Category: Behind The Black

Second solo Ariane 5 launch in 2016

8:46 am

The competition heats up: In successfully placing a commercial communications satellite in orbit last night, Arianespace also did its second consecutive single satellite launch.

The Ariane 5 rocket is designed to carry two satellites, and normally does so in order to maximize its profit per launch. That they have done two straight commercial launches without a second satellite suggests to me that the competition from SpaceX is taking customers from them. The scheduling of the secondary payload usually suffers because priority is given to the primary satellite. Those customers thus might be switching to SpaceX in the hope they can gain better control over their own launch schedule, while also paying far less for their launch.

Then again, considering how unreliable SpaceX’s own launch schedule has been, it is unlikely these customers will have yet gained any scheduling advantages.

One comment

NASA reschedules rather than cancels InSight

8:29 am

Forced to delay its launch because its primary instrument, built by the French, would not be ready for its 2016 launch, NASA has decided to go on with the InSight Mars mission, rescheduling it for a May 2018 launch, rather than cancelling it outright.

The seismometer, built by the French space agency CNES, will be repaired in time to make the 2018 launch window, said Jim Green, the head of NASA’s planetary sciences division in Washington DC. “That’s terrific news,” he told a planetary sciences advisory panel on 9 March. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will assume responsibility for building a new vacuum enclosure for the seismometer.

The last sentence above suggests that NASA has decided to take certain responsibilities from the French to make sure they get done right. It also means that the cost will be born by the NASA’s planetary program, cutting into other possible future missions.

Leave a comment

Ceres’s big mountain

10:26 pm

Ahuna Mons on Ceres

The Dawn science team has released an oblique angle image of Ceres’s big mountain, Ahuna Mons. I have cropped and reduced it above to show it here.

Despite looking almost toylike in this image, the mountain is quite monstrous, especially considering Ceres’s relatively small size.

This mountain is about 3 miles (5 kilometers) high on its steepest side. Its average overall height is 2.5 miles (4 kilometers). These figures are slightly lower than what scientists estimated from Dawn’s higher orbits because researchers now have a better sense of Ceres’ topography.

Consider: Mount Everest is not quite six miles high, on a planet with a diameter about 7926 miles across. Ceres however is only about 600 miles across at its widest, which means a 3 mile high mountain is 0.5% of Ceres’s entire width! Such a thing could only occur on such a small body, whose gravity is not quite great enough to force things into a completely spherical shape. It is for this reason it could be argued that Ceres doesn’t qualify as a dwarf planet, but would be better labeled a giant asteroid.

3 comments

The Kingsmen – Louie Louie

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Normally I don’t post videos with no visuals, but for this I will make an exception. It is probably the first time anyone has ever done the hard work necessary to translate the mumblings of the singer to find out the lyrics of this pop tune. Before now, who knew?

Hat tip Phil Berardelli.

3 comments

On the road

10:04 pm

Sorry for the lack of posting today, or tomorrow. I am on a research trip in California and won’t be back home until late on Tuesday. Normally I would post along the way but cannot as I am doing all the driving, and when I am in the National Archives research room in California there is no time.

2 comments

Dawn’s chief engineer reviews the mission

8:45 am

In a long and very detailed post, the chief engineer and mission director of Dawn gives us a very detailed update on the successful state of the spacecraft’s mission.

Not only does he describe what has been gathered at Ceres since the spacecraft arrived a year ago, he gives us this crucial information about the state of this paradigm-shattering ion engine spacecraft, the first to travel to two different objects in the solar system:

Dawn has faced many challenges in its unique voyage in the forbidding depths of space, but it has surmounted all of them. It has even overcome the dire threat posed by the loss of two reaction wheels (the second failure occurring in orbit around Vesta 3.5 years and 1.3 billion miles, or 2.0 billion kilometers, ago). With only two operable reaction wheels (and those no longer trustworthy), the ship’s remaining lifetime is very limited.

A year ago, the team couldn’t count on Dawn even having enough hydrazine to last beyond next month. But the creative methods of conserving that precious resource have proved to be quite efficacious, and the reliable explorer still has enough hydrazine to continue to return bonus data for a while longer. Now it seems highly likely that the spacecraft will keep functioning through the scheduled end of its primary mission on June 30, 2016.

NASA may choose to continue the mission even after that. Such decisions are difficult, as there is literally an entire universe full of interesting subjects to study, but resources are more limited. In any case, even if NASA extended the mission, and even if the two wheels operated without faltering, and even if the intensive campaign of investigating Ceres executed flawlessly, losing not an ounce (or even a gram) of hydrazine to the kinds of glitches that can occur in such a complex undertaking, the hydrazine would be exhausted early in 2017. Clearly an earlier termination remains quite possible.

Dawn has proven the value of ion engines. I would expect to see them used many more times in the future, especially missions heading to low gravity environments.

5 comments

A Ted Cruz surge tonight

10:09 pm

As predicted a few days ago, Ted Cruz surged against Donald Trump in tonight’s four closed primaries.

Though each won two primaries, the numbers gave Cruz the win over Trump in delegates, 69 to 44 (the numbers now adjusted after all the votes have been tallied). Moreover, as noted at the link, Trump’s voting totals remain flat or have declined, while Cruz’s have been rising steadily. It appears that among Republicans either the love affair with Trump is fading, or there never was one and that his support in the previous open primaries came from cross-over Democrats..

In addition, the numbers for both Kasich and Rubio are going nowhere, which means voting for them in future primaries will essentially give Trump an undeserved win. Thus, expect the movement from them to Cruz to increase.

More here, confirming my analysis above.

99 comments

Clouds on Pluto?

8:05 pm

A report from New Scientist today claims that the New Horizons science team has possibly seen individual clouds in some images.

Grundy had spotted features in the haze on the edge – or “limb” – of Pluto that seemed to stand out from the distinct layers. But more intriguingly, he had also seen a bright feature crossing different parts of the landscape, suggesting it was hovering above. The email kicked off a discussion as to whether the clouds were real, because it was difficult to see whether they cast shadows on the ground. The team also deliberated over the exact distinction between clouds and hazes. “One way to think of it is that clouds are discrete features, hazes widespread,” wrote Alan Stern, who heads up the New Horizons mission.

There has been no public mention of the clouds, suggesting that the team isn’t sure about the detection.

Leave a comment

Roscosmos approves space tourism project

8:01 pm

The competition heats up? Russia’s giant aerospace monopoly Roscosmos has given formal permission for the development of a suborbital space tourism project, proposed by the formally independent company, KosmoKurs.

Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos has admitted the private space company KosmoKurs to working out a project for the development of a reusable system for space tourism flights, KosmoKurs Director General Pavel Pushkin said on Friday. “Our technical design specification was approved by Roscosmos two days ago. The system’s preliminary design will be created with this document,” Pushkin said at the InSpace forum.

According to him, the technical design specification has also been approved by the Central Research Institute of Machine Building (TsNIIMash) and the Keldysh Research Center. In addition, Pushkin said, Roscosmos chief Igor Komarov has already approved the project. “Igor Anatolyevich has taken the project with enthusiasm and gave orders to promote this project”, Pushkin said.

So, if I understand this right, this private company had to get approvals from Roscosmos’s bureaucracy, two other competitive groups within Roscosmos, plus the head of Roscosmos itself, before it would be allowed to proceed with building its independent suborbital operation. I wonder how many bribes KosmosKurs had to pay along the way. I also wonder what kind of quid pro quo deals that had to make in order get those other institutes to give their okay.

With Russia’s aerospace industry function under this kind of set-up, I doubt they are going to get much done in the coming decades.

17 comments

Trump begins to “evolve”

9:37 am

The betrayal begins: At the debate last night Donald Trump noted that he is already beginning to consider easing his hardline immigration stance.

In Detroit, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly pointed out that Trump’s campaign website has a strong statement against increasing the number of H-1Bs, saying it would “decimate American workers,” and yet in one debate Trump spoke favorably of the program. “So, which is it?” Kelly asked.

“I’m changing,” Trump said. “I’m changing. We need highly skilled people in this country, and if we can’t do it, we’ll get them in. But, and we do need in Silicon Valley, we absolutely have to have. So, we do need highly skilled,” Trump continued, “and one of the biggest problems we have is people go to the best colleges. They’ll go to Harvard, they’ll go to Stanford, they’ll go to Wharton, as soon as they’re finished they’ll get shoved out. They want to stay in this country. They want to stay here desperately, they’re not able to stay here. For that purpose, we absolutely have to be able to keep the brain power in this country.

“So you are abandoning the position on your website?” asked Kelly.

“I’m changing it,” Trump said, “and I’m softening the position because we have to have talented people in this country.”

I’ve said from the beginning that Trump is not a reliable conservative, that his roots are liberal, even if they aren’t radical leftwing, and that once he gets in power he will be no different than either George Bush or even Bill Clinton.

Thus, I am not surprised that he “softening the position”. What surprises me is that he is revealing this now, even before he has gotten the Republican nomination. I wonder if anyone will really notice.

39 comments

Businessman found innocent of all charges after years of persecution by the Justice Department.

9:22 am

Our fascist government: A medical company and its head was pursued and persecuted for five years by the Department of Justice, based on a false accusation by a former employee, only to lose its case when it finally presented its case to a jury.

It all started when one of our salesmen became upset he didn’t receive a promotion. So he quit and filed a baseless complaint with the U.S. attorney’s office in San Antonio, alleging a multitude of offenses to try to justify a $20 million claim. Simply by hiring a lawyer and making wild accusations, this former employee with an ax to grind became entitled under the law to receive 20 percent of whatever money the government could “recover” from Vascular Solutions.

The government lawyers reviewed his allegations and chose to pursue just one. I offered to meet with them to correct their misinformation, but two days before that scheduled meeting, they called my lawyer and canceled it. And they never would reschedule. So before deciding to bring criminal charges, these prosecutors never heard my side of the story.

Instead, they subpoenaed over 2 million pages of our documents and interviewed over 60 customers and employees. In the process, they received evidence that conflicted with the story told by that money-motivated former employee. But instead of changing their conclusions to fit the evidence, these prosecutors engaged in obscene tactics to try to change the evidence.

In conversation with our lawyers, they called conflicting statements by witnesses “a line of sh*t.” They referred to one employee as “a poor f***er” who needed to return “on bended knee” to “fix” his testimony. They told a female employee to think about what would happen to her firstborn son if she were indicted because she refused to “cooperate.” And by “fix” and “cooperate,” I mean retract their prior testimony and support the government’s case.

Granted, this is written by the man whom the government was trying to prosecute. Still, I believe him, especially because of one key fact he outlines once they went to trial:

In the end, after I endured four weeks sitting in a San Antonio courtroom while still running Vascular Solutions in Minnesota, the jury rejected each and every allegation. And that was without hearing from any of our 20 witnesses, since we made the decision to rest immediately after the government finished its case. So the government’s own witnesses proved our innocence — simply stunning.

The company says it spent $25 million defending itself. It is now calling for an investigation and a firing of these Justice Department lawyers. How many of you expect the Obama administration to follow through with this? I don’t.

3 comments

Getting higher on Mount Sharp

9:03 am

Looking across Gale Crater

Cool image time! The above image, cropped and reduced slightly for presentation here, was taken by one of Curiosity’s navigation cameras on March 2. Though the science team has not captioned it, I think it is looking down from the heights that Curiosity has climbed and across the plains of Gale Crater to its rim in the far distance. The image itself appears to have been taken after the rover spent several days climbing up to what they have dubbed Naukluft Plateau.

Be sure to check out the full resolution image that can be found here.

Leave a comment

Methane ice on Pluto’s mountain peaks

8:34 am

New images from New Horizons of the dark Cthulhu region have revealed white-capped mountain peaks, thought to be methane ice.

Scientists think this bright material could be predominantly methane that has condensed as ice onto the peaks from Pluto’s atmosphere. “That this material coats only the upper slopes of the peaks suggests methane ice may act like water in Earth’s atmosphere, condensing as frost at high altitude,” said John Stansberry, a New Horizons science team member from Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland.

We as humans are attracted to features on other worlds that remind us of Earth, mainly because this allows us to quickly understand what we are seeing. It is important however to remind ourselves continually that Pluto is not Earth, and is in fact a very alien place. Many things we think we recognize are really very different than what we assume. For example, the methane ice here is coating mountains made of water ice that is as stable as granite in Pluto’s super cold environment.

One more thing: It appears that at this point, seven months after New Horizons flew past Pluto, they have still only downloaded less than half the data obtained. This is not a problem, as this is how things were planned, but it does mean that there are likely many more discoveries yet for us to see.

2 comments

Building a log cabin, alone

6:01 pm

An evening pause: This is the first part of a longer work. To quote the youtube webpage,

“Alone in the Wilderness” is the story of Dick Proenneke living in the Alaska wilderness. Dick filmed his adventures so he could show his relatives in the lower 48 states what life was like in Alaska, building his cabin, hunting for food and exploring the area. Bob Swerer has taken the best footage from Dick’s films and he has created 3 videos about Dick, “Alone in the Wilderness”, “Alaska, Silence and Solitude” and “The Frozen North”

I like this because it gives a good hint at what life was really like for the original mountain men who first explored the American west. They were resourceful, clever, strong-willed, and technologically very sophisticated. Dick Proenneke shows us how to do it again.

Hat tip Rocco.

2 comments

Hubble finds galaxy with record-breaking redshift

4:01 pm

The uncertainty of science: Using the Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have discovered a galaxy with the largest redshift ever measured, 11.1, making it the most distant object so far measured and only about 400 million years after the Big Bang..

The uncertainty is that all theories have said that this galaxy was not supposed to exist at that time.

However, the discovery also raises many new questions as the existence of such a bright and large galaxy is not predicted by theory. “It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form. It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon,” explains Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Marijn Franx, a member of the team from the University of Leiden highlights: “The discovery of GN-z11 was a great surprise to us, as our earlier work had suggested that such bright galaxies should not exist so early in the Universe.” His colleague Ivo Labbe adds: “The discovery of GN-z11 showed us that our knowledge about the early Universe is still very restricted. How GN-z11 was created remains somewhat of a mystery for now.”

16 comments

Titan’s changing shorelines

8:53 am

Shoreline changes on Titan

Cool image time! Using radar images taken during the past decade by Cassini scientists have discovered changes taking place along the shorelines of Titan’s hydrocarbon seas.

Analysis by Cassini scientists indicates that the bright features, informally known as the “magic island,” are a phenomenon that changes over time. They conclude that the brightening is due to either waves, solids at or beneath the surface or bubbles, with waves thought to be the most likely explanation. They think tides, sea level and seafloor changes are unlikely to be responsible for the brightening.

The images in the column at left show the same region of Ligeia Mare as seen by Cassini’s radar during flybys in (from top to bottom) 2007, 2013, 2014 and 2015.

These shoreline changes are not the only ones spotted by Cassini. However, because these are radar images, not visual, there are many uncertainties about what causes the changes, which is why they list several possibilities. For example, with radar, a simple roughness on the surface (such as waves) could cause a brightening.

One comment

Free government money for Aerojet Rocketdyne!

8:16 am

Crony capitalism: Even though ULA prefers Blue Origin’s engine for its Atlas 5, the Air Force continues to fund Aerojet Rocketdyne’s new engine.

The U.S. Air Force announced Feb. 29 it was investing $115 million this year, and with options, as much as $536 million over the next five years, in [Aerojet Rocketdyne’s] AR1, a new liquid oxygen- and kerosene-fueled main-stage engine. The contract award is part of an Air Force initiative to end reliance on the Russian-built RD-180 engine that powers ULA’s Atlas 5 workhorse rocket.

Aerojet says it has two potential other customers to use the engine, but will not name them. In reviewing the field, the only customer I can think of that might be interested would be Orbital ATK (for its Antares rocket), and even there I have doubts. Thus, it appears to me that these funds are really being distributed to prop up a company that is failing, not to build anything useful the government needs.

Leave a comment

Trump winning open primaries, Cruz winning closed ones

10:14 pm

Link here.

If true, why does this matter? Because so far the primary calendar has been heavily tilted toward open primaries. But there have been four closed elections: the Iowa caucus, the Nevada caucus, and Super Tuesday’s Oklahoma primary and Alaska caucus. Ted Cruz won three of those four closed elections.

This suggests that, as a number of polls have indicated, Trump’s victories have largely been aided by moderate Democratic voters crossing over to vote for him, mostly I suspect out of disgust at the extreme leftist tilt of their own party.

A more important factor to consider, however, is that the primaries will be increasingly shifting to closed primaries in the coming weeks. This weekend alone there are four primaries/caucuses, and they are all closed. No Democrats can vote in them. If Cruz tops Trump in most, it will indicate Trump’s true weakness within the Republican Party, a fact that could make it far more difficult for him to achieve the nomination than presently indicated.

And if Trump does well in these closed primaries? Then the nomination is likely his.

24 comments

India’s space agency ISRO gets a budget boost

9:37 pm

In its new budget approved by India’s government the country’s space agency ISRO was the only science agency to get a significant budget increase, approximately 7.3%.

In the short run this is good, as ISRO has been using its funds wisely and accomplishing a lot for a little, while trying to encourage private development in India’s aerospace industry. In the long run, however, this will not be good, as government agencies always grow more than they should while sucking the innovation and creativity from the private sector. This is what NASA did in the U.S.

Hopefully, India will see how things are changing in America with private enterprise reasserting itself after a half century of government stagnation in space development and copy what we are doing.

Leave a comment

Astronauts return after 340 days on ISS

9:25 pm

After 340 days in space astronauts Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko safely returned to Earth early today.

Now the real research begins. Because Kelly has an identical twin, Mark Kelly, who is also a former astronaut, researchers will be able to gain a great deal of knowledge comparing the differences in how their bodies changed over the nearly full year, with one in weightlessness and the other on Earth.

However, what I want is longer missions, two or three years long, thus far exceeding what it would take to travel to and from Mars. Only then can we find out if humans will be able to make the journey safely.

4 comments

Al Bowlly – Melancholy Baby

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Even though it is more seven decades since this was recorded, it remains as fresh and as vibrant as anything sung today. Almost more so because of its simplicity. Bowlly was a big name singer in the 1930s, and he shows why here.

Hat tip Edward Thelen.

4 comments

The suicide of the GOP establishment

10:07 am

Link here.

Time and time again, grassroots and movement conservatives have expressed their opposition to all five of the key planks in Rubio’s platform. These Republicans do not support the Gang of Eight bill. They do not support Obama’s trade deals. They do not want to spend huge amounts of blood and treasure again in the Middle East. And they most certainly do not want the economy to look like it did in the fall of 2008.

These voters have tried, through every means available, to make their opposition felt. They are the reason that Eric Cantor is no longer in the House. They are the reason that the Gang of Eight bill didn’t pass. They are the reason that John Boehner is no longer speaker. And they are the reason that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have dominated the polls for months.

Many people have urged the Rubio donor network, think-tank fellows and media supporters to back off on their policy demands — to do more than simply acknowledge “the voters are right to be angry.” In fact, Gov. Chris Christie advocated for compromise during a speech at St. Anselm’s College earlier this year. People such as former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote recently that the GOP must be more sensitive to the concerns of working-class voters, whom she dubbed the “unprotected.”

Nevertheless, even today, the Rubio supporters refuse to budge.

The Rubio supporters are also the same people in the GOP who tried to push Jeb Bush on us. The real tragedy is that if they had thrown their support to Ted Cruz, they might have been able to quell Donald Trump’s dominance in the polls. Instead, they have refused to face the reality that the general public does not support they policies, and have run like lemmings to the cliff by splitting the conservatives between Cruz and Rubio.

The result: The Republican Party stands a very good chance right now of nominating as its Presidential candidate someone who is as liberal as Bill Clinton and as reliable in what he says. Worse, polls continue to show him losing to the worst Democratic candidates offered in decades.

33 comments
1 … 663 664 665 666 667 … 1,114