Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

Apollo 16 Lunar Rover “Grand Prix”

February 25, 2021 6:01 pm Robert Zimmerman

An evening pause: This seems especially appropriate with the arrival of another rover on Mars last week.

On their first day of three on the lunar surface, John Young and Charles Duke deployed their rover and took it for a test drive before heading out to nearby Plum Crater for two hours of sample gathering and exploration.

This footage shows Young driving with Duke filming and reporting what he sees. The goal was to gather engineering data on how the rover’s wheels functioned in the very dusty lunar soil.

This short clip nicely illustrates the ambitious achievement of the American Apollo missions that should give pause to any arrogant modern young engineer. This was before home computers and CAD-CAM. It was designed by hand and slide-rule, using inches, pounds, and feet. And it worked, and worked magnificently. Oh if we today could only do as well.

Hat tip Björn “Local Fluff” Larsson.

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Starship #10 completes another static fire test after quick engine swap

February 25, 2021 4:44 pm Robert Zimmerman

Screen capture from LabPadre live stream.

Capitalism in space: In what to me appears a remarkable tour de force, SpaceX today completed the second dress rehearsal countdown and static fire test of its tenth Starship prototype.

What made this a tour de force is that the previous test, only two days before, had found issues with one of the prototype’s three Raptor engines. In less than two days, SpaceX engineers were able to replace that engine and fire up the rocket again.

Compare that to the operations of Boeing and NASA in trying to do a single static fire test of SLS’s core stage. Preparations for the first test took months, and when this had an issue it is now going to take at least a month (if not more) before they can attempt a second test.

If today’s Starship static fire test came up clean with no problems, a test flight to about 30 to 40,000 feet could come as early as tomorrow.

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First launch of Blue Origin’s orbital rocket delayed to ’22

February 25, 2021 3:48 pm Robert Zimmerman

Capitalism in space: In what had increasingly appeared likely in recent months, Blue Origin today announced that it is delaying the first launch of its orbital New Glenn rocket from late this year to sometime in ’22.

Blue Origin noted that the updated timeline follows the U.S. Space Force to stop its support for the New Glenn development effort as part of its procurement program for national security launches. That support, which could have added up to $500 million, was closed out at the end of last year.

The Space Force ended up choosing United Launch Alliance and SpaceX for the next round of national security launches. Jarrett Jones, Blue Origin’s senior vice president for New Glenn, told Space News that losing out on that round of launch contracts represented a $3 billion hit to anticipated revenue, and forced the company to “re-baseline” its development plans.

Personally I think this excuse is absurd. Jeff Bezos has been investing about $1 billion per year in Blue Origin. Moreover, in its announcement the company claimed it has invested $2.5 billion of that money in developing New Glenn. This is almost as much as SpaceX has raised to build Starship/Super Heavy, which is in development and in only about two years has already produced multiple prototypes and two test flights. Moreover, SpaceX developed Falcon Heavy for about a half billion dollars, and did it in less than seven years.

New Glenn has been in development for more than four years, and we have yet to even see it assembled in any form at all. The loss of that government military contract should have made no difference if Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin were really serious about building this rocket. He has given the company more than enough investment capital to get it done. They have just not delivered so far.

If I was Bezos, I would be taking a very hard look at the management at Blue Origin, with the intent to make some significant changes.

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Searching for ice in the Martian low latitudes

February 25, 2021 12:31 pm Robert Zimmerman

Click for full image.

Today’s cool image well illustrates the effort of planetary scientists to map out the range of buried ice on the Martian surface. Taken on December 13, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, it shows a 3.5-mile-wide crater located in the southern cratered highlands, but for those cratered highlands at the very high northern latitude of 24 degrees.

The black streaks on the crater’s interior slopes are probably slope streaks, but these are not the subject of this article. Instead, it is the material that covers the crater’s floor. These features resemble the glacial fill material that scientists have found widespread in the latitude bands between 30 to 60 degrees latitude. However, this crater is farther south, where such ice would not be stable and should have sublimated away.

Could there still be ice here? I emailed the scientist who requested the photo, Colin Dundas of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center in Arizona, and asked him what I was looking at. His answer:
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Two educators in NYC fired for refusing to do Black Panther salute

February 25, 2021 11:53 am Robert Zimmerman

They’re coming for you next: Two different educators in New York City, one Jewish and the other a Dominican-American who calls herself Afro-Latina, have been fired for refusing to do the Black Panther salute popularized by the Disney sci-fi 2018 movie, Black Panther.

The latter, Rafaela Espinal, was fired as head of the Community School District 12 in the Bronx and forced to take a demotion in order to save her retirement and health benefits. Not only did she refuse to do this salute because she believed it created a racial divide, she found the policies of New York’s Department of Education (DOE) particularly offensive and bigoted, as described in her $40 million lawsuit filed against New York’s DOE.
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Fellow DOE administrators also allegedly told Espinal she wasn’t “Black enough” and she should “just learn to be quiet and look pretty,” she claims in the $40 million suit.

Espinal, 50, claims racial fissures began to emerge in superintendent meetings in the fall of 2017, when some Black administrators would meet separately after the larger group’s monthly gatherings. Soon, only the birthdays of Black superintendents were recognized at official meetings, she claims.

The other educator, Karen Ames (who is also suing the DOE), experienced equally bigoted treatment before she was fired.
» Read more

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China commits to building its own SLS

February 25, 2021 9:16 am Robert Zimmerman

The new colonial movement: China yesterday officially announced that it has approved construction of a heavy-lift rocket, dubbed Long March 9, that would by 2030 be able to put 140 tons into orbit.

The rocket is planned to have a lift capacity of 140 metric tons, with the capability of sending 50 or more tons into lunar orbit. It would be an immense vehicle, with a 10-meter diameter core and 5-meter side boosters. China would also like to eventually make the rocket, or at least part of it, reusable.

China is also developing another large rocket more comparable to the Falcon Heavy, though this other rocket has no name and information about it is more scarce.

Both projects indicate the long term commitment of the Chinese government to its space program. They also indicate that the present-day international competition to get into space is fueling far more development than the last forty years of international cooperation.

Whether these giant government rockets from China will be practical and efficient is an unanswered question. Just building something to compete is not the same thing as actually competing. The rockets have to be affordable, with the ability to launch frequently to make in-space exploration possible. If not, they will nothing more than big photo ops for incompetent politicians, kind of like SLS is for the U.S.

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February 24, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast

February 25, 2021 12:25 am Robert Zimmerman

Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Glenn Miller Orchestra Scandinavia – American Patrol

February 24, 2021 6:01 pm Robert Zimmerman

An evening pause: Americans once had brass, and Glenn Miller’s music captured it, both in instruments and in sound. This has a happy defiant exuberance that now seems lost.

Hat tip Tom Biggar.

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Another detailed essay demanding SLS be cancelled

February 24, 2021 5:21 pm Robert Zimmerman

Link here.

The analysis is detailed, thoughtful, thorough, and technical. It is worthwhile to read every word, slowly, carefully, and with an open-mind. The lead:

The SLS axiomatically cannot provide good value to the US taxpayer. In that regard it has already failed, regardless of whether it eventually manages to limp to orbit with a Falcon Heavy payload or two.

The question here is whether it is allowed to inflict humiliation and tragedy on the US public, who so richly deserve an actual legitimate launch program run by and for actual technical experts.

The best time to cancel SLS was 15 years ago. The second best time is now.

While this essay is brilliant, its real significance is that it is another data point in the growing sense I have that the Washington community is preparing itself for cancelling SLS at last. Such an essay would not have been written or paid attention to five years ago. I know. I wrote my own and got no traction.

Today attention is getting paid. More importantly, we are seeing a range of people and news organizations advocating similar anti-SLS positions, positions that would have been thought politically impossible only a few short years ago.

The clock is ticking on SLS. If any of its planned upcoming tests or flights fail, it will face a firestorm of hostility. And even if they succeed, its days appear numbered.

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After a year there is zero evidence government edicts slowed the spread of COVID-19

February 24, 2021 4:42 pm Robert Zimmerman

It never was about the virus: After a year of job-destroying lockdowns and the inhuman muzzling of every citizen in a panicked effort to slow the spread of COVID-19, a careful review of the data continues to show what was obvious as early as September 2020: Those authoritarian government edicts did nothing to stop or even slow the spread of the coronavirus.

The article at the link first compares Florida (where the government edicts were few) and California (which was turned into a fascist state by the edicts of its Democratic Party governor) and found that after a year, Florida was actually impacted less by the virus.

In light of everything our officials have taught us about how this virus spreads, it defies reality that Florida, a fully open and popular travel destination with one of the oldest populations in the country, currently has lower hospitalizations and deaths per million than California, a state with much heavier restrictions and one of the youngest populations in the country. While it is true that, overall, California does slightly better than Florida in deaths per million, simply accounting for California’s much younger population tips the scales in Florida’s favor.

Florida has zero restrictions on bars, breweries, indoor dining, gyms, places of worship, gathering sizes, and almost all schools are offering in-person instruction. California, on the other hand, retains heavy restrictions in each of these areas. At the very least, Florida’s hospitalizations and deaths per million should be substantially worse than California’s. Those who predicted death and destruction as a consequence of Florida’s September reopening simply cannot see these results as anything other than utterly remarkable. Even White House covid advisor Andy Slavitt, much to the establishment’s embarrassment, had no explanation for Florida’s success relative to California. Slavitt was reduced to parroting establishment talking points after admitting that Florida’s surprisingly great numbers were “just a little beyond our explanation.”

The article then goes on to look at national trends, and finds similar results. Overall there is absolute no correlation between harsh restrictions and fewer COVID deaths or hospitalizations. Instead, the biggest factor appears to be local climate.
» Read more

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Parker looks at Venus

February 24, 2021 2:57 pm Robert Zimmerman

Click for full image.

During its July 2020 fly-by of Venus, the Parker Solar Probe used its wide field camera to snap a picture of the planet, cropped and reduced to post here on the right.

The photo surprised the scientists in that it apparently was able to detect some major surface features through Venus’ thick cloud cover.

WISPR is designed to take images of the solar corona and inner heliosphere in visible light, as well as images of the solar wind and its structures as they approach and fly by the spacecraft. At Venus, the camera detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet that may be nightglow — light emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules in the nightside. The prominent dark feature in the center of the image is Aphrodite Terra, the largest highland region on the Venusian surface. The feature appears dark because of its lower temperature, about 85 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) cooler than its surroundings.

That aspect of the image took the team by surprise, said Angelos Vourlidas, the WISPR project scientist from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, who coordinated a WISPR imaging campaign with Japan’s Venus-orbiting Akatsuki mission. “WISPR is tailored and tested for visible light observations. We expected to see clouds, but the camera peered right through to the surface.”

“WISPR effectively captured the thermal emission of the Venusian surface,” said Brian Wood, an astrophysicist and WISPR team member from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. “It’s very similar to images acquired by the Akatsuki spacecraft at near-infrared wavelengths.”

This surprising observation sent the WISPR team back to the lab to measure the instrument’s sensitivity to infrared light. If WISPR can indeed pick up near-infrared wavelengths of light, the unforeseen capability would provide new opportunities to study dust around the Sun and in the inner solar system. If it can’t pick up extra infrared wavelengths, then these images — showing signatures of features on Venus’ surface — may have revealed a previously unknown “window” through the Venusian atmosphere.

The streaks in the picture come from cosmic rays.

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Land of rovers

February 24, 2021 1:30 pm Robert Zimmerman

Overview map

Today’s cool image is in honor the two newest Martian rovers, Perseverance (which now sits quite comfortably in Jezero Crater, ready to begin what will probably be more than a decade of exploration on the Martian surface) and China’s yet-to-be-named rover (set to hopefully soft land on Mars some time in late April).

The overview map to the right shows us the region where both rovers shall wander. The black box in Jezero Crater is where Perseverance now sits. The red cross about 1,400 miles away is the believed landing zone for China’s rover, located in Utopia Planitia at about 25 degrees north latitude. The Viking 2 landing site is just off the edge of the northeast corner of the map.

The latitude of 30 degrees, as indicated by the white line, is presently an important dividing line based on our present knowledge of Mars. South of that line the terrain is generally dry, though there is evidence that water in some form (liquid or ice) was once present. North of that line scientists have found evidence of considerable ice below the surface, with its presence becoming increasingly obvious the farther north you go.

Today’s cool image, shown below, is north of that line at 33 degrees latitude in Utopia Planitia, and is marked by the white cross, about 500 miles to the northwest of the Chinese rover’s landing site.
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Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.