Tag: science

Volcano on the Moon

10:08 am

Wide shot of lunar volcano

Close-up of lunar volcano
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team today released the oblique image above and in close-up to the right, showing what they call a “silicic volcano.” From the release:

The Mairan T dome is a large silicic volcanic structure with a pronounced summit depression. Remote sensing indicates that the composition of the volcanic material (lava) making up the dome is enriched in silica (SiO2). This rock type would be classified as either rhyolite or dacite on Earth, and the composition starkly contrasts with the dark, iron-rich mare basalts that embay the Mairan T dome. Most of the volcanism on the Moon is basaltic or iron-rich. Still, silicic volcanism also occurred on the Moon. Indeed, bits and pieces of similar materials were found in the Apollo samples; however, all are small fragments delivered to the Apollo sites as material ejected from distant impact events.

One of the great questions for lunar science is how the silicic materials formed. On Earth, specific tectonic settings and higher water contents in the rocks favor the formation of such lavas; however, the Moon lacks plate tectonics and water-rich sediments. NASA is planning a Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) lander mission to another, larger silicic volcano, one of the Gruithuisen domes, to address this question.

The scientists also note that this volcano formed first, and then was partly covered by the dark flood lava that surrounds it.

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Engineers test fly prototype balloon for Venus

9:31 am

JPL engineers have successfully completed two test flights of a smaller-scale prototype balloon intended to fly in the atmosphere of Venus.

The shimmering silver balloon ascended more than 4,000 feet (1 kilometer) over Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to a region of Earth’s atmosphere that approximates the temperature and density the aerobot would experience about 180,000 feet (55 kilometers) above Venus. Coordinated by Near Space, these tests represent a milestone in proving the concept’s suitability for accessing a region of Venus’ atmosphere too low for orbiters to reach, but where a balloon mission could operate for weeks or even months.

“We’re extremely happy with the performance of the prototype. It was launched, demonstrated controlled-altitude maneuvers, and was recovered in good condition after both flights,” said robotics technologist Jacob Izraelevitz, who leads the balloon development as the JPL principal investigator of the flight tests. “We’ve recorded a mountain of data from these flights and are looking forward to using it to improve our simulation models before exploring our sister planet.”

The idea is an upgrade of two French-built balloons that flew on two Soviet-era missions to Venus in the 1980s and operated in the Venusian atmosphere for almost two days, flying 33 miles in altitude and traversing almost 100 degrees in longitude in that short time due to Venus’s high winds.

This project wants its balloon to survive more than 100 days. As it is presently in very early development, no launch date is even proposed.

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Deadly climate change on Mars!

9:12 am

Junk science! A new computer simulation by scientists now proposes that there was microscopic life on Mars billions of years ago, but its existence served to destroy the climate and kill all life!

The press appears to be eating this story up, with enthusiasm. From the New Atlas story above:

Humans might not be the first lifeforms in the solar system to face the threat of their own activity changing the climate of their home planet. A new model suggests that ancient Mars was once habitable enough to support methane-producing microbes, and they may have wiped themselves out by causing irreparable damage to the Red Planet’s atmosphere. [emphasis mine]

A Space.com story is written better, but it still jumps on the bandwagon:
» Read more

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InSight’s power levels rise very slightly

9:55 pm

InSight's power level through October 8, 2022

In a status report issued today, the science team for the InSight lander on Mars noted a slight increase in the amount of power produced daily by its solar panels. The graph to the right indicates that increase.

On October 8, 2022, InSight was generating an average of 300 watt-hours of energy per Martian day, or sol – an increase after a sharp decline last week from 430 watt-hours per sol to a low of 275 watt-hours per sol.

It appears that the atmosphere has begun to clear from the very large dust storm that occurred more than two thousand miles away. Despite that distance, the storm apparently reduced the available light above InSight significantly, and could take months to clear.

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Icebergs of Martian lava

1:52 pm

Icebergs of Martian lava
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on July 24, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The scientists label this “platy-ridged lava” but to my eye this more resembles lava ice bergs trapped within a now frozen lava stream flowing I think from the northeast to the southwest.

My guess that the flow follows that direction is based on two bits of data. First, the shape of the lava ice flows suggests vaguely a flow to the southwest. The wiggling black ridges inside the streams suggest that these flows occurred in two parts, a stronger wide flow that narrowed as the lava on the edges hardened. When the edges solidified the interior flow scraped against it, forming the wiggling ridges.

Second, the location of this image, as shown on the overview map below, strongly suggests the lava streams flowed to the southwest.
» Read more

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The dam is about to break on the COVID shots

12:02 pm

Democrats might soon enter the Truth booth
Advocates of the jab are about to be forced, against their will,
to enter that door.

The research continues to pour in every day showing increasingly that the COVID shots that Democrats and Joe Biden forced down the throats of ordinary Americans are not only relatively ineffective at stopping COVID, they are downright risky to take, especially for the young and healthy.

One story however — having nothing to do with this scientific research — suggests strongly that the left’s fantasy-world about the jab is about to break, and break in a big way. These mind-numbed robots are suddenly discovering directly and personally how harmful the jab can be, in the worst possible manner.

Before I tell you about this one story, however, we first must review some of the new research and data that has popped up in just the past week. (For the substantial previous research about the harmful risks and uselessness of the COVID shots see Part 1 of my three part series on the COVID lie from the end of September, with parts 2 and 3 here and here.)

First, the uselessness of the jab:
» Read more

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New computer simulation of theorized impact that created the Moon

8:56 am

The uncertainty of science: Before I even begin to describe this story, I must emphasize that it is pure science fiction. As much as it is founded on known data, that data is simply not sufficient to tell us exactly how the Moon was created. The data merely points to many hundreds of possibilities, of which the model below is simply one:

Computer programmers using a supercomputer at a United Kingdom university have created a new simulation of the theorized impact of a Mars-sized body to the Earth that some believe created the Moon, and determined it was possible for that impact to have created the Moon quickly, within hours.

You can read the research paper here.

The fun part of this story is to watch the video of this simulation, which I have embedded below. Whether it describes what actually happened is pure speculation, and in fact cannot be confirmed in any way at all.

It is intriguing, nonetheless.
» Read more

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China launches solar science telescope

1:46 pm

China today used its Long March 2D rocket to launch its first solar science telescope, Advanced Space-borne Solar Observatory (ASO-S), also known as Kuafu-1.

The probe, which was first proposed in 1976 (!), has a four year nominal mission and is designed to monitor the Sun as goes through its next sunspot maximum. More information can be found here.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

46 SpaceX
43 China
12 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 ULA

American private enterprise still leads China 66 to 43 in the national rankings, and the entire globe combined 66 to 63.

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InSight shut down temporarily because of lack of power

10:14 am

InSight's power levels over recent time

Because a dust storm has caused a further decline in the power being generated by InSight’s solar panels, the science team has decided to put the lander into safe mode for the next two weeks in the hope that the air will then clear, allowing its power levels to rise.

The graph to the right shows that drop. From the press release:

By Monday, Oct. 3, the storm had grown large enough and was lofting so much dust that the thickness of the dusty haze in the Martian atmosphere had increased by nearly 40% around InSight. With less sunlight reaching the lander’s panels, its energy fell from 425 watt-hours per Martian day, or sol, to just 275 watt-hours per sol.

InSight’s seismometer has been operating for about 24 hours every other Martian day. But the drop in solar power does not leave enough energy to completely charge the batteries every sol. At the current rate of discharge, the lander would be able to operate only for several weeks. So to conserve energy, the mission will turn off InSight’s seismometer for the next two weeks.

The real problem however is the dust covering the solar panels. If that dust gets thicker due to this storm, the lander will not recover when they power it up in two weeks. It will still generate electricity at this low number, making future operations likely impossible.

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Engineers regain full control of CAPSTONE

9:21 pm

After a month of careful tests and analysis, engineers today successfully regained full control of the CAPSTONE lunar orbiter, on its way to the Moon.

The most likely cause of the anomaly was identified as a valve related issue on one of the spacecraft’s eight (8) thrusters. The partially open valve resulted in thrust from the associated thruster whenever the propulsion system was pressurized. To attempt a recovery from this condition, the mission team conducted multiple tests on the vehicle and evaluated extensive telemetry and simulation data and then formulated a plan for attempting recovery of the vehicle’s full 3-axis control.

This recovery sequence was uploaded to the spacecraft yesterday (Thursday) and was executed early this morning (Friday 10/7). Initial telemetry and observation data after the recovery attempt points to a successful recovery of the system which has now regained 3-axis attitude control. The updated spacecraft attitude has oriented the spacecraft solar arrays to the Sun and implemented an orientation for the downlink antennas which significantly improves data downlink performance as compared to the pre-recovery attitude.

The spacecraft is not out of the woods yet. The engineers still need to figure out how to do future course corrections with “the possible presence of a valve that remains partially open.”

Nonetheless, that they have successfully regained full control means they have a very good handle on the issue, which bodes well for the lunar orbital insertion maneuver on November 13, 2022.

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Thick flow exiting dramatic canyon on Mars

1:22 pm

Thick flow into Mamers Valles on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on July 24, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as a “viscous flow” that has apparently carved the wide curving canyon as it slowly flows into open country to the south.

I would estimate the height of that canyon wall to be around 3,000 feet, though this is a very rough guess. I also image a trail switchbacking up the nose of that canyon wall would make for a truly stupendous hiking experience.

The flow filling the canyon floor appears very glacial, which is not surprising as this canyon is at 37 degrees north latitude, in the mid-latitude band where many glacial features are found. The overview map below provides some more detailed context.
» Read more

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Rocket Lab successfully launches NOAA satellite

10:34 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab today successfully used its Electron rocket to place a NOAA satellite into orbit, designed to gather data from ground-based sensors.

This was the company’s eighth successful launch in 2022, the most it has achieved in any single year. No attempt was made to recover the first stage on this launch.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

45 SpaceX
41 China
12 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 ULA

American private enterprise now leads China 65 to 41 in the national rankings, and the entire globe combined 65 to 61. The 65 successful launches so far this year is now the second most successful American year in rocketry, exceeded only by the 70 launches in 1966. With almost three months left to go in the year, 2022 looks like it will top that record, by a lot.

SpaceX meanwhile has a launch scheduled for later today, after getting scrubbed yesterday at T-30 seconds because of detected minor helium leak.

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Martian crater and mesa sculpted by ancient flow

1:14 pm

Martian crater and mesa sculpted by ancient flow
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on June 15, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a crater whose ejecta has been sculpted to the east into a teardrop-shaped mesa by some ancient flow, coming from the west.

The crater itself is located in one of several outflow canyons draining out from the volcanic Tharsis Bulge into the northern lowland plain of Chryse Planitia, the biggest of which is Valles Marineris. This particular canyon is one of the smaller and is dubbed Ravi Vallis.

The overview map below illustrates why many scientists think the flow that shaped this mesa came from a catastrophic flood of liquid water, billions of years ago.
» Read more

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Another “What the heck?” formation on Mars

2:32 pm

Another
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on May 28, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what the scientists label “unique terrain.”

I have increased the contrast to bring out the details. It appears that we have a flat plain of criss-crossing ridges that in large areas have somehow gotten flattened across their top. Imagine someone laying plaster on a wall and using a scraper tool to smooth the surface, but only partially. In this case on Mars, our imaginary worker only smoothed the surface a little, and only in some areas. To try to come up with a geological process however to explain this seems daunting.

And what created the criss-crossing ridges? The overview map provides only a little help in answering these questions.
» Read more

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Chandra takes an X-ray look at early Webb infrared observations

9:54 am

Chandra's X-ray vision of the Cartwheel Galaxy
Chandra’s X-ray view of the Cartwheel Galaxy

Webb's view of the Cartwheel Galaxy
Webb’s infrared view of the Cartwheel Galaxy
Click for full image.

Hubble's optical view of the Cartwheel Galaxy
Hubble’s optical view of the Cartwheel Galaxy. Click for original image.

Astronomers have now taken X-ray images using the orbital Chandra X-ray Observatory of four of the first Webb Space Telescope observations. The four targets were the Cartwheel Galaxy, Stephan’s Quintet, galaxy cluster SMACS 0723.3–7327, and the Carina Nebula.

The three images to the right illustrate the importance of studying astronomy across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Each shows the Cartwheel Galaxy as seen by three of the world’s most important space-based telescopes, each looking at the galaxy in a different wavelength.

The top picture is Chandra’s new X-ray observations. As the press release notes,

Chandra data generally show higher-energy phenomena (like superheated gas and the remnants of exploded stars) than Webb’s infrared view. … X-rays seen by Chandra (blue and purple) come from superheated gas, individual exploded stars, and neutron stars and black holes pulling material from companion stars.

The middle picture was produced by Webb, shortly after the start of its science operations. It looks at the galaxy in the infrared.

In this near- and mid-infrared composite image, MIRI data are colored red while NIRCam data are colored blue, orange, and yellow. Amidst the red swirls of dust, there are many individual blue dots, which represent individual stars or pockets of star formation. NIRCam also defines the difference between the older star populations and dense dust in the core and the younger star populations outside of it.

The bottom picture was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. I have rotated the image to match the others. It looks at the galaxy in optical wavelengths, the wavelengths that our eyes perceive.

Note how bright the central galactic region is in the infrared and optical, but is invisible in X-rays. Chandra is telling us that all the most active regions in the Cartwheel are located in that outer ring, not in its center.

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Two days after DART’s impact of Dimorphus, ejected dust extends like a comet tail out more than 6,000 miles

12:23 pm

Dust tail from Dimorphus two days after DART impact
Click for full image.

Using a telescope in Chile, astronomers photographed the ejecta two days after the impact of DART into the 525-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphus, and detected a tail of dust extending out more than 6,000 miles.

The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows that tail.

In this new image, the dust trail — the ejecta that has been pushed away by the Sun’s radiation pressure, not unlike the tail of a comet — can be seen stretching from the center to the right-hand edge of the field of view. … At Didymos’s distance from Earth at the time of the observation, that would equate to at least 10,000 kilometers (6000 miles) from the point of impact.

Didymos is the larger parent asteroid that Dimorphus orbits.

It is still too soon to get the numbers on how Dimorphus’s path in space was changed by that impact. In fact, we still really don’t have a clear idea what is left of Dimophus itself. The ejecta cloud needs to clear somewhat to see what’s hidden inside it.

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Europa in true color

9:37 am

Europa in true color
Click for full image.

The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on September 29, 2022 by the Jupiter orbiter Juno during its close fly-by of Europa. Citizen scientist Bjorn Jonsson has processed it to bring out the details. From his caption:

This is an approximately true color/contrast, reprocessed version of Europa image PJ45_1. It is more carefully processed than the version I posted very shortly after the raw image data was released. The color should be fairly close to Europa’s real color and probably slightly more accurate than the color of the earlier version I posted. North is up.

The Sun is coming from the right, so those are craters in the upper left, close to the shadowed limb of the planet. The red color has been known for decades, and appears in many cases to be seepage coming up from the many meandering ridges that criss-cross the planet’s surface. Their chemistry/make-up is not fully known at this time.

Juno came within 219 miles of Europa, the closest any spacecraft has come since the Galileo orbiter circled Jupiter in the 1990s. I was expecting close-up images of the surface, from that close distance, but have not yet seen any. Instead, most of the images released and processed by citizen scientists have been global images from farther away. Thus, at this moment it does not appear Juno took pictures at this closest distance.

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Tiny cobbles on Mars

9:16 am

Tiny cobbles on Mars

Our second cool image takes us from grand galaxies, one of the universe’s largest coherent objects, to tiny cobbles on Mars. The picture to the right, taken by one of Perseverance’s close-up cameras on September 29, 2022, covers an area less than an inch across, making the largest rounded pebbles in this image only a few millimeters in size.

The rover presently sits on the floor of Jezero Crater, at the base of the delta that flowed into that crater eons ago. The data suggests that delta was created by flowing water entering a lake that filled the crater.

Did flowing water create these cobbles? These pebbles all have the look of the rounded cobble one finds either in river beds, or in glacial moraines. In both cases, the flow of the water or ice rolls the rocks along until they become rounded.

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Interacting galaxies

9:02 am

Interacting galaxies
Click for full image.

The news is light this morning, so this cool image will be the first of three. The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released today. From the caption:

The two interacting galaxies making up the pair known as Arp-Madore 608-333 seem to float side by side in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Though they appear serene and unperturbed, the two are subtly warping one another through a mutual gravitational interaction that is disrupting and distorting both galaxies.

I did a search for any research of this galaxy pair, and found that its identification was only part of a larger survey, with only a little research done on its spectroscopy. Thus, I can’t tell you the size or distance, or how far apart from each other these galaxies lie.

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Sunspot update: Activity again exceeds prediction but ramp up pauses

11:29 pm

NOAA this weekend published, as it does at the start of every month, its October update of its monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I have done since I started this website in 2011, I have published that graph below, with some additional details added to provide context.

An increase in sunspot activity in September wiped out the decline seen in August, so that the sunspot number in September once again matched or exceeded the numbers seen during the middle of the previous solar maximum from 2012 to 2014, a low period of activity between that maximum’s two peaks. Activity also continued to exceed the predictions of the panel of government solar scientists put together by NOAA.

At the same time, since May the ramp up to maximum has stalled, something I noted last month and has now become more evident.
» Read more

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Fabric debris spotted on Ingenuity during 33rd flight

10:19 am

Tattered fabric debris on Ingenuity's leg during flight
Click to see full movie of flight.

In reviewing the images from Ingenuity’s 33rd flight on September 24, 2022, engineers have spotted what looks like a tattered piece of fabric fluttering on the end of one of the helicopter’s legs, and then disappearing.

The image to the right, cropped, enhanced, and labeled to post here, comes from an animation created from all images taken during the flight.

A small piece of foreign object debris (FOD) was seen in footage from the Mars helicopter’s navigation camera (Navcam) for a portion of its 33rd flight. This FOD was not visible in Navcam footage from the previous flight (32). The FOD is seen in Flight 33 Navcam imagery from the earliest frames to approximately halfway through the video, when it fell from the leg and drifted back to the Mars surface.

The engineers do not yet know what this was, but it apparently caused no harm to the helicopter. It also is likely not from either Ingenuity or Perseverance, as both are functioning perfectly. Most likely it is a piece of the parachute used during landing and then ejected.

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Part 3: Against the COVID liars and their strong-arm edicts the wheels of justice are grinding forward slowly

1:43 pm

Renewing the Declaration of Independence
Renewing the Declaration of Independence

In the first two parts of this series I very carefully outlined the ugly corrupt lie of the experimental COVID jab, and then followed up with a detailed summary of the lies put forth to justify imposition of the many COVID mandates.

Today, in this concluding essay, we will take a look at the battle by many to resist and end those COVID mandates, a battle that is increasingly successful because the mandates themselves were both immoral and illegal. They desecrated all the fundamental tenets and principles that underlie all American culture and law.

First however an addendum to yesterday’s essay, where I noted that “The royalties possibly received by Fauci and others in the government for their work developing the COVID jab — that the government then mandated — boggles the mind.” Shortly after I posted that essay, this story hit the web:

Fauci’s Net Worth Doubled During Pandemic, As Americans Struggled to Make Ends Meet

In 2021 alone Fauci earned almost two million dollars in royalties, travel perks, and investment gains. We still do not know however exactly what companies paid Fauci this money, or the precise amounts, because, according to the organization Open the Books which obtained this data, NIH has redacted that information.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, “Something is very rotten in the state of COVID”. The only reason I can fathom for keeping the source of those royalties secret is if their unveiling would reveal a serious conflict of interest. Fauci was one of the most visible government officials pushing the COVID shots on adults and children. Was he also making money on each jab? The public has a right to know.

Now, on to the fight against the illegal and immoral COVID mandates.
» Read more

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NASA releases first Juno image from the first close fly-by of Europa in decades

10:00 am

First released Juno image of Europa
Click for full image.

Kevin Gill's processed Juno image of Europa
Click for full image.

NASA yesterday released the first image from the successful close fly-by by Juno of Jupiter’s moon Europa since the 1990s. That photo, reduced and sharpened, is above.

The first picture NASA’s Juno spacecraft took as it flew by Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa has arrived on Earth. Revealing surface features in a region near the moon’s equator called Annwn Regio, the image was captured during the solar-powered spacecraft’s closest approach, on Thursday, Sept. 29, at 2:36 a.m. PDT (5:36 a.m. EDT), at a distance of about 219 miles (352 kilometers).

This is only the third close pass in history below 310 miles (500 kilometers) altitude and the closest look any spacecraft has provided at Europa since Jan. 3, 2000, when NASA’s Galileo came within 218 miles (351 kilometers) of the surface.

Meanwhile, the raw images have been pouring in, and citizen scientists have been quickly processing them. The photo to the right is only one example, created by Kevin Gill. I have cropped it to show one section in full resolution.

Expect many more processed images, especially those taken at closest approach, in the coming days.

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SpaceX and Jared Isaacman offer private mission to NASA to raise Hubble’s orbit

9:44 am

Capitalism in space: In a press release issued yesterday, NASA revealed that it has signed an unfunded agreement with SpaceX and Jared Isaacman’s Polaris program (which has purchased a series of manned missions on Dragon) to study the possibility of sending one of those private manned missions to the Hubble Space Telescope to raise its orbit.

SpaceX – in partnership with the Polaris Program – proposed this study to better understand the technical challenges associated with servicing missions. This study is non-exclusive, and other companies may propose similar studies with different rockets or spacecraft as their model.

Teams expect the study to take up to six months, collecting technical data from both Hubble and the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. This data will help determine whether it would be possible to safely rendezvous, dock, and move the telescope into a more stable orbit.

In my book describing the history of the people who created Hubble, The Universe in a Mirror, I repeatedly noted how throughout its history people have tried to kill it, first in the design phase, then in the budget, then during construction, then after it was launched and the mirror was found to be ground incorrectly, and then after the Columbia accident when NASA management tried to cancel its last shuttle servicing mission.

Every attempt failed. As I have noted in that book and many times since its publication, Hubble is a telescope that will not die. NASA has for years intended to launch a mission to de-orbit it when its orbit had decayed enough that it was unstable. I’ve always said that when that time came, someone would propose and push for a mission to instead raise that orbit.

That prediction is now coming true. Though no robot arm exists yet for Dragon to use to grab Hubble in any rendezvous attempt, creating one is hardly difficult. At that point raising the telescope’s orbit becomes relatively trivial.

Whether such a mission could do more, such as replace Hubble’s ailing gyroscopes, is unknown. It would be foolish however not to review that possibility as well.

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Part 2: How the liars spread the ugly corrupt lie of the COVID jab

4:01 pm

Yesterday I outlined in detail how a growing body of research as well as a great deal of blatantly obvious public data is increasingly demonstrating that the COVID shots carry with them some risk, and that in many cases, especially for those younger than 50, the risks outweigh the relatively minor benefits the jab provides against the Wuhan flu.

Though this data was unknown when the COVID shots were first made available, the amount of uncertainty and risk was great enough to make it unconscionable for any politician or health official to require anyone to get the jab, no matter what. And yet, led by President Joe Biden, government agencies and big corporations nationwide demanded employees get the jab, or be fired.

The result: tens of thousands of individuals, especially the young and healthy, have died unnecessarily from the COVID shots, since COVID itself could never have killed them.

Today I am going to outline the lies perpetuated by politicians and government health officials almost from day one of the Wuhan panic that worked hide these basic facts. Many times these lies were committed with the best of intentions. Many times the liars honestly and sincerely believed the lie was their only course of action.

And in too many cases, the lies were merely lies, said simply to protect the individual from scandal and possible prosecution, should the truth come out.

No matter what the reason, however, these lies were not only dishonest, they were morally wrong, and resulted in routinely bad policy that only made the Wuhan epidemic far worse than it ever had to be.

To begin, let us look at the lies of some specific individuals.
» Read more

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Lunar mountains and wrinkle ridges

12:13 pm

Montes Recti on the Moon

Cool image time! The photo above, taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), was released today by the orbiter’s science team, and provides us an oblique look at the mountains dubbed Montes Recti (lower right) and the wrinkle ridges near them (lower left). The highest point in this mountain range is about 5,900 feet high.

The image looks west across the northern part of the mare region dubbed Mare Imbrium, the dark area on the Moon’s visible hemisphere near its top. In the distance can be the mountains that form part of mare’s rim. The rounded peak in the top right is Promontorium Laplace (about 8,530 feet high). It is named this because it projects out (a promontory) into the mare a considerable distance from the rim. The crater at top center is Laplace D. As for the wrinkle ridges, the scientists describe them like so:

Tectonic landforms are those formed by forces that act to either contract or pull apart crustal materials. These forces develop faults or breaks in the crustal materials, and movement or slip along the faults form either positive or negative relief landforms. On the Moon, positive relief contractional landforms are the most common. The most significant contractional landforms on the Moon are wrinkle ridges, found exclusively in the dark mare basalts.

Essentially, something caused the ground to contract, which caused it to break at these ridges and be forced upward.

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Jupiter’s north pole cyclones appear as stable as those at the south pole

11:26 am

The northern polar cyclones of Jupiter
Click for original figure.

In reviewing five years of data from Juno, scientists now conclude that the polygon of large storms surrounding Jupiter’s north pole appear as stable as the same poloygon of storms found at the south pole.

Each polygon is made up of a central polar cyclone (PC) surrounded by a number of circum-polar cyclones (CPC). The image to the right, Figure 1 from the paper, compares the north polar storms from 2017 (top) to 2022 (bottom). During the five years of observations the whole polygon “rotated approximately 15° westward,” though it essentially maintained its structure.

After 5 years, the 8 + 1 North PCs structure and the 5 + 1 South one show very small changes; the lifetime of a single cyclone is therefore longer than 25 years and possibly longer than 75 years. Also, single cyclones have their peculiar morphology and this is often retained after 5 years, both in radiance and in morphology. In particular, this is the first time that we can observe the North CPCs system since the discovery in 2017, and we find that the structure is almost unperturbed.

The question that appears to remain unanswered by this data is whether these storms are deep-rooted to the interior of Jupiter or shallow structures. The stability suggests the latter, but this remains unproven.

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Chang’e-5 samples suggest lunar meteorite impacts took place the same time as big Chicxulub impact

10:23 am

In analyzing lunar samples brought back by China’s Chang’e-5 Moon lander, Australian scientists have found evidence of lunar meteorite impacts that apparently took place the same time as big Chicxulub impact in the Yucatan 66 million years ago, thought by many scientists to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Their findings suggest that the frequency of meteorite impacts on the Moon may have been mirrored on Earth, and that major impact events on Earth were not stand-alone events and instead were accompanies by a series of smaller impacts. The study has been published in Science Advances.

“We combined a wide range of microscopic analytical techniques, numerical modelling, and geological surveys to determine how these microscopic glass beads from the Moon were formed and when,” says lead author Professor Alexander Nemchin, from the Space Science and Technology Centre (SSTC) in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University in Perth.

The data suggests two possibilities, neither of which is confirmed. First, the impacts could have occurred because a cluster of large objects hit both Earth and the Moon at the same time. Second, the impacts on the Moon could have been caused by objects thrown up from the Earth when the bigger impact occurred at Chicxulub.

Either way, the data suggests a greater and more complex interaction between events on the Earth and events on the Moon.

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Initial Webb results revised because telescope wasn’t yet fully calibrated

10:02 am

The uncertainty of science: Though it appears that no results will have to be abandoned, the scientists who published some of the very first results from the Webb Space Telescope have been scrambling to adjust and revise their papers because the telescope is only now getting fully calibrated.

“This caused a little bit of panic,” says Nathan Adams, an astronomer at the University of Manchester, UK, who, along with his colleagues, pointed out the problem in a 9 August update to a preprint they had posted in late July3. “For those including myself who had written a paper within the first two weeks, it was a bit of — ‘Oh no, is everything that we’ve done wrong, does it all need to go in the bin?’”

To try to standardize all the measurements, the STScI is working through a detailed plan to point Webb at several types of well-understood star, and observe them with every detector in every mode for every instrument on the telescope4. “It just takes a while,” says Karl Gordon, an astronomer at the STScI who helps lead the effort.

In the meantime, astronomers have been reworking manuscripts that describe distant galaxies on the basis of Webb data. “Everyone’s gone back over and had a second look, and it’s not as bad as we thought,” Adams says. Many of the most exciting distant-galaxy candidates still seem to be at or near the distance originally estimated. But other preliminary studies, such as those that draw conclusions about the early Universe by comparing large numbers of faint galaxies, might not stand the test of time. Other fields of research, such as planetary studies, are not affected as much because they depend less on these preliminary brightness measurements.

Overall, it does not appear the more precise calibrations will change much of signficance, since most of the earliest observations were simply that, observations, not theoretical. Because the distance estimates remain largely unchanged however the theorists are left with the same conundrum: The age and apparent nature of the most distant objects does not seem to fit with what the theories had predicted Webb would see.

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Hubble & Webb make first coordinated observations, tracking DART impact of Dimorphus

9:50 am

Webb and Hubble together look at DART impact of Dimorphus
Click for full image.

For the first time scientists have used both the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the same astronomical event, in this case the impact of the DART spacecraft on the asteroid Dimorphus on September 26, 2022.

The two images to the right show the asteroid several hours after impact. Both telescopes also captured images before the impact as well. From the press release:

Observations from Webb and Hubble together will allow scientists to gain knowledge about the nature of the surface of Dimorphos, how much material was ejected by the collision, and how fast it was ejected. Additionally, Webb and Hubble captured the impact in different wavelengths of light – Webb in infrared and Hubble in visible. Observing the impact across a wide array of wavelengths will reveal the distribution of particle sizes in the expanding dust cloud, helping to determine whether it threw off lots of big chunks or mostly fine dust. Combining this information, along with ground-based telescope observations, will help scientists to understand how effectively a kinetic impact can modify an asteroid’s orbit.

When Webb was first conceived in the late 1990s, it was exactly for this reason, to combine Hubble’s optical vision with Webb’s infrared view. Though more than a decade late, it has finally happened.

It will be months before scientists begin to decipher the data produced by all the telescopes and spacecraft used to observe the DART impact. What we are seeing now are merely hints at what has been learned.

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