Author: Robert Zimmerman

Bullet hole found in Mauna Kea observatory

10:20 am

Even as protesters continue to block the roads to the top of Mauna Kea to prevent construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), workers at the Subaru Telescope at the mountain have reported a bullet hole in one door that had been put there sometime over the weekend.

No one knows who did it, or even if the hole was caused by a bullet, though that is what it looks like. The leader of the protests has of course denied any participation and condemned it.

I found this quote from the first link above (which spends a lot of time describing the heroic protesters who have been camping on the road) to be very revealing about this whole affair:

In an email Saturday, DLNR spokeswoman Deborah Ward said the area is not permitted for camping but did not respond to the Tribune-Herald’s questions about why the department has allowed the protesters to remain at the site. “Both state and county officials are monitoring the situation,” she wrote.

Gee, don’t we all remember how government officials turned a blind eye to tea party protests? Not! They did however allow illegal trespassing for Occupy Wall Street. In all these cases, the government officials reveal whose side they are on.

I personally think the astronomy community should organize a boycott of tourism to Hawaii. If their island is so sacred that outsiders shouldn’t be there, maybe we should hold them to their word. We would then find out how serious they really are about the island’s sacredness.

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LightSail successfully deploys solar sail

9:58 am

Engineers have confirmed that the cubesat prototype LightSail has successfully deployed its solar sails.

This is I think only the second time a solar sail has successfully deployed in space. More significant to me is the fact that it is the first time this kind of complex engineering test has been tried using a cubesat. If cubesats can begin to handle these kinds of tasks, unmanned satellite technology is going to take a gigantic leap forward.

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Dawn makes a movie of Ceres

9:28 am

Cool image time! Using images that Dawn has accumulated since it entered orbit around Ceres, scientists have created an animation showing the dwarf planet as it rotates.

Video below the fold. Note that this is an animation. They have filled in the gaps between images to make the rotation smooth, exaggerated the scale two times to bring out details, and added a background of stars that is not visible in the original images. Even so, this video is scientifically useful, as it shows Ceres in its entirety. It is also very spectacular.
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Jets on Comet 67P/C-G now persist into the night

9:18 am

jets from Comet 67P/C-G

Cool image time! Rosetta’s high resolution camera is now finding that, due to increased activity as Comet 67P/C-G approaches the sun, jets of material now continue to evaporate off the surface even after sunset.

“Only recently have we begun to observe dust jets persisting even after sunset”, says OSIRIS Principal Investigator Holger Sierks from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. In the past months, the comet’s activity originated from illuminated areas on the day side. As soon as the Sun set, these jets subsided and did not re-awake until after the next sunrise. (An exception poses an image from 12 March, 2015 showing the onset of a dust jet on the brink of dawn.)

According to OSIRIS scientists, the jets now occurring even after sunset are another sign of the comet’s increasing activity. “Currently, 67P is rapidly approaching perihelion in mid-August”, says Sierks. At the time the image was taken, comet and Sun were only 270 million kilometers apart. “The solar irradiation is getting more and more intense, the illuminated surface warmer and warmer”, Sierks adds.

Because the jets are now remaining active into the night, it is allowing us to see more precisely their points of origin on the surface, which can then be studied more closely in daylight. Previously it was difficult in daylight to pinpoint the exact spot where the jets began.

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LightSail deploys its solar sails

10:48 pm

Though full confirmation will not come until later tonight, telemetry from LightSail suggests that its solar sails have successfully begun deployment.

Telemetry received on the ground showed motor counts climbing to the halfway point before LightSail traveled out of range. Power levels were consistent with ground-based deployment tests, and the spacecraft’s cameras were on. “All indications are that the solar sail deployment was proceeding nominally,” wrote mission manager David Spencer in an email update.

They will have to wait until the cubesat comes back in range at 2:46 am (Eastern) to see if the deployment completed successfully, as well as download images.

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Turkey’s Islamists lose Parliament in elections today

3:25 pm

Some good news: The increasingly authoritarian Islamic-controlled party of President Erdogan of Turkey was soundly defeated in elections today.

Turks went to the polls today in parliamentary elections, and the era of single-party Islamist rule appears to be over. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had been counting on the continued rule of his AKP party to change the country’s constitution after these elections, consolidating his already increasingly authoritarian rule into something even more dastardly. But a 2/3 majority of AKP in parliament is needed to change the constitution.

Today, the Islamist party walked away with only 41 percent of seats. That’s an eight percent drop from 2011.

AKP still holds the most seats of any party, but it appears their effort to make the country more Islamic caused many people to go to the polls and vote against them. The result will likely be a coalition of other parties now controlling Parliament.

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Bee die off hasn’t happened

11:39 am

The uncertainty of science: Despite numerous claims by environmentalists and scientists in the past decade that the bee population was dying off, new data from the Agriculture Department suggests that bee populations are now at a 20 year high.

The reason? It appears that beekeepers have been very innovative and creative when faced with disease or other problems that hurt bees. Driven by the profit motive and competition and free to act, they have come up with solutions.

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State Department proposes fines for writing about guns without permission

11:31 am

New regulations being proposed by the Obama administration would require anyone writing on the web about guns to get approval first from the State Department or face serious fines.

In their current form, the ITAR do not (as a rule) regulate technical data that are in what the regulations call the ‘public domain.’ Essentially, this means data ‘which is published and which is generally accessible or available to the public’ through a variety of specified means. These include ‘at libraries open to the public or from which the public can obtain documents.’ Many have read this provision to include material that is posted on publicly available websites, since most public libraries these days make Internet access available to their patrons.

The ITAR, however, were originally promulgated in the days before the Internet. Some State Department officials now insist that anything published online in a generally-accessible location has essentially been ‘exported,’ as it would be accessible to foreign nationals both in the U.S. and overseas.

With the new proposal published on June 3, the State Department claims to be ‘clarifying’ the rules concerning ‘technical data’ posted online or otherwise ‘released’ into the ‘public domain.’ To the contrary, however, the proposal would institute a massive new prior restraint on free speech. This is because all such releases would require the ‘authorization’ of the government before they occurred. The cumbersome and time-consuming process of obtaining such authorizations, moreover, would make online communication about certain technical aspects of firearms and ammunition essentially impossible. [emphasis mine]

In your wildest dreams did you ever think we’d come to a time in the U.S. where the federal government thought it acceptable to require citizens to get their permission before they could publish something?

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Obamacare bureaucracy threatens doctors who speak out

11:23 am

Finding out what’s in it: Doctors are finding that they better not criticize Obamacare in public or they will face retribution from its bureaucracy.

For physicians in this position, public advocacy against the ACA could be in violation of employment contracts or could be a source for dismissal. Most doctors’ contracts also include a two-year noncompete clause that essentially requires the doctor to move out of town once he or she leaves a specific job. So, running afoul of your employer by criticizing the ACA could result in not just losing your job but also forcing you to leave your hometown.

And that’s not all. Many doctors are also afraid of losing insurance contracts. The vast majority of doctors who are still private-practice owners are dependent on a handful of large insurance contracts for revenue. Speaking out against insurance companies — which were complicit in the ACA’s passage and are some of its primary beneficiaries — can result in cancellation of those contracts.

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LightSail back in business?

8:57 am

The Planetary Society’s solar sail engineering test called LightSail has re-established communications with the ground, allowing for the possibility that it can finally achieve its solar sail deployment, the main purpose of the mission.

I had previously reported that the sails had deployed, but a commenter correctly noted that only the panels have deployed, not the sails themselves, which need full battery power. The communications problem has been related to a battery charging problem. They are hoping that the batteries will get charged by mid-day today when they will try to deploy the sails.

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Manned flights from Vostochny delayed

9:02 am

In order to save construction costs at its new spaceport at Vostochny, Russia has decided to delay its first manned flight there until 2023.

They originally were going prepare a launchpad for Soyuz rockets so that they could do a manned launch at Vostochny as early as 2019, but had already admitted this was inefficient and had abandoned the plan. Now they have admitted that it will take until 2023 for them to get Vostochny and Angara ready for manned flights.

That it will still take almost 8 years to prepare a launchpad and get Angara ready to launch manned capsules, however, seems an ungodly long period of time. It should not take that long.

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Hawaii’s highest court takes on TMT case

8:54 am

In a move that appears to be a victory for the protesters trying to shut down the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii’s supreme court on Friday agreed to bypass lower court procedures and immediately consider the case.

It is even possible the court could rule that it is inappropriate to have any telescopes on Mauna Kea.

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Airbus unveils its first stage re-useability concept

2:32 pm

The competition heats up: Airbus unveiled today its prototype design to recover and reuse the engines and avionics of its Ariane rockets.

Herve Gilibert, technical director for Airbus’ Space Systems division, said the Adeline propulsion unit — engine and avionics — is where lies most of the value of the first stage. The Airbus team concluded that SpaceX’s design of returning the full stage to Earth could be simplified by separating the propulsion bay from the rest of the stage, protecting the motor on reentry and, using the winglets and turbofans, return horizontally to a conventional air strip. “We are using an aerodynamic shield so that the motor is not subjected to such high stress on reentry,” Gilibert said. “We need very little fuel for the turbofans and the performance penalty we pay for the Ariane 6 launcher is far less than the 30 percent or more performance penalty that SpaceX pays for the reusable Falcon 9 first stage.

Gee, for decades Arianespace and Boeing and Lockheed Martin and everyone else in the launch industry insisted it made no economic sense to try to recover and reuse the first stage of their rockets. Then SpaceX comes along and makes an effort to do so, without as yet even coming close, and suddenly everyone agrees it is economically essential to do it as well.

Isn’t competition wonderful?

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Republicans propose replacement after they repeal Obamacare

9:35 am

A plan revealed today and endorsed by nearly 170 House Republicans would repeal Obamacare in total and then introduce a number of tweaks to the many past healthcare laws in an effort to reduce costs and increase competition.

A summary of the 192 page proposal can be read here. Take a look. It is far from perfect, but its main advantage, from what I can see, is that it doesn’t try to fiddle with Obamacare, it gets rid of it and then attempts to make changes to the laws that had existed before Obamacare was passed.

In other words, it tries to do what should have been done back in 2010, when the Democrats forced their crap bill (which most of them didn’t read) down our throats without any negotiations.

Should the Supreme Court rule that the Obamacare subsidies are illegal and the press tries to falsely blame Republicans for that disaster, this bill should be noted as a reasonable offer to solve the problem.

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Scott Walker reveals his inner Democrat

9:11 am

In a disappointing move, Scott Walker, Wisconsin governor and presidential candidate, has announced his support for state funding for a new basketball arena, which would require increased taxes as well.

It seems to me that Republicans, no matter how conservative, always eventually disappoint and evolve into big government stooges. This happens partly because they are politicians, who are generally a lower form of life, and partly because politicians tend to do what the voting public wants. Sadly, for the past century the American voting public — even the so-called conservative voting public — has consistently voted for more government handouts, which is why Republicans evolve to the left with time.

For Walker this is unfortunately seems to be happening sooner than I had hoped.

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Soyuz rocket to launch this week

8:36 am

In the heat of competition: Despite releasing very vague conclusions to its Soyuz rocket failure investigation, the Russians are going to resume Soyuz launches, beginning this week.

Update: The launch on Friday was successful.

I imagine that NASA will insist on more details before the next manned flight, including how they have solved the flaw that caused the Soyuz/Progress failure. At least, that is what a private company would do. What a government agency will do is sometimes beyond my understanding.

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Pushing Darwin

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Hat tip Tom Biggar, who wrote, “As one of the comments said: ‘You know that fine line between bravery and stupidity? Well, you passed it up about 5 miles back.’ My question is how did he get it on the planks from that narrow pier?”

Though I always approve of having the courage to push the envelope and take risks, this is not an example of that. They get away with it, but not because they used their brains. They were merely lucky.

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Even more rate hikes expected in 2016 due to Obamacare

1:00 pm

Finding out what’s in it: More health insurers have now calculated the costs for the first two years of Obamacare and have realized that they need double digit premium increases.

The real political bottom line here, should the Republicans not go squishy and agree to take the blame for something they had no part in, is this:

The consequences of this inevitable failure of the ObamaCare model puts Democrats in a tough spot. They have to decide whether it’s better to have this hit in October 2015 right before the primaries, or try to delay the inevitable and possibly have it hit in 2016 right before the general election. Of course, just because premiums spike upward this year doesn’t mean they won’t escalate sharply in 2016 for the 2017 plans too.

Obamacare was imposed on us by Obama and the Democrats, entirely on their own. All of its problems were caused by them alone. The last thing the Republicans in Congress should do is to help them tinker with Obamacare to try to fix it. Instead, the Republicans should loudly increase their calls for repeal and an effort to start over, from scratch.

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Pluto’s moons rotate chaotically

12:33 pm

Data from the Hubble Space Telescope has determined that two and maybe more of Pluto’s moons have chaotic rotations.

In a surprising new study, it has been found that two of Pluto’s moons, Nix and Hydra, are in a chaotic rotation. This means that an observer on Pluto would not see the same face of the moons from one night to the next. For visitors on the moons themselves, things would get even more confusing, as every day would be a different length to the one that preceded it. The other two moons studied, Kerberos and Styx, will likely be found to be chaotic too, pending further study.

This would also mean that you would not know where on the horizon the sun or Pluto would rise each day.

This information was gathered partly to help New Horizons prepare for its July 14 fly-by.

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Angara to launch commercial payload on next launch

9:02 am

The competition heats up: Russia has decided to accelerate use of its heavy Angara rocket by launching a commercial payload on its next launch in 2016.

They had initially planned to do more test flights. The technical problems with Proton, combined with increased competition from SpaceX and others, is forcing them to move at a less leisurely pace.

In the meantime, they have concluded their investigation into the Progress/Soyuz rocket failure, issuing an incredibly vague press release that only stated the following:

The damage to the ship during its abnormal separation from the third stage of the Soyuz-2-1a launch vehicle resulted from a particular property of the joint use of the cargo spacecraft and the launch vehicle. This design property was related to frequency and dynamic characteristics of joint vehicles. This design property was not fully accounted for during the development of the rocket and spacecraft complex.

Limitations on further flights of the Soyuz-2-1a rocket with other spacecraft had not been found.

It sounds to me as if they don’t know exactly what caused the abnormal separation between the rocket and the spacecraft, and that they have decided to move on regardless.

I think it would be very wise for the U.S. to get its own manned spacecraft operational as fast as possible.

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Air Force asks private companies to develop new rocket engines

5:47 pm

The competition heats up: The Air Force has issued a request for proposals for the development of new rocket engines to replace the Russian engine used on the Atlas 5 rocket.

The press release is a little vague in that it seems to be calling for the development of this new engine, but it could also be interpreted as calling for the development of an entire rocket system. The amount of money involved is too small for this, however, so I suspect we are only talking about engine development here.

Meanwhile, they will continue to issue launch contracts to ULA and SpaceX while they wait for this new engine to be developed. Note also that this sure is a good deal for ULA, getting the Air Force to pay for upgrades to its Atlas 5 rocket.

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