Category: Behind The Black

Strings of Martian cones

10:10 am

Strings of Martian cones

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 25, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The scientists describe these cones as “longitudinally aligned cones,” but this is puzzling since the alignment runs from the northwest to the south east, not north-south along the longitude.

No matter. The alignment is in itself the mystery, especially because the full image shows many more strings of cones in this area, all running from the northwest to the southeast. The strings also are all curved in the same way, sagging to the southwest as if expressing a wave flowing in that direction.

What could create these strings of cones? The overview map below gives us a hint.
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Chandrayaan-3 completes fourth engine burn in Earth orbit

9:04 am

Chandrayaan-3's mission profile

According to India’s space agency ISRO, engineers have successfully completed the fourth of about six engine burns designed to raise Chandrayaan-3’s Earth orbit in preparation for sending it on its path to the Moon.

As shown in the graphic to the right, these adjustments are relatively small, but each increases the speed of the spacecraft at its orbit’s closest point to the Earth. That extra velocity thus reduces the amount of fuel needed for that trans-lunar-injection burn.

If all the maneuvers continue to go as planned, the landing attempt will occur around August 23, 2023.

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South Korean researchers turn simulated lunar soil into building blocks

8:51 am

Using simulated lunar soil, South Korean researchers have developed the engineering that turns that soil into building blocks shaped as needed.

The researchers first produce simulated moon soil by grinding black volcanic rock from Cheorwon County bordering the North. They then use a microwave to turn the sand-like simulant into solidified blocks. Lee said the team has developed a technique to make blocks by heating the soil in a mold to more than 1,000 degrees Celsius in two to three hours and cooling them. In space, the process could be powered by nuclear energy.

The article at the link also provides a nice summary of the status of South Korea’s entire space effort.

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Viking cemetery found at new Saxavord spaceport in Scotland

8:43 am

Archeologists have discovered a Viking “ritual cremation cemetery” about 4,000 years old near the launch site at the new Saxavord spaceport in Scotland.

The burnt bones were found inside an arc of large granite boulders set into pits in the ground. A small platform of white quartz pebbles was also discovered which may have once been linked to a burial. Quartz is often associated with burial tombs in the prehistoric, and covered the entire outside wall of Newgrange in Ireland.

Test launches at Saxavord are expected to begin in the fall, with the first orbital launch next year. This schedule of course assumes launch licenses can be obtained from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority.

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July 20, 2023 Quick space links

3:34 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, helps make sure nothing gets missed.

 

 

 

 

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Real pushback: Stanford Law forces out administrator who aided and abetted a mob

12:31 pm

Tirien Steinbach: in favor of censorship and mob rule
Stanford’s former administrator Tirien Steinbach:
gone because she was in favor of censorship and
mob rule

Bring a gun to a knife fight: It appears that common sense and civilized behavior at Stanford Law School is finally being considered as the only proper behavior for the future and present lawyers that school is supposed to be training.

This story begins on March 9, 2023, when a mob of students and faculty at Stanford, led by Tirien Steinbach, the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion dean, shouted down U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan when he tried to give a lecture about the law for the school’s chapter of the Federalist Society.

At the time the school’s response was weak and inconsistent. Though it sent a letter of apology to Duncan, it also equivocated about punishing anyone who had misbehaved. No students were expelled or suspended, and Steinbach was simply put on leave, even as university officials attempted to portray her as the victim. As I wrote then:

[Law School Dean] Martinez still appeared sympathetic to Steinbach, expressing “..concern over the hateful and threatening messages [Steinbach] has received as a result of viral online and media attention.”

Now, four months later Martinez has finally announced that Steinbach is resigning her post, though even now Martinez appeared regretful that this resignation was necessary.
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Unknown Mars

11:36 am

MRO context camera mosaic
Click for interactive global mosaic.

Cool image time! The picture to the right was created from a global mosaic of all the context camera images taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) since it entered Mars orbit in 2006. It shows an unnamed 17-mile-wide-depression located only about seven miles south of the southern rim of Valles Marineris.

I highlight this particular depression because, despite seventeen years in orbit, MRO’s high resolution camera has at this time still not taken any pictures inside or around it. This is a place on Mars that remains unstudied in detail, in any way, even though its depth is comparable to the Grand Canyon and its features strongly suggest its is a collapse feature, created when the roof over an underground void gave way. If so, it suggests an origin for Valles Marineris that conflicts with present theories.
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China’s Kuaizhou-1A rocket launches four satellites

10:57 am

China’s Kuaizhou-1A solid-fueled smallsat rocket today successfully launched what the state-run press said were four weather satellites “belonging to the Tianmu-1 meteorological constellation.”

The launch was from China’s Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China, so the rocket’s lower stages crashed somewhere inside China. No word on where or if they landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

48 SpaceX
27 China
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 55 to 27, and the entire world combined 55 to 46, with SpaceX by itself leading the entire world combined (excluding other American companies) 48 to 46.

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Hubble image shows several dozen boulders flung from Dimorphos

9:40 am

Boulders drifting from Dimorphos
Click for original image.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have photographed several dozen boulders that were flung off of the asteroid Dimorphos following the impact by the space probe DART. The picture to the right, reduced and brightened to more clearly show those boulders, was taken on December 19, 2022, four months after DART’s impact.

These are among the faintest objects Hubble has ever photographed inside the Solar System. The ejected boulders range in size from 1 meter to 6.7 meters across, based on Hubble photometry. They are drifting away from the asteroid at around a kilometre per hour.

The blue streak is the dust tail that has streamed off of Dimorphos since the impact, pushed away from the sun by the solar wind.

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The possibility of more than one exoplanet sharing the same orbit

9:27 am

PDS 70, as seen by ALMA
The Trojan debris clouds around PDS 70, as seen by ALMA

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have detected evidence that suggests the possibility of more than one exoplanet sharing the same orbit around PDS 70, a star 400 light years away.

This young star is known to host two giant, Jupiter-like planets, PDS 70b and PDS 70c. By analysing archival ALMA observations of this system, the team spotted a cloud of debris at the location in PDS 70b’s orbit where Trojans are expected to exist.

Trojans occupy the so-called Lagrangian zones, two extended regions in a planet’s orbit where the combined gravitational pull of the star and the planet can trap material. Studying these two regions of PDS 70b’s orbit, astronomers detected a faint signal from one of them, indicating that a cloud of debris with a mass up to roughly two times that of our Moon might reside there.

The press release — as well as most news reports — touts the possibility that they have found a second planet in this orbit. They have not, and are likely not going to. As noted above, the data indicates the presence of “a cloud of debris”, which is most likely a clustering of Trojan asteroids, just as the more than 12,000 asteroids we see in the two Trojan points in Jupiter’s orbit.

Nonetheless, this is the first detection of what appears to be a Trojan clustering in the accretion disk of a young star.

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NOAA pays smallsat company PlanetiQ $60 million for its weather data

9:12 am

Capitalism in space: NOAA today awarded the smallsat company PlanetiQ a $60 million contract to provide the agency weather data from the company’s planned constellation of 20 satellites.

At present two satellites are in orbit, with more scheduled for launch in 2024. The satellites use data obtained in orbit from the different GPS-type satellite constellations to determine the atmosphere’s temperature, pressure, humidity and electron density.

In 2018 NOAA had awarded PlanetiQ and two other commercial companies, Spire and GeoOptics, small developmental contracts. This appears to be the first full contract, and continues NOAA’s very slow shift from building its own weather satellites to buying data from commercial satellites built by private companies. The agency has resisted this change, but since it can’t get its own satellites built and launched on budget or on time, it is increasingly being forced to do so.

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ISRO successfully tests propulsion system of Gaganyaan’s service module

8:56 am

India’s space agency ISRO revealed today that it has successfully completed the second phase of static fire engine tests of the complete propulsion system to be used by the service module of its Gaganyaan’s manned space capsule.

The first hot test of the Phase-2 test series demonstrated the integrated performance of the Gaganyaan Service Module Propulsion System. The test, conducted for a duration of 250 seconds, involved LAM engines firing in continuous mode, along with RCS thrusters, adhering to the test profile.

As part of the Phase-1 test series of SM SDM, ISRO had previously conducted five hot tests, totalling a duration of 2750 seconds. The earlier phase involved five 440 N LAM engines and eight 100 N RCS thrusters. For the Phase-2 test series, the current configuration includes the full configuration of five 440 N LAM engines and sixteen 100 N RCS thrusters.

ISRO had been hoping to launch the first manned mission in ’24, but that target date remains very uncertain.

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Scientists discover in archival data a slowly pulsing object that has been beating since 1988

8:48 am

The uncertainty of science: Using archival data, scientists have discovered a previously undetected but very strange slowly pulsing object that has been doing so since 1988.

Astronomers have found an ultra-slow, long-lasting source of radio-wave pulses, and they are perplexed as to its true nature. While “regular” radio pulsars have very short periods, from seconds down to just a few milliseconds, this source emits a brief pulse of radio waves about three times per hour. What’s more, it has been doing this for decades. “I do not think we can say yet what this object is,” says Victoria Kaspi (McGill University), a pulsar researcher who was not involved in the new study.

Natasha Hurley-Walker (Curtin University, Australia) and her colleagues discovered the mysterious source in data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) observatory in Western Australia. They carried out follow-up observations with the MWA and with other radio observatories in Australia and South Africa. Known as GPM J1839-10, the tardy blinker is located at a distance of some 18,500 light-years away in the constellation Scutum. Archival data from the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Indian Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope reveal that it has been pulsating at least since 1988, with a period of just under 22 minutes (1,318.1957 seconds, to be precise).

In a sense, the object is a pulsar, since on a very basic level it does what all pulsars do, send a radio beat in our direction in a precise pattern. The problem is that according to present theories that say pulsars are actually magnetized neutron stars rotating quickly, this object is rotating too slowly to be one.

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SpaceX launches 15 more Starlink satellites into orbit

9:20 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched fifteen more Starlink satellites into orbit, lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its tenth flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific. Both fairings successfully completed their sixth flight.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

48 SpaceX
26 China (with a launch also planned for tonight)
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 55 to 26, and the entire world combined 55 to 45, with SpaceX by itself leading the entire world combined (excluding other American companies) 48 to 45.

An additional note: This was the 100th successful orbital launch in 2023. In the history of space rocketry, reaching 100 launches in a year was generally considered an indication of an active launch year. Now the global rocket industry accomplishes it in just over half the year. Last year set a record with 179 launches. There is now an outside chance of breaking that, topping 200 launches in 2023.

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Ancient lava vent high on a Martian volcano

2:39 pm

Ancient lava vent high on a Martian volcano
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image illustrates the once violent and active volcanic past of Mars, now long dormant. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 11, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as a “vent and channel” located high on the northeast flanks of the giant volcano Arsia Mons.

The rim around the vent suggests that lava had once bubbled up out of the vent and hardened around it, as most of the lava flowed downhill along the channel. And though this vent appears to be the source of this channel, it is not. The channel continues to the southwest uphill until it reaches the edge of Arsia Mons’ caldera, a region where there are many such vents, many much larger and deeper than this one.
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Pushback: Arizona State University loses major donor for its anti-first amendment actions

1:10 pm

Arizona State University: opposed to free speech

Bring a gun to a knife fight: In protest of Arizona State University’s anti-first amendment actions, a major donor, Tom Lewis, has withdrawn an annual $400K donation, used to support the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development at ASU’s Barrett College facility that Lewis had contributed more than $2 million to found.

His action was prompted by the hostility and opposition to a February 8, 2023 university event by Barrett College’s faculty, including a petition signed by 37 of 47 members, condemning the event, before it had even occurred. From his press release [pdf]:

Because these were mostly conservative speakers, we expected some opposition, but I was shocked and disappointed by the alarming and outright hostility demonstrated by the Barrett faculty and administration toward these speakers. Instead of sponsoring this event with a spirit of cooperation and respect for free speech, Barrett faculty and staff exposed the radical ideology that now apparently dominates the college.

After seeing this level of left-wing hostility and activism, I no longer had any confidence in Barrett to adhere to the terms of our gift, and made the decision to terminate our agreement, effective June 30, 2023.

Adding weight to Lewis’ decision was the fact that several weeks earlier ASU had fired the Lewis Center’s executive director, Ann Atkinson, as well as Lin Blake, the events operator for the theater where the event was held. Atkinson made it clear their termination was retaliation because they had organized the February conference.
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Stanford president resigns due to research fraud allegations

12:07 pm

The president of Stanford University, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, has now resigned because of allegations of fraud and data manipulation in papers published by him and others.

The report finds that overall Tessier-Lavigne “did not have actual knowledge of any manipulation of research data” and “was not reckless in failing to identify” the problems in the papers. Yet it concludes that he did not respond adequately when concerns were raised about the papers on PubPeer or by a colleague at four different points over 2 decades—most recently in March 2021. For example, it chides him for failing to follow up when Science did not publish the corrections he submitted.

The report also faults Tessier-Lavigne for his “suboptimal” decision not to correct or retract the 2009 Nature paper, despite “vigorous discussions” about what to do; instead, he and colleagues published follow-up papers revising the findings. Without “an appropriate appetite” for corrections, “the often-claimed self-correcting nature of the scientific process will not occur,” the report says.

In other words, he too often looked the other way when associates were sloppy or were found to have faked data.

This story is an addendum to one I posted yesterday, where a researcher in 2020 had found 1 in 4 clinical trials to be either unreliable or fraudulent. His revelation however was ignored by the medical community, just as Tessier-Lavigne ignored fraud or sloppiness at his own lab.

Nor has anything really changed in the medical research community. Though Tessier-Lavigne has stepped down, the actual perpetrators of the fraud are facing no punishment.

Despite the findings of data manipulation, the report does not assign responsibility to any specific members of Tessier-Lavigne’s lab or determine whether the data manipulation fit the federal definition of research misconduct, “fabrication, falsification, fabrication, or plagiarism.” Whether the findings should be reported to the federal Office of Research Integrity will be up to Stanford, Filip says.

It appears we can trust little from the modern medical research community. There is certainly good work being done, but telling the difference between the good and the bad is now very difficult, if not impossible.

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Astronomers detect white dwarf star with two faces

9:13 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers using ground-based telescopes have discovered a white dwarf star in which the surface chemistry of its two hemispheres are very different, one strongly dominated by hydrogen while the other instead dominated by helium.

The team used the Low Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (LRIS) on the Keck I Telescope to view Janus in optical wavelengths (light that our eyes can see) as well as the Near-Infrared Echellette Spectrograph (NIRES) on the Keck II Telescope to observe the white dwarf in infrared wavelengths. The data revealed the white dwarf’s chemical fingerprints, which showed the presence of hydrogen when one side of the object was in view (with no signs of helium), and only helium when the other side swung into view.

The article lists a lot of proposed explanations, most of which suggest the star’s magnetic field is acting to segregate the materials. All assume these observations are certain and that there is no mixing at all, something we should doubt considering the resolution of the data (a mere point that is rotating).

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Venezuela officially signs onto Chinese lunar base project

9:04 am

Venezuela on July 17, 2023 officially signed an agreement with China to participate in China’s lunar base project.

Venezuela is the first nation, after Russia, to sign on to the project.

Since Venezuela has no space industry and is a bankrupt socialist state that can barely feed its people, this at first glance appears to merely be an effort by China for some international PR. One detail from the article however tells us what the deal is really about: “Venezuela will make its satellite control ground station infrastructure available for lunar missions.” In exchange for providing Venezuela some minor educational aid, China gets use of the ground stations that presently exist in Venezuela, and likely the right to build its own there as well.

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July 18, 2023 Quick space links

4:04 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who acts as a second pair of eyes to make sure we don’t miss anything.

 

 

 

 

 

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Ohio Attorney General to college administrators: Discriminate and YOU will be personally liable

1:28 pm

Making the law mean something again
Making the law mean something again

Bring a gun to a knife fight: In what is certain to become the most powerful deterrent to leftist bigotry in academia, Ohio attorney general Dave Yost has notified the administrators in his state’s public colleges that “qualified immunity” will not be available to them if they are personally sued for discriminating against any individuals and lose.

Employees found guilty of such practices as employing application essays to discern an applicant’s race “might not be protected by qualified immunity, a doctrine that protects public officials from being personally liable in certain situations,” Yost wrote, according to The Dispatch. “Any attempt to invoke that doctrine would likely be frivolous, and my office may be unable to raise any qualified immunity defense on your employees’ behalf,” Yost wrote.

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Glacial evidence in the dry equatorial regions of Mars?

11:15 am

Is this evidence of glacial ice in the Martian dry equatorial regions?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, rotated, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 3, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the eastern half of a six-mile-wide unnamed crater with a depth of about 1,500 to 2,000 feet from rim to floor.

What makes this picture significant is the patchy material in the center of that crater floor, some of which looks almost like very old peeling paint. It also resembles the kind of glacial features routinely seen in many craters poleward of 30 degrees latitude on Mars.

Is this another example of such glacial features? If so, its location is what makes it significant.
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The results of one in four medical clinical trials are probably fraudulent or unreliable

9:11 am

In 2020 a researcher in Great Britain decided to analyze the raw data used by 500 medical clinical trials, and found that one in four contained fraudulent or unreliable data.

Carlisle, an anaesthetist who works for England’s National Health Service, is renowned for his ability to spot dodgy data in medical trials. He is also an editor at the journal Anaesthesia, and in 2017, he decided to scour all the manuscripts he handled that reported a randomized controlled trial (RCT) — the gold standard of medical research. Over three years, he scrutinized more than 500 studies.

For more than 150 trials, Carlisle got access to anonymized individual participant data (IPD). By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data.

Carlisle called these ‘zombie’ trials because they had the semblance of real research, but closer scrutiny showed they were actually hollow shells, masquerading as reliable information. Even he was surprised by their prevalence. “I anticipated maybe one in ten,” he says.

There is the real story, however.

Carlisle rejected every zombie trial, but by now, almost three years later, most have been published in other journals — sometimes with different data to those submitted with the manuscript he had seen. He is writing to journal editors to alert them, but expects that little will be done.

In other words, the peer-review medical community continues to allow fake research to be published, even when it has been warned that research is fake.

But of course, we must trust everything they tell us. They are SCIENTISTS, and we must “follow the SCIENCE!”

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SpaceX to raise another $750 million in stock sale; earnings rise to $8 billion in ’23

8:49 am

According to anonymous sources, a new stock sale at SpaceX is likely to raise another $750 million because of enthusiasm on Wall Street for the stock due to the company’s growing earnings, which are expected to double to $8 billion this year.

Last week, CNBC reported that Elon Musk’s SpaceX valuation reached nearly $150B following an announcement of a stock sale by existing investors. According to a copy of the purchase offer sent by CFO Bret Johnsen, which CNBC obtained, the company has entered into an agreement with new and existing investors to sell up to $750 million in stock at a price of $81 per share. This represents a 5% increase from the previous secondary sale at $77 per share, which valued the company at approximately $140B. SpaceX has not provided any comments regarding the purchase offer.

Though the article does not say, that revenue comes from two sources, SpaceX’s rocket launches and its Starlink constellation. In the first case the company dominates the launch industry, because its launch price is so much cheaper than everyone else. In the second case, Starlink is producing so much revenue because Elon Musk forced the company to move fast and get its satellites in orbit quickly. Though both SpaceX and Amazon announced their internet constellations at about the same time, Amazon has still not launched any satellites, while SpaceX has more than 4,000 in orbit. This active and operating constellation has allowed SpaceX to grab market share that Amazon is now likely never to get, even when it begins launching.

All this makes SpaceX very appealing to investors, which is why its private stock price has gone up. It is also why it has been able to raise now almost $11 billion in private investment capital for building both Starlink and its Starship/Superheavy rocket.

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Rocket Lab launches seven satellites; recovers first stage from ocean

6:46 pm

Rocket Lab today successfully used its Electron rocket to place seven smallsats into orbit, lifting off from New Zealand.

The first stage used parachutes to softly splash down in the ocean, where it was recovered for refurbishment and relaunch. As this stage is the first in which this full reuse will be attempted, the ability to refurbish the stage after its salt water swim remains the critical factor. We will not know its state until a complete inspection plus static fire engine tests are completed.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

47 SpaceX
26 China
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 54 to 26, and the entire world combined 54 to 45, while SpaceX alone still leads the rest of the world (excluding other American companies) 47 to 45.

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