Category: Points of Information

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

Juno’s upcoming December 11 Jupiter flyby

4:12 pm

The Juno science team prepares for the next close flyby of Jupiter on December 11.

At the time of closest approach (called perijove), Juno will be about 2,580 miles (4,150 kilometers) above the gas giant’s roiling cloud tops and traveling at a speed of about 129,000 mph (57.8 kilometers per second) relative to the planet. Seven of Juno’s eight science instruments will be energized and collecting data during the flyby. “This will be the first time we are planning to operate the full Juno capability to investigate Jupiter’s interior structure via its gravity field,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “We are looking forward to what Jupiter’s gravity may reveal about the gas giant’s past and its future.”

Mission managers have decided not to collect data with the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument during the December flyby, to allow the team to complete an update to the spacecraft software that processes JIRAM’s science data. A software patch allowing JIRAM’s operation is expected to be available prior to the next perijove pass (PJ4) on Feb. 2, 2017.

It increasingly appears they do not want to risk firing the spacecraft’s main engine to shorten the 53 day orbit to 14 days because of a fear that the burn could fail catastrophically. This means that Juno’s mission will be extended significantly because it will take longer to gather data with such a long orbit.

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China preparing for anti-satellite test?

1:42 pm

According to Pentagon officials China is preparing for a flight test of a new anti-satellite rocket.

Test preparations for the Dong Neng-3 anti-satellite missile were detected at a military facility in central China, according to Pentagon officials familiar with reports of the impending test. Intelligence agencies were alerted to the impending test by China’s announcement of air closure zones covering the expected flight path of the DN-3.

The flight test could come as early as Thursday, the officials said. No other details of the missile test were available. A Pentagon spokesman and a State Department official both said, “We do not comment on intelligence matters.”

One additional detail: The DN-3 rocket appears to be based on the Chinese commercial rocket Kuiazhou, which a Chinese launch company is pitching to the international market as a vehicle for putting smallsats into orbit.

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Jupiter’s chaotic storms

9:32 am

Jupiter's storms, as seen by Juno after processing

Cool image time! The image on the right shows what anyone can do if they want to play with images that have been taken by the Juno spacecraft. On top is the raw Juno image of a storm on Jupiter. On the bottom is that same storm after significant processing by an ordinary citizen. A larger version can be seen here.

While the Juno science team’s policy of making all their raw images available to the public is routine for a NASA mission, they are doing something a bit different by allowing the public to play with the images and then upload them on a Juno website for everyone to see. While some of the subsequent images have been a little silly, the image on the right illustrates how this policy can help scientists (and the public) better study the atmosphere on Jupiter. The processing has brought out all the storm’s swirls and twirls, and shown clearly how chaotic the storms are in Jupiter’s high latitudes.

The scientists don’t have the resources or the time to do this kind of processing on every image, or even every piece of every image. Allowing the public to do it will increase the variety of results and make it more likely for everyone to gain some understanding of what is going on in the gas giant’s atmosphere. Or not, but then that’s okay, as a realization that we don’t understand something is the first step towards wisdom and real knowledge.

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Dutch rightwing politician convicted by court for expressing anti-immigration opinions

9:11 am

Facists: The leader of the conservative and anti-immigration party in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, has been convicted by a Dutch court of expressing hate speech during a political rally, simply because he called for a change in policy that would bring fewer Moroccans into the country.

Essentially, this liberal court has ruled that it is illegal for any politician, or anyone for that matter, to express an opinion in opposition to the present policy of the European Union to allow uncontrolled immigration into Europe from the Middle East. As noted at the link, “You read that correctly. An elected representative was convicted in a trial for talking about public policy. If that doesn’t send a chill down your spine then you are considerably more comfortable with socialism than you should be.”

This behavior of the left, however, is quite typical. They are fascists. You aren’t allowed to disagree with them, and if you do, they will work to destroy you. Think I am exaggerating? Consider these two stories from today:

If I was to do a quick internet news search for stories in the past week, I could find another dozen like these. The left’s idea of debate is to demand that you shut up. And they are becoming increasingly aggressive in their efforts to enforce this demand, by the use of force or violence.
» Read more

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The present strengths and limits to North Korea’s nuclear missile capabilities

8:43 am

Does this make you feel safer? A U.S. military official today outlined the strengths and weaknesses of North Korea’s aggressive effort to develop the capability of launch missiles with nuclear warheads.

North Korea appears able to mount a miniaturized nuclear warhead on a missile but is still struggling with missile re-entry technology necessary for longer range strikes, a senior U.S. military official said on Thursday. “I think they could mate a warhead with a delivery device. They’re just not sure (about) re-entry,” said the official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity. “They’re endeavoring to overcome that.”

North Korea has carried out repeated nuclear and missile tests this year in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions and sanctions and claims it has the capability to mount a nuclear warhead on a missile. Asked whether North Korea could mate the warhead to the missile, the official said: “I think they can.”

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Details revealed about Trump’s space policy?

9:24 am

Detailed comments by former congressman Robert Walker, who is advising the Trump transition team on space policy, yesterday provided some further hints at what the space policy will be during a Trump administration.

Walker said that there is an intent that the National Space Council be re-instituted so as to guide all space activities. civilian, military, and commercial. Walker went on to say that the Trump team is looking for a space policy that is “disruptive, resilient, and enduring”.

For one thing, Walker said that they are looking for a much longer life for the ISS – and that it will need to be refurbished and upgraded. He speculated that it would need to be handed over to an organization or consortium eventually. They are also looking for opportunities to have the commercial sector backfill for NASA so that NASA can focus on deep space exploration. Walker was very clear on this point noting that there was an awareness of many government programs that “take a decade to do with technology that ends up being out of date”.

…Walker was asked several times about SLS/Orion – in the context of Trump’s recent comments about Boeing and Air Force One. Walker did not answer the questions specifically but went into a broader generalization that Trump is not a politician but rather that he is a deal maker. He also thought that Trump’s funding of an ice rink in New York a few years back was a good example of what kind of president he’d be. Walker went on to say that Vice President-elect Pence would be the de-facto “prime minister” and run the government while Donald Trump went out to cut deals.

The issue of Earth science eventually came up. Walker said that the Trump administration is not looking to cancel NASA climate science but rather that they wanted to transfer all of it to other agencies who might have greater expertise. Earth centric research would be transferred so as to allow NASA to focus on space exploration.

It remains unclear whether SLS/Orion will survive a Trump administration. I suspect that at this point they themselves don’t know. They intend to shift climate research from NASA to NOAA, cutting some of that funding as they do so while also changing the personnel that run the research (thus cleaning house). They also probably want to shift NASA’s publicly-stated deep space goals back to the Moon, but this will simply be the empty rhetoric of politicians. More important is the suggestion that they want to extend the life of ISS. Such an action will also require an extension of the commercial crew/cargo contracts, which will also help continue to fuel the new space industry.

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SpaceX’s loses launch contract due to scheduling delays

9:11 am

Because of SpaceX’s decision to delay its next launch into early January, Inmarsat today decided to switch launch companies for a mid-2017 satellite, dropping SpaceX and signing a contract with Arianespace.

Inmarsat is not abandoning SpaceX, only switching to Arianespace for one satellite. Nonetheless, this decision, coming only one day after SpaceX confirmed the delay, explains to me why SpaceX has been saying for months it intended to resume launches before the end of 2017. Inmarsat had probably told the company that if they delayed into January, they would lose this launch. When SpaceX finally admitted they couldn’t meet the 2016 launch deadline, Inmarsat made the switch.

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Two new studies say different things about Greenland’s icecap history

9:00 am

The uncertainty of science: Two new studies of Greenland’s icecap suggest completely opposite histories, with one saying that Greenland was ice free at least once in the past 2.6 million years, with the other saying that the icecap covered Greenland continuously for the past 7.5 million years.

Evidence buried in Greenland’s bedrock shows the island’s massive ice sheet melted nearly completely at least once in the last 2.6 million years. This suggests that Greenland’s ice may be less stable than previously believed. “Our study puts Greenland back on the endangered ice-sheet map,” says Joerg Schaefer, a palaeoclimatologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and co-author of a paper published on 7 December in Nature.

A second paper in the same issue paints a slightly different view of the ice sheet’s past stability. A group led by Paul Bierman, a geomorphologist at the University of Vermont in Burlington, found that ice covered eastern Greenland for all of the past 7.5 million years. Experts say the two papers do not necessarily contradict one another: at times, nearly all of Greenland’s ice could have melted (as seen by Schaefer’s team) while a frosty cap remained in the eastern highlands (as seen by Bierman’s group).

If all of Greenland’s ice melted, it would raise sea levels by seven metres. Models suggest that Greenland could become ice-free as soon as 2,500 years from now, depending on the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. [emphasis mine]

This story is a perfect example of how the passionate belief in a theory (that global warming is happening, is a threat, and will melt the icecaps) can warp a scientist’s thinking. Both studies used a single drilled ice core, with the first from Greenland’s central region and the second from Greenland’s eastern region. Thus, there is no reason to say that the entire Greenland icecap had melted, as noted in the highlighted text that describes the first study. What the data merely suggests is that these two regions might have had different histories.

Instead, the article, in its effort to confirm the possibility that Greenland’s icecap could melt entirely and thus pose a threat of a big sea level rise, ignores this simple detail and struggles to justify the concept that the entire cap certainly melted in the past, even though one study suggests otherwise. This causes everyone to misunderstand the results, and draw conclusions that are uncalled for, based on the available data.

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Design flaw in India’s Mars Orbiter

8:52 pm

According to American researchers, a fundamental design flaw in the primary scientific instrument on India’s Mangalyaan Mars orbiter prevents it from carrying out its mission of measuring the methane in the Martian atmosphere.

“They did not design this properly for the detection of methane on Mars,” Michael Mumma, senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told Seeker. In 2003, Mumma led a team that made the first definitive measurements of methane on Mars using an infrared telescope in Hawaii. The methane, which appeared in plumes over specific regions of Mars, reached a maximum density of about 60 parts per billion. “The (MOM) instrument is beautifully engineered, but not for the methane task. It has other value, but unfortunately they will not be able to provide measurements of methane at the levels needed to sample even the plumes we saw,” Mumma said.

They are re-purposing the instrument to measure the reflected sunlight coming off the Martian surface, useful data to be sure but hardly worth an entire space mission.

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SpaceX confirms its next launch will be in early January

8:38 pm

In an update today on SpaceX’s September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion investigation webpage, the company announced that its next launch will take place in early January, not mid-December as indicated in recent weeks.

We are finalizing the investigation into our September 1 anomaly and are working to complete the final steps necessary to safely and reliably return to flight, now in early January with the launch of Iridium-1. This allows for additional time to close-out vehicle preparations and complete extended testing to help ensure the highest possible level of mission assurance prior to launch.

Apparently they wish to do more testing to make sure they understand exactly what they need to do to avoid the conditions that caused the September 1 explosion. At the same time, they also think that an extra few weeks will be sufficient.

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The weird south pole of Mars

5:45 pm

Mars' south pole region

Cool image time (literally)! The photo above, cropped slightly to show here, was taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbit (MRO) in August 2016 and was released today as part of the monthly release of captioned images. And though it looks like a fractal computer-generated animation still, it is instead real, showing the strange and quite alien terrain that routinely forms at the carbon dioxide ice cap there.

The polar cap is made from carbon dioxide (dry ice), which does not occur naturally on the Earth. The circular pits are holes in this dry ice layer that expand by a few meters each Martian year. New dry ice is constantly being added to this landscape by freezing directly out of the carbon dioxide atmosphere or falling as snow. Freezing out the atmosphere like this limits how cold the surface can get to the frost point at -130 degrees Celsius (-200 F). Nowhere on Mars can ever get any colder this, making this this coolest landscape on Earth and Mars combined!

This region is about 4 degrees north of the south pole itself.

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USGS responds to Congressional inquiry about data tampering with blank documents

4:01 pm

Why we got Trump: In response to a demand for documents from a Congressional investigation into data manipulation that the US Geological Survey allowed two chemists to do for nearly two decades, the USGS turned over documents with almost all the pages blank.

“Are we supposed to play tic-tac-toe on this?” Gohmert asked Tuesday, while waving one of the documents during a hearing of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on the data manipulation. The USGS lab where two chemists skewed data for nearly two decades was finally closed in March 2016.

Gohmert’s subcommittee had requested the documents in September. The blanks received Tuesday represented only a small portion of the total sought by the panel. “We’re still waiting for documents we requested three months ago,” Gohmert said. “Some of the documents we did receive were redacted, they were duplicates or were even blank pages.”

Meanwhile, the USGS refuses to name the two chemists or describe how they were punished. For all we know, they still work there. And it is important to note, that the data manipulation took place in connection with “various energy-related topics, including coal reserves and uranium deposits.” Want to bet the manipulation was done to discourage development?

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Trump picks oil industry ally and global warming skeptic for EPA

2:49 pm

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Scott Pruitt, to run the EPA.

An ally to the fossil fuel industry, Pruitt has aggressively fought against environmental regulations, becoming one of a number of attorneys general to craft a 28-state lawsuit against the Obama administration’s rules to curb carbon emissions. The case is currently awaiting a decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which heard oral arguments in September.

Pruitt, who questions the impact of climate change, along with Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange, penned an op-ed in the Tulsa World earlier this year that called criticism they’ve received “un-American.” “Healthy debate is the lifeblood of American democracy, and global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates of our time,” states the op-ed. “That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind… Dissent is not a crime.”

Not surprisingly, environmentalists have already begun the campaign to destroy him, based on the quotes at the link.

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Upcoming lectures

10:43 am

Since one of my readers asked about my future speaking appearances, I thought I’d note them here, on the main page. I will be speaking at three different venues in the next month, as follows:

The first is open to the public, but there is a $10 admission fee to the park. While the last two are free and also open to the public, I do not know what the public must do to gain access to the middle event at Vandenberg Air Force Base, as the location I think will be inside the base.

As always, all my appearances, including these, are listed in the right column below.

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Dispute in Russia over Progress failure investigation

9:06 am

The Russian mission control has publicly disavowed a report that cited mission control as saying that the failure of the Soyuz/Progress launch last week was due to the premature shutdown of the Soyuz rocket’s third stage.

First the source:

A source in the space and rocket industry told TASS that the emergency shutdown of the engines occurred after 382 seconds and at the same time the spacecraft’s separation occurred. After that, the flight control system started operating in automatic flight mode and began deploying antennas and solar batteries. However, the spacecraft failed to reach orbit and started falling and ended up being destroyed in the atmosphere.

Next the disavowal:

”Any version which are now being voiced by the media have nothing to do with reality, including the incorrect cyclogram data. The results of the commission’s work will be announced no earlier than December 20,” a spokesperson told RIA Novosti.

I must admit that the source’s suggested cause for the failure, that the rocket engine shut prematurely and the spacecraft then simply separated and began its deployment before it had reached orbital velocity and thus fell back to Earth, sounds good at first glance. However, this explanation does not explain why all communications with the spacecraft suddenly ceased.

Either way, it does appear that there is an effort within Roscosmos to spin the events in the press, prior to the completion of the investigation. This in itself is not a good sign, as it suggests that there are people there who are trying to cover their asses rather than honestly trying to find out the cause of the failure.

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UAE to issue national laws to facilitate space tourism and exploration

8:50 am

The competition heats up: At a ceremony announcing the space policy of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the head of the UAE’s space agency announced that, even as their 2020 unmanned Mars mission moves forward, they are also formulating regulations in order to encourage future space activity.

He said regulations are very important to facilitate space tourism. “You can’t have space tourism without space laws. We will address this.” For example, liability in the event of a problem is determined by the law. The UAE will issue laws regulating the space sector within a few months, he said. The laws will facilitate the UAE’s ambitious Mars Mission in 2020.

He said technology alone is not enough for all space-related activities. The laws are essential to undertake all such projects. “We can’t launch the Mars probe without (relevant) laws.” Once technology is available, regulation is the important element to use it, Al Ahbabi said. He said the draft law was ready, which would be submitted for approval of the council of ministers very soon.

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Republican Congress passes National Park bill that raises fees

9:26 pm

More bull from the House Republicans: In an effort to fix budget problems at the National Park Service, caused by years of Congressional and Presidential budget malfeasance, the lame-duck Republican-run House today passed a bill that would raise the lifetime fees for a park senior pass.

The House of Representatives moved quickly Tuesday to pass legislation designed to provide the National Park Service with badly needed funds to help the agency chip away at a staggering $12 billion maintenance backlog. However, without concurrence by the Senate by week’s end, the measure could die.

As passed by the House, the National Park Service Centennial Act would increase the price of a lifetime pass for senior citizens 62 and older to $80 from its current $10 lifetime fee. Seniors who don’t want to pay the $80 could purchase an annual pass for $20. Park Service staff estimate that the increase in the cost of a senior pass would generate $20 million a year.

It appears that already purchased lifetime passes would still be valid, though I am willing to bet that, given time, these bastards will change that as well. What really annoys me about this is that the reason the Park Service is short of funds is not really because they don’t have enough money. The budget isn’t really any smaller than it’s been for decades. The reason it is short of money is that the federal government, and the Park Service, wastes enormous amounts on things that are not essential, on pork (such as dozens and dozens of tiny park facilities spread throughout the country that are really outside the Park Service’s original purpose and exist mostly because some elected official pushed for their creation).

What these idiots never do is find ways to reduce or rearrange spending to pay for things that are important. Instead, they constantly work to suck more money from the taxpayer, endlessly. And they wonder why they got Trump.

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ExoMars’ Trace Gas Orbiter images Phobos

9:08 pm

As part of its checkout, Europe’s ExoMars’ Trace Gas Orbiter has taken test images of the Martian moon Phobos.

The camera imaged the moon on 26 November from a distance of 7700 km, during the closest part of the spacecraft’s orbit around Mars. TGO’s elliptical orbit currently takes it to within 230–310 km of the surface at its closest point and around 98 000 km at its furthest every 4.2 days. A colour composite has been created from several individual images taken through several filters. The camera’s filters are optimised to reveal differences in mineralogical composition, seen as ‘bluer’ or ‘redder’ colours in the processed image. An anaglyph created from a stereo pair of images captured is also presented, and can be viewed using red–blue 3D glasses.

The images were done to test the spacecraft’s operation, and have apparently shown that it is functioning well.

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First images from Cassini’s first Saturn ring flyby

9:01 pm

Saturn's polar vortex

Cool image time! And this is only the start. The Cassini science team has released the first images taken by Cassini during its first of 42 close flybys of the rings of Saturn. The image on the right, cropped from the full image, shows Saturn’s north polar vortex. The storm at the polar really does look like a whirlpool that is descending down into the gas giant’s depth.

I must emphasize that photography was not the focus of this first flyby. These images were taken the two days before the flyby on December 4. Later flybys are going to produce far better images, as they will be taking pictures throughout.

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