Author: Robert Zimmerman
Rosetta photographs its target comet as it comes to life.
Rosetta photographs its target comet as it comes to life.
The comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, target of ESA’s Rosetta mission, has begun to develop a dust coma. This can be seen in a series of images taken by OSIRIS, the spacecraft’s scientific imaging system, between March 27th and May 4th. In the images from the end of April, the dust that the comet is already emitting is clearly visible as an evolving coma and reaches approximately 1300 kilometers into space.
My cat goes rock climbing.
The pictures are great, but the commentary is wonderful and wise.
ULA today stated that they have enough Russian engines in stock to complete the 36 launch U.S. military bulk buy.
ULA today stated that they have enough Russian engines in stock to complete the 36 launch U.S. military bulk buy.
Whether they will actually complete that bulk buy remains unknown.
How the Peoria mayor used the power of his position to try to destroy someone who was making fun of him.
How the Peoria mayor used the power of his position to try to destroy someone who was making fun of him on Twitter.
Could your town’s mayor spark a police investigation into your activities that ends with town cops rifling through your mobile phone, your laptop, and the full contents of your Gmail account—all over an alleged misdemeanor based on something you wrote on social media? Not in America, you say? But you’d be wrong.
The interesting thing about this story is not so much the abuse of power by the mayor and the police in Peoria but the reaction to their actions. Watch especially the Peoria Council meeting on April 22, 2014. The response is uniformly horrified and disgusted and in opposition to this abuse.
That the public and most politicians get it and realize how inappropriate these actions were gives me hope for our country.
Newly released IRS emails show that the harassment of conservatives was directed by higher management in Washington and elsewhere, not confined to low level employees in Cincinnati.
Working for the Democratic Party: Newly released IRS emails show that the harassment of conservatives was directed by higher management in Washington and elsewhere, not confined to low level employees in Cincinnati.
The key fact here is that these emails prove that Lois Lerner and other officials in the Obama administration lied when they made the claim that the harassment was the work of low level employees.
But then, lying by this administration is par for the course.
29 fascinating images.
#18 is the best, as it illustrates bluntly in one image the technological advances in just the past decade.
A climate scientist who joined the board of a skeptical think tank was forced to resign from that think tank after only three weeks due to intense outside pressure and harassment from the global warming community.
McCarthyism of the left: A climate scientist who joined the board of a skeptical think tank was forced to resign from that think tank after only three weeks due to intense outside pressure and harassment from the global warming community.
I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from [the Global Warming Policy Foundation] (GWPF). I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen.
It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years. Under these situation I will be unable to contribute positively to the work of GWPF and consequently therefore I believe it is the best for me to reverse my decision to join its Board at the earliest possible time. [emphasis mine]
The emphasized language illustrates once again the blacklisting methods now being used by the left to destroy anyone who dares to disagree with them.
Read the full transcript of Tuesday’s briefing in Russia on the subject of the U.S./Russian cooperation in space.
Read the full transcript of Tuesday’s briefing in Russia on the subject of the U.S./Russian cooperation in space.
It is very worthwhile reading the entire thing. The text makes it very clear that Russia is not kicking us out of ISS, as has been wrongly reported by several news agencies. It also makes clear that the Russians consider the Obama administration’s actions childish, thoughtless, and unproductive. They also emphasize how the U.S. government is generally an “unreliable” partner in these matters, something that I have noted before when our government has broken space agreements with Europe.
The text also clarifies the GPS situation. The stations we have in Russia are in connection with scientific research, something they wish to do also in the U.S. If an agreement isn’t reached, that research will cease. Actual use of GPS for navigational purposes will not be effected.
Side note: NASA says that they have not yet received any official notice from Russia concerning the briefing above. This might be because Rogozin’s briefing was meant merely as a shot across the bow, or it could be that the Russians have not yet gotten around to doing it. We shall see.
On Tuesday Virgin Galactic rolled WhiteKnightTwo out of its hanger “as part of a gearing up process.”.
Is it cracked or not? On Tuesday Virgin Galactic rolled WhiteKnightTwo out of its hanger “as part of a gearing up process.”.
Though the above article is very vague about what is being done, this article explains that they are doing taxi tests of new landing gear. The timing, however, makes me suspect that this is also a public relations ploy to counter yesterday’s reports about cracks in the vehicle’s wings.
Three astronauts safely returned from ISS on Tuesday evening.
Three astronauts safely returned from ISS on Tuesday evening.
“We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has.”
Finding out what’s in it: “We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has.”
The quote says it all about what Obamacare is really about: The wielding of power by politicians and the squelching of freedom for everyone else. Along the way society becomes poorer and more oppressive.
India has successfully tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile with a range of more than 1,800 miles.
India has successfully tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile with a range of more than 1,800 miles.
Though they really don’t need it, a private effort to reactivate a 1970s spacecraft has now gotten NASA’s okay.
Though they really don’t need it, a private effort to reactivate a 1970s spacecraft has now gotten NASA’s okay.
This piece of paper from NASA is a definite nice-to-have, given that “a private entity cannot legally salvage U.S. government property in space,” according to Mike Gold, a space law expert and attorney who works full time as the head of Washington operations for Bigelow Aerospace, the North Las Vegas, Nevada, company developing inflatable space habitats with technology licensed from NASA.
But practically speaking, it appears NASA could have done little to stop the ISEE-3 Reboot project from moving ahead with its plan to take over the old spacecraft — an Earth-Sun observatory that launched to the gravitationally stable Earth-Sun Lagrange point 1 in 1978 and is now swinging back toward the home planet in the heliocentric orbit NASA nudged it into in 1982 to chase comets.
What is really more important is that their effort to raise the necessary private funds for this project has largely succeeded.
NASA has chosen the four shuttle engines that will be used to launch SLS on its first mission in 2021.
What a waste: NASA has chosen the four shuttle engines that will be used to launch SLS on its first mission in 2021.
All four engines were used multiple times on many shuttle missions. They will fly once on SLS, at a cost of many billions, and then end up destroyed when that giant rocket’s first stage falls into the ocean. Worse, no one has really defined what the goal of that first launch will be. It might merely be a test launch, with no humans on board.
To me, it would be wiser to put the engines into storage and wait until we have a new reusable capability that could take advantage of the reusable engineering of these engines. Throwing them away on a pork-barrel boondoggle like SLS seems so stupid.
Using computer models and data collected in the past decade, some climate scientists now believe that a major Antarctica ice sheet is in the process of collapsing.
Using computer models and data collected in the past decade, some climate scientists now believe that a major Antarctica ice sheet is in the process of collapsing.
One team combined data on the recent retreat of the 182,000-square-kilometer Thwaites Glacier with a model of the glacier’s dynamics to forecast its future. In a paper published online today in Science, they report that in as few as 2 centuries Thwaites Glacier’s outermost edge will recede past an underwater ridge now stalling its retreat. Their modeling suggests that the glacier will then cascade into rapid collapse. The second team, writing in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), describes recent radar mapping of West Antarctica’s glaciers and confirms that the 600-meter-deep ridge is the final obstacle before the bedrock underlying the glacier dips into a deep basin.
Because inland basins connect Thwaites Glacier to other major glaciers in the region, both research teams say its collapse would flood West Antarctica with seawater, prompting a near-complete loss of ice in the area. “The next stable state for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet might be no ice sheet at all,” says the Science paper’s lead author, glaciologist Ian Joughin of the University of Washington (UW), Seattle.
This result really falls under the category of the uncertainty of science. Though the data suggests a glacier that is part of the much larger West Antarctica ice sheet is melting, the prediction that the ice sheet itself will collapse sometime in the next two centuries is solely based on computer models that have all too often turned turned out to be wrong.
Some scientists are now calling into question the BICEP2 results that confirmed the existence of inflation just after the Big Bang.
The uncertainty of science: Some scientists are now calling into question the BICEP2 results that confirmed the existence of inflation just after the Big Bang.
The biggest discovery in cosmology in a decade could turn out to be an experimental artifact—at least according to an Internet rumor. The team that reported the discovery is sticking by its work, however.
Eight weeks ago, researchers working with a specialized telescope at the South Pole reported the observation of pinwheel-like swirls in the polarization of the afterglow of the big bang, or cosmic microwave background (CMB). Those swirls are traces of gravitational waves rippling through the fabric of spacetime a sliver of a second after the big bang, argue researchers working with the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 (BICEP2) telescope. Such waves fulfilled a prediction of a wild theory called inflation, which says that in the first 10-32 seconds, the universe underwent a mind-boggling exponential growth spurt. Many scientists hailed the result as a “smoking gun” for inflation.
However, scientists cautioned that the result would have to be scrutinized thoroughly. And now a potential problem with the BICEP analysis has emerged, says Adam Falkowski, a theoretical particle physicist at the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics of Orsay in France and author of the Résonaances blog. The BICEP researchers mapped the polarization of the CMB across a patch of sky measuring 15° by 60°. To study the CMB signal, however, they first had to subtract the “foreground” of microwaves generated by dust within our galaxy, and the BICEP team may have done that incorrectly, Falkowski reports on his blog today.
When the BICEP2 result was announced, the media went crazy over it. I however didn’t even post anything about it, as I know from experience that cosmological results such as this are very tentative and require confirmation. Too often, they turn out to be false results, with the scientists in charge fooled by the uncertain nature of their data.
The results from BICEP2 might still hold up. We need to wait a bit longer to find out.
Russia fights back
Much has been made about the sanctions the Obama administration has imposed on any cooperation with Russia due to the situation in Ukraine and how those sanctions might damage the commercial and manned space efforts of the United States.
So far, all evidence has suggested that the sanctions have little teeth. The Obama administration exempted ISS from the sanctions. It also appears to be allowing the shipment of all commercial satellites to Russia for launch. Even a court injunction against using Russia rocket engines in U.S. military launches was lifted when the Obama administration asked the judge to do so.
The Russians now have responded. Why do I take their response more seriously?
» Read more
The mysterious spokes in Saturn’s rings, discovered by the Voyager craft back in the 1980s, still persist today in Cassini images.
The mysterious spokes in Saturn’s rings, discovered by the Voyager craft back in the 1980s, still persist today in Cassini images.
Scientists think they occur as the ring particles interact with Saturn’s magnetic field, but that remains largely an as yet unproven theory.
Archeologists think they have located the wreck of Christopher Columbus flagship, the Santa Maria, from his 1492 voyage.
Archeologists think they have located the wreck of Christopher Columbus flagship, the Santa Maria, from his 1492 voyage.