Helene Fischer – Jeden Morgen wird die Sonne
An evening pause: The dress and lighting effects raise this to a whole new level.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
Author: Robert Zimmerman
October 19, 2022 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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October 19, 2022 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Northrop Grumman delivers two strap-on solid rocket boosters for Vulcan’s first launch
Though the launch is now tentatively scheduled for the 1st quarter of 2023, no launch can occur until Blue Origin finally delivers to ULA the second flightworthy BE-4 engine, years behind schedule. In related news:
- Jeff Bezos receives the Galileo Prophets of Philanthropy Award at the Vatican this week
Jay’s comment: “Oh for the love of … I just ate. How much did that award cost? I think he spent more money on his chick-a-dee to his right than the BE-4!
- Amateur astronomer Philip Smith out of New York tracks Tiangong-3
The image at the link was taken on October 11th, right after the Wentian module was moved to the side port, in preparation for the arrival of the next module, Mengtian, at the end of this month. A second image of Tiangong-3 by Smith can be seen here.
- Chinese PR on twitter is likely run by China’s People’s Liberation Army, not its space or science institutes
This fact, obvious for years, was discovered by China ‘N Asia Spaceflight, which operates out of India and is one of Jay’s main China’s Twitter sources.
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.
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Moderna CEO admits to past lies: “COVID is simply the flu, harmless to the healthy.”
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:
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Twelve years of data from WISE
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.
Webb takes infrared image of Hubble’s Pillars of Creation
Click for original image.
Not unexpectedly, astronomers have quickly begun aiming the Webb Space Telescope’s infrared eye at some of the most famous targets previously imaged in optical wavelengths by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The newest example is shown to the right and reduced and labeled to post here. It shows what NASA officials dubbed “The Pillars of Creation” when Hubble first photographed this nebula in 1995, with a later 2014 Hubble optical image at the top and the new 2022 Webb infrared image on the bottom. From this image’s caption:
A new, near-infrared-light view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, at [bottom], helps us peer through more of the dust in this star-forming region. The thick, dusty brown pillars are no longer as opaque and many more red stars that are still forming come into view.
While the pillars of gas and dust seem darker and less penetrable in Hubble’s view [top], they appear more diaphanous in Webb’s. The background of this Hubble image is like a sunrise, beginning in yellows at the bottom, before transitioning to light green and deeper blues at the top. These colors highlight the thickness of the dust all around the pillars, which obscures many more stars in the overall region.
In contrast, the background light in Webb’s image appears in blue hues, which highlights the hydrogen atoms, and reveals an abundance of stars spread across the scene. By penetrating the dusty pillars, Webb also allows us to identify stars that have recently – or are about to – burst free. Near-infrared light can penetrate thick dust clouds, allowing us to learn so much more about this incredible scene.
While the Hubble colors attempt to mimic the colors seen by the human eye, the colors in the Webb image are all false colors, chosen by the scientists to distinguish the different infrared wavelengths produced by different features in the picture.
SpaceX simplifies smallsat rideshare program, effectively slashing prices
SpaceX has reworked its smallsat rideshare program to allow smaller satellite customers to book directly with the company, effectively slashing the prices they are charged.
While it technically hasn’t reduced its prices, SpaceX will now allow satellites as small as 50 kilograms to book directly through the company at its virtually unbeatable rate of $5500 per kilogram. Before this change, customers with small satellites would either have to pay for all the extra capacity they weren’t using, boosting their relative cost per kilogram, or arrange their launch services with a third-party aggregator like Spaceflight or Exolaunch.
Part of the reason for this change is the shift by SpaceX to a new satellite deployment platform that allows for a wider variety of satellites of all sizes. Some tiny satellites will no longer have to rely on an aggregator’s own deployment platform.
The first Greek star catalog discovered hidden in medieval parchment
Scientists have discovered part of the first Greek star catalog created by Hipparchus — thought by many to have invented the modern field of astronomy — hidden in a medieval parchment that had been reused for other puposes.
Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, describes the find as “rare” and “remarkable”. The extract is published online this week in the Journal for the History of Astronomy. Evans says it proves that Hipparchus, often considered the greatest astronomer of ancient Greece, really did map the heavens centuries before other known attempts. It also illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them.
The manuscript came from the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, but most of its 146 leaves, or folios, are now owned by the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. The pages contain the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a collection of Syriac texts written in the tenth or eleventh centuries. But the codex is a palimpsest: parchment that was scraped clean of older text by the scribe so that it could be reused.
Using modern multi-spectral imaging, the researchers were able to decipher the older text, and determined it was almost certainly written by Hipparchus and included his star measurements.
Read the whole article at the link. It is a fascinating detective story describing the origins of modern astronomy in western civilization.
Isaacman’s next private mission to space now scheduled for March ’23
Jared Isaacman’s next private mission on a Dragon capsule, dubbed Polaris Dawn, has now been scheduled for March ’23, during which the first spacewalk by a private citizen will occur.
The mission is planned to last five days, will have a crew of four led by Isaacman, and will also attempt the highest Earth orbit flown by any manned mission. From the mission’s webpage:
At approximately 700 kilometers above the Earth (434 miles), the crew will attempt the first-ever commercial extravehicular activity (EVA) with SpaceX-designed extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits, upgraded from the current intravehicular (IVA) suit.
It is not clear if one or all four of the crew members will participate in that spacewalk. At a minimum, all four must be in suits that can work during a spacewalk, since their Dragon capsule does not have an airlock.
The mission will also be used as to raise funds for St. Jude Children’s Hospital, as was done during Isaacman’s first flight, Inspiration4, in the fall of 2021.
JAXA reveals cause of Epsilon rocket failure
Japan’s space agency JAXA yesterday announced the results of its investigation into the launch failure of its Epsilon rocket on October 12, 2022, pinpointing the cause to the attitude control system in the solid-fueled second stage.
After the launch of the three-stage solid-propellant rocket, the first-stage rocket engine worked normally and was detached as scheduled. The second-stage engine showed no combustion problem, but an abnormal attitude was confirmed immediately after the engine used up its fuel, JAXA told a science ministry meeting.
The attitude was off to the lower right by some 21 degrees more than planned, according to JAXA. The space agency judged that the rocket could not enter Earth orbit and sent a self-destruction signal to the rocket 6 minutes and 28 seconds after liftoff.
Analyses of flight and other data showed that one function of a reaction control system, which uses thrusters to control attitude and other factors, did not work after the combustion of the second-stage engine, according to JAXA.
Epsilon is Japan’s attempt to produce a low cost rocket, though it has only launched a handful of times since its first launch in 2013, suggesting it has not been attracting many customers.
SpaceX engineer injured during engine test in January
During an engine test of a Raptor engine on January 18, 2022, a SpaceX engineer suffered a fractured skull when a protective cover broke off during venting.
The final step in the pressure check operation, venting, was done for the first time using an automated program as opposed to the normal manual method that had been used in previous operations. Immediately after initiating the automated venting, the employee was struck by the fuel controller cover which broke free from the controller module. The controller cover had sheared at the vertical to horizontal beveled seam, liberating the cover face from the assembly. The employee suffered a skull fracture and head trauma and was hospitalized in a coma for months.
OSHA fined SpaceX $18,475 in July for the accident.
According to a report yesterday in the Los Angeles Times, the employee, Francisco Cabada, was placed in a coma for two months. That report however is very unclear when he was placed in a coma, or his present condition. Also unclear about his present condition is the GoFundMe site created by his wife. As the OSHA case still appears open, this suggest Cabada has not yet recovered fully.