Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
The detailed look at the robotic satellite refueling demo that is taking place on ISS this week.
From Consumer Reports: “Our Fisker Karma cost us $107,850. It is super sleek, high-tech—and now it’s broken.”
Another wise business choice by the Obama administration, which gave this electric car company just over a half billion dollars in federal subsidies to develop this plug-in hybrid car.
Researchers have completed the first comprehensive map of the entire ocean-floor debris field of the Titanic.
More Kepler results: From the abstract of a preprint paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph website:
The mean eccentricity of the Kepler candidates decreases with decreasing planet size indicating that smaller planets are preferentially found in low-eccentricity orbits.
In other words, the smaller a planet is, the more likely its orbit will be circular like the Earth’s. This result is encouraging news for the search for life on other worlds. Before Kepler, astronomers had found that the orbits of most exoplanets were far more eccentric than the orbits of the planets in our solar system, a condition that scientists thought was unfriendly for the development of life. These new results counter that conclusion. The orbits of the planets in our solar system might not be as unusual as first thought.
Engineers’ dreams: A proposal to use a thousand mile long magnetic track to accelerate passengers into space.
In a February 29 letter to NASA, House appropriators have challenged the Obama administration’s decision to shut down the agency’s Mars planetary program.
People could live with big. It’s too big that’s getting to them. Under the Obama presidency, something outside the norm happened. Amid ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, the $800 billion stimulus injection and a federal spending boom, something snapped in the steady-state relationship between many citizens and Washington. A lot of people feel the government, finally, is really starting to crowd them. It has made them uneasy. For the Santorum audience, the call-and-response word to push back against the unease is “freedom.”
Can you judge a President by his Jew-hating friends?
To me, Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan have the same problem: They seem to have too many links and contacts with bigots. And it appears that Obama has the same problem.
Freedom of speech alert: A man was arrested and now faces 60 days in jail and a $500 fine for simply holding up a protest sign on the public plaza outside the Supreme Court in Washington.
Video of him shows he was still and quiet and more than 100 feet from the Court entrance. Nonetheless, officers arrested him, charging him with violating a so-called “no speech zone.”
The day of reckoning looms: The federal government recorded its worst monthly deficit in history in February 2012.
The [Congressional Budget Office] projected the government will run a deficit of $229 billion in February, the highest monthly figure ever. The previous high was $223 billion a year ago, in February 2011. It is the 41st straight month the government has run a deficit — itself a record streak that dates back to the final months of President George W. Bush’s tenure. Before now, the longest streak on record was 11 months.
Obviously, this record-setting deficit is racist for occurring during the term of Barack Obama.
Chicken Little wrong again: The strongest solar storm since 2006 hit the Earth today, and has so far caused no damage.
The U.S. debt, graphed to show how it rose or fell since 1981, compared with who controlled Congress and the White House.
Though to my mind the Republicans have generally been a failure in controlling the growth of government when they held power during the past thirty years, this data shows clearly how far worse the Democrats have been during this same time period.
Consistently hostile and opposed to Judeo-Christian religious beliefs.
With sources and documentation. The list is appalling.
2010 was a trend, not a fluke: An incumbent eight year Republican Congresswoman lost to a tea party favorite in Tuesday’s Ohio primary.
This story illustrates once again that the tea party movement is not a partisan movement. Republican candidates who don’t toe the line on spending and taxes, like the Democrats, are going to lose.
When a solar storm slammed into both the Earth and Mars in January 2008, scientists were able to directly measure the importance of the Earth’s magnetic field in protecting our atmosphere from oxygen loss.
They found that while the pressure of the solar wind increased at each planet by similar amounts, the increase in the rate of loss of martian oxygen was ten times that of Earth’s increase. Such a difference would have a dramatic impact over billions of years, leading to large losses of the martian atmosphere, perhaps explaining or at least contributing to its current tenuous state. The result proves the efficacy of Earth’s magnetic field in deflecting the solar wind and protecting our atmosphere.
Chinese physicists have discovered a key measurement that helps explain why and how neutrinos can magically oscillate between three different states. Moreover, the data
implies that there could be a slight asymmetry between neutrinos and antineutrinos—called CP violation—a slight asymmetry that might help explain why the universe evolved to contain so much matter and so little antimatter.
An analysis of the most recent Kepler data suggests that Earthlike planets in orbits like our own are extremely rare.
Leftwing civility: Numerous death threats have been posted against Rush Limbaugh in numerous places on the internet.
The sun yesterday emitted its second biggest flare since 2006, with two coronal mass ejections heading for the Earth.
None of this will kill us, so stay calm. It is, however, a wonderful opportunity for solar scientists to study an active sun, something that might become rare in the coming decades.
A robotic refueling demo. designed and built by the same people who ran the Hubble Space Telescope repair missions, begins today on ISS, using Dextre.
This demo is designed to prove that a robot, operated from the ground, can refuel a satellite not designed for refueling. The demo satellite on ISS was built to match the design of several climate satellites already in orbit that will end up defunct in a few years if they can’t be refueled.
The USS Monitor gives up the faces of its dead.
A call to impeach Pennsylvania’s Zombie Mohammad judge.
Modern politically correct eduction: “Everybody from Texas is ignorant rednecks.”
The Left’s assault on free speech.
The same media that has done its best to smear any opposition to their agenda is now in overdrive to silence its opponents. This is an issue that goes to the heart of the First Amendment. I may disagree with Mr. Limbaugh, but I will support his right to free speech.
The rail gun: a cheap solution for getting payloads into orbit quickly.
Another state vs federal battle: The Utah legislature is about to pass a law demanding the federal government release to the state almost fifty percent of the state’s federal land.
The context here is that, for most western states, the federal government controls almost all of the real estate, and has in recent years increasingly restricted its use to the detriment of local residents. The legal maneuvering here is a push back by the state.
The delayed launch of Europe’s cargo freighter to ISS is now targeted for March 23.
Explaining the limits of the Congressionally mandated Space Launch System.
In trying to explain why SLS can never function as a crew ferry for ISS, I think Muncy also illustrates why the whole system makes no sense and is really a complete waste of money. Consider this:
SLS’s first uncrewed test flight would be in December 2017, with the first crewed mission nearly four years later, in late 2021. Even worse, NASA’s plan showed that Orion and SLS would be able to fly only one exploration mission every two (or more) years.
We are spending a lot of money for very little results.
