Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

Maricopa County election board defies state subpoenas

December 18, 2020 2:18 pm Robert Zimmerman

And they expect the public to trust them? The election board of Maricopa County has decided to defy the subpoenas issued by the state’s legislature for getting a full audit of its election results, and will instead file a lawsuit against those legislators.

It seems to me that if there was nothing wrong with the Dominion tabulators and the count, than the board would welcome this audit. That they are stonewalling it is if anything evidence that there is likely something they are hiding.

We have now reached the Rubicon. Are our elected officials truly in charge, or are they to be ordered around by unelected bureaucrats like mere serfs? If the state legislature and the governor does not act here, then they are no more than figureheads, and we are now ruled by fiat, by the bureaucracy. Arizona does not have a democracy ruled by law any longer.

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Subaru Telescope photographs Hayabusa-2’s next target asteroid

December 18, 2020 2:09 pm Robert Zimmerman

In order to better constrain its orbit, the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii has obtained new photographs of Hayabusa-2’s next target asteroid, 100-foot-wide 1998 KY26.

This asteroid is predicted to approach to within 0.47 AU of Earth in mid to late December 2020, giving us a rare opportunity that comes only once every three and a half years. However, the diameter of 1998 KY26 is estimated to be no more than 30 meters, and thus its brightness is so dim that ground-based observations of the asteroid are difficult without a very large telescope.

The observations with the Subaru Telescope were conducted upon the request of the Institute for Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), JAXA. And as a result, 1998 KY26 was photographed in the direction of the constellation Gemini as a 25.4-magnitude point of light with a measurement uncertainty of 0.7 mag. The positional data collected during these observations will be used to improve the accuracy of the orbital elements of the asteroid. Similar observations were conducted with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

If all goes right Hayabusa-2 will rendezvous with 1998 KY26 in the summer of 2031.

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NASA decides to fly Orion with failed power unit

December 18, 2020 1:59 pm Robert Zimmerman

Because a repair would delay the first SLS launch for months if not a year, NASA has decided to fly Orion on that November ’21 mission with failed electronics power unit.

In a Dec. 17 statement, NASA said it had decided to “use as is” one of eight power and data units (PDU) on the Orion spacecraft, which provide communications between the spacecraft’s computers and other components. One of two redundant channels in one of two communications cards in that PDU is not working.

…NASA, in its statement about deciding not to replace the PDU, did not go into details about the repair options, but said that the risks of damaging the spacecraft during the PDU repair outweighed any loss of data should the unit completely malfunction.

Engineers, the agency stated, “determined that due to the limited accessibility to this particular box, the degree of intrusiveness to the overall spacecraft systems, and other factors, the risk of collateral damage outweighed the risk associated with the loss of one leg of redundancy in a highly redundant system.”

“NASA has confidence in the health of the overall power and data system, which has been through thousands of hours of powered operations and testing,” the agency added, noting that the PDU in question was still “fully functional.”

Let’s then assess Orion. The contract was issued to Lockheed Martin in 2006. In the fourteen years since Congress has spent about $17 billion on this manned capsule. In that time it has flown once, during a test flight that was intended to test its heat shield, even though when that flight happened NASA had already decided that it was not going to use the heat shield design it was testing.

Orion’s second flight in November ’21 will be unmanned, but it will be flying with this failed unit. The next time it is supposed to fly will be in ’24, when NASA is hoping to send astronauts on a lunar landing missions. By that time NASA will have spent about $20 billion on Orion, and gotten two test capsules (both unrepresentative of the flight model) plus one manned mission.

Would you fly on this capsule under these circumstances? I wouldn’t, especially considering the non-track record of its rocket, SLS.

As the taxpayer, do you think you’ve gotten your money’s worth from this capsule? I don’t. I think it has been an ungodly waste of money, and a demonstration of the incapability of NASA and the big space contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin of getting anything accomplished. Depend on them, and you will never go anywhere.

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Dominion CEO responds to Antrim audit in hearing

December 18, 2020 1:05 pm Robert Zimmerman

All trust is lost: John Poulos, the CEO of Dominion, the company that provided the software and tabulators used to count ballots in numerous states and which have been accused of being unreliable and subject to vote tampering, responded to those charges in a legislative hearing in Michigan.

Poulos told legislators in Michigan via video link on Dec. 15 that his company’s machines and software were not involved in any “switched or deleted votes.” He said that because of a rule change, the machine programming needed to be updated in October. But Antrim County officials failed to update all 18 tabulators, meaning some had new programming while some still had the old programming.

Officials then forgot to conduct the logic and accuracy tests on the programming, he said. A third error took place when a contracting firm in October programmed the tabulators in a way that allowed memory cards with both the old and new programming to count votes. “If all of the tabulators had been updated as per procedure, there wouldn’t have been any error in the unofficial reporting,” he said.

Poulos also said any discrepancies with the counts from its machines can be investigated by referencing paper ballots and insisted that all audits and recounts of Dominion technology used in the 2020 election have “validated the accuracy and reliability” of the election results. “No one has produced credible evidence of vote fraud or vote switching on Dominion systems because these things have not occurred,” he insisted.

In the normal civilized America that once existed, I would be more prone to believe him. Considering the four years of outright lying that Democratic Party officials and their supporters have subjected us to, from a Russian collusion hoax to a fake Ukrainian impeachment of Trump to endless lies relating to COVID-19 lock downs to lying about the actual spying on Trump by the Obama administration to lying to the FISA court to obtain fake warrants to lying about Brett Kavanaugh and others, it is unreasonable for anyone to trust this man’s word. It is worthless.

And my opinion in this is not alone. Consider this response to his testimony by one Michigan Republican leader:

Linda Lee Tarver, president of the Republican Women’s Federation of Michigan and former election integrity liaison in the Michigan Secretary of State’s Office, said Thursday that Dominion chief John Poulos’s recent testimony left more questions unanswered than it clarified.

Tarver, who testified at a Michigan election integrity hearing on Dec. 2, said Poulos’s Dec. 15 testimony to lawmakers boiled down to reiterating that “human error” was to blame for an initial Election Day vote discrepancy in Michigan’s Antrim County, where Dominion products were used.

She said some of the questions that Poulos did not address include whether poll workers received proper training on the Dominion system, concerns about whether vote tabulators could use a USB stick to add votes to a candidate, and how prone Dominion systems are to hacking. Tarver also said chain-of-custody questions remained unanswered, and raised concerns about the ability of Dominion machines to connect to the Internet. Poulos confirmed that a small percentage of Dominion machines have Internet connectivity.

The only way to satisfy Republicans that the vote was honest is to allow a full and careful audit by their elected officials, to prove no fraud took place. Of course Democrats should be allowed to participate and question everything, but under no circumstances can they be allowed to dictate any terms on such an audit.

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Terraced mesas in Martian crater

December 18, 2020 12:38 pm Robert Zimmerman

Click for full resolution image.

The cool image to the right, reduced and annotated to post here, was a captioned photo released by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) science team earlier this week. Taken by MRO’s high resolution camera, it shows in color a beautifully stair-stepped mesa located in an unnamed 22-mile-wide equatorial crater in Arabia Terra, the large transitional zone between the lowland northern plains and the southern cratered highlands. As the caption notes,

Several craters in Arabia Terra are filled with layered rock, often exposed in rounded mounds. The bright layers are roughly the same thickness, giving a stair-step appearance. The process that formed these sedimentary rocks is not yet well understood. They could have formed from sand or volcanic ash that was blown into the crater, or in water if the crater hosted a lake.

If volcanic ash, the layers are signalling a series of equal eruptions of equal duration, which seems unlikely. Water is also puzzling because of the equatorial location. Like yesterday’s mystery cool image, water is only likely here at a time when the red planet’s rotational tilt, its obliquity, was much higher, placing this at a higher latitude than it is today.

Regardless, make sure you look at the full image here. This crater floor is chock-full of more such terraced mesas, some of which are even more striking than the sample above.

I have also posted below the MRO context camera photo of the entire crater.
» Read more

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Pennsylvania: zero or little evidence open gyms or restaurants spread COVID-19

December 18, 2020 10:29 am Robert Zimmerman

Chicken Little report: Pennsylvania health officials in one county admitted today that they have found zero evidence that open gyms spread COVID-19, while with restaurants the only evidence of spread is among restaurant workers, not patrons.

[T]wo local government leaders confirm contract tracing shows these businesses had low incidence of spreading the virus. “We were not able to find transmission in gyms, and we had almost no transmission in restaurants,” Montgomery County Chairwoman Dr. Valerie Arkoosh said at a Wednesday press conference.

There is some incompleteness in the contract tracing, but all the tracing they have done has consistently found no justification for closing gyms or restaurants. This data also confirms other data from other states.

But facts don’t matter to Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party governor, Tom Wolf and his cross-dressing health secretary, “Rachel” Levine, a guy who makes believe he is a woman.

Last week, Wolf and Department of Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine issued new rules saying restaurants could no longer continue with in-person dining or alcohol sales, and “indoor operations at gyms and fitness facilities are prohibited.”

Those rules are set to expire on January 4, but that still amounts to three-and-a-half weeks of what the restaurant industry is calling a de facto shutdown. Restaurants are able to continue with take out and delivery services.

What difference the lock down will destroy lives and ruin businesses? The important thing is to demonstrate the power and majesty of these government officials.

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First flightworthy BE-4 engine delivery now expected in summer ’21

December 18, 2020 9:22 am Robert Zimmerman

Capitalism in space: Tory Bruno, the CEO of ULA, revealed yesterday that Blue Origin will finally deliver two flightworthy BE-4 engines for ULA’s Vulcan rocket this coming summer.

ULA, the Pentagon’s top launch contractor for national security satellites, had initially expected the shipment in 2020 for a debut flight in early 2021, but this was delayed by development hurdles.

The installation of Blue Origin’s reusable BE-4 engines into ULA’s next-generation Vulcan rocket will keep it on track for the debut launch of a moon lander dubbed Peregrine at the end of 2021, ULA Chief Executive Tory Bruno said. The Vulcan rocket has won a slate of key U.S. defense missions through 2027.

“That is now our expectation, that Peregrine will go to space in the 4th quarter of 2021,” Bruno told reporters during a call on Thursday.

Peregrine is a commercial lunar lander being built by Astrobotic for NASA.

More information here.

It appears that ULA thinks the long delay in engine development and delivery from Blue Origin will not delay the planned first launch of Vulcan later in ’21. It appears their long range plan to recover and reuse these engines has caused them to design Vulcan so that they can easily swap out engines, which will allow them to complete that new rocket’s development with the test engines that Blue Origin has already provided, and then switch engines and launch within months.

During Bruno’s press briefing he also noted that they have done a thorough refurbish of the Delta launchpads and have instituted a new policy requiring regular launchpad dress rehearsals, in order to make sure the series of problems that delayed the launch of a Delta-4 Heavy earlier this year will not reoccur.

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ESA confirms cause of November Vega launch failure

December 18, 2020 9:09 am Robert Zimmerman

The European Space Agengy (ESA) has now completed its full investigation of a Vega rocket launch failure in November, and confirmed that the initially announced cause of “human error” was correct.

Engineers had installed cables backwards causing the nozzle in the upper stage to go one way when it should have gone the other.

The press release at the link is a wonder of bureaucratic cover-your-behind gobbly-gook, saying much without providing any concrete information about the corrections imposed. For example, the upper stage structure is built by one company, Airbus, the engine is built by two Russian companies, Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash, while a fourth company, Avio, supervises the stage’s assembly. The press release makes it a point to not tell us where the error was made by which company, though by vague implication it suggests the error occurred during final assembly by Avio.

If I was a satellite company thinking of buying a Vega launch I would demand a much more straight-forward explanation. Otherwise I’d go elsewhere.

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Russia successfully launches another group of OneWeb satellites

December 18, 2020 8:43 am Robert Zimmerman

Russia today successfully launched the first group of OneWeb satellites since that company entered and left bankruptcy, and it did it for the first time from its new Vostochny spaceport.

The Soyuz rocket’s flight path (see the map at the link) also took it for the first time northward over Russia, where it dropped its boosters and stages. No word on whether any villages or homes were hit.

The 36 satellites launched raises OneWeb’s constellation to 110 satellites total.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

33 China
24 SpaceX
15 Russia
6 ULA
6 Rocket Lab

The U.S. continues to lead China 39 to 33 in the national rankings. A SpaceX launch, originally set for yesterday, has been delayed until tomorrow due to an tank pressure issue with its upper stage.

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Ambosspolka

December 17, 2020 6:01 pm Robert Zimmerman

An evening pause: Hat tip Jim Malamace, who correctly notes that “The ‘electric cords’ on the hammers are hilarious and fitting because the hammer impacts actually caused sparks.”

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Astronomers detect radio signal from an exoplanet’s magnetic field

December 17, 2020 5:10 pm Robert Zimmerman

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers using a Netherlands telescope have detected a radio signal coming from an exoplanet 51 light years away that likely comes from the planet’s magnetic field.

The new research actually began at Jupiter; the researchers had previously studied that planet’s radio emissions and then tweaked those measurements to reflect the effect they expected closeness to the host star and distance from Earth would have had on their observations of an exoplanet.

Then, the scientists consulted observations made in 2016 and 2017 by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands. In addition to the potential signal from Tau Boötes b, the researchers also report that they may have picked up a signal from the star Upsilon Andromedae or its planet, but that detection was even fainter than the one from Tau Boötes b.

Obviously, there are many uncertainties with this data. However, if scientists can begin to measure and characterize the magnetic field of exoplanets it will give them an important new data point for studying them.

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Lockdowns likely leading to an increase in suicides among the young

December 17, 2020 4:53 pm Robert Zimmerman

According to new research, the lockdowns that have shuttered all school sports are likely leading to an increase in youth suicides, even as the death rate for young people from COVID-19 is virtually nil.

The article at the link refers to a Washington Post article, which stated:

A survey of high school athletes conducted by the University of Wisconsin this summer found that approximately 68 percent of the 3,243 teens polled have reported feelings of anxiety and depression at levels that typically require medical intervention — nearly 40 percent higher than past studies. The study, which also found that physical activity levels were 50 percent lower for kids than before the pandemic, was labeled “striking and concerning” by one researcher.

The lead researcher of the study at Wisconsin, Tim McGuine, said in an interview in August that “the greatest risk [to student-athletes] is not covid-19. It’s suicide and drug use.”

From the earliest available data in March it was clear that there was no medical reason to shut down the schools (some countries never did and their children did not suffer for it). Since then this early data has been confirmed repeatedly.

Thus, the only reason to shut the schools and youth sports was an expression of unbridled power and panic by elected leaders not interested in data but very much interested in having control over everyone’s lives. Furthermore, that expression of power was not really interested in saving lives in the least, because if it was by this time these corrupt leaders would have rethought their policy and not only opened up the schools but would have ended many of their irrational lock down policies. Instead, they have been doubling down.

And if you don’t think these shutdowns are irrational and merely an expression of power, consider this: In Ohio the government has ruled that high school wrestlers can grapple and fight, but if they dare shake hands after the match they will be violating social distancing rules.

But it’s “SCIENCE!” they scream! I say, they are liars, both to us and to themselves.

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Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.