Hope completes first course correction on trip to Mars

3:24 pm

The new colonial movement: The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Mars Hope orbiter has successfully completed its first course correction on its journey to Mars.

The success of this maneuver is a big deal, as it appears it was controlled from the UAE’s control center by its engineers. Up to now this project has mostly been a joint U.S/UAE project, launched by Japan, with U.S. universities doing the heavy lifting while training UAE personnel. Now the UAE engineers are in charge, and so they have to get it right.

They have another half dozen course corrections scheduled before arrival in February 2021, when the spacecraft will have its big maneuver, entering Martian orbit.

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Another SLS screw-up related to Europa Clipper

3:16 pm

Despite being required for years by a legal congressional mandate to use SLS to launch Europa Clipper to the moon of Jupiter, NASA engineers have suddenly discovered unspecified “compatibility issues” that might make use of the rocket problematic.

At an Aug. 17 meeting of NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said the Europa Clipper mission had recently discovered compatibility issues involving the Space Launch System, the vehicle preferred by Congress to launch the spacecraft. “There have been some issues that have been uncovered just recently,” she said of the use of SLS for Europa Clipper. “We are in a lot of conversations right now with human exploration and others within the agency about what kind of steps we can take going forward.”

She did not elaborate on the compatibility issues regarding SLS. Such issues, industry sources say, likely involve the environment the spacecraft would experience during launch, such as vibrations. That environment would be very different for Europa Clipper, a relatively small spacecraft encapsulated within a payload fairing, than for the Orion spacecraft that will be the payload for most SLS launches.

“We are currently working to identify and resolve potential hardware compatibility issues and will have more information once a full analysis has been conducted,” NASA spokesperson Alana Johnson said in an Aug. 18 statement to SpaceNews. “Preliminary analysis suggests that launching Clipper may require special hardware adjustments, depending on the launch vehicle.”

This is a joke. It is also absurd and disgusting. Finally, it is also par for the course for NASA and all of today’s government, at all levels. They can’t do anything competently. From the beginning Europa Clipper was mandated to fly on SLS. And yet, they didn’t design the two to be compatible?

Based on this example we should of course demand that the government and these bureaucrats be given more power and more control over our lives. Of course.

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Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

Majestic dunes on Mars

11:26 am

Beautiful dunes on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on May 10, 2020, and shows the dune field inside a large unnamed sixty-mile-wide crater in the highlands of Mars.

Scientists have been using MRO to monitor this site to track both dust devils and dune changes since at least 2009. In 2009 the focus was on the numerous dust devil tracks, and in fact I posted in March 2020 a comparison of an earlier image with a more recent picture, showing how the earlier tracks had vanished in recent pictures, probably wiped clean by the global dust storm in 2018.

This time however I am less interested in the science, which I covered in detail in that previous post, but in the beauty of these dunes. They are large and majestic, and the color strip tells us that they exhibit striking colors of green, gold, and tan. Is there a place on Earth with dunes of such colors? If so, it is rare.

Make sure you click on the image to see the full resolution photograph. It is even more breath-taking.

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Tiny asteroid sets record for closest fly-by of Earth

9:10 am

Astronomers using the robotic Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at the Palomar Observatory in California on August 16 spotted a tiny asteroid just after it had zipped past the Earth at a distance of only 1,830 miles, the closest any asteroid has ever been seen to do so without hitting the ground.

Asteroid 2020 QG is about 10 to 20 feet (3 to 6 meters) across, or roughly the size of an SUV, so it was not big enough to do any damage even if it had been pointed at Earth; instead, it would have burned up in our planet’s atmosphere.

“The asteroid flew close enough to Earth that Earth’s gravity significantly changed its orbit,” says ZTF co-investigator Tom Prince, the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Physics at Caltech and a senior research scientist at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. Asteroids of this size that fly roughly as close to Earth as 2020 QG do occur about once a year or less, but many of them are never detected.

The ability to spot these things is continuing to improve, though it does not appear they have yet obtained enough information to predict 2020 QG’s full orbit, or when or if it will return.

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Conscious Choice cover

Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!

From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society.

 

All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.

Conservative firebrand Loomer easily wins Republican primary

9:25 pm

A good sign: Conservative firebrand and outsider Laura Loomer easily won her Republican primary today in Florida, beating five opponents by a large margin.

Loomer gained prominence on social media over the past few years for a number of stunts, including handcuffing herself to Twitter’s headquarters to protest her suspension from the platform and hopping the fence at Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s house to protest immigration. In addition to her suspension from Twitter, Loomer has also been suspended from GoFundMe, Facebook, Uber, and Lyft.

After being suspended from multiple platforms, Loomer’s campaign message was that of free speech, “making America safe again,” and the Second Amendment. With the help of large donors, Loomer raised more than $1 million while campaigning.

She will now face the Democratic incumbent, Lois Frankel, in the November election.

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Leaving Earth cover

Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.

If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.

 

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

 
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke

Mars: A small volcano at the base of a big volcano

1:31 pm

Volcanic vent near Pavonis Mons
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image is of a recent high resolution image taken on May 30, 2020 by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of what they label as a volcanic vent near Pavonis Mons, the middle giant volcano in the string of three that sit between Olympus Mons, the biggest Martian volcano in the solar system, and Valles Marineris, the biggest canyon in the solar system.

MRO took a previous picture of this vent back in 2010, when they labeled it instead a “small volcano.” Both labels are essentially correct. The two depressions here clearly were a vent for lava at some point in the past. The depressions also fit the definition of a small volcano, as they sit at a high point with two rills flowing down from them. In some ways they could be considered small calderas at the top of a volcano.
» Read more

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Stanford drops basic admissions tests for applicants

9:09 am

The coming dark age: Stanford University has chosen to eliminate the requirement that applicants take basic admissions tests as part of their application process.

This includes the MCAT test for medical students and the GRE for physics students. The administration made the decision because of the restrictions being imposed on society due to COVID-19.

What this means of course is that the education standards required of doctors and engineers at this school will now decline. They will simply know less about their fields, because Stanford will not require them to learn it.

However, I am sure Stanford will make sure these future doctors and physicists will be able to explain white privilege and the all-compassing existence of racial and gender bigotry in every procedure they do. Without question. What’s more important, learning how to be a good doctor or condemning the imagined past evils of America?

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Rocket Lab planning private Venus mission

8:33 am

Capitalism in space: According to its founder and CEO Peter Beck, the smallsat rocket company Rocket Lab is now planning a private Venus mission to be launched in 2023.

The 2023 mission will employ Rocket Lab’s two-stage Electron booster and Photon satellite bus. The 57-foot-tall (17 meters) Electron is a viable option for interplanetary missions now, thanks to recent advances in battery technology that boost the performance of the rocket’s Rutherford engines. With that improvement, Electron is now capable of lofting up to 660 lbs. (300 kilograms) of payload to low-Earth orbit instead of 500 lbs. (225 kg), Rocket Lab representatives have said.

“It opens the window for Venus, and it opens the window for recovery,” Beck said. (The company is working to recover and reuse the Electron’s first stage. Returning boosters will make guided re-entries to Earth’s atmosphere, which will require more fuel, which in turn will require more powerful engines to get the added weight off the ground.)

Photon, which has yet to make its spaceflight debut, won’t descend into Venus’ sulfurous skies on the coming mission. The current plan calls for the spacecraft to deploy one or more smaller probes into the planet’s atmosphere, Beck wrote in a Twitter post on Aug. 4.

There is a certain irony here, if Beck launches a private interplanetary science mission ahead of Elon Musk. Musk created the rocket company SpaceX expressly because he wanted to do a private science mission to Mars and needed an affordable rocket to do it. Since then he has been so focused on making that rocket company succeed he has not devoted any effort to that initial science mission concept. Beck, who came much later, now appears set to beat Musk to this first milestone.

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SpaceX launches three commercial plus more Starlink satellites

8:18 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully launched three commercial Earth reconnaissance satellites plus another 58 Starlink satellites.

They have now put 653 Starlink satellites into orbit.

The first stage, which was flying a record sixth time, successfully landed on its platform in the Atlantic. They also caught one of the fairing halves, and are retrieving the second half out of the ocean. Both fairings were also reused.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

19 China
13 SpaceX
9 Russia
4 ULA

The U.S. now leads China 21 to 19 in the national rankings.

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More data from Sweden demonstrates failure of lock downs everywhere else

7:06 pm

Link here. Sweden imposed almost no rules when the Wuhan virus arrived. And though Sweden’s death toll was higher than many other places, consider this:

Of the 5,783 deaths, how many do you think were of people under the age of 40-years-old? 20%? 10%? No. Not even close. In Sweden, 26 people under the age of 40-years-old have died from COVID-19. That means less than one-half of one percent of the deaths associated with the coronavirus were of people younger than middle age. What’s more is that they have now essentially flattened the curve completely to the point that they often report zero deaths on any given day. [emphasis in original]

Also, only one school-age child died. Only one.

This is not a disease to be feared if you are healthy, especially if you are healthy and young. We should stop panicking.

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