The competition heats up: SpaceX is moving forward with its plans for a spaceport in Brownsville, Texas, purchasing more land and applying for building permits.
Using computer models based on the Moon’s crater record, scientists have developed a simulation of the great early bombardment of the Earth around 4 billion years ago.
The model suggests that the biggest asteroids to hit Earth would have been as large as 3,000 kilometres across. Between one and four would have been 1,000 kilometres wide or larger, it predicts, with a total of three to seven exceeding 500 kilometres in width. The most recent of these would have hit around 4.2–4.3 billion years ago.
In comparison with Earth’s mass, the amount of rock hitting the planet would have been tiny. But it would have had an enormous effect on Earth’s surface, says Marchi. A 10-kilometre-wide asteroid was enough to kill the dinosaurs, and studies4 show that one 500 kilometres across would vaporize all of the planet’s oceans. “At 1,000 kilometres, the effects would be so wide the planet would probably be completely resurfaced with material from the mantle,” he says.
More here, including animated gifs showing this bombardment unfold.
Today’s Comet 67P image from Rosetta above is actually an image from yesterday, refined and cleaned up by the spacecraft’s science team. The July 30 image can be found here, but it isn’t as interesting.
The image above was included in a press release that describes the effort by Rosetta to image the coma that surrounds this nucleus.
An evening pause: Performed live on Bob Baxter’s “Guitar Workshop” in 1973. Hat tip to jwing, who wrote the following when he sent me the link:
Clarence was instrumental in making flat-picking guitar a lead solo instrument in bluegrass, along with Doc Watson. He played as a session musician for many groups in the 60’s such as the Everly Brothers and The Monkees. Later he became the lead guitarist for Roger McGuinn’s Byrds. He developed the B-string bender invention that you can hear on the Eagles’ song “Take It Easy.” Sadly, in 1973 while packing up the band’s van after a late night gig he was hit by a drunk driver and was killed. A huge loss to music. This video was recorded in LA only a few months before that fateful night. Enjoy a true virtuoso.
The U.S. State department is claiming that China completed a “non-destructive” anti-satellite test last week.
The State department also demanded that China refrain from further such actions.
China in turn said that the test was for a a ballistic missile defense system. According to these Chinese reports, the test was of a land-based missile designed to intercept an incoming rocket, much like Israel’s Iron Dome and the U.S. SDI systems. Such a system, however, is in many ways indistinguishable from an anti-sat system. In fact, the U.S. military proved that by firing a missile that successfully destroyed an orbiting satellite several years ago.
In the case of last week’s Chinese test, the interceptor did not apparently impact anything but instead demonstrated its ability to hit a prearranged simulated point in space.
The left’s fascist war on anyone that dares disagree with them.
In this case the war was against Roger Pielke, a well known and respected scientist with many peer-reviewed papers with thousands of citations by others in the climate field.
Working for the Democratic Party: In newly revealed emails, Lois Lerner refers to Obama’s conservative opponents as “–holes” and “terRorists”.
In that Nov. 9, 2012 email, Lerner further suggests that conservatives will ruin the country: “So we don’t need to worry about alien teRrorists (sic). It’s our own crazies that will take us down,” she wrote.
The evidence also shows that Lerner used her private email account to conduct official IRS business, while also clearly favoring liberal organizations.
I wonder what we would find if those lost emails could turn up?
Because of technical and financial issues the European/Russian ExoMars rover mission is expected to miss its 2018 launch window.
The main reason for the delay would be the ExoMars’ brand-new landing system, which is designed to safely take the rover through a fiery descent in the Martian atmosphere and then softly land it on the surface of the Red Planet.
In addition to its late development start, the landing system has a complicated share of responsibilities between Russia and Europe, which greatly slows down the work. For example, the overall landing system is being developed by NPO Lavochkin in Moscow, while its parachute system will be provided by Europe. Many other aspects of the mission are similarly intertwined.
To further complicate matters, NPO Lavochkin, which traditionally builds all Russian planetary probes, but also some of the highly classified military satellites, is notorious for its Soviet-style secrecy. As a result, it is harder for the two sides to coordinate the work, Europeans sources said. Finally, the translation of documents between Russian and English further delays the work on the project.
The program is also significantly over budget.
Today’s Rosetta image of Comet 67P shows that the spacecraft has gotten close enough, 1,200 miles, for several distinct features to become visible, including two large craters, one on each of the nucleus’s two sections.
The competition heats up: A New Zealand company says it is building a rocket capable of launching cubesats into orbit for only $5 million.
Rocket Lab says it is building a carbon-composited launch vehicle –named Electron—which will send small satellites into earth’s orbit for five million U.S. dollars. The U.S. company, which is building the vehicle in New Zealand, expects the first to be ready next year and already has committed to its first 30 launch slots.
Though their low cost will once again increase the space launch customer base, they are not really in competition with any of the big players, who don’t really make their money launching cubesats. Instead, by focusing on the cubesat market, Rocket Lab is aimed at providing launch services to a niche that has, up until now, had no real launch services. If a university or small company wanted to launch a cubesat., they had to piggyback on a large launch.
Arianespace today successfully launched the last European cargo ship to ISS.
After doing some flight tests in orbit and in conjunction with ISS, the docking will occur on August 12.
After this flight the Russian Progress freighter will be the only spacecraft with engines capable of changing the station’s orbit. It will also be the only spacecraft capable of refueling the engines on ISS’s Russian modules.
The uncertainty of science: New research by astronomers suggests that the Milky Way is about half as massive as previously estimated.
In the sixties I remember astronomers claiming that the Milky Way was twice as big as Andromeda. Then it was considered half as big. Most recently it was considered about the same size. This new research makes it half as big as Andromeda again.
In other words, the data is very uncertain, and the scientists really don’t have a good handle on it. None of these conclusions should be taken very seriously. All we really know at this point is that the Milky Way and Andromeda are approximately comparable.
The competition heats up: For the first time in six months SpaceShipTwo completed a test flight today.
The article above is from NBC, which also has a deal with Virgin Galactic to televise the first commercial flight. It is thus in their interest to promote the spacecraft and company. The following two sentences from the article however clearly confirm every rumor we have heard about the ship in the past year, that they needed to replace or completely refit the engine and that the resulting thrust might not be enough to get the ship to 100 kilometers or 62 miles:
In January, SpaceShipTwo blasted off for a powered test and sailed through a follow-up glide flight, but then it went into the shop for rocket refitting. It’s expected to go through a series of glide flights and powered flights that eventually rise beyond the boundary of outer space (50 miles or 100 kilometers in altitude, depending on who’s counting).
Hopefully this test flight indicates that they have installed the new engine and are now beginning flight tests with equipment that will actually get the ship into space.
An evening pause: Watch Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea in the classic kiss scene from The More the Merrier (1943).
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime (2014 edition).
The evil returns: In Germany a synagogue is firebombed and a rabbi gets death threats merely because they are Jewish.
As one commenter at the website above explained when another commenter asked for an explanation of anti-semitism, “An example of anti-Semitism is where people in the middle east are shooting at each other and an uninvolved Jewish man in Wuppertal gets death threats because of it.”
Reading the comments and the amount of childish hate that exudes from too many of them will certainly depress you.
After numerous tries, the private effort to put ISEE-3 back into its original orbit has failed.
We have completely accomplished all of our original goals except for one: firing the ISEE-3 propulsion system in a sufficient fashion to alter its trajectory. We did operate the propulsion system briefly so as to correct the spin of the spacecraft, and to start the trajectory correction maneuver. The propulsion system works fine. The problem is that there is no longer any Nitrogen pressurant left in its tanks to allow it to work.
36 years and more than 30 billion miles have taken its toll on the spacecraft’s propulsion system. We have exhausted every option to bring the engines online so as to conduct the correction maneuver required to place it in its planned orbit. Without the pressurant it just won’t work.
Have they given up? No! Though the spacecraft will remain in a solar orbit where maintaining communications will be difficult if not impossible, they are going to try anyway, and are even going to run another crowd-sourcing campaign to finance it.
Black leaders in Fresno, California want to stop the hiring of a teacher merely because his skin color happens to be white.
On Monday morning, a small band of activists showed up in front of the sparkling new school at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Church Avenue. The local press was also there. “We’re just saying what the community wants,” said Rev. Karen Crozier, one of the activists. “We didn’t fight for a white male or female teacher to educate our babies.” Crozier, who appears to be a professor at Fresno Pacific Biblical Seminary, also suggested that a white person cannot teach minority children in this instance because of racism.
Sometimes the bigotry and blindness of people just leaves me speechless.
In related news, the organizer of a “gay” job fair is outraged that non-gays keep showing up there looking for jobs.
After several months of in-orbit analysis, engineers have declared the European space telescope Gaia ready to begin research.
There have been several issues that had raised concerns, but from the article it sounds as if the engineers have either corrected the problems or have found ways to overcome or mitigate them.
Gaia will measure the movement and location of a billion stars, allowing astronomers to map the Milky Way better than ever before.
After the House voted 421-0 in June to eliminate all bonuses at the Veterans Administration in response to the scandals there, a compromise bill with the Senate has restored most of those bonuses.
The compromise bill announced Monday by the chairmen of the House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committees says VA bonuses will be capped at $360 million annually for the next ten years. But that cap is just 10 percent below the $400 million in bonuses the VA has distributed in recent fiscal years, and will allow up to $3.6 billion in bonuses to be awarded over the next decade.
“In each of fiscal years 2015 through 2024, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs shall ensure that the aggregate amount of awards and bonuses paid by the Secretary in a fiscal year… does not exceed $360,000,000,” the bill says. A description of the bill adds that members expect the VA to implement this cap in a way that does not “disproportionately impact lower-wage employees,” although the legislation itself does not include any restriction on how to award the money.
More evidence that our elected officials don’t represent us, but the employees of the government instead.
Visiting the underground tunnels of World War I.
At the height of the underground war, in 1916, British tunneling units detonated some 750 mines along their hundred-mile sector of the front; the Germans responded with nearly 700 charges of their own. Hills and ridges that provided vital lookout points became riddled like Swiss cheese, while the biggest mines blew out huge craters that still scar the landscape to this day. Even a single small mine could wreak havoc: In the tunnel complex we crawled into, a charge set off by the Germans on January 26, 1915, killed 26 French infantrymen and wounded 22 more.
But the underground war was not confined to narrow tunnels. Beneath Picardy’s fields and forests are centuries-old abandoned quarries, some of which could shelter thousands of troops. On a misty morning we explore one such site, located along a cliff edge overlooking the Aisne Valley. We’re led there by the owner of the ancestral property, which we agree not to name to protect the quarry from vandals.
Read the whole thing. It reminds me of my experience exploring the mines under Tombstone. These tunnels provide an archeological window into the history of the first World War.
The competition heats up: Amazon has opened its first 3D-print shop, where customers can buy 3D printed products.
The store has launched with more than 200 print-on-demand designs. Users can customize items like earrings, pendants, rings and bobble head dolls using a special widget, before having the item 3D-printed and delivered. …
Although users of the store cannot upload and print their own designs, it is, as mentioned, possible to customize some of the available designs. Amazon has built a customization engine into the store, allowing for very simple changes to an item’s design, or more wholesale changes. Interactive 3D preview functionality is also provided, with which users can rotate an object and view it from any angle.
What does this story have to do with space exploration? Well, it marks the beginning of a major revolution in manufacturing that will change everything. And since 3D printing is going to be an essential need for future space explorers, having this new industry prosper and grow can only speed up the exploration and settlement of the solar system.
As Messenger continues its observations of Mercury engineers have now lowered its orbit to its closest approach yet, 62 miles.
They will lower the orbit even more in August and September, then raise it up again for its final few months of research at the innermost planet, after which the spacecraft will use its last fuel to impact the planet.
After diving into Venus’s atmosphere on an aerobraking test that could have destroyed the spacecraft, the European probe Venus Express has now successfully used its last bits of fuel to raise its orbit back to research height.
Its present orbit will probably decay sometime in December, when the spacecraft will burn up in the atmosphere. However, the scientists running the mission though that was likely to happen during the aerobraking maneuver. Instead, Venus Express is giving them about another half year of research.
On the left is today’s Rosetta image of Comet 67P. If you compare it with yesterday’s image, it is larger, as the spacecraft has now edged closer, only 1,390 miles away.
Just click on the link.
With a drive of 157 feet yesterday, the Mars rover Opportunity broke the Soviet record, set by Lunokhod 2 in 1973, for the longest distance traveled by a vehicle on another planet.
Using Cassini data assembled over the past seven years, scientists have now identified 101 distinct geysers erupting on the surface of the Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Over a period of almost seven years, Cassini’s cameras surveyed the south polar terrain of the small moon, a unique geological basin renowned for its four prominent “tiger stripe” fractures and the geysers of tiny icy particles and water vapor first sighted there nearly 10 years ago. The result of the survey is a map of 101 geysers, each erupting from one of the tiger stripe fractures, and the discovery that individual geysers are coincident with small hot spots. These relationships pointed the way to the geysers’ origin.
The really important discovery here however is this:
» Read more
Victory for freedom: On Saturday a federal judge ruled that the DC ban on carrying handguns outside your home was unconstitutional and must no longer be enforced.
Expect the crime rate in DC to finally begin declining.
Update: DC’s police chief today announced that they will no longer arrest anyone who has the legal right to carry a gun, concealed or otherwise, in DC or in any other state. This means they now recognize the gun laws of the rest of the country.
The competition heats up? The original builders of the hydrogen-oxygen engine that launched the Soviet Union’s most powerful rocket, Energia, are pushing to restart production of that engine.
By 2013, the KBKhA design bureau, which developed the original RD-0120 engine, declared its restoration as one of several high-priority projects. According to a schedule developed by KBKhA in coordination with its manufacturing arm — the Voronezh Mechanical Plant — the RD-0120 could be brought back to production in six years, given adequate funding.
The final decision on the restoration of the RD-0120 would depend on the approved architecture of the super-heavy rocket, whose development was included into the latest draft of the Federal Space Program from 2016 to 2025. Plans to restore RD-0120 had its critics, who believed that a new investment into the hydrogen propulsion technology would be too costly and risky for the Russian rocket industry. A recent analysis of prospective super-heavy rocket designs by RKTs Progress, the developer of the Soyuz rocket, favored methane and solid propellants over the liquid hydrogen. At the same time, an alternative proposal from RKK Energia, the Russia’s chief manned space flight contractor, featured the RD-0120 engine on the third stage of the super-heavy Energia-KV rocket, industry sources said.
I’m not sure if it will be economically wise for Russia to focus their energies on this engine, or on a super-heavy rocket. Like NASA’s SLS, such projects look great for politicians and provide a lot of pork, but they generally are too expensive to accomplish very much.
