Tag: science

Japanese private lunar lander HAKUTO-R now scheduled for launch on November 22nd

9:45 am

The private lunar lander HAKUTO-R, built by the Japanese company Ispace, has now been scheduled for a November 22, 2022 launch on a Falcon 9 rocket.

The launch of the first commercial lunar lander mission to attempt a landing on the Moon was originally scheduled between November 9 -15. However, ispace stated that after consulting with SpaceX, the new tentative launch date would be moved to November 22 because it “allows for best preparation for the mission when considering the fuel-loading schedule for the lander and launch date availability.” SpaceX has a busy schedule at the Cape and NASA still has the Artemis 1 launch scheduled for November 14.

HAKUTO-R’s primary mission is to test the lander. However, it also includes several customer payloads, the most significant of which is the Rashid rover from the United Arab Emirates. Rashid, which is about the size of a Radio Flyer red wagon, will operate for one lunar day, about two weeks. While its main mission is to test the engineering and to train the engineers who built it, it will have two cameras for taking pictures. In addition, on its wheels are test adhesive patches of different materials, designed to see how each material interacts with the Moon’s abrasive dust.

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Astronomers discover a new large potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid

9:36 am

Using a variety of ground-based telescopes, astronomers have discovered three new near-Earth asteroids orbiting the Sun but inside Earth’s orbit, with one of these asteroids having the possibility of one day in the future impacting the Earth.

An international team using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, has discovered three new near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) hiding in the inner Solar System, the region interior to the orbits of Earth and Venus. This is a notoriously challenging region for observations because asteroid hunters have to contend with the glare of the Sun.

By taking advantage of the brief yet favorable observing conditions during twilight, however, the astronomers found an elusive trio of NEAs. One is a 1.5-kilometer-wide asteroid called 2022 AP7, which has an orbit that may someday place it in Earth’s path. The other asteroids, called 2021 LJ4 and 2021 PH27, have orbits that safely remain completely interior to Earth’s orbit. Also of special interest to astronomers and astrophysicists, 2021 PH27 is the closest known asteroid to the Sun. As such, it has the largest general-relativity effects of any object in our Solar System and during its orbit its surface gets hot enough to melt lead.

You can read their paper here [pdf].

2002 AP7 is the largest such potentially dangerous asteroid discovered in eight years. Its present orbit however never brings it closer to the Earth than 4.4 million miles, and it will be many thousands of years before that orbit might result in an impact. This of course doesn’t prevent foolish mainstream news outlets like the New York Times to label it a “planet-killer.”

The importance of this study however is that it underlines the possibility that there might be other such asteroids lurking close to the Sun that are difficult to spot. This is a blind spot in our asteroid surveys that needs to be eliminated.

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CAPSTONE makes course correction, now on target for lunar orbital insertion on November 13th

1:39 pm

Engineers have successfully overcome the valve issue that had caused the CAPSTONE lunar probe to tumble, and have made a subsequent mid-course correction that has put the spacecraft on target for entering lunar orbit on November 13, 2022, as planned.

The CAPSTONE spacecraft successfully completed a trajectory correction maneuver on Thursday, Oct. 27, teeing up the spacecraft’s arrival to lunar orbit on Nov. 13.

CAPSTONE is no longer in safe mode following an issue in early September that caused the spacecraft to spin. The team identified the most likely cause as a valve-related issue in one of the spacecraft’s eight thrusters. The mission team will design future maneuvers to work around the affected valve, including the two remaining trajectory correction maneuvers scheduled before CAPSTONE’s arrival to orbit at the Moon.

Though it appears the CAPSTONE team has figured out how to deal with that malfuncting valve, it is unclear what the long-term ramifications of that valve will be. If it is still leaking it likely means the mission will be shortened because of loss of fuel, as well as the need to use more to compensate.

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Today’s blacklist victim: Distinguished scientist and long-time journal editor forced to resign due to threats

12:40 pm

Jose Domingo, blacklisted scientist
Dr. José Luis Domingo, blacklisted scientist

The modern dark age: Dr. José Luis Domingo, an often cited expert on toxicology and editor for the last seven years of the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, has been forced to resign his position because of threats and slanders directed at him after he approved the publication of a peer-review paper that documented the potential harmful effects of the mRNA COVID shots.

About a month after the paper was published, Domingo said, he began receiving angry emails and messages. These included insults, calls to resign, demands to retract the paper, and even threats. One email asked him how he could sleep at night, knowing that the scientific paper that he had allowed to be published would lead to the death of millions of people.

The angry messages, he said, were filled with ad hominem attacks against him and against the paper’s co-authors, but did not specify their scientific objections to the contents of the paper.

…Since then, pro-vaccine factions have increased their personal campaign against him, going so far as to adding false information to the Wikipedia entry about him, as well as attacking the Wikipedia page of the journal itself. Both, he said, were negatively modified by pro-vaccination activists. Indeed, an Oct. 4 version of his page, accessed via internet archive, included a subheading entitled “Antivaccine controversy” that accused Domingo of “spreading disinformation during the pandemic.” That paragraph has since been removed.

Domingo even offered — in a gesture of open-mindedness and good will — to publish one of the more-detailed attack messages, if the writers would agree to peer review. They did agree, and then discovered that with peer-review you need to have some facts to back up your accusations. They did not, and their paper was rejected.

No matter. These individuals then found another journal, Stem Cell Reviews and Reports, to publish their attack essay, demanding once again that Domingo retract the paper while once again accusing him of causing the death of millions by its publication:
» Read more

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Distant interacting galaxies

11:25 am

Interacting galaxies
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a survey of known “weird and wonderful galaxies.” This particular pair is dubbed Arp 248, and is estimated to be about 200 million light years away.

Two spiral galaxies are viewed almost face-on; they are a mix of pale blue and yellow in colour, crossed by strands of dark red dust. They lie in the upper-left and lower-right corners. A long, faint streak of pale blue joins them, extending from an arm of one galaxy and crossing the field diagonally. A small spiral galaxy, orange in colour, is visible edge-on, left of the lower galaxy.

The connecting stream indicates that these galaxies are interacting with each other, gravity drawing stars and gas from the upper galaxy towards the lower.

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Al-Amal orbiter tracks unusual northern summer dust storm on Mars

10:04 am

Fig. 3 from Al-Amal paper
Click for full figure.

Scientists, using UAE’s Al-Amal Mars orbiter, have documented the occurrence of a rare high northern latitude summer dust storm whose origin appears linked to both a major canyon in the northern ice cap as well as the giant sand dune seas that surround that ice cap.

The EMM [instrument on Al-Amal] observed a distinct dust cloud on 10 September 2021. That was outside of the classical Martian dust storm season. The observed dust cloud is an arc-shaped dust storm, typically observed at the northern polar cap edge. This type of non-season dust storm is a well-known phenomenon, but this particular case is interesting because the dust cloud has frontal structure. A large atmospheric front is unusual in this location and season.

EMM’s unique observational coverage adds value to this observation, by providing a sequence of four camera images of the frontal dust cloud, separated by 2–3 hr. The frontal dust cloud shows very little movement over 7–8 hr, that is, it is quasi-stationary. We estimated the wind speed and direction by tracking internal motion of the dust cloud. In one case, the estimated wind is consistent with near-surface easterly winds at the polar cap edge.

The two images to the right are adapted from the paper’s figure 3. The yellow line in the top image indicates the location of the dust storm’s front (about 1,200 miles long), aligned with the canyon Chasma Boreale, marked by the black line, that cuts a 300-mile-long and 4,600-foot-deep gash into the North Pole ice cap.

The storm’s wind speeds were estimated very roughly to be about 16 feet per second, about 10 mph. In Mars’ thin atmosphere these winds would be so gentle that they would be almost imperceptible.

The storm front’s alignment with Chasma Boreale is intriguing, but the overview map below suggests another intriguing alignment.
» Read more

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Watching the launch of the final large module to China’s Tiangong-3 space station

12:10 am

UPDATE: The Mengtian module has been deployed, and is now proceeding to a rendezvous and docking within the next day or so. The core stage is in orbit, and we can only wait over the next few days to find out where it will hit the Earth.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

49 SpaceX
47 China
18 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 ULA

American private enterprise still leads China 69 to 47, though it now trails the rest of the world combined 74 to 69.

Original post:
—————-
The launch of the final large module for China’s Tiangong-3 space station is scheduled to occur at 12:37 am (Pacific) tonight.

The module is called Mengtian, and once moved to its permanent port will complete the station in its t-shape. The rocket is the Long March 5B, the core stage of which will reach orbit, and then within a week crash uncontrolled somewhere on Earth.

I have embedded the English live stream below. A lot of Chinese propaganda (though not much different from a NASA broadcast). As I understand it, the launch window is instantaneous, so if there are any holds the launch will be scrubbed for the day.

» Read more

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NASA & ESA pick site for Perseverance to deposit its samples for pickup

9:31 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Engineers at NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have now chosen the site in Jezero Crater where Perseverance will deposit its first set of core samples for later pickup by a mission to bring them back to Earth.

The location, at the base of the delta that flows into the crater and indicated by the white cross on the map to the right, will contain all the core samples collected from the floor of the crater. This area, in the middle of the flat region the science team has dubbed Three Forks, provides a good landing place for the sample return helicopter that will fly from point to point to pick these samples up. The blue dot on the map indicates Perseverance’s present position. The green dot where the helicopter Ingenuity presently sits.

Once the rover has finished collecting samples and doing its research at the base of the delta, it will deposit those samples at this point and then move up onto the delta, where it will collect more samples that will be placed at a different spot for pickup.

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NASA sets new launch date for Psyche asteroid mission

9:01 am

NASA yesterday announced that the delayed Psyche mission, to the asteroid Psyche, now has a new launch date of October 10, 2023, with a planned arrival in 2029.

The spacecraft missed its original launch date in 2022 because of the late delivery of its flight software combined with problems with the equipment needed to test that software.

The new launch date, though only one year later than planned, will cause the spacecraft to arrive two years late because of orbital mechanics.

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InSight detects and dates large impact on Mars

11:14 am

InSight's Christmas Eve impact
Click for full image.

Using the data from InSight’s seismometer of a 4 magnitude earthquake on Mars on December 24, 2021, scientists were able to use the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to find the meteorite impact that produced that quake, the largest detected since spacecraft have been visiting Mars. The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here and unveiled at yesterday’s press conference, shows the new crater.

The meteoroid is estimated to have spanned 16 to 39 feet (5 to 12 meters) – small enough that it would have burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, but not in Mars’ thin atmosphere, which is just 1% as dense as our planet’s. The impact, in a region called Amazonis Planitia, blasted a crater roughly 492 feet (150 meters) across and 70 feet (21 meters) deep. Some of the ejecta thrown by the impact flew as far as 23 miles (37 kilometers) away.

With images and seismic data documenting the event, this is believed to be one of the largest craters ever witnessed forming any place in the solar system.

This is not the first such impact identified from InSight seismic data, but it is the largest. The white streaks surrounding the crater are thought to be near-surface ice ejected at impact.

The overview map below provides further context, as well as showing us the proximity of this impact to the proposed Starship landing sites on Mars.
» Read more

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Past tree ring spikes in carbon-14 were likely not caused by solar flares

9:41 am

The uncertainty of science: According to researchers, past tree ring spikes in carbon-14 found in found at five different times going back seven thousand years were likely not caused by solar flares, as previously thought.

The team behind the new research created software to analyse every available piece of data on tree rings, producing the most comprehensive research on Miyake events to date. They found that the events didn’t show a consistent relationship to the 11-year solar cycle, which is the cycle that the Sun’s magnetic field goes through. (Currently we’re heading towards the solar maximum which means more sunspots and solar flares.)

This lack of relationship to the solar cycle means that Miyake events probably aren’t due to a solar flare, as flares occur more during the solar maximum.

The scientists also found that the events lasted years, not days as one would expect by a solar flare.

You can read their paper here. The bottom line is that the cause of these spikes remains unknown.

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A glacier sea on Mars

6:12 pm

A glacier sea on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, should at first glance be one of my “What the heck!?” images. However, a little detective work quickly provides us some understanding of the inexplicable geology seen at this particular location on Mars.

The picture was taken on August 29, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and was labeled by the science team a “Lobate Debris Apron in Deuteronilus Mensae.” This mensae region is the western part of the 2,000-mile-long strip in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars that I label glacier country, since almost every high resolution picture taken in this strip shows extensive glacial features.

This picture is no different, showing what appears to be glaciers, but by itself it is still difficult to make sense of it. Glaciers flow downhill, like rivers. In this high resolution image the direction of flow is somewhat unclear.

As always, a wider view clarifies the picture.
» Read more

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Martian rectilinear ridges

1:16 pm

Martian rectilinear ridges
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image is also a bafflement. The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on July 25, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The ridges in this picture are labeled by the scientists “Rectilinear Ridges,” but they really do not resemble any of the Martian rectilinear ridge types outlined in this paper [pdf], all of which appear to have a much more pronounced criss-cross pattern.

These ridges however are more meandering, and instead to my eye seem more like inverted channels, ancient channels whose beds became compacted and then became ridges when the less dense surrounding material eroded away. The problem with this conclusion however is the lack of any obvious tributary pattern. If these were once channels where either liquid water or glaciers once flowed, none of them seem to exhibit any drainage pattern. The ridges go in all directions.

The context map below only increases the mystery.
» Read more

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Lucy’s view of the Earth-Moon system during its October fly-by

8:35 am

The Earth and Moon system, as seen by Lucy
Click for original image.

Lucy's planned route
Lucy’s planned route to explore the Trojan asteroids

In the days prior to its October 16, 2022 fly-by of the Earth, the Lucy asteroid probe took several calibration images of the Earth and the Moon. The photo above, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, shows both the Earth and the Moon together. From the caption:

On October 13, 2022, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured this image of the Earth and the Moon from a distance of 890,000 miles (1.4 million km). The image was taken as part of an instrument calibration sequence as the spacecraft approached Earth for its first of three Earth gravity assists. These Earth flybys provide Lucy with the speed required to reach the Trojan asteroids — small bodies that orbit the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter.

In the original, the Moon is so dim, compared to the Earth, that it was hard to find in the picture. I therefore brightened it considerably more than the Earth to make it easily seen above.

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After 50 years Edward Stone retires as the project scientist for Voyagers 1 and 2

8:23 am

Edward Stone, the only project scientist the interstellar spacecraft Voyagers 1 and 2 have ever known, has now retired after 50 years service.

Stone accepted scientific leadership of the historic mission in 1972, five years before the launch of its two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Under his guidance, the Voyagers explored the four giant planets and became the first human-made objects to reach interstellar space, the region between the stars containing material generated by the death of nearby stars.

Until now, Stone was the only person to have served as project scientist for Voyager, maintaining his position even while serving as director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California from 1991 to 2001. JPL manages the Voyager mission for NASA. Stone retired from JPL in 2001 but continued to serve as the mission’s project scientist.

The new Voyager project scientist however is not new to the project.

Linda Spilker will succeed Stone as Voyager’s project scientist as the twin probes continue to explore interstellar space. Spilker was a member of the Voyager science team during the mission’s flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. She later became project scientist for NASA’s now-retired Cassini mission to Saturn, and rejoined Voyager as deputy project scientist in 2021.

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A hole in space

8:48 am

A hole in space
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and was released today as its picture of the week. From the caption:

This peculiar portrait from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope showcases NGC 1999, a reflection nebula in the constellation Orion. NGC 1999 is around 1350 light-years from Earth and lies near to the Orion Nebula, the closest region of massive star formation to Earth. NGC 1999 itself is a relic of recent star formation — it is composed of detritus left over from the formation of a newborn star.

Just like fog curling around a street lamp, reflection nebulae like NGC 1999 only shine because of the light from an embedded source. In the case of NGC 1999, this source is the aforementioned newborn star V380 Orionis which is visible at the centre of this image. The most notable aspect of NGC 1999’s appearance, however, is the conspicuous hole in its centre, which resembles an inky-black keyhole of cosmic proportions.

Once astronomers thought the black area was caused by dust, blocking the light. Now, based on a lot of new data from multiple ground- and space-based telescopes, they know that it actually is a black empty void. Why it exists however is not yet understood.

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Bedrock layers in Terby Crater on Mars

5:55 pm

Bedrock layers in Terby Crater on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image to end the week! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken by on July 18, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the bedrock layers on one of two very large mesas that jut out into the floor of 108-mile-wide Terby Crater.

I want to focus your eye on the spoon-shaped mesa near the top right of the photo. Note how the layers can be seen on both sides, even though the top of the mesa seems to be concave. This is strange and complex geology, made even more fascinating in that the two mesas almost reach the center of the crater floor. Why are they here? Why were they not flattened during impact, like the rest of the crater floor? Or maybe the original crater floor is the mesa top, but if so, why did the rest of the crater interior get eroded away.

The overview map below provides some context, and helps fill in some details, even if it fails to answer any of these questions.
» Read more

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Astronomers discover an exoplanet with the density of a marshmallow

10:18 am

Using ground-based telescopes to gather more data about an exoplanet discovered by the orbiting TESS telescope, astronomers have found that it has the density of a marshmallow.

The planet orbits a red dwarf star, the most common star in the universe, and is the “fluffiest” yet seen around this type of star.

Red dwarf stars are the smallest and dimmest members of so-called main-sequence stars — stars that convert hydrogen into helium in their cores at a steady rate. Though “cool” compared to stars like our Sun, red dwarf stars can be extremely active and erupt with powerful flares capable of stripping a planet of its atmosphere, making this star system a seemingly inhospitable location to form such a gossamer planet.

Astronomers remain puzzled how such a large fluffy planet could have formed around such a dim small star.

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Rate of micrometeorite impacts on Webb holding as expected

10:10 am

According to this Space.com article, the rate and size of micrometeorite impacts on the main mirror of the Webb Space Telescope has held steady at the rate and size expected, since the first surprisingly large micrometeorite impact in May that slightly dinged one mirror segment.

At this point, JWST has experienced a total of 33 micrometeoroid events, according to Smith’s slides. But the most damaging one came before JWST began science observations; in late May, a particularly large micrometeoroid struck the observatory’s mirror, leaving its mark on one golden hexagon. The team estimates that a strike of that size should occur about once a year, Smith said.

“So we got that at month five,” he said. “We haven’t seen another one yet, so it’s still consistent with the statistics that we expected.”

Smith noted that, at the current impact rate, Webb will still be meeting its five-year performance requirement 10 years into the mission. Scientists estimate that the observatory has enough fuel to operate for 20 years.

Meanwhile, one of Webb’s infrared cameras is not doing spectroscopy as engineers analyze the high levels of friction in a “grating wheel.” At this point it appears they still do not understand the cause of the friction, and thus have not come up with a plan for mitigating it.

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Chandrayaan-3 now scheduled for summer 2023

10:01 am

India’s second attempt to put a rover on the surface of the Moon, Chandrayaan-3, has now been tentatively scheduled for launch in the summer of 2023.

The launch had originally been scheduled for launch in the fall of 2020, but was delayed when India shut down due to the Wuhan panic. Official at ISRO, India’s space agency, had hoped to launch by the summer of 2022, but that proved impossible. They have now delayed the mission a full year.

In fact, all earlier reports had indicated the rover was almost ready. This new delay of a full year suggests that some new issues might have been identified.

The news article at the link also notes that ISRO is now planning two unmanned orbital missions plus four launch abort tests before launching its first manned mission, dubbed Gaganyaan, not two abort tests as previously planned. They are still targeting ’24 for the manned mission.

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InSight status: Barely hanging on

9:50 am

InSight's power status as of October 19, 2022

The science team for the InSight lander on Mars today posted an update on the power the spacecraft’s dust covered solar panels are producing. I have added that data to my on-going graph of these power levels, to the right. From the update:

On October 19, 2022, InSight was generating an average between 275 and 285 watt-hours of energy per Martian day, or sol. The tau, or level of dust cover in the atmosphere, was estimated at 1.5 (typical tau levels outside of dust season range from 0.6-0.7).

The jump in tau level is due to a large dust storm that developed in September more than two thousand miles away in the southern hemisphere. Though it is so far away, that storm put a lot more dust in the atmosphere above InSight, and forced engineers to shut down all but its most essential functions.

That storm is apparently continuing, and might even be growing. If so, the future of InSight is dim indeed. Any further drop in the amount of power it generates daily will likely make it unable to operate at all, and the mission will end.

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Frozen lava flows around Martian hills

5:06 pm

Martian lava flowing around hills
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on August 24, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the westernmost edge of the Athabasca flood lava plain, thought to be the youngest lava flow on Mars, having covered the area of Great Britain in a matter of weeks 600 million years ago.

This image was a captioned feature yesterday by the MRO science team. As they note:

Although you can’t sail a boat on a sea of lava, hills and craters that stick up higher than the lava flow act like barriers. When a boat is driven through the water, there is a bow wave at the front of the boat, and a wake that trails off behind that indicates which way the boat is moving. In a lava flow, when a hill sticks up, the lava piles up on the upstream side (just like a bow wave) and can leave a wake on the downstream side, so we can tell which way the lava was moving against the stationary hill.

As you can see, every hill has a pile of lava on its northeast slopes, and a wake to its southeast. As the main vent of the Athabasca eruption is to the northeast, about 500 miles away (as shown on the overview map below), the flow direction suggested by the wakes fit the general geography.
» Read more

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Hubble spots double tail of debris from DART impact of Dimorphus

11:28 am

Dimorphus double tail
Click for original image.

A series of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the ejecta released when DART crashed into the small 525-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphus has found that debris forming a double tail trailing away from the Sun.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on October 11, 2022 by Hubble, and shows those two tails as close parallel debris trails.

Repeated observations from Hubble over the last several weeks have allowed scientists to present a more complete picture of how the system’s debris cloud has evolved over time. The observations show that the ejected material, or “ejecta,” has expanded and faded in brightness as time went on after impact, largely as expected. The twin tail is an unexpected development, although similar behavior is commonly seen in comets and active asteroids. The Hubble observations provide the best-quality image of the double-tail to date.

Following impact, Hubble made 18 observations of the system. Imagery indicates the second tail formed between 2-8 October 2022.

Though observations by telescope will continue for the years to follow, the real punchline to this event will be when the European probe Hera rendezvouses with the Didymous-Dimorphus pair in 2026 to perform several years of very close observations.

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A pseudo-oblique view of Jupiter’s cloud-tops

1:20 pm

A pseudo-oblique view of Jupiter's cloud-tops
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The image to the right, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was created on October 18, 2022 by citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulos from one of the photos taken by Juno during its close fly-by of Jupiter in May 2018.

He created this three dimensional relief by assigning different elevation values across the image’s greyscale, with white having the highest elevation. This relief is thus not based on actual topography, but it provides a nice way to illustrate the cloud structures of Jupiter’s cloud tops. It also, as Thomopoulos notes, provide a good way to possibly “see a representation in relief of surface movements.” Nor is his topography based on greyscale far wrong, since in many Jupiter images the lighter colored clouds are generally higher because the darker ones are in shadow.

The map below provides the context and scale of this image.
» Read more

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Moderna CEO admits to past lies: “COVID is simply the flu, harmless to the healthy.”

12:49 pm

The liar at Moderna
The liar in charge at Moderna

On October 17, 2022 during a news conference, Stéphane Bancel, the CEO of the drug company Moderna, made the following statement about COVID, the so-called plague that allowed his company (and others) to make billions pushing their jabs on a terrified public:

“I think it’s going to be like the flu. If you’re a 25-year-old, do you need an annual booster every year if you’re healthy?

“You might want to… but I think it’s going to be similar to flu where it’s going to be people at high-risk, people above 50 years of age, people with comorbidities, people with cancer and other conditions, people with transplants.”

Gee, where I have heard these exact words for the past two-plus years? Could it have been on this very same webpage, said by me as well as numerous other cool-headed experts who — rather than panicking — looked at the actual data? From my first detailed post about COVID in March 2020, using all the early real data:

The death rate is mostly confined to the older population with already existing health issues, like the flu.

This early conclusion was later confirmed again and again in the months that followed. From September 2020, for example, in citing CDC data I wrote:
» Read more

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Twelve years of data from WISE

10:43 am

The Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) was launched in 2009 with an intended mission of two years, during which it would map the sky looking for asteroids. In 2011 NASA extended the mission, renaming the telescope for inexplicable reasons to NEOWISE (adding “Near-Earth Object” to the beginning).

In the more than a decade since, the telescope has been able to get eighteen repeated scans of the entire sky, allowing scientists to track many changes in a variety of stellar objects over time.

Yesterday NASA issued a press release celebrating this long achievement.

Every six months, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, spacecraft completes one trip halfway around the Sun, taking images in all directions. Stitched together, those images form an “all-sky” map showing the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects. Using 18 all-sky maps produced by the spacecraft (with the 19th and 20th to be released in March 2023), scientists have created what is essentially a time-lapse movie of the sky, revealing changes that span a decade.

There is a bit of hype in this claim. The data isn’t really useful when looked at across the entire sky. One has to zoom into particular objects to see them evolve over time. Also, many of these changes, such as with variable stars, are well known and tracked by many other telescopes.

Nonetheless, this infrared database is very valuable. It can be used for example by astronomers to identify objects that should be viewed with high resolution in the infrared, by Webb.

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Webb takes infrared image of Hubble’s Pillars of Creation

10:28 am

The Pillars of Creation, as seen by Hubble and Webb
Click for original image.

Not unexpectedly, astronomers have quickly begun aiming the Webb Space Telescope’s infrared eye at some of the most famous targets previously imaged in optical wavelengths by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The newest example is shown to the right and reduced and labeled to post here. It shows what NASA officials dubbed “The Pillars of Creation” when Hubble first photographed this nebula in 1995, with a later 2014 Hubble optical image at the top and the new 2022 Webb infrared image on the bottom. From this image’s caption:

A new, near-infrared-light view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, at [bottom], helps us peer through more of the dust in this star-forming region. The thick, dusty brown pillars are no longer as opaque and many more red stars that are still forming come into view.

While the pillars of gas and dust seem darker and less penetrable in Hubble’s view [top], they appear more diaphanous in Webb’s. The background of this Hubble image is like a sunrise, beginning in yellows at the bottom, before transitioning to light green and deeper blues at the top. These colors highlight the thickness of the dust all around the pillars, which obscures many more stars in the overall region.

In contrast, the background light in Webb’s image appears in blue hues, which highlights the hydrogen atoms, and reveals an abundance of stars spread across the scene. By penetrating the dusty pillars, Webb also allows us to identify stars that have recently – or are about to – burst free. Near-infrared light can penetrate thick dust clouds, allowing us to learn so much more about this incredible scene.

While the Hubble colors attempt to mimic the colors seen by the human eye, the colors in the Webb image are all false colors, chosen by the scientists to distinguish the different infrared wavelengths produced by different features in the picture.

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The first Greek star catalog discovered hidden in medieval parchment

10:04 am

Scientists have discovered part of the first Greek star catalog created by Hipparchus — thought by many to have invented the modern field of astronomy — hidden in a medieval parchment that had been reused for other puposes.

Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, describes the find as “rare” and “remarkable”. The extract is published online this week in the Journal for the History of Astronomy. Evans says it proves that Hipparchus, often considered the greatest astronomer of ancient Greece, really did map the heavens centuries before other known attempts. It also illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them.

The manuscript came from the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, but most of its 146 leaves, or folios, are now owned by the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. The pages contain the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a collection of Syriac texts written in the tenth or eleventh centuries. But the codex is a palimpsest: parchment that was scraped clean of older text by the scribe so that it could be reused.

Using modern multi-spectral imaging, the researchers were able to decipher the older text, and determined it was almost certainly written by Hipparchus and included his star measurements.

Read the whole article at the link. It is a fascinating detective story describing the origins of modern astronomy in western civilization.

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Inverted river on Mars

1:52 pm

Inverted river on Mars

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on May 30, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as a “inverted fluvial system”.

Such features are not unusual on Mars. The theory explaining their formation is that this was once a channel where either water or ice flowed, packing the streambed down so that it was more dense than the surrounding terrain. After the flowing material disappeared, the less dense surrounding terrain eroded away, leaving the channel as a meandering ridge.

The location of this inverted channel, as shown in the overview map below, lends some weight to the flowing material being water or ice.
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