Category: Points of Information

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

Inexplicable high latitude Martian terrain

2:58 pm

Inexplicable high southern latitude Martian terrain

Strange image time! The image on the right, reduced in resolution to post here, comes from the August 1, 2018 image release from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). (If you click on the image you can see the full resolution version.) I have not cropped this image at all, so that you can see all of its swirling terrain.

This image did not come with a caption. The image site merely describes this terrain as having an “interesting morphology.” The location, in the very high southern latitudes (78 degrees south) just outside the southern rim of a very large crater, provides a slight explanation, as the growth and retreat of the Martian carbon dioxide polar caps is known to create very strange landforms. These swirling flows are obviously an example of one such landform.

The crater rim is just off of the top of the image and parallel with it. Therefore, the apparent erosional flows going around the hills and mesas are running parallel to the rim, not down from it. The black specks scattered about are probably points where dust was released as the carbon dioxide turned from ice to gas, a process that at the high latitudes on Mars often causes what planetary scientists call “spiders.”

I will not even try to make a guess at the process that formed what we see here. The image itself was taken on June 16, 2018 as part of a seasonal monitoring effort, which means scientists expect there to be changes occurring here from year to year as the polar cap shrinks and grown. An almost identical image had been taken two years ago, on December 18, 2016, and shows almost no black specks, probably because of the different time in the Martian year. A much closer comparison of both high resolution images would be necessary to tease out any more subtle changes.

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EXOS completes successful test flight of reusable suborbital rocket

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Capitalism in space: EXOS Aerospace yesterday completed a successful test flight of its reusable suborbital rocket, SARGE, at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

The company’s first Suborbital Autonomous Rocket with GuidancE, or SARGE, rocket lifted off from Spaceport America in New Mexico at approximately 2:15 p.m. Eastern. After reaching an unspecified peak altitude, the rocket descended under parachute, landing about 15 minutes later a short distance from the pad. The rocket’s nose cone, descending under a ballute, landed several minutes earlier.

The company didn’t immediately disclose technical details about the flight, such as the peak altitude, but in a live webcast of the launch appeared to be satisfied with the vehicle’s performance, despite the vehicle appearing to veer from its vertical trajectory briefly after liftoff.

“This was a very successful test for us,” said John Quinn, chief operating officer of Exos, on the webcast. “We’re very excited that we had all of our recovery systems operational.”

It sounds as if they were mostly testing the recovery systems that will allow the rocket and payload to land safely in a condition to fly again.

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Trump administration cuts $200 million of Palestinian aid

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The Trump administration today announced an additional $200 million cut of Palestinian aid.

“At the direction of President Trump, we have undertaken a review of U.S. assistance to the Palestinian Authority and in the West Bank and Gaza to ensure these funds are spent in accordance with U.S. national interests and provide value to the U.S. taxpayer,” the department said. “As a result of that review, at the direction of the president, we will redirect more than $200 million … originally planned for programs in the West Bank and Gaza.”

“This decision takes into account the challenges the international community faces in providing assistance in Gaza, where Hamas control endangers the lives of Gaza’s citizens and degrades an already dire humanitarian and economic situation,” the notice said, without providing additional details.

As long as the terrorist leadership in Gaza and the West Bank refuse to accept the right of Israel to exist, they simply do not deserve any American aid. This is a reasonable position, and it is also one that follows laws that Congress itself has passed.

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The corruption centered on Mueller and Comey

11:08 am

President Trump might have his ethical issues, but at this point the questions surrounding him don’t hold a candle to the corruption revealed in two stories in the past two days about former FBI director James Comey and Special Council Robert Mueller.

The first story describes in enormous detail the flat-out whitewash that Comey and the FBI did in its investigation of the classified Clinton emails that had been found on an unclassified laptop owned by former Democratic congressman and convicted child molester Anthony Weiner. That whitewash included outright lies by Comey before Comgress.
» Read more

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Los Angeles leftist groups call for “violence against the enemies of the people.”

10:50 am

They’re coming for you next: Los Angeles antifa leftist groups are now publicly calling for “violence against the enemies of the people” including “militant escalations [in the] defense of their undocumented working-class immigrant communities by any means necessary.”

The article describes a recent demonstration by these groups, describing how they threatened the police as well as innocent bystanders who happened to pass by.

Note also where the loyalties of these fascists lie. They scream support only for illegal immigrants, and are hostile to all Americans, both legal immigrants and native born. This illustrates that they real interest is the destruction of the United States and the idea of freedom for which it stands, not the illegal immigrants they are using as a pawn in this campaign.

If you live in California be aware that you likely no longer have the freedoms of an American. These jackbooted thugs, masked like the KKK, will soon be coming after you if you dare dissent from their agenda. And the Democratic Party government in charge there will likely allow them to get away with whatever violence they do.

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Volcanic rills and lava tubes on Mars

9:34 am

Rills and lava tubes on Pavonis Mons

Cool image time! The image on the right, cropped somewhat to show here, was taken by Mars Odyssey of the southwestern slope of Pavonis Mons, the middle volcano of the line of three giant volcanoes located between the biggest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons, and the biggest canyon in the solar system, Marineris Valles. The slope goes down to the south, from the top to the bottom of the image. As noted on the image page,

The channel and nearby oval depressions are both related to the flow of lava. Narrow lava flows can create channels. The cooling of the top of the channel will form a roof over the flow, creating a tube beneath the surface. After the lava stops flowing the tube can empty, leaving a subsurface void. The roof will then collapse into the void forming the oval surface features.

I have added arrows to the image to draw your eye to the features that extend south in line with those oval depressions, eventually widening out to resemble a river delta, with the obvious rill probably indicating the lowest point in that delta.

Though the oval depressions are likely sections of a lava tube that collapsed, the features in line with those depressions suggest that the tube itself might still exist below the surface to the south, feeding into that delta where the rill meanders. It is also possible that my desire to find underground voids here, where glacier ice might possibly exist, might be skewing my conclusion. It could also be that the lava tube ended at these depressions, and what the features indicate is a wide surface flow, later embellished by the smaller flow of the meandering rill.

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China reveals landing site for Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission

8:56 am

The new colonial movement: In a recent paper Chinese scientists revealed their landing plans for the Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission, presently scheduled for at 2019 launch.

If all goes according to plan, the robotic Chang’e 5 will land in the Rümker region, which lies within a huge basaltic lunar plain called Oceanus Procellarum (Latin for “Ocean of Storms”).

A recent paper lays out the scientific significance of this site, and what Chang’e 5 may be able to find there. “Recent studies find that the geological features and volcanic history of the moon are far more complex than previously thought, and many of the most interesting areas have been neither explored nor sampled,” states the study, which was led by Yuqi Qian of the School of Earth Sciences at the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan. “One such area is the northern Oceanus Procellarum region, which consists of very young (<2 Ga) [less than 2 billion years old] mare materials and hosts one of the largest volcanic complexes on the moon (Mons Rümker)."
For the study, the research team conducted a detailed geological mapping of the Rümker region using imagery, spectral and altimetry data.

Chang’e-5 should not be confused with Chang’e-4, which is set to launch in the fall to land on the Moon’s far side.

The choice of the volcanic region around the Ocean of Storms is significant, as it indicates that, for at least this mission, China is not focused on the possibly more valuable polar regions where water-ice might be present for future lunar bases. Instead, they are giving a priority to science and geology with this probe. They likely also picked this site because it is near the equator and therefore a bit easier to reach on this first daring sample return mission.

It does appear however that China is taking the long view. The landing choice here suggests to me that they plan many more missions to the Moon, and do not see anyone else in a position to compete with them for territory. The U.S., Russia, and Europe appear to be throwing their eggs into the basket of (F)LOP-G, which will merely orbit the Moon and eat up resources preventing these countries from planning and building any landing missions, for decades. India meanwhile might be a competitor, but at the moment it is far behind.

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Hayabusa-2 science team lay out Ryugu landing schedule

8:41 am

At a press conference yesterday the Hayabusa-2 science team laid out their landing schedule for the spacecraft and its three tiny landers.

The first lander will be one of its two tiny MINERVA-II probes, and will take place in September. This will be followed by the German/French MASCOT probe in early October, followed in turn in late October by Hayabusa-2 itself.

The landings of the first two probes will help them pick Hayabusa-2’s landing site, as well as the site for last MINERVA lander.

Mission planners faced tough choices because the body almost uniformly strewn with boulders. “Ryugu is beautiful, but challenging,” said Aurélie Moussi, a collaborator from the French space agency CNES in Toulouse, at a press conference in Sagamihara, Japan, on 23 August.

…To minimize risks for MASCOT, mission planners mapped the topography of Ryugu and the distribution and size of the boulders on its surface. They ran computer simulations to produce a shortlist of ten options, and then picked one spot on the asteroid’s southern hemisphere. The choice reflected a number of criteria, including average temperatures on the ground and the materials that MASCOT will analyse with its four on-board instruments. “The other sites would have been just as good, or just as difficult,” says MASCOT payload manager Stephan Ulamec of the German Aerospace Center in Cologne. “Wherever we look, there is a lot of big boulders.”

It does appear that the boulder-strewn surface is posing a problem for the engineers.

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Swooping over a lunar cold spot

10:20 am

cold spot crater

Cool image time! The oblique image on the right, reduced and cropped to show here, was taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of an unnamed crater on the Moon’s far side. (Click on the image to see the full picture.) What makes the crater of particular interest is that it during the long 14-day-long lunar night the area around this young crater quickly cools to a temperature about 10 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the surrounding terrain.

Einthoven cold spot crater, the subject of today’s Featured Image, is 1143 m wide, or about the size of Meteor Crater in Arizona. So far, it has no official name — we call it Einthoven cold spot crater because it is just south of Einthoven crater, which is old, degraded, and, at 69 kilometers in diameter, the largest crater in the neighborhood.

Though craters associated with cold spot anomalies are small, the cold spots themselves are often large. The Einthoven cold spot crater anomaly takes in 2070 square kilometers of terrain and extends up to 50 kilometers from the crater. That’s much too large an area for ejecta from the crater to cover, which eliminates the most obvious cold spot formation hypothesis: that material blasted from the crater during its formation could create the cold spot.

So, how to explain the cold spot anomalies? Some researchers invoke a cascading series of tiny secondary impacts traveling outward from the crater-forming asteroid impact, while others believe that gas produced by the impact flows through the top layer of lunar surface material. Either process might “fluff up” the surface, changing the way heat affects it. Few researchers, however, find these explanations to be 100% convincing.

Though the abstract of one science paper proposes using these cold spots as an easy way to quickly identify young lunar craters, the actual cold area of this particular crater does not correspond perfectly to the crater itself. The temperature map at the link shows that the colder region is not even centered on the crater, and has a very irregular shape. Using these mysteriously cold regions on the Moon to identify young impacts I think will be difficult and will have a very large margin of error.

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NASA considering purchase of communications services

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Capitalism in space: Rather than build its own communications satellites, as it has done in the past, NASA is now considering purchasing these services from private communications satellite companies.

NASA had been studying a next-generation communications system that would ultimately replace the current generation of Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) spacecraft in Earth orbit, as well as support missions beyond Earth orbit. That included the possibility of partnerships with the private sector.

“Past networks have been expensive to operate and maintain because they were designed to only serve government customers, which has limited their ability to leverage commercial partnerships,” the agency said in its fiscal year 2019 budget proposal released in February. “The next generation project will engage with commercial industry through mechanisms such as services contracts, hosted payloads, and other public-private-partnerships to allow multiple commercial entities to partner with the Government in order to significantly reduce and eventually eliminate reliance on NASA or NASA contractor run ground systems.”

In a paper presented last year by several NASA officials at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, the agency said working with both commercial and international partners would be among the elements of its next-generation architecture. “Using open, commercial, and international standards will enable the use of commercial services by specifying required performance and interfaces without specifying provider-specific capabilities,” the paper stated. “Commercial entities will compete based on price, quality, timeliness, support and other factors that maintain a competitive environment.”

That desire to work with the commercial sector, along with harnessing new technologies like optical communications, was a reason cited by NASA a year ago for not exercising an option for an additional TDRS satellite under a contract NASA awarded to Boeing in 2007. The last satellite built under that contract, TDRS-M, launched in August 2017.

Using commercial communications satellites makes perfect sense. It will be faster, provide more redundancy, and will save the taxpayer a lot of money.

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Arianespace’s Vega launches European satellite to study the Earth’s winds

9:18 am

Arianespace’s Vega rocket has successfully launched a European satellite dubbed Aeolus designed to study the Earth’s winds.

Funded by the European Space Agency and built by Airbus Defense and Space, the 480 million euro ($550 million) Aeolus mission is nearly two decades in the making. Since receiving ESA’s formal go-ahead in 2002, Aeolus has suffered numerous delays as engineers encountered problems with the mission’s laser instrument.

Aeolus will gather the first comprehensive worldwide measurements of wind speed — over oceans and land masses — from Earth’s surface to an altitude of nearly 100,000 feet (30 kilometers).

Data collected by the Aeolus satellite will be fed into numerical weather prediction models, replacing simulated “boundary conditions” in the computers models with near real-time measurements from space.

The updated leader board for the 2018 launch standings:

22 China
15 SpaceX
8 Russia
6 ULA
5 Arianespace

In the national race, the U.S. and China remained tied at 22.

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EXOS to test fly reusable suborbital rocket in New Mexico

8:54 am

Capitalism in space: EXOS Aerospace has chosen Spaceport America in New Mexico as the location where it will test fly its reusable suborbital rocket dubbed SARGE.

EXOS has completed the design, test and build; has received its FAA launch license and completed the final integration and test hovering for the rocket. A successful test flight is needed to solidify the company’s plans to use the technology as the basis for a planned reusable Orbital class vehicle, the company said in a pres release issued Tuesday.

“We are excited to enter into the testing phase of our SARGE platform at Spaceport America, and even more excited to reveal our plans for our Jaguar Reusable (first stage) LEO launcher,” EXOS COO John Quinn said in a prepared statement. “We look forward to enabling space research, manufacturing and educational opportunity for the world by providing frequent suborbital flights that provide fast and affordable access to space.”

Spaceport American CEO Dan Hicks said a successful test flight could lead to further testing and development at the spaceport.

EXOS is another one of the host of new smallsat rocket companies vying for expected large launch needs in the 2020s. For Spaceport America, a state-run spaceport that was built for Virgin Galactic and its hyped surge in space tourism that never happened and thus has seen practically no activity for the past decade, this announcement is helpful in its effort to attract other launch business.

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A strange bulge on Mars

2:45 pm

Pollack Crater

Cool image time! The image on the right is not the cool image, but a context image of 59-mile-wide Pollack Crater, located slightly south of the Martian equator in the planet’s southern cratered highlands. What makes this crater intriguing to planetary scientists, and has prompted them to take many images over the decades, is the bulge in the southwest part of the crater’s floor. You don’t normally see a rise off-center like this inside craters. If there were any peaks, you’d expect them to be in the center, formed during the impact, when the crater floor melts and acts more like water in a pond when you drop a pebble into it, forming ripples with an uplifting drop in the dead center.

It therefore isn’t surprising that planetary scientists have taken a lot of pictures of this bulge, going back to the Mariner 9 orbiter in 1972, which first discovered it. Scientists then dubbed it “White Rock” because in the first black & white images it looked much brighter than the surrounding terrain. Later color images revealed that it is actually somewhat reddish in color, not white. As noted at this Mars Global Surveyor webpage,
» Read more

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Man beaten by antifa thugs for carrying American flag

1:06 pm

They’re coming for you next: A man who was attacked and beaten by antifa thugs for carrying an American flag during a Portland demonstration is actually a Democrat and a Bernie Sanders supporter who was at the demonstration to show that even liberals can be patriotic Americans.

In addition to the open embrace of violence exhibited by the Antifa member, the other problem for the group, The Oregonian underscores, is that Welch was not some Proud Boy or Patriot Prayer fan, he was “one of hundreds of progressive Portlanders who had turned out to oppose the right-wing rally held at the Tom McCall Waterfront Park.”

“I didn’t come as a part of any one group,” Welch told The Oregonian. “I was just protesting outsiders coming here for their tacitly fascist event.”

“I had felt like showing that a liberal, free Portland — or any major city, really — is much more American and much more numerous and strong than any of these interloping groups,” said Welch, who the outlet notes is a registered Democrat who voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary and Hillary Clinton in the general election.

More here. Watch the video at the link. Masked thugs try to steal the flag, and when he refused to let go one smashes him on the head with what looks like a baton. Another then comes over and appears to hit him again while he lies on the ground.

I repeat: These are brown-shirted, KKK, Nazi, communist, fascist, jack-booted thugs, who will not tolerate any dissent, and hate the United States and the freedom it stands for.

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Mob rips down Confederate statue

10:50 am

They’re coming for you next: A mob of protesters yesterday pulled down a Confederate statue in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The monument was ripped down after 9:15 p.m. Earlier in the evening, protesters covered the statue with tall, gray banners, erecting “an alternative monument” that said, in part, “For a world without white supremacy.”

Protesters were apparently working behind the covering with ropes to bring the statue down, which happened more than two hours into a rally. It fell with a loud clanging sound, and the crowd erupted in cheers.

After Silent Sam tumbled to the ground, people darted in and out of the crowd through a haze from smoke bombs. Atop the statue someone placed a black cap that said, “Do It Like Durham,” an apparent reference to the toppling of a Confederate statue there a year ago.

Just remember, this protest has nothing to do with fighting racism. This mob, some of whom were masked in black, not unlike the KKK, is instead telling you that they will do whatever they have to do make sure no one ever disagrees with them. And if you do, they will come after you with the same violence and force.

And if you don’t believe me watch the video at the link. These are not peaceful demonstrators promoting love. They hate, and they believe they have the right to do anything, no matter how violent, to get what they want.

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Trump EPA proposes new power plant climate rules

10:23 am

The Trump administration has now proposed a revision to the climate rules established by the Obama administration to limit carbon dioxide releases at power plants.

President Donald Trump’s administration released a plan today to regulate carbon dioxide emissions at power plants, undercutting a much broader effort by former President Barack Obama to slash planet-warming gases.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposal would give states wide latitude for determining how to cut greenhouse gases from the power sector, a key contributor in the U.S. to climate change. The proposed rule is far narrower than the Obama plan, which sought to cut emissions across the power sector rather than only at individual plants.

On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump promised to repeal Obama’s rule, called the Clean Power Plan. His administration stopped short of that today and is instead offering a weakened alternative to avoid a potentially damaging defeat in court.

Based on the article and the actual proposal [pdf], I am far from convinced this change reduces regulation that much. It appears to shift the regulation to the states, but whether this simplifies things for power plant operators is very doubtful.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats and various leftist environmental groups oppose the change. Expect lawsuits, since it is absolutely forbidden for any subsequent president to ever change policies set by past Democratic presidents.

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Air Force to accelerate hypersonic weapon development?

10:12 am

By signing two different contracts worth $1.4 billion in the past four months with Lockheed Martin, the Air Force is claiming that it is accelerating the development of hypersonic weapons in order to keep up with similar development by the Chinese and the Russians.

The first contract, announced in April, awards $928 million to develop something called the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW). And last week, the Air Force disclosed another deal, worth up to $480 million, to begin designing the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW).

“We are going to go fast and leverage the best technology available to get hypersonic capability to the war fighter as soon as possible,” Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson said in a statement last week.

Hypersonic vehicles travel at least five times faster than the speed of sound (Mach 5; Mach 1 at sea level is 762 mph, or 1,226 km/h). And they’re designed to be maneuverable, which differentiates them from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and other fast-flying conventional weapons systems that follow predictable paths. “We don’t currently have effective defenses against hypersonic weapons because of the way they fly; i.e., they’re maneuverable and fly at an altitude our current defense systems are not designed to operate at,” Richard Speier, adjunct staff at the nonprofit RAND Corp., told CNBC in March. “Our whole defensive system is based on the assumption that you’re gonna intercept a ballistic object.”

I am a bit skeptical here. The military has been playing around with hypersonic development now for the last fifteen years, spending a lot of money flying a handful of test flights of three different design concept prototypes. Nothing is even close to an actual operational vehicle. These new contracts might produce something, but I fear that they are also pork-laden, and will be too expensive and take far too long, producing nothing more than test prototypes once again.

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Flying Boeing’s Starliner capsule

9:54 am

Link here. The article provides some nice details about the way the spacecraft will operate (mostly by computer), with the astronauts monitoring and capable of taking over at any point.

Unlike Dragon, the control panel has no touchscreens. According to astronaut Chris Ferguson, the design was “borrowed a little bit from Orion, and it’s kind of the way some of the 5th generation military planes interact with pilots.” Not as fancy, but maybe more practical. I still have my doubts about the ability of astronauts to accurately press a touchscreen during the vibrations of launch.

There is something else, however, about this article that bugs me. It reads too much like an SLS update, filled with glowing reports that, in the case of SLS, are designed to disguise a program that is not going to meet its schedule. This is pure speculation based on nothing but instinct, but it is an impression I have and do not like.

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Stratolaunch to build its own upper stages

9:40 am

Capitalism in space: Stratolaunch today announced that it is designing and building three differently-sized upper stage rockets to attach to the fuselage of its giant Roc airplane.

Beside the Pegasus rocket, owned by Northrop Grumman, aimed for first flight in 2020, Stratolaunch will build a medium and medium-heavy rockets, with the former set for a 2022 flight, as well as a fully reusable space plane, now in early development.

The space plane concept would apparently be capable of taking payloads up and down from orbit, and could therefore become the first totally reusable launch capability.

Overall, it does appear that the company, unable to find someone else to design its upper stage, has been forced to do it itself.

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Parker makes first course adjustment

9:29 am

The Parker Solar Probe successfully made its first mid-course correction burn yesterday.

Spacecraft controllers at the mission operation center initiated the two-part TCM-1 [trajectory correction maneuver] beginning at 6:00 a.m. EDT on Aug. 19 with a 44-second burn of the engines. The majority of the engine firing, which lasted just over seven minutes, began at 6:00 a.m. EDT on Aug. 20.

The spacecraft is now traveling at almost forty thousand miles per hour, easily enough to escape the solar system. Its course however is such that it will instead zip past the Sun, at closer distances after each orbit and Venus flyby.

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South Africa begins confiscating white-owned farms

11:58 pm

They’e coming for you next: The South African government has begun the process to confiscate, without compensation, thousands white-owned farms, and it appears it is willing to do it without regards to the country’s constitution.

The South African parliament voted in February to send its Constitutional Review Committee a motion to work on such a measure introduced by the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters party with ANC support. Mr. Ramaphosa said the ANC would make sure the amendment “outlines more clearly the conditions under which expropriation of land without compensation can be effected.”

But in another warning shot to white farmers and a possible foreshadowing of Seizures even beyond Akkerland Boerdery, the president hinted that the government might not even see itself as needing that amendment. A “proper reading” of the constitution and its current property clause, he said, “enables the state to effect expropriation of land with just and equitable compensation, and also expropriation without compensation in the public interest.”

Mr. Rampahosa, defending that position, said that the state having the power to seize property for no compensation will encourage economic growth. “The ANC reaffirmed its position that a comprehensive land reform program that enables equitable access to land will unlock economic growth by bringing more land in South Africa to full use and enable the productive participation of millions more South Africans in the economy,” he said.

This might be in South Africa, but these actions, bigoted and racist at their core and being pushed by the left, are only another reflection of the tyrannical lust for power that drives collectivists everywhere. In the U.S. the left for now merely attacks whites for being whites in academia. The aim however is no different that that of the Marxists in South Africa, to oppress one race for the fake benefit of another, with all power devolving to the corrupt leftist demagogues who make believe they are fair-minded politicians while pushing race hatred.

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Can the Earth’s magnetic field shut down and flip in only two centuries?

11:49 pm

A new study of a stalagmite in China suggests that the Earth’s magnetic field can reverse polarity in as little as two centuries, not the thousands of years as previously thought.

He and his ANU colleague Dr Xiang Zhao from the Research School of Earth Sciences contributed to the study of the paleomagnetic record from 107,000 to 91,000 years ago that is based on precise magnetic analysis and radiometric dating of a stalagmite from a cave in southwestern China.

The stalagmite, which is one metre in length and eight centimetres in diameter, has a candle-like shape and ranges in colour from yellow to dark brown. “The record provides important insights into ancient magnetic field behaviour, which has turned out to vary much more rapidly than previously thought,” Professor Roberts said.

In the past century or so the Earth’s magnetic field has weakened by about 10%. Some scientists think it possible this presages a possible magnetic reversal, which is apparently overdue. However, up until now it was assumed from available data that any reversal would take thousands of years for the magnetic field to shut down and then restart with a flipped polarity. This new data says the shutdown can happen within the span of one human life.

It is unclear to me if this increases our risk or decreases it. The magnetic field acts to protect us from the solar wind and other space radiation. When it shuts down there will be consequences, many negative, that we now can’t even predict. If a reversal is beginning now but takes longer to happen we will have at least a thousand years to plan and adapt, but the period of shut down will be far longer, causing more harm. If it happens quickly we will have to scramble to adapt, but the period of harm will be very short, and thus might not have time to cause significant harm.

Either way, this result is decidedly uncertain, based on a single stalagmite. No one should take it too seriously without further confirmation from other evidence.

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New analysis strengthens evidence of water in lunar polar craters

11:37 pm

ice signatures in lunar south pole craters

The uncertainty of science: Scientists using data from India’s Chandrayaan-1lunar orbiter today claimed that they have confirmed water in the Moon’s polar craters.

A team of scientists, led by Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii and Brown University and including Richard Elphic from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, used data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument to identify three specific signatures that definitively prove there is water ice at the surface of the Moon.

M3, aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, launched in 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organization, was uniquely equipped to confirm the presence of solid ice on the Moon. It collected data that not only picked up the reflective properties we’d expect from ice, but was able to directly measure the distinctive way its molecules absorb infrared light, so it can differentiate between liquid water or vapor and solid ice.

Most of the newfound water ice lies in the shadows of craters near the poles, where the warmest temperatures never reach above minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of the very small tilt of the Moon’s rotation axis, sunlight never reaches these regions.

The image on the right shows the craters surrounding the south pole with water ice signatures, according to this new analysis.

This press release has some puzzling aspects. First, it is almost a decade since this data was gathered. Why is this suddenly reported now, just prior to the launch of Chandrayaan-2? I suspect this release has come out now to garner some PR for that new mission.

Also, there is nothing in this release that explains why these results should be considered more certain than previous results. In fact, previous data from different lunar orbits has been somewhat contradictory, suggesting a lot of uncertainty about the presence of water-ice at the lunar poles that this story does not address or alleviate in any way.

Nonetheless, this new analysis and data adds more weight to the possibility of water near the lunar poles, making that real estate a prime target for future bases. Too bad it is China that is aiming to grab this territory, while NASA wants us to circle the Moon in LOP-G, going nowhere.

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NASA officially approves SpaceX’s fueling system

9:08 pm

Surprise, surprise! NASA on August 17 officially approved SpaceX’s fueling system where the astronauts would enter the Dragon capsule before the Falcon 9 rocket would fueled.

In a statement published late Aug. 17, the agency said that it was allowing SpaceX to move ahead with plans to use what’s colloquially known as “load-and-go,” where the Falcon 9 launch vehicle is filled with liquid oxygen and kerosene propellants after astronauts board the Crew Dragon spacecraft on top of the rocket.

“To make this decision, our teams conducted an extensive review of the SpaceX ground operations, launch vehicle design, escape systems and operational history,” Kathy Lueders, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said in the statement. “Safety for our personnel was the driver for this analysis, and the team’s assessment was that this plan presents the least risk.”

Blah, blah, blah. They had made it clear they were going to approve SpaceX’s fueling approach last week. NASA safety bureaucrats have been whining about SpaceX’s fueling approach for more than a year and a half, for no logical reason, and for what I surmised were purely political reasons having zero to do with safety. At times I have stated that when SpaceX was getting close to actually flying, NASA would back down. And I also expected SpaceX to push its launch dates to force NASA to back down, in contrast to the old-time big space contractors who routinely would kowtow to NASA in these matters and allow its bureaucracy to push them around.

These events are more evidence that the April 2019 manned Dragon launch is on schedule.

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