I have a article awaiting publication at Sky & Telescope on this same subject, though my piece also asks the question: What was the star cluster like in which the sun formed? And can we find that star cluster today?
They’re the new superhero group of Superfriends from the Supercongress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multitrillion-dollar abyss. There’s Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry) and many other warriors for truth, justice and the American way of debt. The Supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic.
A new analysis of data suggests that the asteroid Lutetia is a leftover fragment from the same original material that formed the Earth, Venus and Mercury.
“Overnight, several attempts were made to obtain telemetric information from the probe. They all ended with zero result,” Interfax quoted a source in the Russian space sector as saying. “The probability of saving the probe is very, very small,” added the source, who was not identified.
Peace and love: A man was shot and killed at the Occupy Oakland camp today. Plus, an immediate effort by the protesters to squelch the press:
Reporter Aimee Allison of the Chronicle says she was attacked when she tried to take a cell phone photo. And she wasn’t the only one: “A few feet away a TV cameraman was shooting footage and a crowd of twenty or so men attacked and punched him, forcing him over the railing of the 14th Street BART Station.” Which means, even in the best-case scenario, there was an unconnected murder right next to the camp and a mob of protesters decided to do “damage control” by beating the hell out of journalists who were trying to report on it. That’s where we’re at here.
NASA has chosen the Delta 4 Heavy rocket to launch the Orion capsule into orbit for its first test flight in 2014.
So, tell me again why NASA needs to spend $18 to $62 billion for a new rocket, when it already can hire Lockheed Martin to do the same thing? Though the Delta 4 Heavy can only get about 28 tons into low Earth orbit, and only about 10 tons into geosynchronous orbit — far less than the planned heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket — Boeing Lockheed has a variety of proposed upgrades to Delta 4 Heavy that could bring these numbers way up. Building these upgrades would surely be far cheaper than starting from scratch to build SLS.
These four stories, all in today’s news, all suggest that the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement is strongly intolerant, filled with angry hatred, and prone to violence. Sadly, they appear to a small subset of a much larger sampling of similar stories.
The university reported earlier that an administrator had told the protesters they could stay around the clock for a week, but only if they didn’t pitch tents or use stoves or other items that would suggest people were sleeping there. The protesters voted not to comply with the demand and to go ahead with setting up a tent site they dubbed “Occupy Cal” to protest financial policies they blame for causing deep cuts in higher education spending.
And finally, there is this eight minute video, where a Occupy Portland protester curses and threatens a news crew repeatedly until the police finally arrive to escort him away.
NASA successfully test-fired today the upper stage engine of its heavy-lift rocket, part of the Space Launch System, formerly called the Constellation program.
An evening pause: In honor of the fall of the Berlin Wall on this day in 1989, I post below Part 2 of a documentary on the history of the Wall’s construction and the many escape attempts by East Germans. Though the documentary does a poor job of explaining why East Germans desperately made attempt after attempt to flee to the west (a wish to escape from oppression and go somewhere where they could freely live their lives), it does include some incredible film footage showing the various escape attempts. Part 1 outlines the Wall’s initial construction, during which many people could easily break through.
Part 2, embedded below, describes the first deaths, when the communist East German government gave its guards orders to “shoot to kill.” Part 3 is even more fascinating, showing the effort by West Germans to dig tunnels under the 150 foot death strip in order to get friends and relatives out. Parts 4 and 5 show later attempts, when the Wall had become more impregnable, including one escape using an arrow (!) and another using two ultralight airplanes. Part 6 shows the Wall’s fall in 1989.
For twenty-eight years a government decided it had the right to imprison its citizens because they longed for freedom. In the end, all that government really achieved was to prove that freedom is better, and that good intentions — based on intellectual ideology and imposed on people by force — lead nowhere but hell.
As it does every month, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center today released its monthly update showing the ongoing changes of the Sun’s solar cycle sunspot activity. I have posted the graph below the fold.
For the fourth month in a row the Sun’s sunspot activity has leaped upward. In fact, for the first time since I have been tracking sunspot activity, beginning in 2008, the Sun’s sunspot activity exceeds the predicted activity by a significant amount. Since the end of the previous maximum, the Sun had consistently failed to meet the expectations of solar scientists by producing far fewer sunspots than expected.
Phobos-Grunt appears to be in trouble in Earth orbit.
In a posting to an online forum for the Phobos-Grunt mission, Anton Ledkov of the Russian Space Research Institute reported that there was “no telemetry” from the spacecraft.
Another report suggests that a variety of engine thrusters did not fire as planned.
An evening pause: In celebration of election day. This might have been made for the 2008 election, but it is remarkably up-to-day now, three years later.
To leap or not to leap: Scientists are considering abandoning the solar year as their method for synchronizing their atomic clocks.
At issue is whether to abolish the ‘leap second’ — the extra second added every year or so to keep [Coordinated Universal Time] (UTC) in step with Earth’s slightly unpredictable orbit. UTC — the reference against which international time zones are set — is calculated by averaging signals from around 400 atomic clocks, with leap seconds added to stop UTC drifting away from solar time at a rate of about one minute every 90 years.
Mars Express takes a close look at one of Mars’ giant volcanoes, Tharsis Tholus.
At least two large sections have collapsed around its eastern and western flanks during its four-billion-year history and these catastrophes are now visible as scarps up to several kilometers high. The main feature of Tharsis Tholus is, however, the caldera in its center. It has an almost circular outline, about 32 x 34 km, and is ringed by faults that have allowed the caldera floor to subside by as much as 2.7 km.
This action, while good, was almost certainly triggered by the competition from the private space companies. The managers at NASA are finally realizing that if they don’t speed up deployment of their own spacecraft, they will certainly lose in the competition for government dollars. That they will have to use another rocket other than their heavy-lift vehicle for this launch, however, will not help that particular project’s lobbying effort.
Either way, I think this action is only further proof that the more competition we have, the quicker we will get into space. And the journey will cost less too, not only because it will take less time and therefore less money, but the competition between companies (or NASA) will force everyone — including NASA — to lower costs to show they can do it better.
I think this collection of stories from the various “Occupy Whatever” protests gives a good flavor of what this protest movement stands for. And unlike the tea party protests, it appears that it is the violent extremists that form the movement’s heart.
And then there’s this, recorded yesterday in New York. Note: Language warning.
