ULA successfully launches NOAA weather satellite
ULA today successfully launched a new NOAA weather satellite.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
8 SpaceX
4 China
2 Russia
2 ULA
The U.S. now leads China 13 to 4 in the national rankings.
Tag: science
The Democrats now prove there never was any science behind their mandates
As noted by the Spirit of Christmas Present in Dickens’
The Christmas Carol, ‘This boy is ignorance, this girl is want.
Beware them both, but most of all beware this boy.’
Only months and years after most Republican Party governors and politicians had lifted or halted all mandates requiring masks or COVID shots or social distancing, in the past week Democrats in numerous places have suddenly decided that masks and COVID shots and social distancing have suddenly become unnecessary or ineffective, and have canceled almost all their government-edicts mandating such things.
- Science! Mask Mandate for Congress Lifted Just in Time for Biden’s State of the Union speech
- California, Oregon, Washington to End School Mask Mandates March 12
- New York to lift statewide school mask mandate by March 2
- NYC Mayor Eric Adams Plans to Drop Vaccine Mandate, Masks in Schools
Simultaneously, the CDC late last week finally loosened its mask recommendations, no longer demanding that Americans wear masks indoors or in many other circumstances.
What none of these announcements mentioned was any evidence of any new scientific results to justify the new recommendations or the loosening of mandates. These changes were based — not on new scientific results — but on the fear-based opinions of politicians and health bureaucrats who for the past two years have consistently based their edicts and mandates solely on emotions and politics, not scientific evidence, and were repeatedly wrong every single time.
That they happened to be correct now is not because they are basing their actions on any new”science”, but like a broken clock, even idiots can stumble on the truth once in awhile, by accident.
In this case however their stumbling is not entirely by accident. » Read more
Scientists: Yutu-2 spots tiny glass globules similar to those found by Apollo astronauts
According to a paper just published Chinese scientists running the Yutu-2 rover on the far side of the Moon have spotted several tiny glass globules similar to those found by Apollo astronauts.
Xiao and his team believe the small spheres, which are between 0.59 and 0.79 inches (1.5 to 2.5 centimeters) across, were probably formed by relatively recent meteor impacts. Specifically, the researchers believe that the globules formed from anorthosite, a volcanically-formed rock rich in the mineral feldspar, after a high-energy impact melted the rock and reformed into spheres.
In appearance these Yutu-2 globules appear translucent, unlike the Apollo globules which were either dark or opaque. Since the rover did not do spectroscopy on these objects before moving on, however, their actual make-up is unknown, with the speculations by the researchers above merely that, speculations, though reasonable.
Chandra’s camera remains in safe mode
Though engineers have improvised a work-around that has allowed most of instruments on the Chandra X-Ray observatory to resume science operations, the power supply problem in the telescope’s high resolution camera (HRC) that occurred on February 9th remains unresolved, leaving that camera in safe mode.
The Chandra science instrument and engineering teams continue to analyze the cause of the HRC power supply issue, as well as potential approaches to enable the HRC again. The spacecraft is otherwise healthy and operating normally.
Chandra has been flying now for more than two decades, well past its original mission. For it to begin to have these problems is not surprising, though it will be a great tragedy if it fails just as the James Webb Space Telescope is about to go operational. Ideally astronomers want data from both, as well as Hubble, to cover a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, from the optical to the infrared to X-rays.
Ingenuity’s 20th flight a success
According to a tweet released tonight by JPL, the 20th flight of Ingenuity on Mars was a success, lasting 130 seconds and traveling about 1,283 feet.
The tweet includes a short video showing the helicopter taking off and then landing, at the same spot, which I am sure is not of this flight but from a previous test that simply went up and down. The flight just completed took off and headed mostly to the north, slightly west, and landed in a different spot entirely.
Expect more information to follow.
Scientists: Martian topography in one region suggests the past existence of lakes and river networks, but not a large single ocean
Based on a just published paper, scientists using orbital topography data and imagery have concluded that more than three billion years ago on Mars ancient rivers in the transition zone between the southern cratered highlands and the northern lowland plains fed into numerous lakes in the lowlands, not a single large ocean as some scientists posit.
From their abstract:
The northern third of Mars contains an extensive topographic basin, but there is conflicting evidence to whether it was once occupied by an ocean-sized body of water billions of years ago. At the margins of this basin are the remnants of deltas, which formed into water, but the size and nature of this water body (or water bodies) is unclear, and detailed investigations of different regions of the basin margins are necessary.
In this study, we use high-resolution image and topographic datasets from satellites orbiting Mars to investigate a series of water-formed landforms in the Memnonia Sulci region, set along the boundary of Mars’s northern basin. These landforms likely formed billions of years ago, providing evidence for ancient rivers and lakes in this region. The geologic evolution of these rivers and lakes was complicated, likely influenced by water-level fluctuations, changes in sediment availability, and impact cratering. Our topographic analysis of these rivers and lakes suggests that they terminated in a series of ancient lake basins at the boundary of Mars’s northern basin, rather than supplying a larger, ocean-sized body of water. [emphasis mine]
The Memnonia Sulci region is in the cratered highlands just south of the Medusae Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash deposit on Mars. The region of study in it is marked by the blue dot in the overview map to the right.
The study does not preclude the possible existence of a northern ocean on Mars, but it says that at least in this region at the equator, it did not exist. Instead, the various river valleys drained into separate smaller and relatively short-lived lakes.
Curiosity images the Martian version of a cave formation
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken today by Curiosity’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), a camera designed to get close high resolution images of very small features on the surface.
The Curiosity image site does not provide a scale, but MAHLI, located at the end of the rover’s robot arm, is capable of resolutions as small as 14 microns per pixel. Since a micron is one thousandth of a millimeter, and the original image was 1584 by 1184 pixels in size, that means the entire image is likely only slightly larger than 18 to 25 millimeters across, or slightly less than an inch.
This feature, which closely resembles a cave helictite, is thus about a quarter inch in size. Helictites, which in caves often resemble wildly growing roots, are nonetheless made of calcite, not organic material. They grow wildly because the water is being pushed out from their center is under pressure, so that as it drips away from the formation it leaves its calcite deposits randomly, causing the formation to grow randomly.
MAHLI also took what looks to be an infrared or heat image of the formation, which appears to show that the tips of the branches are at a different temperature, I think cooler, than the rest of the formation.
While seeping water causes helictites on Earth, what formed this thing on Mars is beyond my guess. It sure looks cool however.
Ingenuity update: Dust storm caused issues; 20th flight upcoming
Click for interactive map.
According to the Ingenuity engineering team in an update today, the Mars helicopter is getting ready for its 20th flight, scheduled for no earlier than today, even as the team successfully dealt with dust that settled on the helicopter’s various parts prior to flight 19.
The dust storm did, however, leave the Ingenuity team with two additional challenges to deal with: a dirty navigation camera window and dust in the swashplate assemblies.
Comparing navigation camera images taken before and after the dust storm revealed that the storm deposited debris on the ground-facing navigation camera window, specifically around the periphery of the camera’s field of view. Debris on the navigation camera window is problematic because Ingenuity’s visual navigation software may confuse the debris with the actual ground features that it tries to track during flight, which can cause navigation errors. Fortunately, Ingenuity’s software provides a tool for dealing with this issue: The team can provide an updated image mask file that tells the visual navigation software to ignore certain regions of the image. The operations team made use of this feature and performed an image mask update late last month.
The dust storm also deposited dust and sand in Ingenuity’s swashplate assemblies. On Mars as well as on Earth, a helicopter’s swashplates are very important because they control the pitch (angle from horizontal) of the rotor blades, which is essential for stable and controlled flight. Ingenuity’s swashplate issue was first detected when the rotorcraft reported a failure during its first automated swashplate actuator self-test since the dust storm on Jan. 28, 2022 (Sol 335 of the Perseverance mission). Data revealed that all six swashplate servo actuators were experiencing unusual levels of unusual levels of resistance while moving the swashplates over their range of motion.
The engineers subsequently tested a procedure, planned before launch, for cleaning the swashplates, and found that it worked.
The data from that activity showed a significant improvement – a reduction in servo loading, so the team followed it up with seven back-to-back servo wiggles on Sol 341. Remarkably, by the end of that activity, Ingenuity’s servo loads appeared nearly identical to nominal loads seen prior to the dust storm.
After dealing with both dust issues, flight 19 proceeded successfully, as planned.
The overview map above shows the present location of Perseverance as the red dot, the present location of Ingenuity by the green dot, and the approximate landing site for the helicopter’s 20th flight by the black dot. The tan dotted line shows Perseverance’s planned route.
Perseverance itself has been traveling fast since Ingenuity’s last flight on February 9th, almost completely retracing its steps to return almost to its landing site.
Dry barren ground in Martian northern lowlands?
Click for full image.
Today’s cool image is intriguing because of what appears to not be there, rather than what is there. The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on November 3, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
At first glance it appears to show a very dry, barren surface. At its base are many parallel grooves running from the southwest to the northeast. On top of these grooves are several more recent crater impacts, as well as several patches of higher bedrock that appears to have been hard enough to resist whatever erosion process caused the groves.
Yet, based on the overview map below, the location of this photo should not be dry and barren, but instead home to a near-surface ice sheet covering everything.
» Read more
Curiosity’s coming travels across the rocky Greenheugh Pediment
Click for full resolution panorama. Original images can be found here, here, and here.
Click for interactive map.
Curiosity, having successfully climbed up and out of Gordon Notch, was able to aim its navigation cameras forward yesterday and get its first views from this position across the very rocky Greenheugh Pediment to its next major goal, Gediz Vallis Ridge. The panorama above, taken by the rover’s right navigation camera, shows this view. The ridge is about 1,500 feet away, at its closest point. The rim of Gale Crater, barely visible in the haze, is about 20-30 miles away.
The overview map to the right indicates the area covered in this panorama by the yellow lines. The red dotted line indicates Curiosity’s planned future route.
Curiosity’s first view of the pediment was made in March 2020, from a point on its northern border, just beyond the top edge of the map. The panorama taken then showed what appeared to be a very treacherous and rough surface, possibly too rough for Curiosity to traverse.
According to the science team’s most recent update from before the holiday weekend, the plan had been to spend February 19-20 studying the ground, then drive a short distance yesterday to get a better view ahead.
This will give us a good vantage point to look into the valley ahead and try to scope out our future route. … We chose to drive about 10m total, in order to get the rover oriented at a good heading and parked in a good spot. We expect a similarly beautiful view from our post-drive imaging.
That view is the panorama above. Though still very rough, the ground ahead appears far more traversable than the surface seen in 2020.
Have astronomers found an exoplanet with raining metal and gems?
The uncertainty of science: Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers think they have detected on a hot Jupiter exoplanet 880 light years away the formation of clouds and rain made up metals and gems.
The exoplanet is tidally locked so that one side always faces its star, which also means the temperature difference between the two hemispheres is gigantic, 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit on the dayside and about 2,600 degrees on the nightside.
Previous Hubble data showed signs of metals including iron, magnesium, chromium and vanadium existing as gasses on the planet’s dayside. But in this study, the researchers have found that on the planet’s nightside, it gets cold enough for these metals to condense into clouds.
And, just as the strong winds pull water vapor and atoms around the planet to break apart and recombine, metal clouds will blow to the planet’s dayside and evaporate, condense back on the nightside and so on.
But metal clouds aren’t the only strange phenomenon these researchers spotted on this hot Jupiter. They also found evidence of possible rain in the form of liquid gems.
While tantalizing and alien, these results have many uncertainties. What the data suggests might not be the reality. To find out more, the astronomers hope to use the James Webb Space Telescope to do more infrared observations, once it becomes operational.
Deformed Martian craters
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on September 3, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The focus of the image for the MRO science team were the wedding cake layers inside the largest crater. These layers suggest glacial ice, with the layers suggesting multiple cycles of glacial ebb and flow. Since the crater is at 43 degrees north latitude, and sits in the chaos region dubbed Protonilus Mensae, smack dab in the center of what I call Mars’ glacier country, this conclusion makes perfect sense.
To my eye, however, the most interesting feature of this photo are the many distorted craters. The overview map below shows the picture’s location, as well as several nearby very large impact craters which might have caused many secondary impacts, including the many craters at this location.
» Read more
Hugging galaxies
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The Hubble Space Telescope science team today released the photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, of the interaction of three galaxies, the larger two of which look like they are hugging each other.
This galaxy triplet is estimated to be about just under 700 million light years away. It was taken as part of a program aimed at producing high quality images of strange looking galaxies.
Using Hubble’s powerful Advanced Camera for Surveys, astronomers took a closer look at some of the more unusual galaxies that volunteers identified. The original Galaxy Zoo project was the largest galaxy census ever carried out and relied on crowdsourcing time from more than 100,000 volunteers to classify 900,000 unexamined galaxies. The project achieved what would have been years of work for a professional astronomer in only 175 days and has led to a steady stream of similar astronomical citizen science projects. Later Galaxy Zoo projects have included the largest ever studies of galaxy mergers and tidal dwarf galaxies, as well as the discovery of entirely new types of compact star-forming galaxies.
If you want to do some real science, you should definitely check out the Galaxy Zoo webpage. Anyone can join in, using images produced by the Victor Blanco 156 inch (4 meter) telescope in Chile to find cool stuff that needs closer examination using better telescopes like Hubble.
Gehrels-Swift returns to science operations
The Gehrels-Swift orbiting space telescope has returned to full science operations, after engineers determined the shut down on January 18th was caused by the failure of one reaction wheel and uploaded software allowing the telescope to function using only its remaining five gyroscopes.
In the last two decades satellite engineers have developed a range of software to allow spacecraft to point with acceptable accuracy using as few as two gyroscopes, even one in some circumstances. Thus, Gehrels-Swift has significant margin with five working reaction wheels.
Chandra in safe mode
The Chandra X-ray Observatory last week experienced a loss of power that caused engineers to put the science instruments on the space telescope into safe mode while they investigate the problem.
No further information is presently available.
Chandra has been in orbit since 1999, and is now on an extended mission through 2025. It would be a great tragedy if it failed now, just as the infrared Webb telescope is about to begin operations. The two space telescopes are complementary.
Cracking ice on Mars?
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on December 7, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the MRO science team dubs “erosion of scalloped terrain” in the northern lowland plains of Mars.
The cracks invoke the polygon cracks one sees in mud as it dries. The circular feature suggests a buried crater whose shape is merely suggested because the cracks are conforming to the underground topography.
Are we looking at dried mud? Maybe, but more likely we are seeing a sheet of ice now sublimating away and cracking as it does so. If you look at the full photo you will see the cracked material also appears to drape itself over several nearby low ridges, something that seems more likely from ice than mud.
The overview map below also suggests this is a buried layer of ice.
» Read more
First image from IXPE
NASA today released the first image produced from its new X-ray space telescope, the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE).
The photo to the right is that image, showing the intensity of X-rays coming from the supernovae remnant Cassiopeia A. From the caption:
Colors ranging from cool purple and blue to red and hot white correspond with the increasing brightness of the X-rays. The image was created using X-ray data collected by IXPE between Jan. 11-18.
Though Chandra also detects objects in X-rays, IXPE will also detect their polarization, or the way the rays are oriented as they travel through space.
Curiosity looks out across the mountains
Click for high resolution. Original images found here and here.
Click for interactive map.
Cool image time! The mosaic above, created from two photos taken by Curiosity’s left navigation camera and downloaded from the rover today, looks to the southeast across the small rocky valley the rover has been traversing for the past two months towards Mount Sharp.
The rover had entered this valley through the nearest gap on the left, then traveled uphill from the left to the right until it had passed behind the nearest dark ridge on the right. It then retreated and turned left, starting uphill through Gordon Notch, as shown in the overview map to the right.
On the overview, the white line marks Curiosity’s past travels, with red dotted line indicating its planned future route. The yellow lines indicate the approximate view in the panorama above.
For scale, Navarro Mountain is about 450 feet tall. The actual peak of Mount Sharp is blocked by the white front range to the left. The rover is presently still 12,600 feet below that peak, which sits to the southeast about 35 miles away.
Astronomers form lobbying group to block development on Moon’s far side
Lunar zone reserved exclusively for radio astronomers
In order to allow them to someday in the future maybe consider the idea of possibly building space-based radio telescopes on the Moon, astronomers have now formed a new lobbying group to advocate the creation of a zone more than a thousand miles wide on the Moon’s far side where all future development will be forbidden.
The new committee is chaired by Claudio Maccone, an Italian SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) astronomer, space scientist and mathematician. Maccone supports creation of a Protected Antipode Circle or PAC, a large circular piece of lunar landscape about 1,130 miles (1,820 kilometers) wide that would become the most shielded area of the moon’s far side.
“PAC does not overlap with other areas of interest to human activity,” he said. “PAC is the only area of the far side that will never be reached by the radiation emitted by future space bases located at the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points of the Earth-moon system.”
In view of these unique features, Maccone believes the PAC should be officially recognized by the United Nations as an international protected area, where radio contamination by humans is curbed, now and into the future.
In other words, these astronomers want to be given, for free, full ownership of the region in the center circle on the graphic above for future radio telescopes, even though at present they have no plans or projects to build such things.
Though the idea of creating a region protected from radio signals so that good radio astronomy can be conducted has merit, no one should have the slightest sympathy for this request by astronomers. Why should anyone give them this vast amount of real estate when astronomers have shown so little interest in building any telescopes in space, anywhere?
Only after the astronomical community finally proposes an actual radio telescope for installation at this site should this request be given the slightest attention. Before that, it is merely a stupid power grab by elitists who deserve nothing from nobody.
The lie that was COVID
How our governments determined policy against COVID during
the past two years.
Almost two years after the first arrival of the Wuhan virus into the United States, we now can look back at what has transpired and come to some solid conclusions about this respiratory illness as well as the draconian panic-based responses by governments and many citizens.
The most significant take-away from this review is simple: Routinely, government officials, especially those in states controlled by Democrats, lied repeatedly in order to create fear and terror in the general population. Almost every claim they made, edict they declared, or mandate they ordered, was either an outright lie, or designed to obscure the truth. Let’s take them one-by-one.
The models
Almost immediately, politicians, health officials, and government scientists began touting a variety of computer models, with the model [pdf] put forth by scientists at Imperial College leading the way, that claimed millions would die if some short-term draconian measures were not taken immediately. Governments and corporations had to impose very temporary two-week lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates to slow the spread of COVID in order to reduce the immediate impact and thus avoid hospitals and health facilities from being overrun.
In other words, we were told that by simply under-going two weeks of martial law, the curve would flatten, hospitals would be able to handle the increased but controllable influx of patients, and we could then go back to normal.
This was an outright lie. » Read more