Category: Behind The Black

China launches 5 military reconnaissance satellites

9:37 am

Using its Long March 6 rocket, China today successfully launched five military reconnaissance satellites.

This is China’s fourth successful launch in the past week.

Though this newer rocket’s first stage does not use toxic hypergolic fuels — China’s older rockets — that first stage still crashes in China after its job is done and it falls to Earth. No word on whether it landed near inhabited regions.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

22 China
20 SpaceX
11 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. still leads China 29 to 22 in the national rankings.

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Today’s blacklisted American: YouTube shuts down channel that routinely broadcasts Trump rallies

1:28 pm

The Bill of Rights cancelled at YouTube
No first amendment allowed at YouTube.

Persecution is now cool! One day prior to the July 3, 2021 Trump rally in Florida, YouTube unilaterally suspended Right Side Broadcasting, the channel most well known for live streaming such events.

The suspension was for seven days. YouTube also deleted the channel’s videos from several other Trump events. From Right Side Broadcasting blog announcement:

YouTube has suspended RSBN from live streaming and posting content to their YouTube channel on the eve of President Donald Trump’s Save America rally in Sarasota, Florida.

YouTube has also deleted all of RSBN’s coverage of Trump’s June 26 rally in Wellington, Ohio, along with his June 5 speech to the North Carolina GOP convention.

The videos deleted had several million views.

As is usual for these efforts at censorship, YouTube merely claimed that “The videos contain remarks from President Trump that violate the aforementioned policies and countervailing views on those remarks are not provided.” Of course, YouTube has never demanded any Democrat to provide “countervailing views” during their political rallies, and I am sure the Google-owned video broadcasting service never will.
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Ingenuity’s view of Jezero Crater during its 9th flight

11:57 am

Ingenuity looks across Jezero Crater
Click for full image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The photo above, cropped, enhanced, and reduced to post here, was taken on July 5, 2021, about thirty seconds after Ingenuity had taken off on its 9th flight on Mars. I have increased the contrast slightly to bring out the features. This is a raw image, so I do not think the colors are accurate, and I also do not know why the middle of the image is brighter than the edges.

The red lines on the map to the right indicates the general area this image captures. Essentially, once the helicopter reached its flying altitude after liftoff the engineers had it tilt so that it could see the route it was about to take to the southwest. As they noted in their description of this flight,

We began by dipping into what looks like a heavily eroded crater, then continued to descend over sloped and undulating terrain before climbing again to emerge on a flat plain to the southwest.

I think that crater is visible on the left edge of this picture.

So far 180 raw images from Ingenuity have arrived at JPL. There might be a few more, but I think this is the bulk from the flight. Of these, all but nine are black and white and point straight down. The nine color images seem tilted up towards the horizon to various degrees, though the image above is the only one that captures the horizon itself and the distance mountains of Jezero Crater’s rim.

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Watching Virgin Galactic’s suborbital flight on July 11th

10:24 am

Capitalism in space: Virgin Galactic has now made available the live stream for its planned suborbital flight on July 11th that will also carry the company’s founder, Richard Branson.

I have embedded the live stream below the fold. Though the company has not announced an actual launch time, according to that stream the broadcast is now scheduled to begin at about 9 am (Eastern). The flight itself should last about ninety minutes total, from takeoff of the carrier airplane to landing of both it and the suborbital spacecraft, VSS Unity.

The weightless portion of the flight will last about four minutes or so. Unity will get to more than 50 miles altitude, which meets the American definition of space but not the international standard of 67 miles. For more details about the flight, see this Space.com article.

Expect the broadcast to be filled with endless hype and blather about how “spectacular” and “amazing” and “wonderful” Virgin Galactic is. And yes, what the company is doing is very cool, a privately financed manned spacecraft capable of reaching space, returning to Earth, and then flying again. Unfortunately, both suborbital companies (Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin) seem to think they have to convince people of this obvious fact on their broadcasts, and scream it at the viewers endlessly. They would be wiser to take SpaceX’s soft-sell approach: State once what they are accomplishing and then simply report on what actually happens, with no breathless commentary.

I don’t expect that to happen however. Thus, I’m not sure I can stomach hours on end of Virgin Galactic PR hype on Sunday, especially considering that this spaceflight by Branson is more than a decade late. His own endless hype for the last fifteen years, promising over and over again that he would be flying in mere months, has soured me from any desire to listen to more. Maybe I’ll go on a hike instead.
» Read more

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British startup rocket company wants to recover only satellite launched by UK

10:08 am

Capitalism in space: Skyrora, a British startup rocket company which is attempting to build the first rocket using hypersonic technology, has now issued a challenge to the commercial space industry to come up with a plan to snatch from orbit the only satellite ever launched by a rocket built by the United Kingdom and bring it back safely to Earth.

Edinburgh-based rocket company Skyrora is issuing a challenge to find a way to retrieve the Prospero satellite. The object was the first and only UK spacecraft to be launched on a British rocket, from Australia in 1971. It’s defunct now, obviously, but is still circling the globe on an elliptical orbit some 1,000km up.

Skyrora, who will soon start sending up rockets from Scotland, regards the satellite as an important piece of UK space heritage. The company has already recovered part of the Black Arrow vehicle that placed Prospero in orbit. This fell back to Australia in the course of the mission where it languished for decades in the Outback until the firm had it shipped home and put on display.

Now, Skyrora is looking for ideas as to how best to approach and grab hold of the 66kg satellite, whose original mission was to investigate the space environment.

After that single successful launch of Black Arrow, the British government decided to abandon it, and in fact for the next half century refused to invest any money in space, at all. While the decision was probably economically wise for the government, it also did not do anything to encourage a private space industry, and for the next half century there was none in the UK. This is now finally changing, but fortunately not as a government space program like Black Arrow but as a competitive private launch industry aimed at profit.

Recovering Prospero would be a nice public relations stunt that might help further encourage that private industry.

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NASA to scientists: Don’t expect to use SLS for science missions for at least a decade

9:58 am

In a briefing held by the planetary science community to propose its future missions for the next decade, a NASA official explained that there will likely be no available launches on NASA’s SLS rocket for planetary missions until the late 2020s, and more likely not until the next decade.

While NASA has a goal of being able to launch three SLS missions in a 24-month period, and two in 12 months, the supply chain is currently limited to one SLS per year. That will change by the early 2030s, [the official] said, growing to two per year and thus creating opportunities for additional SLS missions beyond the Artemis program. That will be enabled by changes to at the Michoud Assembly Facility to increase core stage production and a “block upgrade” to the RS-25 engine used on that core stage that will be cheaper and faster to produce.

The official also claimed that the cost of buying a launch on SLS is at best going to be $800 million, but that price won’t be available until the ’30s when SLS’s are launching more frequently. Until then, it appears NASA will charge one billion per launch.

All of this is pure fantasy on NASA’s part. Once cheaper and more usable private commercial rockets come on line, such as SpaceX’s Starship, SLS will go the way of the horse buggy. And this is likely to happen much sooner than 2030, more likely in the next three years.

Moreover, for both cost and practical reasons I cannot see any planetary scientist planning a mission on SLS, ever. There are now much cheaper options that are actually flying, such as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which costs about $100 million per launch. Moreover, SLS’s slow and cumbersome launch pace should scare any planetary scientist away, as such missions must launch on time, and SLS might easily miss their launch windows. In fact, this has already happened. For years Congress mandated that Europa Clipper launch on SLS. When it became clear that SLS would not be available for that mission’s launch window, Congress finally relented and allowed NASA to buy the launch from a commercial company.

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China targets 2024 for next lunar sample return mission

9:42 am

The new colonial movement: China’s next robotic lunar sample return mission, called Chang’e-6 and targeted for a 2024 launch, will also attempt to bring back the first samples from the far side of the Moon.

Hu Hao, chief engineer of the China Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center, announced in a statement released on China’s national space day in April this year that the Chang’e 6 probe, consisting of an orbiter, lander, lunar ascent vehicle and reentry capsule, will target the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin.The SPA basin is a colossal, ancient impact crater roughly 1,550 miles (2,500 kilometers) in diameter that covers almost a quarter of the moon’s far side. The impact basin, considered to be the oldest on the moon, holds vital clues about the history of the moon and the solar system, according to a new report.

The precise spot for landing has not been revealed. Since the basin is so large and covers the Moon’s south pole, the mission could land in that region where ice is thought to possibly exist in the permanently shadowed floors of some craters. Whether they would attempt a landing in one of those craters is presently unknown, though unlikely because of the technical challenge.

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FAA initiates new prelaunch air space clearance system

9:33 am

FAA has now begun using a new prelaunch air space clearance system that is intended to shorten the time airplane travel is disturbed by the scheduled launch of a rocket.

[The FAA] developed the Space Data Integrator (SDI) tool to reduce how long ATO must close airspace around space launches and reentries. The system is voluntary. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Firefly, and the Alaska Aerospace Corporation are current partners. SDI was first used operationally for SpaceX’s Transporter-2 launch last week and is being used for the SpaceX-22 Cargo Dragon reentry today.

…Space operators now are voluntarily sharing telemetry data including vehicle position, altitude and speed, as well as data if the vehicle deviates from its expected flight path. Asked when additional companies might join, Monteith said he would have to defer to ATO to answer that question.

…Using the automated SDI system coupled with “time-based procedures and dynamic windows,” the FAA expects to be able to shorten airspace closures “from an average of more than four hours per launch to just more than two hours” and eventually less.

The article makes no mention whether this new system will allow the FAA to shrink the closure areas as well, which was Elon Musk’s main complaint after SpaceX’s Transporter-2 launch near the end of June was scrubbed seconds before launch when a helicopter slipped into that airspace. As Musk wrote in a tweet,

Unfortunately, launch is called off for today, as an aircraft entered the “keep out zone”, which is unreasonably gigantic. There is simply no way that humanity can become a spacefaring civilization without major regulatory reform. The current regulatory system is broken.

I suspect there is discussion to reduce the size of the closure areas, but I also suspect that the FAA is resisting industry calls to do so.

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Curiosity looks across at the alien landscape of Gale Crater

2:25 pm

Curiosity's view across Gale Crater
Click for full image.

Most of the images from Curiosity that I have posted recently have been of the spectacular mountain scenery looking south at Mount Sharp itself. Today’s cool image, taken on July 6, 2021 by the rover’s right navigation camera and cropped to post here, instead looks north, out across the floor of Gale Crater to its distant rim about twenty miles away.

The rover is likely not to move for a week or so, as it has just completed drilling its first drillhole since it moved up into the next geological layer, dubbed the sulfate unit. Because of this they have been using the rover’s cameras to take a lot of pictures of the surrounding terrain, including several high resolution mosaics.

The two overview maps below show what the cool image above is looking at.
» Read more

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Engineers successful complete simulation of Hubble repair

12:30 pm

Though the details released are sparse, engineers working to get the Hubble Space Telescope back in operation since it shut down due to a computer problem in mid-June report today that they have successfully completed a simulation of the procedures they need to do to fix the problem.

This is their entire report:

[The engineers] successfully completed a test of procedures that would be used to switch to backup hardware on Hubble in response to the payload computer problem. This switch could occur next week after further preparations and reviews.

Apparently, because the switch to backup hardware requires switching more than one unit, the sequence is important and following it correctly is critical. It appears they have now determined the correct sequence and will attempt it on Hubble next week.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Facebook to punish users who link to peer-reviewed science it dislikes

12:21 pm

Modern science!
How Facebook applies science.

Blacklists are back and Facebook’s got ’em! Facebook is now warning its users that it will punish them if they repeatedly link to peer-reviewed science papers that document the long known harmful effects from improper mask use.

Facebook is warning users against sharing a study that found dangerously high carbon-dioxide intake in masked schoolchildren, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics. “Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will see their overall distribution reduced and be restricted in other ways,” the warning says when users paste the link on Facebook, before confirming they want to share it.

It’s giving the same warning and threat of account restrictions to users who paste a link to Townhall.com article on a University of Florida lab that found dangerous pathogens on children’s face masks, submitted for testing by their parents. [emphasis mine]

Apparently, Facebook’s “‘fact-check’ simply highlight[ed] disagreements between the scientist who conducted the test and other scientists who did not conduct the test. … Instead of acknowledging that more study would resolve the dispute, [Facebook] call[ed] the report false. That’s not science — that’s propaganda.”

The second study about the number of very bad pathogens that gather on masks used during a single day was already discussed by me in an earlier post. That study found that after a single day of use,
» Read more

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Problems with Blue Origin’s engine force more delays of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket

10:28 am

In a detailed and very informative review of the partnership between ULA and Blue Origin yesterday, Eric Berger at Ars Technica noted these unfolding facts:

For years, United Launch Alliance chief executive Tory Bruno had been saying the new Vulcan rocket, powered by two [Blue Origin] BE-4 engines, would launch in 2021. However, he recently told Aviation Week the first launch would slip into 2022. Bruno said this was due primarily to the mission’s customer, Astrobotic, whose Moon lander was not ready. Technically, Bruno said, Vulcan still had a chance to be ready for a 2021 launch.

This seems highly unlikely because it is already July, and United Launch Alliance (ULA) still does not have a pair of flight engines. After receiving the flight engines from Blue Origin, ULA needs to attach them to the Vulcan rocket, roll it to the launch pad, and conduct a lengthy series of tests before a hot-fire ignition. After this hot-fire test, the rocket will be rolled back to the hangar and prepared for an actual launch attempt. As of January, Bruno was saying this hot fire test with the flight engines would take place this summer. That will no longer happen.

In December both companies promised delivery of those flight engines by this summer, but so far nothing has arrived. Moreover, both companies have remained very tight-lipped about the cause of the most recent delays. In October 2020 Bruno said that an issue with the engine’s turbopumps had been identified and fixed, but if so why has the engine not arrived as promised?

A GAO report released last month had described issues with the engine’s “igniter and booster capabilities,” but Bruno himself has denied the igniter was a problem.

Regardless, Blue Origin’s inability to deliver this engine is causing problems at both companies. Both have been forced to delay the launch of their new orbital rockets. Both rockets were initially scheduled to launch in 2020, were delayed to 2021 about two years ago, and now are likely not to launch until 2022.

While ULA can still switch to its Atlas 5 rocket for some planned Vulcan launches (and has already done so), that rocket is more expensive and thus eats into the company’s profit margin. Using the more expensive Atlas 5 in bidding also makes it more difficult for ULA to compete with SpaceX in any head-to-head competition.

Blue Origin does not even have this option. Its proposed New Glenn rocket is grounded until it gets its engine operational.

All told, the failure of Blue Origin to deliver here is essentially grounding all of SpaceX’s potential American competition, a situation that is not healthy for the American rocket industry.

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Update on Ingenuity’s 9th flight

9:55 am

Ingenuity's 9th flight
Click for interactive map

Ingenuity’s engineering team late yesterday posted an update on the helicopter’s successful 9th flight on July 5th, describing in detail the changes they made to their software that made the challenging flight possible.

The changes were required because the helicopter flew for the first time over much rougher terrain then initially planned, as shown by the map to the right.

Flight 9 was not like the flights that came before it. It broke our records for flight duration and cruise speed, and it nearly quadrupled the distance flown between two airfields. But what really set the flight apart was the terrain that Ingenuity had to negotiate during its 2 minutes and 46 seconds in the air – an area called “Séítah” that would be difficult to traverse with a ground vehicle like the Perseverance rover. This flight was also explicitly designed to have science value by providing the first close view of major science targets that the rover will not reach for quite some time.

In other words, Ingenuity flew for the first time over terrain that Perseverance cannot drive to, recording images from above of surface features beyond the rover’s range.

We began by dipping into what looks like a heavily eroded crater, then continued to descend over sloped and undulating terrain before climbing again to emerge on a flat plain to the southwest.

The images of that rough terrain have not yet been downloaded to Earth, but will be in the next week.

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Loudon Wainwright – One-man Guy

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I first posted this as a pause back in 2012. Time to post it again, as I empathize with Wainwright even more now than then.

We all travel a path in life. Once Americans celebrated those who chose an independent and unique path. That no longer appears true, not that it would make any difference to Wainwright, or to me. For some, to chose a unique path and be true to yourself is the only option.

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Enrollment in public schools plunges

2:42 pm

Good news! Federal government data for the 2020-2021 school year shows a steep drop in enrollment in public schools, with the biggest declines in the youngest grades.

While overall the drop was only 3%, the drop was stunning from parents enrolling their children for the first time.

Even more stark is the drop in enrollment among younger students. Preschool enrollment fell by 22%, and preschool and kindergarten enrollment combined dropped 13%.

The drop is even more significant in that it is really the first such decline in decades.

It appears that almost one in four parents have decided that public schools are not a good place for their little ones. Foolish mask mandates, absurd social distancing rules, and leftist propaganda promoting bigotry and sexual perversity are not what they want for their kids.

In a sane world, we would quickly see a reduction in the budgets for these public schools. Sadly this is not likely. Too many local politicians are under the thumb of the teacher unions, and serve them, not their constituents.

In the end however these budgets must be cut, if not entirely zeroed out. As long as the money keeps flowing to these corrupt institutions, they will have power and will use it for bad ends.

Let me add one more point: Considering the horrible state of the public schools, their mistreatment of children in connection with COVID, their failure to teach anything well in the past few decades, their new endorsement of racial bigotry and hatred, and their increasing partnership with radical sexual perversity, I must ask: Why on Earth are 78% of parents still sending their kids there?

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Springtime on Martian dunes near the north pole

1:42 pm

Dunes near the Martian north pole, in the spring

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated and cropped to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on April 27, 2021. It shows a strange scattering of dunes on a flat plain. The red at the top of each dune probably indicates exposed dust and sand. The white fringe is likely either water frost or the leftover mantle of dry ice that is deposited in the polar regions each winter down to 60 degrees latitude, and disappears with the coming of spring, sublimating back into carbon dioxide gas.

There are a lot of puzzles here. The overview map below provides some context, but only some.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Students demand blacklisting of university trustee because he donated to Trump’s campaign

1:00 pm

The Bill of Rights cancelled by students at Northwestern University
No first amendment permitted at Northwestern
University, if the students have their say.

Blacklists are back and the students at Northwestern U have got ’em! The student government at Northwestern University in Illinois recently passed a resolution demanding that the school’s board of trustees remove trustee J. Landis Martin from the presidential search committee because he had the gall to donate to Trump’s presidential campaign.

On June 2, student government members approved a resolution to remove J. Landis Martin, Chairman for the Northwestern University’s Board of Trustees, from the Presidential Search Committee, which is reported to be choosing the next Northwestern University President within the next year, according to the Daily Northwestern.

Outlined in the “Resolution for the Recusal of J. Landis Martin from the Presidential Search Committee” are the reasons the student government voted 17-1 to dismiss Martin on June 2nd.

The resolution lists that that “Northwestern University students are a diverse population that identify with many of the groups that Donald Trump harmed during his campaign and presidency,” and also “the conservative political ideology of Donald Trump, including those that support him, do not align with the views of the average Northwestern undergraduate.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, these students will not tolerate on their campus anyone who expresses an opinion they disagree with. There will be no free speech, no open discourse, and no debate. Agree with them, or you will be silenced, blackballed, and removed.
» Read more

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NOAA struggles with concept of letting private commercial space build its satellites

9:49 am

Capitalism in space? An article today in Space News, “NOAA to take first step toward a small satellite constellation”, describes at great length NOAA’s recent effort to rethink how it builds its weather satellites, shifting from large and expensive single satellites launched years apart to constellations of smallsats that provide more redundancy and are cheaper and easier to replace.

What the article misses, as does NOAA apparently, is that this shift should not be designed by NOAA at all. During the Trump administration there was pressure on this agency to do what NASA had, stop designing and building its satellites but instead become a customer that hires private satellite companies to do it instead.

Not much came of that pressure. NOAA hired one private company to study the idea of building a private satellite to observe the Sun. It also awarded three companies experimental contracts to provide NOAA weather data from already orbiting smallsats.

That was it. NOAA made no other attempts to encourage private companies to design and build weather satellites for it, even as it struggled to get its own satellites off the ground. The second new GOES satellite in a constellation of four for providing global weather coverage failed almost immediately after launch in 2018. Overall, that constellation is expected to cost $11 billion, $4 billion more than initially budgeted. And it is years behind schedule.

What the article above suggests is that, with the Trump administration gone, NOAA has now abandoned the effort to transition to privately-built weather satellites. Instead the article describes at great length the effort by NOAA to redesign its satellites from big, rare, and costly to small, frequent, and cheap.

This effort will fail. Government agencies like NOAA are incapable of accomplishing such a task. They do not think in terms of profit, and keeping costs down to maximize those profits. Instead, such government institutions see high costs as beneficial, as they pump more money into their operations.

Until elected officials force NOAA to change, it will not, and its weather satellites will continue to be late, expensive, and untrustworthy. Sadly, the elected officials we have today, especially in the Biden administration, are not going to do that. They are as satisfied with the present situation as NOAA is.

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SpaceX drone ship arrives in California

9:14 am

Capitalism in space: One of SpaceX’s two drone ships used by its Falcon 9 first stages for ocean landings has arrived in California in preparation for frequent Starlink launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base.

The journey began on the East Coast two weeks ago and included passage through the Panama Canal. Once the drone ship gets offloaded, it will be based at Pier T, where it be part of recovery operations for the Starlink landings that potentially could occur in late July or early August.

These California launches will allow SpaceX to increase the global coverage of its Starlink constellation. It will also allow the company to begin frequent launches from both coasts.

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China launches communications satellite for space effort

8:15 pm

Using a Long March 3C rocket China today successfully launched a communications satellite for use by its manned space missions and its space station, similar to the TDRS satellites used by NASA for similar purposes.

This satellite is the fifth such satellite launched, and is likely intended to enhance communications between the ground and China’s new space station.

No word on where the first stage crashed, or whether it landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

21 China
20 SpaceX
11 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. still leads China 29 to 21 in the national rankings.

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Today’s blacklisted American: What the last six months has revealed

12:42 pm

Today's modern witch hunt
Reporting daily the modern witch hunt against freedom and
independent thought.

It is just about six months since I decided to do a daily column entitled “Today’s Blacklisted American.” In that time I have documented more than 120 examples where one group of Americans thought it okay and proper to destroy the livelihood and freedom of other Americans, all because the latter said something the former did not like.

The link will take you to the full list of columns since mid-January. After six months I think it is time to assess what these columns have revealed. And that revelation is quite ugly.
» Read more

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Sublimating scallops on Mars

2:05 pm

Giant scallop on Mars
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image, shown in a rotated, cropped, and reduced version to the right, gives us a close-up look at one of the giant scallops found in the high mid-latitudes of the northern lowland plains of Mars, specifically in Utopia Basin north of the landing sites of both Perseverance and Zhurong. In fact, this particular image is only a few miles north of one of my previous cool images, Giant scallops on Mars, posted in December 2019.

The image was taken on February 3, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). While such scallops are not unusual in the mid-latitudes, their formation process is not well understood. As I noted in the 2019 post, ” scientists believe [pdf] the formation process is related to the sublimation of underground ice.”

According to [one hypothesis] scallop formation should be ongoing at the present time. Sublimation of interstitial ice could induce a collapse of material, initially as a small pit, then growing [away from the equator] because of greater solar heating on [that] side. Nearby scallops would coalesce together as can be seen to have occurred.

This hypothesis is not proven, and today’s cool image raises questions about it. Though the bright material at its center suggests exposed ice, supporting the idea that sublimation of ice near the surface created the scallop, the scallop scarps seem more extended and distinct to the south, not the north as this hypothesis proposes. Sunlight should hit the northern scarps more, which suggests they should retreat more instead of the southern scarp.

The overview map below provides the context.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Baseball bans man for expressing his opinion at baseball games with banner

11:56 am

The Bill of Rights cancelled by Major League Baseball
Doesn’t exist at the professional baseball games.

This seems especially appropriate during the July 4th weekend: Major League Baseball (MLB) — joining Disney, Sea World, and Sesame Street — has officially banned Dion Cini from all baseball stadiums, simply because he routinely came to games and displayed a “Trump Won Save America” banner.

Cini’s Twitter profile describes him as “Guerilla Marketeer, Political Consultant, Founder of OperationFlagDrop & ‘Professional Provocateur.’”

He has skated with his flag on Wollman Ice Rink, where he was physically assaulted, even though the Trump organization operated Wollman Rink. Cini also unfurled what is rumored to be the world’s largest Trump flag on the front of Trump Tower in Manhattan in March of this year. Cini even dropped a “Trump Pride” flag one day after the end of Pride Month.

Cini has now been banned by MLB stadiums and Disney parks, Sea World, and Sesame Street. As per his Twitter account, he has no plans of stopping the flag drops.

» Read more

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First images from Ingenuity’s 9th flight today

10:20 am

Ingenuity landing, July 5, 2021

Ingenuity has apparently completed its 9th flight on Mars, its most challenging yet attempted. Based on the six images so far released from that flight, all taking during its landing, it appears the flight was successful. Or at least, the helicopter landed without incident or damage.

The photo to the right was the last picture taken just before touch down. From the caption:

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter acquired this image using its navigation camera. This camera is mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed directly downward to track the ground during flight.

The dark shadow of the helicopter is clearly visible. If you want to see the entire sequence of six images, go to the Ingenuity raw image website and pick the “latest images” filter in the right column. At present it shows this sequence, though I am certain as the day passes images from the entire flight will start appearing.

As noted at the first link above, the flight was to be more than twice as long as any previous flight while flying over the roughest terrain. There was the real risk that its software would become confused by that terrain.

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Sun unleashes strongest solar flare since last solar maximum

9:54 am

X1 solar flare as seen by Solar Dynamics Observatory

On July 3, 2021 the Sun emitted the first X-class solar flare of the rising present solar maximum, the first such flare since September 2017 during the previous maximum.

This flare is classified as an X1.5-class flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc.

The image to the right was taken by the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), designed to monitor the Sun continuously and catch such events.

More information here. The flare caused some disturbances to various radio instruments, though nothing that resulted in any serious consequences.

What the flare did demonstrate is that the Sun is definitely ramping up to solar maximum. In fact, the Sun has not been blank, with no sunspots on its facing hemisphere, since May 6th, the longest such stretch since the last solar maximum.

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