Category: Points of Information

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

Water flows on Vesta?

10:26 pm

Some data produced by Dawn while it was in orbit around the asteroid Vesta have suggested to some scientists that liquid water might have helped create a handful of the surface features on the asteroid.

The theory is interesting and might be true. I also wouldn’t bet a lot of money on it, because this interpretation of the data is somewhat tentative and based on a lot of assumptions.

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SpaceX drops Air Force lawsuit in new deal

10:19 pm

The competition heats up: SpaceX has dropped its lawsuit against the Air Force in exchange for the opportunity to bid on more military launch contracts.

“Under the agreement, the Air Force will work collaboratively with SpaceX to complete the certification process in an efficient and expedient manner,” the statement from the two parties said. “The Air Force also has expanded the number of competitive opportunities for launch services under the EELV program while honoring existing contractual obligations.” The statement did not make clear how many competitive launch opportunities would be available or when. The Air Force has committed to seven launch awards by late 2017, but has said that number could grow to at least eight.

Each additional launch contract the Air Force puts out for competition gives SpaceX or ULA another opportunity to win about $100 million or more in business.

This is a big win for SpaceX. It is also not a surprise. As much as some Air Force officials have wanted to maintain the ULA monopoloy, their position has been weak, for both political and economic reasons. SpaceX’s costs are just too much lower, and the company continues to demonstrate its reliability and competence in launch after launch. Thus, it was practically impossible for Air Force officials to justify maintaining the block buy non-competitive contract award to ULA.

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A drone for Mars

10:12 pm

Engineers at JPL have begun testing prototypes of a drone that would be used on Mars to aid future rovers.

The newest solution proposed by JPL is the Mars Helicopter, an autonomous drone that could “triple the distances that Mars rovers can drive in a Martian day,” according to NASA. The helicopter would fly ahead of a rover when its view is blocked and send Earth-bound engineers the right data to plan the rover’s route.

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Look like a Jew in Sweden and get attacked by anti-semitic Arabs

6:38 pm

The religion of peace marches on: A Swedish reporter decided to walk through an Arab neighborhood in a Swedish city and found himself repeatedly attacked.

In one scene, Ljunggren — who, in addition to wearing a kippah was also wearing Star of David pendant — was filmed sitting at a café in central Malmo reading a newspaper, as several passersby hurled anti-Semitic insults at him. Elsewhere, one person hit his arm, the reporter said on camera, though this was not recorded. One of the people who cursed Ljunggren called him a “Jewish devil,” “Jewish shit” and another told him to “get out.”

One person on a scooter approached Ljunggren to warn him to leave for his own safety. In the heavily Muslim Rosengard neighborhood, Ljunggren was surrounded by a dozen men who shouted anti-Semitic slogans as eggs were hurled at his direction from apartments overhead. He then fled the area.

Recently in the U.S. there was a big to-do because a women leftwing radical feminist videotaped herself walking around New York to show how men treat women with disrespect. As usual, for the left this video demonstrated their childish focus on minor abuse when real violence and hate is going on worldwide, under their nose.

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Small businesses dump health insurance

9:57 am

Finding out what’s in it: A new study has found that small businesses are increasingly not offering health insurance to their employees since Obamacare went into effect.

The survey, conducted by Assistant Professor of Economics Leslie Muller, focused on companies that have fewer than 50 employees. Companies of that size are not mandated by the ACA to offer insurance to employees. “Small firms have faced, traditionally faced, higher costs so they’ve been strapped for a while. That doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the ACA it just has to do with the fact that health care costs have been raising it’s been particularly hard on the small firms,” Muller said.

The Survey found that of small businesses that offered health insurance over the past two years, only 40 percent plan to offer insurance in 2015 and only 28 percent in 2016.

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Ten astonishing images from Rosetta

11:12 pm

Link here. These images are from Rosetta’s high resolution camera OSIRIS, the results from which have been kept very closely secret by the Rosetta science team. Today however they published a bunch of papers in the journal Science, so we are finally beginning to see some of their amazing images.

Take a look. Each one illustrates how alien a place Comet 67/C-G is.

More info on these papers can be found here and here.

Even more here, from the Rosetta team.

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Comet 67P/C-G’s coma fluctuates widely

12:57 pm

Climate change: Data from Rosetta has shown that the coma surrounding Comet 67P/C-G’s nucleus varies far more than had been expected by Earth-based observations.

“From a telescope, images of a comet’s atmosphere suggest that the coma is uniform and does not vary over short periods of hours or days. That’s what we were expecting as we approached the comet,” said Dr. Stephen Fuselier, a director in the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division and the lead U.S. co-investigator for the Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis Double Focusing Mass Spectrometer (ROSINA DFMS) instrument. “It was certainly a surprise when we saw time variations from 200 km away. More surprising was that the composition of the coma was also varying by very large amounts. We’re taught that comets are made mostly of water ice. For this comet, the coma sometimes contains much more carbon dioxide than water vapor.”

The variations might be seasonal, or even reflect a variation from day to night.

Expect more news stories about Comet 67P/C-G from Rosetta. The journal Science is today publishing a special section on results from Rosetta.

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Government abducts homeschooled children on trumped up charges

12:17 pm

We’re here to help you: Arkansas county police have seized seven children from their parents, based merely accusations obtained from an anonymous phone call.

Arkansas sheriff’s deputies in Garland County have “stolen” seven homeschoolers from their parents in a home raid spurred by an anonymous caller who told authorities the family’s house contained a “poisonous substance” — which turned out to be a mineral supplement/water purifier that isn’t FDA-approved. It’s been more than a week since the officers and the Department of Human Services (DHS) seized the seven homeschoolers. They remain in state custody.

Michelle Stanley, the mother of the seven children, is still in shock that the police and DHS have gotten away with abducting her children — taking them into custody under what she calls false pretenses. “The DHS has come and stolen our kids from us under the guise of ‘protecting our children,” Stanley wrote in an email shortly after her home was raided by police and the DHS, according to Health Impact News.

Read the whole article. It will terrify you.

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A quasar shuts down

10:19 am

Astronomers have identified the first quasar to change its energy output.

Quasars are massive, luminous objects that draw their energy from black holes. Until now, scientists have been unable to study both the bright and dim phases of a quasar in a single source. As described in an upcoming edition of the Astrophysical Journal, Yale-led researchers spotted a quasar that had dimmed by a factor of six or seven, compared with observations from a few years earlier.

It is also believed that quasars are the central supermassive black holes at the center of these very distant and ancient galaxies. Knowing how these black holes change can tell us something about the behavior of Sagittarius A*, the generally quiet central black hole in the Milky Way.

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Ukrainian space workers protest lack of pay

10:14 am

Ukrainian space workers rallied this week in protest over lack of pay and work in the past year.

The workers build Zenit and Cyclone-4 boosters as well as the first stage of Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Antares launch vehicle and the fourth stage for Europe’s Vega rocket. They are also involved in Dnepr, a decommissioned ballistic missile that has been converted into a satellite launcher. The report indicates that since last July, employees have been working only three days per week and are pay $200 to $300 only once or twice per month. There’s also been a lack of new orders for their products.

The lack of new orders is mostly because Russia has been putting the squeeze on Ukrainian space businesses. Rather than continuing to use them, Russia has been focusing on replacing them with companies inside Russia.

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Putin endorses Russian government consolidation of space industry

10:08 am

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday strongly endorsed the decision by the Russian government to consolidate control of that country’s entire space industry into a single, government-run corporation.

Putin said the plan to unite the federal space agency, Roscosmos, with United Rocket and Space Corporation (URSC) in a new corporate behemoth that will retain the Roscosmos name was “the right proposal” during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, the TASS news agency reported. The union would meld the federal space agency’s strategic oversight function with the industrial might of state-owned URSC — which was itself created from the union of some of Russia’s key space firms in an effort to increase efficiency in 2013.

Shades of the cold war! Even as the U.S. space industry is shifting away from government control to private enterprise, Russia is returning to it. We shall see which model works best as the world competes to get to the stars.

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Were two Iridium satellites hit by space junk?

9:58 am

Engineers are puzzling over the release of debris from two separate Iridium satellites last year, with each even suggesting the satellites were hit by very small pieces of space junk.

The U.S. Joint Space Operations Center detected 10 pieces of debris from the Iridium 47 satellite June 7, 2014. Some of the objects flew away from Iridium 47 at up to 80 meters per second — nearly 180 mph — into orbits almost 200 miles above the satellite, suggesting an explosion or collision triggered their creation. Another Iridium spacecraft — Iridium 91 — produced four debris fragments Nov. 30, according to U.S. military tracking data. “In contrast to the previous Iridium breakup, however, these pieces were produced with minimal delta velocity and remained in the vicinity to the parent spacecraft for some time,” NASA officials wrote.

In both cases, the satellites showed no signs of a breakup and remain operational, according to Iridium Communications, a Virginia-based company that uses a fleet of spacecraft nearly 500 miles above Earth for mobile voice and data services.

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Sarah Brightman’s first day of astronaut training

10:03 am

The competition heats up: A press conference in Russia highlighted the first day of astronaut training for space tourist Sarah Brightman.

A ten minute video excerpt of the conference is below the fold. The most interesting part of the video, however, has nothing to do with Brightman. Instead, it was what was said by her back-up space tourist, Satoshi Takamatus. Since the age of six he had wanted to be an astronaut. At 22 however Japan’s space agency rejected him because he wore glasses or contacts. He then became an advertising executive who in 2001 arranged to shoot a commercial on ISS using Russian astronauts. While in Russia, he apparently met the right people and, using those contacts, has now come back at 53 as a paying customer. If Brightman has any issues that prevent her from flying, he will step up and replace her. If not, he is tentatively scheduled to fly himself in ’17 or ’18.
» Read more

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NASA explains why it picked Boeing over Sierra Nevada

9:38 am

In a report released by NASA late last week, the agency outlined the reasons it picked Boeing’s CST-100 manned capsule over Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser mini-shuttle for the second contract to provide manned ferry capabilities to ISS.

Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser spacecraft, which would take off on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket and land on a runway like the space shuttle, is not as far along in development as the competing CST-100 and Crew Dragon capsules proposed by Boeing and SpaceX, according to a source selection statement signed by Bill Gerstenmaier, head of NASA’s human exploration and operations directorate. “A winged spacecraft is a more complex design and thus entails more developmental and certification challenges, and therefore may have more technical and schedule risk than expected,” Gerstenmaier wrote in the selection statement.

NASA wants to have the commercial crew capsules operational by the end of 2017 to end U.S. purchases of astronaut seats on Russia’s Soyuz ferry craft. Before NASA permits its astronauts to fly on the CST-100 and Crew Dragon, each spaceship will go through ground testing and complete unpiloted and crewed test flights.

The reasoning seems quite reasonable. It also suggests that Sierra Nevada might have a better shot at winning a contract during the next round for cargo, as scheduling will not be as critical since NASA has other alternatives to get cargo to ISS.

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Planet Labs confirms big investment deal

8:16 pm

The competition heats up: Planet Labs has confirmed obtaining an additional $95 million in investment capital on top of previous investments of $65 million.

Planet Labs has launched 73 satellites to date based on the 3U CubeSat form factor, about 30 centimeters in length and weighing only a few kilograms. Most of its satellites have been deployed from the International Space Station into short-lived orbits to test technology for later systems. That satellite total includes two spacecraft included on the latest cargo mission to the ISS, launched by SpaceX Jan. 10. Planet Labs built those satellites in nine days after 26 other Planet Labs satellites were lost in the Oct. 28 launch failure of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Cygnus cargo mission to the station.

Planet Labs plans to ultimately deploy a constellation of satellites to provide imagery of the entire planet every day. It has announced several partnerships with geospatial information companies to make use of imagery from its satellites for various applications.

What both this deal and the SpaceX/Google deal illustrate is the growing financial interest in space activity. Rather than governments financing the activity, private enterprise is going to do it. And it will do it far more efficiently with far far better results far far far more quickly.

The next decade or so in space exploration should be very exciting to watch. I wish I was forty years younger.

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SpaceX confirms Google deal

8:12 pm

The competion heats up: SpaceX has confirmed that Google as well as a second investor, Fidelity, have committed $1 billion for the company’s satellite project.

In its blog post, SpaceX wrote that the funding would “support continued innovation in the areas of space transport, reusability, and satellite manufacturing.” But Google’s involvement has led many to believe that the funding will primarily back SpaceX’s new satellite venture, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced late last week. At the time, Musk gave some indication as to the epic scope of the project that lies ahead. He seeks to create a network of hundreds of satellites that could not only connect people on Earth to the web, but also people on Mars—if and when people get there. The total cost of such an audacious project? $10 billion.

The satellite venture calls for more than 4,000 satellites. The SpaceX announcement suggests that the capital will also be used for other things, however.

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Holder’s end to federal property seizure ban exaggerated

10:45 am

Pigs land: A close look at Eric Holder’s announcement on Friday that he was ending the use of federal law to seize private property turns out to be greatly exaggerated.

Holder’s order applies only to “adoption,” which happens when a state or local agency seizes property on its own and then asks the Justice Department to pursue forfeiture under federal law. “Over the last six years,” the DOJ says in the press release announcing Holder’s new policy, “adoptions accounted for roughly three percent of the value of forfeitures in the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture Program.” By comparison, the program’s reports to Congress indicate that “equitable sharing” payments to state and local agencies accounted for about 22 percent of total deposits during those six years. That means adoptions, which the DOJ says represented about 3 percent of deposits, accounted for less than 14 percent of equitable sharing. In other words, something like 86 percent of the loot that state and local law enforcement agencies receive through federal forfeitures will be unaffected by Holder’s new policy.

The story also notes how the press, especially the Washington Post which led with this story, teamed up with Holder to overstate the impact Holder’s order would have.

Holder’s action is still in the right direction. He just didn’t go very far, which makes perfect sense considering the generally corrupt and oppressive nature of the Justice Department since he took it over. Initially I thought pigs were flying by his announcement. Now I know they can’t.

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Google and SpaceX team-up?

9:50 pm

The competition heats up: A news report today claims that Google will invest $1 billion of the $10 billion SpaceX plans to spend to build a space-based internet system.

More here. Whether true or not, this story illustrates the growing buzz for the idea of investing, building, and making money in space. Increasingly, the biggest and most innovative capitalists in the world want a piece of that endless pie.

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“They were talking about [killing] hundreds of millions.”

9:39 am

The religion of peace strikes again! The first reporter to successfully embed with ISIS and not get killed gives his report.

“I always asked them about the value of mercy in Islam,” but “I didn’t see any mercy in their behavior,” explained Todenhofer. He added, “Something that I don’t understand at all is the enthusiasm in their plan of religious cleansing, planning to kill the non-believers… They also will kill Muslim democrats because they believe that non-ISIL-Muslims put the laws of human beings above the commandments of God.”

But remember! The Islamic state has nothing to do with Islam.

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A Japanese Nobel laureate blasts his country’s treatment of inventors

9:27 am

The Japanese Nobel winner who helped invent blue LEDs, then abandoned Japan for the U.S. because his country’s culture and patent law did not favor him as an inventor, has blasted Japan in an interview for considering further legislation that would do more harm to inventors.

In the early 2000s, Nakamura had a falling out with his employer and, it seemed, all of Japan. Relying on a clause in Japan’s patent law, article 35, that assigns patents to individual inventors, he took the unprecedented step of suing his former employer for a share of the profits his invention was generating. He eventually agreed to a court-mediated $8 million settlement, moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and became an American citizen. During this period he bitterly complained about Japan’s treatment of inventors, the country’s educational system and its legal procedures.

…”Before my lawsuit, [Nakamura said] the typical compensation fee [to inventors for assigning patents rights] was a special bonus of about $10,000. But after my litigation, all companies changed [their approach]. The best companies pay a few percent of the royalties or licensing fee [to the inventors]. One big pharmaceutical company pays $10 million or $20 million. The problem is now the Japanese government wants to eliminate patent law article 35 and give all patent rights to the company. If the Japanese government changes the patent law it means basically there would no compensation [for inventors]. In that case I recommend that Japanese employees go abroad.”

There is a similar problem with copyright law in the U.S., where changes in the law in the 1970s and 1990s has made it almost impossible for copyrights to ever expire. The changes favor the corporations rather than the individual who might actually create the work.

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Next Falcon 9 launch delayed two weeks.

9:19 am

In the heat of competition: The next Falcon 9 launch and attempt to land the first stage has been delayed to no earlier than February 9.

The rocket will carry a NASA solar observatory,

No explanation for the delay was given, but, because there was no indication it is connected to the payload, I stronly suspect it is because SpaceX needed more time to make some modifications to the first stage in preparation for the vertical landing attempt.

It was interesting to get back from a weekend trip to the mountains and find that over the weekend almost every press in the country had published a story about the last first stage landing attempt. SpaceX’s effort to do this has truly captured the interest of a lot of people who normally poo-poo this space stuff.

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Holder bars use of federal law to seize private property

3:55 pm

Good news: Attorney General Eric Holder on Friday barred state and local police from using federal law to seize any private property unless an actual crime is being committed.

Holder’s decision allows some limited exceptions, including illegal firearms, ammunition, explosives and property associated with child pornography, a small fraction of the total. This would eliminate virtually all cash and vehicle seizures made by local and state police from the program. While police can continue to make seizures under their own state laws, the federal program was easy to use and required most of the proceeds from the seizures to go to local and state police departments. Many states require seized proceeds to go into the general fund.

A Justice official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the attorney general’s motivation, said Holder “also believes that the new policy will eliminate any possibility that the adoption process might unintentionally incentivize unnecessary stops and seizures.”

As much as I think Holder has been a dishonest and corrupt attorney general who has used his power to attack his political opponents, this decision by him should be lauded highly. It was the right thing to do.

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Paul Ryan: No new gas taxes

11:58 am

Unlike his Senate Republican cohorts, who were very quick after the election to scream for a tax increase, Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) has now made it very clear that the House will pass no gas tax increases this year.

Good for Ryan. The article notes that large majorities strongly oppose any tax hike. The Republicans ran on a platform of shrinking government, not increasing the tax burden. For Senate Republicans to make a gas tax increase practically their first order of business after taking charge in 2015 is beyond disgusting.

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Comet 67P/C-G’s plumes

8:42 am

plumes from Comet 67P/C-G

The science team running Rosetta has released an image (cropped by me on the right) from the probe’s high resolution camera showing the fine structure of Comet 67P/C-G’s plumes.

I call them plumes rather than jets, which is the word the scientists use as well as everyone else, because it appears to me that they really aren’t jets, tightly confined flows of material coming from a nozzle-like opening. Instead, the image makes me think of very fast-rising plumes of smoke rising from an extinguished fire.

This image was taken in November, and is one of only a very tiny handful of images released from the high resolution camera. Rosetta’s science team has been very possessive of images from this camera, holding them back for their own research papers to follow in the future. Even here, the image is not very detailed. I wonder what cool stuff this camera has snapped close in that they have not yet shown us.

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More Earthlike exoplanets found

8:29 am

Worlds without end: Using Kepler astronomers have discovered a red dwarf star 150 light years away with three Earth-like exoplanets, one of which is in the habitable zone.

The three planets are 2.1, 1.7 and 1.5 times the size of Earth. The outermost planet, at 1.5 Earth radii, is the smallest of the bunch and orbits far enough from its host star that it receives levels of light from its star similar to those received by Earth from the sun, said UC Berkeley graduate student Erik Petigura, who discovered the planets Jan. 6 while conducting a computer analysis of the Kepler data NASA has made available to astronomers. He calculated that the three planets receive 10.5, 3.2, and 1.4 times the light intensity of Earth. “Most planets we have found to date are scorched. This system is the closest star with lukewarm transiting planets,” Petigura said. “There is a very real possibility that the outermost planet is rocky like Earth, which means this planet could have the right temperature to support liquid water oceans.”

These planets were found by Kepler in its present reconfigured mission, which once again illustrates the incredible effectiveness of an optical telescope in space. If only we were building some.

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