Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
European engineers have finalized the landing site on Comet 67P/C-G for Rosetta’s Philae lander.
The link includes much detail about what Philae will do both on the way down as well as after it lands. November 12 will be quite exciting.
Scientists have released the first results from NASA’s MAVEN probe orbiting Mars, designed to study that planet’s upper atmosphere.
As expected, the spacecraft has quickly found evidence of the Martian atmosphere leaking away into space.
Hydrogen appears to be leaving the planet’s atmosphere in clumps and streams that reach about 10 Mars radii into space, said Mike Chaffin, a MAVEN scientist also at the University of Colorado, who discussed the results at a 14 October news briefing. The hydrogen comes from water vapour that breaks apart in the upper atmosphere; because hydrogen is so much lighter than oxygen, it escapes into space relatively easily. “That’s effectively removing water from the Martian atmosphere,” says Chaffin.
Other images show oxygen and carbon drifting away from the planet, although these heavier atoms cluster closer to Mars than hydrogen. Deep within the atmosphere, oxygen forms ozone molecules that accumulate near Mars’s south pole.
I will be doing the first hour with George Noory on Coast to Coast tonight, talking about space and science stuff. Should be fun, as always.
Link here. The analysis is precise, honest, and educated. It is also beyond worrisome, especially with the childish, shallow-minded and politically-correct crowd we are presently stuck with in the White House.
All five points are frightening, but the worst might be #3, as it will likely lead to many more horrific beheadings of Americans.
Fascists: The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding that pastors hand in any sermons on the subjects of homosexuality, gender identity or the city’s first openly gay mayor Annise Parker or be held in contempt of court.
Among those slapped with a subpoena is Steve Riggle, the senior pastor of Grace Community Church. He was ordered to produce all speeches and sermons related to Mayor Annise Parker, homosexuality and gender identity. The mega-church pastor was also ordered to hand over “all communications with members of your congregation” regarding the non-discrimination law. “This is an attempt to chill pastors from speaking to the cultural issues of the day,” Riggle told me. “The mayor would like to silence our voice. She’s a bully.”
The only reason the city government and the mayor are demanding these sermons is to silence their opponents. Their actions are blatant violations of the first amendment and the freedom of speech, and are an effort to oppress any opposition to their own personal political agendas.
Finding out what’s in it: Because of the high cost and high deductibles of Obamacare-mandated health insurance plans, 25% of Americans now believe they can no longer afford healthcare.
That any of these Americans are even considering voting Democratic in any future election is shameful. They conceived it, they wrote it, and then they shoved it down our throats, in one of the most partisan maneuvers ever seen in these United States. Until the Democratic party moves to fix the problems caused by this monstrous law — mostly by repealing it — they do not deserve the support of anyone.
This article is a nice overview of Bigelow’s planned inflatable module for ISS, due to launch next year, and includes some good images.
I found this paragraph especially intriguing:
Earlier this year, Bigelow announced how much it’ll cost you to spend some time inside the BA 330 when it launches. Expect to pay $25 million for a sixty day lease of one-third of the station — if you can get yourself there and back. Should you need a ride, round-trip taxi service between SpaceX and your local launching pad will run you an additional $26.5 million.
That’s a total cost of just over $50 million for a sixty day stay in space.
By reanalyzing the data that had recorded the fireball twenty years ago, a team of meteorite hunters in the Czech Republic have finally located the remains of a meteorite that landed in 1991 but could not be found.
What is most interesting scientifically about their find is that the pieces they found were from different types of meteorites.
[T]hese four meteorites are of three different mineralogical types. This means that the Benešov meteoroid was heterogeneous and contained at least three different types of material. After the Almahata Sitta fall, this is the second time that such a heterogeneous composition has been found. It raises the possibility that a significant fraction of all asteroids are heterogeneous and that they were strongly reprocessed by collisions with other asteroids in the main belt.
In other words, the meteorite had been a conglomerate of different geological types, which were created in different environments and were later smashed together to form this one rock.
When a reporter arrived at the Democratic campaign office of Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper to pick up copies of the candidate’s income tax records, already released to other more friendly news agencies, he was escorted from the building and threatened with arrest.
A very detailed and accurate description of the disaster that is Obamacare. Key sentence:
Over the next couple of years, I will lose my doctor, I will lose my plan and my healthcare costs will increase.
Read it all, and remember that this disaster is coming to all of us in the coming years. Note also that just because the Obama administration is delaying the release of next year’s ballooning health insurance premiums until just after the election does not require us to be stupid and to make believe these increases aren’t going to happen. They are, because the design of Obamacare rations treatment, imposes unneeded costs on everyone, and stifles the free market (which is the best tool for keeping costs down).
And then there’s this: “Grim milestone: Semi-retired president plays 200th round of golf in office.”
A NASA internal document obtained by Aviation Week outlines the agency’s reasons for rejecting Sierra Nevada and its Dream Chaser spacecraft in its commercial manned space program.
Although the document praises Sierra’s “strong management approach to ensure the technical work and schedule are accomplished,” it cautions that the company’s Dream Chaser had “the longest schedule for completing certification.” The letter also states that “it also has the most work to accomplish which is likely to further extend its schedule beyond 2017, and is most likely to reach certification and begin service missions later than the other ‘Offerors’.”
Discussing costs, Gerstenmaier says that “although SNC’s [Sierra Nevada] price is lower than Boeing’s price, its technical and management approaches and its past performance are not as high and I see considerably more schedule risk with its proposal. Both SNC and SpaceX had high past performance, and very good technical and management approaches, but SNC’s price is significantly higher than SpaceX’s price.”
The document essentially was written, and probably leaked to the press now, to justify the political decision to give the contracts to Boeing and SpaceX. Thus, it waxes very enthusiastic about Boeing, since giving Boeing the contract, with the highest price and the least metal cut, needs some justification.
New data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter suggests that lunar volcanism petered out slowly and occurred more recently that previously believed.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has provided researchers strong evidence the moon’s volcanic activity slowed gradually instead of stopping abruptly a billion years ago. Scores of distinctive rock deposits observed by LRO are estimated to be less than 100 million years old. This time period corresponds to Earth’s Cretaceous period, the heyday of dinosaurs. Some areas may be less than 50 million years old. Details of the study are published online in Sunday’s edition of Nature Geoscience. “This finding is the kind of science that is literally going to make geologists rewrite the textbooks about the moon,” said John Keller, LRO project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
In a way, this new conclusion is an example of science discovering the obvious. It seems to me quite unlikely that volcanic activity on the Moon would have “stopped abruptly” under any conditions. That’s not how these things work.
After twenty-two months in orbit, on its second space mission, the Air Force plans to bring the X-37B back to Earth this coming Tuesday.
The exact time and date will depend on weather and technical factors, the Air Force said in a statement released on Friday. The X-37B space plane, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle, blasted off for its second mission aboard an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Dec. 11, 2012. The 29-foot-long (9-meter) robotic spaceship, which resembles a miniature space shuttle, is an experimental vehicle that first flew in April 2010. It returned after eight months. A second vehicle blasted off in March 2011 and stayed in orbit for 15 months.
Finding out what’s in it: Health insurance premiums in Iowa and Louisiana will go up from 9 to almost 20 percent next year because of Obamacare.
We know about these brutal increases because state regulators have released the information. Meanwhile, on the Obamacare website the 2015 premiums are being kept secret until after the election. I wonder why.
Greek archeologists exhuming a set of three giant tombs have found what they believe to be the remains of King Philip II, Alexander the Great’s father.
Fascinating research, though a close read of the article reveals many uncertainties with this conclusion.
Link here.
China’s lunar rover Yutu, unable to move since its first few weeks on the moon, is slowly dying.
The rover is currently in good condition and works normally, but its control problem persists, said Yu Dengyun, deputy chief designer of China’s lunar probe mission. “Yutu has gone through freezing lunar nights under abnormal status, and its functions are gradually degrading,” Yu told Xinhua at an exclusive interview. He said that the moon rover and the lander of the Chang’e-3 lunar mission have completed their tasks very well. The rover’s designed lifetime is just three months, but it has survived for over nine.
As China’s first planetary rover mission, the limited roving success of Yutu is well balanced by its ability to continue functioning on the lunar survey for so long. The engineering data obtained from this mission will serve Chinese engineers well as they plan future missions.
Virgin Galactic officials outline the status of SpaceShipTwo, suggesting that powered flight tests are finally about to begin.
Providing a rare glimpse of progress on a second spacecraft under assembly at sister organization, The Spaceship Co., Virgin Galactic Vice President of Operations Mike Moses says, “we are ready for space.” A former NASA launch integration manager for the space shuttle, Moses adds that SS2 “has been in modification, getting retrofitted ready to resume powered flights.” He notes that “those are going to start imminently—literally very imminently.”
Commenting on the extensive gap between now and the last rocket flight in January, Moses says, “It might seem a long time since our last powered flight-testing and that maybe nothing has been happening, but [ground testing] has been happening.” Tests have largely focused on ground-firings of a hybrid rocket motor fueled with polyamide-based plastic in place of the hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene, a form of rubber used for the first series of powered tests. Although this fuel had been used successfully in SpaceShipOne, the vehicle developer Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic encountered fuel-burn stability and power issues as they tried to scale the Sierra Nevada Corp.-provided hybrid motor up to the size required by the larger SS2.
It appears my guess was right and that the last two glide tests were to retrofit SpaceShipTwo for the new fuel and engine. This has now been accomplished, and they are preparing to begin powered flight tests.
The article also describes work on a second SpaceShipTwo, which when completed will give Virgin Galactic the beginnings of a fleet of ships.
The uncertainty of science: New more robust measurements by Australian astronomers has shown that the amount of dark matter in the Milky Way galaxy is about half of what previous measurements had estimated.
Without doubt something is causing the outer stars in galaxies to orbit their galaxies at much greater speeds than they should. The answer that astronomers have posited since the late 1950s is that there is additional unidentified mass, dubbed dark matter, lurking as a halo around each galaxy, pulling on those outer stars and making them move faster.
The problem remains that no one has as yet detected this unidentified dark matter. Moreover, there are enormous uncertainties in the measurements of the motions of stars. This result helps narrow those uncertainties.
The most transparent administration ever: The EPA has admitted that text messages demanded in a lawsuit, which the agency is required by law to retain, have been lost.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told a federal court that it may have lost the text messages at the center of a lawsuit by a libertarian think tank.The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sued the EPA last year in federal court to compel the release of text messages to and from Administrator Gina McCarthy and her predecessor under the Freedom of Information Act. In the Tuesday filing to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Justice Department lawyers representing the EPA said the agency will soon file a notice that it may have misplaced records that it was legally required to retain.
It seems pretty clear that the Obama administration has decided to follow the same playbook with all its many scandals: stonewall and coverup, legally or illegally.
