Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

MOXIE completes its last run on Mars, producing oxygen from the atmosphere

9:02 am

The MOXIE instrument on the rover Perseverance in Jezero Crater on Mars has completed its sixteenth and last operational run, once again demonstrating that oxygen can be extracted from the Martian atmosphere in sufficient quantities to supply a future colony of humans.

Since Perseverance landed on Mars in 2021, MOXIE has generated a total of 122 grams of oxygen – about what a small dog breathes in 10 hours. At its most efficient, MOXIE was able to produce 12 grams of oxygen an hour – twice as much as NASA’s original goals for the instrument – at 98% purity or better. On its 16th run, on Aug. 7, the instrument made 9.8 grams of oxygen. MOXIE successfully completed all of its technical requirements and was operated at a variety of conditions throughout a full Mars year, allowing the instrument’s developers to learn a great deal about the technology.

Future MOXIEs will likely be larger in scale, even more efficient, and include methods for liquifying and storing any oxygen produced, though for producing a breathable atmosphere for Martian colonists all that would be needed would be an enclosed habitat. An operating MOXIE-type oxygen generator could fill it.

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Targeted layoffs at Blue Origin

8:55 am

It appears that the upper management at Blue Origin has finally realized that a large Human Resource (HR) department contributes no real productive quality to a company, and in fact usually acts to reduce the company’s productive capabilities. According to reports from some company employees, it has begun to downsize this division.

Micah Thornton, a production control specialist at Blue Origin, wrote on LinkedIn that “several people from the Blue Origin Space Human Resource/Talent Acquisition team have been let go due to downsizing.” Several other employees wrote that they were laid off on Tuesday and are seeking new roles elsewhere.

This could be a very good sign for Blue Origin, or it could mean nothing. Other than periodically flying its reusable New Shepard suborbital spacecraft, the company’s main accomplishment since its formation more than two decades ago has been to establish a reputation as an unfocused operation unable to get its most important projects completed on time. Having a big HR department likely helps explain that history, and getting it reduced suggests management might be trying to get the company focused on its real mission.

Or not. HR employees are not engineers. Shifting them to other positions (which it appears the company is doing) simply rearranges the deck chairs on the Titanic.

We shall have to wait and see what transpires next. But then, that is all we have been doing in connection with Blue Origin for the past seven years.

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China’s Long March 4C rocket launches classified remote sensing satellite

5:15 pm

China’s three-stage Long March 4C rocket today (early morning on September 7th in China) successfully placed a classified remote sensing satellite into orbit, lifting off from China’s Jiuquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert.

This launch occurred prior to Japan’s H-2A launch, but I am only catching up with it now. As always, China’s state run press released little information, including where the first and second stages crashed inside China. All three stages of the Long March 4C use very toxic hypergolic fuels, so if those stages landed near habitable areas, there will be significant risk to bystanders.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

62 SpaceX
40 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 71 to 40. It also still leads the entire world combined, 71 to 65, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 62 to 65.

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Japan successfully launches XRISM X-ray space telescope and SLIM lunar lander

4:57 pm

SLIM's landing zone
Map showing SLIM landing zone on the Moon.
Click for interactive map.

Japan today (September 7th in Japan) successfully used its H-2A rocket to place both the XRISM X-ray space telescope and SLIM lunar lander into orbit.

As of posting XRISM has been successfully deployed. SLIM has not, as it needs to wait until after a second burn of the rocket’s upper stage about 40 minutes later. The map to the right shows SLIM’s landing target on the Moon, where it will attempt a precision landing within a zone about 300 feet across.

This was Japan’s second launch this year, so it does not get included in the leader board for the 2023 launch race:

62 SpaceX
39 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 71 to 39. It also still leads the entire world combined, 71 to 64, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 62 to 64.

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September 6, 2023 Quick space links

2:34 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

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Martian ice islands amidst a Martian ice ocean

12:18 pm

Glacier country on Mars
Glacier country on Mars

Martian ice islands in a Martian sea of ice
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 19, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The scientists simply labeled this “Deposit Layers,” but that description hardly covers the incredibly diverse and puzzling features within the picture. We see layers, swirls, and radiating groves, all suggesting glacial features. We see mesas apparently covered with ice, and a flat surrounding lower plain that appears to be also ice but acting more like an ocean or sea. If there is any visible bedrock at this location it is difficult to determine.

The dominance of ice features is not surprising however, considering the location. The red dot on the overview map above marks this location, in a large 80-by-56-mile-wide basin inside the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip I dub glacier country, because almost every image from MRO shows distinct glacial features. This particular basin is considered part of the segmented and indistinct canyon dubbed Mamers Valles, that winds its way through this glacier country of chaos terrain to eventually drain into the northern lowland plains.

From a geologist’s perspective, however, the layers are the most significant feature in the picture, as those layers mark the innumerable climate cycles that have apparently shaped the Martian surface. Mapping those layers will likely involve decades of work, but when largely completed we shall have a very precise history of the red planet’s geological history, going back several billion years.

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Firefly wins three launch contract from L3Harris

9:25 am

Firefly today announced that the satellite company L3Harris has awarded it a three-launch contract as part of Space Force’s quick response satellite launch program.

Firefly will provide rapid launch capabilities for L3Harris to achieve direct access to low Earth orbit at a lower cost and support the responsive space needs of the U.S. government. The three missions will launch from Firefly’s SLC-2 launch site at the Vandenberg Space Force Base.

The missions are scheduled for 2026, which makes sense as Firefly has yet to make its Alpha rocket operational. It has attempted two launches, the first a failure and the second reaching orbit but at an altitude lower than planned. Its third attempt, also a rapid response launch for the Space Force, was officially declared ready for launch within 60 hours, anytime within the next six months when the Space Force demands it.

A side note: It has seemed to me that in 2023 the launch of new American rockets by launch startups has slowed considerably. Why this is occurring is likely the result of many factors. First, two companies (Astra and Relativity) have abandoned their first iteration of their rocket, and appear unready to launch again for several years, if ever. Second, we may be seeing evidence of the heavier regulatory fist under the Biden administration, making it more difficult for new rockets to get launch license approval.

Third, it appears investor enthusiasm for this new industry has cooled, partly because of the first two reasons above as well as the poor stock trends of the new rocket companies that went public.

It is also possible the slowdown is simply the normal fluctuation one sees in any new industry with a relatively small number of players. This could simply be a pause as they gear up for a string of new launches next year.

Only time will answer this question. Stay tuned.

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LRO takes image of Vikram on Moon

9:02 am


Click for interactive map. To see the original
image, go here.

The science team for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) yesterday released an oblique image taken of India’s Vikram lander, on August 27, 2023, four days after the lander touched down about 370 miles from the south pole.

The LROC (short for LRO Camera) acquired an oblique view (42-degree slew angle) of the lander. … The bright halo around the vehicle resulted from the rocket plume interacting with the fine-grained regolith (soil).

That image is shown in the inset to the right. I have cropped it to focus on Vikram itself, which is in the center of the inset, with its shadow to its right, the opposite of all the surrounding craters. Pragyan is in this image, but neither it nor its tracks appear visible. The rover had moved west from the lander, which would be downward to the line of three craters near the bottom of the inset. To get a better sense of Pragyan route, compare this image with the map India’s space agency ISRO released on September 2nd.

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September 5, 2023 Quick space links

2:39 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who also provided me the link to the Chinese launch posted earlier.

  • Video outlining an alternative theory that dismisses the need for either Dark Matter or Dark Energy

    • The theory, MOND, was first proposed in the 1990s, but because of the desire to squelch and suppress any skepticism of the Big Bang, it has been routinely been ignored by all press services and poo-poohed by cosmologists. I tried several times to propose articles about it when I still wrote for magazines, and was consistently shot down. It could be it is finally getting more play because of the data from Webb.

 

 

  • Russia reveals plan to launch a new mission to Mars’ moon Phobos

    • Not only do few proposed Russian space projects ever happen, those that do take decades to get built, and sadly too many fail once launched. The last Phobos mission, Phobos-Grunt, never got out of Earth orbit, crashing to Earth shortly after launch in 2012. Russia announced a replacement mission shortly thereafter, with a target launch date of 2018. No launch ever occurred. This new proposal is likely not to fly for decades yet, if ever.

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Pushback: Doctor partly reinstated after health officials threaten him for stating obvious facts about COVID

1:31 pm

John Littell, persecuted for being a thoughtful doctor
John Littell, persecuted
for being a thoughtful doctor

They’re coming for you next: When the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM) stripped Florida doctor John Littell of his medical license in March 2023 because he had publicly advocated the use of ivermectin to treat COVID patients while questioning many of the government health policies being imposed during the epidemic, he immediate appealed.

I reported on ABFM’s attempt to blacklist Littell back in April, shortly after it took action against him. At the time it appeared the ABFM’s actions were prompted because he had spoken publicly about his successful use of ivermectin at a hospital board meeting, a meeting from which he was evicted.

Interviews with Littell went viral after he gave a speech at the Sarasota Memorial Hospital Board meeting last month in support of using Ivermectin to treat Covid and was subsequently removed by police after approaching a sympathetic board member. Since the video’s release Littell has amassed a large Twitter following and even appeared on Dr. Drew’s TV show to talk about what happened.

ABFM then sent him a letter “saying he’d been de-certified for ‘spreading false, inaccurate, and misleading materials about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccination, and treatment and mitigation of the virus.'”

Finally in response to Littell’s appeal in July ABFM decided to reinstate his license, but it also declared the license was retroactively de-certified for the previous three months, even though he had still being seeing patients because his license was supposed to be still active pending appeal.
» Read more

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Chinese pseudo-company launches four satellites from offshore launchpad

11:35 am

China's spaceports

The Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy today used its Ceres-1 rocket to launch four satellites from an offshore launchpad located a few miles off the coast of Shandong Province in the Yellow Sea.

For the third straight time the government-run state press made no mention of this pseudo-company in reporting the launch. Instead, it was achieved by “China”, which is true since the company isn’t really private. It is a fake company created using investment capital and aimed at making money winning contracts, but everything it does is supervised by the communist government, which can take over operations and control of the rocket at any time. That the state-run press is no longer touting the private company suggests to me that the communists are greedily eyeing its success, and are thinking about stepping in to take over.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

62 SpaceX
39 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 71 to 39. It also still leads the entire world combined, 71 to 63, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 62 to 63.

Note: the world this year has so far achieved 134 successful launches, which only two years ago was a new record for the most global launches in a single year, breaking the previous record from 1966. Last year the world smashed that record, achieving 179 launches. It appears the world this year will smash last year’s record.

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Martian mounds surrounded by moats

11:07 am

Martian mounds with moats
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 1, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the camera team labels “Circular Mounds Surrounded by Moats,” which when all the known data is considered are probably caused by a spray of small meteorites landing on a field of ice.

Why ice? The location is at 37 degrees south latitude, in the cratered southern highlands of Mars, where many images show glacial-type features inside many craters. In fact, all the nearby craters at this location appear to have such features, suggesting the presence of near-surface ice trapped in these craters.

The picture actually looks at the floor of another such crater, with the mounds in the image’s upper left the crater’s indistinct central peaks. Though only 8.5 miles wide, the crater is deep, with interior walls that quickly rise 2,800 feet to the rim. That depth further suggests ice, as any snow that fell here in the far past could easily become trapped, inside what could be thought of a cold trap.
» Read more

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Japan reworking law that limits its space agency from awarding contracts to private companies

8:32 am

The Japanese government is now in the process of reworking the law that governs its space agency JAXA, in that this law has up to now forbidden it from using any of its budget to directly fund the work of any private companies.

According to sources, the government plans to add a provision to the JAXA Law — the basis for establishing JAXA — to set up a fund to provide long-term, large-scale financial support to the private and academic sectors, and to submit a draft revision at an extraordinary Diet session this autumn.

In the past, JAXA has put money into two private companies out of its own income earned from intellectual property and other sources, and the investment per company was limited to several tens of millions of yen. In March, the Liberal Democratic Party proposed that a fund of ¥1 trillion be established over 10 years.

It appears this limitation might explain why Japan trails so badly in the aerospace sector. JAXA has been forbidden to award contracts to private companies. It has been required by law to do all the work itself.

I suspect one of the two private companies it has sent money to was Mitsubishi, which in turn been a major contractor in building JAXA’s H-2A and new H-3 rockets. The system however has not resulted in rockets that are competitive and inexpensive, which is why Japan has garnered little market share.

If the revision in the law allows JAXA to award development contracts to private companies as they develop their own rockets and spacecraft, owned not by JAXA but by them, then we may see a change.

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Bubbling but frozen terrain on Mars

12:19 pm

Bubbling but frozen terrain on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 8, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows some of the more unusual terrain found at the higher latitudes in the Martian northern lowland plains.

How do we explain this strange landscape? Based on what little we presently know about Mars, at 40 degrees north latitude this bubbly-looking surface probably indicates the presence of a lot of near-surface ice that at some time in the past was heated for some reason and thus bubbled upward to form these mounds. Think of tomato soup simmering.

Unlike simmering tomato soup, this terrain is solid and no longer bubbling. We are looking at a soup that has frozen even as it bubbled. The process could have been like an ice volcano, the ice turning to thick slurry that froze quickly, like lava. Or it could have happened fast, and then froze to remain unchanging in the eons since.
» Read more

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A triangular spiral galaxy

9:25 am

A triangular spiral galaxy
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a follow-up observations of a supernova that occurred in this galaxy in 2015. The galaxy, dubbed IC 1776, is about 150 million light years away.

Hubble investigated the aftermath of the supernova SN 2015ap during two different observing programmes, both designed to comb through the debris left by supernovae explosions in order to better understand these energetic events. A variety of telescopes automatically follow up the detection of supernovae to obtain early measurements of these events’ brightnesses and spectra. Complementing these measurements with later observations which reveal the lingering energy of supernovae can shed light on the systems which gave rise to these cosmic cataclysms in the first place.

As the caption notes, the spiral arms of this galaxy “are difficult to distinguish.” At first glance the galaxy instead appears triangular in shape, an impression that dissolves with a closer look.

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JAXA schedules last H-2A rocket launch, carrying X-Ray telescope and lunar lander

9:06 am

SLIM's landing zone
Map showing SLIM landing zone on the Moon.
Click for interactive map.

Japan’s space agency JAXA today announced that it has finally rescheduled the launch of its XRISM X-Ray telescope and its SLIM lunar lander launch for September 7, 2023, lifting off using the last flight of its H-2A rocket.

The previous launch attempt several weeks ago was scrubbed due to high winds. This new launch date has a window of seven days, which means if weather scrubs the September 7th launch they will be able to try again immediately within that window.

The white dot on the map to the right shows the targeted landing site of SLIM, which is testing the ability of an unmanned probe to land precisely within a tiny zone of less than 300 feet across.

Meanwhile, with the retirement of the H-2A rocket and its replacement having not yet flown successfully (its first launch failed in March), Japan after this launch will be in the same boat as Europe, without a large rocket and lacking the ability to put large payloads into orbit.

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Endeavour Dragon capsule carrying four astronauts safely splashes down

8:53 am

SpaceX’s Endeavour Dragon capsule safely splashed down shorty after midnight last night in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida, completing a six month mission for two Americans, one Russian, and one astronaut from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The UAE astronaut, Sultan Al Neyadi, flew as a paying passenger, obtaining his flight through the private space station company Axiom, which in turn purchased the ferrying services to and from ISS from SpaceX. The Russian flew as part of the barter deal that NASA presently has with Russia, with each flying astronauts on the other nation’s capsules at no cost in order to make sure everyone knows how to use them in case of emergency.

Several additional details: First, in the post-splashdown press conference SpaceX officials revealed they are presently building a fifth manned Dragon capsule to add to its fleet, and are also aiming to fly each as much as fifteen times. This suggests they are anticipating a lot of business hauling both NASA and commercial passengers into space.

Meanwhile, the Russian-launched crew on ISS that launched last September and includes American Frank Rubio is targeting a return-to-Earth on September 27, 2023. If so, they will have completed a 371 day flight, or almost thirteen months. This I think is the second longest human flight so far in space, exceeded only by Valeri Polykov’s fourteen-and-half month mission in the 1990s.

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Engineers had Vikram do short flight hop prior to shutting down

8:36 am

Indian engineers revealed today that prior to putting the Vikram lander to sleep for the long lunar night, they had the lander use its rocket engines to do a short up and down flight. From the first link:

“On command it (Vikram lander) fired the engines, elevated itself by about 40 cm as expected and landed safely at a distance of 30 to 40 cm away,” ISRO said in an update on ‘X’.

Before doing the hop engineers stored Vikram’s instruments and rover ramp, then redeployed them afterward to gather a tiny bit of new data before putting everything into hibernation.

The hop test proved that Vikram’s engines could be restarted even after being on the Moon for almost two weeks, and thus could potentially be used on a future sample return mission. It also suggested a future mission could choose to change its landing site periodically by use of its landing engines.

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SpaceX launches 21 Starlink satellites

8:11 pm

Using its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 21 Starlink satellites, lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its tenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

This was SpaceX’s 62nd launch in 2023, a new annual record for the company, as well as any private company anywhere ever. It was also the 71st American launch in 2023, which beats the launch record of 1966 which had lasted until only last year.

It appears SpaceX is moving its live stream off of Youtube and onto X. At least, this live stream was only on X. If so, that is a shame as it lowers its visibility. It is also understandable. Why should SpaceX send business to X’s competitor?

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

62 SpaceX
38 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 71 to 38. It also leads the entire world combined, 71 to 62, while SpaceX by itself now tied the rest of the world (excluding American companies) 62 to 62.

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Engineers place Pragyan into sleep mode

9:26 am

With lunar sunset looming, engineers have completed all work on both the lander Vikram and the rover Pragyan and have prepared Pragyan as best as possible to survive the long 14-Earth-day long lunar night.

Currently, the battery is fully charged. The solar panel is oriented to receive the light at the next sunrise expected on September 22, 2023. The receiver is kept on.

All data from Vikram’s instruments has been transmitted back to Earth, through the rover. It appears that the mission has been using the rover has the main communications relay, not the lander. It also appears there is no expectation of the lander surviving the lunar night.

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ESA successfully test fires upper stage engines of new Ariane-6 rocket

12:02 pm

Despite delays in test firing the first stage engines on ESA’s new Ariane-6 rocket, it has successfully tested fired the rocket’s upper stage engines in Germany.

The test of the full upper stage – including the new Vinci engine and a smaller Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) – took place on a purpose-built test bench at German Aerospace Center DLR’s engine test centre in Lampoldshausen, Germany.

Vinci, the upper stage engine of Ariane 6 fed by liquid hydrogen and oxygen, can be stopped and restarted multiple times – to place satellites into different orbits and then de-orbit the upper stage, so it is not left behind as hazardous debris in space. The APU makes it possible for Vinci to restart in space, by maintaining adequate pressure in the fuel tanks and preventing bubbles in the fuel lines. The APU uses small amounts of liquid hydrogen and oxygen from the main tanks – replacing a system which relied on large quantities of tanked helium.

A last hot-fire test is scheduled before final qualification of the Ariane 6 upper stage, with the aim of testing its operation for different types of missions, as well as in degraded conditions.

Meanwhile, the next attempt to do the same with the first stage in French Guiana is scheduled to take place on September 5th.

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Pragyan rover moves more than 300 feet away from Vikram

11:01 am

Map of Pragyan's traverse
Click for original image.

India’s space agency ISRO today released a map, shown to the right, that shows the entire traverse so far completed by its Pragyan rover in the Moon’s high southern latitudes. It has so far traveled more than 100 meters, or 300 feet, and continues to operate as planned.

The part of the traverse just south of the Vikram lander is where the lander filmed the rover doing several quick maneuvers and a 360 degree spin as engineers tested its operation before heading out on a longer journey. The rover’s image of the crater that the rover avoided, though released first, was actually taken afterward, after the rover had moved to the west.

Lunar sunset is in two days. Though engineers are preparing both Vikram and Pragyan for hibernation during that long lunar night, neither was designed to survive that extreme environment.

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SpaceX launches 13 satellites for the Space Force

10:32 am

SpaceX early this morning successfully completed its second launch for the Space Force, lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and placing another thirteen satellites of its Tranche-0 constellation into orbit.

The first stage completed its thirteenth mission, successfully landing back at Vandenberg.

This flight was SpaceX’s 61st in 2023, which matches the record it set last year, doing it in only eight months. With four months still left to go in the year the chances of SpaceX meeting its goal of 100 launches in the year still remains a possibility.

Furthermore, this was the 70th successful launch for the United States this year, which matches the record that the nation had set in 1966, and had been the record for the country until last year, when American companies (with help of one government launch) completed 85 launches. It seems last year’s record will be smashed without much problem.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

61 SpaceX
38 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 70 to 38. It also leads the entire world combined, 70 to 62, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) by only 61 to 62, with another Starlink launch is now scheduled for tomorrow.

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India successfully launches its first solar observation satellite

11:44 pm

India’s space agency ISRO tonight (September 2, 2023 in India) successfully used its PSLV rocket with six strap-on boosters to place in orbit its first solar observation satellite, Aditya-L1, lifting off from its coastal Sriharikota spaceport.

The spacecraft will eventually maneuver itself to the L1 point about one million miles closer to the Sun, where it will make continuous observations of the star’s visible hemisphere, using seven different instruments. Its observations will supplement those of the SOHO solar observatory (also located at the L1 point), which was launched in 1995 and is long overdue for replacement, or at least some redundancy.

For India, this was the seventh launch in 2023, which ties its previous annual launch high achieved in both 2016 and 2018. The country however has three more launches tentatively scheduled for this year, though none has as yet a specific launch date.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

60 SpaceX
38 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 69 to 38. It also leads the entire world combined, 69 to 62, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) 60 to 62. SpaceX however has launches scheduled for September 2nd and 3rd, so these numbers are likely to change.

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September 1, 2023 Quick space links

5:05 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

  • The Perseverance team posts another dumb tweet making believe the rover is some cute person

    • The tweet includes an image looking towards the western rim of Jezero Crater, but they don’t tell us that. Instead, the tweet says: “I’ve had a great time here poking around the ancient riverbed. Gonna wrap up a few tasks and hit the road soon. What’s over this next rise? Let’s find out”

    Jay writes, “I really don’t care for them to make Perseverance sound like a person. Don’t get me wrong, it is a marvelous piece of engineering, but it is not a person. I know they do this to make Mars more interesting to the general public.”

    I say, “Why are you insulting my intelligence?” Not only isn’t Perseverance a person, to make believe it is on the stupid assumption that is the only way anyone will become interested reveals your utter contempt for the general public. Please stop!

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Real pushback: School district immediately cancels ban on prayer when threatened with lawsuit

1:27 pm

The First Amendment, becoming accepted once again
The First Amendment, becoming accepted once again

Bring a gun to a knife fight: When the officials at West Shore School District in Pennsylvania sent out a letter to the presidents of the various booster clubs at its schools ordering them to “halt prayers at future banquets, and at any other school-sponsored activity” and claiming falsely that “student-initiated prayers at school events are illegal,” two non-profit free speech legal firms, First Liberty and the Independence Law Center teamed up to immediately send a letter to the district challenging that order:

First Liberty and our friends at the Independence Law Center quickly sent a letter to district officials asking them to immediately rescind that threatening letter. Our legal team offered to help draft a new letter and policies to ensure the district would not illegally discriminate against students and staff.

We explained in our letter that the First Amendment prohibits a school district from acting in a hostile manner toward religious belief.

To my readers this story is familiar. What has normally happened next in the past few years — since censorship and blacklisting has become all the rage by those in power — is that the government officials either ignore the letter or publicly defy it. Sometimes they double down and actually fire someone for exercising their First Amendment rights. What follows next is of course a lawsuit, which almost routinely ends in a crushing defeat for the school that costs it significantly in damages.

This story however ended quite differently:
» Read more

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Petrified dunes on Mars?

11:27 am

Petrified dunes on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 31, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

I think the many parallel ridges are likely hardened and petrified dunes of sand because of their craggy nature. Dunes of sand would have a smoother, softer look, and in fact, if you look at some of the dunes inside the depression at the bottom-right of the picture you will see ridges with exactly that look, smooth and curved.

Nor is it unreasonable to believe these ridges are petrified dunes, as orbital data over time has found that many of the dunes on Mars, even those that look active, are not and have likely been hardened for centuries.

As for the ridges running at right angles to each other in the picture’s middle left, I have no idea. Possible we are looking at ancient dykes of lava that pushed up through cracks and faults, but this is pure guess.
» Read more

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Ingenuity completes 56th flight on Mars

9:52 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

According to a tweet yesterday by the Ingenuity engineering team, the helicopter successfully completed its 56th flight on Mars on August 25, 2023, flying 1,345 feet to the northwest at a height of 39 feet for 141 seconds, or two minutes and twenty-one seconds. The distance traveled and the flight time were slightly longer than planned, but that likely was because the helicopter used that extra time to determine a safe landing site.

The green line on the map above shows the approximate new position of Ingenuity, positioned close to the planned route of Perseverance as indicated by the red dotted line. Perseverance’s present location is marked by the blue dot.

Neretva Vallis is the gap in the western rim of Jezero crater through which the delta had flowed eons before, and is the rover’s eventual target in order to begin exploring the terrain beyond, known to be very rich in mineral content.

Meanwhile, the Ingenuity engineering team has already released its flight plan for the 57th flight, heading north about 670 feet and targeting tomorrow for flight.

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