Category: Behind The Black

Is it a volcano or an impact crater? Mars Express wants to know!

9:58 am

Europe’s Mars Express orbiter has taken a high resolution image of Ismenia Patera, a very large crater located in the Arabia Terra region of Mars, the largest part of the transition zone between the low flat northern plains and the high rough southern terrain.

The crater is intriguing to scientists because they are not sure if it was created by an impact, or a volcano.

Certain properties of the surface features seen in Arabia Terra suggest a volcanic origin: for example, their irregular shapes, low topographic relief, their relatively uplifted rims and apparent lack of ejected material that would usually be present around an impact crater.

However, some of these features and irregular shapes could also be present in impact craters that have simply evolved and interacted with their environment in particular ways over time.

There is also additional evidence that this region was once home to volcanic activity. If so, that activity would have changed the terrain, and thus made its geological history more complex and difficult to decipher, a fact that is important since this is also a region that might have been at the edge of theorized northern Martian Ocean.

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New information on SpaceX’s rocket fairing recovery effort

9:25 am

Link here. In requesting permission to recover Dragon capsules in the Gulf of Mexico, SpaceX submitted a great deal of information to the FAA about its effort to recover and reuse the fairings of its Falcon 9 rocket. Doug Messier of Parabolic Arc has done a nice job of excerpting that information at the link.

For example, SpaceX is not only trying to recover the fairings, it is trying to recover the new fairing drogue chutes that it uses to slow the fairings down and then ejects before splashdown.

To me, however, one tidbit that stood out like a beacon and actually tells us more about SpaceX’s future anticipated launch rate was this quote:

From 2019-2024, SpaceX anticipates the frequency of launches involving fairing recovery to increase. In 2018, SpaceX anticipates approximately two recovery attempts, and from 2019-2024, SpaceX anticipates approximately three recovery attempts per month. Thus, for all seven years, SpaceX anticipates up to 480 drogue parachutes and 480 parafoils would land in the ocean.

This is further confirmation of SpaceX’s public prediction that it will soon be launching about 30 to 40 times per year. These numbers also equal the best yearly rates the entire United States launch industry ever achieved, and suggest that the entire launch industry in the next decade will be experiencing a significant boom, since aggressive competition usually causes an increase in business for all competitors.

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New method for scrubbing CO2 out of the air

1:13 pm

Researchers have devised a new much more efficient technique for removing carbon dioxide from the smoke of power plants.

The memzyme meets the Department of Energy’s standards by capturing 90 percent of power plant carbon dioxide production at a relatively low cost of $40 per ton. Researchers term the membrane a “memzyme” because it acts like a filter but is near-saturated with an enzyme, carbonic anhydrase, developed by living cells over millions of years to help rid themselves of carbon dioxide efficiently and rapidly.

“To date, stripping carbon dioxide from smoke has been prohibitively expensive using the thick, solid, polymer membranes currently available,” says Jeff Brinker, a Sandia fellow, University of New Mexico regents’ professor and the paper’s lead author. “Our inexpensive method follows nature’s lead in our use of a water-based membrane only 18 nanometers thick that incorporates natural enzymes to capture 90 percent of carbon dioxide released. (A nanometer is about 1/700 of the diameter of a human hair.) This is almost 70 percent better than current commercial methods, and it’s done at a fraction of the cost.”

The article also notes at the end that this technology could also be adapted to scrubbing CO2 from spacecraft atmospheres.

Hat tip to reader MarcusZ1967.

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Environmental activists to build methane-detecting satellite

9:38 am

What could possibly go wrong? The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), historically one of the U.S.’s most partisan and aggressive environmental activist groups, has announced that it has raised millions to build a satellite to measure atmospheric methane, with a launch aimed for 2020.

The EDF, which is based in New York City, aims to launch the satellite as early as 2020. The environmental group and its scientific partners at Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, say that their planned ‘MethaneSAT’ will make the most precise measurements of methane yet from space. Their goal is to monitor emissions from roughly 50 major oil and gas fields that account for around 80% of the world’s oil and gas production. But the satellite could also be used to estimate emissions from landfills and agriculture.

“We need good solid data so that we really can support global action on climate change, and we’ve got to do it fast,” says Steven Hamburg, the EDF’s chief scientist.

MethaneSAT is an offshoot of the EDF’s research on greenhouse-gas emissions from US oil and gas facilities. In 2012, the group spearheaded a collaboration with industry and academic scientists to better quantify methane emissions and identify leaky infrastructure, from the wellhead all the way to the urban distribution system. That work is ongoing, but suggests that methane emissions from oil and gas facilities exceed US government estimates. Last year, the EDF helped to launch another collaboration with industry partners, governments and academics to carry that research forward internationally. [emphasis mine]

While I applaud their effort to do real research, I have serious concerns about the objectivity of their work. It appears they are aiming this satellite to look specifically at oil and gas facilities, the big enemies of the global-warming community, and clearly wish to document evidence for human-caused global warming. Thus, it will not be surprising if their research results end up biased in these directions.

Nonetheless, this project’s funding, much of it from private sources, highlights the on-going shift away from government money for the funding of space missions, as did my previous post As noted at the link above,

The EDF declined to provide a precise cost estimate for its satellite because the design remains in flux, but said that it is likely to be in the tens of millions of dollars. The group is seeking extra support from philanthropists to operate the satellite once it’s in orbit. All the data will be freely available. Hamburg says that the project provides a new model for funding targeted space missions. “We’re going to be the first, but I think we’re going to see this approach be used by others as well,” he says.

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Private space raised nearly $1 billion the first quarter of 2018

9:22 am

Capitalism in space: A survey of the money raised in the first quarter of 2018 has found that commercial space has raised nearly $1 billion, all from non-government sources.

The April 10 report by Space Angels, a fund that invests in early-stage space companies, concluded that there was $975.8 million in non-government equity investment in space companies in the first quarter of 2018. That would put the industry on a pace for nearly $4 billion for the year, a figure similar to the estimate made by Space Angels for investment in the industry in 2017.

Just over half of that total for the first quarter, though, came from a single investment identified by Space Angels: a $500 million investment in SpaceX led by Fidelity Investments. That investment is intended “to drive development of their satellite communications network, Starlink,” the report stated.

It appears from the article that the bulk of the investment capital went, not to launch rocket projects, but to satellite proposals. Even so, those satellites will have to get launched, so investment in private rockets is sure to go up in the coming years.

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Another smallsat rocket company enters the fray

9:13 am

Capitalism in space: A new smallsat rocket company, EXOS Aerospace Systems & Technologies, has announced that it will do a test launch out of Spaceport America on May 5, the anniversary of Alan Shepard’s first suborbital flight, of a rocket it dubs SARGE.

The press release did not specifically say whether the test launch would be suborbital or not, though I strongly suspect so. Nor can I find any details about this rocket or the launch at the company’s website. The company sells itself as building reusable rockets, and the press release includes a video of a hover static fire test of one rocket. Other videos at the company’s website show short clips of other flights were an earlier rocket returned to Earth by parachute. They state that SARGE is an upgrade, so maybe they are going to use its engines to slow the landing.

Either way, the smallsat launch industry is getting very crowded. This company seems right now aimed at capturing the suborbital science and school portion of the market that is looking for cheap quick ways to get payloads up into space for very short periods at very low cost.

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The search for exoplanets at Alpha Centauri

8:56 am

The search for new exoplanets orbiting the three stars of the Alpha Centauri star system is intensifying, despite significant viewing challenges and solar activity that precludes life around one star.

The system’s two sunlike stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, orbit each other closely while Proxima Centauri, a tempestuous red dwarf, hangs onto the system tenuously in a much more distant orbit. In 2016, astronomers discovered an Earth-mass planet around Proxima Centauri, but the planet, blasted by radiation and fierce stellar winds, seems unlikely to be habitable. Astrobiologists think the other two stars are more likely to host temperate, Earth-like planets.

Maksym Lisogorskyi, an astronomer at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, U.K., tried to find them with an instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) 3.6-meter telescope in Chile. He and his colleagues looked for Doppler shifts in the spectral lines of the stars’ light that would be caused if a planet tugged them back and forth. But Lisogorskyi told the meeting that the stars’ surfaces are turbulent, and prone to flares that also jiggle the spectral lines, masking the subtle signals from any Earth-size planets. “The lines do all kinds of things,” he says. Although Alpha Centauri has been a primary target for the planet-finding instrument since it was inaugurated in 2005, it has seen nothing so far.

Also hampering observations are the current positions of the two stars. As viewed from Earth, they are very close together, making them harder to study individually, Lily Zhao of Yale University told the meeting. More precise observations should become possible as their 80-year orbit carries them farther apart. In the meantime, Zhao and her colleagues have succeeded in ruling out the presence of giant planets around either star, based on a decade’s worth of data from three instruments on different telescopes. “There are no Jupiters in the system, but there may be plenty of Earth-sized planets still to discover,” she said.

I am skeptical of the conclusions of the astrobiologists who think there may be habitable Earth-like planets in orbit around the close binary. Binary formation makes planetary formation difficult, and even if they are there the stars’ orbits would make stable orbits unlikely. Nonetheless, the research is good, as the techniques learned will be applicable elsewhere.

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India’s PSLV successfully launches GPS satellite

11:53 pm

India’s PSLV rocket tonight successfully launched a replacement GPS satellite for its navigational system, replacing the satellite lost on a PSLV launch last year.

The leaders in the 2018 launch standings:

11 China
7 SpaceX
3 Japan
3 Russia
3 ULA
3 Europe
3 India

It surely is getting crowded near the bottom. It is also interesting that nations like India and Japan are still running neck and neck with Russia and Europe. Just last year their total launches didn’t match Europe’s, and was just a touch over half of Russia’s.

Update: News articles today say that, according to the head of ISRO, India is aiming for another 9 launches in 2018, for a total of 12, a new record for that country, while Russia’s space chief says they will complete 30 launches before the end of the year. I think India’s prediction is accurate, while Russia’s is hogwash.

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Jimi Hendrix On An Acoustic Guitar

6:01 pm

An evening pause: There are two clips, with the second beginning at 4:37. This is I think more interesting than good. The first clip is well shot, but it clearly is an unfinished music video because Hendrix himself I think was unsatisfied with his performance. The second is better performed, as it is a improvised performance at what appears to be a party. Regardless, they are worth watching because even when he played below par you can see he is playing at a level above most.

Hat tip Michael Nelson.

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A gun to shoot down drones

9:55 am

A company is now marketing to the military a jamming devise, designed like a gun, that acts to shut down all commercially-made drones.

the gun is as simple as point-and-shoot, with a 30 degree cone of effect on whatever target is being aimed at. And a newer version of the device is even attachable to an assault rifle, similar to how one would attach an M203 grenade launcher. “You point in that direction, and when the drone flies into the cone … the cheaper drones would just crash. But the better ones will fly back to base,” he added. “It can also track the drone and follow it back to home and see who was actually flying it.”

The jammer, which really isn’t a gun, is aimed at disarming the commercial drones used in the Middle East by the radical Islamic fighters, who don’t have the technology to build their own more sophisticated weapons. Sadly, I can see a time in the future where ordinary citizens might want one too.

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A real look at Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress

9:45 am

The satire site the Babylon Bee has been hitting home runs all week with a series of posts poking fun at Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg in connection with his appearance this week at a Senate hearing.

From the last story:

Passing a set of tablets around the room, the tech billionaire asked every person present to read and accept the full 335,000-word, 6-point-font document before they could proceed. “If you would please just click the button signing all of your personal data over to me, yada yada yada, we can get this show on the road,” Zuckerberg said calmly before taking a sip of water. “It’s your basic, no-frills TOS. Nothing to worry about in there, I promise.”

The congressmen quickly skimmed the first of the 1,342 digital pages before clicking “accept” as per their customary approach to signing important legislation as part of their daily jobs, according to sources present.

We must remember that Facebook had previously tried to censor the Bee for publishing “fake news,” and the Bee has clearly not forgiven them for it.

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Jupiter’s North Pole, as seen in infrared by Juno

9:06 am

The Juno science team has released an animation that shows, in infrared and in three dimensions, the storms of Jupiter’s north pole.

The link has three videos. One shows the gas giant’s surprisingly irregular magnetic field, as found by Juno. The first and third show a low and a high fly-over of the north pole, in infrared. I have embedded both fly-overs below the fold. First watch the high fly-over, which is the first video. This will make the low fly-over more understandable as it flies over the eight smaller storms that encircle the pole’s central vortex.
» Read more

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NanoRacks outlines its private space station plans

8:49 am

Capitalism in space: NanoRacks, which already makes money launching private payloads to ISS, has revealed its plans for building its own private space station using converted Atlas 5 upper stages.

This project was previously called Ixion, but they have dropped that name, and will now call the first station Independence-1.

They have a contract with NASA for the initial development, and hope to convince the agency to pay them to next build a full-size test prototype. The video at the link to me was exceedingly unconvincing however. It shows a robot beginning the process of refurbishing a used upper stage while in orbit, and simplifies the process to an almost ludicrous degree. While I surely believe it can be done, it will not be simple. The difficulties should not be dismissed.

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New York to jail man for possessing a legal gun

10:45 am

Fascist New York: A Hawaiian man is going to jail for two years, simply because he mistakenly brought a legally purchased gun into New York City, locked safely in his car.

Officers interviewed Camp’s girlfriend who told them, out of spite, he says, about a weapon he had in his car. In a small compartment behind the seat of his ’85 Chevrolet El Camino, Camp stored a Hi-point .45 pistol he bought legally in Ohio for $140 and that he kept locked away in a safe. When the officers found the weapon, Camp was arrested and charged with a Class C Felony.

His girlfriend had a far-left stance on guns. She said it frightened her to have one in their apartment and so Camp kept it locked safely away in the car to appease her, he explained.

Even his former girlfriend didn’t realize the draconian nature of New York’s gun laws. “I’ve never used it to menace or threaten anyone, especially not her,” Camp said. “She even later told me she regretted turning me in to the police, saying she believed I would ‘just pay a big fine.’”

No matter. New York City does not recognize the second amendment of the Bill of Rights. You do not have the right to bear arms there, even though the threat of gun violence from criminals is far higher than most of the rest of the country.

Note the absurdity of this. New York’s draconian gun control laws were supposedly passed to prevent criminals from getting guns. Instead, they are being used to jail innocent citizens whose only reason for owning a gun is to protect themselves from those illegally armed criminals.

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A Martian snake of collapsed hills

10:21 am

A Martian snake of collapsed hills

Close-up of collapsed hills

Time to once again delve into this month’s release of high resolution images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image above, cropped, rotated, and reduced in resolution to post here, shows a string of strange mounds or hills, each with similar collapse features on their tops. If you click on the picture, you can see the full resolution image, rotated properly with north up. You can also go to the MRO post, which provides some additional information.

The white box indicates the location of the cropped close-up, at full resolution, to the right. This area is typical across the entire snake-like ridge. You have these mounds or hills, each with chaotic depressions at their tops. The depressions suggest that this ridge follows an underground void, like a lava tube. The ridge-like nature of the line of hills also suggest that this tube has been exposed by erosion over time, with the surrounding terrain more easily blown or washed away while the more resistant ridge remains.

At the same time, the line of hills is baffling. Why would a lava tube expand periodically to form something that looks like a string of pearls?

The location of this snaking ridge provides some additional context.
» Read more

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Status update on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

9:25 am

Link here. The story is focused on the decision by NASA to hold off launching a replacement for MRO and instead keep it operating for another decade. In telling this story, however, the article also provides us a detail look at the spacecraft’s present condition.

[A]ging batteries and gyroscopes, used to store electricity and aid navigation, will have to be carefully watched in the coming years to keep the mission going. “We found that they weren’t charging at full capacity,” Tamppari said of the batteries. MRO charges its batteries through its solar arrays while in sunlight. During night passes over Mars, the orbiter draws electricity from its batteries for about 40 minutes during each two-hour lap around the planet. The spacecraft now charges its batteries higher than before, NASA said, and engineers sent up commands for MRO to reduce the draw on the batteries while in shadow.

MRO’s two inertial measurement units are also showing signs of their age. Each redundant unit contains three gyroscopes and three accelerometers, feeding data about the spacecraft’s orientation to on-board computers. One measurement unit likely in the final months of its useful lifetime, Tamppari said, and the other is showing signs of degradation.

Ground controllers found a work-around by implementing an “all-stellar” navigation mode on MRO in March. The new technique allows the orbiter to sense the positions of the stars to determine which way it is pointing. “In all-stellar mode, we can do normal science and normal relay,” said Dan Johnston, MRO project manager at JPL, in a statement released in February. “The inertial measurement unit powers back on only when it’s needed, such as during safe mode, orbital trim maneuvers, or communications coverage during critical events around a Mars landing.”

There’s more at the link. Since MRO is also used as the main communications relay satellite between the Martian ground-based probes and the Earth, the story also outlines the communications capabilities of all spacecraft presently orbiting Mars. All told, it seems that if MRO fails the research on the surface will be significantly impacted, even if the rovers and landers are all still working.

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Absurd monument to Yuri Gagarin lambasted

9:10 am

A new monument to honor Yuri Gagarin in Belgrade, Serbia, is meeting with intense criticism and ridicule because of the absurd proportions between the statue, which is of Gagarin’s head, and its overly tall pedestal.

The bust of Yuri Gagarin was ordered by the city council last year, and was put up on a street that bears his name, the Blic news website reports.

But its appearance – a tiny bust on top of a tall plinth – has been met by a hugely negative reaction, the paper says. “The only way you can see it clearly is to launch yourself into the sky,” the Noizz website says. “While this is somewhat symbolic,” adds writer Ivana Stojanov, “there’s certainly no common sense on show”.

You must click on the link to see this.

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Issue with thermometers on Parker Solar Probe

8:56 am

As NASA prepares the Parker Solar Probe for its summer launch, engineers are reviewing an issue with the spacecraft’s thermometers.

As those preparations continue, officials are studying problems with devices known as platinum resistance thermometers that are part of the spacecraft’s thermal control system. Those devices have suffered a higher-than-expected failure rate, according to a presentation at an April 5 meeting of NASA’s Heliophysics Advisory Committee.

The thermometers are lightweight, highly sensitive temperature sensors used to help provide feedback to the spacecraft’s cooling system and solar arrays, NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown said April 9. “We put all spacecraft through a rigorous test program to make sure all systems are working as designed and it is normal for a test program to uncover issues.”

“The team is looking very carefully at whether any change is needed,” Peg Luce, acting director of NASA’s heliophysics division, said at the meeting. The issue, she said, was debated “quite significantly” at a review last week to approve the shipment of the spacecraft to Florida, including whether to delay that shipment to study the problem. “There are certain, possible fixes if we need to fix something that could be done at the Cape, so the decision was to go ahead and ship,” she said.

This issue is especially critical as the spacecraft is intended to fly as close as four million miles from the Sun. If these thermometers fail too easily, the spacecraft will not be able to monitor its temperature properly, and it will likely fail much sooner than planned.

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China successfully launches three military satellites

8:47 am

The launch race: China today successfully launched three military satellites, using its Long March 4B rocket.

As is typical of Chinese military launches, no information was released about the satellites, and there was no publicity about the launch prior to liftoff. This launch however puts China ahead of the U.S. in total launches in 2018, 11 to 10. The leaders in the 2018 launch standings are as follows:

11 China
7 SpaceX
3 Japan
3 Russia
3 ULA
3 Europe

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Europe’s Trace Gas Orbiter achieves operational orbit around Mars

8:33 am

After a year of aerobraking to lower its orbit, the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter has reached its planned orbit around Mars, and is about to begin studying the red planet’s atmosphere.

The primary goal is to take a detailed inventory of trace gases – those that make up less than 1% of the total volume of the planet’s atmosphere. In particular, the orbiter will seek evidence of methane and other gases that could be signatures of active biological or geological activity.

On Earth, living organisms release much of the planet’s methane. It is also the main component of naturally occurring hydrocarbon gas reservoirs, and a contribution is also provided by volcanic and hydrothermal activity. Methane on Mars is expected to have a rather short lifetime – around 400 years – because it is broken down by ultraviolet light from the Sun. It also reacts with other species in the atmosphere, and is subject to mixing and dispersal by winds. That means, if it is detected today, it was likely created or released from an ancient reservoir relatively recently. Previous possible detections of methane by ESA’s Mars Express and more recently by NASA’s Curiosity rover have been hinted at, but are still the subject of much debate.

The Trace Gas Orbiter can detect and analyse methane and other trace gases even in extremely low concentrations, with an improved accuracy of three orders of magnitude over previous measurements. It will also be able to help distinguish between the different possible origins. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence is important. Pinpointing a region where methane is concentrated will allow scientists to better understand where it is coming from, and what is causing its release. It could be microbiological life, but it also could be from active volcanic processes. Finding either or both would be significant, to put it mildly.

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Two investigations blame Northrop Grumman for Zuma failure

2:18 pm

Two independent investigations have now placed the blame for the failure of the classified Zuma satellite to reach orbit on Northrop Grumman, not SpaceX.

Two independent investigations, made up of federal and industry officials, pointed to Northrop’s payload adapter as the cause of the satellite’s loss, the report said, citing people familiar with the probes. The payload adapter is a key part of deploying a satellite in orbit, connecting the satellite to the upper stage of a rocket.

…The investigations tentatively concluded that onboard sensors did not immediately communicate to ground systems that the satellite did not separate from the rocket, according to the Journal. Unbeknownst to officials at the time, the planned return of the rocket’s upper stage — a method of disposal to avoid adding space debris around the Earth — brought the satellite back down with it. By the time the satellite separated from the rocket it was too late, putting Zuma too low in orbit to save, according to the report.

I still have a nagging suspicion that Zuma actually did reach orbit, and this entire story that it never separated from the upper stage is all a disinformation campaign to help distract people from the satellite’s existence in orbit. At the same time, by this time I don’t put much faith in my own suspicions. These two reports appear to settle the matter.

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Sunspot update for March 2018: the sun crashes!

11:49 am

It surely looks like the solar minimum has arrived, and it has done so far earlier than expected! On Sunday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for March 2018. Below is my annotated version of that graph.

March 2018 was the least active month for sunspots since the middle of 2009, almost nine years ago. In fact, activity in the past few months has been so low it matches the low activity seen in late 2007 and early 2008, ten years ago when the last solar minimum began and indicated by the yellow line that I have added to the graph below. If the solar minimum has actually arrived now, this would make this cycle only ten years long, one of the shortest solar cycles on record. More important, it is a weak cycle. In the past, all short cycles were active cycles. This is the first time we have seen a short and weak cycle since scientists began tracking the solar cycle in the 1700s, following the last grand minimum in the 1600s when there were almost no sunspots.
» Read more

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Homeland Security to track journalists and bloggers in the media

9:42 am

We get our own KGB! Homeland Security has requested bids on providing a database that will continually track of activities of “journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.”

The DHS’s “Media Monitoring” plan, which was first reported by FedBizOpps.gov, would give the contracting company “24/7 access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.” in order to “identify any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event.”

The database would be designed to monitor the public activities of media members and influencers by “location, beat and influencers,” the document says.

The chosen contractor should be able to “present contact details and any other information that could be relevant including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the influencer.”

A Homeland Security official claimed this was “standard practice” but he was either ignorant or lying. This is a new tool for spying on journalists while also obtaining information that can be used against them for political purposes. Any government agency that had proposed such a thing to past American generations would have found itself very quickly shut down. The idea of the government tracking individuals reporting the news would have been considered disgusting and a violation of numerous amendments in the Bill of Rights.

Today however, not so much. We need our KGB, and we are going to get it, come hell or high water!

An added note: Most of the outrage about censorship and spying that we see today in the press is focused on Google, Facebook, and the unsavory stuff these big software companies are doing. These are private efforts, however, and there is a simple solution to stopping their bad behavior: Their customers have to find a competitor who doesn’t do it and switch services.

Unfortunately, we instead have increasing calls for the government to regulate and even break up these companies. This is exactly not what we should do, as it will only place more power in that government. If anything, it will provide justification for the government to spy on journalists and regulate them, as illustrated by this newly proposed law in fascist California.

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