Category: Behind The Black

Strange corroding features on Mars

1:02 pm

Strange corroding features on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and enhanced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on October 4, 2020. It shows what appears to be features that are either corroding or eroding away, with the lower areas filled with rippling sand dunes.

The circular features might be ancient craters. The material that partly fills them might be a layer of dust or sand that the wind is slowly blowing away to dig out the depressions along the southern cliff wall.

According to the MRO science team’s interpretation of the colors produced by the high resolution camera [pdf], the dark blue colors here are likely “coarser-grained materials (sand and rocks)”, while the orange-red material on the higher terrain is likely dust.

Could this material be evidence of buried ice eroding away? At first I thought so, and then I took a look at the photo’s location, as shown in the overview image below.
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Momentus signs deal to deliver two private cubesats to lunar orbit

11:55 am

Capitalism in space: Momentus has signed a deal with a Singapore startup to provide the transportation to lunar orbit of two cubesats using its next generation space tug.

Momentus Inc. (“Momentus” or the “Company”), a commercial space company offering in-space infrastructure services, and Qosmosys, a new space venture founded in Singapore last year, announced today a service agreement to deliver two cubesats to low lunar orbit as early as 2024 via Momentus’ inaugural lunar mission.

The new contract builds and expands on the agreement announced in January 2021 for delivery of up to four cubesats in low Earth orbit by Momentus’ Vigoride service vehicle, starting in 2022. Qosmosys will expand its novel business ideas to the Moon using a specific bus named Zeus-MS, a version of its Zeus platform it has been developing in cooperation with NuSpace from Singapore, and made specific for lunar missions. Zeus-MS is the precursor to a series of multi-mission platforms that will allow organizations and businesses to host their payloads, and will offer individuals a bespoke, unprecedented line of services to the Moon on regularly scheduled flights.

“We are excited to partner with Momentus again, now onboard Ardoride’s inaugural lunar mission in 2024,” said Francois Dubrulle, CEO of Qosmosys. “Our vision is to make space accessible to all, and Momentus will help us achieve this goal through their efficient orbital services.”

Ardoride, the next generation service vehicle after Vigoride, will extend the range and capabilities of Momentus’s services beginning in 2023.

It is unclear who Qosmosys’ customers are for their lunar Zeus-MS cubesat platform, but I have no doubt they have plenty, many from the university community. For example, universities fund student-built cubesats for educational purposes. Why not make this a project to the Moon, rather than just in Earth orbti? The cost difference would not be much using these new private companies.

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Axiom raises $130 million in investment capital

11:41 am

Capitalism in space: The private space station company Axiom announced today that it has obtained $130 million in investment capital during its most recent round of fund-raising.

The funding will allow the company to expand, including doubling its current workforce of about 110 people this year, Michael Suffredini, president and chief executive of Axiom, said in an interview. It will also support quarterly payments to Thales Alenia Space, which is building the pressurized elements of the first modules. The company recently moved into a two-story building in Houston and is buying a new test facility, with plans to establish a campus at Spaceport Houston, also known as Ellington Airport.

“This is a really the major step for us,” he said. “The B round is typically where you get your first large investment, but more importantly than the money is the community of investors that you put together, so that future rounds are largely from those investors.” That group of investors, he said, was “a perfect fit for us and puts us in a good position, however we want to go forward.”

Suffredini also admitted that while helps get those first modules built for launch to ISS in ’24, they will still need “probably between half a billion and a billion dollars” to build their full private space station.

Sounds like a lot, eh? ISS cost about $100 billion, but that is not including the contributions of the U.S.’s international partners. It is also likely a conservative estimate, as it likely does not include any of NASA’s overhead in connection with the station. Construction officially began in 1994, but actually started a decade earlier when President Reagan first proposed its predecessor, the Freedom station, and those costs are not included as well.

So Axiom will build its private station for about a billion, and get it done in about five years. NASA spent anywhere from $100 to $200 billion, and took more than three decades to get it launched and built.

Which product would you buy?

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Watching Perseverance’s landing on Mars

9:51 am

Because it will take eleven minutes for radio communications from Mars to reach Earth, no one on Earth will have any direct contact with the American rover Perseverance as comes in to land in Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18th. When NASA broadcasts the landing here on Earth it will already have happened.

Nonetheless, if you want see as soon as possible if the landing was successful, you can go to NASA public channel here at NASA or here at Youtube. I have also embedded the live stream telecast below the fold in this post.

The landing itself is set for about 3:55 pm (Eastern) on Thursday, February 18th. NASA’s coverage is scheduled to begin at 2:15 pm (Eastern). Expect almost everything you watch to be seeped in NASA propaganda, though of course their overview of the rover, its landing, and its landing site will be informative.

One important note: NASA has been selling the false notion that the primary goal of Perseverance is to search for life on Mars, and sadly much of the mainstream press has been repeating this notion blindly. It is simply not true. The rover’s primary goal, first, last, and always, is to gain more knowledge of the geology of Mars and its past history. If along the way the rover detects evidence of life, all for the better, but that is not what it will be focused on doing during its journey in Jezero Crater.
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SpaceX in Starlink negotiations with the Philippines

9:29 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX and a major internet company based in the Philippines have been in negotiations about offering Starlink to its citizens.

US tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) is in talks to bring broadband satellite services to the Philippines through a partnership with fibre internet tycoon Dennis Anthony H Uy of Pampanga.

Representatives from SpaceX and Uy’s Converge ICT Solutions Inc met on multiple occasions to discuss a potential venture, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Philippine Daily Inquirer.

SpaceX apparently can’t just set up business to compete with this company, probably because it has deep ties in the government that can block it. Converge probably wants a cut, along with I suspect a number of Philippine politicians.

No deal has so far been made, but Starlink would be ideal in the more rural locations of the Philippines.

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SpaceX launches sixty more Starlink satellites; plus an installation report from one customer

10:06 pm

Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 60 Starlink satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket.

The first stage on its sixth flight however failed to land successfully. It is amazing that we now expect these landings to succeed, proving how reliable we now expect SpaceX’s rocket to be.

The 2021 launch race:

5 SpaceX
3 China
2 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Virgin Orbit

The U.S. now leads China 7 to 3 in the national rankings. Another SpaceX launch is scheduled for tomorrow, followed by a Rocket Lab launch a little more than 24 hours later.

A report from one Starlink customer on his installation experience

The sixty new Starlink satellites bring the constellation to more than 1,100 satellites, allowing SpaceX to continue expanding regions where it is offering the service. Below the fold is an update from reader Steve Golson on his experience installing his own Starlink dish and service in Maine, now running for several days. Rather than cut and past sections, I think it best to quote his email to me in its entirety, including some of the images he sent. The opinions expressed are Steve’s alone, but they are coming from a customer who appears very satisfied with the product, up to now.
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New paper: Underlying ice layer seen in Martian gullies at LOW mid-latitudes

2:18 pm

Snow on Mars?
Click to see full image.

In a paper just published, scientists are proposing that bright areas seen in the low mid-latitude gullies on Mars are the underground ice table newly exposed as surface dust is removed.

This paper is a reiteration in more detail of a previous presentation [pdf] by these same scientists at the 2019 the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas and reported here in March 2019.

The image to the right, from the paper, was taken by the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in 2009, and has been cropped to post here. The white streaks are what the scientists propose is that exposed underground ice table. At 32.9 south latitude, this particular gully would be the closest to the equator that such an ice layer has been identified. All the previous ice layer discoveries have been in the ice scarps found at latitudes above 50 degrees. As the paper’s lead author, Aditya Khuller at Arizona State University, explained in to me in an email, “We believe we are seeing exposures of dusty ice that likely originated as dusty snow.” From their paper:

We suggest … that the light-toned materials are exposed H2O ice. … [T]he appearance, and then subsequent disappearance of these light-toned materials, suggests that they are some form of volatile, such as dusty ice, rather than dust alone. … [The appearance] of these light-toned materials is similar to the >100m thick, light-toned ice deposits exposed on steep mid-latitude scarps, indicating that these materials are probably also ice, with some amount of dust on, and within the ice.

The layer would have likely been laid down as snow during a time period (a long time ago) when the rotational tilt of Mars, its obliquity, was much higher than today’s 25 degrees. At that time the mid-latitudes were colder than the poles, and water was sublimating from the polar ice caps to fall as snow in the mid-latitudes.

The overview map below reveals some additional intriguing possibilities.
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Today’s blacklisted Americans: All religious schools

11:10 am

The cancelled Bill of Rights

They’re coming for you next: The homosexual lobby is pushing the Biden administration to deny accreditation to any religious school that did not endorse its political and sexual agendas.

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), America’s largest and most powerful LGBT lobby organizations, is pushing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to target Christian educational institutions, demanding that the Biden Administration strip colleges that adhere to rules and positions opposing homosexuality of their accreditation. The HRC’s “Blueprint for Positive Change,” which offers 85 recommendations, proposes eliminating non-discrimination exemptions for religious colleges if they refuse to abandon the biblical position on marriage.

The Blueprint states, “Language regarding accreditation of religious institutions of higher education in the Higher Education Opportunity Act could be interpreted to require accrediting bodies to accredit religious institutions that discriminate or do not meet science-based curricula standards. The Department of Education should issue a regulation clarifying that this provision, which requires accreditation agencies to ‘respect the stated mission’ of religious institutions, does not require the accreditation of religious institutions that do not meet neutral accreditation standards including nondiscrimination policies and scientific curriculum requirements.”

In other words, if a religious school forbids homosexual behavior among its students or teaches it is a sin, based entirely on that school’s religious beliefs, it accreditation should be cancelled, and its ability to provide students legally recognized degrees eliminated.

Understand that if you are homosexual you have plenty of very friendly schools to go to that will celebrate your sexual preferences and beliefs. No one is oppressing you because a Christian, Evangelical, or Orthodox Jewish school believe otherwise.

That’s not enough however for the leftist gay lobby. Just because it has successfully created positive options for itself throughout society it must still destroy any options for those who disagree with it. This is the epitome of oppression and intolerance.

At this moment the Biden administration has not accepted these recommendations, but if you think it won’t, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you. One of the very first executive orders signed by Biden was one that required schools to let men who “identify” as women compete in women’s sports. They remain men in every biological sense except the clothes they wear, their hairstyle, and (most important) their utterly delusional belief they are a women.

If Joe Biden and the Washington leftist crowd that runs our federal government thinks this edict makes rational sense, we must expect them to do whatever they can to shut down religious schools for daring to express any dissent of the homosexual movement’s agenda.

The first amendment be damned! You are all going to obey our new leftist lords, or you will be silenced!

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Russia launches Progress freighter to ISS

11:40 pm

Russia today successfully launched a new Progress freighter to ISS using its Soyuz-2 rocket, bring almost three tons of supplies to the station..

The 2021 launch race:

4 SpaceX
3 China
2 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Virgin Orbit

The U.S. still leads China 6 to 3 in the national rankings. That lead should widen this week with three American launches scheduled, two Starlink launches from SpaceX and one Cygnus freighter from Northrop Grumman.

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UAE releases first Al-Amal image of Mars

9:45 am

Al-Amal's first Mars image
Click for full image.

The new colonial movement: The leader of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) yesterday released on his twitter feed the first photo of Mars that was beamed back from its Al-Amal (“hope” in English) orbiter, taken shortly after achieving orbit.

That photo is to the right, cropped and reduced to post here. From the article at the link:

[The photo] was captured by Hope’s EXI instrument from an altitude of 24,700 km (15,350 miles) above the Martian surface at 20:36 GMT on Wednesday – so, one day after arriving at the Red Planet.

The north pole of Mars is in the upper left of the image. At centre, just emerging into the early morning sunlight, is Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar System. Look right on the boundary between night and day, the so-called terminator.

The three shield volcanoes in a line are Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsia Mons. Look east, to the limb of the planet, and you can see the mighty canyon system, Valles Marineris. It’s part covered by cloud.

Right now the spacecraft’s orbit is very eccentric, ranging from 600 to 30,000 miles above the Martian surface. After several orbital trims, Al-Amal will end up in an orbit about 14,000 by about 27,000 miles, with an inclination of about 25 degrees. From that high orbit it will then focus on studying the Martian atmosphere.

Thus, future images will likely be similar to this, global and mostly aimed at tracking visible phenomenon in the atmosphere (dust storms and clouds).

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1st Vulcan test core stage arrives at Kennedy

9:31 am

Capitalism in space: ULA’s first complete Vulcan core stage, meant at this point only for testing launch procedures, has arrived at Cape Canaveral.

After connecting the launch platform and the rocket to gas and electrical systems at the pad, ULA engineers will run the Vulcan booster and the ground infrastructure through a series of exercises, culminating in loading of thousands of gallons of cryogenic liquid methane and liquid oxygen into the rocket.

Once these tests are complete, the stage will be returned to ULA’s facility in Alabama to be refitted with flight worthy BE-4 engines so it can fly on a later mission. The engines presently attached are test engines.

ULA expects the first flightworthy BE-4 engines to be delivered by Blue Origin by the summer. These will then be incorporated into the first Vulcan to fly (hopefully before the end of the year) and carrying Astrobotic’s unmanned Peregrine lunar lander.

That rocket, as will all Vulcan rockets for the foreseeable future, will be entirely expendable. Though ULA says it intends at some point to recover for reuse the engines of the core stage, they have not delineated a time schedule for when that will happen.

At this point the only customer ULA has for this rocket is the government — especially the military. Vulcan cannot compete in price with SpaceX’s rockets, so I doubt any commercial satellite company will be much interested in it. The military will pay the extra bucks, because it wants more than one launch company for redundancy, and it has already committed to buying Vulcans for the next five years.

Of course, that long term commitment to Vulcan by the military will likely change if other cheaper rockets enter the market. At the present the military is limiting bidding on future launches to just SpaceX and ULA. That cannot hold up in court if other viable rocket companies wish to bid. Expect those new companies to do what SpaceX did when the Air Force refused to let it bid on military launches about five years ago, sue, and win in court.

At that point ULA’s an entirely expendable Vulcan will be very vulnerable to losing its last customer. ULA must make this rocket reusable or it will die as a company.

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Abraham Lincoln – an annual tribute

6:01 pm

An evening pause: On this, the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, I must once again honor his memory, most especially because the Marxist, anti-American bigots who are now running roughshod across our once free nation wish to cancel him by actually accusing the man who freed the slaves of being a racist.

And though he freed the slaves, I think Lincoln’s most enduring contribution to American history, a contribution that now has sadly been lost, was his limitless good will for everyone, even to those who hated him and wished to kill him. Had he not been assassinated, American history might have been far better because Lincoln would have had the clout to ease the worst elements of Reconstruction, while forcing through reforms in the former southern slave states.

The modern Democrats in Congress — and their supporters nationwide — might benefit by reading some history about Lincoln. Alas, I have no hope of this.

As I wrote for last year’s tribute,

Lincoln stood for freedom for all humans, the central heart of the American experiment. He was willing and did die for that stance. We should all be willing to do no less.

The video below shows probably every photograph ever taken of Lincoln, in chronological order. You can see him age and mature. You can also see a gaunt and serious man who appears to care deeply about whatever he does.

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Today’s blacklisted American: New conservative organization at Illinois Tech blacklisted by students

1:30 pm

The cancelled Bill of Rights

They’re coming for you next: When a conservative student at the Illinois Institute of Technology proposed starting a chapter of the national conservative organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) at the school, a slander campaign was immediately started by other students against both TPUSA and the student, forcing him to back down.

[After his proposal was put forth], classmates began to message his fraternity brothers, asking whether he was attempting to lead a “hate group” on campus. The conservative student said that this occurred on three separate occasions.

On January 27, the conservative student again presented to the student government — this time, to withdraw his proposal. The conservative student emphasized that he had no malicious intent in proposing a TPUSA chapter, but merely aimed to start a political discourse on campus. The conservative student apologized for proposing a TPUSA club and stated that he would consider forming a group under another national conservative organization.

Derek Rhea, the executive vice president of the Student Government Association commented that the “entire campus had been completely mobilized,” leading to a “huge movement on the opposing side” against the prospect of a TPUSA group at Illinois Tech. He applauded the conservative student for withdrawing his request to start a TPUSA chapter.

Senator Hannah-Lauren Moreno asked whether the conservative student was pressured into rescinding his request. The conservative student informed the student government that classmates began to wonder if he, his peers, and his fraternity brothers were “terrible people” for trying to start the club.

Following the January 27 student government meeting, the conservative student provided Campus Reform with screenshots, one of which appears to show a student rejoicing in an online message that “we managed to successfully cyber bully a student org to death.” [emphasis mine]

There is only one reason these partisan leftists (and that’s what they are) wanted to block a new TPUSA chapter. Unlike the moribund and largely uninteresting and dull Republican Party clubs, TPUSA has been very effective on campuses nationwide at countering leftwing hate and censorship while drawing to it large numbers of new students, teaching them that conservative values are about freedom and justice and equal treatment before the law, not the left’s slanderous lies of “white supremacy” and “hate.”

I highlighted the words of Rhea above because if he is telling the truth and a “huge movement” of students formed to blacklist this organization we are in very big trouble. This indicates that the next generation is truly all in with censorship and blacklisting, and will likely soon consider imprisoning anyone who disagrees as perfectly reasonable.

It is also possible that this guy is lying, and that the so-called “huge movement” was a handful of loudmouthed bullies, who have successfully learned how to use social media to intimidate everyone else. In this case Rhea is one of those bullies, and he is using his position as VP of the student government for that depraved purpose.

Either way, I guarantee that should this student return to propose a club linked to a different conservative organization, these same bullies will appear, making the same slanderous claims. They lie when they say they would accept other conservative organizations. They want them all banned, and play this game to make sure none ever appear.

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Rover update: The rovers are coming! The rovers are coming!

12:52 pm

With the imminent landing on Mars of both the American rover Perseverance only days away on February 18th followed by China’s rover in April, I think it time for a new rover update, not only providing my readers a review of the new landing sites but a look at the most recent travels of Curiosity on Mars and Yutu-2 on the Moon.

Curiosity

Curiosity's view of the base of Mount Sharp, February 12, 2021
Click for full resolution image.

Overview map of Curiosity's most recent and future travels

The panorama above, made from four images taken by Curiosity’s right navigation camera on February 12, 2021 (found here, here, here, and here), looks south to the base of Mount Sharp, now only a short distance away. The yellow lines on the overview map to the right show the area this panorama covers. The white line indicates Curiosity’s previous travels. The dotted red line in both images shows Curiosity’s planned route.

The two white dots on the overview map are the locations of the two recurring slope lineae along Curiosity’s route, with the plan to get reasonable close to the first and spend some time there studying it. These lineae are one of Mars’ most intriguing phenomenon, seasonal dark streaks that appear on slopes in the spring and fade by the fall. There are several theories attempting to explain their formation, most proposing the seepage of a brine from below ground, but none has been accepted yet with any enthusiasm.
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The coming death of NASA’s Space Launch System

3:10 pm

SLS about to be cancelled?

In the past week there have been a slew of stories that all suggest strongly that the political support for the NASA-built rocket dubbed the Space Launch System (SLS) is fading very quickly, and might soon be weak enough that the political class in Washington might finally have the courage to cancel it.

First, a group of eleven Democratic Party senators on February 3rd wrote a letter [pdf] to the Biden administration, begging it to continue the manned lunar program dubbed Artemis that the Trump administration had instigated.

What made that letter remarkable was that it made no mention of SLS at all. Instead, its focus was to encourage Biden to not abandon construction of the Artemis manned lunar lander, what NASA dubs the Human Landing System (HLS).

Until that moment it had always been assumed in political circles that if you continue Artemis it means you continue SLS. Artemis itself was conceived as a program to give that heavy-lift rocket a purpose. SLS had been mandated by Congress a decade ago when Obama cancelled Bush’s Ares heavy-lift rocket. The problem was that Congress had not proposed any mission for SLS, and thus Artemis was born to give it that mission.

That these Democrats were pushing Artemis but not SLS was politically significant. It meant that they no longer considered Artemis synonymous with SLS. The former could exist without the latter.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Disney fires actress for noting the Nazis killed Jews

1:04 pm

Gina Carano's tweet about the Nazi genocide

They’re coming for you next: The Disney corporation yesterday fired conservative actress Gina Carano, who was starring in a Star Wars series, simply because she wrote a tweet describing the entirely truthful fact that the Nazis were able to kill the Jews because they had taught the public to hate them and thus agree with that round-up.

Her tweet is to the right. Not surprisingly, a Twitter mob soon formed demanded her blacklisting. How dare she remind people of the evils of oppression, bigotry, and the genocide of a people merely because of their race, religion, or creed? Since she has been an outspoken conservative who supports Trump, her blacklisting by these storm-troopers seemed entirely reasonable to Disney, and so they finally fired here. The statement from the Lucasfilm division of the company indicates the company’s outright ignorance and close-mindedness.

“Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” a Lucasfilm spokesperson said in a statement. “Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

In other words, it is now unacceptable to retell the history of the Holocaust in order to avoid repeating it. In fact, Disney’s action here suggests the left wants another Holocaust, is using Hitler’s tactics quite openly, and thus must do whatever it can — with the help of big corporations like this — to silence and dehumanize anyone who opposes them. And isn’t this exactly what the Nazis did to the Jews, as Carano so nicely illustrated in her tweet?

If Americans don’t fight back hard soon, worse is coming, and soon. Do you subscribe to Disney’s streaming service? Do you rent its movies? Do you watch Star Wars? If after this action you still do, you are then complicit in this blacklisting, and can count yourself as a willing accessory to the coming genocide.

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Possible exoplanet detected in habitable zone around Alpha Centauri A?

10:47 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists have detected faint evidence that suggests the existence of a Neptune-sized exoplanet circling the sunlike star Alpha Centauri A.

After analyzing 100 hours of data gathered by NEAR in May and June of 2019, the scientists detected a thermal fingerprint in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A. The signal potentially corresponds to a roughly Neptune-size world orbiting between 1 and 2 astronomical units (AU) from the star, study team members said. (One AU, the average Earth-sun distance, is about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)

But that planet has not yet been confirmed, so it remains a candidate for now.

This result is very uncertain at this moment, so we should constrain our enthusiasm. If true, however, it would signal the possibility of more exoplanets circling the stars of the nearest stellar system. Alpha Centauri is actually three stars, a binary of two sunlike stars circled at great distance by the red dwarf Proxima Centauri. Scientists already think there are exoplanets circling Proxima, with one about the size of Earth.

What makes this particular interesting, if true, is that the exoplanet was detected not by the slight wobble its gravity caused in the star, or by a transit across the face of the star, but by its own light. If the detection is real, this would be I think the first time that an exoplanet has been seen directly, even if that detection comprises a few tiny pixels of light.

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Saudi government considering Moon and Mars missions

10:33 am

The new colonial movement: The Saudi government has established a commission for developing its own space program, with missions to either the Moon or/and Mars under consideration.

According to the chairman, only a few weeks separate the Commission from launching an entire branch centered on boosting and encouraging investment in the space field.

…More so, Prince Sultan predicted that the Kingdom, in two years’ time, will finish assembling an integrated crew with international space agencies. The team is expected to mount space exploration missions to Mars and the Moon.

Their stated goal is to help diversify their economy as well as inspire their citizens. Their unstated goal is a need to compete with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which already has a successful Mars orbiter (built in partnership with the U.S.)

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Europa Clipper to fly on commercial rocket, not SLS

11:30 pm

NASA managers have now decided unequivocally to not use SLS to launch Europa Clipper, and will instead choose a commercial rocket in about a year.

During a Feb. 10 presentation at a meeting of NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG), leaders of the Europa Clipper project said the agency recently decided to consider only commercial launch vehicles for the mission, and no longer support a launch of the spacecraft on the SLS.

“We now have clarity on the launch vehicle path and launch date,” Robert Pappalardo, project scientist for Europa Clipper at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said. That clarity came in the form of a Jan. 25 memo from NASA’s Planetary Missions Program Office to “immediately cease efforts to maintain SLS compatibility” and move forward with a commercial launch vehicle, or CLV, he said.

Though this decision was expected following the approval of the most recent congressional budget for NASA, which contained language allowing NASA to abandon SLS if it thought it wise, this decision continues the string of recent stories that all point toward the eventually abandonment of SLS itself.

At the moment the rocket most likely to win the contract is the Falcon Heavy.

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Scientists confirm distance to farthest known solar system object

2:46 pm

Scientists have now confirmed that the large asteroid dubbed Farfarout (about 250 miles across) is presently about 132 astronomical units from the Sun (about 12 billion miles), making it the farthest known solar system object.

Its orbit however is far from circular, and it isn’t presently even at its farthest point in that orbit.

[T]he orbit of Farfarout is quite elongated, taking it 175 au from the Sun at its farthest point and around 27 au at its closest, which is inside the orbit of Neptune. Because its orbit crosses Neptune’s, Farfarout could provide insights into the history of the outer Solar System. “Farfarout was likely thrown into the outer Solar System by getting too close to Neptune in the distant past,” said Trujillo. “Farfarout will likely interact with Neptune again in the future since their orbits still intersect.”

The astronomers expect to discover more such objects in the coming years that will even eclipse this one in distance.

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Inexplicable ridges in Hellas Basin on Mars

2:07 pm

Sinuous ridge in Hellas Basin
Click for full image.

Time for some more cool but mysterious Martian images! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, is the first of two images today, both of which show the ridges but of a completely different nature. Both are located in Hellas Basin in Mars southern hemisphere.

This first picture was taken on September 4, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows a sinuous complex that resembles to a remarkable extent a set of river tributaries, but is instead a set of raised ridges rather than a canyon system.

Scientists have found more than 10,000 miles of such ridges in the northern hemisphere in Arabia Terra, the most extensive transition zone between the southern highlands and the northern lowlands, and have dubbed them fossilized rivers. From a 2016 press release:

The inverted channels are similar to those found elsewhere on Mars and Earth. They are made of sand and gravel deposited by a river and when the river becomes dry, the channels are left upstanding as the surrounding material erodes. On Earth, inverted channels often occur in dry, desert environments like Oman, Egypt, or Utah, where erosion rates are low – in most other environments, the channels are worn away before they can become inverted. “The networks of inverted channels in Arabia Terra are about 30m high and up to 1–2km wide, so we think they are probably the remains of giant rivers that flowed billions of years ago. Arabia Terra was essentially one massive flood plain bordering the highlands and lowlands of Mars. We think the rivers were active 3.9–3.7 billion years ago, but gradually dried up before being rapidly buried and protected for billions of years, potentially preserving any ancient biological material that might have been present,” added Joel Davis.

Nor are such features on Mars limited to Hellas and Arabia Terra. For a particularly spectacular feature in the cratered highlands see this 2019 post.

The origin of these sinuous ridges in Hellas might have a similar origin as these other fossilized rivers. At present the bottom of Hellas, the deepest basin on Mars, is a place with little signs of ice. In the past there is evidence that lakes once existed here, so we cannot rule out water as a cause.

At the same time, Hellas was formed by a gigantic impact. One cannot dismiss the possibility of a volcanic origin, impact melt left over from the heat of that crash.

Today’s second ridge complex in Hellas looks far different.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Peter Pan and Dumbo

12:30 pm

They’re coming for you next: In its never-ending effort to cleanse our culture of anything that might offend any minorities or anyone on the left, the Disney corporation has decided to block access in the accounts of any children seven or younger of several of its best and greatest children’s films, including Peter Pan, Dumbo, and Swiss Family Robinson.

Disney implemented a revised content advisory in October to flag up any issues surrounding racial stereotypes and concerns were raised in relation to Peter Pan and the other productions. The decision to ban the films from children’s accounts was made by a group of external experts who were brought in to assess if the content ‘represented global audiences’.

While the films remain available on adult accounts, they come with a disclaimer that says: ‘This programme includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. ‘Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.’

Anyone who has seen these movies knows how utterly harmless the references are. In fact, in Peter Pan for instance the European children end up allying themselves with the Indians to defeat the real villain, the pirate Captain Hook. If anything the movie taught tolerance and the need to accept all races, as long as they mean no harm to others.

This ban also seems to forget something very fundamental about these movies: They are fantasies with a very large dollop of silly nonsense. To ban them for that silliness is beyond brainless.

And the irony is that kids know this. It is a shame that so many adults no longer do.

Nonetheless, such silliness is no longer permitted. Every artist must now forever toe the party line, making obeisance to the Marxist and bigoted identity- and race-based culture that now rules. You can’t, for example, have any pirates “yellow” or “brown”, as was done in Swiss Family Robinson (which was the reason it was banned). No, the only evil people allowed in modern literature and art are white people, preferable Europeans.

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The lie that was COVID

10:44 am

This humor story at the Babylon Bee on February 8th is sadly 100% accurate and illustrates the utter lie that is at the foundation of everything we have been told about COVID-19:

Nation Prepares To Celebrate 1st Anniversary Of Two Weeks To Flatten The Curve

“This time of year we like to come together to remember the historic day one year ago when we put on masks and locked ourselves down, trusting that the lockdown would be over in just two weeks,” said local man Paul Christof as he stared out his window longingly, his three masks securely in place. “This year, I’m going all out with a Zoom party with no more than five of my closest friends — I mean, closest, figuratively speaking, of course. We’ll be literally far apart, because I want to stay home and stay safe, and I don’t want grandma to die.”

From day one, nothing we have been told by government health officials has been reliable or trustworthy. First we were only to lock-down for two weeks in order to slow the spread of the virus slightly so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. We were also told that we shouldn’t wear masks, because a century of research clearly showed them useless and possibly counter-productive if used improperly, and proper use was unlikely if used all the time.

Then we were told we needed to lockdown for months, because we wanted to stop the spread, a goal that was utterly impossible to meet. At that same time, suddenly health officials decided that the previous half century of research about masks was all wrong, and that we must wear them all the time.

These new rules were only going to be necessary until a vaccine was available.

Now, a year later, a vaccine is suddenly not enough to allow us to be free humans again. We must wear masks, with two masks being even better, and normal activities such as attending parties, sports events, shows, and concerts must still be forbidden.

Along the way, a lot of evidence raised legitimate questions about the way coronavirus deaths and cases were tracked, with much of it suggesting the numbers were being manipulated for political purposes.

The result today is that a very very large percentage of the population no longer trusts anything said by these health officials. And for good reason. They have lied, repeatedly, and liars should never be trusted, ever.

Not that it makes much different. These liars are firmly ensconced in power, and can say and do anything, including fines and punishments for not obeying their commands.

America is no longer a nation dedicated to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It is now a place of lies, edicts, petty dictators, blacklists, and increasing oppression. All largely prompted by an irrational over-reaction to a virus that is really nothing more than a variation of the flu.

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Jupiter’s southern jet streams

9:21 am

Jupiter's southern jet streams
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated and reduced slightly to post here, shows the southern jet streams in Jupiter’s atmosphere. From the press release:

The storm known as the Great Red Spot is also visible on the horizon, nearly rotated out of view as Juno sped away from Jupiter at about 30 miles per second (48 kilometers per second), which is more than 100,000 mph (160,900 kilometers per hour).

Citizen scientist Tanya Oleksuik created this color-enhanced image using data from the JunoCam camera. The original image was taken on Dec. 30, 2020 as the Juno spacecraft performed its 31st close flyby of Jupiter. At the time, the spacecraft was about 31,000 miles (about 50,000 kilometers) from the planet’s cloud tops, at a latitude of about 50 degrees South.

According to data obtained by Juno, these bands of storms extend about 1,800 miles into Jupiter’s interior, much deeper than expected.

The Great Red Spot is at about 22 degrees south latitude, so this tells us that this picture covers Jupiter’s southern hemisphere from about the equator down to about 80 degrees.

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Turkey to do lunar mission, send astronaut into space

8:59 am

The new colonial movement: Turkey’s leader, Tayyip Erdogan, announced yesterday a new space exploration initiative that will include sending an unmanned probe to the Moon as well as flying an astronaut into space.

“The first rough landing will be made on the moon with our national and authentic hybrid rocket that shall be launched into orbit in the end of 2023 through international cooperation,” Erdogan said, detailing a two-phase mission. Erdogan did not elaborate further on the cooperation. Last month, Erdogan spoke to Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk on possible cooperation in space technologies with Turkish companies.

Speaking in an event in Ankara, Erdogan announced a programme with 10 strategic goals including sending a Turkish citizen to a scientific mission in space.

The manned mission will not be flown by Turkey, but will be purchased from someone else, either Russia or SpaceX or Boeing maybe even China.

The timing of this announcement, the same day the UAE’s Al-Amal probe entered Mars’ orbit, suggests it was prompted by that success, and is an example of keeping up with the Joneses. Whether there is any reality to these proposals however remains to be seen.

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