Category: Essays And Commentaries

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

The sun, climate change, and censorship

10:14 pm

The chief of CERN has prohibited its scientists from drawing any conclusions from a major experiment that appears to prove that solar activity and the resulting ebb and flow of cosmic rays has a direct effect on the climate.

Two points:

First, the results described provide strong evidence that the sun is a much more important component in climate change than any climate model has previously predicted. These results could help explain the Little Ice Age, which took place around 1700 at exactly the same time the sun became very quiet and stopped producing sunspots for decades. They could explain the Medieval Warm Period around 1000 AD, when cosmic ray activity declined (which also suggests the sun become more active) and the earth apparently warmed. And they might very well even explain the recent cooling during the past decade, which also took place during a period of solar inactivity and a comparable increase in cosmic ray activity.
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A flag in the dust

11:28 am

Bumped: I posted this essay last July 20th on the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. I think it is worth rereading again, even as the shuttle is about to return to Earth for the last time.

Today, July 20th, is the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, the first time ever that a human being arrived on another planet. Americans love to celebrate this event, as it symbolizes one of the finest moments in our history, when we set out to achieve something truly great and noble and succeeded far better than we could have imagined. Not only did we get to the Moon as promised, over the next three and a half years we sent another five missions, each with increasingly sophisticated equipment, each sent to explore some increasingly alien terrain. Forty-plus years later, no one has come close to matching this achievement, a fact that emphasizes how difficult it was for the United States to accomplish it.

There is one small but very important detail about the Apollo 11 mission, however, that most Americans are unaware of. In mounting the American flag, the astronauts found the lunar surface much harder than expected. They had a great deal of trouble getting the flagpole into the ground. As Andrew Chaikin wrote in his book, A Man on the Moon, “For a moment it seemed the flag would fall over in front of a worldwide audience, but at last the men managed to steady it.” Then Armstrong took what has become one of the world’s iconic images, that of Buzz Aldrin standing on the lunar surface saluting the flag of the United States of America.

Aldrin saluting the flag

What people don’t know, however, is that when Armstrong and Aldrin blasted off from the lunar surface, the blast wave from the Lunar Module’s rocket knocked the flag over. As Chaikin also wrote, “Outside, a spray of gold foil and debris from the descent stage flew away in all directions. The flag toppled to the dust.”

Thus, for the last four decades this American flag, shown so proudly unfurled on the surface of the Moon, has actually been lying unceremoniously on the ground, in the lunar dust.

It might actually be possible to see this, though the photos at this time remain unclear and quite blurry.
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Opportunity’s journey on Mars tops 20 miles

7:50 pm

On July 17 the Mars rover Opportunity passed the twenty mile mark on its now seven year journey on Mars. The image below was taken on that day. In the distance, now only about 4,000 feet away, can be seen the rim of Endeavour Crater, fourteen miles wide. Opportunity has been traveling toward that crater now since 2008.

With the rover able to travel about 300 to 500 feet each sol, it should be reaching the crater’s rim sometime in the next few weeks.

Opportunity looks at Endeavour Crater from .8 miles away

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The U.S. and the rising Russian space program

12:48 pm

The Russians yesterday successfully launched their first space telescope since the fall of the Soviet Union. Here is a Google translation of a Russian article describing Spektr-R’s research goals:

[Spektr-R is] designed to study galaxies and quasars in the radio, the study of black holes and neutron stars in the Milky Way, as well as the regions immediately adjacent to the massive black holes. In addition, using the observatory, scientists expect to receive information about pulsars and the interstellar plasma. It is planned that the “Spektr-R” will work in orbit for at least 5 years.

Though this particular space telescope is probably not going to rewrite the science of astrophysics, its launch is historically significant. It indicates that Russia has just about recovered from the seventy-plus years of bankrupt communist rule that ended in 1990.
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Wither the Arctic Icecap?

12:03 am

In a paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters, climate scientists have estimated the distribution and trends for the Arctic icecap from 1980 through March 2011. What they have found is a significant decline in older ice on top of an overall declining trend that showed a strong but partial recovery since 2008. The graph below, from the paper, illustrates clearly these trends.

Arctic Ice, 1980 - 2011

What this means for the icecap itself remains unclear. As the scientists themselves note in their conclusion:
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Bad news for climate modelers

12:20 pm

A new analysis of the orbits of Ceres and Vesta says that in a surprisingly short time those orbits become chaotic and therefore unpredictable. More significantly, those orbits interact with the Earth’s and also make its long term orbit chaotic and unpredictable. From the abstract:

Although small, Ceres and Vesta gravitationally interact together and with the other planets of the Solar System. Because of these interactions, they are continuously pulled or pushed slightly out of their initial orbit. Calculations show that, after some time, these effects do not average out. Consequently, the bodies leave their initial orbits and, more importantly, their orbits are chaotic, meaning that we cannot predict their positions. The two bodies also have a significant probability of impacting each other, estimated at 0.2% per billion year. Last but not least, Ceres and Vesta gravitationally interact with the Earth, whose orbit also becomes unpredictable after only 60 million years. This means that the Earth’s eccentricity, which affects the large climatic variations on its surface, cannot be traced back more than 60 million years ago. This is indeed bad news for Paleoclimate studies. [emphasis mine]

The scientists found that it became impossible to calculate the orbits of the two largest asteroids after only several ten thousand years. They also found that “numerous asteroids in the main belt will behave in the same way with . . . much more chaotic behavior than previously thought.” Worse, the possibility of collisions was far higher than ever thought. Ceres and Vesta have a 1 in 500 chance of colliding with each other every billion years, while other asteroids have chances as low as 1 in 1000.

The importance of this discovery, which still needs to be confirmed by other researchers, cannot be understated.
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Another fuzzy Dawn image?

12:11 pm

July 9 Vesta image

Another image of Vesta from Dawn has been released. This image was taken on July 9 from a distance of 26,000 miles away. It is definitely an improvement over the previous image, with more small details becoming visible. However, I once again wonder about the softness of the image. Look at the limb of the planet. It is soft against the black sky. This is not what one would expect from perfectly focused camera.

Dawn goes into orbit around Vesta next week. We sure learn then for sure if there is a problem with its camera, or whether I am merely being a bit too nervous.

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Being tone deaf is not a good way to fund a government space program

11:59 am

Yesterday the House appropriations committee’s released budget numbers that included no additional funds for commercial space, limiting the subsidies to $312 million, the same number as last year and significantly less than the $850 million requested by the Obama administration.

This is what I have thought might happen since last year. The tone deaf manner in which the Obama administration has implemented the private space subsidies is leaving all funding for NASA vulnerable.
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NASA stalls, Texas lawmakers fume

10:12 pm

The law is such an inconvenient thing: In a bipartisan effort, Texas lawmakers roast NASA administrator Charles Bolden for not meeting mandated Congressional deadlines for Congress’s personally designed rocket, the program-formerly-called-Constellation.

The heavy-lift rocket and capsule that Congress insists NASA build is a complete waste of money and nothing more than pork. It will never get built, mainly because Congress has given NASA less money and less time to build it than they did for Constellation under the Bush administration. Unfortunately, the reason they continue to require NASA to build it is to provide pork to their districts.

In a perfect world this funding would be cut now, especially considering the state of the federal debt.
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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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The painful transition to private space

3:16 pm

It appears that U.S. aerospace layoffs more than tripled in the first half of 2011.

The downsizing, prompted by cutbacks in defense and government contracts, jumped from 6,121 in the first six months of 2010 to 20,851 this year, based on planned layoffs announced by major employers.

Though I have always favored shutting down the government space agency and replacing it with privately-built rockets and spaceships, the manner in which this is being done now is disgraceful. George Bush declared the retirement of the shuttle seven years ago. Since then Congress, Bush, and Obama have all done an abominable job preparing the nation for that retirement.
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More stupidity from the Center for Biological Diversity

9:14 pm

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) today sued the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Colorado for allowing caving to take place at the annual convention of the National Speleological Society.

The CBD claims that human activity can spread white nose syndrome, the mysterious ailment that has been killing millions of bats across the eastern United States. To quote:

It is well documented that the fungus believed to cause white-nose syndrome, aptly named Geomyces destructans, can be spread on the clothes and gear of people visiting caves. Scientists strongly suspect that the disease is a recent import from Europe, likely transported by someone who visited a cave there and then came to North America.

To be blunt, this statement is an outright lie.
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Why some space junk is impossible to track

7:32 pm

This ISS status update, dated June 28, explains why the piece of space junk that flew past the station that day was such a surprise. (Hat tip to NASA engineer James Fincannon for pointing this out to me.)

Last night at ~6:00pm EDT, NASA Houston FTC (Flight Control Team) received notification of an upcoming “red threshold” conjunction of the ISS with a piece of orbital debris (Object 82618, UNKNOWN), with a TCA (Time of Closest Approach) this morning at 8:08am EDT, – which was too late to begin planning for a DAM (Debris Avoidance Maneuver). Therefore, FTC and crew made preparations for crew sheltering in Soyuz 26S & 27S. PC (Probability of Collision) at last tracking fix (7:20am) remained in the Red box, at ~0.003, with a miss distance of 0.25 km radial, 0.375 km downtrack, 0.570 m crosstrack. The necessary reconfiguration procedures (USOS hatches closed, etc.) began 1.5 hrs before TCA (6:38am EDT), and the six crewmembers ingressed their Soyuz vehicles. At 8:08am the object cleared the ISS with no impact, and shortly thereafter the crew was given the Go for returning to the ISS. [The late notification occurred because of the high air resistance (drag) of the object (~175 times higher than ISS) which made its trajectory very sensitive to small errors in atmospheric density predictions at the current solar flux. Due to the high drag, there is no chance of a recurrence of Object 82618).] [emphasis mine]

In other words, the piece of junk was probably something like a piece of insulation, very light but with a large area, much like a sail. Thus, as it flies through the thin atmosphere at 200 to 400 miles altitude its velocity and direction can easily change, making it difficult, if not impossible, to predict its future trajectory.

The good news is that these same conditions mean that the orbit of the object will quickly decay (“due to high drag”) so that it poses no future threat to the station.

Unfortunately, there are many other objects like this in orbit, and they all pose a threat, mostly because of the difficulty of reliably predicting their orbits.

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The wimpy maximum continues

6:46 pm

The monthly updated graph of the Sun’s solar cycle sunspot activity was released today by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. I have posted the June graph below.

For the third month in a row, there was a decline in sunspot activity. Though the sun is producing sunspots quite regularly and there hasn’t been a blank day since January 16, the numbers of sunspots continue to fall far below the predicted level of activity as indicated by the red line.

All this is no longer a surprise or unexpected. As the solar science community noted last month, they have now gathered enough data to convince them that the sun appears to be going quiet, and might even follow this very weak solar maximum — the weakest possibly in 200 years — with a decades-long period of no sunspots at all.

This graph, however, is very intriguing. Even with an expected weak solar minimum, the sun should be producing more sunspots each month, not less, as shown on the graph. This suggests that the most up-to-date predictions for the next solar maximum might still be too high.

The sunspot graph for June 2011

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Prime real estate

2:32 pm

The south pole of the moon

Since the 1990s, scientists have suspected that water-ice might be hidden in the forever-dark floors of the polar craters on the Moon. If so, these locations become valuable real estate, as they not only would provide future settlers water for drinking, the water itself can be processed to provide oxygen and fuel.

Moreover, the high points near these craters, including the crater rims, are hoped to be high enough so that the sun would never set or be blocked by other mountains as it made its circuit low along the horizon each day. If such a place existed, solar panels could be mounted there to generate electricity continuously, even during the long 14-day lunar night.

Below the fold is a six minute video, produced from images taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) from February 6, 2010 to February 6, 2011, in an effort to find out if such a place actually exists. It shows how the sunlight hits the south pole across an entire year.
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Are we finally seeing a sea change in the war between the right and left?

10:12 pm

This story today from what is generally considered a Democratic newspaper, suggests that the political debate has shifted strongly in favor of the Republicans and against Obama and the Democrats. From the Los Angeles Times: Deficit battle shaping up as GOP victory

Even as the political battle mounts over federal spending, the end result for federal policy is already visible — and clearly favors Republican goals of deep spending cuts and drastically fewer government services.

President Obama entered the fray last week to insist that federal deficits can’t be reduced through spending reductions alone. Federal tax revenue also must rise as part of whatever deficit reduction package Congress approves this summer, he said.

Obama has been pushing to end a series of what he calls tax loopholes and tax breaks for the rich. But even if Obama were to gain all the tax-law changes he wants, new revenue would make up only about 15 cents of each dollar in deficit reduction in the package. An agreement by the Republicans to accept new revenue would be a political victory for Obama because “no new taxes” has been such an article of faith for the GOP.

But substantively, budget experts note, the plan would still be dominated by cuts to government programs, many of them longtime Democratic priorities, such as Medicaid and federal employee pensions.

For a liberal newspaper to recognize and describe in detail the absurdity of Obama’s position on taxes versus cuts is remarkable. Normally a liberal newspaper would ignore the fact that the President’s suggested tax-law changes will bring in practically no significant revenue, and focus instead on the so-called refusal of Republicans to compromise. That the Los Angeles Times is not willing to carry water for Obama and the Democrats shows that the Democratic position is incredibly weak politically, and is likely to collapse if the Republicans stand firm. That the newspapers is also willing to describe fairly the Republican position, something liberal newspapers have almost never done in the past two decades, also suggests that they have had enough, and have finally realized how much their creditability has suffered in recent years by their unwillingness to cover political news honestly.

If this pattern spreads, the Republicans might find themselves getting everything — and more — of what they want. And that will be something I have not seen in almost fifty years of watching political life.

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Cassini looks past one Saturn moon to another

4:47 pm

The image below was taken on January 11, 2011 by the space probe Cassini, in orbit around Saturn. First we see the southern polar regions of the moon Rhea, 949 miles in diameter. Beyond is the moon Dione, 698 miles across, appearing to sit on the rings of Saturn.

As far as I am concerned, this image, as well as almost every other image from Cassini, proves that any hotel built in orbit around Saturn is unquestionably going to be one of the hottest tourist spots in the solar system.

Looking past Rhea to Dione and Saturn's rings

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Sunspots and the danger of crying wolf

11:54 am

It’s that time of year again, buckos. Every June, like clockwork, stories and op-eds like these start to flood the media:

Not surprisingly, these stories always happen about the same time our federal bureaucracy puts together a one day June propaganda event called the Space Weather Enterprise Forum, designed to sell to journalists the idea that we are all gonna die if we don’t spend gazillions of dollars building satellites for tracking the sun’s behavior. Along with this conference come numerous press releases, written by the conference’s backers. Here for example is a quote from a press release emailed to me and many journalists:

Recent activity on the Sun, captured in stunning imagery from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and the resulting threat of significant radiation storms and radio blackouts here on Earth are vivid reminders of our need to better understand the science, improve our forecasts and warnings, and better prepare ourselves for severe space weather storms as the next solar maximum approaches.

The problem for these fear-mongers, however, is that shortly before their forum the scientists who actually study the sun held another press conference, where they laid out in exquisite detail the sun’s astonishing recent decline in activity, and how the next solar maximum will likely be the weakest in centuries and might very well be the last maximum we will see for decades to come.

In other words, the annual effort by government bureaucrats to drum up funding for more space weather facilities has collided head on with the facts.

That there are science journalists from so many major news organization so easily conned into buying this fear-mongering is pitiful enough. More significant, however, is the fact that this annual effort at crying wolf has not been very successful. For years Congress has not funded any new space weather satellites, and doesn’t appear ready to do so in the future, especially with the present budget crisis.
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Mann and company write more science fiction

10:09 am

Junk science: Michael Mann and associates have just released a paper claiming “The rate of sea level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years–and has shown a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level.” You can read the paper itself here.

For many, many, many reasons, I agree here with scientist Richard Mueller, who believes in global warming but also believes in good science, “I now have a list of people whose papers I won’t read anymore.”

Nonetheless, I have looked at this new paper by Mann and crew, and find its evidence so weak it ain’t worth the paper it’s written on. To look at the record of a single fossil and claim it is a sufficient proxy for sea level rise is downright laughable.

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The battle between global warming and the sun

3:59 pm

The revelation last week that the sun is very likely about to go into a period of little or no sunspot activity has made a lot of global warming advocates, both scientists and journalists, very nervous. For years these climate activists have declared that the Earth’s climate is getting warmer, and that this warming trend was going to do us great harm. Putting aside whether these claims are based on fact (they are not), the possibility that the Earth might instead become cooler because of a dimming of the sun puts this political agenda under threat, and requires some form of immediate action to defuse that threat. See for example this short podcast (with full transcript) from Scientific American. The key quote:

A cooler sun might mean a drop in global average temperatures of at most 0.3 degree Celsius. But the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere today will add 0.6 degree Celsius to global average temperatures by the end of the century. And more, since greenhouse gas emissions show no signs of diminishing. So the slightly cooler sun won’t counteract a much hotter Earth.

In order to discredit the threat that solar variation poses to global warming, the journalist here acts to minimize any danger from a dimming sun. Unfortunately, he does so by extrapolating a result (warmer climates) based on a very weak foundation: an unproven theory and our very limited knowledge of the climate.
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Cool images from Mars and Mercury

11:57 am

Here are two image releases of interest, one from Mars and one from Mercury.

Pavonis Mons pit

First the Mars image. This close-up image of a pit, requested by a seventh grade Mars student team at Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, California, shows more evidence of underground voids on Mars. The pit is located on the flank of one of Mars’ larger volcanoes, and suggests that there is a lava tube below it. At some point the roof over the tube at this point became unstable and collapsed, producing the surface pit.

A close-up image of the shadowed part of the pit with the exposure turned way up unfortunately shows that there is no skylight in the pit into the lava tube.

Next, the Mercury image, from Messenger.
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The progenitor of the May supernova in M51 identified

10:08 am

supernova 2011dh before it exploded

The progenitor star that produced the May supernovae in the Whirlpool Galaxy (also known as M51) has been identified, and it isn’t what scientists predicted.

In a preprint paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph website, astronomers describe the star that exploded as a yellow supergiant, not a red supergiant or Wolf-Rayet star, as predicted by the theory explaining this particular type of supernova. Moreover, though theory also favors the star being a member of a binary system, the progenitor of 2011dh appears to be a lone star, not even a member of a cluster.
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Solar scientists predict a major decline in sunspot activity

1:37 pm

At a press conference today at the 2011 meeting of the Solar Physics Division (SPD) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Las Cruces, New Mexico, solar scientists predicted that not only will the next solar maximum in 2013 be the weakest in centuries, it is very likely that it will be followed by another long Maunder Minimum, a period of decades without sunspots. “The sun may be going into hiatus,” says Dr. Frank Hill, associate director of the NSO’s Solar Synoptic Network. You can read the press releases for this announcement here and here.

decline in magnetic field over the last few cycles

These conclusions are based on three lines of evidence:

  • There has been a long term weakening in the magnetic strength that produces sunspots themselves. The declining trend suggests that by 2022 it will no longer be strong enough to produce sunspots. The graph above shows this decline.
    » Read more
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Fires in Arizona: more than one

3:27 pm

Though the news has rightly been making a very big deal about the out-of-control Wallow wildfire in eastern Arizona, it turns out that this is not the only serious wildfire in the state.

Friends in Arizona clued me in on this website, Inciweb, which lists all the fires both active and inactive in the U.S. Of the active fires, Wallow is by far the biggest at almost 400,000 acres. However, there are three other big fires in the Coronado National Forest on the Mexican border whose total acreage exceeds 200,000 acres. These particular fires have shut down all public access to Coronado.

It is believed by one of my local Arizona friends that these fires are probably linked to either the illegal drug or immigrant smuggling that passes along the forest’s trails, coming north from Mexico. (When I was out in Tucson in January we saw clear evidence of this smuggling on these trails during one hike in the Huachuca Montains, with a lot of trash scattered along the trail and in several adjacent rock shelters.)

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A press conference of my very own

3:57 pm

This week the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland was holding a conference on the future research possibilities of the James Webb Space Telescope, and ended the conference with a writer’s workshop/press conference today.

Not surprisingly, there was not a lot of press interest. The Webb telescope is way behind schedule and over budget, and is not scheduled for launch until 2018. For most of the press, a press conference now on what Webb might someday do is really nothing more than a NASA sales pitch. Most reporters, including myself, don’t find these kinds of press conferences of much worth.

However, after thinking about it a bit, I decided to go, with the hope that I might be able to find out some more details about the state of the telescope’s construction.

To my astonishment, I discovered how little press interest there was, as it turned out I was the only journalist there! When the presentations ended, the whole workshop became an exercise in answering Bob Zimmerman’s questions about Webb and astronomy. I felt a bit embarrassed about this, but then decided the only stupid question is the one you don’t ask, and forged ahead. Moreover, the situation probably was far more embarrassing for the press people at the Institute then it was for me.
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After a burst the Sun quiets down again

3:57 pm

Time again for the monthly updated graph of the Sun’s solar cycle sunspot activity. Posted today by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, you can see the May results in the graph below.

After a three month steady rise in sunspot activity in January, February, and March, the numbers plummeted during April and May. Though the Sun remains active, with only one blank day since January 16, the pattern of activity as it ramps up to solar maximum continues to suggest that we are looking for the weakest solar maximum in two hundred years, as now predicted by solar scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Whether this weak maximum foreshadows another Maunder-like minimum, with no sunspots occurring for decades, remains unknown. Only time will tell. However, if such a thing should happen, it will be a marvelous opportunity for scientists to finally pin down precisely the actual influence of the Sun on the Earth’s climate. Up until now they can only guess at how much the Sun varies in brightness. Another Maunder Minimum will tell them.

May Sunspot activity

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