Author: Robert Zimmerman

John Glenn – the first American in orbit

6:02 pm

An evening pause: On the fiftieth anniversary of John Glenn’s orbital flight.

After putting a chimpanzee into orbit in November, NASA finally felt ready to send a man into orbit to answer the Soviets and their two manned orbital missions of Gagarin and Titov the previous year.

After Glenn’s mission and for the next few months, it looked like the U.S. was catching up with the Soviets in space. That would change before the year was summer was over.

The video below gives a nice summary of key moments in Glenn’s flight, though the special effects of the “fireflies” is poorly done. And we now know that the “fireflies” were nothing more than frozen particles of condensation coming off the capsule.

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Obama’s war on religious liberty

8:21 am

Obama’s war on religious liberty.

I would simply say that this is a war on liberty. You take away someone’s freedom to pray or practice their religion as they wish, you also take away their liberty. And if you can take their liberty, you can take anyone’s. For those who like the idea of forcing every insurance company and private institution to provide contraceptives, remember, if this administration gains that power, future administrations will have that power as well. And there is no guarantee that those future administrations will impose policies you agree with. To paraphase an old quote, “First they came for the Catholics, and I did nothing, because I wasn’t a Catholic…”

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Mapping the surface of an extrasolar planet light years away.

8:05 am

Mapping the surface of an extrasolar planet light years away. From the paper’s abstract [pdf]:

We use archived Spitzer [Space Telescope] data of [the star] HD189733 … encompassing six transits, eight secondary eclipses, and a phase curve in a two-step analysis. The first step derives the planet-star system parameters. The second step investigates the structure found in eclipse scanning, using the previous planet-star system parameter derivation as Gaussian priors.

We find a 5-sigma deviation from the expected occultation ingress/egress shape for a uniform brightness disk, and demonstrate that this is dominated by large-scale brightness structure and not an occultation timing offset due to a non-zero eccentricity. Our analysis yields a 2D brightness temperature distribution showing a large-scale asymmetric hot spot whose finer structure is limited by the data quality and planet orbit geometry. [emphasis mine]

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ISS to finally get an experimental centrifuge

6:22 pm

At last! The ISS is to finally going to get an experimental centrifuge.

I have studied at length all the research done on all the space station ever launched, from Skylab, all the Russian Salyut stations, Mir, and now ISS, and from I could tell, only once was a centrifuge experiment put in space, by the Russians. Though the centrifuge was small and the results inconclusive, they suggested that even the addition of a truly miniscule amount of force could significantly mitigate the effects of weightlessness on plants and materials.

To finally get an experimental centrifuge on ISS is wonderful news. In order to build an interplanetary spaceship as cheaply and as efficiently as possible using centrifugal force to create artificial gravity we need to know the minimum amount of centrifugal force we need. Less energy will probably require less complex engineering, which should also require less launch weight to orbit, lowering the cost in all ways.

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Why things break in space

3:22 pm

Updated and bumped: I will be discussing this story on the the John Batchelor Show tonight, February 17, Friday, 12:50 am (Eastern), and then re-aired on Sunday, February 19, 12:50 am (Eastern).
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Someday, humans will be traveling far from Earth in large interplanetary spaceships not very different than the International Space Station (ISS). Isolated and dependent on these ships for survival, these travelers will have no choice but to know how to maintain and repair their vessels whenever something on them should break.

And things will break. Entropy rules, and with time all things deteriorate and fail.

Each failure, however, is also a precious opportunity to learn something about the environment of space. Why did an item break? What caused it to fail? Can we do something to prevent the failure in the future? Finding answers to these questions will make it possible to build better and more reliable interplanetary spaceships.

ISS is presently our only testbed for studying these kinds of engineering questions. And in 2007, a spectacular failure, combined with an epic spacewalk, gave engineers at the Johnson Space Center a marvelous opportunity to study these very issues.
» Read more

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The White House chart that illustrates the irresponsible nature of Obama’s proposed budget.

9:22 am

The White House chart that illustrates the irresponsible nature of Obama’s proposed budget.

Yes, that’s right, the chart is from the White House itself, which means they themselves know how useless their proposed budget is, and how little they care. More here, including video of a truly entertaining but clarifying exchange between Congressman Paul Ryan and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

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government by presidential fiat

8:12 pm

“Government by presidential fiat.”

The president of the United States has just ordered private companies to give away for free a service that his own health and human services secretary has repeatedly called a major financial burden.

On what authority? Where does it say that the president can unilaterally order a private company to provide an allegedly free-standing service at no cost to certain select beneficiaries?

Repeal this damn law (Obamacare), and fire the goddamn politicians that had the hubris to force it on us.

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