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Webb instrument has technical issue partly preventing its use

9:31 am

Because a an issue with the mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) on the James Webb Space Telescope, the telescope’s engineering team has paused use of that instrument while it reviews the situation.

On Aug. 24, a mechanism that supports one of these modes, known as medium-resolution spectroscopy (MRS), exhibited what appears to be increased friction during setup for a science observation. This mechanism is a grating wheel that allows scientists to select between short, medium, and longer wavelengths when making observations using the MRS mode. Following preliminary health checks and investigations into the issue, an anomaly review board was convened Sept. 6 to assess the best path forward.

The Webb team has paused in scheduling observations using this particular observing mode while they continue to analyze its behavior and are currently developing strategies to resume MRS observations as soon as possible. The observatory is in good health, and MIRI’s other three observing modes – imaging, low-resolution spectroscopy, and coronagraphy – are operating normally and remain available for science observations.

I am quoting almost entirely NASA’s short announcement. The announcement is vague, confusing, and (quite typically) written to minimize the reality of the issue. I can’t figure out how MIRI’s other observing modes are available if they have paused use of a mechanism that allows them to choose modes.

Regardless, Webb is awful young to have this kind of problem.

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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, any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. 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

September 19, 2022 Quick space links

2:45 pm

Courtesy of stringer Jay, who trolls Twitter so I don’t have to.

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SpaceX fires seven engines on Superheavy prototype #7

1:52 pm

Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully did a static fire engine test of seven engines on its Superheavy prototype #7, intended to be the lower stage of the first Superheavy/Starship orbital test.

The link takes you to the full live stream. Below I have cued that live stream to just before the test occurred. Everything seems to go as planned, with no obvious anomalies.

SpaceX continues to be moving closer and closer to that first orbital flight.
» Read more

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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.

Interstellar clouds backlit by nearby massive star

1:27 pm

Interstellar clouds backlit by nearby massive star
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduce to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of what astronomers believe is a newly formed massive star about 9,000 light years away that has periodically spewed out material during eruptions.

The scientists hope to use Hubble to determine the speed in which this material is flying away from the star by taking pictures at intervals and then measuring the amount of change from image to image. This data will also allow the scientists to better gauge the distance to this star, as well as its actual mass, information that will help them better understand what is happening.

I highlight this picture however simply because of its beauty. The interstellar clouds on the left are all apparently backlit by the brightest star on the right, and thus their shape is easy to perceive.

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InSight’s seismometer detects its first new impact on Mars

1:13 pm

Martian impact discovered by InSight
Click for full image.

Using data from InSight’s seismometer that suggested a new impact had occurred at a specific location on September 5, 2022 on Mars, scientists used the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to search and find that impact.

The photo to the right, reduced to post here, is that MRO photo.

The initial impact itself created a small marsquake that was detected by InSight’s seismometer. The instrument recorded seismological data that showed the moment the meteoroid entered Mars’ atmosphere, its explosion into pieces in the atmosphere, and finally, the impact that created a series of at least three craters in the surface.

MRO then flew over the approximate site where the impact was “felt” to look for darkened patches of ground using its Context Camera. After finding this location, HiRISE captured the scene in color. The ground is not actually blue; this enhanced-color image highlights certain hues in the scene to make details more visible to the human eye – in this case, dust and soil disturbed by the impact.

This was thus the first new Martian impact detected based on its actual occurrence, rather than simply finding a change between two photos taken at different times. The latter only tells you a time period when the impact occurred. InSight’s detection here marks the impact’s exact moment.

Nor is this the only such discovery. It appears that InSight detected at least two other impacts (here and here), that only subsequently were linked to MRO impacts. In those cases, the new impact had already been found by MRO, and only afterward were scientists able to identify its seismic vibration in InSight data, thus pinpointing the exact date it took place.

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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

Today’s blacklisted American: Leftist thugs at University of New Mexico threaten conservative speaker and audience with violence

12:14 pm

Tomi Lahren: targeted for leftist violence
Tomi Lahren: targeted for leftist violence

They’re coming for you next: When the conservative student organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) invited conservative Tomi Lahren to speak at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, a mob of leftist thugs gathered outside, attempted to force their way in, and apparently actually threatened violence against both Lahren, the audience there to hear her speak, and the handful of police officers trying to protect them.

“I start my speech and you can hear the chants and you can hear the screaming and the expletives. And again, nobody really thought anything of it. They’re just, you know, fired up. And I didn’t really think too much of it until they started pushing past the officers and banging on the doors so much that these double doors are visibly moving and shaking and they are smashing into the windows. And that’s when it became incredibly chaotic,” Lahren continued. “Everybody was worried that they were going to get inside. They were pushing officers in front of the doors and pushing them out of the way. I mean, attacking them. It started to get very ugly and very violent, very fast. Of course, we could only see through these little windows in the front the room we were in, so we couldn’t really see exactly what was going on out there.” [emphasis mine]

A very short video shows these protesters chanting and pushing against the door to the room.
» Read more

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Orbital tug company signs launch agreement with German rocket startup

10:06 am

Capitalism in space: The orbital tug company Spaceflight today signed a launch agreement with the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA).

The agreement formalizes the plan for Spaceflight to fly its Sherpa® orbital transfer vehicles (OTVs) and other rideshare payloads on upcoming RFA missions from a variety of European launch sites, including from facilities in the United Kingdom, French Guiana and others. The companies are targeting mid-2024 for their first launch.

Rocket Factory is one of three German startup rocket companies pushing to complete the first German commercial launch. While Isar Aerospace had raised the most capital, it remains unclear which of these companies will win.

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Valeri Polykov, holder of the record’s longest stay in space, passes away

10:00 am

Valeri Polykov
Valeri Polykov

Russian astronaut Valeri Polykov, who holds the record for the longest spaceflight yet of any human in history, has passed away at the age of 80.

In 1994 and 1995 Polykov spent 437 days on Russia’s space station Mir, the equivalent of fourteen months and two weeks. His thoughts at launch, as he told me personally when I interviewed him while writing Leaving Earth, were not so confident:

“What if something goes wrong?” [he explained]. “I had sacrificed so much time. The government has spent so much, more than they can afford. And I’ve learned so much for them myself, for them.

“Better I die if something went wrong,” he thought. “Better if I had a gun to shoot myself.”

Nothing went wrong however. Polykov, a doctor, had pushed for this long mission to find out if it would be possible for a person to function after a year-plus of weightlessness upon arrival on Mars. Originally planned to last 18 months, circumstances eventually shortened it to 14 months-plus. When Polykov came home in March 1995, he managed to walk a few steps on his own, shortly after being removed from the capsule. To his mind, he had proved that a person could function on their own on Mars after such a long flight.

Others disagreed. As I wrote in Leaving Earth, though he was almost normal within a week of landing,

Polykov had come back to Earth very weak. For at least those first few hours, he needed help from those around him. Any spacefarer arriving on Mars after a year in space must be prepared to face that same challenge.

Regardless, Polykov, like Brian Binnie, was one of the early giants in space exploration. His contribution must not be forgotten.

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SpaceShipOne pilot Brian Binnie passes away

9:25 am

R.I.P. Brian Binnie, who piloted SpaceShipOne on its second flight that won the Ansari X-Prize back in 2004, passed away on September 15, 2022 at the age of 69.

Brian’s record flight was the second of two SpaceShipOne flights needed to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize. The prize was given for the first privately-built crewed vehicle to make a flight above 100 km (62.1 miles) twice within two weeks. Mike Melvill made the first flight for the Ansari X Prize competition five days earlier.

The success of this private spaceship proved that private enterprise could do better than government, if given the chance. It laid the groundwork for the renaissance in American rocketry we are seeing today.

His part in this history must not be forgotten.

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Webb takes its first infrared image of Mars

9:12 am

Webb's first infrared image of Mars
Click for full image.

Astronomers have now released the the James Webb Space Telescope’s first infrared image of Mars, taken on September 5, 2022.

The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows some of the data obtained. Because Mars is so close, it is actually too bright for Webb’s instruments. To get any data, the exposures were very very short, and still the brightest areas — as indicated by large areas of yellow — are overexposed. The cause of the different brightness of Hellas Basin, however, is not simply because the basin — the deepest point on Mars — is cooler.

As light emitted by the planet passes through Mars’ atmosphere, some gets absorbed by carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules. The Hellas Basin – which is the largest well-preserved impact structure on Mars, spanning more than 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) – appears darker than the surroundings because of this effect. “This is actually not a thermal effect at Hellas,” explained the principal investigator, Geronimo Villanueva of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who designed these Webb observations. “The Hellas Basin is a lower altitude, and thus experiences higher air pressure. That higher pressure leads to a suppression of the thermal emission at this particular wavelength range [4.1-4.4 microns] due to an effect called pressure broadening. It will be very interesting to tease apart these competing effects in these data.”

The NASA press release says the scientists are preparing a paper analyzing the spectral data and what it revealed about “dust, icy clouds, what kind of rocks are on the planet’s surface, and the composition of the atmosphere,” I suspect however that Webb’s capabilities for studying Mars are much more limited than implied, and that it will over time take much fewer images of the red planet, compared to Hubble.

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SpaceX launches 54 Starlink satellites on Falcon 9

10:53 pm

After four scrubs on four consecutive days, SpaceX tonight finally successfully put 54 Starlink satellites into orbit.

The first stage successfully completed its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The fairings halves completed the third and fourth flights, respectively.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

42 SpaceX
37 China
11 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
5 ULA

American private enterprise now leads China 58 to 37 in the national rankings, and the entire globe 58 to 56. At 58 successful launches, 2022 is now the third most active year in the entire history of the United States, with only 1965 and 1966 having more launches.

This post is late because I spend the weekend in the mountains, caving. Twas a much needed break.

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SpaceX now offers more expensive high performance Starlink for residential customers

10:19 am

SpaceX has now made available the much more expensive Starlink high performance terminals — previously only available to business customers — for its residential customers.

The purchase price for the terminal is the same as for business customers, $2,500. The standard terminal package costs only $599. However, residential customers who buy this more expensive terminal will still pay the standard $110 month rate for the service, instead of the $500 monthly fee that business customers will pay.

SpaceX notes that the high-performance Starlink kit would be best for users who reside in harsh environments, such as those who are in hot or cold climates. Starlink’s Support Page also indicates that the high-performance dish has better download speeds in hot weather, better snow melt capability, improved water resistance, and better visibility of satellites.

I would expect that eventually, when SpaceX is faced with competition in this market, these features will end up on all its terminals. Until then, however, new customers will have to make a choice.

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NASA issues call for new manned lunar lander proposals

10:12 am

NASA yesterday announced a solicitation for proposals for new manned lunar lander proposals, aimed at obtaining services long term, rather than the initial contract it has awarded SpaceX which only covered the first few Artemis lunar missions.

This solicitation is essentially being offered so that Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin will have a second chance to win such a contract, having lost out to SpaceX initially. It also is NASA’s effort to get Congress to give it a bigger budget so that it can pay for two different lunar lander contracts.

Having two competing lunar landers is not a bad thing. Giving a second contract however simply because the company (Blue Origin) exerts political clout is not. Right now it is unclear whether this solicitation is the former or the later.

The announcement also included what has become boilerplate in all NASA announcements about its Artemis lunar missions:

Through Artemis missions, NASA is preparing to return humans to the Moon, including the first woman and first person of color, for long-term scientific discovery and exploration. [emphasis mine]

It is very clear that the number one criteria that NASA has established, under the Biden administration, for picking the crew on that first Artemis lunar landing mission is race and gender, not talent, skill, or ability. While it will be a great thing when the first woman and black steps on the Moon, their skin color or sex should not be the reason they got to go. If it is, it will be incredibly insulting to their talent, skill, and ability. In fact, by making race or gender the only qualification that NASA cares about, it puts an asterisk on those qualifications. Forever people will wonder if these individuals really deserved the honor.

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ABL completes dress rehearsal countdown for its first RS1 rocket launch

9:59 am

Capitalism in space: The smallsat rocket company ABL successfully completed a full dress rehearsal countdown for its first RS1 rocket this past week, and is presently negotiating with the FAA the launch date for that rocket’s first test launch.

Though ABL is its own independent company, one of its biggest investors has been Lockheed Martin. In fact, in almost all ways, ABL is a Lockheed Martin division, and appears to be part of the older and bigger company’s strategy for entering the smallsat market.

3 comments

Max Ehrman – Desiderata

6:01 pm

An evening pause: An excellent meditation for beginning the weekend. From the Youtube webpage:

Max Ehrmann was an American attorney and poet who often wrote on spiritual themes. During his life, he contributed great thoughts to our literary lexicons, blending the magic of words and wisdom with his worthy observations.

Desiderata, which means “things that are desired,” was written by Max Ehrmann “because it counsels those virtues I felt most in need of.”

I think the reading was a bit slow. I think it works better at either 1.25 or 1.5 speed.

Hat tip Cotour.

11 comments

September 16, 2022 Quick space links

4:02 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who trolls Twitter so I don’t have to.

2 comments

Deep inside the youngest flood lava event on Mars

1:30 pm

Deep inside the youngest flood lava event on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! Today we return to the Athabasca Valles flood lava event, believed to be the youngest major lava event on Mars that I highlighted in a cool image last week.

Then, I showed two meandering lava flows near the edge of this Great Britain-sized flood lava plain, produced 600 million years ago in only a matter of weeks. Today, we take a look deep within the lava plain. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on May 6, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label “a lava-crater interaction.”

In plain English, we are looking at a crater that has been inundated by the flood lava, filling it.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: USC professor suspended because one common Chinese word he was teaching sounded like the “N-word”

12:02 pm

Greg Patton, blacklisted for being a good teacher
Greg Patton, blacklisted by USC for being a good teacher

The modern dark age: Today’s blacklist story is in a sense a follow-up of my blacklist story from yesterday, as it clearly shows that the fraternities which broke free of supervision from the University of Southern California (USC) had good reason, and that (as I speculated) one of the main reasons they did so was because of USC’s woke and racist policies.

Today we discover that USC has forced a communications professor specializing in Asia, Greg Patton, to stop teaching because during one virtual class he was explaining the innocent reason why — to English speakers — the Chinese seem to say a racial slur repeatedly. Apparently, the Chinese phrase “那个” (nèi ge), which approximately means “that one” or more simply “um”, is used in Chinese as a filler word, similar to “um,” “ur” in English.

Patton was trying to explain this to his class during a virtual session. Below is embedded that specific moment that has now caused him so much trouble:
» Read more

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Starlink being tested in Antarctica

9:33 am

Capitalism in space: The National Science Foundation (NSF) has begun testing a single Starlink terminal at its McMurdo station in Antarctic, with the hope that the service can improve communications at the station significantly.

Everyone at the base shares a 17 Mbps link, according to the United States Antarctic Program, which severely limits what people can do. The station actually blocks people from using high-bandwidth apps like Netflix, cloud backups, and video calls, with the exception of once-weekly Skype or FaceTime sessions at a public kiosk or mission-critical communications.

The addition of Starlink probably doesn’t mean that McMurdo residents will be able to hold a Netflix movie night or anything — the terminals can handle around 50-200 Mbps, which still isn’t a ton to go around, even during the winter when far fewer people are at the base — but it could help make transferring important scientific data off of the icy continent easier.

According to SpaceX’s plans, this new service in Antarctica means that by year’s end Starlink will be available on all seven continents.

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New theory: Saturn’s rings came from a lost and destroyed moon

9:24 am

The uncertainty of science: According to a new computer simulation, scientists have proposed that the reason Saturn’s rings are tilted 27 degrees is because they were created by the destruction of a moon 160 million years ago, an event that was also linked to the way the orbits of Saturn and Neptune interact, combined with the on-going slow evolutionary changes in Titan’s orbit around Saturn.

Wisdom and his colleagues believe Saturn acquired its tilt because of a peculiar synchronicity: the precession of Saturn’s spin axis—the way it wobbles like a top with a particular rhythm—is suspiciously in tune with a precession in Neptune’s orbit. If Saturn and Neptune were trapped in this resonance, Saturn’s tilt would be “kind of vulnerable to other forces that could cause it to change,” says Rola Dbouk, an MIT graduate student in planetary science. In 2020, Cassini scientists discovered what the study team thinks is that external stimulus: Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is migrating away from Saturn by 11 centimeters a year. In a study published today in Science, Dbouk, Wisdom, and colleagues show how Titan’s migration, in combination with the Saturn-Neptune resonance, could have ratcheted up Saturn’s tilt over the course of 1 billion years.

The work also yielded a potential explanation for the origin of Saturn’s rings. Using Cassini’s measurements of Saturn’s gravitational fields to model the planet’s interior structure, the researchers refined calculations for the wobble of Saturn’s spin axis and found it is no longer in sync with Neptune. “Something kicked it out of the resonance,” Dbouk says. They first ruled out the possibility that chaotic changes in the orbits of some of the largest of Saturn’s dozens of moons could be responsible. But when they added another moon to the mix, things got interesting.

In simulations, the researchers included an object about the size of Iapetus, Saturn’s third largest moon, orbiting about 43 Saturn radii out—between the orbits of Titan and Iapetus. They found this moon could have provided the necessary nudge to the resonance if it were suddenly knocked from its orbit because of chaotic interactions with its neighbors about 160 million years ago.

To say that this theory is uncertain is no different that saying the sky is blue. It is so uncertain that it is difficult to take it seriously. It could be right, but as one scientist quoted at the article noted, there is no way to test it.

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CAPSTONE update: Situation improved but not resolved

9:13 am

Advanced Space, the company operating the CAPSTONE smallsat lunar orbiter that is on the way to the Moon, has issued a hopeful update on the efforts to regain full control of the spacecraft after it began tumbling out-of-control on September 8th.

The communications situation has dramatically improved, the power state of the spacecraft appears to be sufficient for continuous (duty cycled) heating of the propulsion system which dropped below its operational temperature, Over the past few days, CAPSTONE’s power – though limited by the orientation of the spacecraft in its spin relative to the Sun – appears to be sufficient for heating of the propulsion system. When the spacecraft propulsion system temps are at +5C for 12+ hours the system will be further evaluated for use in the recovery operation. Information on the cause of the anomaly has been obtained and is being evaluated, and recovery plans that mitigate risk of further anomalous behavior are being developed. We do not have a timeline for a recovery attempt.

It appears they have not yet done the detumble maneuver that the engineers think will bring the spacecraft back to nominal operations. However, the spacecraft appears to also be on its planned course towards the Moon, so all signs suggest a full recovery is likely.

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September 15, 2022 Quick space links

3:44 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who trolls Twitter so I don’t have to.

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Rocket Lab successfully launches commercial radar satellite

1:49 pm

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab today successfully used its Electron rocket to place a commercial radar Earth observation satellite into orbit.

This was the company’s 30th successful launch. As of this writing, the satellite itself has not yet deployed.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

41 SpaceX
37 China
11 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
5 ULA

American private enterprise now leads China 57 to 37 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 57 to 56. The 57 successful American launches so for this year ties for third place with 1964 and 1967 for launches in a year. The record number of U.S. launches in a single year was 70, in 1966. That record should almost certainly be topped this year.

SpaceX will once again attempt to launch 54 Starlink satellites later tonight, having cancelled several times this week due to weather.

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Pushback: Fraternities break free from USC’s draconian supervision

11:59 am

What USC wants its students to become
What USC wants its students to become

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Faced with the university’s arbitrary rule that shut them down “without explanation or cause,” ten of the fourteen fraternities that serve the students at the University of Southern California (USC) have broken their affiliation with the university and formed their own oversight body.

Not surprisingly, the university immediately implied that these fraternities were acting to encourage “sexual assaults,” “drug abuse,” “mental health abuse,” and “underage drinking,” and should be blacklisted by USC students. Officials from the new independent council immediately disputed these slanderous claims:

“I want to say unequivocally that no, we are not disaffiliating to dodge these social event policies that were put into place,” Harrison Murphy, a representative from the new council, told The Los Angeles Times.

“Murphy said members that separated from USC did so because they felt the university’s policies toward Greek organizations were unfair and flawed,” The Los Angeles Times reported. “For instance, he said, USC banned all social events from November 2021 through January 2022 even for fraternities that had done no wrong.”

A look at university’s long and complex policy [pdf] for supervising these fraternities makes if very clear why so many have told the university to go jump in a lake. The number of inspections, meetings, and consultations required, combined with a lot of odious paperwork, appears absurdly unreasonable and costly. The policies also apparently allowed the school to shut a fraternity down merely on hearsay accusations, based on incredibly vague standards. Note the highlighted words below:
» Read more

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Billionaire wants to build spinning space station for testing artificial gravity

9:40 am

Capitalism in space: Billionaire Jed McCaleb, who earned billions in software and cryptocurrency, has started a company dubbed Vast to develop and build a spinning space station for testing the pros and cons of artificial gravity.

McCaleb is self-financing at the moment, though he hopes to turn his station eventually into a money-making proposition. His company is also right now very small, but he clearly is going for the best in who he is hiring:

Currently, the company has about 20 employees, including Kyle Dedmon, former SpaceX vice president for construction and facilities; Tom Hayford, a systems engineer who has worked for Relativity Space and SpaceX; Molly McCormick, a former SpaceX human factors engineer and Honeybee Robotics program manager; and Colin Smith, a former SpaceX propulsion engineer. In addition, former SpaceX vice president Hans Koenigsmann is advising the company.

This new private space station joins by my count the four other American private space stations now proposed, including Axiom’s station, a partnership led by Sierra Space building Orbital Reef, Nanorack’s Starlab station, and Northrop Grumman’s upgrade station based on its Cygnus freighter.

That’s five private space stations under development in the United States. And there could be others that I have missed.

19 comments

Overlapping galaxies

9:22 am

Overlapping galaxies, as seen by Hubble
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope, and captures two galaxies that happen to overlap in their line of sight to Earth.

The two galaxies, which have the uninspiring names SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461, lie more than a billion light-years from Earth. Despite appearing to collide in this image, the alignment of the two galaxies is likely just by chance — the two are not actually interacting.

This image was taken as part of the citizen-scientist project dubbed Galaxy Zoo, whereby volunteers review lower resolution images of strange-looking galaxies and propose the best for Hubble higher resolution imaging.

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Astronomers propose method for predicting the stars that will go supernovae

9:12 am

The uncertainty of science: Using a computer model based on the most recent data that suggests red supergiant stars like Betelgeuse are the kind of stars that produce certain kinds of supernovae, astronomers now think they have a method for predicting which of those stars are about to go supernovae.

You can read the science paper here. From the link above:

In a few examples, astronomers have looked back at old catalogs and found images of the stars before they exploded, and they all seem to be red supergiants like Betelgeuse. That’s a clear indication that those kinds of stars are supernova candidates, ready to go off at a moment’s notice.

The stars that result in these kinds of supernovas are thought to have dense shrouds of material surrounding them before they explode. These shrouds are orders of magnitude denser than what’s measured around Betelgeuse.

More importantly, the data suggests that once this shroud of material forms, the supernova will follow, in just a few years. As the scientists conclude in their paper:

The final overarching conclusion we can make from this work is that, shortly before core-collapse, [red supergiants] must undergo some prodigious mass-losing event which radically alters the appearance of the star. Therefore, the signature of an imminent explosion should be a dramatic change in the progenitor stars’ optical – near-IR photometry on timescales of less than a month. Such a signature should be detectable in the coming era of wide-field short cadence photometry. [emphasis mine]

Near-IR (infrared) photometry is exactly in the wavelengths in which the James Webb Space Telescope operates. Thus, if it is lucky and sees this kind of star in an image, and a supernova follows shortly thereafter, this theory will have been proven correct.

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