Tag: science

Comet 67P/C-G at 2 feet per pixel

9:58 am

New images from Rosetta, now about 6 miles from the surface of Comet 67P/C-G, show details as small as 2 feet across.

Go to the link to see some images. If you were hiking there, these images would see you.

In related news, the Rosetta team is asking the public to help name the landing site for its Philae lander.

As the location of the first soft landing of a human-made object on a comet, the site, currently identified as Site J, deserves a meaningful and memorable name that captures the significance of the occasion. The rules are simple: any name can be proposed, but it must not be the name of a person. The name must be accompanied by a short description (up to 200 words) explaining why this would make the ideal name for such an historic location. A jury comprising members of the Philae Steering Committee will select the best name from the entries, and the winning proposer will be invited to follow the landing in person from ESA’s mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany on 12 November.

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The mysterious interior of Saturn’s moon Mimas

9:47 am

Mimas

The uncertainty of science: Using data from Cassini scientists have found that Saturn’s weird moon Mimas might have either an underground ocean or a misshapen inner core.

Tajeddine and his team relied on pictures taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which has been exploring the Saturn system since 2004. They built a 3D model of the moon and found that it rotates with an extra wobble, like a misshapen top spinning slightly askew. Because Mimas is nearly spherical, the wobble hinted that something lumpy, or perhaps sloshy, lay beneath the surface. The scientists tested several models of the moon’s interior to see what might give rise to the observed wobble.

It could be the core is lumpy and not spherical. It could be that there is a liquid ocean under the crust that sloshes about as the moon moves through space. Or it could be that a massive impact, the one that produced Mimas’s Death Star look with its one gigantic single crater, could have caused the wobble.

At the moment the data is not sufficient to favor any of these theories. I guess we will just have to go there to find out.

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G2 survives fly-by of Milky Way’s supermassive black hole

9:02 am

The uncertainty of science: The mysterious object G2, thought by astronomers to be either a cloud or a star, has survived its close fly-by of Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, without telling scientists whether it is a cloud or a star.

Not only do astronomers still not know clearly what G2 is, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole continues to behave in ways that baffle them.

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Three potential post-Pluto targets for New Horizons

9:01 am

After completing a deep search using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have identified three Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO) that New Horizons can actually reach after it flies past Pluto next year.

The KBOs Hubble found are each about 10 times larger than typical comets, but only about 1-2 percent of the size of Pluto. Unlike asteroids, KBOs have not been heated by the sun and are thought to represent a pristine, well preserved deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago. The KBOs found in the Hubble data are thought to be the building blocks of dwarf planets such as Pluto.

I think it remarkable that in the vastness beyond Pluto they were able to find any objects that also happen to be within the narrow path that New Horizons must fly after it passes Pluto in July.

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Democrats oppose an ebola travel ban

10:07 pm

Incompetence: Congressional Democrats have expressed strong opposition to any travel bans from ebola infected countries.

Remember, these are the same people who conceived, wrote, and passed Obamacare, without really reading it or even considering the concerns expressed by many people about the law (all of which have turned out to be true). Thus, it is not surprising they don’t have the brains now to recognize that a quarantine is exactly the right approach to handle ebola at this time, We have a very infectious disease that hasn’t yet broken out into the general populace which we can still keep confined to a small area, where we can more effectively fight it. A quarantine, enforced by a travel ban, will accomplish this.

But these Democrats care! So what they don’t have the ability to think? Let’s vote for them again!

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A reviving solar maximum

12:32 pm

Last week NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the sunspot activity for the Sun in September. As I do every month, I am posting it here, below the fold, with annotations to give it context.

As much as I am always willing to point out the errors and foibles of scientists when they get something wrong or overstate their conclusions, I also believe it right to give credit when credit is due. I have been saying for several years now that the prediction of the solar scientist community, indicated by the red curve in the graph below the fold, had seriously overstated the Sun’s sunspot production during this solar maximum.

Well, it now appears that, as the solar cycle continues to run its course, that their May 2009 prediction is becoming increasingly correct.
» Read more

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Ice photographed in Mercury’s permanently shadowed craters?

12:08 pm

Kandinsky Crater on Mercury

Using Messenger, scientists think they have obtained optical images of the ice that is thought to exist in the permanently shadowed craters of Mercury.

Although the polar deposits are in permanent shadow, through many refinements in the imaging, the WAC [Messenger’s camera] was able to obtain images of the surfaces of the deposits by leveraging very low levels of light scattered from illuminated crater walls. “It worked in spectacular fashion,” said Chabot.

The team zeroed in on Prokofiev, the largest crater in Mercury’s north polar region found to host radar-bright material. “Those images show extensive regions with distinctive reflectance properties,” Chabot said. “A location interpreted as hosting widespread surface water ice exhibits a cratered texture indicating that the ice was emplaced more recently than any of the underlying craters.” In other areas, water ice is present, she said, “but it is covered by a thin layer of dark material inferred to consist of frozen organic-rich compounds.” In the images of those areas, the dark deposits display sharp boundaries. “This result was a little surprising, because sharp boundaries indicate that the volatile deposits at Mercury’s poles are geologically young, relative to the time scale for lateral mixing by impacts,” said Chabot. [emphasis mine]

The image on the right is of the crater Kandinsky, and shows a very intriguing bright area on the crater’s central peak.

I highlighted that one word in the the scientist’s quote above to emphasize how preliminary these conclusions are. The images are intriguing, but I would not at this time bet a lot of money on these conclusions. Ice might be the best explanation for this data, at this time, but I would not be surprised at all if later research finds this conclusion to be false.

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First results back from the U.S. MAVEN Mars probe

9:13 am

Scientists have released the first results from NASA’s MAVEN probe orbiting Mars, designed to study that planet’s upper atmosphere.

As expected, the spacecraft has quickly found evidence of the Martian atmosphere leaking away into space.

Hydrogen appears to be leaving the planet’s atmosphere in clumps and streams that reach about 10 Mars radii into space, said Mike Chaffin, a MAVEN scientist also at the University of Colorado, who discussed the results at a 14 October news briefing. The hydrogen comes from water vapour that breaks apart in the upper atmosphere; because hydrogen is so much lighter than oxygen, it escapes into space relatively easily. “That’s effectively removing water from the Martian atmosphere,” says Chaffin.

Other images show oxygen and carbon drifting away from the planet, although these heavier atoms cluster closer to Mars than hydrogen. Deep within the atmosphere, oxygen forms ozone molecules that accumulate near Mars’s south pole.

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Finding a meteorite 20 years after it hit the ground

8:32 am

By reanalyzing the data that had recorded the fireball twenty years ago, a team of meteorite hunters in the Czech Republic have finally located the remains of a meteorite that landed in 1991 but could not be found.

What is most interesting scientifically about their find is that the pieces they found were from different types of meteorites.

[T]hese four meteorites are of three different mineralogical types. This means that the Benešov meteoroid was heterogeneous and contained at least three different types of material. After the Almahata Sitta fall, this is the second time that such a heterogeneous composition has been found. It raises the possibility that a significant fraction of all asteroids are heterogeneous and that they were strongly reprocessed by collisions with other asteroids in the main belt.

In other words, the meteorite had been a conglomerate of different geological types, which were created in different environments and were later smashed together to form this one rock.

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Recent volcanism on the Moon

4:53 pm

New data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter suggests that lunar volcanism petered out slowly and occurred more recently that previously believed.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has provided researchers strong evidence the moon’s volcanic activity slowed gradually instead of stopping abruptly a billion years ago. Scores of distinctive rock deposits observed by LRO are estimated to be less than 100 million years old. This time period corresponds to Earth’s Cretaceous period, the heyday of dinosaurs. Some areas may be less than 50 million years old. Details of the study are published online in Sunday’s edition of Nature Geoscience. “This finding is the kind of science that is literally going to make geologists rewrite the textbooks about the moon,” said John Keller, LRO project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

In a way, this new conclusion is an example of science discovering the obvious. It seems to me quite unlikely that volcanic activity on the Moon would have “stopped abruptly” under any conditions. That’s not how these things work.

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Giant boulders on Comet 67P/C-G

9:42 am

Giant boulders on Comet 67P/C-G

As Rosetta has moved in on Comet 67P/C-G, engineers have focused in on its most interesting surface features, such as the nucleus’s neck as well as a collection of very large boulders on a relatively smooth area on the nucleus’s larger lobe. The biggest boulder, seen as the middlemost rock in the photo above, they have named Cheops. It is estimated to be 150 feet across with a height of about 80 feet.

It should be emphasized that calling these features boulders might actually be premature at this time.
» Read more

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New measurements cut dark matter in Milky Way by half

7:10 pm

The uncertainty of science: New more robust measurements by Australian astronomers has shown that the amount of dark matter in the Milky Way galaxy is about half of what previous measurements had estimated.

Without doubt something is causing the outer stars in galaxies to orbit their galaxies at much greater speeds than they should. The answer that astronomers have posited since the late 1950s is that there is additional unidentified mass, dubbed dark matter, lurking as a halo around each galaxy, pulling on those outer stars and making them move faster.

The problem remains that no one has as yet detected this unidentified dark matter. Moreover, there are enormous uncertainties in the measurements of the motions of stars. This result helps narrow those uncertainties.

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A pulsar that’s eating a galaxy

8:32 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have discovered a pulsar emitting energy at a rate far greater than ever predicted and which is believed caused by the very fast in-fall of matter into the neutron star.

Astronomers have found a pulsating, dead star beaming with the energy of about 10 million suns. This is the brightest pulsar – a dense stellar remnant left over from a supernova explosion – ever recorded. The discovery was made with NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. “You might think of this pulsar as the ‘Mighty Mouse’ of stellar remnants,” said Fiona Harrison, the NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. “It has all the power of a black hole, but with much less mass.”

More here. The galaxy where this pulsar resides, M82, has been known for decades to be one of the most interesting, with evidence of vast explosions tearing it apart. This pulsar is at its center, and appears to be sucking in matter at a rate previously believed impossible, suggesting that the supermassive black holes found at the center of many galaxies could form much faster that any theory predicted.

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Ground-breaking ceremony for Thirty Meter Telescope cancelled because of protesters

9:07 am

A ground-breaking ceremony on Mauna Kea, which would have included a blessing from native Hawaiians, was cancelled Tuesday when protesters showed up trying to block the telescope’s construction.

There were also small numbers of protesters at other locations that are also connected to the telescope project.

With previous similar protests of other telescope projects, the protesters seem to always disappear when the projects agree to give them money. Makes me wonder if their religious fervor is much shallower than the news stories of this protest would lead us to believe.

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Rosetta gets the go to descend to six miles

8:42 am

After spending a week circling Comet 67P/C-G at a distance of about 12 miles, engineers have now decided they can move Rosetta in to only six miles.

A series of manoeuvres will reduce Rosetta’s distance from its current 18.6 km orbit (taking 7 days) to an intermediate orbit approximately 18.6 x 9.8 km (with a period of about 5 days). From there the orbit will be circularised at about 9.8 km radius, with a period of approximately 66 hours on 15 October, and the mission will enter the “Close Observation Phase” (COP). This will provide even higher resolution images of the landing site in order to best prepare for Philae’s challenging touch-down. The new orbit will also allow a number of Rosetta’s science instruments to collect dust and measure the composition of gases closer to the nucleus.

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Nobel Prize goes to blue LED light inventors

9:32 pm

Three scientists share the Nobel physics prize for inventing blue LED lights.

The prize goes jointly to Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan, Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University in Japan, and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Starting in the 1990s they produced blue LEDs, an energy-efficient, environmentally friendly source of blue light, which could be mixed with LEDs of other colors to produce what the eye sees as white light. “I am very honored to receive the Nobel Prize from The Royal Swedish Academy of Science for my invention of the blue LED,” said Nakamura in a statement. “It is very satisfying to see that my dream of LED lighting has become a reality. I hope that energy-efficient LED light bulbs will help reduce energy use and lower the cost of lighting worldwide.”

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The next wave of Obamacare insurance cancellations begin arriving

4:20 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Walmart is dropping health insurance for its part time workers because of Obamacare.

Starting Jan. 1, Wal-Mart told The Associated Press that it will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week. The move, which would affect 30,000 employees, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees.

This is only a sampling of what is beginning to happen throughout private industry. If companies aren’t cutting hours to less than 30 for many employees so they don’t have to provide Obamacare, they are cutting their total staff to less than 50 to exempt themselves from the law. And they are doing it not because they want to but because they have to. If they don’t, the cost of Obamacare will bankrupt them.

Of course, it is also bankrupting the individuals who now have to find their own insurance and quickly find they can’t afford health insurance as offered by Obamacare.

But remember, the Democrats and Obama care! So what they are idiots and wrote a law that does nothing but harm. We must vote for them anyway because they care!

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The deep ocean is not where global warming has gone

5:26 pm

The uncertainty of science: A new NASA study finds that the deep oceans have not warmed since 2005, striking dead one of the favorite theories of global warming advocates to explain the 18 year stall in global warming.

In the 21st century, greenhouse gases have continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, just as they did in the 20th century, but global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising in tandem with the gases. The temperature of the top half of the world’s oceans — above the 1.24-mile mark — is still climbing, but not fast enough to account for the stalled air temperatures.

Many processes on land, air and sea have been invoked to explain what is happening to the “missing” heat. One of the most prominent ideas is that the bottom half of the ocean is taking up the slack, but supporting evidence is slim. This latest study is the first to test the idea using satellite observations, as well as direct temperature measurements of the upper ocean. Scientists have been taking the temperature of the top half of the ocean directly since 2005, using a network of 3,000 floating temperature probes called the Argo array.

“The deep parts of the ocean are harder to measure,” said JPL’s William Llovel, lead author of the study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. “The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is — not much.”

The bottom line: no one really knows what is going on, climate scientists still do not have a good handle on how the climate works, the science is not “settled”, and anyone who says it is is a liar.

 

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The stall in global warming is now more than half the satellite record

7:21 pm

The uncertainty of science: There has now been no global warming for 18 years, a time period that is more than half the entire satellite temperature record.

The Great Pause is the longest continuous period without any warming in the global instrumental temperature record since the satellites first watched in 1979. It has endured for a little over half the satellite temperature record. Yet the Pause coincides with a continuing, rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. …

The length of the Great Pause in global warming, significant though it now is, is of less importance than the ever-growing discrepancy between the temperature trends predicted by models and the far less exciting real-world temperature change that has been observed.

If you click on the link you will see quotes from one global warming scientist who, rather than honestly deal with the conflict between theory and data, instead uses name-calling as an argument. He unfortunately is the rule, not the exception.

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Delta 4 Heavy moved to launchpad for Orion flight

10:09 am

In preparation for a December test flight of the first Orion capsule, the Delta 4 Heavy rocket has been positioned on the launchpad.

The unmanned Dec. 4 mission, known as Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), is designed to test out Orion’s critical crew-safety systems, such as its thermal-protection gear. During the four-hour flight, the Orion capsule will fly 3,600 miles (5,800 kilometers) from Earth, then come speeding back into the planet’s atmosphere at about 20,000 mph (32,190 km/h) before splashing down softly in the Pacific Ocean, NASA officials said.

Forgive me if I remain decidedly unexcited. I still believe SLS to be an enormous waste of resources that would be better spent onother things.

Posted on the road south of Phoenix.

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Another moon for Earth

9:57 am

Astronomers have discovered an asteroid whose solar orbit is almost identical to Earth’s, and has it hovering so near the Earth that it is almost another moon.

Based on orbital data the scientists estimate that the asteroid, between 300 to 1000 feet in diameter, has been hovering near Earth for the past 775 years, and it will only drift away in about 165 years from now.

Correction: Engineer and regular reader James Fincannon emailed me to note that this asteroid really doesn’t have an orbit “almost identical to the Earth.” As he wrote, “Seems to go between Venus and Mercury and then all the way out to Mars! It seems to pass by Earth occasionally.” Thus, this recent period of closeness is only a temporary one.

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