Despite good first images from Euclid, the orbiting telescope has a problem

10:05 am

Even though the first light images from Euclid have been sharp and exactly what astronomers want, the orbiting telescope designed to make a 3D map of billions of galaxies has an issue that will likely put some limits to that map.

When the telescope started booting up, ESA observers were concerned by the appearance of light markings on the first images relayed to Earth. This, it confirmed, was due to sunlight filtering into the telescope, “probably through a tiny gap”.

A correction to Euclid’s position was able to offset this issue. It means that while the ESA is confident Euclid will be fine to proceed with its mapping mission, particular orientations for the telescope may not be possible.

A limitation like this means that the telescope will not being able to look in some directions and get mapping images. Thus, the overall map will have gaps, though it appears at this moment that the scientists think those gaps will not seriously impact the telescope’s overall work. We shall see.

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Update on the technical progress at Boca Chica, preparing for the next Starship/Superheavy orbital test

9:59 am

Link here. Lots of progress had been made in getting the pad and the rocket ready for that next orbital test flight, with the first static fires tests of Superheavy using the launchpad’s new water deluge system are now expected in the coming week.

The company is also preparing additional prototypes of Superheavy and Starship for later orbital tests. even as it upgrades the assembly facilities, replacing temporary tents with actual buildings. More details, including videos, at the link.

Meanwhile, the only word from the FAA about SpaceX’s application for a launch permit has been a warning that it will not issue that permit until it is good and ready, suggesting the company should not expect to launch in August, as I have been predicting for months.

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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 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

August 3, 2023 Quick space links

3:47 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

  • Northrop Grumman to upgrade Cygnus freighter

    • The changes will increase its payload capacity, allow it to dock directly to a port rather than being berthed by a robot arm, and — most importantly — refine is ability to raise ISS’s orbit using its engines. This last capability replaces the Russians, and will be a need that future commercial stations will require.

 

 

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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.

Pushback: Student wins against school officials who tried to suppress her first amendment rights

12:39 pm

Maggie DeJong
Maggie DeJong, fighting back hard and winning

Bring a gun to a knife fight: In April Maggie DeJong, a student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE), sued [pdf] three of the college’s faculty members for attempting in 2022 to both punish her and well as silence her from her first amendment right to speak, simply because some other leftist students complained they did not like her opinions. As I wrote in April when I first reported this story:

These officials issued three “no contact” orders against DeJong, forbidding her to have any contact with three co-students in her program, simply because she had religious and political opinions they disagreed with and did not wish to hear. This orders essentially blacklisted her from the program, because of its small nature, and were literally a priori gag orders on her right to freely express her opinions. The officials also admitted that DeJong had violated no school policy, nor did they provide her any due process before issuing the orders. When challenged by DeJong’s lawyers, the university quickly realized the utter illegality of these orders, and cancelled them.

Unlike most recent cases of blacklisting, DeJong did not sue the university but the individuals involved, making them personally liable. » Read more

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The dry and mountainous terrain west of Jezero Crater

12:00 pm

The dry and mountainous terrain west of Jezero Crater
Click for original image.

Since my earlier update today about Perseverance and Ingenuity mentioned the very diverse and strange geology known to exist west of Jezero Crater and where the rover is eventually headed, I thought it worthwhile to post another cool image of that terrain.

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 22, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled a “terrain sample” image, the location was likely chosen by the camera team in order to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule so that they can maintain its proper temperature. Having a gap that put the spacecraft over this region to the west of Jezero was however a great opportunity to get another look at this rocky, mountainous, and very parched terrain, located in Mars’ very dry equatorial regions.
» Read more

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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

A grateful thank you to all who contributed during July’s fund-raising campaign

11:00 am

My annual July fund-raising campaign for Behind the Black, celebrating the thirteenth anniversary of my first posts back in 2010, has now ended.

This was the second most successful monthly fund-raising campaign ever. Thank you again to everyone who has who donated or subscribed. I would like to email thanks to you all, but there are too many. Please accept this general thank you instead. It is difficult to explain what your support means to me, as it has raised the earnings so far this year to almost match last year’s numbers.

This thank you notice will remain at the top of the page for the next few days. Scroll down for new stories.

From the original post:
——————————
I sincerely dislike begging for donations and subscriptions, which is why I shortened my February campaign from its normal four weeks to only two. I wanted to spare both my readers and myself some of this pleading.

Sadly, that decision resulted in a total drop in donations, so that at this point in 2023 the website’s income is down 25% from last year, even though my traffic continues to be robust, in the range of four to five million hits per month. I am therefore forced to run this July campaign for the full four weeks, unless the donations and new subscriptions in the next few weeks make up this difference.

Please consider supporting my work, by using one of four methods (Zelle, Patreon, Paypal, or check) described in the tip jar elsewhere on this page. I take no advertisements nor accept any sponsors in order to keep the website clean, easy to read, and to avoid any accusations of conflict of interest. Your support leaves me entirely independent, able to say whatever I think while being free from censorship or reprisals.

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Perseverance snaps new close-up of Ingenuity

10:28 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Ingenuity as seen by Perseverance on August 2, 2023
Ingenuity as seen by Perseverance on August 2, 2023.
Click for original image.

Cool image time! With Perseverance and Ingenuity in the past week getting close together for the first time in months, the Perseverance team naturally turned its high resolution mast cameras at the helicopter. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 2, 2023 by the rover’s left mast camera, showing Ingenuity only about two hundred feet away.

The blue dot on the overview map above shows Perseverance’s present location, with the green dot marking Ingenuity’s. The picture to the right is therefore looking almost due south. The red dotted line indicates the rover’s planned route, moving towards Neretva Vallis, the gap in the rim of Jezero Crater from which the delta had flowed, eons ago. The rover’s goal is to eventually enter that gap and explore the very diverse and strange geology known to exist outside the crater to the west.

We should also expect even better images of Ingenuity in the next week. Its 54th flight is scheduled for today, in which the engineering team wants to send the helicopter on a simple straight up and down hop of sixteen feet in order to better “localize” the helicopter. With Perseverance less than two hundred feet away, its cameras should be able to assemble a great movie of that flight.

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New software detects its first potentially dangerous asteroid

9:32 am

New software designed to detect asteroids, developed for use with the Rubin Observatory presently being built in Chile, has successfully discovered its first potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) using data from another smaller operational ground-based telescope.

The discovered asteroid is 600 feet long, large enough to pose a real threat should it ever hit the Earth. Fortunately, the data says that though its orbit can take it as close as 140,000 miles there is no impact likely in the foreseeable future.

When the Rubin telescope begins its planned ten year survey of the entire night sky in 2025, this software is expected to almost triple the number of known potentially-hazardous-asteroids, from 2,350 to almost 6,000.

Funded primarily by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, Rubin’s observations will dramatically increase the discovery rate of PHAs. Rubin will scan the sky unprecedentedly quickly with its 8.4-meter mirror and massive 3,200-megapixel camera, visiting spots on the sky twice per night rather than the four times needed by present telescopes. But with this novel observing “cadence,” researchers need a new type of discovery algorithm to reliably spot space rocks.

Thus, the development of this new software.

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China’s Long March 4C launches weather satellite; SpaceX launches communications satellite

10:09 pm

Two launches this evening. First China used its Long March 4C rocket to put a weather satellite into orbit, lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China. No word on where the lower stages crashed within China.

SpaceX then used its Falcon 9 rocket to put an Intelsat commercial communications satellite into orbit, lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage successfully completed its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairing halves completed their eighth and tenth flights respectively.

As of posting the satellites from both launches had not deployed.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

52 SpaceX
31 China
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
6 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 60 to 31, and the entire world combined 60 to 51, while SpaceX by itself leads the world (excluding American companies) 52 to 51.

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Rosie Hodgson & Rowan Piggott – Dancing At Whitsun

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I was listening to a different recording of this song by Gordon Bok, Ann Muir, and Ed Trickett from 1978 and thought it gives us a window into a gentle culture that is now dead. As the youtube webpage for the performance below states, the song was written as “a tribute to the women who took up morris dancing during the First World War, when the male mortality rate in some English towns and villages approached seventy percent.”

It is the gentle quality of this song, its words and its sound, that is generally dead in today’s culture. Almost all modern music must be loud — shouted more than sung — with a rock beat that while energetic and enthusiastic is also somewhat harsh. Curse words are normal. It is rare to hear new popular music dedicated to expressing gentle soft love.

I post this as a memorial to that lost civilization.

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August 2, 2023 Quick space links

4:26 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

  • Luna-25’s mission profile

    • Based on this profile, the spacecraft will head to the Moon on its first orbit after launch, and get there only a few days later. This means it will be attempting its landing only days before India’s already launched Chandrayaan-3, which is targeting an August 23rd landing date.

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Unless Congress acts soon, the unelected administrative state will rule unopposed

1:53 pm

A dying document
A dying document

While much of the conservative press has been focusing on the illegal abuse of power by security agencies like the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Justice, in the past week a whole slew of stories having nothing to do with election politics or Donald Trump have even more starkly illustrated the growing power of the many alphabet agencies of the federal government’s executive branch, power that is cancelling the real constitutional power of Congress — even as Congress looks on impotently.

Unlike abusive and illegal indictments of Trump, or evidence that the Justice Department and FBI are acting to protect Joe Biden and his son Hunter, however, these others stories have generally gone unnoticed, except by your intrepid reporter here at Behind the Black.

First, on July 26th we had the Space Force proposing new regulations that would allow it to literally take control over all private space assets in any declared international emergency, without any need to compensate the owners.

The Space Force’s draft framework for how commercial satellite services could be called up in times of crisis or conflict to support military missions would allow the Defense Department to deny participating companies the right to sell their wares to any other client in times of “war, major conflict, national or international emergency.” [emphasis mine]

What is the point of owning anything if the U.S. military has the power to simply steal it from you, without paying you for it, anytime any president or Congress on a whim decides to declare an international emergency? Such declarations were once rare, but now they happen routinely, with dire consequences for private citizens, as we all learned during the COVID panic.

On that same day we also learned that the FAA has refused to allow the private company Varda from bringing back to Earth a capsule it had launched to space several months ago, with the express intent to manufacture needed pharmaceuticals in weightlessness that can’t be made on Earth.
» Read more

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Voyager Space partners with Airbus to build its Starlab space station

12:00 pm

Voyager Space, one of the three companies with a contract from NASA to develop a commercial private space station, has now signed a partnership agreement with the European aerospace company Airbus to work together to build its Starlab space station.

The companies announced Aug. 2 the creation of a joint venture, also called Starlab, that will be responsible for the development and operation of the station. The joint venture builds upon an agreement announced in January where Voyager selected Airbus to provide technical support for the proposed station.

“This transatlantic venture with footprints on both sides of the ocean aligns the interests of both ourselves and Voyager and our respective space agencies,” said Jean-Marc Nasr, head of space systems at Airbus, in a statement. “Together our teams are focused on creating an unmatched space destination both technologically and as a business operation.”

Though no specifics of the deal were released, Voyager will continue to retain 51% control. It appears that Voyager’s goal with this deal is to get its foot in the door of Europe. With ESA no longer considering doing any work on the space stations of either China or Russia, it needs a place to go after ISS is retired. By signing up Airbus as a partner Voyager makes Starlab the most likely go-to station for these European companies and governments.

Isn’t private enterprise and freedom wonderful? Without even trying Europe is going to get a space station of its own, and it will do it by hiring this private consortium of American and European companies.

Hat tip to Jay, BtB’s stringer.

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The first glacial evidence found on Mars back in 2007

11:36 am

Glaciers on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, sharpened, and annotated to post here, was taken on January 3, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the eastern wall of what the scientists call a graben, a large depression caused when the ground inside the depression suddenly shifted downward.

The elevation difference between the high and low points is about 3,500 feet. The streaks on the lower half of the cliff wall are slope streaks, a phenomenon unique to Mars that remains at this moment unexplained. Though the streaks resemble avalanches, they do not change the topography in any way, have no debris pile at their base, and appear instead to be a stain that appears at random times of the year that fades with time.

What is intriguing about this picture however is the wavelike floor on its western half. At first glance these waves suggest some form of dust dunes or lava flows, but neither conclusion appears correct. Instead, we are looking at what was one of the first discoveries on Mars of what scientists have determined to be glacial features.
» Read more

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Senate committee gives NASA and Commerce responsibility for removing space junk

9:10 am

The Senate Commerce committee has now okayed a bill that would require NASA to develop several space junk removal projects while giving the Commerce department the responsibility of identifying what space junk needs to be removed.

The core of the bill would direct NASA to establish an active debris removal program. That would include funding research and development activities “with the intent to close commercial capability gaps and enable potential future remediation missions for such orbital debris,” the bill states. NASA would also fund a demonstration mission for debris removal and allow it and other agencies to procure debris removal services.

The version of the ORBITS Act approved by the committee is different from the version introduced earlier this year. Among the changes is in a section that originally called on NASA to develop a prioritized list of orbital debris to remove. In the new version, that responsibility is given instead to the Commerce Department. The Commerce Department, through its Office of Space Commerce, is developing a space traffic coordination system called the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) that will take over civil space traffic management roles currently handled by the Defense Department. That involves taking in data from Defense Department and other sources and using it to provide warnings of potential close approaches to satellite operators.

Though unstated, this bill appears to be a direct slap at the FCC’s effort under the Biden administration to claim the power to regulate space junk, despite its lack of statutory authority to do so.

The bill is of course not yet law, as it still needs to be approved by both the House and Senate. However, some version that stops the FCC now seems very likely, as the House itself has already rejected a bill that would have approved the FCC power grab.

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Satellite startup Planet lays off 10% of its workforce, most located in San Francisco

9:00 am

According to a filing to the SEC yesterday, the smallsat startup Planet has laid off 10% of its workforce, 117 employees of which 85 are located in San Francisco, in order “to prioritize our attention on the highest ROI [return on investment] opportunities for our business and mission,” as expressed by the company’s CEO to his employees.

The company presently operates a constellation of more than 200 small satellites designed to provide high resolution imagery of the Earth. In late 2021 it went public through a merger with a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company), and has since seen its stock price drop from $11.35 to $3.75 yesterday.

The layoffs this week are likely simply the company recognizing that its main office in San Francisco had become bloated and it needed to economize. It is even possible the company is now considering a move from San Fran and California, though this is not mentioned in any of its announcements.

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Bones of the biggest ever whale species possibly found?

8:49 am

A big whale?

The uncertainty of science: Paleontologists have discovered a portion of the skeleton of what they claim might be the biggest and heaviest animal ever found, a whale that potentially grew to be as much as twice as big as a blue whale, the largest living species previously known.

A newly described fossilized whale named Perucetus colossus, dating to roughly 38 million years ago, might have been heavier than a blue whale, even if it was not as long. Blue whales, which are endangered, weigh about 100 to 150 tonnes, although some might be as heavy as 200 tonnes. Perucetus colossus was between 85 and 340 tonnes, according to the scientists who found and described the remains: 13 vertebrae, 4 ribs and a bit of pelvis. Their best-guess estimate is that the whale was around 180 tonnes. This mind-boggling mass is the result of its bones, which were big and dense — an evolutionary adaptation that helped it to dive.

The graphic to the right shows the discovered bones in red, with the rest of the theorized skeleton indicated in grey. Only in the article’s next-to-last paragraph does Nature recognize this very very very large uncertainty:

The team chose to create a visual reconstruction of what the whale might have looked like, basing the head on skulls of related basilosaurid species, but they caution that some of the details are speculative. It could have been skinnier. But it also could have been quite a bit longer or fatter, [co-author Eli] Amson says.

In other words, they presently have no idea what the species actually looked like, or how big it actually was. It very well could have been much shorter and thinner than proposed. It appears therefore they chose to highlight the largest possible size to garner the biggest press coverage — which of course they are getting.

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NASA detects weak signal from Voyager 2

8:22 am

Though communications with Voyager 2 have not been re-established, JPL engineers using NASA’s Deep Space Network of antennas have detected a weak signal from Voyager 2 that indicates the spacecraft is still functioning.

Using multiple antennas, NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) was able to detect a carrier signal from Voyager 2. A carrier signal is what the spacecraft uses to send data back to Earth. The signal is too faint for data to be extracted, but the detection confirms that the spacecraft is still operating. The spacecraft also continues on its expected trajectory. Although the mission expects the spacecraft to point its antenna at Earth in mid-October, the team will attempt to command Voyager sooner, while its antenna is still pointed away from Earth. To do this, a DSN antenna will be used to “shout” the command to Voyager to turn its antenna. This intermediary attempt may not work, in which case the team will wait for the spacecraft to automatically reset its orientation in October.

The hope is that new commands to re-orient, sent by the strongest signal possible, might be heard by the spacecraft, causing it to obey now. If not, this weak signal from Voyager 2 still suggests that the October reset will occur as normal and engineers will be able to recover communications then.

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Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket successfully places Cygnus freighter into orbit

5:44 pm

Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket tonight successfully launched a Cygnus freighter into orbit to ISS, flying for the last time with a first stage built in the Ukraine with engines from Russia.

Until Firefly can provide Northrop Grumman with a new American-made first stage, for the next three Cygnus cargo missions to ISS the company has purchased SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

This was Northrop Grumman’s first launch in 2023, so there is no change to the leader board in the 2023 launch race:

51 SpaceX
30 China
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
6 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 59 to 30, and the entire world combined 59 to 50, with SpaceX by itself still leading the entire world (excluding American companies) 51 to 50.

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Sunspot update: In July the Sun continued its high sunspot activity

5:05 pm

Today NOAA released its monthly update of its graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I have done every month for the entire thirteen years I have been doing this website, I have posted that updated graph below, adding to it some extra details to provide some context.

Though the sunspot count in July was slightly less than the very high numbers in June (the highest seen in more than two decades), the decline was almost inconsequential. Except for June’s activity, the activity in July was still the highest sunspot count in a month since September 2002, when the Sun was just beginning its ramp down after its solar maximum that reached its peak in late 2001. From that time until the last two months, the Sun had been in a very prolonged quiet period, with two solar minimums that were overly long and a single solar maximum that was very weak with a extended double peak lasting almost four years.
» Read more

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August 1, 2023 Quick space links

3:41 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stinger Jay.

 

 

For the next three Cygnus cargo missions to ISS Northrop Grumman has hired SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket as its launch vehicle while it awaits a new first stage from Firefly.
 

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The wind-scoured dusty and cratered dry tropics of Mars

1:16 pm

The wind-scoured dusty and cratered dry tropics of Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 2, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows one small area in Martian equatorial regions where the main features are a dusty plain interspersed with craters, not entirely dissimilar to the Moon .

In the picture the northwest-to-southeast orientation of ridge-lines, plus the position of divots with their steep and deep end all on the northwest side, all suggest the prevailing winds here blow in the same direction, from the northwest to the southeast.

We are looking at a very ancient terrain. Many of these craters likely date from the early bombardment period of the solar system, just after the planets had formed but there was still a lot of objects around crashing into them.
» Read more

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Teachers, parents, and even school districts sue PA Ed Dept over Marxist guidelines

12:34 pm

Parents are rejecting this in droves
Now parents, teachers, and administrators are rejecting this mantra

In April a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Education was filed by the parents, teachers,and three different school districts in western Pennsylvania, challenging the guidelines issued by the state that would force leftist indoctrination down the throats of kids and teachers.

The Mars Area, Penn Crest, and Laurel school districts, as well as two teachers, several board members and parents, filed a lawsuit Monday trying to stop the Shapiro [Democrat] administration from implementing “culturally relevant and sustaining education,” also known as CRSE, in every school district in Pennsylvania.

Leonard Rich, the superintendent of the Laurel School District, explained to KDKA-TV why he and the district joined the lawsuit. “CSRE goes beyond and tells students what to think,” he said. “I’m more driven to tell students and encourage students on how to think.”

“The district’s objection that we are being mandated to not teach our kids how to think but what to think,” he added. “Freedom of expression is a First Amendment right.”

The Thomas More Society is representing the litigants. You can read the filed complaint here [pdf].

The new guidelines are right out of the critical race theory playbook, requiring schools and teachers to:
» Read more

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Eruption on comet results in its tail splitting as it brightens by 100x

9:28 am

On July 20, 2023 the Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks suddenly erupted for the first time in almost seven decades, making it a hundred times brighter than normal while splitting its tail in two.

As of July 26, the comet’s coma had grown to around 143,000 miles (230,000 kilometers) across, or more than 7,000 times wider than its nucleus, which has an estimated diameter of around 18.6 miles (30 km), Richard Miles, an astronomer with the British Astronomical Association who studies cryovolcanic comets, told Live Science in an email.

But interestingly, an irregularity in the shape of the expanded coma makes the comet look as though it has sprouted horns. Other experts have also likened the deformed comet to the Millennium Falcon, one of the iconic spaceships from Star Wars, Spaceweather.com reported.

It is believed the tail’s shape is the result of the shape of the comet’s nucleus, which probably had a solid ridge acting as a barrier to material at that point.

The comet, which orbits the Sun every 71 years, will make its closest approach to Earth in the spring of 2024, when it will likely be visible to the naked eye.

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Chandrayaan-3 is now on its way to the Moon

9:11 am

Chandrayaan-3's mission profile

According to a tweet from India’s space agency, ISRO, engineers have successfully completed the trans-lunar-injection burn that has now sent its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander/rover on its way to the Moon.

As shown in mission’s profile graphic to the right, the spacecraft spent the last two weeks in Earth orbit. repeatedly raising its orbit to reduce the amount of fuel necessary to send it to the Moon. It will now take about five days traveling to the Moon, entering its orbit on August 5th. It will then spend about two weeks lowering that orbit slowly, until it is in the proper orbit for the descent to the surface on August 23, 2023.

If all goes well, its Vikram lander will gently place the Pragyan rover in the high southern latitudes, where it will function for about two weeks, or during the daylight portion of one lunar day.

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Biden reverses late Trump decision to move Space Force headquarters

9:00 am

President Biden yesterday reversed a late Trump decision to move Space Force headquarters from Colorado to Alabama, allowing it to remain in Colorado where most of the former Air Force space operations have been.

Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs has been the preferred choice of the top military space brass ever since the basing process began way back in 2018. Trump’s decision was made over their concerns that moving SPACECOM from its current home (previously the home of Air Force Space Command) would needless delay its full operational capability.

Biden, in the end, shared those concerns. “The most significant factor the President considered was the impact a move would have to operational readiness to confront space-enabled threats during a critical time in this dynamic security environment. U.S Space Command headquarters will achieve ‘full operational capability’ at Colorado Springs later this month. Maintaining the headquarters there maintains operational readiness and ensures no disruption to its mission or to its personnel,” a senior administration official told Breaking Defense in an email. “A move to Alabama, by contrast, would have forced upon that command a transition process between the mid-2020’s and the opening of the new site in the early to mid-2030’s.

Of course, politics was involved as well, with Colorado lawmakers putting great pressure on Biden to make this decision. Alabama lawmakers now say they will fight the decision, but because of the relative speed in which new headquarters can be established, their task is difficult if not impossible.

That difficulty will be reinforced by the proposal of the Senate Appropriations Committee decision to cut the Space Force’s ’24 budget by $1 billion, a 3% reduction. That proposal also has support in the House, which suggests it will become law. Though the cuts are scattered throughout the agency, it will lack the cash necessary to make the expensive shift to Alabama, a fact that will hinder any arguments for making that shift.

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