Category: Points of Information

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

Tianwen-1’s engineers set mid-May for rover landing on Mars

7:59 am

The new colonial movement: The science team for China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter are now targeting mid-May for when they will release and land the as-yet unnamed rover for its landing on Mars.

Wang Chi, director of the National Space Science Center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said March 23 that Tianwen 1’s lander and rover are scheduled to touch down on Mars in May.

“The first Chinese Mars mission, Tianwen 1, is now orbiting Mars, and we are landing in the middle of May,” Wang said in a presentation to the National Academies’ Space Studies Board. “We are open to international cooperation, and the data will be available publicly soon.” [emphasis mine]

Though China has generally released the scientific data of its lunar probes eventually, they have done it slowly. In the case of Tianwen-1, they released so far practically nothing, with the only images released being two hi-resolution ground images and a handful of distant global pictures of Mars.

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Conservatives on the email provider MailChimp

1:25 pm

The cancelled Bill of Rights
Doesn’t exist at MailChimp

They’re coming for you next: The email provider MailChimp has since the November election made it a clear policy to routinely cancel the accounts of conservatives if they dare send out any emails it deems politically incorrect.

In November MailChimp instantly disabled the email account of two tea party organizations, one in Virginia and the other in South Carolina, when they each tried to send out email notices to their members about post-election pro-Trump rallies.

In January MailChimp did the same to a conservative organization in California that was running a conference calling for the end of the overbearing lockdown rules imposed by the Democrat governor Gavin Newsom.

Because the ReOpenCalNow organizers are targeting a high level audience of policymakers, they assembled an email list of several thousand of California’s local elected officials. The list includes city council members, county supervisors, and members of school boards. Using MailChimp, they sent out three email blasts before receiving the following message:

“We received a direct complaint regarding a recent campaign sent from the account with the username ReOpen Cal Now. Direct complaints are serious because they indicate that a recipient contacted Mailchimp, our hosting facility, or a blocklisting agency about an unsolicited email.” The MailChimp email went on to say: “Because the content associated with your industry conflicts with our Acceptable Use Policy (mailchimp.com/legal/acceptable_use), Mailchimp is unable to serve as your email service provider and your account has been disabled.”

MailChimp went on to reject all appeals, and it is clear that the reason they would not reinstate ReOpenCalNow’s account was not because of spam. The laws protecting people from receiving spam do not apply to publicly available emails of elected officials. Every email on the list compiled by ReOpenCalNow were publicly available and corresponded to an elected official. [emphasis in original]

» Read more

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Very peculiar flow features on Mars

12:29 pm

Peculiar flows on Mars
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image focuses on one of the weirdest flow features I have yet seen on Mars. The first photo to the right, rotated and cropped to post here, comes from a January 27, 2021 picture by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). This cropped section focuses on the middle of three such weird features, two close flows heading downhill on the interior rim of very eroded 28-mile-wide crater. For some reason the flows also have depressions on their crowns. The depressions almost look like someone carved them out with a spackling spatula. In fact, the MRO science team agrees, labeling this image as “Spatulate Depressions with and without Upslope Gullies.”

The second image to the right shows a wider crop of the same picture, and explains the reason for the last half of that label.
» Read more

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Ingenuity unfolded and ready for placement on ground

9:59 am

Ingenuity unfolded
Click for full image.

The photo to the right, taken yesterday, shows Perseverance’s Ingenuity helicopter now vertical with its legs deployed, hanging from the bottom of the rover and ready for placement on the ground.

The next step will be drop Ingenuity those last few inches. Once released Perseverance will quickly drive away, as it will no longer be providing power to the helicopter and will instead be blocking its solar panels from sunlight.

Perseverance will then proceed to its lookout post while engineers check out Ingenuity to make sure all is working.

The targeted flight date remains April 8th.

UPDATE: JPL just announced that it is delaying Ingenuity’s flight to April 11th. The announcement was done by a tweet, so provided no explanation as to why JPL decided to delay three days.

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Sierra Nevada will build space stations and a manned version of Dream Chaser

9:38 am

Sierra Nevada's proposed LIFE space station
Artist conception of Sierra Nevada’s LIFE space station

Capitalism in space: Sierra Nevada announced today that it will not only build a manned version of its Dream Chaser reusable mini-shuttle, it now intends to use that shuttle as a ferry to its own space station, made up of inflatable modules.

They have dubbed their proposed station LIFE, and describe as follows:

The LIFE habitat is a three story, 27-foot large inflatable fabric environment that launches on a conventional rocket and inflates on-orbit. The LIFE habitat is undergoing a NASA soft-goods certification this year and the full size ground prototype developed under NASA’s NextSTEP-2 contract is in the process of being transferred from Johnson Space Center in Texas to Kennedy Space Center in Florida for further testing on short-and long-term habitation. SNC’s Astro Garden® system also provides fresh food within the habitat.

Making a manned version of Dream Chaser was always expected. Adding the company’s own station makes complete sense. Except for the rocket to launch a Dream Chaser spacecraft, Sierra Nevada will be able to provide a full service experience to, in, and from space.

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Shetland spaceport application rejected by local monument authority

9:36 am

The application to build a spaceport on one of the Shetland Islands has been rejected by a local monument authority because it would cause “extensive and adverse impact on the cultural significance” of a WWII radar station.

Mr Strang [head of the spaceport organization] said he was “greatly surprised” by the decision, claiming HES [Historic Environment Scotland] had “done nothing to preserve the site for the last 50 years”.

Skaw is the UK’s most northerly Second World War radar station and protected as a scheduled monument of national importance. The proposed space centre would be built almost entirely with in the RAF radar station site. It would require the removal of nine buildings, including air raid shelters, guard huts and those associated with the radar system. More than 200 archaeological features, such as foundations of buildings, gun emplacements and bomb craters would also be removed.

The Shetland Islands are very remote with few job opportunities for its residences. Putting a spaceport there seems like an excellent idea, especially because it will create hundreds of jobs where none exist now.

The radar facility did the same, but it did so more than seventy years ago, during World War II. Protecting these old and unused buildings for the sake of those long gone jobs seems utterly foolish.

The spaceport people say they will oppose this decision, but it is not clear from the article what they can do. The law as written appears to give this historical agency full power to veto.

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Industry group representing big tech demands Starlink be blocked in India

9:08 am

They’re coming for you next: An industry group representing a number of big tech companies like Amazon and Google has written India’s governmental agencies that regulate broadband and space and demanded that they block SpaceX’s Starlink internet service in India.

An industry body representing the likes of Amazon, Hughes, Google, Microsoft and Facebook has written to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) asking them to stop SpaceX from pre-selling the beta version of its Starlink satellite internet services in India. It claimed SpaceX didn’t have licence or authorisation from the government to offer such services in the country. “We request you to urgently intervene to protect fair competition and adherence to existing policy and regulatory norms,” Broadband India Forum president TV Ramachandran said in the letters, seen by ET.

I could have filed this story under my series, “Today’s Blacklisted Americans”. These big tech companies have made it very clear in numerous earlier stories that they do not believe in competition or free speech. They are now demonstrating it again in India. Both Amazon and Hughes are direct competitors with Starlink. Neither also has a product that can compete with it (Amazon appears years from deploying its system and Hughes’ system has latency issues that make it much slower than Starlink). So, they team up with their leftist buddies Google, Microsoft, and Facebook to demand the Indian government do their dirty work for them, shutting down their competition.

It is unlikely that India’s Modi government, which is very much in favor of private enterprise, will do what these thugs want, but you never know. Politicians are like whores, they do what you pay them. If India does move to block SpaceX however I also expect there to be an outcry in that country, as it has many rural areas that can only be served by the kind of service Starlink is offering.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Former President Donald Trump

11:53 am

The cancelled Bill of Rights
What Facebook & Instagram want cancelled.

They’re coming for you next: Both Facebook and Instagram instantly removed today an interview of former President Donald Trump in which he suggested he might run again for president in 2024, merely because the clip contained his voice.

[The interview] was for The Right View. … During the 18-minute interview, Trump also spoke about running for President again in 2024. Lara [Trump, whose show it was and who is Trump’s daughter-in-law] had been promoting it on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter beforehand.

At 9.26pm on Tuesday night, four minutes before it was due to be uploaded, Facebook emailed Lara’s team warning them that it would be removed if it went live. At 9.51pm, they emailed again to say that they’d taken it down.

Lara shared screenshots of the emails on Instagram afterwards. ‘And just like that, we are one step closer to Orwell’s 1984. Wow,’ she wrote alongside them.

Trump has been banned from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram since the January 6 riots, cut off from his supporters and unable to get messages to them in the way he did before.

In their email, the Facebook employee said that ‘content posted in the voice of President Trump is not currently allowed on our platforms (including new posts with President Trump speaking) and will be removed. ‘This guidance applies to all campaign accounts and Pages, including Team Trump, other campaign messaging vehicles on our platforms and former surrogates’. [emphasis mine]

The audacity of this censorship of a former president of the United States by these companies is breath-taking. The highlighted quote makes it clear: Their goal is to silence Trump, in every way possible. They do not celebrate free speech, or the ability of everyone to express themselves publicly. The only people who will be allowed freedom of speech will be those who agree with them.

Though they are private companies who should have the freedom to publish who they wish, these companies also have been granted special tax status as utilities which provide a platform for everyone, not a publisher who picks and chooses what he wishes to publish. Under this tax benefit, they have no right to block anyone’s show, period.

Putting aside these legalities, why would any Republican, conservative, or anyone who supports free speech remain a user of Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter? They are not only clearly Democratic Party operatives, working to promote that political party’s agenda, they also clearly view anyone who disagrees with that agenda to be pond scum. Why provide any support to such authoritarians?

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Ice under Mars’ biggest volcanic ash field, at the equator?

11:24 am

Wind eddies on Mars
Click for full image.

According to new data obtained from the radar instruments on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Express, scientists now think that the Medusae Fossae Formation, Mars’ biggest volcanic ash field and thought by some to be the source of most of the planet’s dust, might have an underground layer of ash that is also ice-rich. From their abstract:

The Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF) on Mars covers a vast area along the boundary between the rugged southern highlands and the smooth northern plains. While the MFF appears to be thick sediments or volcanic ash slowly eroding in the martian winds, how this material was emplaced remains mysterious. Most intriguing is evidence suggesting that some areas of the MFF may contain water ice. In this work we use sounding radar data from the SHARAD instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to probe up to 600 m below the surface and measure the electrical properties of the MFF material. The results suggest that the shallow parts of the MFF deposits are very porous and compress readily under their own weight. To match deeper probing by the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding instrument on Mars Express requires a second layer of either vast porous deposits or ice‐rich material protected from sublimation by the dry sediments.

The MRO image above, originally posted here in November 2020, shows one example of the typical wind erosion found in the Medusae ash field. Apparently the ground-penetrating radar from orbit now suggests the possibility that there is an ash layer rich in ice, at depths beginning somewhere between 1,000 to 2,000 feet below the surface.
» Read more

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X-rays from Uranus detected for the 1st time

10:02 am

Composite Uranus image of X-ray and optical data

Astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory in orbit have for the first time detected X-rays coming from the planet Uranus.

In the new study, researchers used Chandra observations taken in Uranus in 2002 and then again in 2017. They saw a clear detection of X-rays from the first observation, just analyzed recently, and a possible flare of X-rays in those obtained fifteen years later. The main graphic [posted to the right] shows a Chandra X-ray image of Uranus from 2002 (in pink) superimposed on an optical image from the Keck-I Telescope obtained in a separate study in 2004. The latter shows the planet at approximately the same orientation as it was during the 2002 Chandra observations.

What could cause Uranus to emit X-rays? The answer: mainly the Sun. Astronomers have observed that both Jupiter and Saturn scatter X-ray light given off by the Sun, similar to how Earth’s atmosphere scatters the Sun’s light. While the authors of the new Uranus study initially expected that most of the X-rays detected would also be from scattering, there are tantalizing hints that at least one other source of X-rays is present.

One explanation could be that the X-rays could be coming from Uranus’s rings, as such X-rays do from Saturn. This is not confirmed as yet however. More data will be needed.

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