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Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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The search for life on Mars -- and the people who say we've found it already
NASA has never discovered life on the red planet, but a cabal of fringe scientists believe they have.
30 Jun 2020
https://www.cnet.com/features/the-s...-and-the-people-who-say-weve-found-it-already
How The Viking Lander Tested for Life on Mars with Dr. Patricia Ann Straat
NASA has never discovered life on the red planet, but a cabal of fringe scientists believe they have.
30 Jun 2020
https://www.cnet.com/features/the-s...-and-the-people-who-say-weve-found-it-already
How The Viking Lander Tested for Life on Mars with Dr. Patricia Ann Straat
Winston
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Blue Origin’s big job: Restoring an Apollo test stand in Huntsville
Jul 03, 2020
https://www.al.com/news/2020/07/blu...oring-an-apollo-test-stand-in-huntsville.html
Blue Origin knew it was taking on a big job, but restoring Test Stand 4670 turned out even bigger than the company thought. AL.com asked about the progress and the work ahead on a tour of 4670 this week.
“As we performed mitigation and sandblasting work, we discovered significant corrosion in the primary structure including rust that penetrated through 3-inch steel plates” lead engineer Scott Henderson said. Corrosion was expected - the stand has been out in the weather since the 1960 - but holes in 3-inch steel were not.
“Essentially, that’s where the 400 tons of steel we’re adding (to the stand) come into play,” Henderson said. “That’s not all replacing of rusted steel, but a significant part is. Some of that structural steel is unique to project to provide the stiffness necessary to very accurately measure engine thrust.… “
Test Stand 4670 was finished in 1965. It was used to test fire the first stage of the Saturn V rocket, modified in 1974 to test the space shuttle’s external tank and later used to test a modified shuttle engine.
Roughly 400 feet tall, the stand has four concrete support legs that are four feet thick set in bedrock 40 feet deep. It was built to test rocket engines with up to 12 million pounds of thrust.
Another example of its ’60s-era complexity is the way cooling water arrives to keep fiery rocket engine exhaust from melting the stand’s exhaust off-ramp. It comes from the Tennessee River 10 miles away by 13 diesel locomotive engines, and those engines can pump 190,000 gallons of water a minute to the stand. Young Blue Origin engineers have found the levers and dials of the engine control house one of the test site’s most fascinating features.
The key update to the stand is a large, horizontal deck with a hole in the center called “the octagon” for its shape. The steel around that hole will be fitted with specific support structures for each engine, and it will also hold the propellant tanks that will feed the engine and the thrust management systems during each test. New control rooms are also under construction with the necessary new wiring for control and communication.
Employees of rocket company Blue Origin look at a giant pile of cable conduit removed from an old test stand facility at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL:
Jul 03, 2020
https://www.al.com/news/2020/07/blu...oring-an-apollo-test-stand-in-huntsville.html
Blue Origin knew it was taking on a big job, but restoring Test Stand 4670 turned out even bigger than the company thought. AL.com asked about the progress and the work ahead on a tour of 4670 this week.
“As we performed mitigation and sandblasting work, we discovered significant corrosion in the primary structure including rust that penetrated through 3-inch steel plates” lead engineer Scott Henderson said. Corrosion was expected - the stand has been out in the weather since the 1960 - but holes in 3-inch steel were not.
“Essentially, that’s where the 400 tons of steel we’re adding (to the stand) come into play,” Henderson said. “That’s not all replacing of rusted steel, but a significant part is. Some of that structural steel is unique to project to provide the stiffness necessary to very accurately measure engine thrust.… “
Test Stand 4670 was finished in 1965. It was used to test fire the first stage of the Saturn V rocket, modified in 1974 to test the space shuttle’s external tank and later used to test a modified shuttle engine.
Roughly 400 feet tall, the stand has four concrete support legs that are four feet thick set in bedrock 40 feet deep. It was built to test rocket engines with up to 12 million pounds of thrust.
Another example of its ’60s-era complexity is the way cooling water arrives to keep fiery rocket engine exhaust from melting the stand’s exhaust off-ramp. It comes from the Tennessee River 10 miles away by 13 diesel locomotive engines, and those engines can pump 190,000 gallons of water a minute to the stand. Young Blue Origin engineers have found the levers and dials of the engine control house one of the test site’s most fascinating features.
The key update to the stand is a large, horizontal deck with a hole in the center called “the octagon” for its shape. The steel around that hole will be fitted with specific support structures for each engine, and it will also hold the propellant tanks that will feed the engine and the thrust management systems during each test. New control rooms are also under construction with the necessary new wiring for control and communication.
Employees of rocket company Blue Origin look at a giant pile of cable conduit removed from an old test stand facility at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL:
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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SpaceX is using a $75K robot dog named Zeus to test Mars-bound Starship rockets
17 Jun 2020
https://spaceexplored.com/2020/06/17/spacex-robot-dog-starship/
Zeus the Robodog at 12:41:
17 Jun 2020
https://spaceexplored.com/2020/06/17/spacex-robot-dog-starship/
Zeus the Robodog at 12:41:
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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If they're going to use genetic engineering to bring back a dinosaur, let it be this one.
Scientists Discover Extremely Tiny Dinosaur Ancestor in Madagascar
7 JULY 2020
https://www.sciencealert.com/super-...-was-result-of-profound-miniaturisation-event
Scientists Discover Extremely Tiny Dinosaur Ancestor in Madagascar
7 JULY 2020
https://www.sciencealert.com/super-...-was-result-of-profound-miniaturisation-event
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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Could You Make a Snowball of Neutrinos?
You’ll need more than a few — say, 300 decillion. And good luck trying to throw it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/science/neutrinos-snowball-randall-munroe.html
You are getting hit in the face by neutrinos right now. Trillions of neutrinos, most of them emitted by the sun, are streaming through your face as you read this. Every second, 100 billion neutrinos pass through each of your eyeballs.
You don’t notice this constant bombardment because neutrinos barely interact with normal matter. Not only do they pass through your face without stopping, they generally pass right through Earth.
Neutrinos are very light, so you would need a lot of them to make a snowball. For a long time, researchers thought that neutrinos, like photons, didn’t weigh anything at all, but it turned out they do have a very tiny mass. It’s still not clear how much (or little) that is, exactly, but it would take about 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 neutrinos to weigh as much as a snowball. You could also write that in scientific notation as 3x10³⁵, but sometimes it’s nice to write out all the digits as a reminder of how mind-bogglingly large these numbers are.
If you tried to pick up a snowball made from 300 decillion neutrinos (I had to look up the word for that number) it would fall right through your hand. Slow-moving neutrinos pass through matter more easily than fast-moving ones, so only a few, if any, of those 300 decillion neutrinos would interact with your hand at all. They would just drop right through your palm and disappear into the earth.
You’ll need more than a few — say, 300 decillion. And good luck trying to throw it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/science/neutrinos-snowball-randall-munroe.html
You are getting hit in the face by neutrinos right now. Trillions of neutrinos, most of them emitted by the sun, are streaming through your face as you read this. Every second, 100 billion neutrinos pass through each of your eyeballs.
You don’t notice this constant bombardment because neutrinos barely interact with normal matter. Not only do they pass through your face without stopping, they generally pass right through Earth.
Neutrinos are very light, so you would need a lot of them to make a snowball. For a long time, researchers thought that neutrinos, like photons, didn’t weigh anything at all, but it turned out they do have a very tiny mass. It’s still not clear how much (or little) that is, exactly, but it would take about 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 neutrinos to weigh as much as a snowball. You could also write that in scientific notation as 3x10³⁵, but sometimes it’s nice to write out all the digits as a reminder of how mind-bogglingly large these numbers are.
If you tried to pick up a snowball made from 300 decillion neutrinos (I had to look up the word for that number) it would fall right through your hand. Slow-moving neutrinos pass through matter more easily than fast-moving ones, so only a few, if any, of those 300 decillion neutrinos would interact with your hand at all. They would just drop right through your palm and disappear into the earth.
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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The Path to Ingenuity: One Man's Decades-Long Quest to Fly a Helicopter on Mars
NASA is about to fly a rotorcraft on another planet. For the engineers who built the Mars Ingenuity helicopter, it's a Wright brothers moment.
July 1, 2020
https://www.discovermagazine.com/th...ans-decades-long-quest-to-fly-a-helicopter-on
[snip]
During the mid-1990s, Balaram was a young engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where other engineers were already toying with designs to fly fixed-wing aircraft on Mars. He’d even worked on some Mars balloon studies himself. But Balaram had gotten bored with the work he was doing, leading him to search for something new. That’s when he heard about a Stanford University professor’s research using tiny, coin-sized robots to monitor things like air and water pollution on Earth.
Balaram realized that the flight dynamics of these small robots were similar to what a larger aircraft would experience while flying in Mars’ thin atmosphere. So, he wrote a proposal and built a prototype to prove a small helicopter could indeed fly on Mars. The idea appeared to be gathering support. But then, before it could be attached to a mission, Balaram’s helicopter project was unceremoniously shelved due to NASA funding cuts. His project remained in limbo as he moved on to working on Mars rovers and other efforts.
In 2015, the world finally caught back up with Balaram’s early vision. A higher-up at JPL heard an eye-opening talk about the ways drones were revolutionizing the world. So he asked staff if they could send a drone to Mars — and someone recalled Balaram’s project. The engineer gave a briefing, and before Balaram knew it, he was dusting off his Mars helicopter concept. The refined project, now ready for launch, was rebranded as Ingenuity in a naming contest earlier this year.
In its final design, Ingenuity weighs just 4 pounds and stands 19 inches tall. But despite its petite frame, Mars’ thin atmosphere means the craft needs two sets of rotor blades that span some 4 feet each. Plus, to generate enough lift, the blades must spin at some 2,800 rotations per minute — or about 10 times faster than typical blades on an Earth-based helicopter.
[snip]
The team practiced flying in a 25-foot-wide, 85-foot-tall chamber full of the gas mixtures found on Mars: roughly 95 percent carbon dioxide, 2.5 percent nitrogen, 2 percent argon, a fraction of a percent oxygen and a smattering of trace gases. After testing, they’d plug their measured flight details back into computer simulations to continue testing virtually.
To evaluate the drone’s landing abilities, the team simply took it outdoors and flew it over different terrain to see how it handled setting down on various rocks and soils. “The test program had to be invented from scratch,” Balaram says. “That was one of the major challenges.”
But Ingenuity isn’t just an aircraft; it’s a spacecraft, too. It has to survive radiation and temperatures unlike anything aerospace engineers ever have to deal with. It’s so cold on Mars that just one-third of the helicopter’s power can be used for flying. The rest has to be spent warming the craft’s electronics to prevent them from freezing during the frigid martian night, where temperatures can drop down to nearly –200 degrees Fahrenheit.
All these challenges mean Ingenuity’s main goal is experimental rather than to return actual scientific results from Mars. The space agency has also given Ingenuity’s engineers some breathing room on its tests. They aren’t sure how many flights Ingenuity might make before its components start to break, so as a technology demonstration the helicopter was allowed some shortcuts that larger flagship missions don’t get, like using off-the-shelf parts without extreme screening.
“If they see enough thermal cycles, they will start breaking,” Balaram says. “We don’t know when that will happen, but it can’t continue forever.”
If it survives just one flight on Mars, NASA will consider the mission a great success. However, they have plans for up to five test flights, which will begin almost as soon as Perseverance touches down on Mars.
[snip]
After roughly 30 days, Perseverance will leave Ingenuity and continue on its way with no other plans to fly the helicopter again. After all, throughout its entire life, Ingenuity’s top priority will be to avoid crashing into NASA’s multibillion-dollar Perseverance rover. This is why the rover and helicopter will be required to put several hundred feet between each other before every test flight. Once Ingenuity proves it can fly, NASA sees it as simply not worth the risk of more tests while the off-the-shelf components continue to degrade.
“Perseverance has been very accommodating and given us 30 precious [martian days] out of a two-year window to dedicate toward this particular technology-demonstrating experiment,” Balaram says. “That’s a big commitment.”
But Balaram says that, in theory, the team’s little helicopter could be capable of much more. If their testing here on Earth hints at what’s possible on Mars, Ingenuity could soon surprise space fans. It may also leave NASA with the tough decision of whether or not to abandon the drone.
Their only real limitation is the mechanical dampers used in Ingenuity’s legs to soften the landing, which can last about 50 flights. Beyond that, the helicopter could theoretically last until winter — some six months after reaching Mars — when it will be too cold to survive.
“If this does work, in the future you can imagine more exploration with larger helicopters that can carry between 1 to 4 kilograms [2 to 9 pounds] of payload,” Balaram says. “I can easily imagine a mission where a helicopter fetches a sample and brings it back to a rover looking for something like life.”
[snip]
NASA is about to fly a rotorcraft on another planet. For the engineers who built the Mars Ingenuity helicopter, it's a Wright brothers moment.
July 1, 2020
https://www.discovermagazine.com/th...ans-decades-long-quest-to-fly-a-helicopter-on
[snip]
During the mid-1990s, Balaram was a young engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where other engineers were already toying with designs to fly fixed-wing aircraft on Mars. He’d even worked on some Mars balloon studies himself. But Balaram had gotten bored with the work he was doing, leading him to search for something new. That’s when he heard about a Stanford University professor’s research using tiny, coin-sized robots to monitor things like air and water pollution on Earth.
Balaram realized that the flight dynamics of these small robots were similar to what a larger aircraft would experience while flying in Mars’ thin atmosphere. So, he wrote a proposal and built a prototype to prove a small helicopter could indeed fly on Mars. The idea appeared to be gathering support. But then, before it could be attached to a mission, Balaram’s helicopter project was unceremoniously shelved due to NASA funding cuts. His project remained in limbo as he moved on to working on Mars rovers and other efforts.
In 2015, the world finally caught back up with Balaram’s early vision. A higher-up at JPL heard an eye-opening talk about the ways drones were revolutionizing the world. So he asked staff if they could send a drone to Mars — and someone recalled Balaram’s project. The engineer gave a briefing, and before Balaram knew it, he was dusting off his Mars helicopter concept. The refined project, now ready for launch, was rebranded as Ingenuity in a naming contest earlier this year.
In its final design, Ingenuity weighs just 4 pounds and stands 19 inches tall. But despite its petite frame, Mars’ thin atmosphere means the craft needs two sets of rotor blades that span some 4 feet each. Plus, to generate enough lift, the blades must spin at some 2,800 rotations per minute — or about 10 times faster than typical blades on an Earth-based helicopter.
[snip]
The team practiced flying in a 25-foot-wide, 85-foot-tall chamber full of the gas mixtures found on Mars: roughly 95 percent carbon dioxide, 2.5 percent nitrogen, 2 percent argon, a fraction of a percent oxygen and a smattering of trace gases. After testing, they’d plug their measured flight details back into computer simulations to continue testing virtually.
To evaluate the drone’s landing abilities, the team simply took it outdoors and flew it over different terrain to see how it handled setting down on various rocks and soils. “The test program had to be invented from scratch,” Balaram says. “That was one of the major challenges.”
But Ingenuity isn’t just an aircraft; it’s a spacecraft, too. It has to survive radiation and temperatures unlike anything aerospace engineers ever have to deal with. It’s so cold on Mars that just one-third of the helicopter’s power can be used for flying. The rest has to be spent warming the craft’s electronics to prevent them from freezing during the frigid martian night, where temperatures can drop down to nearly –200 degrees Fahrenheit.
All these challenges mean Ingenuity’s main goal is experimental rather than to return actual scientific results from Mars. The space agency has also given Ingenuity’s engineers some breathing room on its tests. They aren’t sure how many flights Ingenuity might make before its components start to break, so as a technology demonstration the helicopter was allowed some shortcuts that larger flagship missions don’t get, like using off-the-shelf parts without extreme screening.
“If they see enough thermal cycles, they will start breaking,” Balaram says. “We don’t know when that will happen, but it can’t continue forever.”
If it survives just one flight on Mars, NASA will consider the mission a great success. However, they have plans for up to five test flights, which will begin almost as soon as Perseverance touches down on Mars.
[snip]
After roughly 30 days, Perseverance will leave Ingenuity and continue on its way with no other plans to fly the helicopter again. After all, throughout its entire life, Ingenuity’s top priority will be to avoid crashing into NASA’s multibillion-dollar Perseverance rover. This is why the rover and helicopter will be required to put several hundred feet between each other before every test flight. Once Ingenuity proves it can fly, NASA sees it as simply not worth the risk of more tests while the off-the-shelf components continue to degrade.
“Perseverance has been very accommodating and given us 30 precious [martian days] out of a two-year window to dedicate toward this particular technology-demonstrating experiment,” Balaram says. “That’s a big commitment.”
But Balaram says that, in theory, the team’s little helicopter could be capable of much more. If their testing here on Earth hints at what’s possible on Mars, Ingenuity could soon surprise space fans. It may also leave NASA with the tough decision of whether or not to abandon the drone.
Their only real limitation is the mechanical dampers used in Ingenuity’s legs to soften the landing, which can last about 50 flights. Beyond that, the helicopter could theoretically last until winter — some six months after reaching Mars — when it will be too cold to survive.
“If this does work, in the future you can imagine more exploration with larger helicopters that can carry between 1 to 4 kilograms [2 to 9 pounds] of payload,” Balaram says. “I can easily imagine a mission where a helicopter fetches a sample and brings it back to a rover looking for something like life.”
[snip]
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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The Lines of Code That Changed Everything
Apollo 11, the JPEG, the first pop-up ad, and 33 other bits of software that have transformed our world.
OCT 14, 2019
https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/consequential-computer-code-software-history.html
Apollo 11, the JPEG, the first pop-up ad, and 33 other bits of software that have transformed our world.
OCT 14, 2019
https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/consequential-computer-code-software-history.html
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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A Massive Star Has Disappeared Without a Trace
30 Jun 2020
https://gizmodo.com/a-massive-star-has-disappeared-without-a-trace-1844207424
An unusually bright star has gone missing, in a mystery of cosmic proportions.
An object inside the Kinman dwarf galaxy has disappeared from view, according to new research published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This massive and exceptionally bright blue star was hypothesized to exist based on astronomical observations made between 2001 and 2011, but as of 2019, it is no longer detectable.
The authors of the study, led by PhD student Andrew Allan of Trinity College Dublin, have conjured two possible explanations: Either the star has experienced a dramatic drop in luminosity and is now partially hiding behind some dust, or it transformed into a black hole without sparking a supernova explosion. If it’s the latter, it would represent just the second known failed supernova.
30 Jun 2020
https://gizmodo.com/a-massive-star-has-disappeared-without-a-trace-1844207424
An unusually bright star has gone missing, in a mystery of cosmic proportions.
An object inside the Kinman dwarf galaxy has disappeared from view, according to new research published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This massive and exceptionally bright blue star was hypothesized to exist based on astronomical observations made between 2001 and 2011, but as of 2019, it is no longer detectable.
The authors of the study, led by PhD student Andrew Allan of Trinity College Dublin, have conjured two possible explanations: Either the star has experienced a dramatic drop in luminosity and is now partially hiding behind some dust, or it transformed into a black hole without sparking a supernova explosion. If it’s the latter, it would represent just the second known failed supernova.
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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Powerful eruptions on the Sun might trigger earthquakes
Ground-shaking earthquakes occur all across the globe. And according to a new study, many of them might be triggered by the Sun.
July 13, 2020
https://astronomy.com/news/2020/07/powerful-eruptions-on-the-sun-might-trigger-earthquakes
...But scientists have also noticed a pattern in some large earthquakes around the planet: they tend to occur in groups, not at random. This suggests there may be some global phenomenon that’s triggering these worldwide earthquake parties. And though many researchers have done statistical studies to try to determine a cause before, no compelling theories have yet been rigorously proven.
So, to tackle the lingering mystery, the researchers of this latest study combed through 20 years of data on both earthquakes and solar activity, searching for any possible correlations. Specifically, the team used data from NASA-ESA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite, compiling measurements of protons (positively charged particles) that come from the Sun and wash over our planet.
SOHO, which is located 900,000 miles (1.45 million kilometers) from Earth, keeps its sights set on the Sun, which helps scientists track how much solar material ends up striking our planet. By comparing the ISC-GEM Global Instrumental Earthquake Catalogue — a historical record of strong earthquakes — to SOHO data, the scientists noticed more strong earthquakes occurred when the number and velocities of incoming solar protons increased. Specifically, when protons streaming from the Sun peaked, there was a spike in quakes above magnitude 5.6 for the next 24 hours.
“This statistical test of the hypothesis is very significant,” De Natale says. “The probability that it's just by chance that we observe this, is very, very low — less than 1 in 100,000.”
After noticing the correlation between solar proton flux and strong earthquakes, the researchers went on to propose a possible explanation: a mechanism called the reverse piezoelectric effect.
Previous experiments have clearly shown that compressing quartz, a rock common in the Earth’s crust, can generate an electrical pulse through a process known as the piezoelectric effect. The researchers think that such small pulses could destabilize faults that are already close to rupturing, triggering earthquakes. In fact, signatures from electromagnetic events — such as earthquake lightning and radio waves — have been recorded occurring alongside earthquakes in the past. Some researchers think these events are caused by the earthquakes themselves. But several other studies have detected strong electromagnetic anomalies before large earthquakes, not after, so the exact nature of the relationship between earthquakes and electromagnetic events is still debated.
The new explanation, however, flips this electromagnetic cause-and-effect on its head, suggesting electromagnetic anomalies aren’t the result of earthquakes, but instead cause them. It goes like this: As positively charged protons from the Sun crash into Earth protective magnetic bubble, they create electromagnetic currents that propagate across the globe. Pulses created by these currents could then go on to deform quartz in Earth’s crust, ultimately triggering quakes.
Published: 13 July 2020
On the correlation between solar activity and large earthquakes worldwide
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67860-3
Abstract
Large earthquakes occurring worldwide have long been recognized to be non Poisson distributed, so involving some large scale correlation mechanism, which could be internal or external to the Earth. Till now, no statistically significant correlation of the global seismicity with one of the possible mechanisms has been demonstrated yet. In this paper, we analyze 20 years of proton density and velocity data, as recorded by the SOHO satellite, and the worldwide seismicity in the corresponding period, as reported by the ISC-GEM catalogue. We found clear correlation between proton density and the occurrence of large earthquakes (M > 5.6), with a time shift of one day. The significance of such correlation is very high, with probability to be wrong lower than 10–5. The correlation increases with the magnitude threshold of the seismic catalogue. A tentative model explaining such a correlation is also proposed, in terms of the reverse piezoelectric effect induced by the applied electric field related to the proton density. This result opens new perspectives in seismological interpretations, as well as in earthquake forecast.
Ground-shaking earthquakes occur all across the globe. And according to a new study, many of them might be triggered by the Sun.
July 13, 2020
https://astronomy.com/news/2020/07/powerful-eruptions-on-the-sun-might-trigger-earthquakes
...But scientists have also noticed a pattern in some large earthquakes around the planet: they tend to occur in groups, not at random. This suggests there may be some global phenomenon that’s triggering these worldwide earthquake parties. And though many researchers have done statistical studies to try to determine a cause before, no compelling theories have yet been rigorously proven.
So, to tackle the lingering mystery, the researchers of this latest study combed through 20 years of data on both earthquakes and solar activity, searching for any possible correlations. Specifically, the team used data from NASA-ESA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite, compiling measurements of protons (positively charged particles) that come from the Sun and wash over our planet.
SOHO, which is located 900,000 miles (1.45 million kilometers) from Earth, keeps its sights set on the Sun, which helps scientists track how much solar material ends up striking our planet. By comparing the ISC-GEM Global Instrumental Earthquake Catalogue — a historical record of strong earthquakes — to SOHO data, the scientists noticed more strong earthquakes occurred when the number and velocities of incoming solar protons increased. Specifically, when protons streaming from the Sun peaked, there was a spike in quakes above magnitude 5.6 for the next 24 hours.
“This statistical test of the hypothesis is very significant,” De Natale says. “The probability that it's just by chance that we observe this, is very, very low — less than 1 in 100,000.”
After noticing the correlation between solar proton flux and strong earthquakes, the researchers went on to propose a possible explanation: a mechanism called the reverse piezoelectric effect.
Previous experiments have clearly shown that compressing quartz, a rock common in the Earth’s crust, can generate an electrical pulse through a process known as the piezoelectric effect. The researchers think that such small pulses could destabilize faults that are already close to rupturing, triggering earthquakes. In fact, signatures from electromagnetic events — such as earthquake lightning and radio waves — have been recorded occurring alongside earthquakes in the past. Some researchers think these events are caused by the earthquakes themselves. But several other studies have detected strong electromagnetic anomalies before large earthquakes, not after, so the exact nature of the relationship between earthquakes and electromagnetic events is still debated.
The new explanation, however, flips this electromagnetic cause-and-effect on its head, suggesting electromagnetic anomalies aren’t the result of earthquakes, but instead cause them. It goes like this: As positively charged protons from the Sun crash into Earth protective magnetic bubble, they create electromagnetic currents that propagate across the globe. Pulses created by these currents could then go on to deform quartz in Earth’s crust, ultimately triggering quakes.
Published: 13 July 2020
On the correlation between solar activity and large earthquakes worldwide
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67860-3
Abstract
Large earthquakes occurring worldwide have long been recognized to be non Poisson distributed, so involving some large scale correlation mechanism, which could be internal or external to the Earth. Till now, no statistically significant correlation of the global seismicity with one of the possible mechanisms has been demonstrated yet. In this paper, we analyze 20 years of proton density and velocity data, as recorded by the SOHO satellite, and the worldwide seismicity in the corresponding period, as reported by the ISC-GEM catalogue. We found clear correlation between proton density and the occurrence of large earthquakes (M > 5.6), with a time shift of one day. The significance of such correlation is very high, with probability to be wrong lower than 10–5. The correlation increases with the magnitude threshold of the seismic catalogue. A tentative model explaining such a correlation is also proposed, in terms of the reverse piezoelectric effect induced by the applied electric field related to the proton density. This result opens new perspectives in seismological interpretations, as well as in earthquake forecast.
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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Because of the IMO stupid decision to stuff this all in one fairing and launch it to a servicing-unreachable orbit before completing its extremely complex deployment process required by that stuffing of it into one faring instead of developing a way to send it up in sections, assemble and test it in Earth orbit, and then gently moving it to its operational orbit, this thing is way over budget and, IMO, is far too likely to fail. If it does fail what a boondoggle that will be considering its 10 BILLION dollar price tag.
NASA delays launch of flagship James Webb Space Telescope to Oct. 31, 2021
It's a seven-month delay due in part to COVID-19.
https://www.space.com/nasa-delays-james-webb-space-telescope-october-2021.html
The launch of NASA's next flagship space telescope has been pushed back another seven months.
The liftoff of the $9.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed from March 2021 until Oct. 31 of that year, NASA officials announced today (July 16), citing technical difficulties as well as complications imposed by the coronavirus pandemic.
"Webb is the world's most complex space observatory, and our top science priority, and we've worked hard to keep progress moving during the pandemic," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. "The team continues to be focused on reaching milestones and arriving at the technical solutions that will see us through to this new launch date next year."
NASA delays launch of flagship James Webb Space Telescope to Oct. 31, 2021
It's a seven-month delay due in part to COVID-19.
https://www.space.com/nasa-delays-james-webb-space-telescope-october-2021.html
The launch of NASA's next flagship space telescope has been pushed back another seven months.
The liftoff of the $9.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed from March 2021 until Oct. 31 of that year, NASA officials announced today (July 16), citing technical difficulties as well as complications imposed by the coronavirus pandemic.
"Webb is the world's most complex space observatory, and our top science priority, and we've worked hard to keep progress moving during the pandemic," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. "The team continues to be focused on reaching milestones and arriving at the technical solutions that will see us through to this new launch date next year."
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2009
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- 9,560
- Reaction score
- 1,748
What Our First Close Look at Mars Actually Revealed
The Disappointment of a Blighted Planet
15 Jul 2020
https://lithub.com/what-our-first-close-look-at-mars-actually-revealed
Two hundred and thirty-one days after Mariner 4 had launched, on the night of July 15, 1965, the tiny levers of the telex machine at JPL began ferociously clicking. Leighton must have felt a surge of emotion: The Mariner 4 pictures would be the first ever close-up images of anything beyond the moon, as the mission to Venus hadn’t taken any pictures. Leighton poignantly recognized the difference between knowing something about a place and actually seeing it, and so did his imaging team. As Bruce Murray, then only a postdoc, realized, “Looking at a planet for the first time . . . that’s not an experience people are likely to have very often in the history of the human race.”
The data packets were being flung from Mars to Earth, captured in the huge bowl of the tracking station at Goldstone Space Communications Complex in the Mojave Desert and transmitted across California via teletype to JPL’s Voyager Telecommunications section. To Leighton, it seemed that the bits of the picture were like pearls, strung kilometers apart on a string from Earth to Mars. The data rate was only eight and a third bits per second, so it would take eight hours for the first image to be fully transferred. Eight hours of nail-biting, eight hours of pure suspense.
The day before, as Mariner 4 was approaching Mars, the operations team had decided to relay a command, DC-25, with an updated stretch of code to initiate a platform-scanning action, which would identify the planet, followed by a second command, DC-26, which would ensure the camera stopped and didn’t record over the images. The data received before the code was sent suggested that the tape recorder had started and stopped, but there had been some anomalous errors. The tape recorder was also a flight spare, swapped in at the last minute because of a technical problem with the original. It would still be hours, possibly days, before the computers could assemble a real photograph, and now some were second-guessing whether the commands should have been sent, whether they might somehow confuse the computer.
Leighton began utilizing some electronic tricks to improve the quality, like erasing the clearly aberrant lines that arose from faulty scanning. But when he got to frame seven, he stopped in his tracks, struggling to believe what he saw. He called Jack James, the mission director, and the then project manager, Dan Schneiderman, into a small, secure room and showed them the tiny Polaroid of the video scope. It wasn’t at all what they had expected. They stared at the image in quiet disappointment. Eventually, Schneiderman uttered what they all knew to be true: “Jack, you and I have a twenty-minute jump on the rest of the lab to go out and look for new jobs.”
Scarcely anyone had been prepared for what frame seven revealed, much less what they saw in the next dozen images. “My God, it’s the moon,” thought Norm Haynes, one of the systems engineers. There were craters in the image, all perfectly preserved, which meant the planet was in bleak stasis. The crust hadn’t been swallowed by the churn of plate tectonics, but, more important, the surface hadn’t been worn down by the ebb and flow of water. Preserved craters meant there had been no resurfacing, no aqueous weathering of any kind resembling that of the Earth. As with the moon, it appeared there had never been any significant quantity of liquid water on the surface—no rainfall, no oceans, no streams, no ponds.
Stunned, the Mariner 4 team didn’t publicly release the images for days as they tried to understand the implications of what they were seeing. Finally, they scheduled a press conference.
The Disappointment of a Blighted Planet
15 Jul 2020
https://lithub.com/what-our-first-close-look-at-mars-actually-revealed
Two hundred and thirty-one days after Mariner 4 had launched, on the night of July 15, 1965, the tiny levers of the telex machine at JPL began ferociously clicking. Leighton must have felt a surge of emotion: The Mariner 4 pictures would be the first ever close-up images of anything beyond the moon, as the mission to Venus hadn’t taken any pictures. Leighton poignantly recognized the difference between knowing something about a place and actually seeing it, and so did his imaging team. As Bruce Murray, then only a postdoc, realized, “Looking at a planet for the first time . . . that’s not an experience people are likely to have very often in the history of the human race.”
The data packets were being flung from Mars to Earth, captured in the huge bowl of the tracking station at Goldstone Space Communications Complex in the Mojave Desert and transmitted across California via teletype to JPL’s Voyager Telecommunications section. To Leighton, it seemed that the bits of the picture were like pearls, strung kilometers apart on a string from Earth to Mars. The data rate was only eight and a third bits per second, so it would take eight hours for the first image to be fully transferred. Eight hours of nail-biting, eight hours of pure suspense.
The day before, as Mariner 4 was approaching Mars, the operations team had decided to relay a command, DC-25, with an updated stretch of code to initiate a platform-scanning action, which would identify the planet, followed by a second command, DC-26, which would ensure the camera stopped and didn’t record over the images. The data received before the code was sent suggested that the tape recorder had started and stopped, but there had been some anomalous errors. The tape recorder was also a flight spare, swapped in at the last minute because of a technical problem with the original. It would still be hours, possibly days, before the computers could assemble a real photograph, and now some were second-guessing whether the commands should have been sent, whether they might somehow confuse the computer.
Leighton began utilizing some electronic tricks to improve the quality, like erasing the clearly aberrant lines that arose from faulty scanning. But when he got to frame seven, he stopped in his tracks, struggling to believe what he saw. He called Jack James, the mission director, and the then project manager, Dan Schneiderman, into a small, secure room and showed them the tiny Polaroid of the video scope. It wasn’t at all what they had expected. They stared at the image in quiet disappointment. Eventually, Schneiderman uttered what they all knew to be true: “Jack, you and I have a twenty-minute jump on the rest of the lab to go out and look for new jobs.”
Scarcely anyone had been prepared for what frame seven revealed, much less what they saw in the next dozen images. “My God, it’s the moon,” thought Norm Haynes, one of the systems engineers. There were craters in the image, all perfectly preserved, which meant the planet was in bleak stasis. The crust hadn’t been swallowed by the churn of plate tectonics, but, more important, the surface hadn’t been worn down by the ebb and flow of water. Preserved craters meant there had been no resurfacing, no aqueous weathering of any kind resembling that of the Earth. As with the moon, it appeared there had never been any significant quantity of liquid water on the surface—no rainfall, no oceans, no streams, no ponds.
Stunned, the Mariner 4 team didn’t publicly release the images for days as they tried to understand the implications of what they were seeing. Finally, they scheduled a press conference.
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2009
- Messages
- 9,560
- Reaction score
- 1,748
How much did the Apollo program cost?
The United States spent $28 billion to land men on the Moon between 1960 and 1973, or approximately $283 billion when adjusted for inflation. Spending peaked in 1966, three years before the first Moon landing. The total amount spent on NASA during this period was $49.4 billion ($482 billion adjusted).
Itemized:
https://www.planetary.org/get-invol.../become-an-expert/cost-of-apollo-program.html
The United States spent $28 billion to land men on the Moon between 1960 and 1973, or approximately $283 billion when adjusted for inflation. Spending peaked in 1966, three years before the first Moon landing. The total amount spent on NASA during this period was $49.4 billion ($482 billion adjusted).
Itemized:
https://www.planetary.org/get-invol.../become-an-expert/cost-of-apollo-program.html
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2009
- Messages
- 9,560
- Reaction score
- 1,748
17 30-second images of the comet added up by @cielodecanarias, completely photobombed by @elonmusk's #Starlink satellites. It's a few hundreds of them right now, there will be a few thousands in the near future.
Different photographer with 20 minute image:
Different photographer with 20 minute image:
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2009
- Messages
- 9,560
- Reaction score
- 1,748
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2009
- Messages
- 9,560
- Reaction score
- 1,748
Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2009
- Messages
- 9,560
- Reaction score
- 1,748
NASA safety panel has lingering doubts about Boeing Starliner quality control
July 23, 2020
https://spacenews.com/nasa-safety-panel-has-lingering-doubts-about-boeing-starliner-quality-control/
WASHINGTON — Members of a NASA safety panel expressed continued concern about quality issues with Boeing’s commercial crew spacecraft while cautiously supporting SpaceX’s plans to fly reused spacecraft on future crewed missions.
During a July 23 teleconference by the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, members discussed several reviews of issues with the uncrewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft last December. NASA announced July 7 it had completed its reviews of that Orbital Flight Test (OFT) mission, which resulted in 80 recommendations specific to the flight and several more from a separate “high-visibility close call” review carried out earlier this year by NASA.
All of the recommendations specific to Starliner, including software issues that accounted for the majority of those recommendations, will need to be completed and approved before a second OFT mission, said Don McErlean, a member of the panel. He noted NASA has augmented its commercial crew software team “to significantly increase insight and oversight” into the vehicle’s software development.
However, he said the panel still had concerns about the overall Starliner program. “Despite this progress, which is definite and, in fact, measurable, the panel continues to be concerned about quality control problems that seemingly have plagued the Boeing commercial crew program,” he said. “This is still an issue that the panel will continue to watch closely as OFT and, later, CFT, are conducted.”
July 23, 2020
https://spacenews.com/nasa-safety-panel-has-lingering-doubts-about-boeing-starliner-quality-control/
WASHINGTON — Members of a NASA safety panel expressed continued concern about quality issues with Boeing’s commercial crew spacecraft while cautiously supporting SpaceX’s plans to fly reused spacecraft on future crewed missions.
During a July 23 teleconference by the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, members discussed several reviews of issues with the uncrewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft last December. NASA announced July 7 it had completed its reviews of that Orbital Flight Test (OFT) mission, which resulted in 80 recommendations specific to the flight and several more from a separate “high-visibility close call” review carried out earlier this year by NASA.
All of the recommendations specific to Starliner, including software issues that accounted for the majority of those recommendations, will need to be completed and approved before a second OFT mission, said Don McErlean, a member of the panel. He noted NASA has augmented its commercial crew software team “to significantly increase insight and oversight” into the vehicle’s software development.
However, he said the panel still had concerns about the overall Starliner program. “Despite this progress, which is definite and, in fact, measurable, the panel continues to be concerned about quality control problems that seemingly have plagued the Boeing commercial crew program,” he said. “This is still an issue that the panel will continue to watch closely as OFT and, later, CFT, are conducted.”
