Category: Points of Information

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

A snakelike Martian ridge

1:21 pm

A snakelike Martian ridge
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on November 22, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labeled a sinuous ridge. Make sure you also look at the full image. The ridge goes on to the south, but then fades way as an almost perfect ramp, only to have another even more wiggly but thinner north-south ridge begin only a few feet to the west.

Sinuous ridges like this are found in many places on Mars. Almost always their origin is thought the result of a former river channel that became a ridge when the surrounding softer material eroded away.

That explanation however does not seem to work for this ridge. It has too many other inexplicable features. For example, note how the peak of the ridge smoothly transitions from sharp to flat-topped. It has a soft appearance that is strengthened by the gap near the top.

It is almost as if this ridge is a kind of elongated sand dune! And guess what: The overview map below gives that explanation some believability.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: School board threatens parent with lawsuit if she doesn’t shut up

12:16 pm

Alexandra Schweitzer: a true momma grizzly
Alexandra Schweitzer: a true momma grizzly

When parent Alexandra Schweitzer began challenging publicly the use of inappropriate sexual materials in the elementary schools in Oconomowoc Area School District (OASD) in Wisconsin, the school board made what appeared to be some minor superficial changes in its policy without really addressing her concerns.

Above all, school district officials would not confirm unequivocally that these materials — many of which advocated the queer agenda on gender — had been removed. Unsatisfied with this response, Schweitzer expanded her campaign.

After enrolling her children elsewhere, Alexandra continued to be an advocate and resource for local parents regarding their concerns. As President of No Left Turn in Education [NLTE]– Wisconsin, Schweitzer voiced her concerns, and those of district parents, in public forums and in testimony before the Wisconsin legislature.

Apparently, the school district did not like what she said in those public forums or in that testimony. It proceeded to hire an outside lawyer — using school funds — to send Schweitzer a cease-and-desist letter [pdf], threatening further legal action against her if she did not retract her statements and then shut up.
» Read more

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A telescope using a liquid mirror about to become operational

10:02 am

Link here. The telescope, located in the Himalayas, is “an international collaboration between institutions in India, Belgium, Poland, Uzbekistan and Canada.”

The mirror works by rotating it so that its thin layer of liquid mercury forms a parabola.

The tradeoff is that the [telescope]is fixed in a single position, so it only observes one strip of the night sky as the Earth rotates below it. But since the telescope will be hyper-focused on just one area, it’s well-suited for spotting transient objects like supernovas and asteroids.

It appears the scientists will use it to study this same strip of sky over five years, hoping to detect changes in that time period.

This telescope is more a technology test than an actual observatory. Eventually the best place to put such a telescope — and much larger — will be on the Moon, and to do that requires some construction and testing beforehand.

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InSight team decides to shorten lander’s life to operate seismometer longer

9:49 am

The InSight science team has decided to continue to operate the lander’s seismometer through August rather than turning it off at the end of June, even though that longer use will drain InSight’s batteries sooner and kill the lander shortly thereafter.

The previous plan would have allowed the lander to survive through the end of the year, but would have meant no earthquake data would have been gathered after June.

To enable the seismometer to continue to run for as long as possible, the mission team is turning off InSight’s fault protection system. While this will enable the instrument to operate longer, it leaves the lander unprotected from sudden, unexpected events that ground controllers wouldn’t have time to respond to.

“The goal is to get scientific data all the way to the point where InSight can’t operate at all, rather than conserve energy and operate the lander with no science benefit,” said Chuck Scott, InSight’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

Apparently they have realized that it is now very unlikely that a dust devil will come by and clear the dust from InSight’s solar panels, so keeping the spacecraft alive longer — but getting no data — does not make sense.

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The battlelines and alliances shift over big satellite constellations in space

9:41 am

Two stories today show that the competition for frequency use and orbital territory in space are shifting, partly because of international politics and partly due to changes in technology.

First the harsh conflict between OneWeb and Starlink over the positioning and frequency use of their constellations in orbit now appears to have vanished.

The companies have written a joint letter to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), declaring harmony in low Earth orbit (LEO) for spectrum coordination between their respective current and next generation broadband constellations.

In the letter, which is dated June 13, SpaceX and OneWeb request that the FCC disregard previously filed dissenting comments regarding spectrum coordination in LEO. SpaceX and OneWeb both submitted proposals for their first-generation internet constellations to the FCC in 2016, followed by a second round of proposals in 2020 for each company’s next-generation broadband satellites. Simultaneously, both SpaceX and OneWeb submitted complaints with the FCC in an attempt to get a leg up on each other. Now, it seems the companies are operating on friendlier terms.

The article I think correctly speculates that this new-found cooperation probably resulted from OneWeb’s need to use SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets to get its satellites in orbit, caused by Russia’s confiscation of 36 OneWeb satellites in response to Europen sanctions over the Ukraine War. During the launch negotiations I am sure SpaceX demanded both iron out their differences relating to the satellite constellations. While SpaceX might have been able to gain some advantages in that negotiation due to its strong position, I also suspect that OneWeb has not been hurt in any major way.

In the second story, SpaceX ramped up its opposition to a Dish 5G system in a wavelength used by its Starlink satellties.
» Read more

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Psyche software issue could prevent launch this year

9:08 am

In a remarkably brief announcement on the Psyche website, the engineering team suggested that the flight software issue that forced a seven week delay in its launch might now prevent a launch this year.

This is the entire announcement:

NASA’s Psyche mission team continues to assess ongoing issues with the spacecraft’s flight software. The team is evaluating its ability to meet a schedule to launch in 2022 – the current launch period is Sept. 20 to Oct. 11. If it is determined that launch in 2022 is not possible, a full range of actions for how to proceed will be considered.

This year’s launch window would have gotten the spacecraft to the asteroid Psyche in 2026. Since this flight path required a fly-by of Mars, it is very unclear when another launch window will be available.

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China’s Kuaizhou-1A smallsat rocket launches technology test satellite

8:47 am

China today used its smallsat solid rocket Kuaizhou-1A to put a technology test satellite into orbit.

The Kuaizhou-1A rocket is not the same as the Kuaizhou-11 rocket, which some have speculated exploded during a static fire test in the fall of ’21. Both are part of a family of rockets designed for fast launch.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

26 SpaceX
19 China
8 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 ULA

The U.S. still leads China 35 to 19 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 35 to 31.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Student gov’t demands blacklisting of every club that does not endorse the queer agenda

11:38 am

Student government at North Texas opposes freedom of speech

They’re coming for you next: The student government at North Texas University has passed a resolution that demands the school blacklist of every club that expresses any dissenting opinion about the queer agenda.

From the resolution [pdf]:

THEREFORE, LET IT BE RESOLVED THAT, any UNT Student Organization that engages in harassment, discrimination, hate crimes, and/or violation of UNT policy through transphobic posts, statements, and actions be immediately suspended to protect the mental, emotional, and physical health of transgender students at UNT. [emphasis mine]

Note how this resolution isn’t condemning actual harassment. Instead, it considers mere disagreement to be “harassment, discrimination, and a hate crime”, and thus must be punished.

The resolution lists a bunch of incidents where so-called “trans” students (more accurately described as emotionally unstable individuals who want to make-believe they are of a different sex) were offended and felt “unsafe” when others expressed their opposition to this queer agenda. The key and most significant event however involved an appearance at the school of Jeff Younger, who was then running for the state legislature but more importantly had been involved in a very public and truly horrifying case where one of his two sons had been forced by a guardian to dress as a girl because that guardian had decided the boy was one. (To understand how horrifying, look at the images at the link.)

Younger had fought but failed to protect his son. He came to the campus to tell his story, which was then disrupted by leftist protests of chants and obscenities. Apparently, it is all right for Younger to feel “unsafe.” These leftist rules as always apply in only one direction.

The article at the link quotes Program Officer Graham Piro from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression:
» Read more

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South Korea successfully launches its Nuri rocket

9:04 am

The new colonial movement: South Korea today successfully launched its home-built Nuri rocket, placing a test satellite, a dummy satellite, and four university cubesats into orbit.

The government program to build this rocket began in 2010 and cost $616 million, though not all of that money was devoted to the rocket. South Korea’s space agency has four more launches planned through 2027.

This was obviously South Korea’s first launch this year. The leaders in the 2022 launch race thus remain the same:

26 SpaceX
18 China
8 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 ULA

American private enterprise now leads China 35 to 18 in the national rankings, and leads the entire world combined 35 to 30.

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SLS dress rehearsal countdown ends at T-29 seconds

7:47 pm

NASA’s fourth attempt to complete a full dress rehearsal countdown of its giant SLS rocket today ended at T-29 seconds, just short of the complete countdown.

It appears the countdown had one issue — a hydrogen fuel leak at the point where the umbilical fuel line attaches to the rocket — that mission control decided to ignore (or “mask” to use their word) so that they could proceed into the count as far as possible. It was this decision however that caused the two-hour delay in the countdown. They then resumed the countdown at T-10 minutes, the beginning of terminal count.

During the terminal count, the teams performed several critical operations that must be accomplished for launch including switching control from the ground launch sequencer to the automated launch sequencer controlled by the rocket’s flight software, and important step that the team wanted to accomplish.

NASA will hold a press conference tomorrow at 11 am (Eastern) to discuss the results of this dress rehearsal. While the leak is concerning, I expect NASA to decide that this dress rehearsal was a success, that they will roll the rocket back to the vehicle assembly building where they will fix this problem, after which the agency will declare the rocket ready to launch by the end of August.

While risky, doing otherwise likely raises other risks. If they decide to do another dress rehearsal the launch faces more delays. And waiting much longer continues to increase the danger that the solid rocket side boosters will not function as intended because they have been stacked almost a year longer than their accepted use-by date.

If this turns out to be the plan, expect the actual launch countdown to be as plagued with issues and delays and scrubs. NASA has yet to demonstrate it can do this smoothly with no problems. Worse, this level of mediocre performance has been par for the course for this entire SLS program.

If that launch should go smoothly it will be a welcome and unprecedented event.

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Water and dry ice at the Martian north polar ice cap

12:41 pm

water and dry ice at the Martian north pole
Click for original image. Click here for full image.

In our third Martian cool image of the day, we go to the north pole of Mars, as seen from orbit by the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Taken on March 30, 2022 and cropped and reduced to post here, this picture shows some of the distinct and unique geological features found only on the polar caps of Mars. From the caption by Candy Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona:

Both water and dry ice have a major role in sculpting Mars’ surface at high latitudes. Water ice frozen in the soil splits the ground into polygons. Erosion of the channels forming the boundaries of the polygons by dry ice sublimating in the spring adds plenty of twists and turns to them.

Spring activity is visible as the layer of translucent dry ice coating the surface develops vents that allow gas to escape. The gas carries along fine particles of material from the surface further eroding the channels. The particles drop to the surface in dark fan-shaped deposits. Sometimes the dark particles sink into the dry ice, leaving bright marks where the fans were originally deposited. Often the vent closes, then opens again, so we see two or more fans originating from the same spot but oriented in different directions as the wind changes.

The top layer of translucent dry ice falls as dry ice snow during the winter, than sublimates away with the arrival of spring. Since this photo was taken in autumn, we are looking at features left over from the activity from the spring and summer.

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Perseverance peers towards the rim of Jezero Crater

12:17 pm

Perseverance peers through winter haze
Click for full image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

In our second cool image from Mars today, the Mars rover Perseverance gives us its own long distance view of the dusty winter air inside Jezero Crater. The photo above, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on June 16, 2022 by the rover’s left high resolution camera, and looks to the southwest towards the crater’s western rim.

As with today’s previous cool image from Curiosity, we can see several ranges, each with distance faded more by the dust that hangs in the air during the winter on Mars. In the foreground right is the nearest cliff of the delta that flowed into Jezero over time in the past. Next is a knob and ridge line, also part of that delta flow but farther away. Third are some farther ridges that might have been part of that flow but maybe not.

Faintest of all are the highest mountains that form the western ridge of Jezero Crater, barely visible in the haze.

The blue dot in the overview map to the right marks Perseverance’s approximate position when the photo was taken. The yellow lines my guess as to the area covered by the photo. The green dot marks Ingenuity’s present position after its last flight, much closer to the delta that I had predicted.

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