Author: Robert Zimmerman

October 20, 2022 Quick space links

3:35 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who trolls Twitter so we don’t have to.

 

  • Chinese scientists produce a tectonic map of the Moon

    • Their paper is here. From the abstract:

    The map provides a state-of-the-art illustration of structures and tectonic units of different periods, the distributions of 9 types of linear structures, including 18976 elements (358 inferred deep faults, 1335 shallow faults, 11046 wrinkle ridges, 474 rillles, 816 grabens, 2583 crater-floor fractures, 227 lobate scarps, 1882 impact fractures and 255 impact crater chains), and 5 types of circular structures, including 2501 elements (271 volcanic vents, 47 domes, 46 mascons, 3460 impact craters and 81 impact basins).

 

 

 

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Nurses fired and blacklisted for either being white or Christian

2:31 pm

In today’s blacklist story, I tell two different tales, both of long-time nurses of great experience were not only fired from their jobs because one was white and the other was Christian, but are now apparently blacklisted from getting new work for the same reasons.

I tell two stories today because I am finding I have so many blacklist stories in the queue that many are getting dropped because they are getting stale in terms of the news cycle. Since none of these stories are stale to the individuals being persecuted, I feel a need to tell more than one per day, for a few days, just to catch up.

Laura Morgan, blacklisted
Laura Morgan

First we have Laura Morgan, a nurse with 39 years experience. Morgan was fired by her employer, Baylor Scott & White Health, when she refused to take a new anti-racism course required by her employer that specifically accused her of being a racist, because she was white.

Morgan said her “ordeal” began in September 2021 when her company, Baylor, Scott & White Health, directed annual training for clinicians that this year included a course called “Overcoming Unconscious Bias.”

After reviewing the course, she requested a meeting with the nursing director and the human resources manager. Both blew her off.

“The idea of implicit bias is grounded in the belief that white people treat those who aren’t white worse than those who are. It’s part of the woke assumption that society, including healthcare, suffers from ‘systemic racism,’” she wrote. “Accordingly, my own supposed implicit bias, which is a euphemism for ingrained racism, must be rooted out. Not only that, it must be replaced with preferential treatment for the nonwhite.”

“I fail to see how real racial discrimination is justified by my nonexistent racism,” Morgan added.

Morgan also added in a Wall Street Journal op-ed,
» Read more

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Hubble spots double tail of debris from DART impact of Dimorphus

11:28 am

Dimorphus double tail
Click for original image.

A series of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the ejecta released when DART crashed into the small 525-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphus has found that debris forming a double tail trailing away from the Sun.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on October 11, 2022 by Hubble, and shows those two tails as close parallel debris trails.

Repeated observations from Hubble over the last several weeks have allowed scientists to present a more complete picture of how the system’s debris cloud has evolved over time. The observations show that the ejected material, or “ejecta,” has expanded and faded in brightness as time went on after impact, largely as expected. The twin tail is an unexpected development, although similar behavior is commonly seen in comets and active asteroids. The Hubble observations provide the best-quality image of the double-tail to date.

Following impact, Hubble made 18 observations of the system. Imagery indicates the second tail formed between 2-8 October 2022.

Though observations by telescope will continue for the years to follow, the real punchline to this event will be when the European probe Hera rendezvouses with the Didymous-Dimorphus pair in 2026 to perform several years of very close observations.

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NASA approves use of American spacesuits for spacewalks after investigation

10:14 am

NASA this week gave approval to the resumption of spacewalks on ISS, using its American spacesuits, following its investigation into a March incident where one astronaut’s spacesuit became somewhat water-logged.

The agency has now completed a review of the incident, finding that it was not a leak caused by hardware issues. Instead, the water was condensation caused by high levels of astronaut exertion and the cooling setting on Maurer’s extravehicular mobility unit (EMU) spacesuit, NASA officials said.

Though NASA was somewhat vague about the solution, it appears it has simply told astronauts to adjust the cooling setting of their suits to prevent condensation within the suits.

These American suits are very complicated to use, and very expensive. The agency has contracted out for new suits from private companies, but it will be very instructive to see what SpaceX comes up with for the spacewalk suits it is making for the private commercial manned Polaris Dawn mission in the spring of 2023.

1 comment

ESA delays first Ariane-6 launch to late in 2023

10:02 am

The European Space Agency has once again delayed the first Ariane-6 launch, shifting it to the fourth quarter of 2023.

Even so, officials warned that this is merely “a planned date,” and that static fire tests of both the first stage and second stage must first be completed before the launch can go forward.

Ariane-6 was initially supposed to begin launching in 2020, putting it three years behind schedule. Furthermore, it has struggled to obtain customers, as it is entirely expendable and thus expensive and not competitive with SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

Since Ariane-6 is delayed and the Ariane-5 rocket’s has only a few launches left before retirement, ESA officials also noted that it has now been forced to buy two launches from SpaceX.

The launches include the Euclid space telescope and the Hera probe, a follow-up mission to NASA’s DART spacecraft which last month succeeded in altering the path of a moonlet in the first test of a future planetary defence system. “The member states have decided that Euclid and Hera are proposed to be launched on Falcon 9,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher told reporters after a meeting of the 22-nation agency’s ministerial council.

The launches will take place in 2023 and 2024 respectively.

The irony is that ESA is probably going to save a lot of money launching with the Falcon 9, rather than its own Ariane-6. In fact, I would not be surprised if the total SpaceX price for both launches equals one Ariane-6 launch. Furthermore, SpaceX gets this business because its own American competitors, ULA and Blue Origin, have also failed to get their new rockets flying on time.

6 comments

SpaceX launches 54 Starlink satellites

9:37 am

SpaceX today successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to launch 54 Starlink satellites.

The first stage completed its 10th flight, landing on its drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

48 SpaceX
45 China
15 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 ULA

American private enterprise now leads China 68 to 45, and is tied with the entire world combined 68 each. Note that SpaceX’s 48 launches so far this year matches the entire total for the U.S. last year.

5 comments

October 19, 2022 Quick space links

3:57 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

4 comments

A pseudo-oblique view of Jupiter’s cloud-tops

1:20 pm

A pseudo-oblique view of Jupiter's cloud-tops
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The image to the right, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was created on October 18, 2022 by citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulos from one of the photos taken by Juno during its close fly-by of Jupiter in May 2018.

He created this three dimensional relief by assigning different elevation values across the image’s greyscale, with white having the highest elevation. This relief is thus not based on actual topography, but it provides a nice way to illustrate the cloud structures of Jupiter’s cloud tops. It also, as Thomopoulos notes, provide a good way to possibly “see a representation in relief of surface movements.” Nor is his topography based on greyscale far wrong, since in many Jupiter images the lighter colored clouds are generally higher because the darker ones are in shadow.

The map below provides the context and scale of this image.
» Read more

6 comments

Moderna CEO admits to past lies: “COVID is simply the flu, harmless to the healthy.”

12:49 pm

The liar at Moderna
The liar in charge at Moderna

On October 17, 2022 during a news conference, Stéphane Bancel, the CEO of the drug company Moderna, made the following statement about COVID, the so-called plague that allowed his company (and others) to make billions pushing their jabs on a terrified public:

“I think it’s going to be like the flu. If you’re a 25-year-old, do you need an annual booster every year if you’re healthy?

“You might want to… but I think it’s going to be similar to flu where it’s going to be people at high-risk, people above 50 years of age, people with comorbidities, people with cancer and other conditions, people with transplants.”

Gee, where I have heard these exact words for the past two-plus years? Could it have been on this very same webpage, said by me as well as numerous other cool-headed experts who — rather than panicking — looked at the actual data? From my first detailed post about COVID in March 2020, using all the early real data:

The death rate is mostly confined to the older population with already existing health issues, like the flu.

This early conclusion was later confirmed again and again in the months that followed. From September 2020, for example, in citing CDC data I wrote:
» Read more

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Twelve years of data from WISE

10:43 am

The Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) was launched in 2009 with an intended mission of two years, during which it would map the sky looking for asteroids. In 2011 NASA extended the mission, renaming the telescope for inexplicable reasons to NEOWISE (adding “Near-Earth Object” to the beginning).

In the more than a decade since, the telescope has been able to get eighteen repeated scans of the entire sky, allowing scientists to track many changes in a variety of stellar objects over time.

Yesterday NASA issued a press release celebrating this long achievement.

Every six months, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, spacecraft completes one trip halfway around the Sun, taking images in all directions. Stitched together, those images form an “all-sky” map showing the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects. Using 18 all-sky maps produced by the spacecraft (with the 19th and 20th to be released in March 2023), scientists have created what is essentially a time-lapse movie of the sky, revealing changes that span a decade.

There is a bit of hype in this claim. The data isn’t really useful when looked at across the entire sky. One has to zoom into particular objects to see them evolve over time. Also, many of these changes, such as with variable stars, are well known and tracked by many other telescopes.

Nonetheless, this infrared database is very valuable. It can be used for example by astronomers to identify objects that should be viewed with high resolution in the infrared, by Webb.

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