Johnny Rivers – Memphis Tennessee
An evening pause: Performed live, 1964. Also includes a short interview of Rivers afterward, who by the way wrote the song Secret Agent Man.
Hat tip Dan Steele.
Category: Points of Information
Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Today’s blacklisted American: Christian chaplain for Austin fire dept fired for believing in Christianity
Andrew Fox
The modern dark age: Andrew Fox, who had been the chaplain for the fire department in Austin, Texas, was fired by the department’s fire chief, Joel Baker, because Fox had expressed some opinions on his own independent blog that Baker did not like.
Dr. Fox is an ordained minister who started Austin’s fire chaplaincy program and served as the city’s lead chaplain—a volunteer position—for eight years. After sharing on his personal blog his religious and commonsense view that men and women are biologically different and men should not compete on women’s sports teams, city officials demanded that Dr. Fox recant and apologize for expressing that view, and then proceeded to fire him.
More details here. Fox has now filed a lawsuit [pdf], which notes the following about the website where Fox posted his comments:
» Read more
August 22, 2022 Quick space links
From BtB’s stringer Jay:
- Chinese observers note that the Artemis candidate landing zones overlap three candidate landing zones planned for China’s unmanned Chang-e-7 probe
- Chinese pseudo-company Ispace completes drop tests for its Hyperbola-2 rocket’s first stage landing legs
It appears both the U.S. and China have picked the rims of Shackleton, Shoemaker, and Haworth craters. This is no surprise, as both countries are using data obtained from the American orbiter, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
You can watch two short video clips of the tests here. Hop tests of the stage are expected to follow soon.
NASA again approves design concept for Orbital Reef commercial space station
Capitalism in space: Sierra Space announced today that NASA has completed, apparently for the second time, the design review for the Orbital Reef space station that the company wants to build in partnership with Blue Origin and others, thus allowing the actual design of the station to begin.
This press release announcement, on August 22, 2022, is a bit puzzling, as Sierra Space made almost the exact same announcement in April 2022. What, did NASA have to do this twice? Did issues come up after the first approval? Was the agency reviewing different things?
Regardless, NASA as usual is slowing things down considerably. Sierra Space and Blue Origin, the primary partners in this private space station project, first announced it in October 2021. It took the government almost a year to simply approve the basic concept so that the design phase could finally begin. At this pace it will be 2090 before the station is launched.
Another Webb infrared image of Jupiter released
Click for original image.
The science team for the James Webb Space Telescope today released another infrared false-color image of Jupiter, this time processed for science instead of calibration of the telescope after launch.
That image is to the right, reduced to post here. From the caption:
Several exposures in three different filters were assembled to create this mosaic, after being corrected for the rotation of the planet. The combination of filters yields an image whose colors denote the height of the clouds and the intensity of auroral emissions.
The F360M filter (mapped to the red-orange colors) is sensitive to light reflected from the lower clouds and upper hazes. The red features in the polar regions are auroral emissions, caused by ions excited through collisions with charged particles at altitudes up to 1000 km above the cloud level. Auroral emission in red is evident in the northern and southern polar regions and reaches high above the limb of the planet. In the F212N filter (mapped to yellow-green colors), the gaseous methane in Jupiter’s atmosphere absorbs light; the greenish areas around the polar regions come from stratospheric hazes 100-200 km above the cloud level. The stratospheric haze that appears green in this composite is also concentrated in the polar regions, but extends down to equatorial latitudes and can also be seen along the limbs (edges) of the planet. The cyan channel holds the F150W2 filter, which is primarily sensitive to reflected light from the Jupiter’s deeper main cloud level at about one bar.
The Great Red Spot, the hazy equatorial region and myriad small storm systems appear white (or reddish-white) in this false-color image. Regions with little cloud cover appear as dark ribbons north of the equatorial region. Some dark regions — for example, those next to the Great Red Spot and in cyclonic features in the southern hemisphere — are also dark-colored when observed in visible wavelengths.
This image is part of the telescope’s early release science program.
Update on Starship/Superheavy prototypes at Boca Chica
Link here. Bottom line: Engine static fire tests continue, even as the company continues to install new engines on Starship prototype #24, intended for the first orbital launch.
NASA lists 13 candidate landing sites for Artemis-3 manned mission
Click for original image.
NASA yesterday revealed its first preliminary list of thirteen candidate landing sites for the Artemis-3 manned mission, the first manned mission the agency wants to send to the Moon in 2026.
The image to the right, reduced, enhanced, and annotated by me to post here, shows these thirteen zones in blue. I have added the red dot to mark what I understand to be the planned landing zone of Viper, an unmanned rover that NASA hopes to launch by ’23 at the latest. From the press release:
The team identified regions that can fulfill the moonwalk objective by ensuring proximity to permanently shadowed regions, and also factored in other lighting conditions. All 13 regions contain sites that provide continuous access to sunlight throughout a 6.5-day period – the planned duration of the Artemis III surface mission. Access to sunlight is critical for a long-term stay at the Moon because it provides a power source and minimizes temperature variations.
Note that this mission will land a Starship with crew at this South Pole region. That spacecraft’s large payload capacity likely means that it could conceivably leave behind supplementary supplies for a follow-up next mission, and thus speed up development of the first lunar base.
Ingenuity gearing up for 30th flight
The engineering team for the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars announced yesterday that they have successfully completed two some spin-up tests and are preparing for the first short hop following the pause in flights during the height of the Martian winter dust season.
To confirm that she is still flightworthy, we performed a 50-rpm spin on Aug. 6, and on Aug. 15 we performed a high-speed spin, which spun up the rotor system to flight-like speeds of 2,573 rpm for several seconds. Telemetry downlinked after both tests indicates Ingenuity is a go for flight.
Our 30th flight will be similar to our second flight. On April 22, 2021, Flight 2 was the first to include sideways movement: We “translated” 13 feet (4 meters) and then returned before landing. Flight 30 will be shorter, translating sideways only 7 feet (2 meters) and then landing, but with the specific goal of providing a data point on Ingenuity’s ability to accurately approach a landing target. Our navigation system’s performance will be of value to the Sample Recovery Helicopter team (part of the Mars Sample Return Program) in their early design work for a next-generation Mars Helicopter navigation system.
The last sentence references the recent decision to use a helicopter on the future sample return mission to land near the cached Perseverance samples and grab them.
The 30th flight is supposed to occur sometime in the next few days.
August 19, 2022 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, well worth your time, go here.
» Read more
SpaceX and China complete launches
Two launches have just occurred in the 2022 launch race. First, SpaceX today successfully launched another 53 Starlink satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket.
The first stage successfully landed on its drone ship in the Atlantic, completing its ninth flight.
China in turn used its Long March 2D rocket to launch three military reconnaissance satellites, at what was the early morning hours of August 20, 2022, China time. The launch path took the rocket over China’s interior as well as Taiwan, with the first stage crashing somewhere in China.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
37 SpaceX
31 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 52 to 31 in the national rankings, and the entire world 52 to 49. The 52 launches so far this year is now the fifth best total for the U.S. since the launch of Sputnik in 1957.
Today’s blacklisted American: Conservatives blackballed with enthusiasm from Harvard
Blacklists are back and academia loves ’em! According to a survey put together by the campus newspaper The Harvard Crimson, only 1.5% of Harvard’s faculty identified themselves as conservatives.
You can read the survey here. From the link above:
A total of 333 respondents completed the entire survey, while another 143 partially completed it. The paper distributed it to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applies Sciences professors.
According to the survey, only 16 percent of Harvard faculty characterized their views as moderate and 1.5 percent identified as conservative.
However, it isn’t this decidedly one-sided nature of Harvard’s faculty that is the real problem, but the enthusiasm this leftist community has for this blacklisting. From the survey itself:
» Read more
Strings in Perseverance’s drill?
Click for full image.
Since August 5th, the Perseverance science team has been trying to figure out the origin as well as the consequences of “two string-like pieces” of foreign object debris (FOD as used by today’s acronym-happy scientists) that they have spotted next to one of the rover’s coring drill bits.
The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, looks directly down at that core drill bit and shows one of those strings both to the side of the bit as well in full resolution in the inset. From today’s update:
Since first identified Aug. 5 in imagery of the rover’s sample collection system after a 12th rock core sample was taken, the FOD has been the focus of several methodical diagnostic activities in an attempt to better understand the nature of the debris.
We’ve commanded the rover to move, rotate, or vibrate components we think could harbor FOD. And we’ve obtained multiple sets of images of the components from different angles and in different lighting conditions from rover cameras: Mastcam-Z, Navcam, Hazcam, Supercam, and even the WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera located on the rover’s turret. Finally, a thorough review of recent coring and bit-exchange activities confirm that they all executed nominally with no indication of interference from the FOD.
Analysis of the latest round of imaging, downlinked earlier today, indicates that while the two small pieces remain visible in the upper part of the drill chuck, no new FOD has been observed. In addition, imagery taken of the ground beneath the robotic arm and turret, as well as the rover deck, also showed no new FOD.
Because these strings do not appear to interfere in any way with the drill’s operation, the science team has decided neither is a cause for concern, and will therefore command the rover to leave this just-completed drill site and move on to the southwest to a location at the base of the delta the rover visited about three months ago.
The strings themselves are likely pieces from the equipment released during the rover’s landing, and might even have come from the tangled string the rover imaged on the nearby ground in July, and that was gone just four days later. The wind had blown it away, and may have even at that time blown pieces into the drill.