Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
After a two day delay because of an aborted engine burn, a Soyuz spacecraft docked last night with ISS, bringing its next crew of three to the station.
The Republican leadership in the House today held a sham vote to get a spending bill passed.
They did it because they couldn’t get enough votes from both Republicans and Democrats for the bill. So, “Republican leadership worked with their Democratic counterparts to orchestrate the ploy.”
It is stuff like this that makes me sick for our country: bi-partisan corruption.
Hubble takes an image of Comet Siding Spring and finds two jets coming off the nucleus.
The comet will fly past Mars on October 19 by a distance of only 84,000 miles, which makes understanding its jets crucially important for protecting the various spacecraft that orbit the red planet.
A different look at 25 famous places that gives you a better idea of what it is really like to visit them.
I thought the images of the Mona Lisa and the Alamo were the most revealing.
Government power relies on violence and coercion, regardless of where and when.
The author justly lambasts both the left and the right for playing favorites when it comes to the abuse of power by our federal government.
Feel the love: A feminist comedian calls for violence against conservative Christians.
I really like how effective Obama’s call for civility after the Tucson shootings has been. Considering how rarely he has spoken up on the subject since then, however, you’d almost think his demand that people be civil really only applied to conservatives, while liberals were to remain free to be as abusive and hateful as they like.
Rosetta has taken its first picture of its target comet since coming out of hibernation.
The comet, 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, is only a dot now, but will look far more interesting when Rosetta goes into orbit around it in August.
A fire at a radar site used by the Air Force to track rockets lifting off at the Kennedy Space Center has delayed all launches there, including SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 flight.
Initially the Air Force thought they could make repairs relatively quick, but now think it could take as long as 45 days. No new launch date for the Falcon 9/Dragon flight as yet been set.
Hurrah! A college student who was attacked and then arrested by Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control agents because she and two friends had purchased a case of sparkling water is now suing Virginia and those seven agents for $40 million.
The key here is that she is not only suing the state, she is suing the agents themselves. They screwed up, but instead of apologizing to her immediately they arrested her and put her in jail for the night in order to intimidate her. I am glad she is not intimidated.
Though engineers still don’t know why a Soyuz spacecraft carrying three astronauts to ISS was oriented incorrectly — thereby preventing a scheduled engine firing yesterday — they have uploaded new software and have subsequently executed two additional burns successfully.
The engine firings are excellent news, since they demonstrate that the capsule can make the necessary orbital maneuvers to get it to ISS.
Astronomers have found an asteroid with its own rings.
Chariklo is the largest member of a class known as the Centaurs and it orbits between Saturn and Uranus in the outer Solar System. Predictions had shown that it would pass in front of the star UCAC4 248-108672 on 3 June 2013, as seen from South America. Astronomers using telescopes at seven different locations, including the 1.54-metre Danish and TRAPPIST telescopes at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, were able to watch the star apparently vanish for a few seconds as its light was blocked by Chariklo — an occultation.
But they found much more than they were expecting. A few seconds before, and again a few seconds after the main occultation there were two further very short dips in the star’s apparent brightness. Something around Chariklo was blocking the light! By comparing what was seen from different sites the team could reconstruct not only the shape and size of the object itself but also the shape, width, orientation and other properties of the newly discovered rings.
The team found that the ring system consists of two sharply confined rings only seven and three kilometres wide, separated by a clear gap of nine kilometres — around a small 250-kilometre diameter object orbiting beyond Saturn.
Astronomers have discovered a new dwarf planet about 300 miles wide at the outer edge of the solar system.
The closest it gets to the Sun is 80 AU, or about 7.4 billion miles. More tantalizing, however,
… the findings also suggest the presence of another large planet in the outer reaches of the solar system. When the authors plotted the motion of Sedna, 2012 VP113, and distant Kuiper belt objects, they noticed some odd behaviors which they couldn’t explain — but which a massive, “super-Earth” planet about 250 AU away could. They note that such a dimly lit planet “would be fainter than current all-sky survey detection limits, as would larger and more distant perturbers” (i.e., planets), so it’s certainly possible… but right now it’s little more than a guess. A weird, intriguing guess.
Police state: A Kansas family’s home is raided by a gun-toting SWAT team because police found tea leaves in their garbage pails.
The family, which were entirely innocent of any wrong-doing, also had to spend $25,000 to find out this fact, as the police stonewalled them when they asked why their house was raided.
Fascist state: A Massachusetts judge has ruled that the state there owns your children.
The case involves Justina Pelletier, who lived in Connecticut with her parents, was ill, and brought to Massachusetts to get treatment her Connecticut doctors couldn’t give. The Massachusetts doctors took control of the case, changed the diagnosis, and started psychiatric treatment that was against the wishes of the parents. When the parents tried to get their daughter back, the hospital refused, literally imprisoning their daughter and denying them access to her. The Massachusetts judge has now ruled that the hospital and the state have this right, and that the parents are irrelevant to the treatment of their daughter.
My advice: Stay out of Massachusetts. And if you live there, move!
The timeline of Obamacare delays arbitrarily imposed by the Obama administration.
Practically all of these are illegal, as the law does not give the president the power to make these changes. Also, note the wide gap from July 2, 2013 to November 27, 2013, when no delay orders were issued. It was during this time period that Obama and the Democrats in Congress were refusing to negotiate with Republicans about a variety of proposed Republican delays to the law. The result of this refusal was the shutdown of the government in October. Had the Democrats been willing to negotiate then, these delays would at least have been legal, and there would not have been a shutdown.
An expected engine burn on board the Soyuz capsule taking three astronauts to ISS did not take place as scheduled, forcing at minimum a two day delay in the rendezvous and docking.
[NASA spokesman Rob] Navias said the engine burn was aborted due to a problem with the Soyuz’s attitude control system, but further details were not immediately available. “Right now we don’t understand exactly what happened,” a mission manager at Russian Mission Control told the Soyuz crew late Thursday. Ground controllers planned to download data from the Soyuz and determine whether the glitch was due to a hardware or software problem. [emphasis mine]
Though the astronauts are not in any immediate danger, this is very worrisome. Indications from various other news stories suggest the problem was software related, which in a sense is a good thing. They would still have the option to manually fire their engines to do a manual rendezvous and docking. However, if it isn’t a software issue, and the vagueness of the reports so far makes me wonder about this, they might instead be stranded. Let us hope not.
Update: This report gives a little more information. It appears the capsule itself was not in the right orientation at burn time, and the computer software, sensing this, canceled the burn. If so, the problem might be software (incorrectly gauging the position of the spacecraft) or mechanical (something failing so that the capsule is not oriented correctly). Engineers need to find out which.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: The Obama administration has once again arbitrarily extended the deadline in Obamacare for obtaining health insurance.
This same President, allied with the Democrats in Congress, refused any negotiations in October with Republicans about legally extending the deadline. Then, they were willing to shut the government down. Now, however, they delay things willy-nilly, like petty dictators. It seems childish, petulant, petty, foolish, and not very thoughtful.
But hey, Democrat voters, we gotta support them, through hell or high water, because they care!
Democratic civility: When challenged about his gun control proposals and how they conflict with the second amendment, a Rhode Island state legislator responded “Go f–k yourself.”
Video at the link. Note how gleefully he says it.
Sierra Nevada has subcontracted Lockheed Martin to help build its Dream Chaser spacecraft.
The article is about the beginnings of construction at the Michoud Assembly facility in Louisiana, but to me the significant fact revealed by this article is that Jim Crocker of Lockheed Martin is involved in the effort. Crocker was one of the key engineers who came up with the solutions that helped return focus to the Hubble Space Telescope back in 1993. He is one of the country’s best aerospace engineers, and his participation here is excellent news.
A Russian rocket successfully lifted off today from Kazakhstan with the next crew for ISS.
