Billy Ocean – Caribbean Queen
An evening pause: Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Author: Robert Zimmerman
Data suggests the winds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot are changing
Click for original image.
Data accumulated from 2009 to 2020 by the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the outer winds in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot have speeded up by about 8%, while the winds in the spot’s inner regions have slowed.
The change in wind speeds they have measured with Hubble amount to less than 1.6 miles per hour per Earth year. “We’re talking about such a small change that if you didn’t have eleven years of Hubble data, we wouldn’t know it happened,” said Simon. “With Hubble we have the precision we need to spot a trend.” Hubble’s ongoing monitoring allows researchers to revisit and analyze its data very precisely as they keep adding to it. The smallest features Hubble can reveal in the storm are a mere 105 miles across, about twice the length of the state of Rhode Island.
“We find that the average wind speed in the Great Red Spot has been slightly increasing over the past decade,” Wong added. “We have one example where our analysis of the two-dimensional wind map found abrupt changes in 2017 when there was a major convective storm nearby.”
The graphic above shows the different wind speeds between the spot’s inner and outer regions, not the increase in speed described in this press release.
To put it mildly, these results are uncertain. We simply could be seeing the long term random fluctuations in the storm, or the change could simply be a reflection of the data’s margin of error. Moreover, since the data covers only the top layer of the Great Red Spot, it tells us nothing about the storm’s deeper regions or its more fundamental origins.
Rivulets in Martian lava
Today’s cool image is another example of scientists finding cool things hidden within distant pictures. The small white rectangle on the overview map to the right shows us where we are heading, to the severely eroded lava plains to the southwest of Mars’ largest volcano, Olympus Mons.
The white spot is about 500 miles from the caldera of Olympus Mons. In elevation it sits about 58,000 feet below that caldera, more than twice the height of Mt. Everest. Yet, despite these great distances, the material at that white rectangle was almost certainly laid down during an eruption from Olympus Mons, thus illustrating the gigantic scale of volcanic events on Mars. Because of the red planet’s light gravity, about 38% of Earth’s, not only can lava flow farther, it does so much faster.
The second image below is a wide angle photo taken by the context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in January, 2012, rotated, cropped, expanded, and enhanced to post here.
» Read more
Today’s blacklisted American: Unvaccinated students at Penn State banned from remote classes
Rounding up the unclean unvaccinated: It is coming.
They’re coming for you next: Unvaccinated students at Penn State who fail to get a COVID test for three weeks in a row are now banned from the school, including a ban from even attending remote classes.
At Penn State University, 117 students have been placed on interim suspension for failure to comply with the university’s weekly COVID-19 testing requirement.
Students at University Park who are subject to required weekly COVID-19 testing and who have missed at least three weeks of testing have been notified by Penn State that they are out of compliance with the university’s health and safety policies and have been placed on interim suspension through the Office of Student Conduct, a statement from Penn State said.
Students on interim suspension may not participate in classes, in-person or remotely; are not allowed on university property; and may not attend any Penn State-sponsored events, programs, and activities, including football games. On-campus students on interim suspension also are temporarily removed from their residence halls.
The highlighted word prove the insanity and irrationality of this policy. » Read more
ULA successfully launches Landsat 9
Capitalism in space: Using its Atlas-5 rocket ULA today successfully launched Landsat 9, built by Northrop Grumman.
At the time of writing, the rocket and payload are in orbit and in a 60-minute coast phrase prior to payload deployment.
This was only the third launch this year by ULA, tying them with Rocket Lab but still too few launches to make the leader board. The leaders in the 2021 launch race remains the same:
33 China
23 SpaceX
15 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
The U.S. now leads China 35 to 33 in the national rankings. In 2020 the U.S. completed 40 launches total, the most since 1968. At the moment there are sixteen more U.S. launches scheduled for launch in 2021. If all occur as planned, that would make 51 launches, making ’21 the fifth best launch year for the U.S. ever, exceeded only by four years in the mid-1960s.
For ULA, the low number of launches so far this year continues a slow downward trend since 2014, when the company completed fourteen launches. ULA still has four launches listed for ’21, but one, the unmanned Starliner demo launch, is likely to get delayed till ’22. The dates of two other launches remain “too-be-determined”, which also makes them questionable.
China launches Earth observation satellite
China today successfully launched an Earth observation satellite using its smallsat Kuaizhou-1A rocket, the first launch of this quick response rocket since a failure in November 2020.
The satellite is supposedly for commercial use, but little information has been released about it and its constellation.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
33 China
23 SpaceX
15 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
The U.S. still leads China 34 to 33 in the national rankings, with these numbers changing in a few hours should ULA successfully launch Landsat 9 using its Atlas-5 rocket.
September 24, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Ralph Vaughn William – 5th Symphony
An evening pause: Performed live in 2016 by the Frankfort Radio Symphony Orchestra.
This is long for an evening pause, but William’s gentle, mild British tones I think make a great way to start the weekend. Use it to unwind from your daily workweek craziness.
Hat tip Dan Morris.
Glaciers in the Martian south latitudes
Click for full image.
Most of the glacier cool images I have posted in the past few years from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have shown the obvious glacial features found in the northern hemisphere in that 2,000 mile long strip of chaos terrain at about 40 degrees latitude I dub “Glacier Country.”
Today’s glacier image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, takes us instead to the southern hemisphere, into Hellas Basin, the death valley of Mars. The picture was taken on April 8, 2021, and in the full picture gives us a myriad of examples of glacial features. The section featured to the right focuses in on what appears to be an ice covered south facing slope, which in the southern hemisphere will get the least sunlight.
Think of the last bits of snow that refuse to melt after a big blizzard. They are always found in shadowed areas, which in the southern hemisphere would be this south-facing slope.
The overview map below shows how this location, marked by the small white rectangle, is inside Hellas Basin, at a low altitude comparable to the northern lowland plains. The feature is also a comparable latitude, 43 degrees south, to the glacier country of the north.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Garden hoes banned by Facebook!
According to Facebook, a garden hoe apparently represents evil
and the worst of white supremacy.
Today’s blacklisted American, garden hoes, is meant more to illustrate the utter brainlessness of the blacklist culture, and why every intelligent American should refuse to bow to it in any way.
It appears that Facebook has been repeatedly flagging and then blocking posts on a gardening group because those gardeners periodically make reference to the gardening tool called a “hoe.”
A group called WNY Gardeners has been repeatedly flagged by the social network for “violating community standards,” when its more than 7,500 members discussed the long-handled bladed implement, which is spelled with an “e,” unlike the offensive term.
When one member commented “Push pull hoe!” on a post about preferred weeding tools, Facebook sent a notification that read, “We reviewed this comment and found it goes against our standards for harassment and bullying,” a moderator said.
“And so I contacted Facebook, which was useless. How do you do that?,” Elizabeth Licata said. “You know, I said this is a gardening group, a hoe is gardening tool.”
Nor has this been Facebook’s only “hoe” error. It had also been routinely flagging posts that referred to the English seaside community of Plymouth Hoe.
Facebook of course never responded to gardening group when they complained, as is usual for these inhumane big tech companies. However, when this story began appearing in the press, it told the AP that it was sorry about it, had corrected the algorithms that had caused the problems, and had assigned a real human to monitor the gardening group to make sure it is not censored for ordinary gardening discussions.
Hah! That didn’t work. The gardeners soon found themselves censored for writing about the various techniques they use for battling the Japanese beetle, a destructive pest to “flowers, trees and shrubs, fruits and vegetables, field crops and turf.” When on commenter suggested that gardeners should “Kill them all. Drown them in soapy water,” and “Japanese beetles are jerks,” the posts were blocked by Facebook.
It seems Facebook employees really don’t know how to read. Instead, they work eagerly to silence anyone for any statement they think should be silenced, without thought.
Throwing away the Kerwood Derby
All this reminds me of the short clip below from the early 1960s cartoon show, Rocky & Bullwinkle.
» Read more
News flash! Union lobbyists wants to influence Biden against non-union SpaceX
In the past two days probably a dozen of my readers have sent me a link to this story at the Washington Examiner,
The Anti-SpaceX lobbying campaign casts new light on Elon Musk’s Biden beef.
The story reveals some private emails between a union lobbyist and a vice president at ULA, outlining their mutual effort to discredit Elon Musk and SpaceX because of its long term success in preventing its workforce from unionizing.
Everyone who has sent me this story somehow thinks it reveals a major breaking story.
I think this story is a tempest in a teapot. It reveals nothing newsworthy. All it shows is that a union lobbyist is trying to influence the Biden administration against SpaceX, a decidedly non-union company. Why should these actions surprise anyone? Unions always go after non-union companies, and they often do it by exerting their political clout.
Nor should be we surprised that one of SpaceX’s biggest competitors is partnering with the union in this effort. There is nothing newsworthy about this. Competitors compete, and that competition can sometimes be quite cut throat.
Furthermore, nothing in these emails appears illegal. The lobbyist’s claims against SpaceX are spurious and shallow, but so what? Unions have the right to lobby politicians, and they have the freedom to make whatever arguments they want, even if those arguments are silly or false.
Finally, to think it is a news story that Biden might be receptive to union lobbyists is kind of silly. Biden is a modern Democrat. In almost all matters he is going to genuflect to the unions. I don’t need to read the private emails of a union lobbyist to find this out.
However, the evidence in the past ten months shows that this lobbying effort has so far been incredibly ineffective. While I certainly do not trust the Democrats running the Biden administration, and fully expect them to take actions eventually to squelch private enterprise, this White House’s actions regarding space has so far generally continued the capitalist policies begun during the Trump administration. Note too that these are the same policies first begun at the end of the Bush Jr. administration, and encouraged strongly throughout the Obama administration. It certainly appears that — in space at least — the Democrats are as much for capitalism as the Republicans.
And these emails have apparently done nothing to change that. Thus, there is no news here.
Northrop Grumman says six customers have bought missions using its upgraded orbital repair robot
Capitalism in space:A Northrop Grumman official has revealed that it already has six customers willing to buy missions using its upgraded orbital repair robot to fix orbiting satellites that are presently defunct due to lack of fuel.
Unlike the company’s first robotic repair satellites, dubbed Mission Extension Vehicles (MEV), the Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) for these new contracts will not dock directly to the satellite, but use a robot arm to attach an extension pod to each.
The primary commercial mission of the MRV is to install small propulsion devices known as mission extension pods. One of these units is inserted in the back of a client satellite propulsion system, adding six years of life to most geostationary satellites, he said.
The six customers have signed term sheets for seven mission extension pods, Anderson said. Once contracts are firmed up the company will be able to disclose their names.
The first MRV launch in 2024 will carry three pods. “With these six customers, the MRV manifest is currently filled through mid-2026,” he said. The MRV is expected to have a 10-year service life.
This MRV system is far more cost effective than the MEV, since the latter can only repair one satellite, while the former can fix several with a single launch.
Both Northrop Grumman and Astroscale (see my previous post) are demonstrating the emergence of a new cottage satellite industry, the repair of old satellites and the removal of space junk, all for profit.