A evening pause: Performed live 2015.
Hat tip Doug Johnson. Note too that this does not come from youtube, but from metatube. Let’s find more alternative video resources like this, just to increase some competition.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
According to the tweet thread, the company has done other suborbital flights. The concept is essentially a steal of Russia’s own unmanned orbital capsule that it has been flying both materials and biological experiments for decades.
Nothing new here. Zhurong remains in hibernation, or dead, depending on what happens next.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 27, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as domes in Arcadia Planitia, one of the many large northern lowland plains of Mars.
This to me is a “What the heck?” image. I won’t dare try to explain the warped concentric ringed pattern at the top of the mesa, nor the bright and dark splotch that surrounds it. The small craters around it appear to have glacier material within them, and the terrain here likely has a lot of near surface ice, being at 37 degrees north latitude in a region where the data suggests such ice exists. The different colors here likely indicate the difference between dust (orange) and coarser material (aqua).
The location, as shown in the overview map below, makes this mesa more tantalizing.
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The evil candle that the Biden administration insists must be snuffed out,
or else the hospital must close.
They’re coming for you next: Because the Saint Francis Health System in Oklahoma has always kept a single candle lit in its hospital chapels, Biden administration officials are now threatening to shut down five Catholic hospitals in Oklahoma, citing federal government fire safety requirements.
If Saint Francis does not comply, the government will revoke its ability to obtain any Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) payments for treating patients, in essence blocking those patients from healthcare while threatening the entire Saint Francis Health System with bankruptcy.
In response, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (as legal representative of St. Francis) sent a letter [pdf] in protest, noting that the Biden administration’s goal has nothing to do with fire safety, but to censor and squelch the religious practice of the St. Francis Health System:
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Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released today. From the caption:
This new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows interacting galaxies known as AM 1214-255. These galaxies contain active galactic nuclei, or AGNs. An AGN is an extraordinarily luminous central region of a galaxy. Its extreme brightness is caused by matter whirling into a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s heart.
Hubble observed the galaxy [on the right] as part of an AGN survey, with the aim of compiling a dataset about nearby AGNs to be used as a resource for astronomers investigating AGN physics, black holes, host galaxy structure, and more.
Note how the outer arms of both galaxies appear warped, with long streams of stars being pulled towards the other galaxy. Imagine living on a planet orbiting one of those stars as it finds itself over time farther and farther from its home galaxy, out in the vast emptiness of intergalactic space. While this sounds lonely, it has advantages for life, because isolated from the galaxy the star will not be threatened by supernovae, gamma ray bursts, and the host of other events that happen inside galaxies that can threaten biology.
It also means your night sky will be heralded by the rising and setting of two nearby giant galaxies.
With the help of the new European robot arm on the Russian half of ISS, two Russian astronauts completed a 7-hour spacewalk yesterday, successfully shifting a Russian airlock module to the new Nauka module on ISS.
The cosmonauts began their spacewalk at 11:01 p.m. Moscow time on Wednesday and spent seven hours and ten minutes outside the International Space Station (ISS). The main objective of their extravehicular activities was to transfer an airlock from the Rassvet module to the Nauka multi-purpose laboratory module. It was done with the help of the ERA robotic arm under the remote control of cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, who stayed aboard the ISS.
The work is part of an ongoing series of spacewalks required to complete the installation of Nauka to the station.
With the purchase today for $6.4 billion of the satellite company Maxar by two private investment firms, its stock was removed from the NY stock exchange and is no longer traded publicly.
The company was acquired for $53 per share by the U.S. private equity firm Advent International and minority investor British Columbia Investment Management Corp. in a deal announced in December. “With the closing of the transaction, Maxar will remain a U.S.-controlled, owned and operated company,” the company said. Maxar’s common stock will also be delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Maxar started trading on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2017. It officially became a U.S. corporation in 2020 when the company spun off the Canadian subsidiary MDA.
The desire of these private investors to spend so much strongly indicates that Maxar has real value. It also indicates indirectly the strength of the emerging new commercial launch market. These investors clearly believe that this launch market will continue to grow and force the launch price of its satellites to go down.
Using its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX tonight successfully placed 56 Starlink satellites into orbit, lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairing halves completed their eighth and ninth flights, respectively.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
29 SpaceX
16 China
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 India
American private enterprise now leads China 32 to 16 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 32 to 28. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world, including American companies, 29 to 31.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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An evening pause: More road stuff, of an entirely different kind.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
Quite cool. As the tweet notes, this “was the hottest and fastest [fairing return] we’ve ever attempted.”
Most of this is simply lobbying for more money. The shortage of plutonium will only matter if NASA’s planetary program gets a gigantic budget boost.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! My headline paraphrases slightly the witches’ chant from Shakespeare’s MacBeth, if only to make it more accurately describe the picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here. Taken on January 5, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows a patch of mid-latitude terrain in the icy northern lowland plains of Mars.
While some of the craters here were certainly caused by impact, it is also likely that most were instead cryo-volcanic in nature, whereby ice bubbles up from below as changing temperature conditions — none of which need to be very warm — cause it to either melt temporarily into liquid or sublimate directly into a gas. The dark pimplelike hole on the picture’s right edge is a perfect example, with the hole sitting at the top of a cone.
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Megan Brock, without question still
being targeted by the government
Bring a gun to a knife fight: When Pennsylvania parent Megan Brock demanded, under her state’s right-to-know law, public documents of the Bucks County health department concerning its decisions to impose Wuhan flu lockdowns and school closures (with the office of open records ruling in her favor), county officials then sued her multiple times to try to prevent her access to the records.
The court has now ruled against the county’s lawsuits, while also ruling that the county had operated in “bad faith” and fined it $1,500, the maximum allowed by law.
After the court conducted an in-camera review of the records, Judge Denise M. Bowman ruled on April 28 that more than half of Brock’s requests, which were made under the state’s Right-to-Know Law (RTK), had been withheld “in bad faith.” She ordered the county to release certain documents and pay $1,500 in sanctions for each of the two lawsuits brought against Brock, the maximum allowed under RTK.
You can read the ruling here [pdf]. It notes in particular how county officials had even refused to provide the court one of these documents for review, demonstrating clearly its bad faith.
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I appeared on Robert Pratt’s Pratt on Texas podcast yesterday, doing a short ten minute interview about the lawsuit filed against the FAA that is attempting to shut down Starship/Superheavy development.
That podcast is embedded below. It can also be listened to here, beginning at 12:15 minutes.
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Click for full image.
The Super-Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (Super-BIT) that has been circling Antarctica for the last two weeks has now obtained two more more high resolution wide-field astronomical pictures.
The picture to the right, cropped to post here, is of Messier 104 (the Sombrero Galaxy). While the telescope cannot zoom in closer than this to such objects, it is able to get much wider and sharp pictures, covering an entire galaxy or nebula that ground-based telescope using adaptive optics (designed to counter the fuzziness caused by the atmosphere) cannot. Adaptive optics only work on very small fields of view, thus making it unable to observe some of the larger nearby astronomical objects like galaxies and nebulae.
If you look at the live stream of the balloon’s track, it has now almost completed its second circuit of Antarctica.
Click to watch full animation.
Using data from a variety of space- and ground-based telescopes, astronomers now think they have recorded the moment a star similar to our Sun actually swallowed a planet thought to be comparable to Jupiter or smaller.
Once the science team put all the evidence together, they realized the dust they were seeing with NEOWISE [in orbit] was being generated as the planet spiraled into the star’s puffy atmosphere. Like other older stars, the star had begun to expand in size as it aged, bringing it closer to the orbiting planet. As the planet skimmed the surface of the star, it pulled hot gas off the star that then drifted outward and cooled, forming dust. In addition, material from the disintegrating planet blew outward, also forming dust.
What happened next, according to the astronomers, triggered the flare of optical light seen by ZTF [survey telescope in California]. “The planet plunged into the core of the star and got swallowed whole. As it was doing this, energy was transferred to the star,” De explains. “The star blew off its outer layers to get rid of the energy. It expanded and brightened, and the brightening is what ZTF registered.”
Some of this expanding stellar material then escaped from the star and traveled outward. Like the boiled-off layers of the star and planet that previously drifted outward, this material also cooled to form dust. NEOWISE is detecting the infrared glow of all the newly minted dust.
The picture above is a screen capture from a short artist’s animation created to illustrate what happened. The most amazing aspect of this event is how long the planet skimmed the surface of that star. It appears it did so for several orbits at least.
An evening pause: Better late than never. I forgot to schedule some pauses. This one is fascinating because of the history of technology it reveals.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
These are the same two images the company posted on April 10th, so either nothing is happening, or they are simply not telling us anything.
The idea is to simulate the lunar environment and find out ways to eliminate dust issues.
It appears the launch tower will be completed one month early, in May, with the foundation hole for the second pad 96% dug.
The company hopes with this plan it will be bought whole by a single buyer and thus saved. There remains no guarantee that will happen. The auction will now occur on May 18th.
All told, completed or parts of 11 Starships exist, as well as completed or parts of 8 Superheavies.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 17, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) by the camera team not as part of any particular research project but in order to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule so as to maintain its proper temperature. In such cases the camera team tries to pick potentially interesting spots.
This cliff, about 1,100 feet high, is the north wall of a major volcano channel flowing across the Tharsis Bulge, the lava plains that surround Mars’ giant volcanoes. Located in the dry equatorial regions, there is no near surface ice here, but a lot of dust, much of it likely volcanic ash. In the full picture are several ancient craters, all of which are almost entirely buried by this dust and ash.
The cliff wall itself is made up of numerous layers, each representing a past volcanic flood lava event that covered this region with a new flow of material. These events occurred over more than a billion years.
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NOAA this week once again published an update of its monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I do every month, I have posted this graph below, with some additional details included to provide some context.
In April the number of sunspots dropped again, for the second time in the past three months. The high activity previously had suggested that the solar maximum was going to be much higher than predicted, or possibly would come sooner than expected. The drop however now suggests that the fast rise in sunspot activity that we have seen since the beginning of the ramp up to solar maximum in 2020 might finally be abating.
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