Category: Behind The Black

The eroding edge of Mars’ largest volcanic ash field

1:45 pm

Eroding yardangs at the edge of Mars' largest volcanic ash field
Click for full image.

Cool image time! In the regions between the biggest volcanoes on Mars is the Medusae Fossae Formation, a immense deposit of volcanic ash that extends across as much surface area as the nation of India. As planetary scientist Kevin Lewis of Johns Hopkins University explained to me previously,

In general, much of the [formation] seems to be in net erosion now, retaining very few craters on the surface. …One hypothesis is that this long term erosion, since it’s so enormous, is the primary source of the dust we see covering the much of the planet’s surface.

The image above, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on January 25, 2020. It shows one very small area at the very edge of the Medusae ash deposit, in a region where that deposit is clearly being eroding away by the prevailing southeast-to-northwest winds. The mesas of this ash that remain are called yardangs, their ash more tightly pressed together so that it resists erosion a bit longer than the surrounding material.

In the context map below the location of these yardangs is indicated by the white cross, right on the edge of the Medusae ash field.
» Read more

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California building “army” to track those infected with COVID-19

10:40 am

They’re coming for you next: The California government is now building an “army of tracers” to track those infected with COVID-19 and restrict their future movements.

Gov. Gavin Newsom addressed the concern about inadequate contact tracing on [April 22], announcing plans to train 10,000 people to help local health departments. “The good news is we believe we have the capacity to build an army of tracers,” Newsom said, although he did not say when they’d be ready to deploy.

More on that “army” and its goals here.

“As people move more, we increase the risk for people to get sick,” Sonia Angell, California Department of Public Health director and State Health Officer, said in a live stream. “If people get sick, we want to identify those individuals very early, and then make sure that all of their contacts are also identified.”

…The new contact-tracing platform the state announced today will sync up with California’s existing digital disease surveillance platform, and contact tracers can use it to check in on people’s symptoms through texts, chat, emails, and phone automation, according to Angell. Angell emphasized that the database will focus on health information and will be kept confidential. [emphasis mine]

If you believe the last two words of that quote, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

The second link admits that for this whole plan to work, under present privacy laws “people must be willing to cooperate.” I can tell you this: If I am tested for the Wuhan flu, the very last people I will tell my results to will be these fascist thugs. They aren’t really interested in stopping the virus, which is impossible for them to do. No, what they want is to build up a database of people whom they will then have the right to oppress, by law.

And if you don’t believe me, I still have that bridge in Brooklyn for sale. Make you a good deal, too!

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A failed star with cloud bands like Jupiter’s

9:32 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers think they have detected cloud bands similar to Jupiter’s on a brown dwarf about 6.5 light years away.

A team of astronomers has discovered that the closest known brown dwarf, Luhman 16A, shows signs of cloud bands similar to those seen on Jupiter and Saturn. This is the first time scientists have used the technique of polarimetry to determine the properties of atmospheric clouds outside of the solar system, or exoclouds.

Brown dwarfs are objects heavier than planets but lighter than stars, and typically have 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter. Luhman 16A is part of a binary system containing a second brown dwarf, Luhman 16B. At a distance of 6.5 light-years, it’s the third closest system to our Sun after Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star. Both brown dwarfs weigh about 30 times as much as Jupiter.

Despite the fact that Luhman 16A and 16B have similar masses and temperatures (about 1,900° F or 1,000° C), and presumably formed at the same time, they show markedly different weather. Luhman 16B shows no sign of stationary cloud bands, instead exhibiting evidence of more irregular, patchy clouds. Luhman 16B therefore has noticeable brightness variations as a result of its cloudy features, unlike Luhman 16A.

This conclusion is based on studying the polarized light coming from both brown dwarfs. For Luhman 16A, the result suggested bands. For Luhman 16B, the result suggested patchy, irregular clouds like on Earth.

The emphasis should be on the words “suggested” and “uncertainty.” This is good science, but the data is very sparse. We will need to actually see at these objects to really determine their weather.

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New capacity limits will destroy most remaining restaurants

9:03 am

The beatings will continue until morale improves: The new capacity limits being imposed by state governments due to their panic over the Wuhan flu will likely destroy the bulk of the remaining restaurants that have managed somehow to get through the lock downs.

As some states across the country allow businesses to reopen with limited occupancies, there are still serious obstacles in the paths of restaurant owners. In those Tennessee counties that have already reopened, restaurants can’t exceed 50 percent of their maximum occupancy. Restaurants in most of Iowa will also have the option to reopen at half capacity. Those in Alaska will be limited to 25 percent capacity, and will only seat diners who make reservations in advance.

Ryan Pernice, who owns three restaurants north of Atlanta, didn’t jump with excitement when Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp released a list of 39 guidelines in advance of a push to open certain businesses — including restaurants — on April 27. Most notably for restaurant owners, the guidelines do not allow more than 10 patrons per 500 square feet in dining rooms. After Pernice closed his restaurants on March 17, leaving just one of his restaurant kitchens open for delivery, he sat down to crunch some numbers.

Even with the lights and the walk-in refrigerators turned off, running a restaurant remains an expensive endeavor. Pernice decided to continue paying for services, like pest control, that couldn’t just be ignored, as well as major costs like rent and outstanding vendor invoices. To break even and cover expenses at Table and Main, Osteria Mattone, and Coalition — his three restaurants — would cost $4,128 a day. Though he’ll take the measurements and rearrange the tables to see if reopening is feasible, Pernice can’t imagine hitting that number with only half of the seats in his restaurants occupied. “Not having run the numbers, I seriously doubt that in Table and Main, a tiny restaurant of 1,800 square feet, that I could make more doing sit-down dining than I can right now through our takeout … I think there’s very little to be gained by being the first to this party, in terms of opening the dining room again.”

In other words, under these new rules, a large percentage of the remaining restaurants will be unable to make a profit and die.

The lock downs are expected to bankrupt 20% of all restaurants, putting more than 8 million people out of work. These new rules will probably destroy, at a minimum, another 40%, mostly the smaller, independently owned businesses.

And the rules are absurd, on their face. They will not stop the spread of COVID-19, in the slightest. All they will do is destroy the lives of the people who own the restaurants.

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Successfully first launch of China’s Long March 5B

8:42 am

The new colonial movement: China today successfully completed the first launch of its Long March 5B rocket, the rocket it plans to use to launch its future manned and planetary missions as well as the modules of its first space station.

The payload was the first unmanned test flight of their new upgraded manned capsule, still unnamed. It is expected that this capsule will return to Earth in the next day or so.

China’s next-generation crew carrier is also reusable for up to 10 flights, with a detachable heat shield built to handle higher-temperature returns through Earth’s atmosphere, such as those a capsule would encounter on a re-entry from a lunar mission.

The Xinhua news agency reported the primary purpose of the crew capsule test flight is to verify the ship’s re-entry technologies, such as its heat shield and recovery system. The capsule will return under parachutes and inflate airbags to cushion its landing on solid ground.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

7 China
6 SpaceX
6 Russia

The U.S. still leads China 10 to 7 in the national rankings.

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Virginia now double-counting Wuhan flu cases

5:34 pm

Sure, let’s believe those stats! The Virginia state government this week announced that will count as a new case of the Wuhan flu for every positive test done on a patient, even if that patient had been counted previously from an earlier test.

They claim the goal is merely to get a better count of the number of tests they’ve done, but what this new policy will do is significantly increase, falsely, the total number of coronavirus cases in Virginia, which in turn will serve the corrupt and fascist goals of the governor.

That policy may serve to sharply drive up case numbers, which may in turn significantly delay the re-opening of the state. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has stated that the state will begin its first phase of re-opening only when state officials have logged 14 straight days of declining case numbers and hospitalizations.

The governor last week did allow elective surgeries in the state to resume, though the state’s stay-at-home order, which is set to last until June 10, is still in place.

Virginia has been hit relatively lightly by the coronavirus pandemic compared to many other states. According to Worldometers, it ranks 21st in the country for deaths per one million residents, and 20th for cases. [emphasis mine]

Northam needs some justification for extending his power-grab for as long as possible. Fudging the numbers is certainly one way to get him that justification, even if there really is no justification for the power-grab, under almost any circumstances.

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First Fast Radio Burst discovered inside the Milky Way

2:22 pm

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers now think they have discovered the first Fast Radio Burst (FRB) to have occurred inside the Milky Way, only 30,000 light years away, and from this now hypothesize that the bursts come from a particular kind of neutron star called a magnetar because of its super-powerful magnetic field.

The key is that, using multiple different telescopes, they also detected X-ray emissions from the same object.

The X-ray counterpart to the SGR 1935+2154 burst was not particularly strong or unusual, said astrophysicist Sandro Mereghetti of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy, and research scientist with the ESA’s INTEGRAL satellite. But it could imply that there’s a lot more to FRBs than we can currently detect.

“This is a very intriguing result and supports the association between FRBs and magnetars,” Mereghetti told ScienceAlert. “The FRB identified up to now are extragalactic. They have never been detected at X/gamma rays. An X-ray burst with luminosity like that of SGR1935 would be undetectable for an extragalactic source.”

Of course, more data is needed, as well as more detections, but it appears that astronomers are beginning to hone in on the solution to the source of FBRs.

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The edge of Mars’ north polar ice cap

1:55 pm

The scarp face of the Martian north polar ice cap
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on December 29, 2019 by the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and shows the many-layered scarp face of the Martian north polar ice cap. I have also rotated the image so that north is at the top. The overall height of this scarp is quite high, more than 3,500 feet.

There are a number of very cool features in this image. For example, note what at first look like puffs of clouds just below the contact between the bright and dark layers. I count almost two dozen, with the largest near the center. They are not cloud puffs, however, but areas scoured by past avalanches. According to Patricio Becerra at the University of Bern in Switzerland,

An image from a few years ago shows evidence for the same patches, so they likely happened a while back. When the avalanches or “block falls” occur, they scour the Basal Unit [the dark layer] and break up the exposed surface, causing a brighter/cloudier appearance of the ground than the undisturbed parts.

Avalanches on the scarps of the North Pole icecap occur in great numbers at the beginning of every Martian summer. As sunlight hits the scarp, it causes the carbon dioxide frost layer that settled on the cap during the winter to sublimate away as vapor, and like the freeze-melt cycle on Earth, this sublimation disturbs any unstable ice boulders on the scarp face.

During the early Martian summer, images from MRO routinely capture many such avalanches. Scientists think there could be hundreds to thousands every summer. In many ways, this is similar to the large pieces of ice that routinely calf off the foot of glaciers here on Earth, and that tourists take cruise ships to see in the inside passage of Alaska.

For context, the overview map below indicates with a gold cross where on the icecap’s edge this image is located. The red and pink areas indicate the vast dune fields that surround the icecap.
» Read more

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Experts now admit COVID-19 mortality rate much lower then predicted

11:41 am

According to Dr. Deborah Birx, the U.S. coronavirus response coordinator, the experts who initially claimed that the Wuhan flu was far more deadly than the flu were wrong, and that the death rate appears far less, closer to that of a typical flu.

“I think we underestimated very early on the number of asymptomatic cases,” Dr. Birx said. “And I think we’re really beginning to understand there are people that get infected that those symptoms are so low-grade that they don’t even know that they’re infected.”

Dr. Birx added that many of those dying from coronavirus have other diseases, such as heart disease or problems with their immune systems. “[W]e’re seeing the majority of the people that we’re losing to this disease have those other diseases that you just described,” she said. “And so, I do believe that a lot of the diseases we’re seeing in the hospital right now, yes, they may have preexisting conditions but those preexisting conditions are resulting in them having a much more serious course when they’re infected with this virus.”

In other words, the best way to defeat this virus is to get a lot of young and healthy people infected so they can develop antibodies. Those antibodies then do the job a vaccine might do, squelch the disease, and do it far faster and with almost no cost.

This article provides the evidence for Birx’s statement, outlining the five studies so far that have all confirmed the Wuhan flu death rate to be less than 1%, with four finding the rate exactly comparable to that of the ordinary flu.

I must note, with some anger, that from the very beginning, as soon as we began to collect reliable data outside of China, it was clear that this was where the data was taking us. Did any of our elected politicians or mainstream press do anything to note this fact and thus ease the panic? No. Instead, they went out of their way to pour gasoline on the fire, for their own evil and power-hungry ends.

Americans have got to stop obeying these people, or follow any of their advice. They are taking us down the road to hell.

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A “gallery of snitches, busybodies, and employees who rat out their own neighbors and employers.”

11:21 am

Good: The names and addresses of 900 snitches, who reported “social-distancing violations” in Missouri on neighbors, friends, fellow employees, and their employers, have been revealed publicly, as required by the state’s Sunshine Law.

The quote in the headline was said by the man who requested the information and then posted it online for all to see.

It appears these tipsters thought they make these accusations anonymously, without any consequences. Hah! Think again. Our culture and law requires that the accused can see their accuser, or as the sixth amendment in the Bill of Rights states, “be confronted with the witnesses against him.”

Now they “fear backlash” from those they snitched against. Too bad. In fact, I applaud the guy who requested this information and posted it online.

During this entire Wuhan flu panic, there has been a lot of social pressure imposed on those that dare disagree with accepted wisdom that COVID-19 is going to kill us all and that we must take extreme measures against it, no matter what the cost. It has also been expected that one must be polite in expressing any disagreement, tiptoeing on egg shells in case you might offend them, or be accused of wanting to kill people.

Enough. It is time to stare this petty dictators in the face and tell them that they were wrong, and have caused untold harm to many. And if possible, make them feel a some pain as well for their bad behavior.

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Japan tests new engine for new rocket

8:43 am

Capitalism in space: Mitsubishi has successfully tested the new engine it will use in the new rocket, the H3, that it is building for Japan’s space agency, JAXA.

JAXA reports that the engine fired for the planned duration of 240 seconds (4 minutes) at the space agency’s Tanegashima Space Center. It was the seventh hot fire of the new engine, which is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.

JAXA plans H-3’s first test launch by the end of the nation’s 2020 fiscal year, which began on April 1 and will end on March 31, 2021. It is not known whether work slow downs resulting from the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic will affect the schedule.

The two-stage H3 is intended to be a more affordable and flexible replacement for the H-IIA and H-IIB boosters now in use. The new rocket is designed to place payloads weighing 4,000 kg (8,818 lb) or more into sun-synchronous orbit at 500 km (310.7 miles) or 6,500 kg (14,330 lb) into geosynchronous transfer orbit.

I do wish JAXA or Mitsubishi would give this rocket a more interesting name. It would help their woeful marketing attempts to sell it to other customers.

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Comparing the Wuhan flu with the 1968 Hong Kong flu

9:20 am

Link here.

The Hong Kong flu killed about twice as many people in the U.S. as COVID-19 has so far, and it did this for a population about a third smaller (200 million vs 328 million), meaning that its deadliness was even worse. Yet:

Nothing closed. Schools stayed open. All businesses did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants. John Fund has a friend who reports having attended a Grateful Dead concert. In fact, people have no memory or awareness that the famous Woodstock concert of August 1969 – planned in January during the worse period of death – actually occurred during a deadly American flu pandemic that only peaked globally six months later. There was no thought given to the virus which, like ours today, was dangerous mainly for a non-concert-going demographic.

Stock markets didn’t crash. Congress passed no legislation. The Federal Reserve did nothing. Not a single governor acted to enforce social distancing, curve flattening (even though hundreds of thousands of people were hospitalized), or banning of crowds. No mothers were arrested for taking their kids to other homes. No surfers were arrested. No daycares were shut even though there were more infant deaths with this virus than the one we are experiencing now. There were no suicides, no unemployment, no drug overdoses.

Essentially, life went on. Except for a few people who took some precautions, mostly in connection with older and already sick individuals, everyone took little notice, recognizing that — just like COVID-19 — the Hong Kong flu was not threat to them, and that the best way to beat it was to allow the young and healthy to get it, recover, and thus develop an immunity that would limit its spread to the old and vulnerable.

The result was that the Hong Kong was a blip to society, hardly remembered today, and never a problem. Sadly the situation today is different. Because we decided to panic, we have essentially destroyed our economy and our future freedom. Behaviors that are simply absurd (wearing masks all the time and never getting closer than six feet to anyone else) are becoming socially required.

And the idea that a government can bankrupt business and harass women and children, at will, has now become acceptable.

It will be a long time before a people will ever be as free as Americans once were.

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NASA buys 18 new space shuttle engines for SLS for $1.79 billion

8:09 am

NASA has awarded Aerojet Rocketdyne a $1.79 billion contract to build 18 new space shuttle R-25 engines for its still unlaunched SLS rocket.

In plain math, that equals $100 million per engine. Since SLS uses four of these engines per launch, and since that rocket is entirely expendable and will thus throw these engines away after each launch, that guarantees each SLS launch must cost no less than $400 million, about four times the price of a Falcon Heavy launch.

But wait, there’s more! Eric Berger at Ars Technica notes

NASA has previously given more than $1 billion to Aerojet to “restart” production of the space shuttle era engines and a contract for six new ones. So, according to the space agency, NASA has spent $3.5 billion for a total of 24 rocket engines. That comes to $146 million per engine. (Or 780,000 bars of Gold-Pressed Latinum, as this is a deal only the Ferengi could love.)

That means each SLS launch must cost a minimum of just under $600 million, and that’s just the price for the four engines. It doesn’t include the rocket itself, the ground systems, its upper stages, or any other component.

But wait, there’s more! Berger also reminds us that SpaceX estimates the cost to build each its Starship Raptor engines to be about $1 million, and each will be used multiple times. He also points out that the Raptor is actually more powerful than the R-25 engine.

That’s okay though. This is the federal government, run by Washington, whose goal for the few decades has been to let no project succeed, and to waste as much money as possible in the process. And if they can squelch the dreams and aspirations of everyone else as they do it, so much the better!

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Sierra Nevada names its first Dream Chaser spacecraft “Tenacity”

7:52 am

Capitalism in space: Sierra Nevada yesterday announced that it is giving the name “Tenacity” to its first Dream Chaser spacecraft.

Though the press release does not say so, this decision essentially confirms the company intention to build more Dream Chaser spacecraft, once this one proves itself in flight. And I would expect those later craft will be aimed at manned flight.

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SpaceShipTwo Unity makes first New Mexico glide flight

7:42 am

Capitalism in space: Virgin Galactic’s Unity suborbital spaceship successfully completed its first glide test flight from its New Mexico launch site yesterday.

They still have not set a date for their first commercial flights, so the company still claims those first flights will occur this year. I will believe it when I see it.

There does appear to be one apparent positive development for Virgin Galactic. It increasingly appears as if Blue Origin is slowly abandoning its effort to compete for suborbital tourism with its New Shepard spacecraft. Blue Origin has not said so, but the extreme slow down in test flights the last two strongly implies it. Moreover, that company’s success in garnering big government contracts, a billion from the military for its orbital New Glenn rocket and about a half billion from NASA for its proposed Blue Moon manned lunar lander, reinforces the sense that the company is shifting its focus away from suborbital space.

If so, that will clear the market for Virgin Galactic, assuming a viable market still exists with the coming of private commercial orbital spaceships like Dragon and Starliner.

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NASA delays 1st SLS launch again

9:55 pm

NASA has now made official what had been expected for months, announcing a new delay of the first unmanned test flight of its SLS rocket from March 2021 to November 2021.

The article tries to put a lot of the blame for this new delay on the shut down over the Wuhan panic, but that shut down will only stop work for at most two months. The new delay however adds eight months to the schedule, showing that they probably were never going to meet that March 2021 deadline, and are using COVID-19 as a cover for the program’s continuing problems, delays, and cost overruns.

Should this unmanned flight take place in November 2021, it will have taken NASA about seventeen years and about $60 billion to get to that first flight. They say the first manned mission is scheduled in late 2022 or early 2023. If true would mean it took NASA about two decades to achieve a single manned flight since Bush Jr. proposed it.

Of course, that is making the very unlikely assumption that there will be no further delays before that first manned flight. I personally am very confident there will be.

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Funding breakdown for three lunar landing contracts

3:47 pm

Capitalism in space: The contracts awarded by NASA yesterday to build manned lunar landers totaled almost a billion dollars, distributed as follows:

  • Blue Origin: $579 million
  • Dynetics: $253 million
  • SpaceX: $135 million

That Blue Origin got the biggest amount might have to do with the bid’s subcontractors, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. This gives these traditional big space partners, who normally rely on these kinds of government contracts and have little ability to make money outside them, some financing. This will also please their political backers in Congress.

For SpaceX, this is the first time they have taken any government money in connection with Starship. It also appears that NASA is going to stay back and generally let SpaceX develop it without undue interference.

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Scientists better constrain time frame of Mars’ active dynamo

12:33 pm

Using data from the MAVEN orbiter, scientists have now constrained the time frame when Mars’ dynamo was active and producing a global magnetic field, between 3.7 and 4.5 billion years ago.

Magnetism in certain rocks on Mars’ surface indicate that the Martian dynamo was active between 4.3 and 4.2 billion years ago, but the absence of magnetism over three large basins – Hellas, Argyre, and Isidis – that formed 3.9 billion years ago has led most scientists to believe the dynamo was inactive by that time.

Mittelholz’s team analyzed new data from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter and found clear evidence of a magnetic field coming from the Lucus Planum lava flow that formed about 3.7 billion years ago – much later than at other areas studied.

There is of course a lot of uncertainty here.

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Europa’s mysterious stained grooves

11:18 am

Europa's jumbled icepack
Click for full image.

From 1995 to 2003 the Galileo orbiter circled Jupiter 34 times. During those orbits the spacecraft made numerous close fly-bys of Jupiter’s moons, including eleven past the tantalizingly mysterious moon Europa.

The image to the right was taken during the eighth fly-by of Europa. It is one of three Galileo images of Europa that scientists have pulled from the Galileo archive and subjected to modern computer processing in order to improve what can be seen. The other two can be found here and here. From the release for the image to the right:

All three images were captured along the same longitude of Europa as Galileo flew by on Sept. 26, 1998, in the spacecraft’s 17th orbit of Jupiter (orbit E17). It was the eighth of Galileo’s 11 targeted flybys of Europa. High-resolution images were taken through a clear filter in grayscale (black and white). Using lower-resolution, color images of the same region from a different flyby (orbit E14), technicians recently mapped color onto the higher-resolution images.

In other words, they laid the colors from a lower resolution color image on top of the high resolution black & white image so that we could see these three images in color. The blue and white areas are made of up water ice, while the reddish areas are made up of “more non-ice materials.”

The vagueness for describing the non-ice materials is intentional, as scientists still do not know what they made of. They do believe that this material came from the planet’s interior, as the red material is always found aligned with the cracks, fissures, and grooves, as illustrated clear by this image.

What has always struck me about this surface of Europa since I first saw similar Galileo images back in 1998 and wrote about them for the magazine The Sciences is how much it resembles the Arctic ice pack as seen by early explorers during their attempts to reach the North Pole, jumbled jigsaw pieces of ice packed together but moving slowly so that the cracks between them shift and change over time.

The resemblance adds weight to the theory that there is a liquid ocean below Europa’s icepack, and the red material hints at some intriguing chemistry coming from that ocean.

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NY funeral directors: Government is padding Wuhan flu deaths

9:59 am

According to funeral directors in New York, the government is significantly exaggerating the mortality from the Wuhan flu, assigning it as the cause to practically every death

In conversations with several funeral directors across New York City, O’Keefe [of Project Veritas] uncovered a shocking narrative where, without fail, every director he spoke to expressed his or her concern that coronavirus deaths are being inflated and every death in NYC is being recorded as a COVID death with or without testing to confirm.

“They are putting COVID on a lot of death certificates because people who are going to their hospital with any kind of respiratory distress, respiratory problems, pneumonia, the flu — the flu-like symptoms lead into the COVID-19,” said Joseph Antioco of Schafer Funeral Home. “To me, all you’re doing is padding the statistics. You’re putting people on that have COVID-19 even if they didn’t have it. You’re making the death rate for New York City a lot higher than it should be.”

Such corruption in New York, a Democratically-controlled one party state for decades, is not a surprise. It tells us that we cannot trust the numbers now being issued for coronavirus coming from this state. And since New York accounts for about a third of all deaths in the U.S., the totals for the Wuhan flu in this country are highly suspect.

We are being scammed.

One other aspect of this story: Note that all Project Veritas did was some fundamental journalism. They called funeral directors and asked them what was happening. What a concept. Real journalism. I have embedded the full Project Veritas video below the fold.
» Read more

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Curiosity and other Mars orbiters threatened by budget cuts

9:25 am

The proposed budget for NASA in the Trump administrations 2021 budget request to Congress includes significant budget cuts to both Curiosity and several Mars orbiters needed to act as relay communications satellites.

The White House’s 2021 federal budget request allocates just $40 million to the mission, a decrease of 20% from the rover’s current funding. And that current funding is 13% less than Curiosity got in the previous year, said Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

If the 2021 request is passed by Congress as-is, Curiosity’s operations would have to be scaled back considerably. Running the mission with just $40 million in 2021 would leave unused about 40% of the science team’s capability and 40% of the rover’s power output, which comes from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), Vasavada said.

In addition, the proposed budget will require a 50% reduction in imaging by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the end to the Mars Odyssey orbiter, and a significant but unspecified reduction in the use of the MAVEN orbiter.

I reported these facts back in March but there is no harm in noting them again.

The question is not whether there should be cuts at NASA. Considering the overall federal debt and annual budget deficit, NASA’s budget should be cut. The question is what to cut. The planetary program, probably NASA’s most successful program, is certainly not the program to cut. Instead, the Trump administration should be cutting the waste and badly run programs, like SLS, that spend billions and accomplish nothing.

If Congress and Trump did this, they could cut NASA’s total budget and still have plenty left over for the commercial manned program — including going to the Moon — and also increase the budget to the planetary program. I’ve been saying this since 2011, and nothing has happened in the past decade to change that conclusion.

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Car sales continue crash in April

9:04 pm

The beatings will continue until morale improves: According to one car industry analysis, the April sales of cars will continue to plummet.

“April auto sales took the biggest hit we’ve seen in decades,” said Jessica Caldwell, Edmunds’ executive director of insights. “These bleak figures aren’t just because consumers are holding back on their purchases — fleet sales are seeing an even more dramatic drop as daily rental business has dried up. Like many other industries, the entire automotive sector is struggling as the coronavirus crisis continues to cripple the economy.”

They hope that the end in May of some of the government shut downs imposed because of the Wuhan flu panic will ease the crash, but recognized that with millions out of work, people may no longer have the crash to buy new cars.

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In-person voting in Wisconsin produced no new Wuhan flu cases

1:26 pm

Surprise! Surprise! Despite many predictions of disaster by our lordly “experts,” the data now shows no increase in Wuhan flu cases at all in Wisconsin following its decision to allow in-person voting during its primary earlier this month.

There is of course uncertainty in this conclusion, but even the “experts” agree with this conclusion.

But then, we shouldn’t be surprised. The normal gathering of people in a sane normal society does not result in wholesale deaths from these kinds of viruses. If anything, it serves to strengthen the population’s immunity to them.

We are unfortunately living in a time of mass hysteria, where such common sense facts are ignored, and panic and fear rule the day.

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Starlink satellites, not aliens, are those strings of lights in the night sky

1:12 pm

Apparently many people have been seeing the reflected strings of SpaceX’s new Starlink satellites in the night sky, and are calling news organizations asking about them.

Some viewers have noticed the “lights” in the sky will go dark, one by one. This is due to the reflection of light from the moon and Earth and how the position of the satellites change.

Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, detailed a plan this week to “mitigate the impact of their Starlink satellite constellation on night sky observation,” according to an article on Tech Crunch.

In that Tech Crunch article, Musk describes how they are installing sun visors on the satellites to prevent the reflections and make them hopefully invisible to the Earthbound observers.

This will make the astronomy crowd happy, which wants its new big ground-based telescopes to be useful. I think they should instead be focusing their effort in building more space-based telescopes.

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