An evening pause: I’ve posted this song as an evening pause previously, but I think Audrey Hepburn’s performance of the song in the 1961 movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which introduced it to the world, deserves to be seen.
Hat tip Andrew_W.
This Nature article provides a nice summary of the European/Russian ExoMars 2016 mission that on Wednesday will try to place a lander on Mars as well as put an orbiter in orbit.
Neither probe is going to provide many exciting photos. The orbiter, dubbed boringly the Trace Gas Orbiter, is designed to study Mars’ atmosphere, while the lander, Schiaparelli, is essentially a technology test mission for planning and designing what Europe and Russia hope will be a more ambitious lander/orbiter mission in 2020.
Anyone expecting spectacular pictures from Schiaparelli itself might be disappointed — photos will be limited to 15 black-and-white shots of the Martian surface from the air, intended to help piece together the craft’s trajectory. No photos will be taken on the surface, because the lander lacks a surface camera.
Schiaparelli’s instruments will study the Martian atmosphere, including the possible global dust storm that might happen this month but so far has not yet appeared. The instruments will also be able to detect lightning, should it exist on Mars.
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
The competition heats up: SpaceX has confirmed that they will reuse a Dragon capsule to bring cargo to ISS in the spring of 2017.
This plan had already been revealed earlier. The news here is simply that NASA and SpaceX have finalized the decision and picked the actual schedule cargo mission that will use a Dragon capsule. What is more significant is this:
SpaceX plans to reuse Dragon spacecraft through the remainder of its current CRS contract, which runs through SpX-20. [Benjamin Reed, SpaceX director of commercial crew mission management] did not discuss how many Dragon spacecraft are available to be reused, or how many times SpaceX believes a Dragon capsule can be flown.
If successful, Reed said it would allow SpaceX to end production of the cargo Dragon spacecraft. “We’ll be reflying Dragons going forward, and be able to close down the Dragon 1 line and move all the way into Dragon 2,” he said, referring to the next-generation version of the Dragon being developed for commercial crew missions.
In other words, their goal is to transition very quickly from disposable capsules to a fleet of capsules that they fly over and over again.
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.
In preparation for its Mars landing on October 19, Schiaparelli has successfully separated from the Trace Gas Orbiter of the European/Russian ExoMars 2016 mission.
They had some initial communications issues soon after separation, all of which have now been resolved.
China today (Monday in China) launched two astronauts successfully on a 30-day mission to their second space station, Tiangong-2.
They have not yet docked with the station.
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
Valve problems detected during Juno’s orbital insert around Jupiter has caused engineers to delay the October 19 engine burn that would have lowered the probe’s orbit around Jupiter.
Mission managers for NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter have decided to postpone the upcoming burn of its main rocket motor originally scheduled for Oct. 19. This burn, called the period reduction maneuver (PRM), was to reduce Juno’s orbital period around Jupiter from 53.4 to 14 days. The decision was made in order to further study the performance of a set of valves that are part of the spacecraft’s fuel pressurization system. The period reduction maneuver was the final scheduled burn of Juno’s main engine. “Telemetry indicates that two helium check valves that play an important role in the firing of the spacecraft’s main engine did not operate as expected during a command sequence that was initiated yesterday,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “The valves should have opened in a few seconds, but it took several minutes. We need to better understand this issue before moving forward with a burn of the main engine.”
Because of this, they will instead use this next close approach to Jupiter to do pure science, something that they would not have done during the engine burn. Though this is a good example of turning lemons into lemonade, it will not be a good thing if Juno can never reduce its orbit to 14 days. A 53 day orbit will mean that they can only do good research every two months, and will seriously limit what they can learn over the long run.
Orbital ATK has delayed its first launch in two years of its redesigned Antares rocket after discovering a cable needed to be replaced during prelaunch tests.
The launch is now scheduled for 7:40 pm (Eastern) Monday.
My posting this week has been somewhat slack, mostly because I am trying to finish up a caving monograph for a survey project that has been on-going for the past five years. I have also been swamped with the very last changes to my policy paper for the Center for New American Security, which now has the title Capitalism in Space: Private Enterprise and Competition reshape the Global Aerospace Launch Industry. (I am hoping that title causes a few liberal heads to explode when the paper is released in the coming days.) I am also off on another cave project this weekend, so I will not be posting again until Sunday night.
Hopefully, things will ease up next week. In the meantime, enjoy your weekends and do not get too depressed over the insanity and madness that appears to be taking over our society.
An evening pause: I thank God every day that I don’t work in the corporate world!
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
No matter how peaceful and friendly and tolerant the majority of Muslims might be, their religion continues to attract and generate the most intolerance and hate and violence worldwide. Below are just a few stories in the past 24 hours that illustrate the increasingly vicious nature of Islam:
This is only three stories. If I wanted, I could have listed dozens, from all over the world, all giving examples of Islamic hate for and violence against anyone that is not a practitioner of that religion.
In the first story, the UNESCO declaration that these Jerusalem sites are exclusively Muslim didn’t only rub out thousands of years of Jewish history, it also wiped out thousands of years of Christian history as well. As has been historically typical of Islam, it cannot tolerate other religions. When Islam conquered Israel it did not respect the site of the Jewish Second Temple, it instead immediately built its own temple on top of it, claimed ownership, and has since worked to exclude Jews and Christians from the site. Now Muslim countries are trying to use the UN to strengthen their claim and to justify their effort to remove all Jews from the Middle East, an effort that is well illustrated by the .third story.
Finding out what’s in it: More than a million people are losing their health insurance plans this year as insurers increasingly flee Obamacare.
The number above was determined by
At least 1.4 million people in 32 states will lose the Obamacare plan they have now, according to state officials contacted by Bloomberg. That’s largely caused by Aetna Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and some state or regional insurers quitting the law’s markets for individual coverage.
…Nationwide estimates of the number of people losing their current plans are higher. For example, Charles Gaba, who tracks the law at ACASignups.net, estimates that 2 million to 2.5 million people in the U.S. will lose their current plans, compared with 2 million a year ago. Gaba’s estimate is based on insurance company membership data.
For the people losing plans, there are fewer and fewer choices. One estimate by the Kaiser Family Foundation predicts that for at least 19 percent of the people in Obamacare’s individual market next year there will be only one insurer to choose from.
Obviously, the solution is to ask the people that wrote this bad law to fix it. We should all vote Democratic on election day, and help make this disaster even worse!
Seven years after the mission ended Japan has finally released the full catalog of images and videos taken by its lunar orbiter Kaguya.
No explanation for the long delay has been provided. Overall, this is just another example of what to me appears to be a bloated, bureaucratic, and slow to move Japanese space program. Their rockets are expensive, their planetary probes have had repeated problems, and they seem to be very uninterested in stepping up their game to compete in the increasingly competitive international race to explore and settle the solar system. That it took them more than seven years to release this data is quite shameful.
This article provides a detailed look at Sunday’s arrival of ExoMars 2016 at Mars.
If all goes right the Schiaparelli lander will soft land on the surface while the Trace Gas Orbiter will enter an initial 185 by 60,000 mile orbit, which will slowly be adjusted so that by January it can begin its atmospheric research.
Though the Russian contribution to this mission was only the rocket that sent it to Mars, if the mission succeeds it will be the first time any Mars mission with major Russian participation has succeeded. The failure rate for any Russian effort to go to Mars has been 100%. And it hasn’t been because the missions have been particularly difficult. The majority of their failures occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, even as they were very successfully completing much harder lander missions to Venus.
It has almost as if there is a curse against any Russian attempt to visit the Red Planet. Hopefully, that curse will finally be broken on Sunday.
The competition heats up: Both Boeing and SpaceX better get their manned capsules working by 2019, because NASA at this point has no plans to buy more seats on Russian Soyuz capsules after the present contract runs out.
Even as the commercial crew schedules move later into 2018, NASA officials say they are not considering extending the contract with Roscosmos — the Russian space agency — for more launches in 2019. The last Soyuz launch seats reserved for U.S. astronauts are at the end of 2018.
It takes more than two years to procure components and assemble new Soyuz capsules, so Russia needed to receive new Soyuz orders from NASA by some time this fall to ensure the spacecraft would be ready for liftoff in early 2019.
The second paragraph above notes that even if NASA decided it needed more Soyuz launches, it is probably too late to buy them and have them available by 2019.
This article provides some details about the design changes being made to Starliner that have caused its first test flight to be delayed until 2018.
An evening pause: What I think makes these performances by Rieu and his orchestra so especially appealing is that he finds musicians who are glad to show how much they enjoy playing this lovely music. He recognizes the importance of fun.
And yes, as a child of the 1960s, I cannot help listening to this music and see spaceships docking. Those of my generation will of course immediately know to what I am referring. Will anyone younger?
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Research at JPL has developed new materials called skutterudites that have the potential of increasing the efficiency and power output of the radioisotope electric generators used on deep space missions where solar power will not work.
The new eMMRTG would provide 25 percent more power than Curiosity’s generator at the start of a mission, according to current analyses. Additionally, since skutterudites naturally degrade more slowly that the current materials in the MMRTG, a spacecraft outfitted with an eMMRTG would have at least 50 percent more power at the end of a 17-year design life than it does today.
“Having a more efficient thermoelectric system means we’d need to use less plutonium. We could go farther, for longer and do more,” Bux said.
This being NASA research, they are moving somewhat slowly in testing and confirming whether these new materials will work. They hope that after passing further reviews in 2017 and 2018 the agency might finally approve their use in subsequent missions.
The uncertainty of science: A new analysis from Hubble and other telescope data suggests that the universe actually contains ten times more galaxies than previously estimated, several trillion instead of the past estimate of 100 to 200 billion.
I would not bet much money on this conclusion. I suspect that further research will find even more galaxies, since our deep observations of the universe are at the moment confined to a mere handful of Hubble deep field images that cover only a few tiny specks of space.
This new analysis however did confirm previous estimates that suggest the universe has evolved and changed significantly over time.
In analysing the data the team looked more than 13 billion years into the past. This showed them that galaxies are not evenly distributed throughout the Universe’s history. In fact, it appears that there were a factor of 10 more galaxies per unit volume when the Universe was only a few billion years old compared with today. Most of these galaxies were relatively small and faint, with masses similar to those of the satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky Way.
These results are powerful evidence that a significant evolution has taken place throughout the Universe’s history, an evolution during which galaxies merged together, dramatically reducing their total number. “This gives us a verification of the so-called top-down formation of structure in the Universe,” explains Conselice.
Plant scientists have found a way to encourage plants to better use atmospheric nitrogen, thus increasing yields by more than one third.
For years, scientists have tried to increase the rate of nitrogen fixation in legumes by altering rhizobia bacterioid function or interactions that take place between the bacterioid and the root nodule cells.
Tegeder took a different approach: She increased the number of proteins that help move nitrogen from the rhizobia bacteria to the plant’s leaves, seed-producing organs and other areas where it is needed. The additional transport proteins sped up the overall export of nitrogen from the root nodules. This initiated a feedback loop that caused the rhizobia to start fixing more atmospheric nitrogen, which the plant then used to produce more seeds. “They are bigger, grow faster and generally look better than natural soybean plants,” Tegeder said. “Some evidence we have suggests they might also be highly efficient under stressful conditions like drought.”
The technique not only produces healthier plants and more seeds, it reduces the need for fertilizer, the overuse of which can be an environmental issue.
The uncertainty of science: A close review of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) images now suggests that asteroid impacts occur 33% more than previously estimated.
The research also suggests that the lunar surface gets rechurned faster than previously thought, which could force planetary scientists to adjust their solar system aging system that is based on crater counts.
The article makes the entirely false claim that this increased rate of impacts poses a threat to lunar colonies, probably in an effort by these scientists to lobby for funds for a combined lunar orbiter-lander mission. The first lunar colonies will likely be placed below ground, partly to protect them from the harsh lunar environment as well as from radiation, and partly because that will be the easiest way to build those colonies. The impacts being measured here are all relatively small, and would not threaten these underground colonies.
The Russian investigation into problems during the last Proton launch in June has caused them to once again push back the next launch from November until December 2016.
There are still no details or updates from that investigation, including any hint as to why the rocket’s second stage had problems.
The competition heats up: Vector Space Systems has decided to build a rocket manufacturing facility in Tucson.
The Tucson-based company is expected to create 200 jobs locally within three years of beginning operations, at an average annual salary of $70,000. It could employ as many as 500 people within five years as production ramps up, said its co-founder and CEO, Jim Cantrell. Vector plans to invest roughly $19 million during the first three years, and possibly as much as $50 million over the next 15 years, according to Pima County officials. The total direct economic impact of the facility could be $290 million over five years, says an analysis by Phoenix-based Applied Economics completed for Sun Corridor Inc., the local economic-development agency. The company plans to build 36,000 square feet of office space and another 40,000 square feet for manufacturing south of Tucson International Airport.
The company already has several million in smallsat launch contracts, plus options for $160 million more once they begin producing rockets.
A science research center has announced it is forming an independent nation in space which anyone can join.
If you are 18 or over and have an email address, you can apply to become a ‘citizen’ of Asgardia today. At the time of this writing, more than 4,900 people have signed up, including at least one Popular Science editor. “When the number of those applications goes above 100,000 we can officially apply to the UN for the status of state,” said Ashurbeyli, adding that Asgardians would not have to give up citizenship in their countries of origin.
The group hopes to launch its first satellite in 2017 or 2018. How it will avoid being under the jurisdiction of any other country remains to me a mystery.
Eventually, when there are thriving reasonably self-sufficient colonies in space, circumstances will demand that they declare their independence from what is becoming an increasingly oppressive Earth culture. Until then, declarations like Asgardia are nothing more than publicity stunts that are not going to go anywhere.
An evening pause: Created by Sebastian Gurtler and Aleksey Igudesman. Unfortunately, the full performance is not available for U.S. audiences. This clip however, is worth every second.
Hat tip Frank Kelly.
Faced with a continuing legal battle to build the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the consortium running is now seriously considering alternative sites.
Potential Northern Hemisphere sites include San Pedro Mártir in Baja California in Mexico and Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma, a Spanish island off the Atlantic coast of Morocco. “Our friends in La Palma are pushing hard” to get the TMT, says Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C. But neither alternative matches the seeing conditions on Mauna Kea, and they would bring extra cost and complication. The project has already ruled out sites in the Himalayas, put forward by India and China—both TMT partners along with the United States, Japan, and Canada—because they are too far from ports and have short construction seasons.
The TMT governors are expected to choose their top alternative site later this month. Regardless of what happens in Hawaii, the governors have vowed to start construction—on Mauna Kea or elsewhere—no later than April 2018.
It is clear that Mauna Kea in Hawaii is the best location. Unfortunately, they are faced with the reality that there might be years of delays before they ever get permission to build, if they get permission at all.
The competition heats up: Russia has signed two new contracts using its newly announced Proton-Medium rocket configuration.
Both contracts are for the same launch. The primary payload will be a Intelsat communications satellite. The secondary payload will be Orbital ATK’s first Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-1), which is actually more significant and somewhat ground-breaking.
The MEV-1 provides life-extending services by taking over the propulsion and attitude control functions. Satellites have an average of 15 years of life on orbit, before they need to be replaced. The vehicle itself has a 15-year design life with the ability to perform numerous dockings and undockings during its life span. “Rather than launching new satellites, operators can extend the life of healthy in-orbit satellites, providing enhanced flexibility through Orbital ATK’s scalable and cost-efficient capabilities,” noted Our simple approach minimizes risk, enhances mission assurance, and enables our customers to realize the maximum value of their in-orbit satellite assets.”
The launch of MEV-1 will involve in-orbit testing and a demonstration to be performed with an Intelsat satellite. MEV-1 will then relocate to the Intelsat satellite scheduled for the mission extension service, which is planned for a five-year period. Intelsat will also have the option to service multiple satellites using the same MEV.
If MEV-1 proves successful, Orbital ATK will have built, launched, and made money from the first robot repair satellite. While at first glance this success suggests that satellite companies will need to launch fewer satellites, thus reducing the market demand for rockets, what it will really do is make the orbiting satellite more useful and profitable, thus encouraging new players to enter the market. The demand for satellites will increase, thus increasing the demand for rockets.
Ain’t freedom and private enterprise grand?
Boeing has delayed the first test flight of its Starliner manned capsule from the end of 2017 until June 2018.
Boeing says that production delays and problems with qualification tests are partly to blame for the timeline slip. The company also found a production flaw in September that forced them to get rid of a main element on one of their spacecrafts — a dome that made up the pressure shell of the crew module. All of these complications combined prompted Boeing to push back the development timeline of Starliner by about six months.
Embedded below the fold. Once again we did a double podcast, 39 minutes long, and spent a lot of time talking about Obama’s empty Mars announcement today.
» Read more
An evening pause: Watching this only confirms for me a well known fact: Young people sure have more energy than they know what to do with. In this case, it is used well.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace, who adds that this “Swedish group originally formed as an ABBA tribute band (originally, they called themselves “ABBA Teens”). As they became older, they branched out into their own music selections that had nothing to do with ABBA.”
