An evening pause: Remembered mostly today for his dedication to entertaining our American troops overseas as well as his comedy movies with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope was more than this. He had one of the quickest wits of any comic in history combined with a manner that was gentle but honest. It is a shame that few comics today can put this combination together, going instead for a kind of Don Rickles-type insult humor instead. Here is Hope (with his co-star Jane Russell) in the movie The Paleface, showing that he could sing as well. The second-half of the clip shows a not-too-interesting skit with Roy Rogers and (again) Jane Russell with all three singing the same song:
This interview of Charles Bolden, NASA administrator, is another example (in a long list of examples) of the clearly misplaced priorities of the Obama administration when it comes to NASA and space exploration.
The key quote is in the first two minutes of the interview [emphasis mine]:
Bolden: When I became the NASA Administrator – before I became the NASA Administrator – [President Obama] charged me with three things: One was that he wanted me to re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, that he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.
Though all three of these priorities (inspire kids, international cooperation, and help the Muslim world develop) sound nice, none have anything to do with space exploration. More specifically, they have absolutely nothing to do with NASA’s original charter, which was to explore the solar system and encourage the development of the American aerospace industry.
At about 9:50, Bolden then states that “We’re not going to go anywhere beyond low Earth orbit as a single entity. The United States can’t do it. China can’t do it. No single nation is going to go to a place like Mars alone.”
Gee, I wonder what international consortium put those men on the Moon? I always thought the U.S. did it alone. According to Bolden, however, that was impossible: No single nation can do anything alone beyond Earth orbit.
There are more inanities in this interview. Listen for example to his clueless discussion of solar flares at around 19:00 and his statement at 20:30 where he claims an asteroid made of “sand” poses no threat to the Earth.
With leadership like this, the future does not look good for the American aerospace industry.
The launching post of Andrew Breibart’s Big Peace website expresses best why the courage to defend freedom and liberty at all costs is the best guarantor of peace.
The press finally notices the absurdities of Obama’s new space policy, something I have been talking about for months, and noted again earlier this week.
Saturday’s weekly dump of publications from the American Geophysical Union also included a paper that showed visual proof of avalanches on Mars! In this case, the location is Russell Crater, “a large crater in the southern hemisphere that exposes a large dune field in its center.” The avalanches occur because a frost layer made up of dry ice and a little bit of frozen water builds up on the crest of the dunes. When that frost melts, dark streaks about three to six feet wide and about 150 feet long appear, flowing downhill. The scientists believe these are avalanches made up of “a mixing of sand, dust, and unstable CO2 gas.”
Before and after shots of the dark streaks flowing down the dune.
A very long (182 pages) and detailed preprint paper was published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph website, describing the completion of a survey of just about all the sunlike stars within approximately 82 light years of the Earth. I haven’t had time to read the whole thing, but the abstract made these notable points:
The study found that more the fifty percent of all sunlike stars are single stars.
Among double and triple systems, the bell curve for the orbital periods peaked at 300 years.
The more heavy elements the star has (atoms more complex than hydrogen and helium), the more likely it will have planets.
The very intriguing conclusion: “The fraction of planet hosts among single, binary, and multiple systems are statistically indistinguishable, suggesting that planets are as likely to form around single stars as they are around components of binary or multiple systems with sufficiently wide separations. This, along with the preference of long orbital periods among stellar systems, increases the space around stars conducive for planet formation, and perhaps life.” [You need to download the full pdf to see this quote in the unabridged abstract.]
In other words, the evidence continues to suggest that solar systems like ours are very common.
I haven’t been posting that much this weekend because I’ve been very busy, doing American July 4th types of things: mainly guns and fireworks! On Saturday, I went to the 12th Precinct Pistol and Archery Club for the range’s twice weekly bullseye target pistol league competition. Shot a pretty good 817 out of 900 with my 22 caliber pistol, and a mediocre 733 with my 45. » Read more
For those who fantasize that Mars might still have vast underground lakes with fish, the recent data is unfortunately not encouraging. A paper published today by the American Geophysical Union suggests that if groundwater exists on Mars, it is going to be increasingly difficult to find, possibly only in the low latitudes at low elevations. These paragraphs from the conclusion of the paper say it all:
Various lines of evidence suggest that at the time of the Late Hesperian, Mars possessed a planetary inventory of water equal to a global ocean ~0.5 km deep, much of which is believed to have been stored as ground ice and groundwater in the subsurface. The potential survival of groundwater to the present-day has important implications for understanding the geological, hydrological and mineralogical evolution of the planet, as well as the potential survival of native Martian life. The two most important factors affecting the persistence of groundwater on Mars are the depth and pore volume of the cryosphere.
To date, the orbital radar sounding data from MARSIS [an instrument on Mars Orbital Express] has provided little evidence of any deep reflectors potentially indicative of subpermafrost groundwater. Here we have examined two (of several) possible explanations for this lack of evidence: (1) that subpermafrost groundwater no longer survives on Mars or (2) that groundwater is present, but that a thicker than expected cryosphere has restricted its occurrence to depths that exceed the estimated ~3 km maximum sounding depth of MARSIS.
[snip]
Which one (or combination) of explanations discussed here is responsible for the lack of deep reflectors on Mars is unknown. But our revised estimates of cryosphere depth suggest that a successful detection of subpermafrost groundwater, outside of those areas on Mars that combine low latitude and low elevation, is unlikely. In an effort to better constrain this problem, a more comprehensive investigation of the MARSIS sounding data obtained over Athabasca Valles, and four other low-elevation, near-equatorial sites, is currently underway.
Tonight, from 9 pm to 1 am (EDT), I will be on the John Batchelor Show. John is off tonight, so the guest host is Simon Constable, with yours truly acting as his co-host. For my part, I’ve arranged four guests:
Dr. Roy Spencer, climatogist and former NASA scientist, who will discuss the recently published global warming black list as well as other climate change issues.
Then I have brought in three guests to talk about the Obama administration’s new space policy and the space war developing between the administration and Congress over the administration’s effort to cancel the Constellation program:
Scott “Doc” Horowitz, former astronaut and designer of the Ares rocket. He will offer his reasons for opposing the Obama space proposals.
Dr. Charles Lurio, space analyst and publisher of the Lurio Report. He will outline reasons to support the Obama proposals.
Dr. David Livingston, host of the Space Show. He will fill us in on the state of the aerospace community and what it thinks of the Obama proposals.
Each will have his own 15 minute segment to express his views. Should be a fun time tonight.
