Juno enters Jupiter’s gravity well
After a five year journey the Jupiter science probe Juno today entered the gas giant’s gravity well.
It will fire its engines on July 4 to enter orbit.
Category: Points of Information
Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Blue Origin builds engine test facility in only seven months
The competition heats up: Blue Origin has completed construction of one of two new test cells for the development of its BE-4 rocket engine, only seven months after the company made the decision to build them.
Microsoft and Facebook to lay Atlantic cable
Microsoft and Facebook have announced plans to lay a trans-Atlantic communications cable from Virginia to Spain.
Running from Virginia Beach, Virgina to Bilbao, Spain, MAREA (which is Spanish for “tide”), it will be the first cable to connect the US to southern Europe, over a distance of 6,600 km (4,100 miles). From Blibao, it will connect to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, with the goal of improving speed and reliability. For Microsoft this means improvements for users of its cloud services, such as Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live, and Microsoft Azure, while for Facebook it means improvements for users of its eponymous social network.
I find this story very puzzling. The whole reason communication satellites exist is because they have historically been far cheaper to build and launch with far greater capacity than ocean cables. Thus, the decision of these companies to go with an undersea cable instead of satellites suggests that something has changed in that equation, though I can’t see what. Have undersea cables improved so much that they have a bigger capacity than satellites, so much bigger that it compensates for the higher cost of installation and maintenance?
May 26, 2016 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold. This segment I spent a lot of time talking about the state of ground-based astronomy, spurred by the problems at TMT and the beginnings of the construction of E-ELT.
» Read more
The party of science?
Link here. Read it and weep, as this essay describes to a T a steadily increasing number of citizens, from all political persuasions.
China to fly sample return mission to Moon
The competition heats up: The next Chinese lunar probe will be an unmanned sample return mission
They hope to fly it in the second half of 2017.
Next New Shepard test flight to test parachute failure
The competition heats up: The next New Shepard test flight will try to land the capsule with only two of three parachutes.
No date for the flight was announced.
Health insurance premiums to rise 24% because of Obamacare
Finding out what’s in it: Because of Obamacare, health insurance companies across the nation are requesting rate increases next year ranging from 8 to 65%, with the average increase running about 24%.
Too bad no one predicted this, except for every conservative think tank, every Republican politician, and the entire Tea Party movement. Luckily, President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party had our backs, and ignored those predictions. Otherwise, where would we be?
Planetary Resources has raised $21 million
The competition heats up: Planetary Resources, the company that claims its goal is to mine asteroids, has raised $21 million to build and launch an Earth resources satellite.
They plan to create a 10-satellite constellation to provide this data commercially.
While everything this company is doing will eventually make asteroid mining easier and more effective, nothing they are doing now has anything to do with mining asteroids. Their first project was to build a prototype orbiting telescope to look for asteroids. This second project will sell data about the Earth.
Jupiter exoplanet around baby star
The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have discovered a Jupiter-class exoplanet orbiting a very young star, something their models of planetary formation told them shouldn’t happen.
“For decades, conventional wisdom held that large Jupiter-mass planets take a minimum of 10 million years to form,” said Christopher Johns-Krull, the lead author of a new study about the planet, CI Tau b, that will be published in The Astrophysical Journal. “That’s been called into question over the past decade, and many new ideas have been offered, but the bottom line is that we need to identify a number of newly formed planets around young stars if we hope to fully understand planet formation.”
CI Tau b is at least eight times larger than Jupiter and orbits a 2 million-year-old star about 450 light years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.
In other words, a planet that, according to the present models for planetary formation, supposedly needs 10 million years to form is orbiting a star only 2 million years old. In other words, the models are wrong. We simply don’t know enough yet about planetary formation to create any reliable models.
Another look at what President Trump would likely do
Link here. The author tries to thoughtfully predict what Trump will do should he win the Presidency, based on his record. This quote at the article’s beginning however describes Trump quite accurately:
My biases are clear up front: I don’t trust Trump. I don’t trust his promises, because he has shown no willingness to hold to them. I don’t trust his ideology, because he proclaims that his guiding star is his own self-assurance. I trust Trump to be Trump: a man of convenience, a thinker of no great depth, a reactionary with no constitutional understanding and a willingness to maximize executive power.
The analysis is fair, however, and notes some smart things Trump might do, based on his past record, as well as the dumb things we can expect from him.
I post this not to suggest I prefer Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. I do not. Clinton is a corrupt, power-hungry leftwing ideologue who will magnify all the bad things Barack Obama has done, supported by a corrupt, power-hungry leftwing Democratic Party that likes everything Barack Obama has done. We need to do everything we can to prevent her election.
At the same time, we mustn’t blind ourselves to the problems we will face should Trump win. This article is a warning. Prepare yourself, because things are not going to be much better under a Trump presidency, and the best option for minimizing that damage is to make sure Congress is as conservative as possible.
IRS steals millions from people for depositing the wrong amount of money
Theft by government: IRS has confiscated $43 million from more than 600 innocent individuals merely because they did large cash transactions just under $10K.
The law in question forbids people from purposely breaking up deposits so that they are under $10,000 in order to avoid reporting the deposit to the government, and was originally written to target drug dealers. Instead, the government has been using it as a convenient way to steal people’s money.
After issuing a Freedom of Information Act request to the IRS, the Institute for Justice found 618 cases from 2007 to 2013 where the IRS seized funds without evidence of underlying criminal wrongdoing. When the Institute for Justice requested more information about these cases, the IRS said the group would have to pay a quarter million dollar fee because the request fell into the category of “commercial use.”
According to [Robert Johnson, lawyer for one individual whose bank account was seized], the IRS is still harassing small business owners because of their bank deposits despite the 2015 rule change [that supposedly required evidence of criminal activity before confiscation]. “Shockingly, when the IRS engages in such tactics, it can use the money that it takes to pad its own budget,” Johnson said. “When the IRS uses civil forfeiture to take money for structuring violations, the money is deposited in the Treasury Forfeiture Fund. In other words, the money that the IRS takes from hardworking Americans can be put back to work to seize money from additional Americans,” he said.
Read it all. The IRS has admitted that the individuals from whom they seized this money had committed no crime. Yet they still refuse to return the money.
D.C. ignores 2nd amendment court order
The law is such an inconvenient thing: In denying a reporter a concealed carry permit, police officers told him that attorney general of D.C. had ordered them to ignore the court order requiring the city to issue permits.
The attorney general has since denied this illegal policy, but the reporter still doesn’t have his permit.
TMT calls for removal of official supervising permit process
The University of Hawaii has filed a motion to have the hearing officer in charge of the new permitting process for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) removed.
What the lawyers for TMT appear to be doing is trying to prevent further delaying tactics by those opposing the telescope. Their motion describes these delaying tactics, which involve questioning the objectivity of various officials involved, but doing it piecemeal in order to slow the permitting process down as much as possible. The officer in question has membership in an astronomy center, and though the anti-TMT forces have not yet questioned this, TMT lawyers want to act now to remove that possibility later.
Once again, I think TMT officials are spinning their wheels. Hawaii will never give them permission to build TMT. Read the ten-point plan of Hawaii’s governor for protecting Mauna Kea and you will agree. They should move the telescope to a more friendly location as soon as possible.
Bigelow’s ISS module expansion halted
Engineers called a halt today to the expansion of Bigelow’s BEAM module on ISS when the procedure did not go as planned.
Originally, the plan was to use air from tanks located inside BEAM to inflate these bladders, however analysis showed that this could cause expansion to occur too fast and potentially place damagingly high loads on the ISS in the process, so instead the air will be supplied from the station in a more controlled manner. It was not actually known precisely how the inflation dynamics would occur, as it has only ever been done twice before (Genesis I and II), neither of which were viewable from external cameras such as those found on the ISS.
This proved to be a learning curve, as after two hours of adding a few seconds of air into the module, only the width expanded, as opposed to the length. Mission controllers decided it would be best to defer operations for the day to allow them to evaluate the next steps.
More violent protests against Trump
Brownshirts: Waving Mexican flags anti-Trump protesters at a Trump rally in California today threw objects and started fires, with a number getting arrested.
There was a very strong police presence, which appears to have contained the violence. More details here, which describes the protests in more detail, including one story of a Trump protester throwing an egg at Trump supporter.
Protesting Trump is fine. Trying to suppress a Trump rally with violence is not. To me it appears that the only thing that prevented these anti-Trump protesters from getting out of control was the police.
Antares static engine test scheduled
The 30-second static fire engine test of the Antares first stage and new Russian engine has now been scheduled for May 31.
The window for the engine test, or hot fire, is 5 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. EDT. Backup test dates run through June 5. Completion of the test will be noted on the Wallops’ Facebook and Twitter sites. During the test, the upgraded Antares dual RD-181 rocket engines will fire for 30 seconds at maximum 100% power (thrust) while the first stage of the test rocket will be held down on the pad. The hot fire will demonstrate the readiness of the rocket’s first stage and the launch pad fueling systems to support upcoming flights.
If all goes well, they hope to launch Antares with a Cygnus capsule in early July.
Protesters crash stage and threaten conservative speaker
Brownshirts: Protesters (who were admitted Bernie Sanders supporters) crashed the stage, grabbed the mike, and threatened the speakers at a conservative event at DePaul University last night.
The security guards, required by the university and partly paid for by the people running the event, refused to do anything.
After an extended period of time, the crowd started to chant “Do your job” at security, who remained at the back of the venue for the entire event. When security refused to intervene, Yiannopoulos posed for pictures with fans in the audience, and ordered the crowd to follow him to the college president’s office.
More details, including video, at the link.
ESO signs giant telescope contract
The European Southern Observatory today signed the contract to begin building the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT).
The contract covers the design, manufacture, transport, construction, on-site assembly and verification of the dome and telescope structure. With an approximate value of 400 million euros, it is the largest contract ever awarded by ESO and the largest contract ever in ground-based astronomy. The E-ELT dome and telescope structure will take telescope engineering into new territory. The contract includes not only the enormous 85-metre-diameter rotating dome, with a total mass of around 5000 tonnes, but also the telescope mounting and tube structure, with a total moving mass of more than 3000 tonnes. Both of these structures are by far the largest ever built for an optical/infrared telescope and dwarf all existing ones. The dome is almost 80 metres high and its footprint is comparable in area to a football pitch.
The E-ELT is being built on Cerro Armazones, a 3000-metre peak about 20 kilometres from ESO’s Paranal Observatory. The access road and leveling of the summit have already been completed and work on the dome is expected to start on site in 2017.
E-ELT will have a main mirror 39 meters in width, about 9 meters bigger than the stalled TMT project.
Anti-Trump protesters get violent at Trump rally
Brown-shirts: Protesters at a Trump rally tonight in New Mexico threw rocks, broke windows, and blocked exits.
More here. and here. There were some reports of gunfire, but these appear to not be true. Regardless, it is unconscionable for these protesters to act this way. They might think the Trump is a fascist, but the only ones acting like fascists here are the protesters themselves.
There has been a lot of anger and passion during this presidential campaign, but so far almost all the violence has come from the left.