August 17, 2022 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, well worth your time, go here.
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Author: Robert Zimmerman
ABBA – Waterloo
An evening pause: Performed live in 1974.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Get above 30 degrees latitude on Mars and you can find ice everywhere
Click for full image.
Today’s cool image provides further proof that there is ample near surface ice almost anywhere on Mars once you get above 30 degrees latitude, in either the northern or southern hemispheres. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken on May 26, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the interior slope of an unnamed 15-mile-wide crater that sits inside the much larger 185-mile-wide Newton crater, located in the cratered southern highlands of Mars.
The black cross on the global map of Mars above marks the location of this crater.
The photo was taken as part of the routine monitoring planetary scientists are doing of the gullies that flow down this crater’s interior rim, a monitoring program that goes back to 2007. It is thought that those gullies might be created by seasonal frost, either water ice or dry ice, that causes erosion.
What struck me about the photo however was the glacial features on the floor of the crater. Near the bottom of the interior slope those features look broken up, as if the pressure from above pushed the ice sheets apart. Farther from the interior slope the features more resemble a typical glacial flow, slowly inching downward toward the crater’s low spot. All these glacial features also lend weight to the theory that water ice somehow caused or contributed to the formation of those gullies.
The global map above shows that this crater, while well within the 30 to 60 degrees mid-latitude band where many Martian glaciers are found, is also far from the many regions on Mars that scientists have mapped as having high concentrations of glaciers. And yet, the glacial features are here as well.
Near surface ice will not be found at every spot on Mars. However, once you get above 30 degrees latitude, the evidence increasingly suggests that you won’t have to go far or dig down deep to find it.
Pushback: Doctor files $25 million defamation lawsuit against Houston Methodist for its COVID slanders
Dr. Mary Bowden, refusing to bow to the authorities
Bring a gun to a knife fight: Blacklisted Dr. Mary Bowden has now upped her game and filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas and its CEO, Marc Boom, for the slanders both published against her for her opposition to the COVID jab mandates.
You can read her lawsuit here [pdf].
Bowden had been suspended by Houston Methodist Hospital in November 2021 and was subsequently forced to resign because she publicly opposed COVID shot mandates and used ivermectin in treating her Wuhan flu patients. Both the hospital and Boom had accused her of “spreading dangerous misinformation which is not based on science” because she had successfully treated about 2,000 COVID patients, none of which ever needed hospitalization, with both ivermectin and monoclonal antibodies.
In February 2022 Bowden began her pushback when she sued Houston Methodist to get its own data on the success or failure of its own CDC-endorsed treatment of COVID, as well as its financial records to find out how much it had earned from that treatment.
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A detailed description of Rocket Lab’s private Venus mission
Click for full figure.
Capitalism in space: In partnership with scientists at MIT, the Planetary Science Institute, and others, Rocket Lab engineers this week published a detailed description of the company’s planned privately funded mission to Venus, presently targeting a launch in May 2023.
From the paper’s abstract:
The Rocket Lab mission to Venus is a small direct entry probe planned for baseline launch in May 2023 with accommodation for a single ~1 kg instrument. A backup launch window is available in January 2025. The probe mission will spend about 5 min in the Venus cloud layers at 48–60 km altitude above the surface and collect in situ measurements. We have chosen a low-mass, low-cost autofluorescing nephelometer to search for organic molecules in the cloud particles and constrain the particle composition.
The figure above is figure 6 from the paper. It shows the probe’s planned path through Venus’s atmosphere. If the mission launches in May ’23 the probe would enter the atmosphere in October ’23.
Redwire to launch first commercial and private greenhouse in space
Capitalism in space: The in-space 3D printing company Redwire announced yesterday that it will launch to ISS the first privately-built greenhouse, scheduled for a ’23 liftoff.
Redwire is developing this greenhouse for agricultural company Dewey Scientific.
During the inaugural flight, Dewey Scientific will grow industrial hemp in the Greenhouse for a gene expression study. The company collaborated with Redwire, contributing technical details about the 60-day experiment and describing its potential to demonstrate the capabilities of the facility, while advancing biomedical and biofuels research.
The long term goal is to prove that this technology can produce products of value on future space stations, products that can then be sold on Earth. That both companies appear willing to invest some of their own research and development capital in this project suggests they both believe there will be a strong viable market for these products.
Samples from Ryugu prove the truly delicate and long-lived nature of the rubble-pile asteroid
Two new studies of samples brought back from the rubble-pile asteroid Ryugu by the Japanese probe Hayabusa-2 have found that the asteroid not only was never heated above 86 degrees Fahrenheit, it also contained dust grains older than the solar system itself.
The evidence from the first study, completed by Japanese scientists, suggested that:
- 1.Asteroid Ryugu accreted some components that originated in the outer Solar System and contained abundant water and organics. The asteroid then traveled to the inner Solar System.
- 2.Organics associated with coarse-grained phyllosilicates may serve as one of the potential sources of water and organics to the Earth.
The second study, using samples provided to American scientists, found two tiny dust grains that must have come from the material that existed before the formation of our solar system.
The team detected all the previously known types of presolar grains—including one surprise, a silicate that is easily destroyed by chemical processing that is expected to have occurred on the asteroid’s parent body. It was found in a less-chemically-altered fragment that likely shielded it from such activity.
This is not the first discovery of presolar grains, but their delicate existence in Ryugu confirms the conclusions of the first study, that Ryugu had to have formed in the outer solar system and then migrated inward over eons.
The second study also reviewed the make-up of the sample and concluded that Ryugu appears to most closely match the family of carbonaceous Ivuna-type (CI) chondrites, thought to be among the most primitive asteroids known, of which very few have been studied because of they rarely survive the journey through the Earth’s atmosphere.
Astrobotic makes bid to buy assets of bankrupt Masten
Capitalism in space: Astrobotic, a startup focused on building lunar and planetary unmanned landers, has now made a formal bid to buy the remaining assets of Masten Space Systems, which had also been a startup focused on planetary missions but recently went bankrupt.
In a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for Delaware Aug. 14, Masten said it received a “stalking horse” bid of $4.2 million for Masten’s assets, including a SpaceX launch credit worth $14 million, from Astrobotic. The agreement, in effect, sets a minimum price for the sale of those assets but does not prevent Masten from seeking higher bids through an auction process that runs through early September.
The agreement appears to supersede an earlier agreement between Masten and a third lunar lander company, Intuitive Machines, included in Masten’s Chapter 11 filing July 28. That agreement covered the SpaceX launch credits alone and Masten did not disclose the value of it in its original filing.
Masten’s long term specialty has been vertical take-off and landing, something it has successfully done for the last several years on suborbital flights. This technology would be of great value to both Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines in developing their own first lunar landers.
SLS arrives at launchpad
The Space Launch System rocket (SLS) that will fly on NASA’s first test launch of this rocket on August 29, 2022 has finally arrived at its launchpad, seven years late and about $20 billion overbudget.
In the coming days, engineers and technicians will configure systems at the pad for launch, which is currently targeted for no earlier than Aug. 29 at 8:33 a.m. (two hour launch window). Teams have worked to refine operations and procedures and have incorporated lessons learned from the wet dress rehearsal test campaign and have updated the launch timeline accordingly.
The rollout from the Vehicle Assembly Building took ten hours.
InSight’s power status continues to hold steady on Mars
According to a new status update posted today by the science team, the power status for the Mars InSight lander continues to hold steady.
The graph to the right adds the new data, showing that the daily watt hours of power produced each day continues to hold at 400, while the dust in the atmosphere continues to drop towards its normal level of between 0.6 and 0.7 tau during the non-dust seasons.
These new numbers appear to be generally good news. Even though the dust continues to settle out of the atmosphere, it does not appear to be adding dust on the solar panels that would reduce their capability to generate power. Though the science team had predicted that the power levels would cause the mission to end sometime in August, at 400 watts per hour InSight has apparently continued to generate enough electricity to keep its seismometer running for at least another week.
Counting Crows – Angels of the Silences
An evening pause: Performed live 1997.
Hat tip Dan Morris.
August 16, 2022 Quick space links
Click to see full image.
Some quickie stories worth noting, most provided by stringer Jay:
- Michael Tzukran, astrophotographer from the University of Tel Aviv, takes great ground-based picture of Tiangong-3 in orbit
- Assembly begins on Europa Clipper
- Air Force awards SpaceX $1.9 million contract for Starlink services in Europe and Africa
- Electron’s next launch in September will be its 30th overall
That picture, cropped to post here, is to the right.
Launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy is scheduled for 2024.