June 22, 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
B-52s – Rock Lobster
An evening pause: Performed live 2011.
Hat tip Dan Morris.
A snakelike Martian ridge
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on November 22, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labeled a sinuous ridge. Make sure you also look at the full image. The ridge goes on to the south, but then fades way as an almost perfect ramp, only to have another even more wiggly but thinner north-south ridge begin only a few feet to the west.
Sinuous ridges like this are found in many places on Mars. Almost always their origin is thought the result of a former river channel that became a ridge when the surrounding softer material eroded away.
That explanation however does not seem to work for this ridge. It has too many other inexplicable features. For example, note how the peak of the ridge smoothly transitions from sharp to flat-topped. It has a soft appearance that is strengthened by the gap near the top.
It is almost as if this ridge is a kind of elongated sand dune! And guess what: The overview map below gives that explanation some believability.
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Today’s blacklisted American: School board threatens parent with lawsuit if she doesn’t shut up
Alexandra Schweitzer: a true momma grizzly
When parent Alexandra Schweitzer began challenging publicly the use of inappropriate sexual materials in the elementary schools in Oconomowoc Area School District (OASD) in Wisconsin, the school board made what appeared to be some minor superficial changes in its policy without really addressing her concerns.
Above all, school district officials would not confirm unequivocally that these materials — many of which advocated the queer agenda on gender — had been removed. Unsatisfied with this response, Schweitzer expanded her campaign.
After enrolling her children elsewhere, Alexandra continued to be an advocate and resource for local parents regarding their concerns. As President of No Left Turn in Education [NLTE]– Wisconsin, Schweitzer voiced her concerns, and those of district parents, in public forums and in testimony before the Wisconsin legislature.
Apparently, the school district did not like what she said in those public forums or in that testimony. It proceeded to hire an outside lawyer — using school funds — to send Schweitzer a cease-and-desist letter [pdf], threatening further legal action against her if she did not retract her statements and then shut up.
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A telescope using a liquid mirror about to become operational
Link here. The telescope, located in the Himalayas, is “an international collaboration between institutions in India, Belgium, Poland, Uzbekistan and Canada.”
The mirror works by rotating it so that its thin layer of liquid mercury forms a parabola.
The tradeoff is that the [telescope]is fixed in a single position, so it only observes one strip of the night sky as the Earth rotates below it. But since the telescope will be hyper-focused on just one area, it’s well-suited for spotting transient objects like supernovas and asteroids.
It appears the scientists will use it to study this same strip of sky over five years, hoping to detect changes in that time period.
This telescope is more a technology test than an actual observatory. Eventually the best place to put such a telescope — and much larger — will be on the Moon, and to do that requires some construction and testing beforehand.
InSight team decides to shorten lander’s life to operate seismometer longer
The InSight science team has decided to continue to operate the lander’s seismometer through August rather than turning it off at the end of June, even though that longer use will drain InSight’s batteries sooner and kill the lander shortly thereafter.
The previous plan would have allowed the lander to survive through the end of the year, but would have meant no earthquake data would have been gathered after June.
To enable the seismometer to continue to run for as long as possible, the mission team is turning off InSight’s fault protection system. While this will enable the instrument to operate longer, it leaves the lander unprotected from sudden, unexpected events that ground controllers wouldn’t have time to respond to.
“The goal is to get scientific data all the way to the point where InSight can’t operate at all, rather than conserve energy and operate the lander with no science benefit,” said Chuck Scott, InSight’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Apparently they have realized that it is now very unlikely that a dust devil will come by and clear the dust from InSight’s solar panels, so keeping the spacecraft alive longer — but getting no data — does not make sense.
The battlelines and alliances shift over big satellite constellations in space
Two stories today show that the competition for frequency use and orbital territory in space are shifting, partly because of international politics and partly due to changes in technology.
First the harsh conflict between OneWeb and Starlink over the positioning and frequency use of their constellations in orbit now appears to have vanished.
The companies have written a joint letter to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), declaring harmony in low Earth orbit (LEO) for spectrum coordination between their respective current and next generation broadband constellations.
In the letter, which is dated June 13, SpaceX and OneWeb request that the FCC disregard previously filed dissenting comments regarding spectrum coordination in LEO. SpaceX and OneWeb both submitted proposals for their first-generation internet constellations to the FCC in 2016, followed by a second round of proposals in 2020 for each company’s next-generation broadband satellites. Simultaneously, both SpaceX and OneWeb submitted complaints with the FCC in an attempt to get a leg up on each other. Now, it seems the companies are operating on friendlier terms.
The article I think correctly speculates that this new-found cooperation probably resulted from OneWeb’s need to use SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets to get its satellites in orbit, caused by Russia’s confiscation of 36 OneWeb satellites in response to Europen sanctions over the Ukraine War. During the launch negotiations I am sure SpaceX demanded both iron out their differences relating to the satellite constellations. While SpaceX might have been able to gain some advantages in that negotiation due to its strong position, I also suspect that OneWeb has not been hurt in any major way.
In the second story, SpaceX ramped up its opposition to a Dish 5G system in a wavelength used by its Starlink satellties.
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Psyche software issue could prevent launch this year
In a remarkably brief announcement on the Psyche website, the engineering team suggested that the flight software issue that forced a seven week delay in its launch might now prevent a launch this year.
This is the entire announcement:
NASA’s Psyche mission team continues to assess ongoing issues with the spacecraft’s flight software. The team is evaluating its ability to meet a schedule to launch in 2022 – the current launch period is Sept. 20 to Oct. 11. If it is determined that launch in 2022 is not possible, a full range of actions for how to proceed will be considered.
This year’s launch window would have gotten the spacecraft to the asteroid Psyche in 2026. Since this flight path required a fly-by of Mars, it is very unclear when another launch window will be available.
China’s Kuaizhou-1A smallsat rocket launches technology test satellite
China today used its smallsat solid rocket Kuaizhou-1A to put a technology test satellite into orbit.
The Kuaizhou-1A rocket is not the same as the Kuaizhou-11 rocket, which some have speculated exploded during a static fire test in the fall of ’21. Both are part of a family of rockets designed for fast launch.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
26 SpaceX
19 China
8 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 ULA
The U.S. still leads China 35 to 19 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 35 to 31.
Tim Weisberg – Summertime
An evening pause: Seems fitting to begin the summer.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
Has work begun on a dedicated helicopter mission to Mars?
Click for full image.
In my routine searches through the image archive for the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, I recently came upon several images labeled “Candidate Mars Science Helicopter Traverse” that I at first thought referred to Ingenuity’s extended mission in Jezero Crater.
A closer look however revealed these photos have nothing to do with Ingenuity or Jezero Crater. Taken in November ’21, January ’22, and March ’22, the images instead cover parts of the south rim of Valles Marineris, the solar system’s largest canyon, and appear to be research for a future dedicated Mars helicopter mission. The overview map above shows the location of these photos by the black dots. Three locations have each been imaged twice to produce a stereoscopic view that can precisely measure the topography.
The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows the easternmost image, taken November 3, 2021. Not only does it show ample flat areas, the picture captures an impressive avalanche flow coming down from that southern interior canyon slope.
All the images were requested by planetary scientist Edwin Kite of the University of Chicago. Though I tried several times to contact Dr. Kite to get more information, he unfortunately did not respond. It could be this work is still too preliminary and thus he does not wish to comment.
Nonetheless, the extent of the three sets of images give us a fair idea of the kind of missions Kite and others might be considering. From east to west the distance between the images is about four hundred miles, and covers a traverse of the southern interior slopes of Valles Marineris along that entire length. The photos look mostly at the base of the canyon’s slope, each showing clearly that a helicopter flying there would have plenty of landing spots.
Obviously this first dedicated Mars helicopter mission might not cover this entire distance. Right now these images could simply be the first tentative research on choosing potential landing areas. Regardless, it appears that at least one scientist has already concluded that Ingenuity has proven such helicopter missions make sense, and is beginning to target one of Mars’s most spectacular locations, Valles Marineris, for that mission.
Today’s blacklisted American: Student gov’t demands blacklisting of every club that does not endorse the queer agenda
They’re coming for you next: The student government at North Texas University has passed a resolution that demands the school blacklist of every club that expresses any dissenting opinion about the queer agenda.
From the resolution [pdf]:
THEREFORE, LET IT BE RESOLVED THAT, any UNT Student Organization that engages in harassment, discrimination, hate crimes, and/or violation of UNT policy through transphobic posts, statements, and actions be immediately suspended to protect the mental, emotional, and physical health of transgender students at UNT. [emphasis mine]
Note how this resolution isn’t condemning actual harassment. Instead, it considers mere disagreement to be “harassment, discrimination, and a hate crime”, and thus must be punished.
The resolution lists a bunch of incidents where so-called “trans” students (more accurately described as emotionally unstable individuals who want to make-believe they are of a different sex) were offended and felt “unsafe” when others expressed their opposition to this queer agenda. The key and most significant event however involved an appearance at the school of Jeff Younger, who was then running for the state legislature but more importantly had been involved in a very public and truly horrifying case where one of his two sons had been forced by a guardian to dress as a girl because that guardian had decided the boy was one. (To understand how horrifying, look at the images at the link.)
Younger had fought but failed to protect his son. He came to the campus to tell his story, which was then disrupted by leftist protests of chants and obscenities. Apparently, it is all right for Younger to feel “unsafe.” These leftist rules as always apply in only one direction.
The article at the link quotes Program Officer Graham Piro from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression:
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