Category: Points of Information

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

Perseverance has successfully landed

2:07 pm

Cheers in the control room

First image from Perseverance on the ground

The rover Perseverance has successfully landed in Jezero Crater on Mars.

The picture to the right is a screen capture of everyone cheering in the control room on hearing the good news.

The second image is the first image beamed back, from the rover’s hazard camera used mostly for guiding it in future travels. The haze is from the dust kicked up during landing.

The engineering narrator indicated that they also know exactly where the rover landed, and it is a good location, but NASA’s live stream appears uninterested in telling us this critical information. Right now they are spending time blathering on with more NASA propaganda.

I should get this information during the post-landing press conference, which begins at 5:30 (Eastern).

UPDATE: The press conference started 30 minutes late, and then spent the first 25 minutes letting the top NASA managers claim credit for everything. Then we finally got to hear from actual mission managers to tell us where the rover landed and what should happen next.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: The sci-fi publishing company Baen Books

11:11 am

They’re coming for you next: Because of a single hit piece falsely claiming that a forum run by the long-established science fiction publishing company Baen Books was “fomenting insurrection” (the new buzzword of the brainless left being used to silence dissent), the publisher’s web-based operations were threatened with shutdown.

As a result Baen was forced to close-down, it says temporarily, that forum.

Yesterday some nobody, wannabe writer, social justice twit released a hit piece “expose” about how posters on Baen’s Bar were fomenting insurrection or some such nonsense. It was the usual [expletive deleted] hit piece (the sad part is, by saying the usual, half the country immediately knows exactly what I’m talking about). It was lots of pearl clutching over regular people not toeing their arbitrary political lines, misquotes, errors, quotes taken out of context, and some flat out lies.

However, this was clearly part of a coordinated attack in order to materially harm our business, because immediately after the hit piece was released complaints were filed with the various internet companies Baen uses for services to pressure them into kicking us off the internet. This hit piece was presented as “evidence”. Without going into details the companies then contacted Baen about these “serious allegations” so last night Baen temporarily took down the Bar forum to protect the rest of the company from being deplatformed.

The link provides lots of background, including the publisher’s response and statements of support from a number of published authors from across the political spectrum.

The internet companies who immediately kow-towed to these storm-troopers and threatened Baen Books deserve nothing but contempt. If they were truly American, they would have told the complainants to go jump in a lake. Don’t like what people are writing in the Baen forum? Either join the conversation and refute what they are writing, or go somewhere else. Don’t try to blackball someone just because you disagree with them.

Instead, these corporate internet platforms joined the two-minute hate and threatened Baen with blacklisting. To my mind the people at those platforms are not Americans, but narrow-minded petty dictators who either like oppressing people who disagree with them or live in constant cowardly fear which requires them to join the mob when it seeks violent retribution.

We need to know who these internet platforms are. Now. This will allow free Americans to begin searching for alternatives.

And if we don’t get those alternatives we will soon face a situation where any complaint against a publisher will lead to that publisher being shut down and its books flushed down the toilet, simply because someone doesn’t like them.

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Perseverance’s possible travel route on Mars

9:06 am

Perseverance's planned driving routes
Click for full image.

In touting the plans of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to someday launch a rover to Jezero Crater designed to pick up the cached samples that Perseverance is going to leave behind, NASA today published the map to the right, showing Perseverance’s planned driving routes in the crater, on the large delta that poured into the crater in the past, and beyond that crater.

The yellow lines indicate Perseverance’s planned route, beginning somewhere in that red landing ellipse. The green lines indicated the many proposed landing sites and pathways the proposed follow-on sample retrieval mission can take to grab Perseverance samples.

The planned route looks like they will spend a lot of time exploring the top of delta, then will move out of the crater and to the southwest towards what had been another candidate landing site for Perseverance, now dubbed the Midway ellipse.

What route the science team will eventually take at the delta depends greatly on exactly where Perseverance lands today. We will know more in only a few hours.

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Texas power outages delay Starliner but not Starship

8:42 am

Boeing announced yesterday that due to the winter storms and power outages in Texas it has delayed the second unmanned demo flight of its Starliner manned capsule from March 25 to no earlier than April 2nd.

Meanwhile, SpaceX’s Starship operation in Boca Chica, Texas has been proceeding practically unaffected by the power outages.

At the southernmost fringes of Texas, SpaceX’s Boca Chica Starship factory hasn’t been insulated from the chaos, though a large Tesla Solar and Energy installation has almost certainly lessened the blow. Highly cognizant of Boca Chica’s shortcomings for industrial-grade power needs, SpaceX installed that solar array and Tesla-made Powerpacks almost three years ago and substantially expanded it in 2020.

As a result, despite major issues posed by freezing weather and power grid instability, SpaceX has managed to keep the lights on and continue work at its Starship factory, while also slowly but surely preparing Starship serial number 10 (SN10) for its first static fire and high-altitude launch.

The weather is clearly slowing the Starship test schedule, but at least the work seems insulated from loss of power.

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Hungarian company awarded NASA contract to develop Moon mini-rover

4:49 pm

A Hungarian company has won a NASA contract worth $225K to develop what the company calls its Puli Moon mini-rover.

Named after a Hungarian breed of dog, the Puli rover is a low-cost platform designed to carry different payloads, including the ice water snooper, which won the 2020 “Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload” challenge, a competition organised by the U.S. space agency. Weighing less than 400 grammes (14 oz), its purpose is to probe for water ice by identifying and mapping the subsurface hydrogen content of the lunar soil.

The “news article” at the link appears to be a poorly researched article distributed by Reuters that has now been reprinted without changes by such stalwart American mainstream news outlets like the New York Post and MSN.com, to name two. Neither bothered to do any further research.

The article falsely claims that the airplane-based SOFIA telescope recently confirmed there is water on the Moon. It also claims that this rover will be on a lunar mission next year, something that does not seem likely at all.

A look at the company’s website clarifies things. The company competed in a NASA contest offering its design of a very tiny lightweight rover, won, and was then awarded a larger development contract of $225K. No launch is presently set, though if the company is successful in building it for this cost, they will likely get a berth on a later unmanned mission.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Biden sign language interpreter blackballed for also translating for conservative outlets

3:30 pm

The cancelled Bill of Rights

They’re coming for you next: In a news article soon after Biden became president, the Washington Post demanded that a sign language interpreter be blacklisted from working in the Biden administration simply because she previously translated for conservative and pro-Trump organizations.

From the Post’s article,

[The interpreter] who appeared in the White House coronavirus briefing on Monday beside press secretary Jen Psaki was identified by deaf and hard-of-hearing advocates and Time Magazine, fueling questions about the White House’s vetting process and what could have happened if [she] misinterpreted Biden officials or inserted her own bias. No one has publicly disputed her interpretation, but many questioned why the White House would legitimize her by giving [her] the national platform.

…More than 3,500 people have signed a petition to have [the interpreter] banned from interpreting for the White House. Some indicated they intended to report her.

That petition now has 9,000 signatures, and it appears that the Biden administration is now blackballing her, as she has not been given any work by them since the Washington Post story was published. It also appears that she has since been harassed and slandered online as well.

I have removed the interpreter’s name because I do not wish to help these storm-troopers in their two-minute hate campaign.

As noted at the first link above,

It’s a blacklist, and, in a sad devolution from the days when the press was the enemy of such things, now our national press is the very conduit. Here is a woman who has done nothing wrong. Her only sin was working. Even the reporter [Meryl Kornfield] admits that there is absolutely no evidence that this woman has done anything wrong — anything but her job. Her interpretations to this point seem to be deemed faultless.

All this woman did was take work from any who called her, from both sides of the political spectrum. That’s not good enough for our modern Democratic Party and its army of jack-booted thugs. They must always ask this paraphrased question from the worst of the McCarthy era : “Have ever been a member of or worked for the Republican Party or any pro-Trump organization?” If the answer is yes, then your life must be destroyed.

Welcome to the modern leftist paradise, brought to us by the supporters of the Democratic Party.

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Russia denies visa to NASA manager in retaliation for claimed similar denial by U.S.

3:29 pm

Russian officials revealed today that they denied and entrance visa to a NASA manager in retaliation for what they claim was a similar denial by U.S. government of another Russian individual.

The Russians did not reveal the names of either official, or even the work they were involved in. It appears however that that Russian blocked from entering the U.S. was not involved in space work. We also do not know if this was done during the Trump or Biden administration.

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Enigmatic channel on Mars

9:58 am

Enigmatic channel on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on October 26, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and labeled by the science team as simply an “Enigmatic Channel in Syrtis Major.”

It shows a channel going downhill to the northeast east in a series of steps, separated cliffs that in the southwest hikers call pour-offs, with the channel becoming initially deeper and then slowly becoming more shallow, until the next pour-off. On Earth the pour-offs would be waterfalls, with a deep pond at the base. On Mars?

Without doubt this channel poses mysteries, but maybe with a little research we can make it less enigmatic. Asl always, the overview map below gives context, and helps give a possible explanation for what created this channel.
» Read more

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SpaceX raises another $850 million in investment capital

8:10 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX last week successfully raised another $850 million in investment capital in order to fund both its Starlink and Starship projects.

The article does not detail how the company plans to use the money, though it does also indicate this was not all that was raised.

In addition to SpaceX further building a war chest for its ambitious plans, company insiders and existing investors were able to sell an additional $750 million in a secondary transaction, one of the people said.

If I understand this correctly (which I admit I might not), this means SpaceX now has an additional $1.6 billion on hand in addition to the $2 billion it has previously raised.

Even if it only raised $850 million, that gives it a war chest of almost three billion for both Starlink and Starship. With Starlink already bringing in some earnings, the company should have enough to get done what it aims to do.

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Ivy league students & teachers demand revocation of all degrees earned by Republican politicians

1:07 pm

The dead Constitution
The dead Constitution

They’re coming for you next: Both students and professors at a number of Ivy league colleges are petitioning their schools to revoke the degrees of numerous high-ranking Republican politicians, merely because they dared request an investigation into the many creditable allegations of voter fraud and election tampering during the November 3rd election.

The article outlines campaigns to blackball Republicans at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, among others. The Harvard campaign is typical, demanding that these Republicans be banned merely because they exercised not only their first amendment rights of free speech, but their duly elected responsibilities as elected officials.

Students and alumni of Harvard University are signing a letter, titled, “Revoke Their Degrees,” which asks Harvard’s leadership to take action against Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany by banning them from campus and stripping them of their degrees.

The Harvard petition argues that, by contesting Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results, these Republican officials “incited a violent attempt to overthrow the U.S. government.” Harvard University dropped Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) from her role on the university’s Kennedy School advisory committee because she contested the 2020 election results.

The article also notes that no such similar petitions have been instigated against any Democrats for challenging previous election results in 2000, 2004, and 2016. Nor have any petitions been put forth against the many Democrats who during the entire Trump adminstration were calling for a violent uprising against the government and Republicans.

The goal of these college brownshirts is therefore not to protect the election process or the Constitution. No, their goal is to dehumanize all Republicans and any positions they take on any subject. Make them appear evil so that no one will pay any attention to them. Then ban them so they have no power at all.

What I gather from this story however is the utter intellectual bankruptcy of these Ivy League schools. For any reasonable parent it would be insane to send your children there. Not only would these schools indoctrinate your child into leftist politics, it would also teach them to hate anyone who disagreed with them. Such an education is not something any parent should wish upon their children.

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Strange corroding features on Mars

1:02 pm

Strange corroding features on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and enhanced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on October 4, 2020. It shows what appears to be features that are either corroding or eroding away, with the lower areas filled with rippling sand dunes.

The circular features might be ancient craters. The material that partly fills them might be a layer of dust or sand that the wind is slowly blowing away to dig out the depressions along the southern cliff wall.

According to the MRO science team’s interpretation of the colors produced by the high resolution camera [pdf], the dark blue colors here are likely “coarser-grained materials (sand and rocks)”, while the orange-red material on the higher terrain is likely dust.

Could this material be evidence of buried ice eroding away? At first I thought so, and then I took a look at the photo’s location, as shown in the overview image below.
» Read more

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