Category: Points of Information

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

Yutu is slowly dying

4:00 pm

China’s lunar rover Yutu, unable to move since its first few weeks on the moon, is slowly dying.

The rover is currently in good condition and works normally, but its control problem persists, said Yu Dengyun, deputy chief designer of China’s lunar probe mission. “Yutu has gone through freezing lunar nights under abnormal status, and its functions are gradually degrading,” Yu told Xinhua at an exclusive interview. He said that the moon rover and the lander of the Chang’e-3 lunar mission have completed their tasks very well. The rover’s designed lifetime is just three months, but it has survived for over nine.

As China’s first planetary rover mission, the limited roving success of Yutu is well balanced by its ability to continue functioning on the lunar survey for so long. The engineering data obtained from this mission will serve Chinese engineers well as they plan future missions.

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SpaceShipTwo poised for powered test flights

3:51 pm

Virgin Galactic officials outline the status of SpaceShipTwo, suggesting that powered flight tests are finally about to begin.

Providing a rare glimpse of progress on a second spacecraft under assembly at sister organization, The Spaceship Co., Virgin Galactic Vice President of Operations Mike Moses says, “we are ready for space.” A former NASA launch integration manager for the space shuttle, Moses adds that SS2 “has been in modification, getting retrofitted ready to resume powered flights.” He notes that “those are going to start imminently—literally very imminently.”

Commenting on the extensive gap between now and the last rocket flight in January, Moses says, “It might seem a long time since our last powered flight-testing and that maybe nothing has been happening, but [ground testing] has been happening.” Tests have largely focused on ground-firings of a hybrid rocket motor fueled with polyamide-based plastic in place of the hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene, a form of rubber used for the first series of powered tests. Although this fuel had been used successfully in SpaceShipOne, the vehicle developer Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic encountered fuel-burn stability and power issues as they tried to scale the Sierra Nevada Corp.-provided hybrid motor up to the size required by the larger SS2.

It appears my guess was right and that the last two glide tests were to retrofit SpaceShipTwo for the new fuel and engine. This has now been accomplished, and they are preparing to begin powered flight tests.

The article also describes work on a second SpaceShipTwo, which when completed will give Virgin Galactic the beginnings of a fleet of ships.

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New measurements cut dark matter in Milky Way by half

7:10 pm

The uncertainty of science: New more robust measurements by Australian astronomers has shown that the amount of dark matter in the Milky Way galaxy is about half of what previous measurements had estimated.

Without doubt something is causing the outer stars in galaxies to orbit their galaxies at much greater speeds than they should. The answer that astronomers have posited since the late 1950s is that there is additional unidentified mass, dubbed dark matter, lurking as a halo around each galaxy, pulling on those outer stars and making them move faster.

The problem remains that no one has as yet detected this unidentified dark matter. Moreover, there are enormous uncertainties in the measurements of the motions of stars. This result helps narrow those uncertainties.

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EPA tells court it has lost text messages

3:21 pm

The most transparent administration ever: The EPA has admitted that text messages demanded in a lawsuit, which the agency is required by law to retain, have been lost.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told a federal court that it may have lost the text messages at the center of a lawsuit by a libertarian think tank.The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sued the EPA last year in federal court to compel the release of text messages to and from Administrator Gina McCarthy and her predecessor under the Freedom of Information Act. In the Tuesday filing to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Justice Department lawyers representing the EPA said the agency will soon file a notice that it may have misplaced records that it was legally required to retain.

It seems pretty clear that the Obama administration has decided to follow the same playbook with all its many scandals: stonewall and coverup, legally or illegally.

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Construction of Angara launchpad at Vostochny delayed

9:23 am

In order to complete construction of the Soyuz rocket launchpad at Russia’s new spaceport in Vostochny as quickly as possible, Russian managers have decided to delay completion by one year of the launchpad for the new Angara rocket.

I would not conclude from this decision that the construction at Vostochny is lagging. Instead, it appears that the Russian government continues to give it a high priority, and is merely beginning to structure that priority as effectively as possible. The Soyuz rocket is already in operation and will be ready to fly as soon as Vostochny is operational. Angara meanwhile is still under development. I suspect a delay in getting its launchpad ready will have no effect in the overall schedule of that rocket, as they need to do several additional test flights before it will be ready to be declared operational.

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Launch abort system installed on Orion for December test flight

9:14 am

Engineers have installed a test version of the launch abort system (LAS) for the first test flight of the Orion capsule in December.

The LAS will not be active during the uncrewed EFT-1 mission, but during future missions it will be equipped to act within milliseconds to pull the spacecraft and its crew away from its rocket so that Orion could parachute safely back to Earth.  While the abort motors  are inert and not filled with solid fuel, the LAS will have an active jettison motor so that it can pull itself and the nose fairing away from the spacecraft shortly before Orion goes into orbit. The flight test will provide data on the abort system’s performance during Orion’s trip to space.

Based on what I know of the Orion/SLS launch schedule, I don’t think NASA ever intends to test it during a full launch of the SLS rocket. For one thing, the rocket is too expensive and NASA can’t afford to waste a launch just to test this one component. For another, the rocket’s development is too slow as it is, with the first launch not scheduled until 2018 and the first manned flight not until 2021, at the earliest. If they add a launch test of the abort system, NASA might not fly an SLS manned mission until late in the 2020s.

Meanwhile, NASA is sure insisting that SpaceX do such tests. And they will, since their capsule and rocket is affordable and quick to launch. What does that tell us about the two systems? Which would you buy if you were the paying customer?

Oh wait, you are the paying customer! Too bad you your managers in Congress don’t seem interested in managing your money very wisely.

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Air Force to take over two former shuttle hangers in Florida for its X-37B program

8:47 am

In an effort to find tenants for its facilities, the Kennedy Space Center is going to rent two former shuttle processing hangers to Boeing for the Air Force’s X-37B program.

NASA built three Orbiter Processing Facilities, or OPFs, to service its space shuttle fleet between missions. All three are located next to the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building at the Florida spaceport where Apollo Saturn 5 moon rockets and space shuttles were “stacked” for launch. Under an agreement with NASA, Boeing will modify OPF bays 1 and 2 for the X-37B program, completing upgrades by the end of the year.

The company already has an agreement with NASA to use OPF-3 and the shuttle engine shop in the VAB to assemble its CST-100 commercial crew craft being built to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The company says up to six capsules can be processed in the facility at the same time.

The most important take-away from this news is that it strongly suggests the Air Force now intends to expand the X-37B program. They will not only be flying both X37B’s again, they might even planning to increase the fleet’s size from two ships.

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A pulsar that’s eating a galaxy

8:32 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have discovered a pulsar emitting energy at a rate far greater than ever predicted and which is believed caused by the very fast in-fall of matter into the neutron star.

Astronomers have found a pulsating, dead star beaming with the energy of about 10 million suns. This is the brightest pulsar – a dense stellar remnant left over from a supernova explosion – ever recorded. The discovery was made with NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. “You might think of this pulsar as the ‘Mighty Mouse’ of stellar remnants,” said Fiona Harrison, the NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. “It has all the power of a black hole, but with much less mass.”

More here. The galaxy where this pulsar resides, M82, has been known for decades to be one of the most interesting, with evidence of vast explosions tearing it apart. This pulsar is at its center, and appears to be sucking in matter at a rate previously believed impossible, suggesting that the supermassive black holes found at the center of many galaxies could form much faster that any theory predicted.

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Obamacare forces 13 states to cancel insurance plans

10:50 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Thirteen states plus the District of Columbia are expected to force the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of health care policies just before the November elections because they are not in compliance with ObamaCare.

In coming weeks, 13 states and the District of Columbia plan to cancel such policies, which generally fall out of compliance with the Affordable Care Act because they don’t offer the level of coverage the law requires. Virginia will be hardest hit, with 250,000 policies expected to be canceled. And because federal law requires a 60-day notice of any plan changes, voters will be notified no later than November 1, right before the Nov. 4 midterms.Many of those forced out of their current plans and into ObamaCare may not be able to keep their doctors. They also could face higher deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses, making ObamaCare an election issue on the eve of voting.

But we all know none of this is possible because Obama promised us multiple times that “If you like your plan you get to keep your plan. Period.” And everything Obama and every Democrat says is always true!

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IRS begins an audit of an anti-Obamacare filmmaker

9:28 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS has begun an audit of an anti-Obamacare filmmaker, even as it proceeds with audits of other consevatives.

Logan Clements, producer of “Sick and Sicker: ObamaCare Canadian Style,” announced via press release Tuesday that he is being audited for the first time ever. The news comes one month after the conservative Breitbart News announced that it, too, was being audited and that the action was probably politically motivated. Mr. Clements‘ movie makes the case that Obamacare will eventually lead to socialized medicine like Canada.

Remember, Obama claimed there wasn’t a “smidgeon of corruption” surrounding the IRS. And of course, we all believe everything this Democratic politician says!

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SWAT teams kill another innocent citizen in raid

9:21 am

Another late night raid of a citizen’s home, based on the lies of a drug user, has resulted in the death of that innocent citizen.

The police entered the home without knocking or identifying themselves. Their warrant apparently required them to knock first. The home had been burglered two nights earlier by the drug user, so the homeowner’s were understandably on edge.

This is nothing more than murder. It is also unconstitutional. Every police SWAT team in the nation should be dismantled now. We managed for 200 years without them, and can do so again.

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Ground-breaking ceremony for Thirty Meter Telescope cancelled because of protesters

9:07 am

A ground-breaking ceremony on Mauna Kea, which would have included a blessing from native Hawaiians, was cancelled Tuesday when protesters showed up trying to block the telescope’s construction.

There were also small numbers of protesters at other locations that are also connected to the telescope project.

With previous similar protests of other telescope projects, the protesters seem to always disappear when the projects agree to give them money. Makes me wonder if their religious fervor is much shallower than the news stories of this protest would lead us to believe.

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Rosetta gets the go to descend to six miles

8:42 am

After spending a week circling Comet 67P/C-G at a distance of about 12 miles, engineers have now decided they can move Rosetta in to only six miles.

A series of manoeuvres will reduce Rosetta’s distance from its current 18.6 km orbit (taking 7 days) to an intermediate orbit approximately 18.6 x 9.8 km (with a period of about 5 days). From there the orbit will be circularised at about 9.8 km radius, with a period of approximately 66 hours on 15 October, and the mission will enter the “Close Observation Phase” (COP). This will provide even higher resolution images of the landing site in order to best prepare for Philae’s challenging touch-down. The new orbit will also allow a number of Rosetta’s science instruments to collect dust and measure the composition of gases closer to the nucleus.

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Independent Arianespace investigation cites design error as cause of Russian launch failure

8:36 am

A just released independent investigation by Arianespace of the Soyuz rocket launch failure that put two European Galileo GPS satellites in the wrong orbits has concluded that the design of the Fregat upper stage, not an assembly error, was at fault for the failure.

The upper stage was not oriented correctly because fuel lines to thrusters had become frozen.

The freezing resulted from the proximity of hydrazine and cold helium feed lines, these lines being connected by the same support structure, which acted as a thermal bridge. Ambiguities in the design documents allowed the installation of this type of thermal “bridge” between the two lines. In fact, such bridges have also been seen on other Fregat stages now under production at NPO Lavochkin. The design ambiguity is the result of not taking into account the relevant thermal transfers during the thermal analyses of the stage system design.

That the Russian investigation found that this arrangement of feed lines happened once in every four stages that were assembled still suggests sloppiness, if not in assembly then in design. The Arianespace investigation, though thorough, thus appears to me to be trying to provide cover for thier Russian partners here.

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XCOR sells its Lynx suborbital spaceplane

10:19 pm

This NBC story tries very hard to help XCOR sell its Lynx suborbital space plane, but I found myself very unimpressed. To me the images suggested instead that little progress has occurred in recent months, and that the project has stalled.

I hope I am wrong, but this whole story reminded me strongly of many of Richard Branson’s efforts to sell Virgin Galactic, which have so far proven to be vastly overstated.

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Successful American spacewalk today on ISS

9:55 pm

Two American astronauts today successfully completed the first American spacewalk this year on ISS.

The spacewalk, known as US EVA-27, was originally slated to occur in August, but was postponed due to concerns with the batteries in the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuits, which necessitated a delay while new Long Life Batteries (LLBs) were launched to the ISS aboard the recent CRS-4 Dragon and the Soyuz TMA-14M/40S on September 25, and subsequently installed into the suits.

The work done was mostly clean-up in preparation for a series of future spacewalks to reconfigure the American sections of ISS so that it can allow docking of two private manned capsules as well as two private cargo freighters.

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Nobel Prize goes to blue LED light inventors

9:32 pm

Three scientists share the Nobel physics prize for inventing blue LED lights.

The prize goes jointly to Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan, Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University in Japan, and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Starting in the 1990s they produced blue LEDs, an energy-efficient, environmentally friendly source of blue light, which could be mixed with LEDs of other colors to produce what the eye sees as white light. “I am very honored to receive the Nobel Prize from The Royal Swedish Academy of Science for my invention of the blue LED,” said Nakamura in a statement. “It is very satisfying to see that my dream of LED lighting has become a reality. I hope that energy-efficient LED light bulbs will help reduce energy use and lower the cost of lighting worldwide.”

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The next wave of Obamacare insurance cancellations begin arriving

4:20 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Walmart is dropping health insurance for its part time workers because of Obamacare.

Starting Jan. 1, Wal-Mart told The Associated Press that it will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week. The move, which would affect 30,000 employees, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees.

This is only a sampling of what is beginning to happen throughout private industry. If companies aren’t cutting hours to less than 30 for many employees so they don’t have to provide Obamacare, they are cutting their total staff to less than 50 to exempt themselves from the law. And they are doing it not because they want to but because they have to. If they don’t, the cost of Obamacare will bankrupt them.

Of course, it is also bankrupting the individuals who now have to find their own insurance and quickly find they can’t afford health insurance as offered by Obamacare.

But remember, the Democrats and Obama care! So what they are idiots and wrote a law that does nothing but harm. We must vote for them anyway because they care!

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The deep ocean is not where global warming has gone

5:26 pm

The uncertainty of science: A new NASA study finds that the deep oceans have not warmed since 2005, striking dead one of the favorite theories of global warming advocates to explain the 18 year stall in global warming.

In the 21st century, greenhouse gases have continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, just as they did in the 20th century, but global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising in tandem with the gases. The temperature of the top half of the world’s oceans — above the 1.24-mile mark — is still climbing, but not fast enough to account for the stalled air temperatures.

Many processes on land, air and sea have been invoked to explain what is happening to the “missing” heat. One of the most prominent ideas is that the bottom half of the ocean is taking up the slack, but supporting evidence is slim. This latest study is the first to test the idea using satellite observations, as well as direct temperature measurements of the upper ocean. Scientists have been taking the temperature of the top half of the ocean directly since 2005, using a network of 3,000 floating temperature probes called the Argo array.

“The deep parts of the ocean are harder to measure,” said JPL’s William Llovel, lead author of the study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. “The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is — not much.”

The bottom line: no one really knows what is going on, climate scientists still do not have a good handle on how the climate works, the science is not “settled”, and anyone who says it is is a liar.

 

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SpaceX wins safety design award

4:52 pm

I post this story about SpaceX winning an award for its safety-in-design work mostly to illustrate again that, except for one lone commenter on my webpage, most of the aerospace industry recognizes the generally good work that SpaceX has been doing. Not only do their recognize it, they have found themselves struggling to meet the competitive challenge that SpaceX now represents, an effort that has been all to the good for everyone in the space industry.

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Reality bites liberal Texas judge

10:09 pm

The Texas judge who visited the infected apartment of America’s first ebola victim without protection has now had a complaint filed against him for endangering his own 9-year-old daughter.

The concerned citizen reached out to Breitbart Texas in a phone interview and provided information about his complaint to [Child Protective Services]. He told Brietbart Texas he wanted to remain anonymous because he is a business owner and is concerned about retaliation. He said he felt Jenkins’ conduct was inappropriate and unnecessarily exposed his child to potential danger. “I am doing this because I am concerned about the child,” the complainant said, “and I am concerned for the children in her school who might become exposed if the virus were to spread.”

Read the article at the link. The risks to the judge’s family and their acquaintances are real. Moreover, there is evidence that the judge has spent considerable time in contact with infected locations and individuals, without protection.

But he cares! That absolves him of any guilt should his actions causes others to die!

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