Musk announces November as month for 1st Falcon Heavy launch
Capitalism in space: Elon Musk announced today that SpaceX is now aiming to launch its first Falcon Heavy rocket in November.
Author: Robert Zimmerman
Have astronomers using Kepler discovered the first exomoon?
The uncertainty of science: Using data from Kepler astronomers think they have spotted the first exomoon, orbiting a star 4,000 light years away.
They think it might be the size of Neptune, and orbits a planet about ten times more massive than Jupiter.
All this is unconfirmed, however, especially because their conclusions are based on data from only three transits. They plan to use the Hubble Space Telescope to do more observations and hopefully confirm the discovery.
SpaceX now one of the world’s most valuable companies
Data from a new round of investment capital fundraising says that SpaceX is now valued at $21 billion, placing it among the only six venture-backed companies worth more than $20 billion.
The article also notes that this new valuation is up from the $12 billion listed only two years ago.
Update: As noted by my readers, I have revised the post to note that this story refers not to all companies but to those that obtained their financing privately.
Republican Senate committee restores all cuts to NASA climate budget
Failure theater: The Senate Appropriations Committee today marked up NASA’s budget, restoring almost all of the proposed cuts, including cuts to the agency’s climate programs that both the Trump administration and the House had proposed.
The only program it appears the Senate cut was NASA’s planetary program, which they trimmed by almost 25%.
This only provides more evidence that the large number of the Republicans in the Senate are not really Republicans. They certainly aren’t conservative. And it sure appears that they aren’t very smart either, considering that NASA’s planetary program is one of its most successful endeavors.
We shall see how this budget shakes out in the coming months. Overall I am not hopeful. It appears to me that this Republican Congress wants to spend big bucks, and is hell bent on doing it.
Video of Iranian launch today
The Iranians have released video of today’s rocket launch.
I’d love a translation of what the crowd is chanting. I would also encourage the engineers in my readership to look at this and tell me if the launch looks right, and if there is any way to judge whether it is an rocket for orbital satellites or a missile. We still have no evidence the rocket successfully put anything in orbit.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has called this launch a breach of a UN resolution forbidding Iran from developing ballistic missiles.
July 27, 2017 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold. The second half of this segment focuses on a lot of today’s fake science, and I think is quite entertaining.
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Cole Porter – Night and Day
An evening pause: I think this makes a nice contrast with yesterday’s evening pause. Both show talent, skill, musical ability, but which is actually more civilized?
From the 1934 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical, The Gay Divorcee.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Iran launches satellite
According to its state news services, Iran today successfully launched a satellite into orbit.
Iranian state television described the launch as involving a “Simorgh” rocket that is capable of carrying a satellite weighing 550 pounds. The state media report did not elaborate on the rocket’s payload. “Simorgh” means “phoenix” in Farsi.
The website YJC.ir, which is affiliated with Iranian state television, as well as the semi-official Fars news agency, also reported the launch on Thursday, saying it was successful.
No information as yet on the payload. That the launch itself has not yet been recognized by websites that track these things, it is possible the launch was not successful, but they do not want to admit it.
FBI arrest former IT staffer for many Democrats in Congress
A real Washington scandal: The FBI on Tuesday arrested a former Congressional IT staffer as he was trying to flee the country.
The man, Imran Aran, had run the computer systems for many Democrats in Congress, including former DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And while most Democrats fired Aran when he came under investigation months ago, Wasserman Schultz had kept in on her payroll until his arrest this week.
Several details that give some important political context to this story, and are not mentioned in the CNN article above:
- Wasserman Schultz tried to use her position to get one of her laptops used by Aran back from DC police, even though it was evidence in a possible crime.
- The FBI had seized computer hard drives from Aran’s former
Wasserman Schultz’shome that had been smashed by a hammer. - Aran is also accused of threatening his stepmother if she cooperated with authorities in the investigation.
- The arrest happened on Tuesday. CNN, along with all the major media outlets, did not think it important enough to report it until two days later. These mainstream outlets have also never thought any of the earlier stories above were worth reporting.
The last story above includes other details about how Aran also threatened the renter of his home for cooperating with police. As the renter (a Marine and apparently a Democrat) noted, “He’s dangerous. This is a crime syndicate that has successfully infiltrated Congress,” he said. “If Donald Trump and the Republicans had hired foreign nationals to be their top IT guys and somehow their congressional files had been compromised, this would have been all over the news.”
Update: The correction above is because the news article linked to had mistakenly said that the hard drives were taken from Wasserman Schultz’s home. There were instead recovered from the Marine above when he found them in Aran’s former home, which he was now renting.
Cameras on next Kepler-like exoplanet space telescope out of focus
NASA has revealed that the cameras on the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) become slightly out of focus when they are cooled to -75 Celsius, the temperature they will experience in space.
NASA has also decided that the fuzziness is not enough to require a fix, and is proceeding with the mission as is, despite concerns expressed by scientists.
Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution, brought up the issue in a summary of a meeting last week of the Astrophysics Advisory Committee, of which he is a member. “That could have some big effects on the photometry,” he said of the focus problem. “This is certainly a concern for the folks who know a lot about photometry.”
TESS will use those cameras to monitor the brightness of the nearest and brightest stars in the sky, an approach similar to that used by Kepler, a spacecraft developed originally to monitor one specific region of the sky. Both spacecraft are designed to look for minute, periodic dips in brightness of those stars as planets pass in front of, or transit, them. Chou said that since TESS is designed to conduct photometry, measuring the brightness of the stars in its field of view, “resolution is less important compared to imaging missions like Hubble.” However, astronomers are concerned that there will be some loss of sensitivity because light from the stars will be spread out onto a slightly larger area of the detector.
“The question is how much science degradation will there be in the results,” Boss said. “The TESS team thinks there will be a 10 percent cut in terms of the number of planets that they expect to be able to detect.”
It could be that NASA has decided that the cost and delay required to fix this is not worth that 10% loss of data.
Time/PBS video documentary nominated for Emmy despite factual error in title
Fake news: The Time/PBS video documentary A Year in Space has been nominated for an Emmy award, despite a blatant factual error in the show’s title.
I haven’t seen the documentary, and so it might a great achievement. Nonetheless, this mission only lasted 340 days, not a year, and to call it “a year in space” is not only false, but an outright lie. For a news organization to start out this wrong, in the title, and then for it to get an Emmy nomination, tells us a great deal about the standards of accuracy in television news.
Breakthrough Starshot puts smallest satellites ever into orbit
Breakthrough Starshot, the privately funded $100 million effort to launch a probe to the nearest star, has put into orbit the world’s smallest satellites ever.
The six prototypes, dubbed Sprites, weigh only 4 grams and contain solar panels, computers, sensors, and radios on a surface equal to that of a U.S. postage stamp. Developed by researchers at Cornell University and transported into space as secondary payloads on a rocket built by the Europe-based company OHB System AG, the nanosatellites are being tested for electronics and communication performance in orbit.
The significance here is not so much that this advances the project’s interstellar mission, but that this technology is becoming more likely for use on both commercial and planetary spacecraft.
Judge okays TMT permit
In a 305-page decision, an Hawaiian judge has approved a new construction permit for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea.
This does not mean that the project now proceeds.
This isn’t the final say on whether the embattled project will proceed.
Now that Amano has issued her 305-page proposed decision and order, the state land board will set a deadline for telescope opponents and permit applicants to file arguments against her recommendations. The board will later hold a hearing and then make the final decision on the project’s conservation district use permit.
Not surprisingly, the Democratic governor of Hawaii issued a short, non-committal statement, stating that he supports “the co-existence of astronomy and culture on Mauna Kea,” whatever that means.
Denmark facing the first “summerless” July in four decades
Does this mean anything? Denmark is facing the first July in four decades with no days warmer than 77 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature the weather bureau there defines as a summer day.
According to the Danish Meteorology Institute (DMI), July is likely to end without a single ‘summer day’, which is defined as any day in which temperatures top 25C (77F) at least somewhere in Denmark. If the next five days come and go without hitting 25C as predicted, it will mark the first time that Danes will have suffered through a summer-less July in nearly four decades.
“There are only three years in our records in which July contains a big fat zero when it comes to summer days and temps above 25C. That’s 1962, 1974 and 1979,” climatologist John Cappelen said on the DMI website. DMI’s database goes back to 1874.
Actually, this doesn’t mean a lot. It is however an interesting factoid that once again raises questions about the NASA and NOAA claims that this year (along with the past few years) were the hottest on record.
Anti-vaccine campaigns are threatening the return of measles
The coming dark age: The ignorant and mindless campaigns against vaccination is making it more likely that the U.S. will see a return of major measles epidemics.
Researchers Nathan Lo and Dr. Peter Hotez were motivated to conduct the study after seeing data showing growing vaccine hesitancy and use of non-medical exemptions—largely due to lies and misinformation about the safety of vaccines and the threat of devastating diseases, such as measles. Currently, about two percent of kids aged two to 11 have a non-medical vaccine exemption.
Measles, in particular, requires vigilant vaccination. The highly infectious virus can linger in the air for hours after a cough or sneeze. Those sickened develop high fevers, rashes, inflamed eyes, and cold-like stuffy nose and cough. But people can spread the infection days before those symptoms appear. About 30 percent develop complications, such as pneumonia, brain swelling, and blindness.
To thwart infections, a population must have between 90- and 95-percent vaccine coverage to maintain herd immunity. Many communities and counties in the US are already on the brink of dipping below that range and thereby losing their protection from a case of measles going, well, viral. And there’s room for those vaccination rates to continue to slip. Presently, 18 states allow for personal belief exemptions, and all but two states allow for religious or philosophical exemptions.
They of course propose forcing people to get their kids vaccinated. I say, if you have kids, you have the responsibility to get informed and get them vaccinated, instead of taking advice from uneducated television stars who know nothing about science and doctors who have had their licenses revoked.
Jane’s Addiction – Jane Says
An evening pause: The future, or as I like to say, the coming dark age.
Jane says
I’ve never been in love
I don’t know what it is
Only knows if someone wants her
I want them if they want me
I only know they want me
Hat tip Joseph Griffin.
Commercial lunar mission gives launch contract to ULA
Capitalism in space: Astrobotic, a private company planning to put a lander on the Moon by 2019, has awarded its launch contract to ULA.
This initial Peregrine lunar lander will fly 77 pounds (35 kilograms) of customer payloads from six nations either above or below the spacecraft’s deck, depending on specific needs. The autonomous landing will use cameras, guidance computing and five Aerojet Rocketdyne-made hypergolic engines to set the lander down on four shock-absorbing legs.
It will stand 6 feet tall (1.8 meters) and have a diameter of 8 feet (2.5 meters).Subsequent missions envision scaling up to payload masses of 585 pounds (265 kilograms). Markets range from scientific instruments to placing mementos on the Moon.
This company had been competing for the Google Lunar X-Prize, but pulled out of the competition when it realized it couldn’t launch by the end of 2018. It continued development, however, and apparently has gathered enough customers to pay for its launch in 2019.
Japan’s first private rocket to launch this weekend
Capitalism in space: A company in Japan hopes to launch the first Japanese privately built suborbital rocket this coming weekend.
The rocket is small, but it uses liquid fueled engines, which gives the company the potential to scale it up to produce an orbital version, something they say they want to do by 2020.
TDRS-M launch moved to August 20
NASA has decided to delay the launch of its TDRS-M satellite until August 20.
This simplifies their launch schedule, as it allows SpaceX to launch as planned on August 12 and thus not interfere with an August 17 Russian spacewalk that is releasing two satellites from ISS. It will also give them plenty of time to replace the antenna that was damaged during launch prep, in an incident which they still have not described in any detail.
July 25, 2017 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold.
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