Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Guess who: “He is incompetent, dishonest and not interested in the actual work of governing.”
Seems an apt and accurate description to me. And the man who wrote it was an Obama voter in 2008.
Construction workers in space: A spacewalk November 1 will attempt to find and repair a coolant leak that could force a power reduction at the station.
A slight 1.5-pound-per-year leak in the channel 2B cooling system has been present since 2007 and during a shuttle visit last year, two spacewalking astronauts added eight pounds of ammonia to the reservoir to boost it back up to a full 55 pounds. The plan at that time was to top off the system every four years or so to “feed the leak,” replacing the lost ammonia as required.
But over the past few months, engineers saw the leak rate suddenly quadruple, either because something changed at the original leak site or, more likely, because another leak developed somewhere else in the system.
Whether the leakage was caused by space debris or a component failure of some sort is not yet known. But the result is: If the leak continues at its current rate, the coolant will drop below a 40-pound safety limit and the system will shut down by the end of the year or shortly thereafter, taking power channel 2B down with it. While the space station can operate without the full complement of power channels, the loss of channel 2B would force flight controllers to power down equipment, eliminating redundancy and reducing the amount of research the crews could carry out.
Hurricane Sandy has forced Orbital Sciences to suspend the engine tests of the Antares rocket.
Sugru: the story of the invention of this ultimate repair tool.
Fake but accurate: Michael Mann’s claim that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize has now been denied by the Nobel committee.
Mann’s claim was made in his lawsuit against many of the climate skeptics who have been critical of him.
The uncertainty of science: Meteorite experts now think the rock that hit a pastor’s house could be a piece from last week’s San Francisco fireball.
At first they said, “Yes it was from space,” then they said “No it is not from space.” Now they think yes.
Firing paintballs at an asteroid to prevent it from hitting the Earth.
The uncertainty of science: A new study suggests that the exoplanet orbiting the star Formalhaut that was supposedly imaged and then later theorized to be nothing more than a dust cloud might be a planet after all.
The failure last August of the second stage of a Russian Proton rocket is causing more problems: the stage exploded in mid-October and the debris is now a threat to ISS and other satellites.
The competition heats up: The FAA has issued an experimental permit to SpaceX to test fly its Grasshopper reusable rocket booster.
With a successful Soyuz docking today, ISS is back to a full six person crew.
Guess who said this: “We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”
And the speaker was not an Islamic radical.
Because we have a friend visiting from Maryland, we are off to do some sightseeing today in Bisbee and Tombstone. Thus, posting will be light. Also, tonight’s appearance on the John Batchelor Show is been rescheduled for tomorrow night.
The after effects of the giant storm on Saturn.
The Air Force has released its investigation into the failure of the August test flight of the X-51a hypersonic scramjet.
As first surmised, the problem was a control fin. Though they haven’t set the date for the next test flight, it appears they do intend to proceed.
The competition heats up: Stratolaunch has officially opened its production facility in Mojave.
On Wednesday Richard Branson told an audience of students in Poland that the first paid tourist flight of SpaceShipTwo is at least 12 to 18 months away.
That seems about right. This gives them about a year of powered flight tests, all manned but with no paying customers, in order to make sure the system is save for customers.
The son of a Democratic Congressman in Virginia, a paid member of the Congressman’s re-election campaign, has been caught on video helping to facilitate voter fraud.
Singing sand dunes. With video.
Two reactions today to the Italian conviction of seven earthquake scientists:
In the first, scientists are appalled. In the second someone asks what I think is at least a reasonable question. Even if we agree that prison is an overreaction in this case, it does seem valid to me that scientists face some consequences for misstating risks in certain circumstances.
False alarm: The rock found on Sunday is not part of the meteor that fell over San Francisco last week.
The comet that vanished.
Good news: The TSA is pulling its invasive X-ray scanners from the country’s busiest airports.
Unfortunately, they aren’t getting rid of them, only moving them to less busy airports. Nonetheless, this action suggests that the refusal of many people (such as myself) to submit to these machines slowed things down enough that the TSA was forced to abandon them. This suggests that more people should refuse and force them to do as many body searches as possible. In the end we get rid of them all.
When you try to sell government policy based on crisis, and that crisis doesn’t take place as predicted, and in fact is shown to be based on fraud and dishonesty, the sales job will eventually fail. Thus, better to forget the whole thing and make believe it never happened.
The first mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope has been completed.
This is the first of seven. It is also the largest single mirror ever polished, at 8.4 meters, or 27.5 feet across. When completed the GMT’s segmented mirror will be 25 meters across, or more than 82 feet.
An ode to the beauty of nature in 23 images.
Leftwing civility: The death threats against Mitt Romney continue to pour out from Twitter.
Early today a Soyuz rocket successfully lifted ISS’s next crew into orbit.
Using modern technology scientists think they have a chance of decoding the oldest known undeciphered writing.
In a room high up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, above the Egyptian mummies and fragments of early civilisations, a big black dome is clicking away and flashing out light. This device, part sci-fi, part-DIY, is providing the most detailed and high quality images ever taken of these elusive symbols cut into clay tablets. This is Indiana Jones with software. It’s being used to help decode a writing system called proto-Elamite, used between around 3200BC and 2900BC in a region now in the south west of modern Iran.
The supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way is about to get a snack.
Update: The recently launched NuStar telescope in July detected its first flare from the central black hole (which by the way is called Sagittarius A* and is pronounced Sagittarius A-star). If the gas cloud produces any fireworks as it whips past the black hole in the coming year then NuStar should see it.
