The new colonial movement: China today used its Long March 2D rocket to launch one Earth observation satellite and two cubesats into orbit.
The leaders in the 2020 launch race:
12 China
9 SpaceX
7 Russia
3 ULA
The U.S. continues to lead China in the national rankings, 15 to 12.
An evening pause: I especially like the guitar solo.
Hat tip Greg Hughey.
We are in a time of oppression. Make no mistake. If you publicly express an opinion that the left does not like, it is now considered perfectly reasonable among our smart set to destroy your business, dox your family, threaten your children, and have your very existence cancelled.
It is happening repeatedly now every moment of every day in communities across America. Dare to speak out against the accepted leftist mantras of the moment and you will be crushed.
Consider for example the orthodox Jewish community in New York. That city’s leftist Democratic mayor, Bill De Blasio, has forbidden them to gather at funerals, has shut down their schools, and has now locked nearby playgrounds so that Jewish children cannot play safely, all in the name of supposedly saving them from the Wuhan flu.
At the exact same moment however that same leftist Democratic mayor had no objection to a gathering of tens of thousands in packed street demonstrations in favor of “Black Trans Lives Matters,” a gay racist group that wants to impose its sexual and racist agenda on everyone. For some reason, De Blasio has decided that the Wuhan flu is no threat to that political movement.
Only Jews can get COVID-19, and must be protected from it, even if that protection is against their will.
The Orthodox Jews in New York have been fighting back. They have repeatedly cut the locks that De Blasio’s police thugs have put on the parks, only to have De Blasio order the park gates welded shut.
Now they have gone to court to force this clear double standard to cease.
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Click for full image.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), astronomers have been able to map out the gigantic atmosphere of gas that surrounds the red gas supergiant star Antares, the closest such star to our solar system.
The ALMA and VLA map of Antares is the most detailed radio map yet of any star, other than the Sun. ALMA observed Antares close to its surface (its optical photosphere) in shorter wavelengths, and the longer wavelengths observed by the VLA revealed the star’s atmosphere further out. As seen in visible light, Antares’ diameter is approximately 700 times larger than the Sun. But when ALMA and the VLA revealed its atmosphere in radio light, the supergiant turned out to be even more gigantic.
“The size of a star can vary dramatically depending on what wavelength of light it is observed with,” explained Eamon O’Gorman of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland and lead author of the study published in the June 16 edition of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. “The longer wavelengths of the VLA revealed the supergiant’s atmosphere out to nearly 12 times the star’s radius.”
The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, is what these two telescopes detected. As you can see, the outer atmosphere of the star is very uneven, confirming what other observations of both Antares and Betelgeuse has seen.
These stars are giant gasbags. It appears their shape fluctuates depending on the local “weather” in each star’s atmosphere.
Link here. As NASA begins the assembly process for its first long-delayed SLS launch sometime in the next year. the article at the link outlines in detail the space shuttle history of the many reused segments used to build the rocket’s two solid rocket boosters.
All together, the Artemis I solid rocket booster segments previously helped launch 40 space shuttle missions dating back 30 years.
The oldest cylinder, which will fly as part of the booster mounted on the right side of the SLS core stage, first lifted off on the STS-31 mission with the Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 1990. It was then used for six more shuttle flights, including Endeavour’s debut on STS-49 in 1992 and STS-95 in 1998, which lifted off with Mercury astronaut and senator John Glenn as part of its crew.
Other notable missions that are part of the Artemis 1 boosters’ legacy include: STS-71, which marked the first shuttle docking with the Russian space station Mir in 1995; STS-93, which deployed the Chandra X-ray Observatory and marked the first spaceflight commanded by a woman, Eileen Collins, in 1999; STS-114, the return to flight after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2005; and STS-133, the final launch of the space shuttle Discovery in 2011.
The hardware also includes new components, including the two forward domes, two cylinders and four stiffeners.
This first SLS launch however will be the last time these segments will fly. Unlike the shuttle, NASA is making no effort to recover and reuse these boosters.
The shuttle effort to reuse these booster segments was never really very cost effective, so not reusing them on SLS might actually save money. Those savings however are chicken feed when compared to SLS’s overall cost. The problem really is with SLS’s fundamental design: cumbersome, slow, expensive, and difficult to use.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX has successfully recovered both of the reused fairings that were used in its June 13th Starlink launch.
This sets the stage for the first reuse of a fairing for the third time. The article at the link notes this important detail about these used fairings, both of which were not caught prior to landing in the ocean:
Preventing a vast majority of seawater exposure, a catch with [the ships] Ms. Tree or Ms. Chief may always be preferable for fairing reuse but the fact remains that all three successful reuses up to this point have been achieved with fairing halves that landed in the ocean. That success means that SpaceX has found a way to fully prevent or mitigate any potential corrosion that might result from seawater immersion. Given that that problem must have been a showstopper for the ~2.5 years SpaceX was able to recover – but not reuse – intact fairings, it’s safe to say that the company’s engineers have more or less solved the problem of corrosion. [emphasis mine]
In a sense we should not be surprised that the fairings were not seriously damaged by their short exposure to salt water. As designed, the shape of the fairings is essentially that of a boat hull. By landing them controlled by parachute, SpaceX guarantees that the sensitive electronics and equipment inside the fairings remains dry and untouched by salt water.
Europe’s Trace Gas Orbiter, in orbit around Mars, has detected for the first time the green atmospheric layer in Martian atmosphere caused by the interaction of oxygen and sunlight.
From what I can tell from the press release at the link, they did not “see” this green glow, they detected it spectroscopically. So, any images you see portraying it are simply artist renditions, not the real thing.
The detection is important, nonetheless. First, it confirms that there is oxygen in Mars’ atmosphere. Second, it is the first time this has been detected in the atmosphere other than Earth. Third, the detection matched closely to their computer models, suggesting that the models are a reasonable simulation of this aspect of Mars’ atmosphere.
Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab yesterday announced that its next launch is now scheduled for July 3, less than three weeks after its previous launch, the fastest turnaround the company has attempted so far.
The July launch will place seven cubesats into orbit. The fast turnaround this time is part of the company’s attempt to complete one launch per month through the rest of the year, a pace they have been promising now since 2019 but have been as yet unable to achieve.
An evening pause: From the youtube webpage:
The Antikythera Mechanism is the oldest known scientific computer, built in Greece at around 100 BCE. Lost for 2000 years, it was recovered from a shipwreck in 1901. But not until a century later was its purpose understood: an astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies with extraordinary precision. In 2010, we built a fully-functional replica out of Lego.
Hat tip Shaun Karry.
Scientists are now proposing that. based on a close look at data and imagery of Titan from the Cassini mission archive, that this moon of Saturn might have volcanoes, and that they might even be active today.
Volcano-like features seen in polar regions of Saturn’s moon Titan by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft could be evidence of explosive eruptions that may continue today, according to a new paper by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Charles A. Wood and coauthor Jani Radebaugh of Brigham Young University.
Morphological features such as nested collapses, elevated ramparts, halos, and islands indicate that some of the abundant small depressions in the north polar region of Titan are volcanic collapse craters, according to “Morphologic Evidence for Volcanic Craters near Titan’s North Polar Region” that appears in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. A few similar depressions occur near the south pole of Titan. “The close association of the proposed volcanic craters with polar lakes is consistent with a volcanic origin through explosive eruptions followed by collapse, as either maars or calderas,” Wood said. “The apparent freshness of some craters may mean that volcanism has been relatively recently active on Titan or even continues today.”
The data being somewhat think, there is a great deal of uncertainty with this theory. Nonetheless, it makes perfect sense, and in fact it would be a surprise if some sort of volcanic activity was not occurring on Titan.
Click for full image.
Today’s cool image is for once not taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Instead, the image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by Mars Odyssey on April 5, 2020, and shows the scouring and erosion caused by winds over many eons in a region dubbed Zephyria Planum. (Note that the image might fool your eye. Sunlight is coming from the east, and the rough terrain at the top is higher than the smooth plain at the bottom.)
Years ago, when I first started to rummage through the archives of images from the various Mars orbiters, I would have seen this image and posted it because I was completely baffled by what I saw, and thought that mystery made it worth showing to the public. Since then my incessant probing of research papers as well as asking a lot of questions of scientists has taught me a lot more about what scientists now surmise of the Martian geology. This greater knowledge in turn makes it possible for me to look at an image like this and immediately make a reasonable guess as to an explanation. This photo, while still containing much that is mysterious, is no longer completely baffling to me.
This willingness to ask questions and dig deeper is fundamental to all things. To have a deeper understanding and not simply guess about any subject, you always have to recognize that your assumptions are likely wrong, and that to learn anything you have to repeatedly ask what I call “the next question.” The first answer will force you to recognize that your first guesses are wrong, raise more questions, which in turn will lead to more questions, and then more questions, and so forth.
Whether I am researching Mars or early space history or politics, this rule always applies. Don’t leap to a conclusion. Think it possible you could be wrong. Ask the next question. And the next. You will repeatedly find that what you thought you knew was not correct, and in the end you will gain a deeper understanding of what is actually known about any subject, as well as what is unknown. And knowing the unknowns is probably the most important thing you can learn.
To gain a better understanding of today’s particular image, our first questions must start with context. Where is this feature on Mars? What is the surrounding history of that location? And what is already known about this place?
The location immediately reveals a great deal, as shown in the overview map below.
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Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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