Category: Essays And Commentaries

Long essays or op-ed length commentaries on the issues of the day or on topics of special interest.

What yesterday’s National Space Council meeting really reveals

9:39 am

Link here. While most news articles about yesterday’s third public meeting of the National Space Council are focused on Trump’s apparently off-the-cuff announcement that he wants a new military branch dubbed the “Space Force,” the story at the link provides a nice summary of the entire meeting, including a look at the presentations by four astronauts, two scientists, and one businessman.

The panel of former astronauts also offered some more general advice, including the importance of international and commercial partnerships, seeking bipartisan support to ensure the long-term viability of NASA’s exploration plan, and more outreach to the public. “We have got to get the support of the American people by getting the message out to people,” Collins said.

That panel came after another panel of two space scientists and one businessman who has flown payloads on the ISS. They argued for the importance of both human and robotic exploration, rather than one taking precedence over the other.

One of the astronauts came out against LOP-G, but his alternative suggestion was not really very different from that proposed by the other astronauts, calling for a massive NASA-run Apollo-style government space project:

Appearing on a panel during the meeting at the White House, Terry Virts said that the proposed Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a human-tended facility in orbit around the moon, wasn’t an effective next step in human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit after the International Space Station. “It essentially calls for building another orbital space station, a skill my colleagues and I have already demonstrated on the ISS,” he said. “Gateway will only slow us down, taking time and precious dollars away from the goal of returning to the lunar surface and eventually flying to Mars.”

Virts wasn’t specific on what should replace the Gateway as that next step but called for an Apollo-like model of stepping-stone missions to return to the moon, with ISS, he said, serving well as the Mercury role.

Meanwhile, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine gave his full endorsement of LOP-G.

Virts’ comments came after NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the Gateway played an essential role in developing a long-term, sustainable human presence at the moon. “This is our opportunity to have more access to more parts of the moon than ever before,” he said of the Gateway, a reference to its ability to shift orbits using its electric propulsion system. He also played up the role of the Gateway in bringing in international and commercial partners while taking a leadership role in space exploration.

“The goal is sustainability,” he said. “When we’re going to the moon, as the president said in his speech, this time we’re going to stay, and the Gateway gives us that great opportunity.”

What we can glean from these presentations, all very carefully staged by the council to support what it wants the government to do in space, is that the Trump administration is going full gang-busters for another big Kennedy-like government space program, launched by SLS. They haven’t announced it yet, but they are definitely moving to propose such a program.

And such a program will cost billions, take forever to do anything (if it does anything at all), and accomplish nothing but spread pork to congressional districts while sustaining the big space companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing and possibly reshaping the new space companies — tempted by the big cash being offered by the government — into becoming as bloated and as uncreative.

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The modern non-debate over climate, or anything

11:28 am

Last week there was a much bally-hooed public event where several very well known scientists from both sides of the global-warming debate were given an opportunity to make their case before the public. Though they were not the only speakers, the two names that were of the most interest were Michael Mann (global warming advocate) and Judith Curry (global warming skeptic).

Mann’s appearance was especially intriguing, because he has very carefully insulated himself from any unpredictable public questioning in the decade since the climategate emails were released (revealing that his objectivity and rigor as a scientist could be considered very questionable). With Curry as an opposing panelist it seemed to me that this event could produce some interesting fireworks.

The event was in West Virginia, too far away for me to attend. However, one of my caving buddies from back when I lived in DC and caved monthly in West Virginia, John Harman, lives in West Virginia and as the owner of a company that builds space-related equipment I knew he’d be interested. I let him know about the event, and he decided to make the two and a half hour drive to watch.

Below is John’s detailed report on the event. You can see Judith Curry’s full presentation and script here.

I only have one comment, indicated by my headline above. The way this event was staged was specifically designed to prevent a real debate. There was no vibrant give and take between participants. Instead, the speakers were each given time to make their presentation, and then were faced with what appeared to be preplanned questions. Very staged. When Curry was given a question she didn’t expect, she said so, and was surprised.

This is not how real science is done. Michael Mann strongly pushes the theory that the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, caused by human-activity, is warming the climate. His work has been strongly challenged by qualified scientists like Judith Curry. For science, and the truth, to prosper, Mann has to be willing to face those challenges directly, and address them. Instead, this event as well as every other public forum that Mann has participated in for the past decade have all been designed to protect him from those challenges. Nor has Mann been the only global warming enthusiast protected in this way.

The result is a decline in intellectual rigor and the rise of politics and propaganda within the climate science community, as noted by Curry in her last slide. She calls this “The Madhouse effect”:

The madhouse is characterized by

  • Rampant overconfidence in an overly simplistic theory of climate change
  • Enforcement of a politically-motivated, manufactured ‘consensus’
  • Attempts to stifle scientific and policy debates
  • Activism and advocacy for their preferred politics and policy
  • Self-promotion and ‘cashing in’
  • Public attacks on other scientists that do not support the ‘consensus’

Curry notes that she was forced out of academia expressly because of these factors, merely because she expressed skepticism concerning the hypothesis of human-caused global warming.

The worst part of this lack of debate is that it now permeates our society. In every area of importance to our nation’s future, debate is now impossible. The left, to which global warming activists like Michael Mann routinely belong, will not tolerate it, and will do anything to avoid it, even so far as to destroy the careers of anyone who dares challenge them. This is what Mann advocated in the climategate emails, and this is exactly what happened to Judith Curry.

Anyway, take a look at John’s very fair-minded report of the event. You will find it quite edifying.
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Landslides on Ceres

9:31 am

Landslides on rim of Occator Crater

Cool image time! With Dawn completing its descent into its final low orbit only about 30 miles above the surface of Ceres, it is beginning to take some very spectacular images. Above is a cropped section from a full image taken on June 9th of the rim of Occator Crater from an altitude of 27 miles. It shows evidence of landslides on the crater’s rim, as well as at least two bright patches. If you click on it you can see the entire picture.

Crater on Ceres

Nor is this the only cool image released As Dawn descended to its new orbit, it took one very cool oblique image of the planet’s horizon. On the right I have cropped a small section out of one such image, taken on May 30th from an altitude of 280 miles. If you click on it you can see the full image, showing numerous other small craters all around it, to the horizon.

Note the bright streaks on the crater walls, suggestive of more landslides as well as seepage of the thought-to-exist brine from below the surface.

For the next year or so, as Dawn winds down its mission, expect a lot more very intriguing pictures of Ceres. I am especially eager to see close-ups of the bright spots at the center of Occator Crater.

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The two candidate landing sites for ExoMars2020

12:27 pm

The June release of new images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) included three images of the two candidate landing sites for Europe’s 2020 ExoMars rover mission. All three images provide us as hint at what that rover might see when it arrives a few years from now.

ExoMars 2020 landing sites

The two candidate sites are locations on Mars dubbed Mawrth Vallis and Oxia Palas. The map to the right shows their general location to the east of Mars’s giant volcanoes and giant canyon Valles Marineris. The red splotches indicate the large number of images taken by MRO of these locations, partly to help the ExoMars science team choose which site to pick and partly to study the geology in these Martian locations. As you can see, both candidate sites are in the transition zone between the northern low plains and the southern highlands.

At first glance Mawrth Vallis seems the more spectacular site. Mawrth (Welsh for Mars) is one of the gigantic drainage canyons near Valles Marineris. Though tiny in comparison to Valles Marineris, on Earth it would easily rival the Grand Canyon in size, and in fact is slightly longer (400 miles versus 300 miles). Unlike the Grand Canyon, however, Mawrth Vallis doesn’t appear to have a distinct or obvious rim. This video, produced by the European Space Agency using images from its Mars Express orbiter, gives a sense of the canyon’s terrain as it flies upstream from the northern lowlands to the canyon’s high point in the southern highlands. The highlands on either side of the canyon more resemble the broken geology of Mars’s chaos regions that are found scattered about in this transition zone than the flat generally level Kaibab plateau that surrounds the Grand Canyon.

Mawrth Vallis

The image on the right is a tiny crop from the most recently released MRO image. The full image shows a strip of the upper plateau south of canyon and near its inlet from the southern highlands. This crop reveals a surface that is a wild mixture of colors and complex geology. In fact, in a 2017 MRO image release showing a different place in Mawrth Vallis, the canyon was dubbed a “painted desert.” To quote that release:

The clay-rich terrain surrounding Mawrth Vallis is one of the most scenic regions of Mars, a future interplanetary park. …The origin of these altered layers is the subject of continued debates, perhaps to be resolved by a future rover on the surface. We do know that these layers are very ancient, dating back to a time when the environment of Mars was wetter and more habitable, if there were any inhabitants.

Other MRO images of Mawrth Vallis here and here emphasize this description.

As for Oxia Palas, the other candidate landing site for ExoMars 2020, in the June MRO image release there were two images.
» Read more

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Another intriguing pit on Mars

1:37 pm

pit on Mars

Cool image time! In the June release of images from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, I came across the image on the right, cropped slightly to post here, of a pit in a region dubbed Hephaestus Fossae that is located just at the margin of Mars’s vast northern plains.

Below and to the right is an annotated second image showing the area around this pit. If you click on it you can see the full resolution image, uncropped, and unannotated.

wider view of pit

The scale bar is based on the 25 centimeter per pixel scale provided at the image link. Based on this, this pit is only about ten to fifteen meters across, or 30 to 50 feet wide. The image webpage says the sun was 39 degrees above the horizon, with what they call a sun angle of 51 degrees. Based on these angles, the shadow on the floor of the pit suggests it is about the same depth, 30 to 50 feet.

The shadows suggest overhung walls. This, plus the presence of nearby aligned sinks, strongly suggests that there are extensive underground passages leading away from this pit.

For a caver on Earth to drop into a pit 30 to 50 feet deep is nowadays a trivial thing. You rig a rope (properly), put on your vertical system, and rappel in. When you want to leave you use that same vertical system to climb the rope, using mechanical cams that slide up the rope but will not slide down.

On Mars such a climb would be both easier and harder. The gravity is only one third that of Earth, but the lack of atmosphere means you must wear some form of spacesuit. Moreover, this system is not great for getting large amounts of gear up and down. Usually, people only bring what they can carry in a pack. To use this Martian pit as a habitat will require easier access, preferable by a wheeled vehicle that can drive in.

The pit’s location however is intriguing. The map below shows its location on a global map of Mars. This region is part of the Utopia Basin, the place with the second lowest elevation on Mars.
» Read more

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New impact craters on Mars

1:49 pm

New impact crater on Mars

Cool image time! The high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) keeps finding recent impact craters, all of which the science team try to monitor periodically to see how the surface evolves over time. The image on the right, cropped to post here, is one such crater, the image taken in January 2018 and released with as one of the captioned images from this month’s image catalog release. If you click on the image you can see the full picture.

What is notable about this particular impact are the colors.

The new crater and its ejecta have distinctive color patterns. Once the colors have faded in a few decades, this new crater will still be distinctive compared to the secondaries by having a deeper cavity compared to its diameter.

Those colors of course have importance to researchers, as they reveal the different materials found beneath the surface at this location, normally hidden by surface dust and debris.

Nor is this the only impact crater revealed in this month’s image release. Earlier in the month the science team highlighted an image that captured two small impacts. While all three of these impacts are in the general region called Elysium Planitia, they are not particularly close to each other. They are however surrounding the landing site for the InSight lander now heading to Mars. This last link takes you to my January 28, 2018 post detailing some information about this landing site, and also includes another recent crater impact, found at the center of the landing zone.

It is not clear if these recent impacts are related to each other. As noted by Alfred McEwen of the science team, “Often, a bolide breaks apart in the atmosphere and makes a tight cluster of new craters.” It could be that all these recent impacts came from the same bolide, which is why there appear to be a surplus of them in Elysium Planitia.

Then again, our surface survey of Mars is very incomplete. These impacts could simply be marking the normal impact rate for Mars. We will not know until we have completed a detail survey of all recent impacts on Mars, and have been able to date them all.

Who wants to do it?

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Mars rover update: May 23, 2018

3:35 pm

Summary: Curiosity drives down off of Vera Rubin Ridge to do drilling in lower Murray Formation geology unit, while Opportunity continues to puzzle over the formation process that created Perseverance Valley in the rim of Endeavour Crater.

For a list of past updates beginning in July 2016, see my February 8, 2018 update.

Curiosity

Curiosity's travels on and off Vera Rubin Ridge

For the overall context of Curiosity’s travels, see Pinpointing Curiosity’s location in Gale Crater.

Since my April 27, 2018 update, Curiosity has continued its downward trek off of Vera Rubin Ridge back in the direction from which it came. The annotated traverse map to the right, cropped and taken from the rover’s most recent full traverse map, shows the rover’s recent circuitous route with the yellow dotted line. The red dotted line shows the originally planned route off of Vera Rubin Ridge, which they have presently bypassed.

It appears they have had several reasons for returning to the Murray Formation below the Hematite Unit on Vera Rubin Ridge. First, it appears they wanted to get more data about the geological layers just below the Hematite Unit, including the layer immediately below, dubbed the Blunts Point member.

While this is certainly their main goal, I also suspect that they wanted to find a good and relatively easy drilling candidate to test their new drill technique. The last two times they tested this new technique, which bypasses the drill’s stuck feed mechanism by having the robot arm itself push the drill bit against the rock, the drilling did not succeed. It appeared the force applied by the robot arm to push the drill into the rock was not sufficient. The rock was too hard.

In these first attempts, however, they only used the drill’s rotation to drill, thus reducing the stress on the robot arm. The rotation however was insufficient. Thus, they decided with the next drill attempt to add the drill’s “percussion” capability, where it would not only rotate but also repeatedly pound up and down, the way a standard hammer drill works on Earth.

I suspect that they are proceeding carefully with this because this new technique places stress the operation of the robot arm, something they absolutely do not want to lose. By leaving Vera Rubin Ridge they return to the more delicate and softer materials already explored in the Murray Formation. This is very clear in the photo below, cropped from the original to post here, showing the boulder they have chosen to drill into, dubbed “Duluth,” with the successful drill hole to the right.
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The federal government’s blank check

9:38 am

Three articles this morning about actions taken by Congress in connection with the budgets for NASA and NOAA illustrate the bankrupt nature of our federal government.

The first story describes how several legislators from the House Appropriations Committee have inserted amendments into their budget bill that will restore a $10 million NASA climate monitoring program that the Trump administration had shut down.

The second story describes how that same budget bill generously funds both NASA and NOAA at levels far above their own requests.
» Read more

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Chaos on Mars

11:56 am

chaos terrain

Cool image time! The image on the right, cropped and reduced in resolution to post here, shows an area on Mars that geologists have dubbed “Chaos Terrain.” If you click on the image you can see the full image, which also includes several canyons oriented in what seem to be random directions.

I first heard this geological term for regions on Mars shortly after the first orbital missions circling Mars began taking images back in the 1970s. It applied to places where the terrain was hummocky, a crazy collection of hills forming no pattern at all. Earth does not really have such terrain.

The close-up to the right also shows that at least one of these hills is fractured, made up of several large pieces that have separated over time.

This image was part of the May 2nd image release from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. What makes it interesting is its location on Mars. The image below shows that location, indicated by a white cross.
» Read more

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Craters, cones, pits, amid endless plains

12:49 pm

Pits, cones, and craters

Cool image time! Buried in the catalog of recent high resolution images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are places on Mars that are inexplicable and fascinating, while also indicative of its vastness. The image on the right, reduced in resolution and cropped to post here, shows us one such place. If you click on the image you can see the full image at high resolution.

The archive posting of this image is titled “Cones near Pits.” As you can see, to the north and east of the pits are some mesas (why they call them cones I do not know).

The pits are unusual, and appear to be some form of collapse. In the larger image several additional mesas can be seen at farther distances, but most of the overall terrain is remarkably flat and featureless, except for numerous small craters that appear either partly buried by dust or significantly eroded.

I am not going to guess at the geology that caused the pits and mesas. What I do want to focus on is the vastness of Mars. This location is on the southern edge of Utopia Basin, the second deepest basin on Mars. It is part of the planet’s endless northern plains, an immense region covering almost half the planet that tends to be at a lower elevation, is relatively smooth, and is thought by some scientists to be evidence of what was once an intermittent ocean. The global map of Mars below indicates the location of the above image with a black cross.
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Sunspot update for April 2018: Heading into solar minimum

9:00 am

On Sunday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for April 2018. Below is my annotated version of that graph.

While there was an uptick in sunspots in April, compared to the almost complete inactivity in March (the least active month for sunspots in a decade), the uptick did little to change the general trend. Sunspot activity is now comparable to what we saw in early 2008 (as indicated by the yellow line). This was just before the arrival of the previous solar minimum, which happened to also be one of the longest and deepest on record.

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Volcano or Impact?

11:34 am

Elliptical crater with flow features

Cool image time! Yesterday the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) team released its monthly image dump of more than 500 new photographs, taken by the spacecraft’s high resolution camera. As I have started to do in the past few months, I am reviewing this collection and plan to post a few of the more interesting images over the next month. On the right is the first of this series. I have cropped and reduced the resolution to show here, but you can see the full resolution version if you click on the image.

The MRO team labels this image an “elliptical crater with flow features.” The first impression one gets from the image is that the impact that caused the crater came from the side and hit the ground obliquely, creating the crater’s oval shape and the lava-type flow features in the crater’s floor.

As is almost always the case with Martian geology, beware of first impressions. You need to give any feature both a more detailed look as well as a broader view to have any chance at understanding its context and geology.
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Alien world

9:21 am

Meridiani Planum
So what is it we are looking at in the image above? I have reduced the resolution slightly to fit it here, but you can see the full resolution image by clicking on the picture.

Is it a marble or granite kitchen counter? Nah, the surface is too rough.

Maybe it’s a modern abstract painting that we can find hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Nah, it has too much style and depth. Abstract art is much more shallow and empty of content.

Could it be a close-up of a just-opened container of berry-vanilla ice cream, the different flavors swirling and intertwined to enhance the eating experience? No, somehow it looks too gritty for ice cream.
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Mars rover update: April 27, 2018

10:11 am

Summary: Curiosity’s exploration of Vera Rubin Ridge is extended, while an attempt by Opportunity to climb back up Perseverance Valley to reach an interesting rock outcrop fails.

For a list of past updates beginning in July 2016, see my February 8, 2018 update.

Curiosity

Curiosity's traverse map, Sol 2030

For the overall context of Curiosity’s travels, see Pinpointing Curiosity’s location in Gale Crater.

Since my March 21, 2018 update, it has become apparent that the Curiosity science team has decided to extend the rover’s research on Vera Rubin Ridge far beyond their original plans. They have continued their travels to the northeast well past the original nominal route off the ridge, as indicated by the dotted red line on the traverse map above. Along the way they stopped to inspect a wide variety of geology, and have now moved to the north and have actually begun descending off the ridge, but in a direction that takes the rover away from Mount Sharp and its original route. As noted in their April 25 update,
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Zooming in on a Martian surprise

1:55 pm

Global map of Mars

Let’s take a journey. Above is a global map of Mars, showing its largest and well known geological features. While far smaller than Earth, its lack of oceans means that Mars’ actual dry surface has about the same square footage as the continents of Earth. It is a vast place. Getting a close look at every spot is going to take many decades of work, and probably won’t be finished until humans are actually walking its surface.

Let’s pick a spot, zoom in and find out what’s there.
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More hatred and bigotry from the left

1:24 pm

It has become quite depressing to repeatedly document the numerous daily examples of leftist hatred and bigotry that now populate American intellectual and political culture. It must be done, however, so below are a few more recent examples from the past month, categorized appropriately. A quick scan of the stories will illustrate to anyone how bankrupt our modern intellectual and political culture has become. Worse, it appears with time that the levels of emotional hate and bigotry are only growing.

First the bigotry:

I could list more, but these are enough. They illustrate the bigoted focus of the left. To them, everything is race or ethnicity. You cannot accomplish anything as an individual if you are a minority, and all your failures can be blamed on the evils of the white race. More important, it is their right to oppress whites, merely because they perceive that some white cultures in the past were oppressive. Under this mentality, we shall soon see the return of segregation (as indicated by at least two stories above) and racial discrimination. And it won’t matter that this time it will be whites who are oppressed instead of blacks. It will still be evil, because it will be based not on the content of each individual’s character but on the color of their skin.

Next the hate:
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How I spent my Saturday: Removing graffiti in a cave

11:40 am

Yesterday was another of my many cave adventures, but different than most. Instead of exploring and mapping newly discovered or out-of-the-way remote cave passages, I participated in a project of the Central Arizona Grotto (a chapter of the National Speleological Society and located in Phoenix) to remove years of graffiti from Peppersauce Cave. You can see pictures of yesterday’s effort here, published by the Arizona Star.

You won’t see any pictures of me. The younger cavers were far more photogenic.

Peppersauce has become what cavers call a “sacrificial cave.” It is open and ungated, relatively easy to traverse, and very well known throughout the state. Thus, many inexperienced people go there to see it, most of whom know little about caving, the ethics of protecting them, or the proper techniques for caving safely. Yesterday, while we were working to either sand-blast, chemically remove, or grind away old spray-paint (some of which was sadly obscene), I must have seen between 150 to 200 people go by. At least two thirds of them were not wearing helmets. Many clearly had never been in a cave before. Some were not wearing headlamps, carrying flashlights instead (which makes climbing harder because you don’t have use of both hands and can easily lose your light). A few even came in with no lights, depending instead on the lights their companions carried.

Because of this heavy traffic, Peppersauce has been badly trashed. On visits by experienced cavers we routinely carry out bags of trash, only to find that trash reappearing, sometime in mere hours. The walls of the cave had been covered with graffiti, some many layers deep.

Ray Keeler of Central Arizona Grotto (CAG) has organized several projects in the past to remove this graffitti over the past two decades. The effort he is leading this year is the third, and has the help of cavers from grottos throughout the state. This was the fourth clean-up weekend, and the first that I was able to attend (having missed the first three due to scheduling conflicts).

I’ve done similar things before, but never on this scale. It was quite educational using the solvent to remove some graffiti, but unfortunately many types of paint are completely resistant to removal by either sand-blasting or solvent. After awhile I got discouraged doing solvent work. Too often nothing got removed. In the afternoon I switched to our last technique, grinding, and was far more gratified with the results. The grinder, which we do not use on formations, removes only the slightest layer of material, and thus does little damage. It however is very effective in removing all paint, no matter how resistant.

The cave is now about two thirds cleaned. We are racing to finish the rest before the summer, because a typically insane reason forced upon us by the government. You see, according to a law passed by Congress, graffiti that is more than fifty years old is considered historical, and cannot be removed without a great deal of paperwork and complex bureaucracy. Spray paint was invented in the late 1960s (about fifty years ago), and so some of this ugly graffiti, no matter how obscene, is going to be protected by our government beginning later this year. Our goal is to get it removed beforehand, so that the cave can be returned to a more natural state, for future visitors to experience.

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The first sunspots of the next solar cycle

9:53 am

In linking to my sunspot update this week, there has been a lot of speculation at the climate website WattsUpWithThat that the next solar cycle has begun.

Our resident solar physicist, Dr. Leif Svalgaard commented and provided a link to something reported by his colleagues, something that likely would not have been possible without the fantastic solar observations of NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observeratory (SDO). He said: “Cycle 25 has already begun. It looks to me that SC25 will be a bit stronger than SC24, so probably no Grand Minimum this time.” It seems a small sunspot has been observed, that has the opposite polarity of cycle 24 sunspots. [emphasis in original]

The speculation at WattsUpWithThat, which suggested that this sunspot was the first such sunspot this cycle, was not quite accurate however. This sunspot with an opposite polarity, which decayed so quickly that it did not rate getting a sunspot number, was not the first. This week the Solar-Terrestrial Centre of Excellence, a Belgian organization focused on space-solar science, published this very good article discussing not only this sunspot but two others, one of which occurred more than a year ago.
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A Martian snake of collapsed hills

10:21 am

A Martian snake of collapsed hills

Close-up of collapsed hills

Time to once again delve into this month’s release of high resolution images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image above, cropped, rotated, and reduced in resolution to post here, shows a string of strange mounds or hills, each with similar collapse features on their tops. If you click on the picture, you can see the full resolution image, rotated properly with north up. You can also go to the MRO post, which provides some additional information.

The white box indicates the location of the cropped close-up, at full resolution, to the right. This area is typical across the entire snake-like ridge. You have these mounds or hills, each with chaotic depressions at their tops. The depressions suggest that this ridge follows an underground void, like a lava tube. The ridge-like nature of the line of hills also suggest that this tube has been exposed by erosion over time, with the surrounding terrain more easily blown or washed away while the more resistant ridge remains.

At the same time, the line of hills is baffling. Why would a lava tube expand periodically to form something that looks like a string of pearls?

The location of this snaking ridge provides some additional context.
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Sunspot update for March 2018: the sun crashes!

11:49 am

It surely looks like the solar minimum has arrived, and it has done so far earlier than expected! On Sunday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for March 2018. Below is my annotated version of that graph.

March 2018 was the least active month for sunspots since the middle of 2009, almost nine years ago. In fact, activity in the past few months has been so low it matches the low activity seen in late 2007 and early 2008, ten years ago when the last solar minimum began and indicated by the yellow line that I have added to the graph below. If the solar minimum has actually arrived now, this would make this cycle only ten years long, one of the shortest solar cycles on record. More important, it is a weak cycle. In the past, all short cycles were active cycles. This is the first time we have seen a short and weak cycle since scientists began tracking the solar cycle in the 1700s, following the last grand minimum in the 1600s when there were almost no sunspots.
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“If you have wrongthink, you will not be allowed.”

1:34 pm

The fascist, intolerant, and oppressive nature of today’s leftist culture has now gotten so bad that The Atlantic, a liberal publication long considered a reasonable intellectual voice from the left, can no longer tolerate for more than two weeks the hiring of a conservative, even though that conservative, Kevin Williamson, was also a vehement opponent of Donald Trump.

The quote that forms the title of this essay however comes not from the above Williamson story, but from a cogent essay by Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist about that intolerant leftist culture. As he says,

This story [Williamson’s firing] is a predictable continuation of the left’s ownership not just of media but indeed of all institutions. It is depressing. It is predictable. And it is where we are as a country now. It is not confined to the realm of ideas. Eich, Damore, Williamson and others are subject to blacklists and HR reports and firing in every arena of industry and culture. If you have wrongthink, you will not be allowed for long to make your living within any space the left has determined they own – first the academy, then the media, then corporate America, and now the public square. You will bake the cake, you will use the proper pronoun, and you will never say that what Planned Parenthood does is murder for hire, and should be punished as such under the law.

As Domenech notes, Williamson’s firing is only one example of a legion of similar stories. There is the fascist intolerance of modern academia for example. Or we can talk about the hateful scapegoating of innocent NRA members, blaming them for a murderer’s violence merely because they wish to defend their Constitutional rights as specifically outlined in the Bill of Rights.

Or maybe we should mention the hate and violence committed against children and students, merely because they either wear a “Make America Great Again” t-shirt or carry signs supporting Trump.

I wish these were only isolated examples. They are not. For most of the second half of last year I was able to post weekly updates listing anywhere from six to several dozen new stories describing this hateful leftist culture. Here are just a few more that I gathered in mid-March but found too depressing to report at the time:
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Revisiting Biosphere 2

1:22 pm

Biosphere 2

This week Diane and I have a friend visiting from back east. As locals generally do when guests visit, we used this visit as an excuse to go sightseeing at local attractions that we somehow never got the time to visit on our own.

So on Tuesday we drove north to take a tour of Biosphere 2, what has been called “a giant space-age ark in the middle of the desert.” The idea, as sold heavily to the public when it was built in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was that eight people would try to live in a closed system for two years, demonstrating the technology needed to both build colonies on other worlds as well as protect the environment here on Earth.

The system wasn’t really closed however (power came from outside), and during the first two year mission it seemed they were somewhat lax about keeping the system closed.

One Biospherian accidentally cut off the tip of her finger and left for medical care. When she returned, she carried in two duffle bags of supplies to the supposedly self-sustaining environment (which presumably would not have been feasible on, say, Mars).

There were also financial issues, as mentioned by our tour guide and confirmed by news stories. Its backer, Texas oil man Edward Bass, spent somewhere between $150 to $200 million. It seems however that the managers running Biosphere 2 didn’t keep good books, and when Bass asked for an accounting they couldn’t provide it. Instead, they attempted to sabotage the project’s second mission.
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A spray of volcanic ejecta on Mars?

10:38 am

pit features on floor of crater

Time for some more weird Mars geology! Today the science team for the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released its monthly batch of new images. There is a lot of interesting stuff buried therein, some of which I will feature periodically in the next month.

The image on the right, reduced in resolution to post here, is a good example. (If you click on the image you can see the full resolution version.) It shows a scattering of pits in three specific areas on the crater floor, all in a line going from the northeast to the southwest. Yet, the rest of the crater floor lacks similar pits, and is either very smooth or has a mottled appearance. Both the smooth and the mottled areas appear to have a very faint trend going from the northwest to the southeast, which to my eye appears caused by the general wind direction that flows across the crater floor.

Even more intriguing, the pits in these three areas appear to be mostly oblong and also trend from the northeast to the southwest, cutting across the general trend of the rest of the crater floor. You can see this in the cropped closeups from the full resolution image below, showing the two boxed areas indicated on the image on the right.
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Near the Martian shoreline

1:20 pm

One of the prime areas of research for Mars planetary geologists is the region on Mars where the geography appears to transition from the southern cratered, rough terrain to the northern low, generally smooth, and flat plains. It is theorized by some scientists that the northern plains were once an ocean, probably shallow and probably intermittent, but wet nonetheless for considerable periods. The global map of Mars below, created by the laser altimeter on Mars Global Surveyor, clearly shows the obvious elevation differences between the low northern plans (blue) and the high, more cratered southern regions (changing from yellow to orange as you move higher).

Labeled global Map of Mars

Scientists have spent a considerable effort studying this transition zone (green on the map), illustrated by just one example I recently highlighted, showing that, though there does not appear to be a clear shoreline in many places, there is strong evidence that a shallow ocean repeatedly rose and fell in this transition zone, leaving behind geological ripple marks vaguely reminiscent of those seen on a beach caused by the rise and fall of the tides.

Today we highlight another example, taken in January 2018 at the location indicated by the cross on the above map.
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The James Webb Telescope: a signpost for identifying fake news sources

11:35 am

The news yesterday that NASA will once again have to delay the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope due to a variety of technical issues and management errors not only exemplified the fundamental failure of the federal government, it also illustrated the routine failures of today’s mainstream press.

First, Webb’s new delay epitomizes the systemic incompetence of Washington. Despite being 13 years behind schedule and costing eight times more than originally planned, NASA and its contractors still couldn’t get things right.

Most of the problems have occurred with the spacecraft half of the project, which was built by Northrop Grumman in California and is undergoing testing there. During the teleconference, NASA officials, including acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot, expanded upon technical problems first reported publicly by the agency’s inspector general last month.

These include leaky valves within the spacecraft’s propulsion system and difficulties encountered during deployment tests of the sun shield. Not only did the thin, five-layer sun shield snag during the deployment, but technicians also found seven tears up to 10cm long within the material. NASA and Northrop Grumman have identified fixes for these problems, but their repair has added months of delays to the project, and engineers cannot be sure that more issues will not crop up during further testing.

Such failures, in NASA and in all big federal projects in recent years, are hardly news. Only the willfully blind or those who support wasting tax dollars to distribute pork will deny they exist.

The failures of the federal government however is not the focus of this essay. Instead, the announcement yesterday and the coverage of it by the press provides us a perfect and very obvious signpost for differentiating between the fake news sources that are generally unreliable or too often allow their biases to influence their reporting, and those sources that do a good job.

That signpost is one simple fact: Webb is not a replacement or successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, despite NASA making this false claim for decades. Hubble is an optical telescope. Webb will view the universe in the infrared. These are too entirely different things.

Yet, too many news sources today repeated NASA’s false claim, illustrating how little they know about both telescopes and their design, while revealing their complete inability to do some basic journalistic research. Instead they merely rewrite old press releases, and thus prove clearly by their bad reporting why so many people have so little respect for the modern press.

The worst examples made this false claim right in the headline:
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Mars rover update: March 21, 2018

2:10 pm

Summary: Curiosity continues its exploration of Vera Rubin Ridge, including several drilling attempts. Opportunity is halfway down Perseverance Valley.

For a complete list of all past updates going back to July 2016, see my February 8, 2018 update.

Curiosity

Curiosity's traverse map, Sol 1993

For the overall context of Curiosity’s travels, see Pinpointing Curiosity’s location in Gale Crater.

Since my February 8, 2018 update, the Curiosity science team has apparently been loath to leave Vera Rubin Ridge. They had begun the trek to the northeast that would take them towards the exit ridge heading to the southeast, as indicated by the dotted red line on the traverse map above, but then continued past that planned route to continue to the northeast. Along the way they attempted to drill twice using an improvised approach that they hoped would bypass the drill’s stuck feed mechanism, without apparent success.

The panorama below is looking to the west and south, as indicated by the yellow lines in the image above.
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This week in leftist fascism

11:06 am

It is only a week since my last report on leftist fascism and bigotry. Yet, in that short week the number of new examples of violence, intolerance, bigotry, and hate coming from liberal and leftwing activists is almost more than I can keep up with. Below is a small sampling, all from the period from March 6 to March 12:

This week’s stories highlight three themes that clearly dominate today’s leftist activist movement of outrage. First, there is the use of violence and mob action to attack things they don’t agree with or dislike, as illustrated in the first two stories. If you click on the link to the Jordan Peterson speech, you can see some video of these demonstrators. It is not pretty.

Videos of the protest, taken by protestors themselves, don’t paint the leftists in a good light. In the video below an exit door is barricaded as one protestor shouts, “Lock ’em in and burn it down!”

The second theme is that of bigotry and race hatred. This leftwing movement clearly hates Jews and whites, and is trying to institutionalize that bigotry so that it becomes acceptable to marginalize and oppress individuals of those groups, merely because of their race or religion. Consider for example the program instituted by Evanston public school district from the fourth link above:
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Martian craters go splat!

2:17 pm

Overview of the volcanic Tharsis Bulge on Mars

Cool image time! In continuing my exploration of this month’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) image release, I found two interesting images of small craters, one as part of that image release, the other found completely by accident.

The map on the right, taken from the MRO HiRISE archive page, shows the locations of these two images. Both are located in the lava plains that surround the giant volcano Pavonis Mons, the central volcano of the three volcanoes to the east of Olympus Mons. Previously, I have done posts focusing specifically on both Pavonis Mons and Arsia Mons. Not only is the geology of these gigantic volcanoes fascinating, there is evidence that ancient glacial ice lurks in lava tubes on their slopes, making them potentially prime real estate for future explorers.

The first image, labeled #1 on the image above, was taken in January 2018 to get a better look at a small crater on the surrounding lava plains, and was part of the MRO March image release. I have cropped it to post here, focusing on the crater itself.

My first reaction on seeing the image was, “Did this impact not go splat when it hit?”
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Leftist fascism at the start of 2018

10:09 am

Beginning in October 2017, I began to do weekly posts listing the free speech atrocities that were occurring on American campuses. I finished the year with a summary which listed all the colleges where such tyranny appeared to be supported and encouraged. As I noted,

[A]lmost every college shown marks a moment when leftist members of an administration, facility, or student body acted to squelch the free speech rights of a conservative. Nor do I think this is because of bias on my part. From the beginning I have recognized the possibility that I might unfairly only report oppressive incidents committed by the left, and have tried to avoid that. Unfortunately, despite my sincere effort to report incidents where conservatives tried to silence liberals, during the whole year I only came across one event where a conservative college acted to shut down a dissenting liberal speaker. I admit that I might have missed a few, but even if I did I do not think this would change the overall pattern. 2017 was a year in which the left decided that it was acceptable to act like fascist thugs and do whatever they could to shut down the free speech of opposing points of view.

I have been lax posting these weekly reports since the beginning of 2018, and this post is my attempt to catch up. Interesting, I got inspired to do this by a story that isn’t directly related to academic fascism at all: Christian Bridal Shop Closes Down Over Fear of LGBT Law After Facing Death Threats.

The local government there is about to pass an ordinance that will make it illegal for these dressmakers to both practice their religion while also making wedding dresses. Rather than violate their conscience, they are shutting down. Worse however was the level of hate directed at them simply because they do not support same-sex marriage:

Because of the store’s refusal to sell dresses for same-sex weddings, Boucher and her family have faced a variety of different threats through social media, email and telephone since 2014. People have not only threatened to burn down their place of business but have also threatened to shoot them in the head. Last summer, the shop closed down temporarily to the public and was only accepting appointments because the harassment got so bad.

Much like the early days of Christianity in the Roman empire, faithful Christians are now finding that they must go underground to practice their faith in America.

It is for this reason that the title of this post uses the term “leftist fascism,” not “academic fascism.” Even though most of the events where jack-booted thugs have attacked innocent people, merely for expressing their freedom of speech, have occurred on college campuses, I realize that this problem has spread beyond the campus. We are now faced with a fascist movement in the U.S., linked to the Democratic Party, that is filled with hate for anyone who disagrees with it, and whose goal is to destroy all dissenters.

If you doubt me, then I dare you to read some of the following stories:
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