Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

ULA pinpoints cause of Delta launch abort, reschedules launch

September 10, 2020 2:58 pm Robert Zimmerman

ULA has identified the cause of the launch abort of its Delta 4 Heavy rocket on August 29th, and has now aiming for a launch no earlier than September 18th.

A torn diaphragm in one of three pressure regulators at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 37 caused the computer-controlled scrub just three seconds before liftoff on Aug. 29, ULA CEO Tory Bruno said via Twitter on Wednesday. The engines briefly lit on fire, but the rocket remained firmly on the pad.

“Torn diaphragm (in the regulator), which can occur over time,” Bruno said. “Verifying the condition of the other two regulators. We will replace or rebuild as needed, re-test, and then resume towards launch.” [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words illustrate the less than stellar old space rocket design that the Delta 4 Heavy represents, and that ULA is perpetuating as long as it uses this rocket. Rather than redesign so that these torn diaphragms will no longer be a problem, it appears they will simply make sure this design is tested and works, for this launch. Thus, this issue has the possibility of reappearing in a future launch.

Wouldn’t it be better to upgrade and eliminate such a problem, for good, once it is identified? That appears to be SpaceX’s strategy, and the consequence is that their rockets and spacecraft get increasingly more reliable with time.

Anyway, if ULA’s schedule holds, it means there will be two launches at Cape Canaveral in less than 24 hours, as SpaceX is aiming for another Starlink launch the day earlier.

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Northrop Grumman shuts down Omega rocket program

September 10, 2020 2:49 pm Robert Zimmerman

Having lost any chance of getting launch contracts or development money from the military for the next five-plus years, Northrop Grumman has chosen to shut down its Omega rocket program.

“We have chosen not to continue development of the OmegA launch system at this time,” Northrop Grumman spokeswoman Jennifer Bowman said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to play a key role in National Security Space Launch missions and leveraging our OmegA investments in other activities across our business.”

Bowman said the company will not be protesting the U.S. Space Force’s decision to select United Launch Alliance and SpaceX for the NSSL contracts.

This was a typical big space Washington project, aimed solely at getting government contracts, as well as government cash to develop it. The company had no interest in trying to develop it with its own R&D funds in order to garner market share in the general launch market, or even to make it cheaper and more useful to the military than SpaceX’s rocket.

In this sense this is no great loss. What we need is real competition, aimed at coming up with better ideas that will lower cost and increase capabilities. What Northrop Grumman was offering was none of those things. It was fake competition, and of no real value.

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Texas sees 400% increase in homeschooling

September 10, 2020 11:42 am Robert Zimmerman

The silver lining? Faced with odious rules and remote zoom classes in the public education system due to fear and terror over the corona virus, Texas parents are choosing to homeschool their children this year, with the numbers rising by 400%.

The spike, the group reported, stems directly from the Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) pandemic schooling guidelines sparking a mass exodus from the public school system as parents opt to teach their children at home over enrolling them in a digitized, remote state-run classroom.

Our government public schools have been corrupted by leftist indoctrination for years, while they have steadily done a worsening job at educating children in the basics. (Witness for example the ignorance exhibited by the Antifa protesters about American history.) Maybe this disaster created by the Wuhan flu panic might have some benefits, such as getting parents more involved once again in their kid’s education, and thus improve it.

Because, based on everything I’ve seen and read about modern public school education and culture, parents really can’t do worse.

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Sharp Martian ridges sticking up from the dust

September 10, 2020 10:35 am Robert Zimmerman

Click for full image.

Today’s cool image brings us back to the region of Mars where the rover Opportunity journeyed. Taken on June 25, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance orbiter (MRO), the photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, focuses on some sharp but low ridges that appear to stick up out of the Martian dust, hinting that they are the tops of some larger feature buried over the eons and only now revealed partly by recent erosion. I estimate that their height is roughly one to two hundred feet or so.

This image is in Arabia Terra, the widest and largest transitional zone region between the northern lowland plains and the southern cratered highlands. It is also only about 200 miles north of where Opportunity landed, and about 230 miles from where it died after almost fifteen years of operation, on the west rim of Endeavour Crater. The overview map below gives the context.
» Read more

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“We quarantined the healthy, and we exposed the sick.”

September 10, 2020 9:30 am Robert Zimmerman

According to Jay Bhattacharya, director of both the Program on Medical Outcomes and the Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging at Stanford University, the decisions made by most governments during the past six months in reaction to the Wuhan virus made no sense, and actually acted to worsen the epidemic.

“We essentially, in effect, exposed people who were at high risk in nursing homes, in assisted care facilities, elderly populations,” Bhattacharya said. “We essentially, in the early days of the epidemic, did the inverse of the right policy.”

“We quarantined the healthy, and we exposed the sick,” he added.

The professor noted that the World Health Organization, early on in the pandemic, suggested that the death rate for the disease might be as high as 3.4%, significantly higher than that of seasonal influenza. Revised estimates have put that rate as low as 0.26%, though some studies have put it closer to 0.5%. [emphasis mine]

The mortality rate for the flu is generally estimated at about 0.1%, so the Wuhan virus is higher, but really not by much. Moreover, these new estimates are much closer to what could have been gleaned from the early data, data that the WHO and many other government health officials ignored in favor of unreliable models. More important however is that, when compared to the flu, the data today suggests that COVID-19 is less dangerous to the healthy population, and a greater risk to the elderly sick, which once again shows that quarantining the healthy population (the lock downs) makes no sense. It only slows the arrival of herd immunity, giving the virus more time to reach the vulnerable population.

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The mystery of rust on the Moon

September 10, 2020 8:40 am Robert Zimmerman

Link here. The data shows that there is rust on the Moon, in an environment lacking oxygen and water that should make it impossible for it to form.

Yet the rust is there, in the form of hematite, and in fact the data from India’s first lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1, has found that the Moon’s nearside has much more of it. To explain how it got there the scientists have come up with a complex hypothesis, first requiring the Moon to be shielded from the Sun’s solar wind by the Earth’s magnetic field for part of its orbit, then having that magnet field transport oxygen from the Earth’s upper atmosphere to the Moon.

This oxygen then reacts with the tiny amount of water that some scientists believe Chandrayaan-1 detected scattered in the Moon’s regolith, the equivalent of its topsoil. The result, according to this hypothesis, is that over time that oxygen and water reacted with the surface iron on the Moon’s nearside, facing the Earth, causing it to rust.

The explanation is elegant, and fits the known facts (though the presence of that water in the lunar regolith remains unconfirmed). It is also complex, which should raise doubts. Regardless, the nearside of the Moon appears to have more hematite than the farside, and the formation of that iron oxide remains baffling.

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No coronavirus illnesses after 1,000 HS football games

September 9, 2020 6:49 pm Robert Zimmerman

Why am I not surprised? Despite more than a thousand high school football games across several states in the past month, there have been no COVID-19 outbreaks related to those games, with cases continuing to drop in each state.

Utah, for example, launched youth sports more than five weeks ago. Alabama, Indiana and Tennessee commenced with high school football roughly four weeks ago. Alaska has been allowing games for more than two weeks.

Many have been wondering whether these events would ultimately lead to an increase in COVID-19 cases being spread within communities.

Despite more than a thousand individual games having taken place, no significant recorded outbreaks of COVID-19 have occurred as a result.

Since the very start of the epidemic the evidence strongly told us that young people did not get sick from this virus. Nothing, absolutely nothing, as occurred since to change that initial assessment.

And yet American politicians tremble in terror at the idea of having children return to classrooms, and mandate that little kids wear masks. It is beyond stupid.

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Larkin Poe – Black Betty

September 9, 2020 6:01 pm Robert Zimmerman

An evening pause: Hat tip Cotour.

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A Martian starburst spider

September 9, 2020 12:44 pm Robert Zimmerman

Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, illustrates an example of a wholly unique Martian phenomenon, that is not only unique to Mars but is also found only in its south polar regions. The image was taken on July 17, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

What we are looking at is a permanent spider formation etched into the layered deposits of ice and dirt that cover the widest area surrounding Mars’ south pole. The blue dot just north of Chasma Australe on the overview map below shows the location of these starbursts, on those layered deposits.

Each winter the poles of Mars are blanketed with a thin mantle of dry ice, generally less than six feet thick. When spring arrives and sunlight hits this mantle, it heats the ice and sand on which the mantle lies, and that warmth causes the mantle’s base to sublimate back into gas. Eventually gas pressure causes the mantle to crack at its weak points so the gas can escape. By the time summer arrives that mantle is entirely gone, all of it returning to the atmosphere as CO2 gas.

This sublimation process differs between the north and south pole, due to the different terrain found at each. In the north the mantle mostly lies on ice or sand dunes, neither of which is stable over repeated years. Thus, the mantle weak points do not occur at the exact same place each year, even though they occur at the same type of locations, such as the base and crests of dunes.
» Read more

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The lockdowns were a bad idea and did not work

September 9, 2020 9:44 am Robert Zimmerman

Link here. The key quote compares this epidemic with the last two large similar epidemics, and finds this one hardly an issue:

As novelist Lionel Shriver writes, “We’ve never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries.” As I’ve noted, the 1957-58 Asian flu killed between 70,000 and 116,000 Americans, between 0.04 percent and 0.07 percent of the nation’s population. The 1968-70 Hong Kong flu killed about 100,000, 0.05 percent of the population.

The US coronavirus death toll of 186,000 is 0.055 percent of the current population. It will go higher, but it’s about the same magnitude as those two flus, and it has been less deadly to those under 65 than the flus were. Yet there were no statewide lockdowns; no massive school closings; no closings of office buildings and factories, restaurants and museums. No one considered shutting down Woodstock.

He then notes the failures of the lockdowns this time, and its apparently inability to really make much difference in the path of the epidemic, while causing enormous harm to the economy, to the lives of millions, and to many who were denied healthcare for other reasons due to the panic and shut downs.

If only someone had pointed this out back in March.

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Bennu tosses particles from its surface routinely

September 9, 2020 9:26 am Robert Zimmerman

Tracked particles after August 28, 2019 ejection event.

During OSIRIS-REx’s more than twenty months flying close to the Bennu, scientists have found that the asteroid routinely kicks particles from its surface into space, with these events linked to the asteroid’s day-night cycle.

Since arrival the scientists have seen and tracked more than 300 ejection events, with the almost seven hundred objects detected ranging from about an eighth to a half inch in size. Most moved about eight inches per second, comparable to “a beetle scurrying across the ground.”

The image to the right, cropped, reduced, and brightened to post here, comes from the introductory paper of a suite of papers on the subject, published today.

The timing of the events however reveals the most.

As Bennu completes one rotation every 4.3 hours, boulders on its surface are exposed to a constant thermo-cycling as they heat during the day and cool during the night. Over time, the rocks crack and break down, and eventually particles may be thrown from the surface. The fact that particle ejections were observed with greater frequency during late afternoon, when the rocks heat up, suggests thermal cracking is a major driver. The timing of the events is also consistent with the timing of meteoroid impacts, indicating that these small impacts could be throwing material from the surface. Either, or both, of these processes could be driving the particle ejections, and because of the asteroid’s microgravity environment, it doesn’t take much energy to launch an object from Bennu’s surface.

The link includes a cool movie showing the ejections events and the tracked paths of the ejected particles.

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NASA solicits lunar landers to bid on bringing science instruments to Moon

September 9, 2020 8:56 am Robert Zimmerman

UPDATE: It appears I misunderstood the nature of this NASA solicitation in my initial post. I have rewritten it to correct it. Hat tip reader Rex Ridenoure.

Capitalism in space: NASA has issued a request from the private companies building unmanned lunar landers to bid on carrying a variety of science instruments to the Moon by ’23.

Initially NASA had indicated it was farming out the design and construction of the lunar landers to private companies, but would have the science instruments designed and built in-house. Since ’19 however NASA has had private companies designing and building these fourteen small science payloads, and is now in the process of determining which private landers will bring them to the Moon.

Though this approach is not very different than past NASA arrangements, what is different is NASA’s public approach. Instead of touting NASA’s part in this work, the agency is touting the work of the private companies.

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