The reactivation of Rosetta continues, with no serious issues so far.
The reactivation of Rosetta continues, with no serious issues so far.
The reactivation of Rosetta continues, with no serious issues so far.
The reactivation of Rosetta continues, with no serious issues so far.
The National Science Foundation wants to get rid of some of its older big telescopes, and you can buy them!
We are not talking small here. The biggest is the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia, which though only fourteen years old is unable to compete scientificially with the new large radio telescope arrays. In truth, when it was mostly built to satisfy the pork ambitions of the late Democratic Senator Robert Byrd.
In a spacewalk earlier this week, two Russian astronauts on ISS successfully installed the commercial UrtheCast cameras.
The cameras cost $17-million and are capable of beaming down images and high-definition video from the Russian part of the ISS to UrtheCast, a small Vancouver company that struck a deal with the Russian space agency to have its devices blasted into space on a Soyuz rocket and installed in exchange for imagery captured over Russia.
There had been a problem installing these cameras on an earlier spacewalk last month, so this was the second attempt.
Once operational, these cameras will also provide a continuous and free live feed of the Earth for anyone who wishes to view it.
After dimming for decades, the North Star is now getting brighter.
My very first published article, once I changed careers to become a freelance science writer, was a story in 1995 about the mysterious changes that astronomers had noticed Polaris undergoing. It appears those mysterious changes continue.
An update on my eye problem. I just returned from the doctor. The retina has reattached itself. It looks like all will heal properly over the next week or so, assuming I continue to be diligent about treatment.
I will probably not resume posting until tomorrow, as today I still have to keep my head positioned a certain way so that the treatment can work properly. (I will explain this all when I can sit in front of the computer for long enough to write something substantial.)
Regardless, thank you to everyone who has wished me well. I appreciate it more than you know.
For the next few days posting will be very light, as today I developed a detached retina in the right eye and will undergo treatment tomorrow to fix it. The doctor is optimistic, but I will be unable to sit and stare at the computer much after tomorrow’s procedure until probably Wednesday.
If all goes well I should resume posting on Wednesday, with a two hour appearance that night on Coast to Coast to discuss climate, environmentalism, and the corruption of science because of politics.
“The most dangerous years of the Obama presidency are upon us.”
His conclusion says it all:
Holding the House and taking back the Senate in 2014, while extremely important, cannot stop someone who considers himself above it all. A united front is needed for the next three years. So what is Republican and Congressional leadership planning?
A war on the Tea Party.
This is no time to petty internal politics. It is time to unite against the threat the Democrats pose, which they have now repeatedly admitted to quite openly, which is to deny their opponents any say in the political process.
Twenty places that are difficult to believe really exist.
More information on the problems with China’s lunar rover Yutu.
It appears that the rover was not responding properly to commands from the ground and thus did not prep itself properly for going into hibernation for the long lunar night.
New NASA data has confirmed that the flat climate temperatures that started around 1998 has continued in 2013.
The link above catches the real story that most mainstream news organizations missed, focusing instead on NASA’s weak claim that last year was one of the warmest on record.
Something is wrong with China’s lunar rover.
The link above is exceedingly short, one sentence, and describes the problem as an “abnormity” which makes no sense, so there is as yet no clear idea what the issue is.
A longer report is here, but it doesn’t add much, other than the “abnormality” is related to “mechanical control.”
Freedom under attack: A newspaper chain plans to assemble a state-by-state database of every person permitted to carry a concealed weapon.
The CEO of the chain has released a statement saying that
[Civitas Media] never had any plans or intentions of publishing in print or online lists of holders of “conceal and carry” permits. Nor will Civitas Media develop databases of permit holders. A poorly crafted internal memo meant to highlight editorial discussions and planning incorrectly indicated that such a database was being planned; it has been considered and rejected.
Maybe so, but that such an idea was even considered by some of the company’s editors tells you a great deal about what those editors believe in, and it surely isn’t privacy, the second amendment, or personal rights.
Does this make you feel safer? The TSA spent almost a billion dollars hiring behavior detection officers who then detected zero terrorists.
A Democrat reveals his dislike for democracy: New York Senator Charles Schumer proposes disenfranchising tea party voters in order to weaken their impact at the polls.
He also suggested that the IRS harassment of conservatives, and conservatives only, is a good thing.
Finding out what’s not in it: Enrollees in Obamacare in California are discovering few doctors or hospitals willing to accept their plans.
Worse, they are finding that the lists of doctors and hospitals that supposedly accept Obamacare is wrong.
For his part, Peter Lee, Covered California’s executive director, acknowledged that consumers may be getting misinformation from the state agency or insurer about whether their providers are participating. But, he said, the exchange is prepared to help those consumers get new plans that more suitably meet their needs. “If our directory or the directory of the health plan is wrong and a consumer wants to change plans, we’ll work with them to make sure they can do so,” Lee said in a news call this week. [emphasis mine]
Trouble in Russia: A Kazakhstan political party is demanding the end of all Proton launches from Baikonur.
Though I doubt this party’s radical and somewhat ignorant environmental position will gain much traction in a country where Russia’s spaceport is one of its biggest employees, its existence demonstrates why Russia is working hard to get its new spaceport in Vostochny, Russia, finished as quickly as possible.
Come October 2014 astronomers will attempt to weigh Proxima Centauri, the nearest star.
The uncertainty of science: Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s top experts on black holes, has written a paper stating there are no black holes.
At least, there is no such thing as an event horizon, meaning that black holes are not what scientists have believed.
The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada has now set November 2016 as the date for its first orbital flight of Dream Chaser.
The flight will be unmanned, followed by a manned mission the next year.
Pushback: The conservative target of a fake investigation by a Wisconsin Democratic prosecutor — having won in court — is now threatening to sue if the prosecutor doesn’t shut the investigation down immediately.
Eric O’Keefe, who has been identified in media reports as a target of a secret “John Doe” investigation in Wisconsin, today demanded that state prosecutors end their action against him or face a federal civil rights action. O’Keefe is director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, which was also targeted for alleged unlawful “coordination” with Governor Scott Walker’s campaign for fiscal reforms. “This investigation is political payback by elected prosecutors against conservative activists for their political successes in Wisconsin,” stated O’Keefe. “They are violating the constitutional rights of private citizens and must be held accountable.”
In a letter to the prosecutors, O’Keefe’s lawyer, Washington attorney David B. Rivkin, states that the probe has no basis in Wisconsin law and violates Mr. O’Keefe’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association. The prosecutors’ legal reasoning, the letter states, “is unsupportable as a matter of law and crystal clear evidence of bad faith.”
“I am confident that any federal court that reviews the facts will see your investigation for what it is, put a stop to it, and hold you publicly accountable,” the letter states.
I have missed the story in which a judge had quashed the prosecutors’ subpoenas, which is good news. That the Wisconsin Club for Growth is going on the offensive now is even better news.
The totalitarians of New York.
It is why I left back in 1998. Amazingly, it is getting far worse with the passing years. See for example this story.
It ain’t an accident, they were brought there by Cygnus as part of an experiment to see how an ant colony adapts to weightlessness.
In celebration of the tenth anniversary of Opportunity’s landing on Mars, the journal Science has published a special section of the newest findings from Mars.
The main conclusion of all this research is that Mars was once potentially habitable, though there is no evidence so far to show that anything actually inhabited it. The data obtained however is now giving scientists clues on the best places to look for the remains of that ancient life, should it exist.
The IRS harassment of conservatives continues.
The massive abuse of government power by the Obama administration against their conservative opponents nationwide makes anything done in New Jersey by Chris Christie’s underlings seem petty and inconsequential.
Banning guns by proxy: Gun manufacturers flee California over its microstamping law.
Smith & Wesson announced it will stop selling its handguns in California rather than manufacture them to comply with the new microstamping law. The other publicly traded firearms manufacturer in the U.S., Sturm, Ruger, also said this month that it will stop new sales to California. The announcement late Wednesday came a week after the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for firearms manufacturers, filed suit against California for requiring that all new semi-automatic pistols that are not already on the state’s approved gun roster have the microstamping technology.
Microstamping is a patented process that, in theory, would have a unique code on the tip of a gun’s firing pin that would engrave that information on the casing when fired.
In other words, while the California legislature might want to make believe the technology is practical, the people who have to build and sell the guns know otherwise and can’t do it. So, this law essentially becomes a backdoor ban on guns and the second amendment. If you make it illegal to manufacture and sell guns, it doesn’t matter whether you have a right to own one.
Note also the basic dishonesty of the legislators who passed this law. They knew it was impractical, and did it not to put microstamping on ammo, but to make it impossible to sell guns. Or to put it more bluntly, they lied about what they were doing.
Finding out what’s in it: The credit rating agency Moody’s has downgraded its outlook for health insurancers from stable to negative because of Obamacare.
In other words, the agency now expects many of these companies to go bankrupt because of the costs and regulations imposed on them by the healthcare law.
Aren’t we all glad Obama and the Democratic Party forced this law on us?
For more information about that newly discovered supernova in the nearby galaxy M82 go here and here.
The first link notes that the supernova has brightened to 11.5 magnitude and could get even brighter in the next two weeks. Though still too dim for the naked eye, it is easily bright enough right now for most amateur telescopes and binoculars. How much brighter it will get remains a question.
Using the Herschel Space Telescope astronomers have detected water vapor spurting from Ceres, the solar system’s largest asteroid.
Herschel’s sensors spied plumes during three of the four observation periods. The strength of absorption varied over a matter of hours, a trend probably caused by relatively small sources of water vapour rotating in and out of view of Earth, the researchers say.
Data gathered in March 2013 suggest that the plumes originated from two widely separated, 60-kilometre-wide spots in the dwarf planet’s mid-latitude regions. Together, these spots ejected about 6 kilograms of water vapour into space each second. Neither ground-based observations nor images from the Hubble Space Telescope are keen enough to identify the as-yet-mysterious areas, says Küppers. “We don’t know what these features are, we just know that they’re darker than their surroundings,” he notes.
The NASA probe Dawn will arrive at Ceres early next year, and take a good look at these plumes. Should be exciting.
The competition heats up: Virgin Galactic today announced the successful testing of their own new rocket engine.
Virgin Galactic, the world’s first commercial spaceline, announced today that it has reached a significant milestone in the testing of a new family of liquid rocket engines for LauncherOne, the company’s small satellite launch vehicle. As part of a rapid development program, Virgin Galactic has now hot-fired both a 3,500 lbf thrust rocket engine and a 47,500 lbf thrust rocket engine, called the “NewtonOne” and “NewtonTwo” respectively. Further, the NewtonOne engine has successfully completed a full-mission duty cycle on the test stand, firing for the five-minute duration expected of the upper stage engine on a typical flight to orbit. These tests are being conducted on two new state-of-the-art test stands that the team designed, assembled and installed internally. [emphasis mine]
Though they say that these engines are for their orbital rocket, not SpaceShipTwo, I find it interesting that their development was in-house, not by Scaled Composites which has so far been building everything for Virgin Galactic. Moreover, note the highlighted words, “rapid development program.” Though you should never be leisurely about this stuff in order to compete, giving this particular title to this engine program suggests they are in a particular hurry to develop it.
Both factoids suggest again that they are not happy with the performance of the hybrid engines Scaled Composites built for them, under their direction, and are now working hard to replace them.
You might have noticed a plethora of stories in the last couple of days, reporting claims by NASA and NOAA that 2013 was one of the hottest years ever on record.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday released its global temperature figures for 2013. The average world temperature was 58.12 degrees (14.52 Celsius) tying with 2003 for the fourth warmest since 1880. NASA, which calculates records in a different manner, said Tuesday that 2013 was the seventh warmest on record, with an average temperature of 58.3 degrees (14.6 Celsius).
How can this be, if there has been a pause in global warming for the past 17 years, as has been admitted by the UN’s IPCC and climate scientists everywhere?
The answer, in my opinion: outright fraud.
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