Category: Behind The Black

September 12, 2023 Quick space links

3:59 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

 

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Today’s blacklisted American: Innocent man sentenced one-year in prison for appearing as George Washington in the Capitol on January 6

2:26 pm

Isaac Yoder at the Capitol
Isaac Yoder at the Capitol, dressed as George Washington

They’re coming for you next: When Isaac Yoder put on his home-made costume of George Washington and went to the demonstrations on January 6, 2021, he was doing what he had been doing for years, making his statement about the roots of American liberty and free speech at many different protests. His goal wasn’t solely to protest the election of Joe Biden. He was there as much to remind everyone where our freedoms came from, “to honor the memory and legacy” of our Founding Fathers.

The Biden Department of Justice however didn’t like this innocent expression of free speech. It arrested Yoder, and has gotten him sentenced to a one year prison term for “Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building,” actions that the First Amendment to the Constitution expressly permits, and in fact outlaws our federal government from prohibiting.

A Missouri man walked into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, dressed as George Washington. He caused no damage, engaged in no violence, and was even recorded peacefully speaking with police before leaving. For daring to dress as America’s pre-eminent Founding Father and symbolically rebuking our corrupt ruling class, Isaac Yoder was surveilled for seven months, eventually arrested, fined, and sentenced to a year in prison.

When Yoder arrived, the worst protests had ended, and the Capitol police had already opened the doors and were letting people quietly walk through the building. But he was part of a protest against Joe Biden, the Washington ruling class, and its control of the Federal government, and that could not be allowed, even though he was dressed as George Washington.
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Weird rocks on Mars

1:02 pm

Weird rocks seen by Curiosity and Perseverance
For original images, go here and here.

Time for two cool images, this time from both of the American rovers on Mars.

The left picture above was taken on September 9, 2023 by the high resolution mast camera on Curiosity. It shows what appears to be a many-layered but rounded rock which appears typical of the many boulders that cover the terrain through which Curiosity is presently traveling. In the past the layered rocks that Curiosity has observed lower on the flanks of Mount Sharp have not been rounded. Instead, the delicate layers have often extended outward at the rock’s edges, almost like paper or threads. For some reason, the layers in the rocks here have been eroded smooth, suggesting they were once covered by flowing water or ice, able to round the rough edges in a way that Mars’ thin atmosphere can’t.

What is puzzling is the location, higher on Mount Sharp. One would expect the reverse, with such erosion more typical lower on the mountain and uneroded delicate layers more common higher on the mountain.

The right picture above was taken on September 8, 2023 by one of the high resolution mast cameras on the rover Perseverance in Jezero Crater, about 5,000 miles to west of Curiosity. It shows a rock whose shape is so strange it is hard to fathom a geological process that would result in this form. Possibly the rock was a surface layer on a larger round boulder, and the normal freeze-thaw cycle of Mars caused it crack off as one piece. The lump in the middle however makes this explanation questionable.

Also puzzling is the curved shape. On Mars almost no geological layers have been found that are curved. They are generally flat and horizontal, reflecting the lack of tectonic processes that on Earth often twist and squash layers.

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Ingenuity completes 58th flight on Mars

11:16 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Ingenuity yesterday successfully completed its 58th flight on Mars, flying 571 feet to the northwest for 107 seconds at a height of 33 feet.

The overview map above shows with the green line the approximate route of the helicopter. Though the Ingenuity engineering team has updated the flight log (at the link above), the route has not yet been added to the Perseverance interactive map. I am guessing at that route based upon the flight plan posted on September 7, 2023, which stated the rover would head northwest as well as image science targets. That suggests it was flown above Perseverance’s planned route, as indicated by the red dotted line.

This particular flight was different than recent flights, which have generally lasted slightly longer and covered a slightly longer distance, probably so the helicopter could find a safe landing spot. This time Ingenuity landed about 23 seconds early, though the distance traveled was still slightly longer. The difference once again was almost certainly caused by the helicopter’s software picking a good landing spot. It just got above its planned landing spot sooner than expected, found a good pad, and then landed.

The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present location. It is presently moving west to reach what the scientists consider an important geological contact between two layers.

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Repeating moonquakes on Moon found to be caused by remaining sections of Apollo 17’s LM

10:41 am

Scientists reviewing the archive seismic data produced by the seismometers placed on the Moon by the Apollo missions have discovered that repeating small moonquakes in that data were actually caused by base of Apollo 17’s Lunar Module (LM) that provided a launchpad for the part of the LM that lifted the astronauts off the Moon.

Triangulating the origin of the mystery quakes, researchers surprisingly realized they came from the Apollo 17 lunar lander base, which expands and vibrates each morning as it becomes heated by the sun.

“Every lunar morning when the sun hits the lander, it starts popping off,” Allen Husker, a Caltech research professor of geophysics who worked on the project, said in a statement. “Every five to six minutes another one, over a period of five to seven Earth hours. They were incredibly regular and repeating.”

That the extreme range of temperatures experienced by the LM could cause detectable quakes as the LM base expanded suggests strongly how difficult it is for a spacecraft to survive the lunar night lasting 14 Earth days. For all we know, that base has now literally fallen apart due to these stresses. This in turn suggests it is highly unlikely that India’s Pragyan rover will come back to life when the sun rises on September 22, 2023.

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Lucy gets first images of its first target asteroid, Dinkinesh

10:32 am

The asteroid Dinkinesh as seen by Lucy

The asteroid probe Lucy has obtained its first images of Dinkinesh, the first of the ten asteroids the spacecraft is hoping to visit during its twelve year voyage to the Trojan asteroids.

The image to the left shows the motion of that asteroid over a two day period when Lucy was getting the pictures.

Lucy took these images while it was 14 million miles (23 million km) away from the asteroid, which is only about a half-mile wide (1 km). Over the next two months, Lucy will continue toward Dinkinesh until its closest approach of 265 miles (425 km) on Nov. 1, 2023. The Lucy team will use this encounter as an opportunity to test out spacecraft systems and procedures, focusing on the spacecraft’s terminal tracking system, designed to keep the asteroid within the instruments’ fields of view as the spacecraft flies by at 10,000 mph (4.5 km/s). Lucy will continue to image the asteroid over the next months as part of its optical navigation program, which uses the asteroid’s apparent position against the star background to determine the relative position of Lucy and Dinkinesh to ensure an accurate flyby. Dinkinesh will remain an unresolved point of light during the long approach and won’t start to show surface detail until the day of the encounter.

Lucy’s primary targets are asteroids in the two Trojan groups that orbit the Sun in the two Lagrange points in same orbit as Jupiter, fore and aft of the gas giant by 60 degrees. For a map of Lucy’s full mission profile, go here.

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Frank Rubio on ISS sets new record for an American in space

10:10 am

Though Frank Rubio was only supposed to do a six month mission, a leak on the Soyuz capsule that brought him and his two crewmates into space has resulted in all three doing a mission exceeding one year, and setting a new record for an American in space.

Today Rubio broke the old American record of 355 days, set by Mark Vande Hei in 2022. When they return on September 27, 2023, all three will have spent 371 days in space, the third longest manned mission in history, exceeded only by Sergei Avdeyev’s 381 in 1999 and Valeri Polyakov’s 437 in 1994-1995, both on Russia’s Mir space station.

Based on my interviews with Polyakov and Musa Manarov (who was on the first mission with Vladimir Titov to spend one year in space — 366 days total — in 1988) for my book Leaving Earth, it will take Rubio about one year to fully recover from this mission, though he will likely be able to function almost normally within a month or so.

It remains interesting that these American records set by Rubio and Vande Hei occurred because of decisions by the Russians, not the American space agency NASA. NASA has consistently resisted doing long missions on ISS, even though this is exactly the kind of medical research required if we are to send humans on multi-year missions to Mars and beyond. Even more embarrassing, the longest NASA planned mission, flying Scott Kelly for 340 days, was touted by NASA as a year-long mission, even though it was never going to and did not achieve that distinction.

In doing this research the Russians have always led, and appear to continue to do so on ISS.

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SpaceX launches 21 Starlink satellites

9:38 am

SpaceX last night launched 21 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg in California, using its Falcon 9 rocket.

The first stage completed its eleventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

64 SpaceX
42 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 74 to 42. It also now leads the entire world combined, 74 to 67, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 64 to 67.

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September 11, 2023 Quick space links

4:33 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

 

 

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Real pushback: Defiance from all sides to New Mexico’s unlawful suspension of the 2nd amendment

1:27 pm

Michelle Lujan Grisham

When New Mexico’s Democratic Party governor Michelle Lujan Grisham suddenly declared on September 8, 2023 that she was unilaterally suspending the second amendment by outlawing for 30 days the right to carry firearms by any citizens in Albuquerque and its surrounding Bernalillo county, no one should have been surprised.

All Grisham was doing was following the many precedents set during the COVID epidemic, where nationwide governors routinely made unilateral and unlawful declarations violating the Constitutional rights of citizens, with no pushback at all. Grisham was merely following those precedents. To her, it was now okay for a governor to routinely declare a “health emergency” for any reason under the sun (in this case the violent shooting death of an innocent eleven-year-old boy), and declare any law she didn’t like to be null and void.

Grisham was simply demonstrating forcefully the worst lessons learned from the COVID panic. It taught power-hungry politicians that they could get away with any abuse of power they conceived, as long as they dressed that power grab as part of some sort of “health emergency.”

You see, power is very habit-forming, and when you find you suffer no pain for abusing it it is then very easy to abuse it again, and again and again.

The response to Grisham’s unlawful abuse of power however suggested strongly that things are no longer going to follow the script of the COVID panic, when the public meekly went along. Instead, the uproar in the past three days has been astonishing, not so much from the ordinary citizens defying the ban, but from politicians and pundits from across the entire political spectrum.
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Ridge in Martian lowland plains

11:47 am

Tiny ridge in Martian lowlands
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image is interesting not because it shows us some spectacular Martian terrain, but because the most distinct feature is a thin ridge only a few feet high that pokes up out of the northern lowland plains for apparently no reason.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 1, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The ridge is about 1.8 miles long, and is only about five feet high on its western end, rising to about 25 feet on its eastern end.

The colors differences indicate that the ridge’s peak is likely bedrock, and the surrounding greenish/blue hue suggesting sand and rocks covered with dust. The ridge might be the top of a deeper buried topological feature but that is only a guess.
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