Category: Points of Information

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

Bright-tipped perplexing terrain on Mars

1:29 pm

Perplexing terrain on Mars
Click for full image.

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 June 24, 2020, and shows a bit of inexplicable country in Arabia Terra, the widest and largest transition zone region on Mars between the northern lowland plains and southern cratered highlands.

The stuff visible in this image falls into what I call “What the heck?” geology. It is very clear we are looking at a collection of straight and curved ridges and mesas, all of which for some reason are bright at their tips and edges. Some of the curved ridges might be the rims of craters, but only some. Other ridge lines look more like leftovers following a strange erosion process. The problem is that to my uneducated eye I can find little rhyme or reason to these shapes. The mesas and canyon on the image’s right edge might be explained by the erosion processes that create chaos terrain on Mars, but that process does not do a good job of explaining anything else in the photo.

That this uncaptioned image is merely labeled “Arabia Terra” suggests that the scientists involved in getting this image were equally perplexed by it, and could not give it a better description.

The overview map below provides some location context, including how this geology relates to the landing site of Europe’s Rosalind Franklin rover, now scheduled for a 2022 launch.
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Another successful Starship prototype hop

11:15 am

Starship prototype #6 in flight

Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully completed a 150-meter high hop of its sixth Starship prototype, the second such hop but the first for this prototype. They have now flown two different prototypes, plus Starhopper, all successfully. No flight failures, so far.

Next they will be doing a pressure tank test, to failure, of the seventh prototype. That prototype is using what they think will be a better steel alloy, and they want to find out its limits. I have also heard that they will either fly this prototype again or fly the fifth again, sometime in the next two weeks.

I have embedded a few more images below the fold.
» Read more

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FAA issues Wallops Island launch license to Rocket Lab

9:21 am

Capitalism in space: The FAA has now issued a five year launch license to the smallsat rocket company Rocket Lab, allowing them to launch their Electron rocket from the company’s launch site on Wallops Island, Virginia.

The Launch Operator License allows for multiple launches of the Electron launch vehicle from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 2, eliminating the need to obtain individual, launch-specific licenses for every mission and helping to streamline the path to orbit and enable responsive space access from U.S. soil.

The company hopes to do its first launch from the U.S. before the year is out. It will then have two spaceports, allowing it to double its launch rate.

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SpaceX attempting another Starship hop today

9:15 am

Capitalism in space: Engineers at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility in Texas are today preparing the sixth Starship prototype for its first 150 meter hop, the second hop of a Starship prototype overall.

The launch window is anytime between 8 am and 8 pm (Central). I have embedded the livesteam below the fold if you wish to watch. Based on previous attempts, they will try for a morning launch before noon, and if there are issues they will recycle and try again in the afternoon.
» Read more

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Northrop Grumman successfully tests SLS solid rocket booster

9:03 am

Northrop Grumman yesterday successfully test fired a solid rocket booster to confirm its design for use on NASA’s long-delayed and overbudget SLS rocket.

The test, completed at the T97 test area at Northrop Grumman‘s facility in Promontory, Utah, took place on Wednesday, September 2, 2020, at 1:05 PM Mountain Daylight Time (19:05 UTC). A single five-segment SLS solid rocket motor with a thrust of up to 3.6 million pounds was ignited, and burned for approximately two minutes.

The booster is an expanded version of the solid rocket boosters used on the space shuttle, with five segments instead of four, and in fact will use previously flown segments from past shuttle launches. Since this booster will not be recovered, these launches will be the last time those segments fly.

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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 successfully launches 60 Starlink satellites

8:52 am

Falcon 9 1st stage after landing

Capitalism in space: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket this morning successfully launched another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit.

It also successfully landed its first stage, the second time this stage has done so.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

20 China
15 SpaceX
9 Russia
4 ULA
4 Europe (Arianespace)

The U.S now leads China in the national rankings 24 to 20.

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Arianespace’s Vega rocket successfully launches 53 satellites

9:02 pm

Capitalism in space: Arianespace’s Vega rocket tonight finally resumed commercial operations more than a year after a July 2019 launch failure, successfully placing 53 small commercial satellites into orbit.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

20 China
14 SpaceX
9 Russia
4 ULA
4 Europe (Arianespace)

The U.S.’s lead over China in the national rankings remains at 23 to 20.

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COVID-19 numbers surge after mask mandate in Hawaii

5:45 pm

More evidence masks are a very bad idea: Soon after Hawaii imposed new rules requiring masks both indoor and outdoor, the number of Wuhan virus cases and hospitalizations zoomed upwards.

Just like in the Philippines and Peru, Hawaii’s government has imposed a long, strict lockdown and has never emerged from it beyond a modified phase one reopening. Additionally, the state has had an indoor mask mandate in place since April 20 and an outdoor mandate (even while jogging!) since July 7. It is the model for what the political elites believe to be the key to stopping the spread. Yet the results are the same as they have been in every place that tried to put up a cloth in front of the inexorable spread of viral particles that can only be seen with an electron microscope.

As [indicated by the graph], Hawaii’s daily case count grew more than tenfold in July and August. All along, state officials thought they were steering this ship cleanly throughout the spring and that their draconian efforts avoided the spread of the virus. Instead, it has become clear that the virus simply arrives at southern latitudes several months later and spreads for six to eight weeks, as it does everywhere else. [emphasis mine]

I must emphasize what the author notes, that Hawaii is the most isolated U.S. state with one of the most stringent lock down and quarantine rules for visitors. Basically entering Hawaii has become difficult if not impossible, and if you do go you are required to quarantine for weeks.

Yet, as soon as they required masks, the disease’s spread accelerated.

Masks are fake science. Not only is there no solid science proving they are a benefit, the data clearly shows that if used improperly (which the general public is doing routinely) they are unsanitary and will easily promote infection and the spread of pathogens.

This data from Hawaii also proves the utter pointlessness of the lock downs. Even on this remote island the disease has arrived, and is spreading. This is what these respiratory viruses do. The best way to fight them is let them spread as fast as possible among the young and healthy population, which will easily fight them off and become immune and thus act to choke off any further spread to more vulnerable populations.

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Biggest black hole merger yet detected by gravitational waves

3:30 pm

The uncertainty of science: In May 2020 scientists using the LIGO and VIGO gravitational waves telescopes detected evidence of a merger from two giant black holes, one of which was of a size that according to all theories had been considered “impossible.”

The short gravitational wave signal, GW190521, captured by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave observatories in the United States and Europe on 21 May last year, came from two highly spinning, mammoth black holes weighing in at a massive 85 times and 66 times the mass of the Sun, respectively.

But that is not the only reason this system is very special. The larger of the two black holes is considered `impossible’. Astronomers predict that stars between 65 – 130 times the mass of the Sun undergo a process called pair instability, resulting in the star being blown apart, leaving nothing behind.

With a mass of 85 solar masses, the larger black hole falls squarely in that forbidden range, referred to as the upper black hole mass gap, and should be `impossible’.

The explanation the scientists propose is that this black hole initially formed with a mass smaller than 65 solar masses, and then sucked in matter, including a possible additional black hole merger, that raised its weight to 85 solar masses.

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The longest lava tube in the solar system?

9:19 am

A lava tube on Mars
Click for full image.

Before I delve into today’s cool image, I think it important to explain to my readers why I seem to post so many cool images from Mars. The simple explanation is that Mars right now is where almost all the cutting edge planetary research is taking place, and as a science journalist focused on space exploration I must go to that cutting edge. My dear readers know that I love variety (just consider the evening pauses on Behind the Black), but you can’t ignore the reporting of real discoveries simply to increase the diversity of one’s posts. This is too often what modern news outlets do, which is also why they often miss the real story.

Anyway, today’s cool image to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, shows only a small section of what might be the longest lava tube in the entire solar system. Taken on May 5, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows a string of pits along a meandering depression coming down the northwest flank of the giant volcano Arsia Mons. The image was a follow-up to a July 2014 photo of the same location, and was taken to produce a stereo pair.

The feature strongly suggests a lava tube, with the pits being skylights into the meandering underground void. From top to bottom this section of the tube is a little over three miles long. Since there are lava tubes on Earth far longer, this one image hardly makes this the longest tube in the solar system.

The tube, however, extends off the image both at the bottom and at the top. Not many high resolution images have been taken in this area, so it is therefore hard to say how far the tube extends. Other nearby high resolution images in this area however have found similar lava tubes, which conceivably could be part of the same tube. The overview map below shows the relationship.
» Read more

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Musk gives update on Starship/Super Heavy

8:11 am

Capitalism in space: During a phone conversation at a conference earlier this week, SpaceX founder Elon Musk gave an update on the development of Starship/Super Heavy, intended to be the first completely reusable rocket.

He did not reveal much that isn’t already known but his broad overview is helpful for understand what is happening at the company’s development facility in Boca Chica, Texas. One detail of note:

Asked on Monday when SpaceX might perform the first orbital Starship launch and re-entry, Musk replied: “Probably next year.”

“I hope we do a lot of flights,” Musk continued. “The first ones might not work. This is uncharted territory. Nobody has ever made a fully reusable orbital rocket. So just having that at all is pretty significant.”

Musk also said that they plan to do a lot of orbital flights before upgrading the ship for humans. I think his experience with Dragon has influenced him on this score.

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COVID-19 illnesses after half million people attend Sturgis rally: almost none

10:24 pm

Can we please put aside our fear? Almost two weeks after about a half a million people attended the Sturgis motorcyle rally in South Dakota (an event that spanned ten days), only three hospitalizations from COVID-19 have been linked to this event, and two of those have already recovered.

I can only find confirmation of three hospitalizations at this point in the reporting. Two of the patients have confirmed discharges indicating they will fully recover. Since they had symptoms and developed them within fourteen days of the rally, contracting the virus during their travels or attendance seems likely. By way of contrast, there were four fatal crashes at the Sturgis event that killed five people.

Even using the largest number of positive tests and granting they all 222 resulted from rally attendance, 0.048% of attendees and contacts tested positive for COVID-19. Some states have done contact-tracing on people who tested positive post-rally and included those individuals in their reporting.

You won’t see this reported in the media nationally. It is too much good news. If almost half a million people can gather for an event that spans 10 days with this outcome, it puts their COVID-19 panic porn to rest.

If you saw any videos from this rally, you saw that most people were not social distancing, were not wearing masks, and were having a darn good time.

COVID-19 is not dangerous. You won’t get it easily, or if you do, you are likely not to even know. And if you do get sick, you will almost certainly recover, like the flu. The only people who should be concerned about the virus are those with other serious illnesses who likely should not attend such large events anyway.

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