Category: Behind The Black

Air leak on ISS

10:17 am

An air leak on ISS was detected yesterday, and pinpointed to cracks found in the spherical habitation module of one of the Soyuz capsule’s docked to the station.

According to Russian sources, the problem was found in the Habitation Module of the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft, where the crew detected two small cracks, reaching 1.5 millimeters in size. Alexander Gerst apparently first discovered the leak.

The cosmonauts photographed the affected area and sent it to mission control for analysis. The first estimates indicated that the holes could be caused by meteor or debris strikes which punctured the hull of the spacecraft. Head of the Roskosmos State Corporation Dmitry Rogozin confirmed the incident but said that the problem had been resolved. According to Rogozin, the crew had to close off various sections of the station to isolate the leak.

According to ESA sources, the area of the leak was temporarily sealed with tape, while Russian cosmonauts were working on a permanent sealing patch. After some drop during the night, the air pressure inside the ISS was reported as stable near sea level. In the meantime, mission control informed the crew that all scheduled activities for August 30 had been cancelled.

The cracks do not pose a problem for using the Soyuz for returning to Earth, as the habitation module is discarded before de-orbit. The descent module appears unharmed.

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The aurora of Saturn

10:11 am

Cool movie time! Using the Hubble space telescope scientists have compiled an animation showing the changes in Saturn’s north pole aurora over time.

In 2017, over a period of seven months, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope took images of auroras above Saturn’s north pole region using the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. The observations were taken before and after the Saturnian northern summer solstice. These conditions provided the best achievable viewing of the northern auroral region for Hubble.

…The images show a rich variety of emissions with highly variable localized features. The variability of the auroras is influenced by both the solar wind and the rapid rotation of Saturn, which lasts only about 11 hours. On top of this, the northern aurora displays two distinct peaks in brightness — at dawn and just before midnight. The latter peak, unreported before, seems specific to the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere at Saturn’s solstice.

The animation of all the images is embedded below. At the link is a second video showing the aurora in close-up

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Lunar scientist Paul Spudis had passed away

10:03 am

R.I.P.: Paul Spudis, lunar scientist and strong advocate for the human exploration of space, passed away yesterday at the age of 66.

Spudis was one of the best lunar scientists we have had. He also saw past petty budget battles and his personal planetary research to recognize the need for human exploration and settlement on the Moon and elsewhere. This is a premature loss for us all.

Leonard David at Space News has written a fine obituary, which gives only a hint at how important Spudis was to the recent resurgence of the U.S. in the exploration of space.

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Looking for Marsquakes

1:24 pm

After eight and a half years of study of one particular very young fault system on Mars using high resolution images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, scientists have found no evidence that any quakes occurred there in that time.

The team studied images of Mars’s surface over nearly a decade to look for changes that might have been caused by marsquakes. The researchers used images of Mars’s surface from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and applied Co-registration of Optically Sensed Images and Correlation (COSI-Corr)—software that has been validated to track terrestrial glaciers, landslides, and quakes on Earth, as well as dune movement on Mars itself—to hunt for signs of displacement near fault zones.

The researchers focused on the Cerberus Fossae fault system, the youngest fault system on the Red Planet and thus the most likely to still be active. They used the average coregistration performance of each study image to determine that this method should be able to detect fault slip rates of 0.1–10 millimeters a year.

The team identified only one displacement signal that could have been interpreted as evidence of a marsquake—but dismissed it as the result of a topographic artifact. Their results suggest that no seismic movement occurred in the Cerberus Fossae area over the course of the study, which spanned 8.5 Earth years’ worth of images from the planet.

This suggests, but does not prove, that Mars has very few quakes. We shall know more when InSight lands on Mars on November 26.

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Ukraine test flies winged cruise missile

9:53 am

Ukraine announced today that it has successfully test flown Neptun, a new cruise missile with wings.

[Neptun] is a subsonic weapon developed to hit maritime targets, but can also be deployed against land targets, said Ukrainian defense expert Serhiy Sguretz. “The trajectory is standard for a cruise missile, the cruising flight altitude is 10 to 30 meters (33 to 100 feet), and in the final approach phase, it descends to four to five meters. The missile is equipped with a high-explosive fragmentation warhead. Guidance system details have not been published, but it is capable of hitting different targets, including enemy radar stations. When attacking maritime targets, Neptun has a range of approximately 280 km, increasing to 300 km when launched against land targets. “With a little help, it could fly up to Moscow,” added Sguretz.

The cruise missile is scheduled to be built in three different versions—sea-launched, land-launched, and air-launched—targeting sea and land objects. A picture published by the RNBO shows that the Neptun’s mobile transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) has some similarity to that of the S-300 Soviet/Russian air defense system.

Neptun could be integrated onto not only the Ukrainian air force’s Soviet/Russian aircraft but on some NATO aircraft.

Obviously, this is designed to give Russia pause about any further aggression against the Ukraine.

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India’s manned flight schedule revealed

9:43 am

The new colonial movement: K. Sivan, the head of India’s space agency ISRO, announced yesterday the planned flight program that will lead up to that nation’s first manned spaceflight in 2022.

The Indian Space Research Organisation will conduct two flights of unmanned space capsules about 30 months and 36 months from now in preparation for the country’s first manned space mission by 2022, space agency officials announced on Tuesday.

The manned space capsule will be designed for a five-to-seven day mission about 300km to 400km above the Earth, officials said, adding that Isro has for over a decade been developing key technologies for human space flight.

Isro has designed a three-person space capsule but how many astronauts will be sent in the first mission has not been decided yet, they said. Only Russia, the US and China have until now sent astronauts into space aboard their own spacecraft.

This entire program hinges on the repeated successful use of India’s most powerful rocket, the GSLV Mark 3, which has only flown once so far. Two more launches are scheduled through January, including one that will take India’s first lunar lander to the Moon.

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Virgin Orbit performs more flight tests of 747

9:37 am

Capitalism in space: Virgin Orbit has completed a series of flight tests of the 747 airplane that will be used to launch its LauncherOne smallsat rocket.

The flights of the company’s Boeing 747 aircraft, nicknamed “Cosmic Girl,” were the first since the company installed a pylon on the plane’s left wing that will be used to carry the LauncherOne rocket on future flights of the air-launch system.

The company disclosed few details about the test flights, but flight tracking services such as Flightradar24 list three flights of the aircraft in recent days, most recently Aug. 27, taking off from the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, California. The flights ranged in duration from one and a half to three and a half hours in airspace over the Mojave Desert and over the Pacific Ocean off the California coast.

The company appears to be making progress, though its also appears that their promised first rocket flights are not happening this summer, as previously announced.

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Launch schedule shuffles for SpaceX

9:29 am

Link here. A combination of payload issues, scheduling conflicts, and rocket refurbishment demands has forced SpaceX to shuffle and delay many of its remaining launches scheduled for the rest of 2018.

The biggest conflict appears to be between the first manned Dragon test flight, and the second Falcon Heavy flight, both of which are now listed for a November launch. Since both will use the same launchpad, there must be some space between them.

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Russian medics have approved UAE’s astronaut candidates

9:19 am

The new colonial movement: Russian medics have now narrowed the candidates for the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) first spaceflight.

Nine candidates were sent to Russia for testing. The article does not say how many candidates were given medical clearance. Further training in September will narrow the choices further, followed by a final decision by the UAE naming the one person who will fly to ISS.

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Dragon/Starliner schedules firming up

9:11 am

At a meeting at NASA this week a status update of SpaceX’s manned Dragon and Boeing’s manned Starliner capsules indicated that their proposed flight schedules, with the first manned flights occurring next year, are increasingly firm.

Overall, the updates were quite positive with most of the flight hardware nearing completion. The two companies must each execute two test flights to the International Space Station (ISS) in order to be certified to perform operational crew rotation missions.

On the SpaceX side, the company will first execute an uncrewed test flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft called Demonstration Mission 1 (DM-1) – currently scheduled for this coming November. It will then be followed by a crewed test flight designated Demonstration Mission 2 (DM-2). In between the two missions, SpaceX will also execute an in-flight abort test.

In terms of Boeing, they will perform an uncrewed Orbital Flight Test (OFT) with the CST-100 Starliner followed by a Crewed Flight Test (CFT). A pad abort test will be also conducted between the two missions.

While Boeing’s schedule for these flights is somewhat uncertain as they investigate the recent failure of several valves to close during an engine test, SpaceX’s schedule has become very solid. Assuming nothing goes wrong on the unmanned test flight in November and the in-flight abort test, they will fly humans in April, 2019.

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Scientist proposes aerobraking asteroids into Earth orbit

9:00 am

What could possibly go wrong? A scientist has proposed the use of the Earth’s atmosphere to aerobrake resource-rich asteroids into Earth orbit to make them easily available for mining.

In the new paper, Tan and colleagues propose using aerobraking to slow small asteroids enough that they don’t just shoot straight past Earth, but stay in orbit, where they could be mined for platinum or water. Those resources could then be taken to space stations to supply future missions or operations. Water, they write, could even be split into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. All it would take is a precisely calculated push from an unmanned spacecraft, they report this month in Acta Astronautica.

And if the maneuver were done far enough from Earth—millions of kilometers, in most cases—it likely wouldn’t take much effort. That’s because a small push from far away would greatly change the angle of an incoming space rock’s path. Tan notes that each case would be different, depending on the trajectory of the target asteroid, and says that modifications might be necessary if the asteroid gets off track.

They propose doing this only with small asteroids, less than 100 feet in diameter.

I am sure my readers can outline the numerous problems with this proposal. From my perspective, the primary one is that it is almost impossible to predict the precise path of these kinds of asteroids. Their rotation and irregular shape combined with radiation pressure from the Sun tends to make their solar orbits somewhat chaotic and difficult to predict at the accuracy needed to safely nudge them into a close fly-by of the Earth.

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New Horizons snaps first picture of Ultima

8:48 am

It isn’t much more than a tiny moving dot across a sea of stars, but on August 16, 2018 New Horizons was able to capture its first series of images of its January 1st fly-by target, the Kuiper belt object they have nicknamed Ultima Thule.

This first detection is important because the observations New Horizons makes of Ultima over the next four months will help the mission team refine the spacecraft’s course toward a closest approach to Ultima, at 12:33 a.m. EST on Jan. 1, 2019. That Ultima was where mission scientists expected it to be – in precisely the spot they predicted, using data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope – indicates the team already has a good idea of Ultima’s orbit.

Ultima was 100 million miles away at the time.

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The shift to smallsats by the U.S. military

10:05 pm

Link here. The story focuses on the first planned constellation of smallsats, hopefully set for launch by 2021.

[DARPA] has mounted a program called Blackjack, which aims to loft a network of 20 prototype spy satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) in 2021. These craft will be incredibly cheap compared to the current crop: The goal is get each satellite built and launched for about $6 million, said Thomas, the Blackjack program manager.

Blackjack aims to meet this ambitious cost target by leveraging developments in the private space sector. Several companies plan to establish huge constellations in LEO in the next few years, to deliver cost-effective internet service to people around the globe. SpaceX’s Starlink network, for example, will feature thousands of individual satellites.

Blackjack will integrate reconnaissance and communications payloads into standard commercial satellite bodies (known as buses) and take advantage of the high launch rate required to loft the mega-constellations, Thomas said. “The Blackjack approach assumes that we’re not going to be an anchor tenant. We’re not going to be driving these companies,” he said during the FISO presentation. “But we want to take advantage of that production line of spacecraft, the buses especially, that they’re going to be building. We want to take advantage of that launch and take advantage of all of those pieces.”

There’s a lot more at the link. If this first constellation works out, they will upgrade it to a constellation of 90 satellites. And it will based on buying the bulk of its product from the private sector instead of having the military build it. This will provide a wealth of business for smallsat manufacturers as well as smallsat rocket companies.

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3D gun files still available to public despite judge’s ruling

4:36 pm

Pushback: Despite a judge’s apparently unconstitutional ruling that banned the free give-away of the plans for printing 3D guns, the company that is producing them has instead made them available for purchase, at any price the buyer designates.

The ruling was intensely shaky and a jab to both the First and Second Amendment, so naturally Democrats were aroused.

But their celebration was premature.

Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson crushed their short-lived happiness during a Tuesday press conference where he revealed that he actually won’t be stopped from sharing technical data; he will simply sell the files via his website, defcad.com. (Yes, he can do this.) “This judge’s order, stopping us from simply giving things away, was only an authorization that we could sell it, that we could mail it, that we could email it, that we could provide it by secure transfer. I will be doing all of those things, now,” announced Wilson.

“A lot of this to me was about principle,” he continued. “For many years, I just chose not to sell these files, because I’m an open-source activist. I believed in demonstrating that there was a right to commit this information to the public domain.”

“But, this is my opportunity to correct the media all in one place. To read headline after headline about how you can no longer 3D-print a gun, you can no longer have these files, this is not true. This has never been true. I now have to demonstrate this to you, forcefully, to deliver the point.”

There is no set price for the material; patrons are asked to give whatever they’d like in exchange. Wilson said the money would be used for further legal fees.

The judge’s ruling was completely bogus, especially since the Trump Justice Department had already settled the suit that the Obama Justice Department had brought. Moreover, since when can a judge ban the publication of any information the U.S.? His ruling appears to violate the First Amendment, and possibly the Second Amendment as well.

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The search for Mars Polar Lander

12:08 pm

A small section where Polar Lander might have crashed

In December 1999 the U.S. lander Mars Polar Lander was to set down near the southern polar cap of Mars. After an almost routine eleven month journey to Mars, all efforts to contact the spacecraft after its landing failed. A NASA review eventually concluded that the spacecraft had prematurely shut down its landing engines while the spacecraft was still far above the surface, and had therefore crashed to the ground.

Since then there have been extensive efforts to locate the lander’s remains on the surface, all to no avail. Though Mars Global Surveyor, in orbit at the time, tried to find it, its resolution was not sufficient. In recent years Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has taken several dozen high resolution images of the estimated landing area, two of the most recent were included in the August 2018 image release. The image on the right is a cropped section of one of those images, illustrating the difficulty of the search. (If you click on the image you can explore the full version.) The other image is quite similar.

As the southern polar cap shrinks and grows seasonally, it produces endless numbers of black spots from the release of underground dust as the carbon dioxide dry ice sublimates into gas. Moreover, the growth and retreat of the dry ice cap changes the landscape, periodically covering any remains of the rover as well as quickly removing many of the ground disturbances that the crash might have caused. In the almost two decades since the lander’s crash landing, about ten Martian years have passed, meaning that cap has melted and frozen ten times over this region in that time.

Images taken by MRO of Mars Polar Lander landing area

The image on the right shows the footprint of all the images that MRO has so far taken of the Mars Polar Lander landing area. If you are ambitious and want to get your name in the news, all you have to do is spend some time combing through those images and find the lander there. Every one of these images is available for public download at full resolution. Go to HiRise image archive, hover your mouse over latitude 77 degrees south, longitude 166 degrees east, and click several times to zoom in. You then change the selector icon at the top from “+” to “the arrow”. When next you click on any portion of that footprint it will show you a bunch of the images taken, all of which you can now download and inspect.

If you are successful and find the lander, please let me know. It would be nice to make that announcement here on Behind the Black.

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Arecibo gets upgrade, new funding

9:33 am

Back from the dead: Threatened with closure only last year due to lack of funds, then damaged badly from Hurricane Maria, the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico has not only obtained a new operational funding from a new partner but also a $6 million upgrade.

The money will help design and build a super-sensitive set of antennas to be installed at the focal point of Arecibo’s dish. The 166 antennas, together part of the phased-array feed to be installed in 2022, are expected to significantly increase Arecibo’s capabilities. The phased-array feed will boost the telescope’s sky survey speed, making it five to six times faster than it is now, and it’ll enable the telescope to look at a larger piece of sky at one time.

…This month’s announced upgrade comes after years of uncertainty about Arecibo’s operations. In September 2017 Hurricane Maria caused about $14 million in damage to the telescope and ancillary buildings, some of which is still being repaired today. The facility lost its 430-megahertz line feed, which was used for atmospheric studies. Pieces of the antenna fell and punctured panels in the primary reflector of the main dish, forcing the replacement of 80–90 of the panels. There was also significant flooding under the primary reflector, which damaged some of the lines and heating facilities. In addition, several pieces of electronic equipment, some imagers, and laser rangers were damaged. Three buildings — a maintenance facility, a heater/transmitter building and a family unit — were also partially or completely destroyed due to rock and tree debris.

The hurricane was only the latest challenge for the observatory, after Arecibo had fought off repeated threats of closure over the previous decade due to NSF funding concerns. The latest situation was resolved last February, when a consortium led by the University of Central Florida took over operation and management of the observatory, significantly lessening the burden on NSF.

While Arecibo is no longer the world’s largest single radio dish, having been topped by China’s FAST radio telescope, it appears at least for now better positioned to do research. China does not yet have the radio astronomers experienced enough to operate its telescope, and so FAST at present is significantly under-utilized.

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Hayabusa-1 sample pins down age of asteroid

9:19 am

Using particles gathered by Hayabusa-1 Japanese scientists have determined the age of the asteroid Itokawa.

Japanese scientists, including those from Osaka University, closely examined particles collected from the asteroid Itokawa by the spacecraft Hayabusa, finding that the parent body of Itokawa was formed about 4.6 billion years ago when the solar system was born and that it was destroyed by a collision with another asteroid about 1.5 billion years ago.

These results are only the beginning. As more samples return from more asteroids, scientists will start to add details to the overall history of the formation and evolution of the solar system, adding significant depth to the rough outline they presently have. And these new samples are already on the way, with both Hayabusa-2 and OSIRIS-REx approaching their target asteroids.

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Inexplicable high latitude Martian terrain

2:58 pm

Inexplicable high southern latitude Martian terrain

Strange image time! The image on the right, reduced in resolution to post here, comes from the August 1, 2018 image release from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). (If you click on the image you can see the full resolution version.) I have not cropped this image at all, so that you can see all of its swirling terrain.

This image did not come with a caption. The image site merely describes this terrain as having an “interesting morphology.” The location, in the very high southern latitudes (78 degrees south) just outside the southern rim of a very large crater, provides a slight explanation, as the growth and retreat of the Martian carbon dioxide polar caps is known to create very strange landforms. These swirling flows are obviously an example of one such landform.

The crater rim is just off of the top of the image and parallel with it. Therefore, the apparent erosional flows going around the hills and mesas are running parallel to the rim, not down from it. The black specks scattered about are probably points where dust was released as the carbon dioxide turned from ice to gas, a process that at the high latitudes on Mars often causes what planetary scientists call “spiders.”

I will not even try to make a guess at the process that formed what we see here. The image itself was taken on June 16, 2018 as part of a seasonal monitoring effort, which means scientists expect there to be changes occurring here from year to year as the polar cap shrinks and grown. An almost identical image had been taken two years ago, on December 18, 2016, and shows almost no black specks, probably because of the different time in the Martian year. A much closer comparison of both high resolution images would be necessary to tease out any more subtle changes.

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EXOS completes successful test flight of reusable suborbital rocket

9:30 am

Capitalism in space: EXOS Aerospace yesterday completed a successful test flight of its reusable suborbital rocket, SARGE, at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

The company’s first Suborbital Autonomous Rocket with GuidancE, or SARGE, rocket lifted off from Spaceport America in New Mexico at approximately 2:15 p.m. Eastern. After reaching an unspecified peak altitude, the rocket descended under parachute, landing about 15 minutes later a short distance from the pad. The rocket’s nose cone, descending under a ballute, landed several minutes earlier.

The company didn’t immediately disclose technical details about the flight, such as the peak altitude, but in a live webcast of the launch appeared to be satisfied with the vehicle’s performance, despite the vehicle appearing to veer from its vertical trajectory briefly after liftoff.

“This was a very successful test for us,” said John Quinn, chief operating officer of Exos, on the webcast. “We’re very excited that we had all of our recovery systems operational.”

It sounds as if they were mostly testing the recovery systems that will allow the rocket and payload to land safely in a condition to fly again.

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Trump administration cuts $200 million of Palestinian aid

2:05 pm

The Trump administration today announced an additional $200 million cut of Palestinian aid.

“At the direction of President Trump, we have undertaken a review of U.S. assistance to the Palestinian Authority and in the West Bank and Gaza to ensure these funds are spent in accordance with U.S. national interests and provide value to the U.S. taxpayer,” the department said. “As a result of that review, at the direction of the president, we will redirect more than $200 million … originally planned for programs in the West Bank and Gaza.”

“This decision takes into account the challenges the international community faces in providing assistance in Gaza, where Hamas control endangers the lives of Gaza’s citizens and degrades an already dire humanitarian and economic situation,” the notice said, without providing additional details.

As long as the terrorist leadership in Gaza and the West Bank refuse to accept the right of Israel to exist, they simply do not deserve any American aid. This is a reasonable position, and it is also one that follows laws that Congress itself has passed.

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The corruption centered on Mueller and Comey

11:08 am

President Trump might have his ethical issues, but at this point the questions surrounding him don’t hold a candle to the corruption revealed in two stories in the past two days about former FBI director James Comey and Special Council Robert Mueller.

The first story describes in enormous detail the flat-out whitewash that Comey and the FBI did in its investigation of the classified Clinton emails that had been found on an unclassified laptop owned by former Democratic congressman and convicted child molester Anthony Weiner. That whitewash included outright lies by Comey before Comgress.
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Los Angeles leftist groups call for “violence against the enemies of the people.”

10:50 am

They’re coming for you next: Los Angeles antifa leftist groups are now publicly calling for “violence against the enemies of the people” including “militant escalations [in the] defense of their undocumented working-class immigrant communities by any means necessary.”

The article describes a recent demonstration by these groups, describing how they threatened the police as well as innocent bystanders who happened to pass by.

Note also where the loyalties of these fascists lie. They scream support only for illegal immigrants, and are hostile to all Americans, both legal immigrants and native born. This illustrates that they real interest is the destruction of the United States and the idea of freedom for which it stands, not the illegal immigrants they are using as a pawn in this campaign.

If you live in California be aware that you likely no longer have the freedoms of an American. These jackbooted thugs, masked like the KKK, will soon be coming after you if you dare dissent from their agenda. And the Democratic Party government in charge there will likely allow them to get away with whatever violence they do.

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