Alan Jackson – Mercury Blues
An evening pause: Performed on the television comedy show, Home Improvement.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Author: Robert Zimmerman
Hubble update: Engineers narrow possible failed hardware to one of two units
Engineers working to pinpoint the cause of the computer hardware issue that has placed the Hubble Space Telescope in safe mode since June 13th have now narrowed the possible failed hardware to one of two units.
The source of the computer problem lies in the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling (SI C&DH) unit, where the payload computer resides. A few hardware pieces on the SI C&DH could be the culprit(s).
The team is currently scrutinizing the Command Unit/Science Data Formatter (CU/SDF), which sends and formats commands and data. They are also looking at a power regulator within the Power Control Unit, which is designed to ensure a steady voltage supply to the payload computer’s hardware. If one of these systems is determined to be the likely cause, the team must complete a more complicated operations procedure to switch to the backup units. This procedure would be more complex and riskier than those the team executed last week, which involved switching to the backup payload computer hardware and memory modules. To switch to the backup CU/SDF or power regulator, several other hardware boxes on the spacecraft must also be switched due to the way they are connected to the SI C&DH unit.
Over the next week or so, the team will review and update all of the operations procedures, commands and other related items necessary to perform the switch to backup hardware. They will then test their execution against a high-fidelity simulator.
The team performed a similar switch in 2008, which allowed Hubble to continue normal science operations after a CU/SDF module failed.
That such a switch was done successfully in the past is a very hopeful sign. However, it sounds as though they are not 100% sure they have pinpointed the actual issue, which means that this switch still might not fix the problem.
We can only wait and hope. And even if the fix works, Hubble will no longer have working backup units for these pieces of hardware. Should any of the backup that are now being activated fail, the telescope will fail, and this time it won’t be fixable with the equipment on board.
SpaceX successfully launches 88 smallsats, marking a renaissance in rocketry in 2021
First stage landing at Cape Canaveral today
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to place 88 smallsats into orbit, the third rocket launch today.
While Transporter-2 won’t beat the unprecedented number of satellites launched on on Transporter-1 [the first such smallsat launch by SpaceX earlier this year], SpaceX says it will still “launch 88 spacecraft to orbit” and – more importantly – carry more customer mass. In other words, Transporter-2 will carry roughly 50% fewer satellites, each of which will weigh substantially more on average.
Ordering directly through SpaceX, [the price] begins at $1 million for up to 200 kg (~440 lb). … A majority of small satellites weigh significantly less than 200 kilograms but if a customer manages to use all of their allotment, the total cost of a SpaceX rideshare launch could be as low as $5000 per kilogram – incredibly cheap relative to almost any other option. For a [comparable] launch … on a Rocket Lab Electron or Astra Rocket 3.0 rocket using every last gram of available performance, the same customer would end up paying a minimum of $25,000 to $37,500 per kilogram to orbit.
The launch also included a handful of Starlink satellites, adding to SpaceX’s constellation. I have embedded SpaceX’s live stream below the fold. As I write this the satellites have not yet been deployed from the second stage, but that should happen shortly.
The first stage landed successfully, the eighth time this booster has done so. The fairings were also reused, completing their third flight. All told, this was SpaceX’s 20th launch in 2021, 18 of which used reused boosters.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
» Read more
Today’s blacklisted American: Journalist Andy Ngo blackballed again, this time by SoundCloud
Journalist Andy Ngo: blacklisted and banned by Soundcloud
Persecution is now cool! Journalist Andy Ngo has been blackballed again, this time by the podcast and music website SoundCloud.
[Ngo’s] podcast, ‘Things You Should Ngo’ was banned “on grounds of being dedicated to violating” Soundcloud’s rules. Unsurprisingly, as Ngo’s publication The Post Millennial reports, there’s a problem with the explanation.
The latest episode of the podcast was uploaded more than one year ago and there was no option in the notification email for Ngo to appeal or even seek further information. Over the weekend, SoundCloud’s Trust & Safety Team informed Ngo via email of the permanent ban for “violating” the site’s Terms of Use and Community Guidelines, which state that users must not use the platform to create content “that is abusive, libellous, defamatory, pornographic or obscene, that promotes or incites violence, terrorism, illegal acts, or hatred on the grounds of race, ethnicity, cultural identity, religious belief, disability, gender, identity or sexual orientation, or is otherwise objectionable in SoundCloud’s reasonable discretion.”
Of course, Ngo’s podcast did none of those things. His podcast simply interviewed politicians and public figures, a perfectly legitimate thing for a reporter to do in a free society. That such reporting according to SoundCloud must now be censored because some of those interviewed expressed conservative values just shows us the close-minded and oppressive attitude of that company’s management.
I say “again” in the headline because this censorship by SoundCloud follows a long string of blackballing of Ngo by many different outlets and totalitarian organizations.
» Read more
Paypal lowering fees charged to sellers
Isn’t competition great? Paypal announced today that as of August 2, 2021 it is lowering the fees it deducts from the payments made by buyers to sellers.
The fee reduction is about 15% to 20%, depending on the fee, which means I have just gotten a pay raise from those who donate or subscribe to Behind the Black using PayPal. This does not mean I want everyone to use PayPay. Right now I actually prefer new subscribers use Patreon, simply because it makes me less dependent on PayPay should it decide my commentary is “evil” and must be blacklisted.
The reductions make these fees lower than Paypal’s new competitors, such as Patreon, or from the conservative right, such as David Rubin’s Locals.com and Dan Bongino’s AlignPay. However, I expect them all to quickly drop their fees as well to match PayPal. And as long as PayPal continues to treat its conservative customers like dirt, expect this competition to continue to heat up.
Lowering its price won’t help if PayPal doesn’t stop playing partisan politics. It really has only two options for maintaining its market dominance. Either it can stop acting like a petty authoritarian dictator and canceling conservative vendors, or it can team up with the government to get its competitors banned or shut down. Which do you think it will eventually choose?
Astronomers detect a white dwarf that is both the smallest and most massive ever found
Using an array of telescopes on the ground and in space, astronomers have discovered a white dwarf star that is both the smallest ever found while also being the most massive.
White dwarfs are the collapsed remnants of stars that were once about eight times the mass of our Sun or lighter. Our Sun, for example, after it first puffs up into a red giant in about 5 billion years, will ultimately slough off its outer layers and shrink down into a compact white dwarf. About 97 percent of all stars become white dwarfs.
While our Sun is alone in space without a stellar partner, many stars orbit around each other in pairs. The stars grow old together, and if they are both less than eight solar-masses, they will both evolve into white dwarfs.
The new discovery provides an example of what can happen after this phase. The pair of white dwarfs, which spiral around each other, lose energy in the form of gravitational waves and ultimately merge. If the dead stars are massive enough, they explode in what is called a type Ia supernova. But if they are below a certain mass threshold, they combine together into a new white dwarf that is heavier than either progenitor star. This process of merging boosts the magnetic field of that star and speeds up its rotation compared to that of the progenitors.
Astronomers say that the newfound tiny white dwarf, named ZTF J1901+1458, took the latter route of evolution; its progenitors merged and produced a white dwarf 1.35 times the mass of our Sun. The white dwarf has an extreme magnetic field almost 1 billion times stronger than our Sun’s and whips around on its axis at a frenzied pace of one revolution every seven minutes (the zippiest white dwarf known, called EPIC 228939929, rotates every 5.3 minutes).
Based on their present understanding of stellar evolution, single white dwarfs do not form from stars with more than 1.3 solar masses. Stars with greater masses instead become neutron stars, or black holes. To get a white dwarf of 1.35 masses thus requires a merger of two white dwarfs, but it also means that the resulting dwarf could be unstable and could collapse into a neutron star at some point. The data also suggests that this merger process might be how a large number of neutron stars actually form.
The dwarf is also the smallest ever found, with a diameter of 2,670 miles, because the larger masses squeezes it into a tighter space.
Dust covering solar panels threatens to end InSight mission
The InSight science team has revealed that the amount of dust that presently covers the solar panels on the Mars lander has now reduced their available power by about 80%, and if a dust devil doesn’t soon blow the dust off they will have to shut the spacecraft down sometime in the next ten months.
“The dust accumulation on the solar arrays has been considerable. We have about 80% obscuration of the arrays,” said Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator for the InSight mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, according to SpaceNews.
Banerdt showed the impact of the declining power levels during a June 21 meeting of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group. When InSight landed near the Martian equator in November 2018, he said, the robot was generating roughly 5,000 watt-hours of power. Today that level is less than 700 watt-hours.
None of this is a surprise. Both the Opportunity and Spirit rovers faced the same problems. Both however were able to recover because periodically a dust devil would fly over the rover and clear the dust from the solar panels.
InSight however has not so far been lucky. While it has seen many nearby dust devils with its camera, none has come close enough to sweep the solar panels clean.
As the power has declined they have shut off various systems in order to keep the lander’s prime instrument, its seismometer, operating continuously. Engineers have also been using the scoop on the lander’s robot arm to try to dislodge some of the dust, with only a very very limited success. If the panels are not cleared soon, however, engineers will eventually be forced to shut everything down.
Gravitational wave detectors see two different black holes as they swallowed a neutron star
Astronomers using three different gravitational wave detectors have seen the gravity ripples caused when two different black holes swallowed a nearby neutron star.
The two gravitational-wave events, dubbed GW200105 and GW200115, rippled through detectors only 10 days apart, on January 5, 2020, and January 15, 2020, respectively.
Each merger involved a fairly small black hole (less than 10 Suns in heft) paired with an object between 1½ and 2 solar masses — right in the expected range for neutron stars. Observers caught no glow from the collisions, but given that both crashes happened roughly 900 million light-years away, spotting a flash was improbable, even if one happened — and it likely didn’t: The black holes are large enough that they would have gobbled the neutron stars whole instead of ripping them into bite-size pieces.
Note the time between the detection, in early 2020, and its announcement now, in mid-2021. The data is very complex and filled with a lot of noise, requiring many months of analysis to determine if a detection was made. For example, in a third case one detector was thought to have seen another such merger but scientists remain unsure. It might simply be noise in the system. I point this out to emphasize that thought they are much more confident in these new detections, there remains some uncertainty.
SpaceX launch scrubbed because airplane strayed into what Musk calls “an unreasonably gigantic” launch zone.
Capitalism in space: Yesterday a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch was scrubbed mere seconds before launch because an airplane had been detected inside the government’s keep-out zone.
The scrub was called by the range officer at T-11 seconds. SpaceX will attempt the launch again today.
Musk immediately blasted the size of that keep-out zone, which was established decades ago at the very beginnings of the space race and has not been adjusted as launch technology has improved.
“Unfortunately, launch is called off for today, as an aircraft entered the ‘keep out zone,’ which is unreasonably gigantic,” Musk tweeted Tuesday afternoon. “There is simply no way that humanity can become a spacefaring civilization without major regulatory reform. The current regulatory system is broken.”
Musk has successfully forced the range to accept new technology that simplifies launches, makes it possible for them to occur faster with less time in-between, and requires fewer range officials monitoring the launch. He is now pushing them to rethink the size of the range, which is likely much larger than now necessary, as Musk claims, because not only are rockets more reliable, their programming is more precise.
The article at the link also notes as an aside at the end another Musk tweet, that SpaceX’s Starlink network now has 70,000 customers and hopes to have 500,000 within a year. More on that story here.
Russians launch Progress freighter; Virgin Orbit launches seven commercial satellites
This morning two launches occurred. First the Russians successfully launched a Progress freighter to ISS, using their Soyuz-2 rocket.
Second, Virgin Orbit successfully completed its second orbital launch with its air-launched LauncherOne rocket, which was its first operational commercial launch, placing seven smallsats into orbit for three customers. This was also its second launch in 2021.
If all goes as planned, SpaceX will complete a third launch today also, placing more than 80 smallsats in orbit with its Falcon 9 rocket. Until then, however, the leaders in the 2021 launch race are as follows:
19 SpaceX
18 China
10 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman
The U.S. now leads China 28-18 in the national rankings.
Hand Clap Skit
An evening pause: All the website tells me is that this was performed at a youth conference talent show.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Comet spewed out an unusual amount of alcohol during solar flyby
A review of the data gathered when Comet 46P/Wirtanen made its close fly-by of the Sun in 2018 has found that the comet released an unusual amount of alcohol during that flyby.
The data also showed that the temperature of the comet’s coma did not cool as much as expected at larger distances from the comet.
“46P/Wirtanen has one of the highest alcohol-to-aldehyde ratios measured in any comet to date,” said Neil Dello Russo, a cometary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and co-author of the study. “This tells us information about how carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen molecules were distributed in the early solar system where Wirtanen formed.”
Keck Observatory data also revealed a strange characteristic. Normally, as comets orbit closer to the Sun, the frozen particles in their nucleus heat up, then boil off, or sublimate, going directly from solid ice to gas, skipping the liquid phase. This process, called outgassing, is what produces the coma – a giant cloak of gas and dust glowing around the comet’s nucleus. As the comet gets even closer to the Sun, solar radiation pushes some of the coma away from the comet, creating the tails.
With comet 46P/Wirtanen however, the team made a strange discovery: Another process beyond solar radiation is mysteriously heating up the comet.
“Interestingly, we found that the temperature measured for water gas in the coma did not decrease significantly with distance from the nucleus, which implies a heating mechanism,” said co-author Erika Gibb, professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of Missouri–St. Louis.
They have theories about why they got these results, such as a chemical reaction with sunlight or the presence of large ice chunks breaking off the comet that reflect light and increase the ambient temperature of the coma. Nothing is confirmed however.