Category: Points of Information

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

Second ARTEMIS space probe about to enter lunar orbit

8:27 pm

The second ARTEMIS space probe will enter lunar orbit on Sunday.

“With two spacecraft orbiting in opposite directions, we can acquire a full 3-D view of the structure of the magnetic fields near the moon and on the lunar surface,” said Vassilis Angelopoulos, principal investigator for the THEMIS and ARTEMIS missions and a professor of space physics at UCLA. “ARTEMIS will be doing totally new science, as well as reusing existing spacecraft to save a lot of taxpayer money.”

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White dwarf stars in a dance of death

8:24 pm

White dwarf stars in a dance of death.

[The binary pair of] white dwarfs are so near they make a complete orbit in just 13 minutes, but they are gradually slipping closer together. About 900,000 years from now – a blink of an eye in astronomical time – they will merge and possibly explode as a supernova. By watching the stars converge, scientists will test both Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the origin of some peculiar supernovae.

The two white dwarfs are circling at a bracing speed of 370 miles per second (600 km/s), or 180 times faster than the fastest jet on Earth. “I nearly fell out of my chair at the telescope when I saw one star change its speed by a staggering 750 miles per second in just a few minutes,” said Smithsonian astronomer Warren Brown, lead author of the paper reporting the find.

The brighter white dwarf contains about a quarter of the Sun’s mass compacted into a Neptune-sized ball, while its companion has more than half the mass of the Sun and is Earth-sized. A penny made of this white dwarf’s material would weigh about 1,000 pounds on Earth. Their mutual gravitational pull is so strong that it deforms the lower-mass star by three percent. If the Earth bulged by the same amount, we would have tides 120 miles high. [emphasis mine]

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House spending panel cuts John Holdren’s science office budget by 55%

7:18 pm

The House spending panel today proposed cutting the budget of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) office, run by John Holdren, by 55%.

“OSTP has chosen to disregard a strong and unambiguous legislative prohibition on bilateral engagement with China or Chinese-owned companies,” says language accompanying the 2012 bill, to be voted on tomorrow by the full appropriations committee. “OSTP’s behavior demonstrates a lack of respect for the policy and oversight roles of the Congress.”

I think the Obama administration is about to discover that ignoring the law as passed by Congress can have bad consequences.

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Gore Announces New Campaign and Worldwide Event to Re-energize Global Warming Hysteria

12:57 pm

Al Gore has announced a new campaign “to broadcast the reality of the climate crisis and mobilize citizens to help solve it.”

And I ask: what the hell does a propaganda campaign tell us about the climate? The answer: nothing. Just because you say so, Al, does not make it so.

On another note, satellite data continues to show absolutely no warming for the past decade.

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wings in space

12:49 pm

James McLane points out that the shuttle shape is not the only way to build a spaceship.

In an email to me Jim noted that he “is still trying to save NASA.” My response to him was that trying to save NASA right now is more hopeless than Don Quixote chasing a windmill. However, the engineering ideas he outlines in his essay are just the kind of innovative thinking required by the new private companies. And the more ideas the merrier!

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Public debt and the peril of Obamacare

11:51 am

Public debt and the peril of Obamacare.

Countries with universal healthcare fall into two camps:

1. Totalitarian regimes like Cuba and North Korea, and authoritarian Third World countries in the Middle East and Africa.

2. Western nations that free-ride off of American military spending and its provision of international security, but nonetheless run unsustainable budgets with immense debts trying to pay for their social welfare states. [emphasis mine]

In other words, we had better repeal this monstrosity or we face economic collapse, probably preceded by a dictatorship.

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House Budget Bill Would Leave it to NASA To Apportion Bulks of Cuts

9:49 pm

The House bill that brings NASA’s budget back to 2008 levels essentially leaves it to NASA to figure out what to cut.

If true, what this means is that NASA itself will have to choose what it considers important. The one problem is that according to this article Congress is still requiring NASA to spend $3 billion on the program-formerly-called-Constellation. which gives the agency less flexibility in doling out the cash.

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Ethane lakes in a red haze: Titan’s uncanny moonscape

10:33 am

Titan’s ethane lakes in a red haze.

So far, there are no recognisable signs of organic life. That’s not surprising: by terrestrial standards, Titan is a deep freeze with surface temperatures at a chilly -180°C. Yet Titan is very much alive in the sense that its atmosphere and surface are changing before our eyes. Clouds drift through the haze and rain falls from them to erode stream-like channels draining into shallow lakes. Vast dune fields that look as if they were lifted from the Sahara sprawl along Titan’s equator, yet the dark grains resemble ground asphalt rather than sand. It is a bizarrely different world that looks eerily like home. Or as planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz puts it: “our prototype weird-world exoplanet”.

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NASA continues to stall on heavy-lift rocket

10:41 am

It ain’t ever happening: NASA continues to stall on their final design for Congress’s mandated heavy-lift rocket.

No one should be surprised by this. Obama has never wanted NASA to build this rocket, when it was Constellation and now when it is the program-formerly-called-Constellation. Moreover, Congress hasn’t given NASA enough money or time to do it anyway. Better the program die and the money is used for something else, or cut entirely in order to reduce the crushing federal debt.

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