Tom Jones & Helene Fischer – Sexbomb
An evening pause: Performed live 2020, probably early in the year before the Wuhan panic struck.
Hat tip Tom Wilson.
Category: Behind The Black
December 15, 2022 Quick space links
Courtesy of Jay, BtB’s stringer. All the links today have to do with the Soyuz capsule that is leaking on ISS.
- Russians forced to use U.S. communications system because Russian channel broke down
The data was conveying information about the Soyuz leak. The words used by Dmitry Strugovets, the former head of Roscosmos press service, to describe the failure are not safe for this website. :)
- Details about the leaking coolant are described here and here.
The second link provides a description of the cooling system that is leaking. It appears the leaking material could be water, or “Isooctan LZ-TK-2”.
- If a replacement capsule is required, the Russians could launch the next Soyuz capsule empty
That next Soyuz, dubbed MS-23, is scheduled for a March launch, with a crew. If the capsule is sent empty, Russia would use the next Soyuz, MS-24 for that mission.
Sunken butte on Mars
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 1, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label a “layered butte.” Like the mesas in the American southwest, those layers, or terraces, mark the geological history of this place, where over time layer upon layer was placed down, and then eroded away except for this mesa.
What makes the mesa even more intriguing and strange, however, are surrounding concentric cracks and the moat at the mesa’s base. These features suggest that at some point the ground below the mesa collapsed so that the entire mesa dropped, as a unit.
What could cause this? The overview map below provides a clue, though certainly not an answer.
» Read more
Today’s blacklisted American: Conservative students and pro-speech law firm slandered and threatened at University of Kansas
Today’s blacklisted American: When a chapter of the Federalist Society at the University of Kansas Law School scheduled an event featuring a speaker from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a pro-speech legal firm that has won many cases at the Supreme Court, the school’s “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Committee” falsely claimed ADF promoted “hate speech”, and two members of the school’s faculty then tried to get the chapter to cancel the event.
The story of what happened are outlined in detail by a justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, Caleb Stegall, in his resignation letter [pdf] in protest of the college’s unwillingness to defend the principle of free speech and open debate. As he wrote, first the law school administrator called a meeting with chapter’s board of students:
» Read more
Perseverance records sound of dust devil
For the first time scientists have used the microphone on the Mars rover Perseverance to successfully record the sound of dust devil as it flowed overhead.
I have embedded a video of the recording below. The research paper can be read here.
Dust devils on Mars, while much less dense in its very thin atmosphere, are generally much larger than found on Earth.
The dust devil recently detected by Perseverance was 25 meters wide and 118 meters tall (82 feet by 387 feet), putting it squarely in the average zone in terms of size for Martian dust storms. But they can grow much bigger, too, as dust on Mars can be whipped up in huge global dust storms.
The data also picked up the sound of dust particles hitting the microphone, which will allow the scientists to measure the density of the devil.
» Read more
France orders Eutelsat to stop broadcasting Russian channels
Arcom, the French television regulation agency, yesterday ordered the communication satellite company Eutelsat to stop allowing three Russian channels from broadcasting using the satellites.
In a news release, Arcom said the television stations’ coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine “include repeated incitement to hatred and violence and numerous shortcomings to the honesty of the information.” Eutelsat said in a brief statement that “it will no longer be involved in the broadcasting of the three sanctioned channels within the prescribed time-frame.”
Arcom’s decision comes a week after France’s top administrative court, prompted by a request from the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders advocacy group, ordered Arcom to review an initial decision to permit Eutelsat to continue carrying the stations.
Arcom’s claim, that it made this order because of the content of the broadcasts, is another example of the blacklisting/censorship culture we now live in. The French regulators could have simply stated that, as an ally of the Ukraine in the Russian-Ukraine war, it does not want French-regulated satellites to provide aid to the Russian side. There is a war going on, and this alone is a rational reason to block the Russian channels.
Instead, Arcom uses censorship as its justification. It doesn’t like what the Russians are saying, and therefore has the right to censor them. Remember this argument, because in the future Arcom will likely use it again, but next time against any one of the other broadcast channels under its control that simply says something it doesn’t like.
China launches classified remote sensing satellite
Using its Long March 2D rocket, China last night successfully launched a classified remote sensing satellite into orbit.
The launch was from an interior spaceport. No word on where the first stage crash-landed.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
59 China
56 SpaceX
21 Russia
9 Rocket Lab
8 ULA
The U.S. still leads China 80 to 59 in the national rankings, but now trails the entire world combined 90 to 81.
Though SpaceX led China in successful launches for most of the year, China historically tends to do a lot of launches in the November-December time period. This is why it has surged ahead in the past month. SpaceX can still catch up, however, as it still has five launches planned for 2022. Either way, we will not know who comes out ahead until probably the end of the year.
That a private American company however has even a chance of beating out the entire world in annual launches is quite remarkable, whether or not SpaceX ends up ahead.
December 14, 2022 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Soyuz manned capsule docked to ISS is apparently leaking something
A spacewalk today was cancelled when it was suddenly noticed that some unknown substance was leaking from one of the Soyuz manned capsules docked to ISS.
During preparations for this evening’s planned spacewalk by Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, ground teams noticed significant leaking of an unknown substance from the aft portion of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to the Rassvet module on the International Space Station. The spacewalk has been canceled, and ground teams in Moscow are evaluating the nature of the fluid and potential impacts to the integrity of the Soyuz spacecraft, which carried Prokopyev, Petelin, and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio into space after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sept. 21.
The big question is whether this leak will impact the capsule’s function as a lifeboat or a return vehicle for the three astronauts it brought into space. If so, then an empty manned capsule needs to be launched, either by the Russians or SpaceX, though if the latter someone would have to pay the cost.
American Giants – Restoring a Paul Bunyan Giant
An evening pause: There are endless and wonderful ways to make a living. This is just another example.
Hat tip Cotour.
December 14, 2022 Quick space links
Courtesy of stringer Jay, whose help is making BtB much better.
- SOFIA makes its final flight to Tucson to become exhibit at Pima museum
This 747 (configured to be an astronomy telescope) was always too costly for the relatively small amount of research it could produce.
- Landing system installed on Luna-25
This increases the chance that this much delayed lunar lander will actually launch in 2023.
Scientists publish papers describing largest Mars quake from May
Though news of the largest quake so far detected by InSight on Mars, magnitude 4.7, was released in May, this week the science team published two papers describing the quake itself and what they have learned from it. From the press release:
The waves from the record-breaking quake lasted about 10 hours — quite a while, considering no previous Marsquakes exceeded an hour.
It was also curious because the epicenter was close to but outside the Cerberus Fossae region, which is the most seismically active region on the Red Planet. The epicenter did not appear to be obviously related to known geologic features, although a deep epicenter could be related to hidden features lower in the crust.
Marsquakes are often divided into two different types — those with high-frequency waves characterized by rapid but shorter vibrations, and those of low-frequency, when the surface moves slowly but with larger amplitude. This recent seismic event is rare in that it exhibited characteristics of both high- and low-frequency quakes. Further research might reveal that previously recorded low- and high-frequency quakes are merely two aspects of the same thing, Kawamura said.
The green-dotted white patch on the map above marks the approximate location of this quake, east of where most of the previous larger quakes have been detected and under the Medusa Fossae Formation of volcanic ash. That no surface features appear to correspond to this quake, it is thought it was the result of a shift of underground features.