Steve ‘n Seagulls – Nothing else matters
A evening pause: Hat tip Sayomara.
OSIRIS-REx has begun its return to Bennu
On January 14th the OSIRIS-REx team fired the spacecraft’s engines to halt its drift away from the asteroid Bennu and begin its return for one last reconnaissance before heading to Earth with its samples.
OSIRIS-REx executed the first maneuver on Jan. 14, which acted as a braking burn and put the spacecraft on a trajectory to rendezvous with the asteroid one last time. Since October’s sample collection event, the spacecraft has been slowly drifting away from the asteroid, and ended up approximately 1,635 miles (2,200 km) from Bennu. After the braking burn, the spacecraft is now slowly approaching the asteroid and will perform a second approach maneuver on Mar. 6, when it is approximately 155 miles (250 km) from Bennu. OSIRIS-REx will then execute three subsequent maneuvers, which are required to place the spacecraft on a precise trajectory for the final flyby on Apr. 7.
OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to depart Bennu on May 10 and begin its two-year journey back to Earth. The spacecraft will deliver the samples of Bennu to the Utah Test and Training Range on Sep. 24, 2023.
While they will gather images of the whole asteroid, their number one goal will be to get high resolution photos of the sample-grab site Nightingale to see how it was changed by that sample grab. The spacecraft pushed into the asteroid’s rubble pile about 1.6 feet, and that act certainly disturbed both the interior and surface. By comparing the before and after pictures scientists can garner a lot of information about the asteroid’s make-up, density, and structure. It will also teach future engineers what to expect when next they try to touch another rubble-pile asteroid.
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. If you buy it from 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
Today’s blacklisted American: Chase Bank blacklists Pro-Trump Covfefe Coffee
Click image to buy their product.
They’re coming for you next: Chase Bank has suddenly decided that it can’t do business with the coffee company, Covfefe Coffee, apparently for the simple reason that the coffee company is unabashedly pro-Trump and supports the standard American values of freedom and liberty that made this nation the haven for the oppressed for more than two centuries.
Chase Bank has abruptly stopped a pro-Trump coffee company from using its payment processing service, WePay, and is currently preventing them from withdrawing any funds.
Covfefe Coffee, founded in 2018, brands itself as “Coffee For Deplorables By Deplorables.” The company, which says their goal is to “provide proud to Americans access to world-class coffee without having to fund your political and cultural opponents,” was informed via email on Wednesday that they would no longer be able to use their payment processing service because payments were “for one or more of the activities prohibited by” their terms of service. [emphasis mine]
Nor has this been all. Amazon suspended the company’s advertising on that platform in 2019 for using the phrase “Make America Great Again,” a phrase that Amazon thinks “incites hate.”
What this really tells us is that the people at Amazon and Chase Bank hate America, and want it to fail. Anyone who thinks different must be blacklisted and preventing from succeeding.
To understand how hateful Amazon and Chase are being, you need only read what Covfefe says on its own website:
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The Icy Surface of Mars
Two newly published science papers in the past few days have once again reinforced the growing evidence that much of Mars from 30 degrees latitude to its poles is very icy, with much of that ice found close to the surface.
The map above, adapted and annotated by me from figures 4 and 12 of one of those papers (“Widespread Exposures of Extensive Clean Shallow Ice in the Mid‐Latitudes of Mars”), show the areas on Mars where the evidence suggests ample and easily accessible ice, underground but close to the surface.
The red dots and diamonds indicate recent impact craters that temporarily exposed the underground ice layer that would normally not be visible. The white dots and diamonds indicate ice scarps with visible ice layers in their cliff faces. The size of these locations is greatly exaggerated.
The two hatched lines at 30 degrees latitude, north and south, indicate the closest to the equator that scientists have detected evidence of glacial ice. It is also the closest to the equator that the second new paper, “Water Ice Resources Identified in Martian Northern Hemisphere “, has found evidence of underground ice in the north. From the abstract of this second paper:
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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.
Lockheed Martin picks ABL’s rocket to make its first UK launch
Capitalism in space: Lockheed Martin has chosen the smallsat rocket company ABL Space Systems to launch its first UK satellite payload from Shetland.
Lockheed said Feb. 7 that ABL will perform a launch of its RS1 rocket from the Shetland Space Centre, a spaceport to be developed on the island of Unst in the Shetlands, in 2022. The rocket, on a mission called the UK Pathfinder launch, will place into orbit a tug developed by Moog in the UK that will then deploy six 6U cubesats.
The launch will fulfill an award made by the British government in 2018 to support development of a domestic launch capability. The $31 million contract to Lockheed Martin covered a launch, then planned for a spaceport at Sutherland in northern Scotland, as well as Moog’s orbital maneuvering vehicle.
Lockheed did not disclose at the time, though, which vehicle it would use for the launch. The company does not have a small launch vehicle of its own compatible with the spaceport, but has invested in companies working on such vehicles, including ABL Space Systems and Rocket Lab.
It appears Lockheed choose ABL over Rocket Lab because of its mobile launch capability. As designed, its RS1 rocket needs no permanent infrastructure at the launch site. All they need is a concrete pad.
This decision also heightens the competition between the two presently proposed UK spaceports in Sutherland, Scotland, and Unst, Shetland. While planning at Sutherland started earlier, local opposition appears to be slowing it down.
ABL is one of six smallsat rocket companies planning a first orbital launch in 2021. While it is unlikely all will do so, the likelihood is increasing that several will, which will make things very busy in the rocket industry.
Starship update: Prototype #10 being readied for launch
Link here. Not only have the engines been installed on the tenth Starship prototype, the static fire test is set for this week, maybe as early as today. It appears they are trying to launch the next test flight before the end of February.
At landing they will now fire all three engines, in case one or more fail to light (as happened with prototype #9), and then shut down all but one immediately and let that do the landing burn. This adds redundancy and increases the odds of a successful landing.
The article also provides a detailed update on the status of future Starship and Super Heavy test articles. While #11 is being readied for launch, it appears that, based on what has been learned from #8 and #9, they are dismantling prototypes #12-14 and incorporating changes to #15, which will likely fly after #11.
One aspect of this development program struck me today. These prototypes are essentially expendable rockets. Like it did with its early expendable Falcon 9, SpaceX is using these throw-away prototypes to test ways to make them more reusable and reliable. Unlike the Falcon 9s, however, the company isn’t using these prototypes to launch payloads, at least not at this stage. It isn’t good enough that these prototypes can successfully launch. They must be able to land as well.
I suspect that once during this test program the full rocket begins to reach orbit SpaceX will add payloads, even as they continue to test re-entry and landing. The early flights might produce rockets that successfully bring satellites into space but end up getting destroyed upon return. Those loses will then be used to make later ships better and more likely to return intact.
Eventually, we will have a rocket entirely reusable and flying multiple times, just like the Falcon 9 first stage.
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
February 5, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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FlippinDingDong – Trailer Annie
An evening pause: Hat tip Jim Mallamace, who rightly added, “No clue what this means, but I’m certain the student animators had fun making it.”
Fun to watch too. They might have done it on a computer, but it sure has the feel of hand-drawn animation.
Today’s blacklisted American: Journalist Andy Ngo
They’re coming for you next: Journalist Andy Ngo has spent the last two years being pretty much one of the few real journalists covering the violent, fascist, storm-trooper tactics of the leftist Antifa and Black Lives Matter movements, carefully documenting in both print and visuals their riots and attacks of innocent citizens.
His reporting has been so effective that Antifa thugs attacked him in 2019, sending him to the emergency room in Portland.
Furthermore, those same Portland brownshirts stormed a local bookstore, causing its evacuation and early closure, because it happened to be selling Ngo’s book on Antifa activities in Portland, Unmasked. The protests eventually forced the bookstore to remove the book from its shelves, though it still sells it online.
Nor has that been the sum total of Antifa’s effort to blacklist Ngo. They have been issuing him death threats, and even though Ngo told the Portland police, even naming some names, the police did nothing.
Ngo was thus forced to flee Portland temporarily, moving to London. The irony is that his parents were refugees who came to the United States to gain freedom and the right to speak freely. Now their son has fled the U.S. for the same reasons.
When asked how he would describe Antifa in one sentence, he said, “For their world to live and thrive, America has to die.”
The worst part of these attacks has been the shallow willingness of the mainstream media to go along with the false slanders and lies against Ngo and to spread them.
National publications, such as Rolling Stone and Salon used a local alternative weekly “blog,” as Ngo puts it, to smear him using epithets with which we’re only all too familiar: racist extremist. “And then so whenever you google me now and [view] my Wikipedia page, all you see are these false accusations,” he explained. “All of this has been an attempt to get me canceled; to make me out to be someone I’m not, make me out to be a far-right extremist.”
It is all part of Obama’s legacy of hate, where slanders and libels by the left are now their first go-to argument in any debate.
Ngo deserves great kudos and support, however. Unlike many who fold to this fascist pressure, he has stood strong, and continued his reporting, honestly and in detail. Furthermore, the attacks have actually helped sales of Unmasked, making it a major bestseller. For a short while was number one on Amazon, and is still #37 as of today.
His fearless willingness to fight is of course the right response. Buying his book is another. We must not bow to these bullies and tyrants. We must look them in the eye and defy them. Only then will we ever have the chance to once again become free.
Tianwen-1 takes first picture of Mars
Click for full image.
The new colonial movement: China’s Tianwen-1Mars spacecraft has taken its first picture of Mars, cropped and reduced to post here to the right.
The photo shows Valles Marineris as the darker splotch in the center-right of the hemisphere, with the northern lowland plain that this canyon feeds into, Chryse Planitia, the triangular dark area to the north east. Both Viking-1 and Mars Pathfinder landed in this region. The whitish border area on the triangle’s eastern flank is the area that Europe’s Rosalind Franklin rover will hopefully land in ’23.
The whitish area that caps the north pole is likely the annual mantle of dry ice that covers the planet’s polar regions down to about 60 degrees latitude each winter. Right now it is early spring in the northern hemisphere, and that mantle has only begun to sublimate away. In another few months that mantle will disappear entirely, exposing the terrain below it.
Finally, the very bright edge on the planet’s eastern limb is either caused by a cloud layer, or is simply an over-exposure. Hard to say which.
Hydrazine on the surface of Saturn’s moon Rhea?
The uncertainty of science: Scientists using data from several Cassini flyby’s of the Saturn moon Rhea now think that hydrazine, a very toxic chemical routinely used by spacecraft as fuel, might exist on its surface.
Their effort was an attempt to identify an unknown spectroscopy absorption feature at a specific wavelength.
In comparison to chloromethane, the production of hydrazine monohydrate was easier to explain due to chemical reactions involving water-ice and ammonia or delivery from Titan’s nitrogen rich atmosphere. Elowitz et al. considered the possibility of contamination of the UVIS data by a hydrazine propellant from the Cassini spacecraft, although it was highly unlikely since the hydrazine thrusters were not used during icy satellite flybys.
The team confirmed the specific signature of a 184-nm feature on Rhea’s surface using the UV spectrometer observations made by the Cassini spacecraft. In addition to that, the irradiation of ammonia by charged particles from Saturn’s magnetosphere induced the dissociation of ammonia molecules to form diazene and hydrazine. The source of ammonia on Rhea could be primordial, incorporated into its interior during formation and brought to the surface within a period of endogenic activity, as evident in Cassini ISS imagery, although ammonia was unlikely to survive indefinitely on the surface. The team suggest further analysis to understand the potential for satellite-to-satellite transfer of materials across Titan’s atmosphere to explain the presence of hydrazine monohydrate on Rhea.
Though useful as a fuel, its poisonous nature will make any exploration of these moons very hazardous, and will also likely make its usefulness difficult initially in that exploration
Betelgeuse is closer and smaller than previously thought
Images taken by Europe’s
Very Large Telescope in Chile
The uncertainty of science: A new analysis by scientists of Betelgeuse, triggered by its dip in brightness in 2020, has concluded that the red giant star is both closer and smaller than previously estimated.
Their analysis reported a present-day mass of 16.5 to 19 solar mass—which is slightly lower than the most recent estimates. The study also revealed how big Betelgeuse is, as well as its distance from Earth. The star’s actual size has been a bit of a mystery: earlier studies, for instance, suggested it could be bigger than the orbit of Jupiter. However, the team’s results showed Betelgeuse only extends out to two-thirds of that, with a radius 750 times the radius of the sun. Once the physical size of the star is known, it will be possible to determine its distance from Earth. Thus far, the team’s results show it is a mere 530 light years from us, or 25 percent closer than previously thought.
The research also suggested that the star is in the initial stages of burning helium rather than hydrogen, and so it likely more than 100,000 years from going supernova.
As for the dimming, the scientists concluded (as other have) that the dimming in ’20 was due to the passage of a dust cloud in front of the star.