Category: Points of Information

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

Scientists confirm ample Ryugu material in first Hayabuse sample chamber

8:01 am

Japanese scientists have opened the first chamber that stored the Ryugu asteroid samples obtained during its first touch-and-go sample grab, and confirmed that it holds ample material.

They also noted that the chamber itself contained gas from the asteroid as well.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has confirmed that the gas collected from the sample container inside the re-entry capsule of the asteroid explorer, Hayabusa2, is a gas sample originating from asteroid Ryugu.

The result of the mass spectrometry of the collected gas within the sample container performed at the QLF (Quick Look Facility) established at the Woomera Local Headquarters in Australia on December 7, 2020, suggested that the gas differed from the atmospheric composition of the Earth. For additional confirmation, a similar analysis was performed on December 10 – 11 at the Extraterrestrial Sample Curation Center on the JAXA Sagamihara Campus. This has led to the conclusion that the gas in the sample container is derived from asteroid Ryugu.

They think that this gas must have outgassed from the samples themselves. I suspect it was released either during the long journey or when the samples were subjected to the high accelerations and impact during its return to Earth. Research is going to have to try to pin this down, however.

They plan to open the two remaining sample chambers containing material sometime next week.

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Astra test launch almost reaches orbit

2:53 pm

The view from space on Astra's Rocket

UPDATE: The rocket came up slightly short of orbit. From Eric Berger:

Rocket was 0.5 km/s short of orbit. With a better fuel mixture in the upper stage it would have orbited. Apogee of 390km. Rocket 3.3 will carry a payload, and there will be no hardware or software changes.

Original post:
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Capitalism in space: According to the company’s Twitter feed, the second launch attempt today by Astra of its rocket appears to have reached orbit.

The images to the right were taken by their rocket, which is unimaginatively dubbed Rocket 3.2. I hope they now give this vehicle a more striking name.

If they have succeeded, they will have joined Rocket Lab as one of only two private commercial smallsat startups to launch a rocket to orbit. Two Chinese pseudo-private companies, Galactic Energy and ExSpace, have accomplished this, but I do not count them as real private companies. They might have worked independent of the government and raised investment capital, but nothing they do happens without close government supervision.

We will have to wait for full flight data from the company, but assuming they reached orbit that will be 40th American launch in 2020, the first time the U.S. has topped 40 launches in a single year since 1969, when the country achieved 46 successful orbital launches.

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Subpoena issued to audit all Dominion machines in Phoenix area of Arizona

12:23 pm

The Arizona state senate today issued a subpoena requiring the election board of Maricopa County, which covers the entire Phoenix area, to allow for a full audit of the Dominion tabulators and software used to count the ballots in that county.

More here.

I will repeat what I have said from the beginning. What I want, and what all voters should want, is a complete reassurance that these machines did not miscount the totals, and that the result as presently certified is correct. If the audit finds this is so, that will actually be a great relief, even if it means Joe Biden to my sorrow has become president. Having a reliable election system is more important than who wins any particular election.

However, if the audit finds the kinds of issues revealed in the audit of the Dominion machines used in several counties in Michigan, then the election for president is unreliable and should not stand. Once might be a fluke, or an example of a poor audit. Twice means the issues are real. Moreover, unlike the audit in Michigan, this one will be performed under the guidance of the legislature, not one specific firm hired by an attorney. It will therefore carry more weight, as it will have the input of the Democrats in that legislature.

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A good summary of the status of the election political battle

11:53 am

Link here. The author, William Jacobson, always has a solid legal grounding on the political warfare that is on-going today in America. In this case he argues correctly that the key has always been winning elections, and that the Republicans have consistently failed to play that game hard. They didn’t fight the use of loosely regulated mail-in ballotss They didn’t fight ballot harvesting. They didn’t reject the use of Dominion software. And he gives a classic example in Wisconsin, whose Supreme Court has rejected election lawsuits partly because of the following reason:

There is no better example of why elections matter, and how the 2020 presidential election was lost months ago. Liberal Jill Karofsky defeated conservative sitting Justice Daniel Kelly in an April 2020 election the Wisconsin Republicans completely botched by allowing it to take place the same date as the Democratic presidential primary. Guess who turned out to vote? Democrats. That took the court down to a nominal 4-3 conservative majority, with Justice Brian Hagedorn the weak conservative link.

In many other states, legal and political battles were fought strategically by Democrats over the several months leading up to the election. Democrats organized for a mail-in election, Republicans didn’t. Republicans were out-organized, out-hustled, and out-lawyered.

Even now the Republicans in Georgia are not gearing up to deal with potential election fraud in the upcoming Senatorial runoff elections that will determine who controls the Senate. They are fiddling around as the entire credibility of the election process burns. The odds of them winning even one of those two run-offs I rate is low, because not only will the same cheating take place by the Democrats, Republican voters will not come out to vote, because they don’t see their party as a useful party to vote for.

And yet, the most important and only task Republican-controlled state legislatures have right now is to insure that fraud cannot happen in future elections. It is their last hill to stand on. That in Georgia they seem uninterested in dealing with this now, before these runoffs, tells us how weakly they will likely fight in other states in the coming years.

And if they don’t fight, they will lose. It is that simple.

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Ancient and recent volcanoes on Mars

9:41 am

Volcanic vent on eastern flank of Olympus Mons
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on October 25, 2020. It shows what it calls a “possible volcanic vent east of Olympus Mons”.

Is this active? If not, how old is it. Also, the elongated shape of the vent suggests the possibility of a lava tube, or at least some underground complexity to the release of its magma.

In order to get some clarity, I emailed Sarah Sutton of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona, who requested this photograph. Her response:

The image is of a small shield volcano with an elongated vent at the summit. We don’t have complete stereo here yet, so we can’t tell exactly what the height is. This vent might have sourced tube-fed flows, but in this case, we can’t resolve such features in the image data. This and other small shield volcanoes in the vicinity are partially buried by plains-forming lava flows. The lava flows around the base overlap the flows that emanate radially from the summit vent. Therefore we infer that the shield is older than the surrounding lava flows.

The vent, which runs from the southwest to the northeast, sits on top of a sloping wide hill, which is that small shield volcano described by Sutton. The flat plains surrounding this hill are from later eruptions from other and possibly larger volcanoes. The wider overview map below might give us a clue as to the source.
» Read more

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SpaceX in preliminary negotiations for another big fundraising round

9:07 am

Capitalism in space: According to this report, SpaceX is now in preliminary negotiations with investors prior to beginning another big fundraising round, even though the company just raised $1.9 billion in private investment capital in August.

The talks are still in early phases, and exact pricing for the fundraising round has not yet been determined, one of the people said. Terms could still change, and it could take several weeks to decide and firm up allocations, the person added. SpaceX also may not be able to convince investors to give it the lofty valuation it desires. Allocations refer to which investors will be authorized to buy shares and how much they will pay for those shares.

“It’s a pretty big shock to me, honestly,” one of the people said. “What company jumps to double its valuation in six months? I don’t care at what scale you’re operating, it’s kind of crazy,” they added. “If you look at the series, every single valuation is a 10 to 20% bump.”

It appears that the company is trying to leverage its successes with Dragon, Starship, and Starlink to obtain more funding. The story also suggests that SpaceX now has a better sense of what it will cost to get Starship built, and thus is looking to obtain those funds now, when they are in a good position to get them.

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Scientists confirm Hayabusa-2’s return capsule brought back material from Ryugu

8:56 am

Based on their first observations of the return capsule from Hayabusa-1, Japanese scientists yesterday confirmed that it successfully has returned material from the asteroid Ryugu.

JAXA said in a statement that they observed the sandy material at the entrance of the collection chamber, but have yet to look inside to see if more asteroid dust is lurking there. It is only the second time that scientists have returned material from an asteroid.

This find in the entrance portends a gold mine of material in the collection chamber itself.

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Rocket Lab successfully launches Japanese radar satellite

8:48 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab early today successfully launched an Japanese radar satellite using its Electron rocket.

This was the company’s sixth successful launch in 2020, matching the count it had predicted at the start of the year it would reach. And this despite one launch failure. The rocket also sported a new and larger faring, giving Rocket Lab the ability to launch larger payloards or more satellites with each launch.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

33 China
24 SpaceX
14 Russia
6 ULA
6 Rocket Lab

The U.S. now leads China 39 to 33 in the national rankings.

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Confirmed: Martian glacial features are ice

10:12 am

Lobate glacial flows on Mars
Click for full image.

Scientists using the radar instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have now confirmed that the Martian glacial features that most resemble the glaciers seen on Earth are made of substantial amounts of ice, and were possibly active and growing only a few million years ago.

“Our radar analysis shows that at least one of these features is about 500 meters thick and nearly 100 percent ice, with a debris covering at most ten meters thick,” said Berman, lead author of “Ice-rich landforms of the southern mid-latitudes of Mars: A case study in Nereidum Montes” published online in Icarus at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2020.114170. PSI scientists Frank C. Chuang, Isaac B. Smith and David A. Crown are co-authors on the paper.

Global mapping of Viscous Flow Features (VFFs), a general grouping of ice-rich flow features in the southern hemisphere of Mars shows a dense concentration in Nereidum Montes, along the northern rim of Argyre basin. Located within a northwestern subregion of Nereidum Montes is a large number of well-preserved VFFs and ice-rich mantling deposits, the paper says, potentially the largest concentrations of any non-polar region in the southern hemisphere.

…Processed data from the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft were used to search for basal reflections across VFFs within the region. For one in particular, these observations and analysis indicate that it is composed of nearly pure water ice. Model ages obtained from crater counts and their associated size-frequency distributions (SFDs) on both ice-rich mantling deposits and small lobate VFFs suggest that the deposits stabilized several to tens of millions of years ago in the Late Amazonian Epoch, and that small lobate VFFs likely formed due to the mobilization of mantling deposits.

This data here reinforces the impressions from many other places within the 30-60 degree latitude bands on Mars where many such features are found.

Mars might be a desert, but it is a desert like Antarctica, not the Sahara. Any settlement there must use the Earth’s south pole as its guide for construction and design.

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Russia successfully completes second Angara rocket launch

9:46 am

The new colonial movement: After many delays, Russia today successfully completed the second launch of its new Angara rocket, placing a dummy test payload into orbit.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

33 China
24 SpaceX
14 Russia
6 ULA
5 Rocket Lab
5 Europe (Arianespace)

The U.S. lead over China in the national rankings remains 38 to 33. With this launch the total launches in 2020 now matches that achieved last year, something achieved despite the Wuhan virus panic.

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Data: Hospitals underwhelmed by 2nd COVID wave, as they were with 1st

9:19 pm

Chicken Little report: Federal government data now shows that hospital capacity has never been at full capacity or even strained during the first wave of COVID-19 in the spring, as well as the current spike now.

[F]ederal government data compiled from state-level reports suggests that hospitals nationwide have considerable space left to deal with both routine medical issues and COVID-19 patients. The Department of Health and Human Services offers on its website estimates of hospitalization rates across the United States.

…The HHS numbers belie forecasts of impending collapse of the U.S. medical system. As of Saturday, the department estimated that hospitals nationwide were at about 75% capacity. ICU beds were even lower, at 63.5%. Patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 occupied just under 15% of all beds nationwide. Even in areas that have recently posted huge surges in positive COVID tests, the numbers were largely similar to the national average: In New York, 76% of hospital beds (and 61% of ICU beds) were taken.

In California, where positive test results have skyrocketed, 76% of inpatient beds were likewise filled (though the ICU numbers were notably higher than New York’s, at 79%). Ohio, which has also seen a surge in positive tests over the last few months, has 71% of inpatient beds taken, and 77% of ICU beds.

Those numbers are not far out of line with national average occupancy rates seen in normal times and are, in some cases, lower than what are widely considered optimal rates.

There’s more at the link, but overall the data confirms what I wrote back in March, only two weeks after some states had declared statewide emergencies, imposed lockdowns, and destroyed their economies based on a panicked fear of a gigantic spike that would overwhelm their hospitals. The data then strongly suggested that these fears were unwarranted. This new data confirms that conclusion.

The lockdowns, mandates, and cancellation of the Bill of Rights were all entirely unnecessary. Worse, corrupt politicians (mostly Democrats) have morphed their so-called purpose from easing the sudden arrival of many sick patients (“flatten the curve”) to a vain attempt to prevent the spread of the virus, something that only six months ago sane people knew was impossible.

Under this new impossible mantra (“Stop the spread!”), lockdowns will never end. Which to these corrupt politicians is just fine, as it gives them the kind of absolute power they crave.

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