Category: Points of Information

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

Cygnus freighter arrives at ISS

9:52 am

Capitalism in space: Northrop Grumann’s Cygnus freighter yesterday arrived at ISS, bringing with it four tons of supplies plus a new toilet.

The unpiloted cargo ship was loaded with four tons of supplies and equipment, including crew food and clothing, experiment hardware and material, the virtual reality camera, the new toilet and even samples of Estée Lauder skin cream that will be used in a commercial photo shoot for the company’s social media platforms.

The $23 million toilet, or “universal waste management system,” is smaller and more sophisticated than the station’s current potty and includes modifications to make it easier for female astronauts to use.

Next up for ISS are two manned missions later this month, first a Soyuz bringing a crew of three, followed by the second SpaceX Dragon manned mission, bringing a crew of four. In between the present crew of three will return to Earth.

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Leak search on ISS narrows further

9:25 am

Further work on ISS by the astronauts has now narrowed the location of the station’s long-term slow leak to the aft area of the Russian Zvezda module.

As of Monday, the station crew had not located the precise site of the leak, but officials believe they have traced it to a transfer compartment at the rear section of the Zvezda module, near an aft docking port where a Russian Progress resupply freighter is attached.

The rate of leak continues to be slow and thus not any danger to the crew. It is also a concern, as it could become a safety issue should it increase. They want to find it and patch it. Furthermore, Zvezda is ISS’s second oldest module, launched in 2000. If this leak is a sign of that age is even more essential to know.

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Musk to personally review SpaceX launch procedures

8:51 am

Capitalism in space: As a result of the spate of launch aborts in the past few weeks, the head of SpaceX, Elon Musk, is now planning a personal review of the company’s launch facilities in Florida next week.

Musk would like SpaceX to increase its cadence such that it can reach 48 launches in 2021, which would more than double the company’s previous record for total number of missions in a single year. Technical scrubs like the ones this week would prevent this. Achieving frequent launches will require smooth operations.

“We’re doing a broad review of launch site, propulsion, structures, avionics, range & regulatory constraints this weekend,” Musk tweeted. “I will also be at the Cape next week to review hardware in person.”

This review aligns with the company’s entire strategy regarding rocketry. Instead of accepting such aborts as the cost of doing business, Musk wants to review procedures to see if launches can be made more reliable.

Musk’s statement that they want to be able to do 48 launches next year is most intriguing, as it suggests, based on their manifest of launches, that they are going to launch a lot of Starlink satellites.

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Two dozen exoplanets superior to Earth for life?

8:45 am

The uncertainty of science: A team of scientists have now identified 24 exoplanets from the Kepler telescope archive that they propse might actually be better for life than Earth itself.

All the exoplanets are rocky and terrestrial, like the Earth. All are in the habitable zone, meaning that they orbit their star at a distance that makes their general temperature comparable to Earth.

What makes them superior, according to these scientists, are three factors. First, their stars are not G-type stars, like the Sun, but K-types. K-types have much longer lifespans, 70 billion years compared to the Sun’s 8 to 10 billion, allowing more time for life to develop.

Second, the planets have a slightly greater mass than Earth.

Part of the reason the Earth is habitable is because it’s large enough to be geologically active, giving it a protective magnetic field, and has enough gravity to retain an atmosphere. According to the team, if a planet was 10 percent larger, it would have more surface area to live on. If it was 1.5 times as massive as the Earth, its interior would retain more heat from radioactive decay, would remain active longer, and hold onto its atmosphere for a longer time.

Finally, the orbits of these two dozen exoplanets makes them just slighter warmer than Earth, which is thought to be beneficial to life.

This is interesting, but it is pure guesswork. These factors might make our Earth life happier, but these scientists have no idea if such conditions are beneficial or harmful to the creation of life. At present we have zero data on what the ideal conditions would be.

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SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites

8:20 am

After a number of weather delays, SpaceX this morning finally launched another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit, using its Falcon 9 rocket.

They also successfully landed the 1st stage, on its third flight, the 61st time they have done this. One fairing half was also making its third flight, and was also recovered. I have embedded the live stream of the launch below the fold.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

25 China
16 SpaceX
10 Russia
4 ULA
4 Europe (Arianespace)

The U.S. has retaken the lead from China, 26 to 25, in the national rankings.
» Read more

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“N-Word Science” Proves You’re a Racist!

6:44 pm

Link here. The author delves into the so-called “science” of some of the most hyped “white supremacy” academic research, and finds it not only wanting, he finds it downright garbage and not worth the recycled paper it is written on.

No surprise. Race and gender studies are all lies and bigotry, designed not to improve the knowledge of the human race, but to slander all whites, to dehumanize them, and to make it justifiable to treat them as second-class citizens.

I liked his opening however:

With summer 2020 finally in the rearview mirror, and after seven months of “two weeks to flatten the curve,” I’m getting a little sick of “the science.” Not science, mind you, but theee science, the thing that leftists keep assuring us exists—a singular, canonical truth we all must obey. Mind you, it sure seems like there’s not a great deal of agreement about “the science” regarding COVID: You don’t need masks/You do need masks. Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work/Hydroxychloroquine totally works. Sunlight doesn’t help/Sunlight helps. COVID doesn’t linger in the air/COVID totally lingers in the air/COVID doesn’t linger after all.

Large crowds spread COVID/Large crowds don’t spread COVID (if it’s a BLM crowd).

Theee science is whatever today’s CNN home page says it is. If that happens to contradict yesterday’s home page, well, that’s your fault for having a memory. [emphasis in original]

The number of lies and inconsistencies coming from the “We’re all gonna die from COVID-19” crowd is legion. In this one short quote he sums the worst up quite succinctly.

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Criss-crossing Martian ridges hit by new impacts

9:41 am

Criss-crossing Martian ridges hit by new impacts
Click for full image.

The image to the right, cropped to post here, is a captioned photo from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance orbiter and released today. From the caption:

The black spots [recent impacts] form because the craters exposed cleaner materials in the subsurface beneath the bright, dusty surface.

Our image is also interesting because the surface has a criss-cross pattern formed by wind activity. Bright ripples that are oriented from the upper right to the lower left are perpendicular to the wind flow. In contrast, outcrops that have been eroded by the wind are oriented perpendicular to the ripples to produce the criss-cross pattern we now observe.

The overview map below might also help explain this criss-cross pattern.
» Read more

4 comments

A donut on the Moon

8:58 am

A donut crater on the Moon
Click for full image.

In this case the donut is a crater dubbed Bell E Crater, with a second concentric rim in its interior. The photo to the right, reduced to post here, was taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) as part of its high resolution survey of the entire Moon. As noted at the first link:

Craters not only vary in shape but also in complexity. There are simple craters and complex craters with ring structures and mountains at the center. Somewhere in between is Bell E, a small crater located within the larger Bell crater. These donut-shaped formations are commonly known as concentric craters. Many questions remain on the origin of donut craters. While there have been several ideas about their origin, including double impacts, the currently favored hypotheses involve volcanic processes and compositional variations.

The article outlines four hypotheses for explaining this crater’s formation, a perfectly aligned double impact, ripples at impact into thick warm lava, layers of different densities, and later volcanic activity. None do a good job of explaining all of the concentric craters found on the Moon, and thus suggest that these craters might have formed from some combination of more than one theory.

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Antares launches; Falcon 9 aborts

8:55 pm

Of the two launches scheduled for tonight, Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket was the only one to launch, lifting off on schedule at 9:16 pm (Eastern). This was the company’s third launch this year.

SpaceX’s launch however aborted at T-2 seconds. No word on why the rocket’s computer’s shut down, or when they will reschedule.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race remain unchanged:

25 China
15 SpaceX
10 Russia
4 ULA
4 Europe (Arianespace)

The Antares launch however puts the U.S. back into a tie with China, 25-25, in the national rankings.

6 comments

Michigan Supreme Court calls lock down orders by governor illegal

4:16 pm

The Michigan Supreme Court today struck down the endless number of arbitrary lock down orders imposed by Democratic governor Gretchen Witmer, stating that her actions were “an unlawful delegation of legislative power to the executive branch in violation of the Michigan Constitution.”

In a 4-3 ruling, the court determined the governor did not have the authority under state law to issue any additional emergency declarations pertaining to the pandemic after April 30. That was the last date when the legislature allowed the governor to declare an emergency.

Whitmer has relied on an interpretation of an emergency powers law passed in 1945 and the Emergency Powers Act of 1976 to issue a litany of executive orders related to the pandemic. The orders mandated the closure of businesses and restricted the number of people allowed to gather at events, all in the name of safety and preventing the spread of coronavirus.

Everyone whose businesses were damaged or lost their job because of her illegal actions should sue Witmer personally. This abuse of power should cost her, in the hope that other governors down the road will think twice before trying the same thing.

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Two launches scheduled for tonight, 27 minutes apart

9:08 am

The numerous launch scrubs this past week has created an unprecedented situation tonight, two orbital launches scheduled only 27 minutes apart from two different East Coast spaceports.

First Northrop Grumman will try again to launch its Cygnus cargo freighter to ISS from Wallops Island, Virginia, with the launch scheduled for 9:12 pm (Eastern). The first launch attempt last night was aborted 2:21 seconds before liftoff “after receiving off-nominal data from ground support equipment.”

Second, SpaceX will try to launch two Air Force GPS satellites from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the launch scheduled for 9:43 pm (Eastern). This launch has been delayed several times because of the repeated launch scrubs of ULA’s Delta 4 Heavy rocket, attempting to launch a military reconnaissance satellite. ULA’s launch had priority for the range, but with it delayed due to the investigation over the T-7 second launch abort on September 30th, the SpaceX’s GPS launch moves up in line.

The first will be live streamed on NASA TV, the second by SpaceX. I have embedded the live streams for both below the fold.
» Read more

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