Author: Robert Zimmerman

House Budget Bill Would Leave it to NASA To Apportion Bulks of Cuts

9:49 pm

The House bill that brings NASA’s budget back to 2008 levels essentially leaves it to NASA to figure out what to cut.

If true, what this means is that NASA itself will have to choose what it considers important. The one problem is that according to this article Congress is still requiring NASA to spend $3 billion on the program-formerly-called-Constellation. which gives the agency less flexibility in doling out the cash.

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Ethane lakes in a red haze: Titan’s uncanny moonscape

10:33 am

Titan’s ethane lakes in a red haze.

So far, there are no recognisable signs of organic life. That’s not surprising: by terrestrial standards, Titan is a deep freeze with surface temperatures at a chilly -180°C. Yet Titan is very much alive in the sense that its atmosphere and surface are changing before our eyes. Clouds drift through the haze and rain falls from them to erode stream-like channels draining into shallow lakes. Vast dune fields that look as if they were lifted from the Sahara sprawl along Titan’s equator, yet the dark grains resemble ground asphalt rather than sand. It is a bizarrely different world that looks eerily like home. Or as planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz puts it: “our prototype weird-world exoplanet”.

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Standing up for your rights with the police when they ask for id

2:28 am

If you have broken no laws, you are not required to show the police your id. Getting them to accept this legal fact is often quite difficult. It is even more difficult if you should approach them with a camera while openly carrying a gun, as this man does. Watch the video below to see he not only refuses to give them his id, he literally walks away in the end, leaving the two cops befuddled.

Some background on the video can be found here.

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NASA continues to stall on heavy-lift rocket

10:41 am

It ain’t ever happening: NASA continues to stall on their final design for Congress’s mandated heavy-lift rocket.

No one should be surprised by this. Obama has never wanted NASA to build this rocket, when it was Constellation and now when it is the program-formerly-called-Constellation. Moreover, Congress hasn’t given NASA enough money or time to do it anyway. Better the program die and the money is used for something else, or cut entirely in order to reduce the crushing federal debt.

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Where to find life in the Milky Way galaxy

11:05 am

A paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint website has attempted to model the habitable zones within the Milky Way galaxy. From the abstract:

We predict that ~1.2% of all stars host a planet that may have been capable of supporting complex life at some point in the history of the Galaxy. Of those stars with a habitable planet, ~75% of planets are predicted to be in a tidally locked configuration with their host star. The majority of these planets that may support complex life are found towards the inner Galaxy, distributed within, and significantly above and below, the Galactic midplane.[emphasis mine]

They took into consideration the hazard of supernovae for killing off planetary life, as well as other factors such as the where the necessary heavier elements would be available for producing planets.

You can download the paper here [pdf].

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Highest Water in a Decade Expected at Lake Powell

3:04 am

The highest water level in a decade is expected at Lake Powell by August.

Lake Powell’s rising water level is a result of the long and wet winter this year. An above-average snowpack, with late snows and unseasonably cold weather has lead to a slower melt than usual. As of May, the snowpack that feeds Lake Powell was 30 percent higher than average, with only 50 percent of the accumulated snowpack melted. [emphasis mine]

I thought Al Gore told us this wasn’t going to happen anymore.

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