Anne Reburn – Mr. Sandman
An evening pause: Nice way to finish the week.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Author: Robert Zimmerman
Russian Soyuz rocket launches 36 OneWeb satellites
Using its Soyuz-2 rocket and launching from its new Vostochny spaceport, Russia today successfully launched another 36 OneWeb satellites.
Their goal is to make these launches monthly. OneWeb now has more than 200 satellites in orbit.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
16 SpaceX
13 China
8 Russia
2 Rocket Lab
2 ULA
The U.S still leads China 22 to 13 in the national rankings.
A lopsided spiral galaxy
Click for full image.
For a change, today’s cool image is not from Mars, but instead goes deep into space. The photo to the right, reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the relatively nearby spiral galaxy NGC 2276, located about 120 million light years away. As the caption explains:
The magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 2276 looks a bit lopsided in this Hubble Space Telescope snapshot. A bright hub of older yellowish stars normally lies directly in the center of most spiral galaxies. But the bulge in NGC 2276 looks offset to the upper left.
In reality, a neighboring galaxy to the right of NGC 2276 (NGC 2300, not seen here) is gravitationally tugging on its disk of blue stars, pulling the stars on one side of the galaxy outward to distort the galaxy’s normal fried-egg appearance. This sort of “tug-of-war” between galaxies that pass close enough to feel each other’s gravitational pull is not uncommon in the universe. But, like snowflakes, no two close encounters look exactly alike.
The scientists also note that the bright edge along the galaxy’s north and west perimeter mark regions of intense star-formation. In those same regions astronomers six years ago identified the first medium-sized black hole ever found.
Today’s blacklisted American: Classic philosophy and literature banned at Howard University and across academia
Banned at Howard University.
They’re coming for you next: Though today’s victims of blacklisting are neither American nor even alive (some having passed away more than two thousand years ago), the decision last month by Howard University (in line with what many other colleges are doing) to dissolve its classics department and send to oblivion such thinkers as Socrates, Plato, Homer, Cato, and Cicero will do more harm than can be measured to Americans today and far into the future.
From the first link the announcement:
Howard University has decided to close the Department of Classics as part of its prioritization efforts and is currently negotiating with the faculty of Classics and with other units in the College as to how they might best reposition and repurpose our programs and personnel. These discussions have been cordial, and the faculty remains hopeful that the department can be kept intact at some level, with its faculty and programs still in place.
The cordiality of these classic scholars reminds me somehow of the Jewish leaders in the Warsaw Ghetto, who cordially worked with the Nazis in order to (paraphrasing the statement above) “keep their Jewish community intact at some level.”
» Read more
Canada to build a Moon rover for NASA
Canada has signed an agreement with NASA to build an unmanned lunar rover to launch in 2026.
Like NASA,the Canadian government isn’t going to build the rover but will select private companies to design and build for it.
To get the ball rolling on the project, which will explore a lunar polar region, the CSA will soon select two Canadian companies to develop concepts for the rover and its instruments, agency officials added.
Other Canadian gear will reach the moon in the coming years as well, if all goes according to plan. For example, three commercial technologies funded by the CSA’s Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program are scheduled to get a lunar-surface test in 2022 — an artificial intelligence flight computer from Mission Control Space Services; lightweight panoramic cameras built by Canadensys; and a new planetary navigation system developed by NGC Aerospace Ltd.
All three will travel on the first moon mission of the HAKUTO-R lander, which is built by Tokyo-based company ispace, it was announced on Wednesday.
No word on who will launch this new rover, but then it is probably too early for such a decision.
South Korea signs the Artemis Accords
On May 24 South Korea officially signed the Artemis Accords, joining nine other countries in the agreement designed as a work around of the Outer Space Treaty’s provisions in order to protect property rights in space.
By my count, that makes eight signatories, including Japan, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates and Italy.
Essentially, the space-faring nations of the world are splitting into two groups, those who will follow these accords, and those who won’t, led by China and Russia. In a sense, we are seeing a renewal of the Cold War in space, with the western powers that believe in private enterprise and freedom aligned against those whose cultures are authoritarian and ruled from above.
Ingenuity has issues on sixth flight
On its sixth flight and first intended as an operational scouting mission for Perseverance, the Mars helicopter Ingenuity had problems, requiring an emergency landing.
The trouble cropped up about a minute into the helicopter’s sixth test flight last Saturday at an altitude of 33 feet (10 meters). One of the numerous pictures taken by an on-board camera did not register in the navigation system, throwing the entire timing sequence off and confusing the craft about its location.
Ingenuity began tilting back and forth as much as 20 degrees and suffered power consumption spikes, according to Havard Grip, the helicopter’s chief pilot.
A built-in system to provide extra margin for stability “came to the rescue,” he wrote in an online status update. The helicopter landed within 16 feet (5 meters) of its intended touchdown site.
Engineers are presently trouble-shooting the issue, which they suspect was a “navigation timing error.”
Sommerrodelbahn im Stubaital – Mountain Coaster
An evening pause: Let’s go for a ride!
Hat tip Tom Biggar, who notes that this is “Europe´s longest Mountain Coaster with a track length of 2.8 km (1.73 miles) and an elevation difference of 640 meters (2,100 feet). It also has forty steep curves reaching a maximum speed of 42 kmh (26 mph).
The strange flows in Shalbatana Vallis on Mars
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on March 31, 2021, and shows a series of very distinct arrowhead-shaped sloping ridges interspersed with hollows flowing down from the southern cliff face of Shalbatana Vallis, one of the larger long meandering drainages flowing into the northern lowlands of Chryse Planitia and north of Valles Marineris.
This location is at 5 degrees north latitude, so nothing we see in the picture is likely glacial or evidence of ice.
So what are we looking at? My guess is that the parallel ridges show us a hint of the original slope of alluvial fill. In the past canyon’s south rim or cliff either did not exist, or was much smaller. Instead the ground mostly sloped gently downhill from the plateau to the canyon floor.
Scientists believe that in the far past catastrophic floods of water flowed through Shalbatana. If a massive flood of water off that rim came down that slope of alluvial fill, it could have pushed into that fill and created the hollows, washing the fill down into the canyon floor and leaving behind the ridges in between.
The overview maps below provide the geographical context.
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Today’s blacklisted Americans: No whites allowed during some events in Massachusetts school district
The new bigotry: The Wellesley public school district in Massachusetts has organized an event in which it expressly banned — in writing — the attendance of all whites.
A screen capture of the text of the invitation [pdf], taken from the legal complaint by a parents-rights group, is to the right, with the pertinent language highlighted.
Then, when parents complained, the district’s administration doubled down, justifying its racist policy with platitudes and dishonest rationalizations.
» Read more
New Chandra mosaic of galactic center reveals spider-web of magnetism
Click for full image.
Scientists today released a spectacular panorama of the center of the Milky Way using X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and radio data from the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. The panorama reveals a complex web of magnetic field lines emanating out from the supermassive black hole at the center, Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star).
Below the fold are reduced versions of the full panorama, unlabeled on the left and labeled on the right. The image to the right, reduced to post here, shows just one single example of those magnetic field lines, dubbed G0.17-0.41 and about 20 light years long. This particular filament is the subject of a paper just published in connection with the release of this panorama. From the press release.
A new study of the X-ray and radio properties of this thread by Q. Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst suggests these features are bound together by thin strips of magnetic fields. This is similar to what was observed in a previously studied thread. (Both threads are labeled with red rectangles in the [full labeled panorama]. The newly studied one in the lower left, G0.17-0.41, is much farther away from the plane of the Galaxy.) Such strips may have formed when magnetic fields aligned in different directions, collided, and became twisted around each other in a process called magnetic reconnection. This is similar to the phenomenon that drives energetic particles away from the Sun and is responsible for the space weather that sometimes affects Earth.
The image below is fascinating to study because of the wealth of detail it includes, not only of magnetic filaments but of other nearby gas clouds and Sagittarius A* itself.
» Read more
Starship will fuel a shift of spaceports to the Earth’s equator
Rand Simberg yesterday posted an intriguing essay speculating on how the arrival of Starship is going to vastly change how and where rockets launch from Earth, encouraging the increase in spaceports along the equator while changing the design of satellites launched from that point.
He describes the many advantages for launch from the equator, and suggests it is really the only location that will allow for regular, reliable, and frequent launches, the kind that SpaceX wants to happen using Starship. This is maybe the key point:
You get maximum advantage of earth’s rotation by launching due east at the equator. There are no launch windows to get there; you can launch any time of the day, every day, and you will be in the equatorial orbit plane. There is also little weather risk; hurricanes at the equator are almost unheard of (there’s too little coriolis there to spin things up).
Launching from the equator will make some high inclination orbits more difficult to reach, but he suggests the solution will be to rethink the satellites themselves, designing them differently so that they, not the rocket, get them to the orbit they want.
Read it all. He raises some interesting points that I think Elon Musk has already thought of, suggested by the company’s decision to purchase two oil rigs and refurbish them as launch and landing platforms for Starship.