Month: May 2021

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane crossed its 50-mile-high space boundary over New Mexico for the first time today, after months of challenges.

The trip by VSS Unity marks the first time a spacecraft has been launched so high from a New Mexico spaceport. Unity passed the 50-mile mark twice during tests at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port, in 2018 and 2019. Since then, the plane and its WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane, dubbed VMS Eve, have been transferred to their operational home base at New Mexico’s Spaceport America.

“Today’s flight sees New Mexico become the third U.S. state to launch humans to space,” after Florida and California, Virgin Galactic said in a post-mission press release.

Virgin Galactic goes with the U.S. Air Force’s 50-mile definition for the boundary of space — rather than the internationally recognized 100-kilometer (62-mile) boundary, known as the Karman Line.

Today’s flight followed the standard profile for a SpaceShipTwo trip: The twin-fuselage Eve made an airplane-style takeoff from Spaceport America with Unity bolted to its underbelly. Around the target altitude of 44,000 feet, Unity was released from its mothership and fired up its hybrid rocket engine to rise spaceward.

Test pilots Dave Mackay and CJ Sturckow guided Unity to its peak altitude of 55.45 miles, cheered on by Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and other VIPs who gathered at Spaceport America.

At the top of the ride, Mackay and Sturckow experienced a few minutes of weightlessness and saw a wide swath of the American Southwest spread beneath the black sky of space. Passengers are due to get a similar experience once Virgin Galactic begins commercial flights.

Unity glided back to a runway landing at Spaceport America — and Eve’s pilots, Kelly Latimer and Michael Masucci, landed their mothership soon afterward. Virgin Galactic noted that Sturckow, a former NASA astronaut, is now the first person to take part in space launches from three states. (The others include Florida space shuttle launches and Unity’s California test flight in 2018.)

Branson noted that the drive to create the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport began in New Mexico 15 years ago.

’Today, we launched the first human spaceflight from that very same place, marking an important milestone for both Virgin Galactic and New Mexico,” he said. “I am proud of the team for their hard work and grateful to the people of New Mexico who have been unwavering in their commitment for commercial spaceflight from day one. Their belief and support have made today’s historic achievement possible.”

Today’s success came after months of challenges: Last December, Unity’s blastoff to space had to be aborted just moments after rocket ignition, due to an electromagnetic interference issue.

This month, a book titled “Test Gods” revealed that a faulty seal in Unity’s horizontal stabilizer had to be fixed after the rocket plane’s previous flight in February 2019. And a couple of weeks ago, Virgin Galactic had to check a maintenance issue relating to Eve’s tail. Engineers determined that the tail was good to go for today’s test.

Virgin Galactic’s schedule calls for an assessment of the flight test’s results, to be followed by another space shot with four company employees riding along as passengers. If all goes well, Branson himself would then take a ride, and a $2 million research flight for the Italian Air Force would mark the start of commercial trips for spacefliers.

Today’s test flight also had a commercial element to it: Unity carried several payloads for NASA’s Flight Opportunities program, including experiments designed to measure electromagnetic fields, study the behavior of dust in space conditions, and test technologies for doing surgery in space.

The next few months are due to bring more milestones in commercial spaceflight. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is planning to send people on a suborbital space ride for the first time in July. One of the seats for that flight is being auctioned off, and the current high bid amounts to $2.8 million.

A privately funded orbital flight in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is scheduled for liftoff by as early as September, and another all-civilian crew is training for a SpaceX ride to the International Space Station in January.

Lead image: VSS Unity’s shiny wings are “feathered” for its test flight over New Mexico, with a curving Earth in the background. Source: Virgin Galactic,

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Reposted by NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THAT

May 22, 2021

By Paul Homewood

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the Joplin, Missouri tornado, which killed 161 people. This was the first three-digit number since 1953. At the time, the usual suspects were quickly emerging from the woodworks, blaming global warming:

Caution: It is extremely important not to make any connections. If you see pictures of debris like this week’s footage from Joplin, MO, don’t be surprised: Does this have anything to do with the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., Or the huge eruption a few weeks earlier (What? Together, this was the most active April for tornadoes in US history. No, that means nothing.

It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is inadvisable to try to associate them in your head with the Texas fires – fires that have burned more of America by this time this year than wildfires in years past. Texas and the adjacent parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico are drier than ever – the drought is worse than the Dust Bowl. But don’t be surprised if they’re somehow connected.

If you were wondering, you should also be wondering whether this year’s record midwestern snowfalls and rains – which are causing record flooding along the Mississippi – might be related in any way. And then you may find that your thoughts are wandering about global warming and that climatologists have been predicting for years that if we flood the atmosphere with carbon, we will also start drying and flooding the planet, as warm air holds more water vapor as cold air.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-link-between-climate-change-and-joplin-tornadoes-never/2011/05/23/AFrVC49G_story.html

In fact, McKibben’s disgusting climate porn couldn’t have been more wrong. 2011 was nothing more than an outlier, and since then the frequency of strong tornadoes has continued to decline compared to the global cool-down years in the 1970s:

https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/#data

There has only been one EF-5 tornado in the past decade, the Moore tornado in 2013; This corresponds to a long-term average of almost one per year.

Fortunately, the number of deaths from tornadoes has also fallen, with an annual average of 31 over the past decade.

Will McKibben now publicly apologize for misleading the public back then?

FOOTNOTE

McKibben also used the Texas drought in 2011 as another example of the effects of global warming. Needless to say, he was wrong about that too:

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In space, the location of an object has a major impact on its temperature. The closer the object is to its star, the hotter it is, most likely. Heat then plays an important role in the materials that are present in the atmosphere of the object, if any. Lighter elements like hydrogen and helium and much easier to take on a gaseous state and create an atmosphere. So it was a surprise when two different teams found much heavier elements in the atmosphere of comets that were relatively far from the Sun. And one of these comets happened to come from another solar system.

Many comets are metallic, so it was not surprising that elemental metals such as iron and nickel are present on their surface. And when metallic comets approach the sun, these elements can sometimes sublimate into the cloud of dust that surrounds the comet. Astronomers have been observing this phenomenon for years and it makes sense given the temperatures.

UT video explaining the origin of comets.

When a team of astronomers at the University of Liege studied the atmosphere of a number of comets relatively far from the solar system, they found some strange spectral lines that they couldn’t explain. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), they studied comets three times farther from the Sun than Earth, making them cold and stable compared to nearby comets.

After some more research, the team found that the spectral lines they were looking at were representative of very weak signals for iron and nickel. Oddly enough, the two elements had almost the same concentration with about 1 g iron and 1 g nickel per 100 kg of water in the comet’s atmosphere. Closer to the Sun, where it is more common to find these heavier elements in the comet’s atmosphere, there is usually about ten times the amount of iron than nickel.

Image of the VLT, in which the data of the comets were collected during a lunar eclipse.
Photo credit: ESO / Yuri Beletsky

This could mean that there is a new material that contains iron and nickel and has a much lower sublimation temperature. Or there could still be unexplained reasons for the occurrence of these metals. However, the team has already made some progress, including re-analyzing other older data to check for faint spectral lines as well. Soon they will also have a new tool for the extremely large telescope, the mid-infrared ELT imager and spectrograph (METIS), which will allow them to determine the exact composition of the material that led to atmospheric iron and nickel.

Unfortunately, the team investigating the other object found with heavy metals in its atmosphere cannot use METIS to observe it. This is because Object 2I / Borisov is an interstellar comet that flowed through our solar system a few years ago, splitting in two, and flying out of range of our instruments.

This image was captured with the FORS2 instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in late 2019 when Comet 2I / Borisov passed near the Sun. With the comet moving at breakneck speeds of about 175,000 kilometers per hour, the background stars appeared as streaks of light as the telescope followed the comet’s trajectory. The colors in these stripes add a certain disco flair to the image and are the result of the combination of observations in different wavelength bands highlighted by the different colors in this composite image.
Credit – ESO

However, the team used a tool they had on hand at the time – the X-Shooter Spectrograph as the VLT. While they did not find iron in Borisov’s atmosphere, they found atomic nickel. Given that the comet was 300 million kilometers from the Sun when it was observed, this is again surprising, as previous estimates would have expected the comet to be too cold to have atmospheric nickel.

While Borisov himself may be out of sight, we are likely to find other interstellar invaders in the near future as we know what to look for. With better observation tools and new theories to understand why these unexpected elements appear in cometary atmospheres, the future looks bright for cometary science.

Learn more:
ESO – heavy metal vapors unexpectedly found in comets across our solar system – and beyond
Nature – iron and nickel atoms in cometary atmospheres also far away from the sun
Nature – Gaseous atomic nickel in the coma of the interstellar comet 2I / Borisov
Sky and Telescope – INTERETELLAR AND SOLAR SYSTEM COMETS SHARE A SURPRISING COMPONENT: NICKEL

Mission statement:
Representation of elements in comets with the VLT.
Credit – ESO

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Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Remember the time everyone wondered who would do the easy jobs if everyone graduated? Greta Thunberg solved this problem for us.

School strike 4 Climate: Thousands of young Australians are urgently calling for action against climate change

Posted at 4:23 pm yesterday, updated 6 hours ago

Thousands of students and their supporters left classrooms and workplaces to attend School Strike 4 Climate events across the country and became part of a global youth movement advocating urgent action against climate change.

Important points:

• Thousands of students and supporters attended events in major Australian cities
• They called on the federal government to do more to ensure a future for renewable energies
• Some said because they were too young to vote it was the only way to get their voices heard

Participants made their way to large rallies in the business districts of every Australian capital on Friday. Events were also planned in dozens of rural and regional areas from Alice Springs to Atherton.

The organizers call on the federal government to turn its back on emission-intensive energy sources, including through:

• Solutions led by Aboriginal and islanders of Torres Strait that guarantee land rights
• Funding the creation of secure jobs that accelerate solutions to the climate crisis
• Financing projects that will convert the economy to 100 percent renewable energies by 2030

All events took place in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic and, according to the organizers, were organized with the involvement of the relevant state and territorial health authorities.

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A central theme for many in attendance was the federal government’s recent announcement that it would be spending $ 600 million on a new gas-fired power plant.

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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-21/school-strike-for-climate-2021-national-wrap/100155114

The Australian government is being forced to fund a new gas-fired power plant with taxpayers’ money as shippable energy is no longer a safe investment in Australia due to its own market distortion rules and the hostility of opposition to fossil fuels. Energy companies seem to have given up on the idea that they are in any way responsible for Australia’s grid stability. A rational position in the face of all of their shippable energy sources is bled to death by anyone who can convince a politician to give them a grant to build renewable energy.

Imagine if the kids did something constructive with their time instead of marching and whining, like taking a trip into the desert and participating in some land restoration projects. But I think a few hours from their game consoles is all the poor darlings can stand, and digging Australia’s poor quality desert soil and dealing with flies, snakes and other pests is a terribly uncomfortable job.

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