Jennifer Nettles – O Holy Night/Hallelujah
An evening pause: For my Christian readers, from a secular Jew, in good will.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Category: Behind The Black
A Christmas Carol
An afternoon pause: As I have done for several years on Christmas day, I bring you the classic 1951 version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, starring Alastair Sim. To my mind this movie is still by far the best adaption of the book. It is also a truly wonderful movie.
As I wrote last year,
Dickens did not demand the modern version of charity, where it is imposed by governmental force on everyone. Instead, he was advocating the older wiser concept of western civilization, that charity begins at home, that we as individuals are obliged as humans to exercise good will and generosity to others, by choice.
It is always a matter of choice. And when we take that choice away from people, we destroy the good will that makes true charity possible.
Enjoy, and have a Merry Christmas!
Repost: The real meaning of the Apollo 8 Earthrise image
I wrote this essay last year, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon. I think it worth reposting, especially because stories about Apollo 8 still refuse to show the Earthrise image as Bill Anders took it. Note that they took the picture on Christmas Eve, not Christmas day.
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Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the moment when the three astronauts on Apollo 8 witnessed their first Earthrise while in orbit around the Moon, and Bill Anders snapped the picture of that Earthrise that has been been called “the most influential environmental picture ever taken.”
The last few days have seen numerous articles celebrating this iconic image. While all have captured in varying degrees the significance and influence of that picture on human society on Earth, all have failed to depict this image as Bill Anders, the photographer, took it. He did not frame the shot, in his mind, with the horizon on the bottom of the frame, as it has been depicted repeatedly in practically every article about this image, since the day it was published back in 1968.
Instead, Anders saw himself as an spaceman in a capsule orbiting the waist of the Moon. He also saw the Earth as merely another space object, now appearing from behind the waist of that Moon. As a result, he framed the shot with the horizon to the right, with the Earth moving from right to left as it moved out from behind the Moon, as shown on the right.
His perspective was that of a spacefarer, an explorer of the universe that sees the planets around him as objects within that universe in which he floats.
When we here are on Earth frame the image with the horizon on the bottom, we immediately reveal our limited planet-bound perspective. We automatically see ourselves on a planet’s surface, watching another planet rise above the distant horizon line.
This difference in perspective is to me the real meaning of this picture. On one hand we see the perspective of the past. On the other we see the perspective the future, for as long humanity can remain alive.
I prefer the future perspective, which is why I framed this image on the cover of Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 the way Bill Anders took it. I prefer to align myself with that space-faring future.
And it was that space-faring future that spoke when they read from Genesis that evening. They had made the first human leap to another world, and they wished to describe and capture the majesty of that leap to the world. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Yet, they were also still mostly Earth-bound in mind, which is why Frank Borman’s concluding words during that Christmas eve telecast were so heartfelt. He was a spaceman in a delicate vehicle talking to his home of Earth, 240,000 miles away. “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.” They longed deeply to return, a wish that at that moment, in that vehicle, was quite reasonable.
Someday that desire to return to Earth will be gone. People will live and work and grow up in space, and see the Earth as Bill Anders saw it in his photograph fifty years ago.
And it is for that time that I long. It will be a future of majesty we can only imagine.
Merry Christmas to all, all of us still pinned down here on “the good Earth.”
U.S. Army Band – Bluegrass Christmas Medley
An evening pause: Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Merry Christmas!
I have found myself being very lazy today. Rather than posting, I’ve been watching Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol and videos on how to wrap your cat for Christmas.
All silliness, but the music for that Magoo film remains top-notch and worth listening to.
Regardless, a Merry Christmas to my many readers. And a Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish readers. May we all have good will to all, even when we disagree.
December 23, 2019 Zimmerman/Space Show appearance
My two hour appearance last night on the Space Show is now available as a podcast, downloadable here.
As Wayne would say, “Good stuff!”
Crater in the Martian northern lowlands
Click for original full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on October 26, 2019. It shows a crater in the western edge of Utopia Planitia, the largest and deepest region of the Martian northern lowlands where it is theorized that an intermittent ocean might have once existed.
My first uneducated guess at looking at this image is that the impact occurred in some sort of wet slushy mud or ice, which then melted and filled the crater interior, ponding in the crater’s center as it froze.
A more educated guess, based on what I have learned in the past year, is not much different. The crater is located at 40 degrees north latitude and therefore sits in the middle of the mid-latitude band where scientists think there are a lot of buried inactive glaciers.
The map to the right, revised from my December 20, 2019 post about glaciers flowing off the slopes of a mid-latitude mesa, illustrates this even more clearly.
This crater, indicated by the white cross, sits at approximately the same latitude as that mesa and its glaciers in Protonilus Mensae. It also sits at in an area where accumulated data from several spacecraft have mapped a lot of water ice, close to the surface.
Thus, it is reasonable to suppose that the impact that made this crater pushed into that ice-table, melting the water which subsequently froze and then subsided downward into the ground to form the crater’s central ponded features.
Or to put it as I did initially, the impact smashed into some wet slushy mud/ice, melting it so that it filled the crater interior to then freeze as we see it.
SpaceX completes new round of crew Dragon parachute tests
Capitalism in space: SpaceX this week completed a new round of crew Dragon parachute tests, meeting a goal they had announced in October.
This clearly paves the way for the January 11th launch abort test, followed by the first manned flight, as soon as February or March 2020, according to the article at the link.
Russia’s Proton launches weather satellite
Russia today used the Proton-M version of their Proton rocket to place a geosynchronous weather satellite into orbit.
The leaders in the 2019 launch race:
31 China
21 Russia
13 SpaceX
8 Arianespace (Europe)
China still leads the U.S. 31 to 27 in the national rankings.
Right now there are only two more launches scheduled for 2019, a Russian Rockot launch and China’s third launch of its big Long March 5 rocket. Look for my global launch report for 2019 soon after the New Year.
Mariah Carey – All I Want For Christmas Is You
An evening pause: I hope we all get our own equivalent of what she wants.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
A deep dive into Valles Marineris
Click for full image.
The vastness of Mars is sometimes hard to fathom. While the planet is much smaller than Earth, its entire global surface is approximately the same as the Earth’s land area. This is a lot of territory. It took humanity many tens of thousands of centuries to expand outward to settle all of it. It took even longer before humanity was successfully able to map all of the Earth so that its entire surface was known to all humans, a task that was only completed a handful of centuries ago.
While we now have the technology to quickly map the entire globe of a planet like Mars, the devil is always in the details. At this time the resolution of our global maps give us only a glimpse of the Martian surface.
The image to the right, reduced and cropped to post here, is a good example. Taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on October 30, 2019, it shows a set of large dunes on the northern floor of a side canyon on Mars that is part of Coprates Chasma, a canyon that forms only a small part of the vast Valles Marineris canyon system east of the giant volcanoes of the Tharsis Bulge.
The sand of these dunes is mostly volcanic material, dark basalt that was deposited as lava from those giant volcanoes, then later ground down in landslides and erosion to be recycled as sand that formed dunes trapped within the canyon bottom. The dunes themselves are slowly moving eastward, driven mostly by the predominate west-to-east winds that blow down this side canyon of Coprates Chasma. The motion is very slow, so slow that even though the image title is “Coprates Chasma Dune Changes”, I was unable to spot any changes when I compared this 2019 image with a photo taken in June 2019.
To find out what had changed, I contacted Matt Chojnacki of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, who has been studying the nature of the sand dunes in Valles Marineris. After making a quick preliminary blink test using more sophisticate tools than I have available, he found “minor advancements. The rocks move a bit too in places.” Without a full analysis he also added, “I can tell some dune crests have moved to the east.”
The research by Chojnacki and others has found that the dunes within Valles Marineris are in many ways different than dunes found elsewhere in the mid-latitudes on Mars, suggesting that being trapped within this giant canyon has produced some specific regional features. They tend to be darker, the canyon contains several sand dune seas, called ergs (only seen elsewhere on Mars in the polar regions), and the dunes tend to be more hardened, so that they change relatively little when compared to similar dunes elsewhere on Mars.
These particular dunes in Coprates Chasma however are not hardened, since if so they would have been covered by the landslides and material that comes down from the canyon’s nearby northern slopes. Instead, they move, but appear to move far slower than similar dunes elsewhere on Mars.
To me, this image provides a good vehicle for getting a sense of the size of Valles Marineris. Coprates Chasma itself only one of about a dozen named sections of the entire Valles Marineris canyon system, and this particular image shows only the floor of a side canyon of Coprates. The map below gives an overview of the entire system.
» Read more
On the Space Show tonight
Just thought I’d post a heads up to my readers that I am appearing tonight on The Space Show with David Livingston, beginning at 7 pm (Pacific). Should be a lot of fun, talking about Boeing and Starliner. Please consider calling in with your own thoughts and questions.
The Navy’s horrible software and the crashes it caused
Apropos to Starliner: This article outlines in detail the causes behind the crash in 2017 of the USS McCain and an oil-tanker that killed ten sailors and injured many others.
It is a horror story of a bankrupt Navy upper management that seemed more in love with cool computer software and automation than making sure the Navy’s ships and its crews can function efficiently and effectively in any situation. Moreover, the story suggests that this same upper management made lower level officers the scapegoats for its bad decisions, while skating free with no consequences.
And worst of all, that same overly complex computer navigation system remains in place, with only superficial patches imposed in both its software and its user instructions.
This story however is hardly unique. It reflects the general and systemic failures of almost any project coming out of the upper managements of the entire federal government for the past three decades, a pattern of failure that partly explains why Donald Trump was elected, and why he is hated so thoroughly by so many in that federal workforce. He more than anyone in decades has been demanding from them quality work, and firing them when they fail to provide it.
It seems, based on this story, that Trump needs to make a harsh review of the Navy’s upper management as well.
Boeing fires CEO
Boeing today fired its CEO Dennis Muilenburg, citing the need to “restore confidence in the company.”
The company has had a very bad year, with the grounding of its 737-Max airplane, the cost overruns and delays in its NASA Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and the failure of its Starliner manned capsule to dock with ISS this past weekend.
Whether this change will accomplish anything is hard to say. The problems above appear very deeply embedded within the company’s culture, and might require the kind of wholesale changes that big bloated corporations like Boeing are generally loath to impose.
Movie of Jupiter’s south pole storms
Cool image time! Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt has used images taken by Juno of Jupiter’s south polar storms to produce an animation that shows the evolution of those storms over a short time period.
The movie is more a computer model than an assemblage of images.
A fluid dynamical 2D model rotating with Jupiter’s System III rotation rate is started with a map of PJ19 (Juno’s 19th close approach) vorticity measurements of the south polar region between 75 and 90 degrees south (azimuthal, equidistant, planetocentric) as initial condition. The vorticity map is based on a sequence of PJ19 JunoCam images.
Relative vorticities are encoded in color, blue for cyclonic, orange for anticyclonic relative vorticity. The animated gif covers 48 hours, with one frame per real-time hour. Played with 25 fps, the result is a 90,000-fold time-lapsed animation.
I have embedded the animation below the fold. It is quite impressive.
» Read more
India aims for about a dozen launches in 2020
The new colonial movement: India’s space agency ISRO is targeting about about a dozen launches in 2020, including the first unmanned test flight of its manned capsule Gaganyaan, the first flight of its smallsat SSLV rocket, and the first test flights of a reusable rocket, the first stage landing vertically and the second stage returning like a space shuttle.
Of these I estimate about seven are orbital flights.
Based on the last few years, this prediction by ISRO is likely high. They tend to over-predict what they will accomplish each year. This isn’t necessarily bad, as it forces them to accelerate their work rather than allowing it to drag on endlessly.
December 20, 2019, Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
» Read more
Starliner lands safely after failed orbital insertion
Capitalism in space:Boeing’s Starliner capsule successfully landed today in New Mexico, returning to Earth prematurely because of its failure to reach its proper orbit after launch two days ago.
The article quotes extensively from both NASA and Boeing officials touting the many successful achievements of this flight, while trying to minimize the failure that prevented the capsule from docking with ISS properly. And that failure?
The mission elapsed timer issue that cut short Starliner’s planned eight-day mission started before the spacecraft lifted off Friday from Cape Canaveral aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, according to Chilton. “Our spacecraft needs to reach down into the Atlas 5 and figure out what time it is, where the Atlas 5 is in its mission profile, and then we set the clock based on that,” Chilton said in a press conference Saturday. “Somehow we reached in there and grabbed the wrong (number). This doesn’t look like an Atlas problem. This looks like we reached in and grabbed the wrong coefficient.”
“As a result of starting the clock at the wrong time, the spacecraft upon reaching space, she thought she was later in the mission, and, being autonomous, started to behave that way,” Chilton said. “And so it wasn’t in the orbit we expected without the burn and it wasn’t in the attitude expected and was, in fact, adjusting that attitude.”
I read this and find myself appalled. While I agree that overall the mission proved the capsule capable of launching humans to ISS (which is why NASA is considering making the next Starliner mission manned despite this failure), this failure suggests a worrisome lack of quality control at Boeing. I can’t even imagine how the Starliner software could be mis-configured to “grab the wrong number.” This explanation makes no sense, and suggests they are spinning the failure to avoid telling us what they really did wrong.
Either way, I suspect that NASA will approve a manned launch for Starliner’s next orbital flight, but will do so only after dwelling on the problem for at least six months.
Trump signs defense bill which includes Space Force
It’s official: Trump today signed the annual NDAA defense authorization bill which also includes the creation of a new military branch dubbed the Space Force.
Whether this new branch will function to make the U.S.’s space military more effective, or merely act as a foundation for a bureaucracy in Washington requiring lots of useless jobs and lots of wasteful spending remains at this moment an unknown.
My instincts favor the latter, based on a lifetime of watching how Washington operates. Every time in the past half century Congress has created a new agency that was supposed to make the federal government more efficient it has instead accomplished the exact opposite. I see no reason at this moment to expect otherwise.
Note that for the immediate future not much is going to change, as this new branch will be operating initially from within the Air Force, where space operations have been based for decades anyway.
The Starbugs – Mr Tambourine Man
An evening pause: Sung by Jessie Hillel, Sarah Whitaker, Roisin Anderson, Ben Anderson, Rebecca Jenkins. From the youtube page: “We have re-pitched this captivating selection of favourites to suit children’s voices.”
Truly one of Bob Dylan’s most beautiful and poetic songs.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.