Author: Robert Zimmerman

Trump proves COVID-19 is nothing to fear

12:34 pm

The recent spat of positive tests for COVID-19 among the Washington elite, including President Trump, highlight spectacularly the continuing overreaction and unnecessary fear and terror that people have of this respiratory illness.

All told since October 1st about eighteen Washington elected officials, staffers, and reporters have announced testing positive for the coronavirus, based on several reports here, here, and here.

These of course are only the announced cases. I suspect that in Washington a lot more are testing positive but are keeping quiet about it.

And yet, among these announced cases has anyone died? No. Has anyone gotten seriously ill? No. In fact, almost no one has been hospitalized, except for Trump, and he recovered so fast that he was released from the Walter Reed hospital today after spending less than four days there. Moreover, he was sent to the hospital only out of caution, not because he was having any significant problems. During his stay it appears he continued his work schedule with almost as much vigor as before.

We used to have a saying during flu season. “Something’s going around, everyone’s got it.” » Read more

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Criss-crossing Martian ridges hit by new impacts

9:41 am

Criss-crossing Martian ridges hit by new impacts
Click for full image.

The image to the right, cropped to post here, is a captioned photo from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance orbiter and released today. From the caption:

The black spots [recent impacts] form because the craters exposed cleaner materials in the subsurface beneath the bright, dusty surface.

Our image is also interesting because the surface has a criss-cross pattern formed by wind activity. Bright ripples that are oriented from the upper right to the lower left are perpendicular to the wind flow. In contrast, outcrops that have been eroded by the wind are oriented perpendicular to the ripples to produce the criss-cross pattern we now observe.

The overview map below might also help explain this criss-cross pattern.
» Read more

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A donut on the Moon

8:58 am

A donut crater on the Moon
Click for full image.

In this case the donut is a crater dubbed Bell E Crater, with a second concentric rim in its interior. The photo to the right, reduced to post here, was taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) as part of its high resolution survey of the entire Moon. As noted at the first link:

Craters not only vary in shape but also in complexity. There are simple craters and complex craters with ring structures and mountains at the center. Somewhere in between is Bell E, a small crater located within the larger Bell crater. These donut-shaped formations are commonly known as concentric craters. Many questions remain on the origin of donut craters. While there have been several ideas about their origin, including double impacts, the currently favored hypotheses involve volcanic processes and compositional variations.

The article outlines four hypotheses for explaining this crater’s formation, a perfectly aligned double impact, ripples at impact into thick warm lava, layers of different densities, and later volcanic activity. None do a good job of explaining all of the concentric craters found on the Moon, and thus suggest that these craters might have formed from some combination of more than one theory.

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Antares launches; Falcon 9 aborts

8:55 pm

Of the two launches scheduled for tonight, Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket was the only one to launch, lifting off on schedule at 9:16 pm (Eastern). This was the company’s third launch this year.

SpaceX’s launch however aborted at T-2 seconds. No word on why the rocket’s computer’s shut down, or when they will reschedule.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race remain unchanged:

25 China
15 SpaceX
10 Russia
4 ULA
4 Europe (Arianespace)

The Antares launch however puts the U.S. back into a tie with China, 25-25, in the national rankings.

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Canvas – The Simpsons theme song

6:01 pm

An evening pause: About two years ago I said to Diane that I’d never seen any of The Simpsons animated TV show. Neither had she. Since then we have watched all the available episodes on DVD, covering most of the first twenty seasons.

What first impressed us about the show was how actually normal and family-oriented it was, in the beginning. It was not the “edgy” ugly portrayal of America its reputation had implied.

Over time that theme was more and more lost, though whenever the writers went back to those roots the show shined. Even so, what was most impressive was how the show managed somehow to remain fresh, for most of that time period. Except for a period around season nine, the satire and jokes remained solid for almost all of the first twenty years.

Since the last ten years have not been put on DVD, we won’t likely see them. No matter. Twenty years of The Simpsons was great, but it was more than enough.

Hat tip Diane Zimmerman, who used numerous musical quotes from the series to find many great evening pauses.

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Michigan Supreme Court calls lock down orders by governor illegal

4:16 pm

The Michigan Supreme Court today struck down the endless number of arbitrary lock down orders imposed by Democratic governor Gretchen Witmer, stating that her actions were “an unlawful delegation of legislative power to the executive branch in violation of the Michigan Constitution.”

In a 4-3 ruling, the court determined the governor did not have the authority under state law to issue any additional emergency declarations pertaining to the pandemic after April 30. That was the last date when the legislature allowed the governor to declare an emergency.

Whitmer has relied on an interpretation of an emergency powers law passed in 1945 and the Emergency Powers Act of 1976 to issue a litany of executive orders related to the pandemic. The orders mandated the closure of businesses and restricted the number of people allowed to gather at events, all in the name of safety and preventing the spread of coronavirus.

Everyone whose businesses were damaged or lost their job because of her illegal actions should sue Witmer personally. This abuse of power should cost her, in the hope that other governors down the road will think twice before trying the same thing.

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Sunspot update: Practically no sunspots for a month

11:49 am

It is sunspot update time again! NOAA today updated its monthly graph for tracking the Sun’s monthly sunspot activity, and I have posted it below, with additional annotations by me to show the past solar cycle predictions.

July and August had seen sunspot numbers higher than the new NOAA prediction (shown by the red curve on the graph below). September however was almost totally blank, with only two weak sunspots for the entire month, as shown on the SILSO graph below.
» Read more

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Two launches scheduled for tonight, 27 minutes apart

9:08 am

The numerous launch scrubs this past week has created an unprecedented situation tonight, two orbital launches scheduled only 27 minutes apart from two different East Coast spaceports.

First Northrop Grumman will try again to launch its Cygnus cargo freighter to ISS from Wallops Island, Virginia, with the launch scheduled for 9:12 pm (Eastern). The first launch attempt last night was aborted 2:21 seconds before liftoff “after receiving off-nominal data from ground support equipment.”

Second, SpaceX will try to launch two Air Force GPS satellites from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the launch scheduled for 9:43 pm (Eastern). This launch has been delayed several times because of the repeated launch scrubs of ULA’s Delta 4 Heavy rocket, attempting to launch a military reconnaissance satellite. ULA’s launch had priority for the range, but with it delayed due to the investigation over the T-7 second launch abort on September 30th, the SpaceX’s GPS launch moves up in line.

The first will be live streamed on NASA TV, the second by SpaceX. I have embedded the live streams for both below the fold.
» Read more

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Cygnus launch scrubbed less than 3 minutes from launch

6:49 pm

The scrubs keep coming! Northrop Grumman’s launch team tonight scrubbed the launch of its Antares rocket and Cygnus cargo freighter at T-2:21 minutes.

It appears, listening to the countdown, that the abort came from the engineers monitoring the propellants on the first stage, but this remains preliminary. More information is needed. (Update: It appears the issue was related to ground support equipment, not the rocket itself.)

They can recycle and launch tomorrow from Wallops Island, but this is also not confirmed. SpaceX also wishes to launch at almost the exact same time tomorrow from Cape Canaveral, and I am not sure both launches can occur simultaneously.

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