That coronal mass ejection thrown out by the Sun on Sunday is expected to energize the aurora tonight and again on Thursday. Look up at night if you live in the high northern latitudes.
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 you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
"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
Using sonar equipment Canadian archeologists have detected the underwater remains of the British ship Investigator, abandoned in the Canadian archipelago of islands by Captain Robert McClure and his crew in 1853. McClure had been sent out to both find the Northwest Passage as well as locate the missing Franklin expedition. As winter had set in in September 1851, however, McClure had anchored the ship for refuge in a bay he named Mercy Bay on the coast of Banks Island. As Pierre Berton noted in his wonderful history of the exploration of the Arctic in the 1800s, The Arctic Grail, Mercy Bay was not a refuge but “a cul-de-sac in which the crew would be confined for the next two years and from which the ship itself would never be freed.” Now, that ship has been rediscovered after almost 150 years.
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.
“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.
Sand dunes on Mars, from the HiRise camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter:
Fun quote:
These dunes are “barchan” dunes, which are also commonly found on Earth. Barchan dunes are generally crescent-shaped, with their “horns” oriented in the downwind direction. They have a steep slip face (the downwind side of the dune). Barchan dunes form by winds that blow mostly in one direction and thus are good indicators of the dominant wind direction. In this case, the strongest winds blow approximately north to south.
Two new predictions of the upcoming solar maximum were published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint webpage. Both call for a weak solar maximum, with one expecting a sunspot number of 92 at maximum while the other predicting a number of 72.
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.
"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
Three citizens of the United Arab Emirates are now the first non-American citizens to train at the NASA Ames Research Center, with more to come, suggesting that NASA Administrator Charles Bolden really meant it when he said his foremost priority was Muslim outreach.
Ed Driscoll has an excellent summary outlining the sale of Newsweek to the husband of Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-California). Fun quote from headline: Washington Post Unloads Newsweek for $1; Buyer Clearly Overpaid
The first spacewalk to replace the pump module on ISS and thus fix on of the station’s two cooling system is now scheduled for Friday at 6:55 (EDT).
Scientists have found that the methods used to measure frog populations in the U.S. might be flawed, producing many more false positives than expected and thereby overestimating the populations.
The coolant system failure on the International Space Station this weekend and the upcoming spacewalks being planned to fix it is a dramatic and fascinating story, capturing the interest of the general public while causing some news pundits to express fear and dread about science fiction scenerios of disasters in space.
The situation is hardly that death-defying. The station’s cooling systems have a lot of redundancy, all of which are being used to good effect. Moreover, the spacewalk repair to install a replacement pump module, though challenging, is exactly the kind of thing the astronauts have been trained to do. I expect them to do it with few problems. I would be far more surprised if they have serious difficulties and fail to get it done.
What this failure foreshadows, however, is the future on ISS. As the years pass and systems age, » Read more
An evening pause: ABBA, performing Dancing Queen in 18th century costumes for King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.
Talk about stupid: It seems the legal eagles at NASA have shut down a website that featured a variety of webcams, showing NASA missions.
The Met Office in the United Kingdom has issued a report on the state of the climate. In it they state unequivocally that the “world is warming”. Unfortunately, the report fails to address the questions that have been raised about much of the existing climate data, following the climategate scandal.
It appears that McCarthyism and the blacklist are both alive and well, thriving happily in the field of climate research. Key quote:
It is disturbing, to say the least, that organisations and persons who would be quick to claim professional status consider that it is their current duty to disparage, or to refuse to debate with, or to muzzle scientists whose views on climate change they apparently disagree with.
Read the whole article.
More on that failure of the cooling system on ISS. It appears that NASA is gearing up to send two astronauts out for up to two spacewalks to try to fix the problem.
An evening pause: From Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955), a moment of quiet reflection.
War between the elites of our society and everyone else. Key quote:
If this election has a theme, it’s going to be the rejection of the elites and a return to a form of populism with a long streak in American history — the demand of citizens to their government to get the hell out of their lives.
A failure in the cooling system on the International Space Station yesterday has forced the astronauts to shut down some of their systems while ground control troubleshoots the situation.
Undersea adventure by robot. An unmanned probe completed its first dive beneath the Arctic ice this week.
At an airshow on Thursday, July 29, in Oskosh, Wisconsin, Burt Rutan, designer of SpaceShipOne, made some interesting remarks about the past and future of private space flight. Key quote:
Rutan said NASA should give 10 to 15 percent of its budget to new space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX without regulating how to spend the money. “That would allow them to not (have to) beg for commercial investment, while still working in an entrepreneurial mode.”
After more than six years, it appears that the Mars rover Spirit has finally died. The rover was originally designed to only operate 90 days.
An evening pause: We’ve had animated machines and actors pretending to be machines. Now, let’s have a Rube Goldberg machine.
Who are the racists? Readers (and one former editor) respond with dismay because Essence magazine has hired a fashion editor who happens to be white.
