September 23, 2022 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Author: Robert Zimmerman
The Jack Benny Show – November 4, 1951
An evening pause: This was the first episode in Benny’s second season on television, following nineteen years doing a regular radio show. The first singer is Bob Crosby, brother of Bing. The taxi driver is Mel Blanc, voice of Bugs Bunny and almost all of the characters in Warner Brothers best cartoons.
Almost everything in this episode works, but make sure especially you stay with it to see the Benny’s performance as lead fiddler of a hillbilly band.
Above ground and underground Martian drainages
Cool image time! Today we are going to zoom into our cool image. The overview map to the right provides us the context. Our target is the small white rectangle inside the small box just below the north rim of 185-mile-wide Newton Crater, located 200 to 800 miles from the southwest edge of the lava plains dubbed Daedalia Planum that flowed down from Mars’s biggest volcanoes.
Newton Crater has a number of interesting features. Only two weeks ago I featured 4-mile-wide Avire Crater in Newton’s western quadrant, long known to have many gullies on its interior slopes as well as glacier features on its floor. Scientists have been monitoring those gullies now for more than a decade to see if they change seasonally, in a attempt to figure out their cause.
Today’s cool image looks at the very intriguing meandering canyons that appear to flow south from Newton’s north rim.
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Range gives NASA waiver to launch SLS on September 27th, despite a questionable flight termination system
In a briefing today, NASA officials confirmed that they are proceeding with their September 27, 2022 first launch of the SLS rocket, having obtained a waiver from the Space Force’s range office on testing the batteries for the flight termination system that would destroy the rocket should it begin flying out of control.
During a Sept. 23 teleconference, NASA announced an extension for the flight termination system battery certification, which expired after 25 days on Sept. 6. Now the Space Force’s Eastern Range has granted a waiver to allow the rocket to launch as late as Oct. 2 before needing to be returned to the Vehicle Assembly building to recertify the batteries.
The flight termination system is only used in the event the rocket veers off course during a launch anomaly.
Note that the 25 day use-by limit was actually an extension itself, as these batteries had been previously required testing every 20 days. Now the range is willing to let them go for as long about 50 days without testing, a two and half times increase.
If the rules before — based on engineering — said the batteries were not reliable after 20 days, why are those batteries now considered reliable up to 50 days? What facts or data does NASA or the Space Force have to allow this waiver? And if they have no data, it seems almost criminal to allow the go-ahead of this launch of a giant untested rocket on its first lift-off. Should something go seriously wrong — which is not that unlikely — and the flight termination system fails to work, we could see a very big rocket careening out-of-control into populated areas.
We all hope SLS launches with no problem on September 27th. We now have a really serious reason for that desire.
Regardless, the launch is now scheduled for a 70-minute launch window that opens at 11:37 am (Eastern) on September 27th, with a back-up launch window on October 2nd of 102 minutes beginning at 2:52 pm (Eastern).
Meanwhile, a developing tropical storm could put a kabosh on all these plans, forcing NASA to roll SLS back to the assembly building anyway. NASA managers plan to meet again before launch to make a decision.
Pushback: Professor fired for making joke wins $165K settlement from university
Speech that is forbidden at the University of North Texas
Nathaniel Hiers, fired by his boss as a math professor at the University of North Texas for daring to express a political opinion, has won a $165K settlement from the university.
This story is a follow-up on a previous column from March, when a judge had ruled that Hiers’ lawsuit could go forward. The judge also dismissed the university’s claim of qualified immunity for its officials, thus leaving them personally liable under any settlement.
The background: Hiers’ was fired when, having found flyers in math department’s lounge warning faculty against triggering “microaggessions” in their conversations, responded as shown in the picture to the right, placing one flyer on the chalk rack of the blackboard and wrote his own opinion of it above.
It appears that though the settlement was a victory for Hiers, paying him for damages and his attorneys’ fees, it does not get him his job back. Nor does it appear the officials who fired him wrongly will pay any of the settlement. Instead, the University of North Texas is picking up the tab.
Thus, this victory is not the triumph Hiers’ legal team, the Alliance Defending Freedom, claims it is. » Read more
A hot wave in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere has been discovered, flowing away from the pole
Using data obtained by ground-based telescopes, scientists have discovered a hot wave, with temperatures in the range of 700 degrees Celsius (about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit), rolling outward from Jupiter’s hot polar atmospheric regions, believed caused by the gas giant’s intense aurora.
Jupiter’s atmosphere, famous for its characteristic multicoloured vortices, is also unexpectedly hot: in fact, it is hundreds of degrees hotter than models predict. Due to its orbital distance millions of kilometres from the Sun, the giant planet receives under 4% of the amount of sunlight compared to Earth, and its upper atmosphere should theoretically be a frigid -70 degrees Celsius. Instead, its cloud tops are measured everywhere at over 400 degrees Celsius.
…Just like the Earth, Jupiter experiences auroras around its poles as an effect of the solar wind. However, while Earth’s auroras are transient and only occur when solar activity is intense, auroras at Jupiter are permanent and have a variable intensity. The powerful auroras can heat the region around the poles to over 700 degrees Celsius, and global winds can redistribute the heat globally around Jupiter.
The graphic above, adapted from the research presentation [pdf], shows that wave propagating away from the pole. The wave’s width is about the size of the Earth, with different sections moving from about 1,000 feet per second to 8,000 feet per second.
Watching DART impact asteroid on September 26, 2022
A NASA planetary probe, dubbed DART, is on course for a planned impact of the asteroid Dimorphos this coming Monday, September 26, 2022, at 4:14 PM (Pacific).
DART was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, CA on November 23, 2021 PST (November 24 EST) headed to the asteroid Didymos and its tiny moon Dimorphos 7 million miles away. The plan is for DART to ram itself into Dimorphos while scientists on Earth measure whether its orbit around Didymos changes.
Dimorphos is about 525 feet in diameter, while Didymos is much larger, about a half mile in width. The goal is to see if this method can be used in the future to adjust an asteroid’s orbit enough to shift it away from hitting the Earth.
The impact will be observed by a camera on DART, as well as an Italian cubesat dubbed LICIACube.
NASA TV will be live streaming the event, and I will embed that live stream here when it goes live. Once DART gets close, its camera will record the asteroid’s approach through impact.
Voyager Space signs cooperative deal with Azerbaijan
Capitalism in space: Voyager Space, the subsidiary of Nanoracks that is building its Starlab private space station, has signed a cooperative agreement with Azercosmos, Azerbaijan’s space agency.
The press release is very vague about what the deal entails.
This strategic multi-year collaboration paves the way for Azercosmos and Voyager Space to proactively develop mutually beneficial space infrastructure, technology, and manufacturing initiatives, research programs, and further opportunities for innovation. With the potential to exchange experience and knowledge, the organizations will focus on commercial and educational opportunities in-country to foster a thriving local space ecosystem.
I suspect it will eventually lead to Azerbaijan sending research payloads to Starlab, once it is in orbit and operational.
The number of recent deals made by American private space companies, either to fly foreign astronauts in space, provide payload space on planetary missions, or provide space station capabilities for foreign science research, is beginning to be difficult to count. With at least four different American private space stations under construction, with at least one more proposed, the rush to sign up customers by these companies is accelerating.
Expect the business to be very brisk once these get launched. It appears that practically every government on Earth wants to claim it has a space program, and buying space and seats from these American commercial companies is going to be the quickest and cheapest way to do it.
Astrobotic gets ESA’s first commercially purchased lunar lander payload
Capitalism in space: Astrobotic yesterday announced that the European Space Agency (ESA) has purchased payload space on the company’s Griffin lunar lander for a commercially produced camera.
This is the first commercial payload ESA has purchased for a lunar mission. The camera will fly as a secondary payload on Griffin’s first mission, which will deliver NASA’s VIPER rover to the Moon’s south pole in 2024. The camera is being built by a French startup called Lunar Logistics Services.
Confirmed: Saudi Arabia buys two seats on next Axiom commercial flight to ISS
Capitalism in space: Saudi Arabia’s official press yesterday confirmed an earlier Reuters story that it has purchased two seats on an Axiom commercial flight to ISS, using a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
The twist is that the Saudi government says one of those astronauts will be a woman, and the mission should fly in 2023. It will include Axiom’s pilot, two Saudi passengers, and a fourth passenger, all as-yet unnamed.
The mission is part of what the Saudi government calls a new astronaut training program.
U2 – Sunday Bloody Sunday
An evening pause: Performed live 1983.
Hat tip Dan Morris.
September 21, 2022 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more