promotion — focused solely on skin color, ethnicity, and sex more than talent, knowledge, and skills — is making flying on that airline downright dangerous, another United flight today had to make an emergency landing when immediately after take-off fluid began pouring from the plane.
Just 10 seconds after flight 830 from Sydney to San Francisco took the air, video by plane spotter New York Aviation got clear images of fluid spewing from the plane — it looks like it was coming from the rear right landing gear.
The crew of the Boeing 777-300 jet continued over the ocean for a while before turning around. Video from a passenger shows the crew dumping fuel before landing. The plane landed safely back at the airport in Sydney, with no injuries, but a lot of questions.
This was the fifth such incident of a United flight in just over a week, including four emergency landings and a failure after landing.
Though this was a Boeing jet, the fault here lies entirely with United, its pilots, and its maintenance department. Though pilots should be able to rely on their maintenance departments to keep the plane airworthy, they are also supposed to check their airplanes carefully before take-off. That neither the pilots of this plane or the maintenance staff detected anything before take-off suggests that no one is really doing their job right.
No matter. United is determined to make sure that half its employees are blacks or minorities or women, no matter how little those new hires know about maintaining an airplane. So what if planes fall from the sky and people die? United will have achieved diversity, equity, and inclusion!