Author: Robert Zimmerman

Dragon update for the ongoing and next mission

10:34 am

Two stories today provide an update of the overall schedule and status of SpaceX’s manned Dragon capsule, both now and into the future.

First, they are preparing for the return of Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley from ISS on August 2nd. Prior to return they will use the station’s robot arm to inspect the capsule’s heat shield to make sure it did not sustain any damage during its two months in space. Such inspections will be standard procedure on future flights, something NASA did not do on shuttle flights until after the Columbia failure.

It is unlikely there is any damage, but making this inspection is plain common sense. If the heat shield has been damaged, the astronauts can stay on board ISS until the next Dragon arrives, which can then bring them home.

Second, NASA and SpaceX have worked out a tentative schedule for that next Dragon manned launch, now set for sometime in late September. The agency wants a bit of time to review the full results of the first demo mission before flying a second.

Based on all that has happened so far, it now appears unlikely that the agency will find anything that prevents that late September flight.

1 comment

Midnight repost: Squeal like a pig

11:59 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: Tonight’s repost was written just prior to the 2010 mid-term elections. I correctly predicted that the Democrats would get creamed in that election. I then tried to predict what would happen next politically due to that Republican victory. I leave it to my readers to determine how good my analysis was, and how well it applies to what is happening right now.

——————————
Squeal like a pig

Let’s take a trip into the future, looking past Tuesday’s midterm election.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that, come Tuesday, the Republicans take both houses, in a stunning landslide not seen in more than a century. Let’s also assume that the changes in Congress are going to point decidedly away from the recent liberal policies of large government (by both parties). Instead, every indication suggests that the new Congress will lean heavily towards a return to the principles of small government, low taxes, and less regulation.

These assumptions are not unreasonable. Not only do the polls indicate that one or both of the houses of Congress will switch from Democratic to Republican control, the numerous and unexpected primary upsets of established incumbents from both parties — as well the many protests over the past year by large numbers of ordinary citizens — make it clear that the public is not interested in half measures. Come January, the tone and direction of Congress is going to undergo a shocking change.

Anyway, based on these assumptions, we should then expect next year’s Congress to propose unprecedented cuts to the federal budget, including the elimination of many hallowed programs. The recent calls to defund NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcastings are only one example.

When Congress attempts this, however, the vested interests that have depended on this funding for decades are not going to take the cuts lightly. Or to put it more bluntly, they are going to squeal like pigs, throwing temper tantrums so loud and insane that they will make the complaints of a typical three-year-old seem truly statesman-like. And they will do so in the hope that they will garner sympathy and support from the general voting public, thereby making the cuts difficult to carry out.

The real question then is not whether the new Congress will propose the cuts required to bring the federal government under control, but whether they, as well as the public, will have the courage to follow through, to defy the howls from these spoiled brats, and do what must be done.
» Read more

0 comments

Study: Heaviest social media users enjoy hurting others

3:15 pm

A new study of almost 500 college-age students has found that the heaviest users of social media routinely had personalities that tended to enjoy hurting and denigrating others.

A fascinating study of 472 university students tracked their usage on two top platforms for 18-to-24-year olds: Snapchat (2.64 hours per day) and Facebook (2.28 hours per day). Researchers found that users displaying addictive behavior were also more likely to be motivated to be cruel and callous and to use others for personal gain.

“Our results demonstrate that individuals who have a greater preference for these types of rewards display greater problematic use of both platforms,” write the researchers, who note that these traits are also associated with narcissism and psychopathy and have previously been correlated with addictive internet use. They write that social media sites unwittingly “cater to people who seek rewards from being cruel, such as through cyberbullying or various aggressive online behaviors.”

Not only does this study confirm the general behavior of the bulk of all Twitter users, which has become a cesspool of slander, character assassination, and hate, it also describes the behavior of the many trolls one routinely sees commenting on websites (including Behind the Black). Too often such anonymous individuals show up throwing out comments whose only purpose is to either disagree, argue, or insult others. It requires on my part a lot of monitoring to keep such childish behavior off of this website, and this study helps to explain why it happens.

The study also provides some guidance on what adults should be doing to prevent this behavior in their children. It is a bad thing to let young children play on social media endlessly. Their use of computers and smart phones must be monitored, and their use must be disciplined, to teach children to think independently from the social media trends that can easily overwhelm them

Hat tip Ace of Spades.

6 comments

Slip-sliding away – on Mars

1:00 pm

Faults on Mars
Click for full image.

Today’s cool Martian image, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, comes from the camera on Mars Odyssey and was taken on May 18, 2020. It shows an area on Mars where faults and cracks in the ground have caused criss-crossing depressions. In this particular case we can see that the north-south trending fissure at some point got cut in half by east-west trending fault, its northern and southern halves thus getting shifted sideways from each other. For scale the straight section of the northern canyon is about five miles long, with the sideways shift about a mile in length.

As the caption notes, “With time and erosion this region of fault blocks will become chaos terrain,” regions of canyons often cutting at right angles to each other with flat-topped mesas and buttes in between.

Now for the mystery.
» Read more

0 comments

A July 4th Hubble image of Saturn

10:27 am

Saturn as seen by Hubble on July 4, 2020
Click for full image, annotated.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on July 4, 2020, and shows Saturn, its rings, plus several moons, in all their glory.

The dot near the bottom center is Enceladus. The dot at center right is Mimas. If you click on the annotated full image it will show the locations of several other smaller moons much harder to see.

This new Saturn image was taken during summer in the planet’s northern hemisphere.

Hubble found a number of small atmospheric storms. These are transient features that appear to come and go with each yearly Hubble observation. The banding in the northern hemisphere remains pronounced as seen in Hubble’s 2019 observations, with several bands slightly changing color from year to year. The ringed planet’s atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium with traces of ammonia, methane, water vapor, and hydrocarbons that give it a yellowish-brown color.

Hubble photographed a slight reddish haze over the northern hemisphere in this color composite. This may be due to heating from increased sunlight, which could either change the atmospheric circulation or perhaps remove ices from aerosols in the atmosphere. Another theory is that the increased sunlight in the summer months is changing the amounts of photochemical haze produced.

The distance across from one end of the rings to the other is about 150,000 miles, about two thirds the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

0 comments

First image of multi-exoplanets around young sunlike star

10:00 am

Two exoplanets in one image

Worlds without end: Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, astronomers have taken the first image that captures two different exoplanets circling a young sunlike star.

The star’s light is partly blocked in the upper left of the photo to the right, cropped slightly to post here.

You can read the paper here [pdf]. The star itself, though similar in mass to the Sun, is thought to be only seventeen million years old.

But the system, dubbed TYC 8998-760-1, is nothing like our solar system. One of the star’s companions straddles the line that defines planets, with a mass 14 times Jupiter’s; the other has a mass of six Jupiters. Both orbit far from the star, about 160 and 320 times the average distance between Earth and the Sun. That puts them more than four times farther out than Pluto is from the Sun.

The size and distance of these giant planets were why they could be imaged from the ground.

0 comments

Break in fuel line caused LauncherOne failure

9:50 am

Capitalism in space: Virgin Orbit has determined that a break in the oxygen feed line in its LauncherOne rocket caused the failure during its first orbital test flight in late May.

Speaking at a webinar organized by the Space Generation Advisory Council, an organization for young space industry professionals, Dan Hart said the demonstration mission for the LauncherOne rocket May 25 went well until several seconds after the ignition of the NewtonThree engine that powers the rocket’s first stage. “We had a component break in our engine system. It was a high-pressure feed line,” he said. Liquid oxygen “stopped going into the engine and our flight was terminated.”

The company has performed an investigation and identified what needs to be fixed in the engine to strengthen the components that failed. A second LauncherOne rocket is in final integration right now and will be leaving the factory in the next few weeks while modifications to the engine continue. “We’ll be targeting our next flight before the end of the year,” Hart said.

They need to meet that schedule, as in the past few years they have consistently failed to fly when promised.

0 comments

Cubesat uses thruster to avoid collision

9:42 am

Capitalism in space: For the first time a cubesat has used a thruster to not only adjust its orbit but to also avoid a collision with another satellite.

From June 23 to July 3, the UWE-4 cubesat fired its NanoFEEP thrusters several times to reduce its altitude by more than 100 meters. By comparison, natural orbital decay would lower the altitude 21 meters in the same timeframe, according to a University of Wuerzburg news release.

One July 2, as the UWE-4 cubesat was lowering its altitude, the University received a warning from the U.S. Air Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron of a July 5 conjunction with a retired Iridium satellite. When UWE-4 mission operations personnel analyzed the conjunction, they determined the UWE-4 cubesat would not collide with the Iridium satellite because it would be orbiting at a lower altitude. As a result of the analysis, UWE-4 mission operations personnel continued firing thrusters to lower the cubesat’s altitude. They received no further conjunction messages.

The thrusters were built by Morpheus Space. Incorporating thrusters onto a cubesat, the size of which fits on the palm of your hand, is quite amazing, and illustrates the growing capability of these tiny satellites.

1 comment

Moving ripples on Mars

9:37 am

Using Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) high resolution images, scientists have now determined that the giant ripples seen from space are actually moving, albeit very slowly.

Megaripples are found in deserts on Earth, often between dunes. Waves in the sand spaced up to tens of meters apart, they’re a larger version of ripples that undulate every 10 centimeters or so on many sand dunes. But unlike dunes, megaripples are made up of two sizes of sand grains. Coarser, heavier grains cap the crests of megaripples, making it harder for wind to move these features around, says Simone Silvestro, a planetary scientist at Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics in Naples.

Since the early 2000s, Mars rovers and orbiters have repeatedly spotted megaripples on the Red Planet. But they didn’t seem to change in any measurable way, which led some scientists to think they were relics from Mars’s past, when its thicker atmosphere permitted stronger winds.

Now, using images captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Silvestro and his colleagues have shown that some megaripples do creep along—just very slowly.

They found that the ripples shift position about four inches per year, which astonished them since they had not believed the winds of Mars were strong enough to move them at all.

0 comments
1 … 1,073 1,074 1,075 1,076 1,077 … 2,927