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Conveniently, IPCC doesn't mention that the Antarctic ozone hole in 2015, just 3 years ago, was very close to as large as it's ever been. (Largest was in 2017.)

https://postimg.cc/8JmnR7Ys



Source: NASA Ozone Watch.

In fact, the data shown in the graph I linked to shows no apparent trend at all.

Just more propaganda BS.

Perhaps because it's an obvious troll? Global temperatures have been rising for 150 years, and the size of the ozone hole has only started leveling off in the last 20 years. A single glance tells anyone they're not remotely correlated.

Perhaps because it's an obvious troll? Global temperatures have been rising for 150 years, and the size of the ozone hole has only started leveling off in the last 20 years. A single glance tells anyone they're not remotely correlated.

Well there is this ION drive that NASA has that should be fast enough.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/g...

It was overkill then, but I am not aware of a smaller helicopter carrier in service back then.

They had the Iwo Jima class LPH's, two of which (USS Guadalcanal (Gemini 10) and USS Guam (Gemini 11)) were used as Gemini recovery vessels. USS Guadalcanal also recovered Apollo 9, USS USS Iwo Jima recovered Apollo 13, USS New Orleans recovered Apollo 14, and USS Okinawa recovered Apollo 15. USS New Orleans also recovered Skylab 3, Skylab 4, and ASTP.

Looking at the Gemini/Apollo missions that were recovered by a full size carrier... One thing immediately leapt out at me - they were all older carriers, WW II leftovers of the Essex class. That's probably because they constituted over half the active carriers at the time more than anything else.

And now, we have a lot better idea of where the capsule is coming down.

According to Apollo By The Numbers the largest miss distance was 3 nautical miles. Most missions missed by no more than 2 nautical miles. The largest distance to the recovery vessel was 13 nautical miles on Apollo 11, the rest were under 4 nautical miles. I can't find any similar compilation for Gemini, but IIRC the numbers were generally similar. (Mercury was all over the place.)

It was overkill then, but I am not aware of a smaller helicopter carrier in service back then.

They had the Iwo Jima class LPH's, two of which (USS Guadalcanal (Gemini 10) and USS Guam (Gemini 11)) were used as Gemini recovery vessels. USS Guadalcanal also recovered Apollo 9, USS USS Iwo Jima recovered Apollo 13, USS New Orleans recovered Apollo 14, and USS Okinawa recovered Apollo 15. USS New Orleans also recovered Skylab 3, Skylab 4, and ASTP.

Looking at the Gemini/Apollo missions that were recovered by a full size carrier... One thing immediately leapt out at me - they were all older carriers, WW II leftovers of the Essex class. That's probably because they constituted over half the active carriers at the time more than anything else.

And now, we have a lot better idea of where the capsule is coming down.

According to Apollo By The Numbers the largest miss distance was 3 nautical miles. Most missions missed by no more than 2 nautical miles. The largest distance to the recovery vessel was 13 nautical miles on Apollo 11, the rest were under 4 nautical miles. I can't find any similar compilation for Gemini, but IIRC the numbers were generally similar. (Mercury was all over the place.)

Rememer that The Apollo 11 ascent stage was left in Lunar orbit to be retreived by a future mission a few years later.

I don't remember that, and orbits around the moon tend not to be stable. This source - https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pl... - says it is not in orbit.

[Reaction wheels] were [used], they failed.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/j...

Someone needs to improve that design if four out of four failed in only a handful of years.

I will miss the Dawn Journal which has been a fascinating description of the engineering behind the mission.

They were, they failed.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/j...

Upcoming mission to 16-psyche the most interesting asteroid, 100 km diameter, known to be metallic nickel-iron. Was it originally part of the molten core of a destroyed planet? We want to know. Launches in 2022, arrives in orbit 2026. Like Dawn, has a very cool ion thrust motor, looks like old science fiction.

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/rese...

In other words, clouds are not the problem for climate modeling that you seem to think they are.

How would you plan to refuel something that is ~150 million kilometers, roughly 100 million miles, away from your planet?

The distance is irrelevant — if a maintenance craft can get to it at all, it can refuel. International Space Station is 254 miles above Earth, but is routinely resupplied (and refueled) despite this much higher altitude.

If we can send a car into space just for the heck of it, we can reach any object in the Earth orbit...

The process of refueling in space is, likely, even easier than it is for airplanes. And American airplanes have been refueling in flight for decades. It is a solved problem. Indeed, NASA are already researching robotic refueling of satellites themselves. Back, when Kepler was designed, they could've provided for a possibility of a manned refueling mission...

No, at the right altitude-- about 56 km above the surface-- Venus is remarkably Earthlike.

No oxygen, of course, but in temperature and pressure, very close.

I wrote a paper about this: "Colonization of Venus", back in 2003. Glad to see my work is being taken seriously!

Wouldn't the lack of hydrogen be a larger problem than the lack of oxygen? Oxygen is at least available bound with carbon dioxide but water vapor is just a trace.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap0...

The "warming" is actually more like ...

Not even close. Even over 50 years the trend is closer to 0.2/decade:

GISTEMP Least squares trend line; slope = 0.177 per decade over the last 50 years.

BEST Least squares trend line; slope = 0.178 per decade over the last 50 years.

But of course this has continued to accelerate so over the last couple decades you get:

GISTEMP Least squares trend line; slope = 0.21 per decade over the last 20 years.

BEST Least squares trend line; slope = 0.20 per decade over the last 20 years.

RSS Satellite data (which doesn't extend back 50 years) Least squares trend line; slope = 0.20 per decade over the last 20 years.

The "warming" is actually more like ...

Not even close. Even over 50 years the trend is closer to 0.2/decade:

GISTEMP Least squares trend line; slope = 0.177 per decade over the last 50 years.

BEST Least squares trend line; slope = 0.178 per decade over the last 50 years.

But of course this has continued to accelerate so over the last couple decades you get:

GISTEMP Least squares trend line; slope = 0.21 per decade over the last 20 years.

BEST Least squares trend line; slope = 0.20 per decade over the last 20 years.

RSS Satellite data (which doesn't extend back 50 years) Least squares trend line; slope = 0.20 per decade over the last 20 years.

A lot of people (here, especially) reject the 'appeal to expert' logical fallacy. It takes some form of 'experts say' and related. They want to see the data and decide for themselves. Whenever they hear an appeal to expert, it turns them off. But if I don't have the time or expertise to delve into the data, one can accept suitably formed appeals.

Some part of the response to climate change does involve power grabs and redistribution.

It is important to separate the question of whether there is global warming or anthropogenic global warming, and the responses to it.

" I say Venus may be the second most Earth-like location in the solar system." Well, that's bullshit.

No, at the right altitude-- about 56 km above the surface-- Venus is remarkably Earthlike.

No oxygen, of course, but in temperature and pressure, very close.

I wrote a paper about this: "Colonization of Venus", back in 2003. Glad to see my work is being taken seriously!

This has been talked about several times, for example, "Why We Should Build Cloud Cities on Venus," here: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/539jj5/why-we-should-build-cloud-cities-on-venus
based on this 2003 paper: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20030022668.pdf

That's correct, and water is also a greenhouse gas. Current estimates are that it accounts for about half of the temperature rise that we are seeing.

https://www.giss.nasa.gov/rese...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/m...

Also, regarding how such a small amount of CO2 can make a big difference, here's a great article about it.

https://www.scientificamerican...

I always found it fascinating that CO2 levels moving from 200ppm (0.0002) to 400ppm (0.0004), a change of 0.0002, is the cause of all this warming.

Yes, isn't it fascinating? The fact that small fractions of trace gasses can dominate the atmospheric infrared absorption was discovered by John Tyndall in 1859. https://earthobservatory.nasa....
We now know that this is because the tightly-bound diatomic molecules don't have vibrational modes in the infrared energy range, of course, but at the time, it was indeed quite fascinating that miniscule amounts of water and carbon dioxide could absorb more than the vastly larger concentration of oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere.

Tyndall was quite an amazing man. He's also the person credited with coming up with the first reasonable answer to the question "why is the sky blue"? https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/e...
(his answer was "scattering", which is right as far as it goes, but of course it took the mathematics of Rayleigh scattering fifty years later to understand the actual details.)

Well, the claim is that unless we reduce our CO2 output then we will see temperatures rise. If temperatures keep rising then at some point 1998 will no longer be the maximum. It's been the maximum for 20 years now, when can we expect this to no longer be true?

The 1998 peak was tied again in 2002, and has been broken in 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. See here for detailed table: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gis...

The annual anomaly (Jan through Dec) in 1998 was +0.62 degrees C. The highest year so far is 2016, with +0.99 degrees C. We haven't been under the 1998 value since 2011.

How embarrassing.

Lissajous curves are the family of curves described by [...] parametric equations ...

Go away.

The James Webb Space Telescope will not be in orbit around the Earth, like the Hubble Space Telescope is - it will actually orbit the Sun, 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) away from the Earth at what is called the second Lagrange point or L2.

On October 4, 2018, https://blogs.nasa.gov/commerc... talks about June 2019 as target for a crewed demo mission for SpaceX, August 2019 for Boeing.

Citation?

NASA. It's not hard to find information about a big public mission like this. The goal of the curiosity mission was multi-fold a lot of which included testing a new landing system. It was primarily an experiment to test a hybrid powered decent system. A bit of science was included as well. The rover had instruments to determine if the conditions for microbiol life exist, and it answered that question within a few months of landing, done. Mission over.... except....

The mission included a hardware test the rover itself had a mission life of 1 martian year with the primary objective being to survive one martian winter. The design goal of the rover was to remain functional for 687 earth days from landing date.

Everything else has been a bonus. The operational life of the rover has been extended indefinitely and multiple missions have been queued up for it since it is still viable with the few instruments it has. https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/miss...

Only a fraction of the 2 KW energy is converted to electricity.

Some of the thermal energy is used to keep the rovers computers at operating temperature the way Voyager does. It's a common technique that they use to keep space craft functioning.

The MMRTG looks interesting.

Only a fraction of the 2 KW energy is converted to electricity.

Some of the thermal energy is used to keep the rovers computers at operating temperature the way Voyager does. It's a common technique that they use to keep space craft functioning.

The MMRTG looks interesting.

Here's an application that requires images to be loaded into the computer's RAM:

https://mars.nasa.gov/news/nas...

Unlike Charlie Sheen, Elon's company regularly sends supplies to the International Space Station. Cheaper than anybody, ever.
But other than that, yeah, they're both just as delusional.

The lovely thing about this subject is nobody knows what's going on but everyone is willing to demand money and other people do things

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/ea...

Water vapor is known to be Earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution to global warming has been debated. Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of the gas as a critical component of climate change.

Andrew Dessler and colleagues from Texas A&M University in College Station confirmed that the heat-amplifying effect of water vapor is potent enough to double the climate warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

All the article does is reaffirm my point that without a thorough understanding of how the dominant green house gas functions you can't make meaningful predictions based on incomplete models.

But hey tell me again how anything that says windpower causes warming is FUD.

If you think CO2 is enough to change that balance, then you better believe altering the patterns of motion and conduction are as well.

Global mean temperature of the Earth without greenhouse gasses is ~ 33C cooler than today.

Global mean temperature of the Earth without wind turbines is ~ exactly the same as today.

And the bulk of that is from water vapor, hmm why didn't link mention water except for cooling ? hmmmmmm

"Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. It controls the Earth's temperature.” It's true that water vapor is the largest contributor to the Earth's greenhouse effect. On average, it probably accounts for about 60% of the warming effect

https://www.acs.org/content/ac..."

If you think CO2 is enough to change that balance, then you better believe altering the patterns of motion and conduction are as well.

Global mean temperature of the Earth without greenhouse gasses is ~ 33C cooler than today.

Global mean temperature of the Earth without wind turbines is ~ exactly the same as today.

The graph is for surface area, which is two dimensional.

The volume of ice on Greenland, however, is a different matter entirely.

The ice is thinning.

The average surface temperature of the globe is increasing. average != everywhere. See this animation.

So, tell us: On your image of the page freely available to all at https://climate.nasa.gov/vital... , why did you choose a time span of six months to argue a time span of six years?

Oh. Plus 3.2 mm a year, huh?

So, tell us: On your image of the page freely available to all at https://climate.nasa.gov/vital... , why did you choose a time span of six months to argue a time span of six years?

Oh. Plus 3.2 mm a year, huh?

There is no hole in the ozone. "The ozone hole is not technically a hole where no ozone is present, but is actually a region of exceptionally depleted ozone in the stratosphere." - https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.g...

Similarly there's no Great Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean: "Dr Angelicque White, Associate Professor at Oregon State University, who has studied the âgarbage patchâ(TM) in depth, said: âoeThe use of the phrase âgarbage patchâ(TM) is misleading . I'd go as far as to say that it is a myth and a misconception....... It is not visible from space; there are no islands of trash; it is more akin to a diffuse soup of plastic floating in our oceans.." - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sc...

So it's a Garbage Soup of microscopic particles.

And an Ozone Depletion Spot.

Satellites don't measure surface air temperature, which is most relevant for us. Here's a better graph: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gis...

and the temperatures have dropped dramatically since then.

What?
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/...
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc...
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/0...
http://www.climatecentral.org/...
https://www.co2.earth/global-w...

Yes, I know... CNN is liberal fake news and NASA has also been infiltrated by liberals, as has been the National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration... or any scientific organization for that matter.

The thing is, lifetime of a BEC is so short (last I heard, on the order of a few seconds), that itself puts significant constraints on precision measurements you can do.

It's worse than that - most BECs have a lifetime of fractions of a second. One of the limiting factors on the lifetime of a BEC is, oddly enough, gravity: the clump of particles simply falls out of the trap. A recent delivery to the International Space Station will allow for the creation of BECs with longer lifetimes: 5-10 seconds according to this article. That may still not sound like a lot, but it is an order of magnitude longer, and will allow deeper investigation of these tricky things. The better they are understood, the more likely useful applications may come along.

Pick a plant. They all convert light and CO2 to sugar. In terms of efficiency it depends on what is being measured. If it is the object's size vs their output over time, that it one way to look at efficiency. If it is a huge forest of maple trees, a field of sugar cane, or beet plants, they don't need much maintenance. Entire forests exist without any human effort, electricity, chemical additive, etc.

Anyway, the research seems kinda pointless after NASA just announced Terra-forming Mars won't be possible for many reasons. I will let NASA explain why...

https://www.nasa.gov/press-rel...

Mars just happens to look like an Earth desert in pictures. It doesn't mean it just needs oxygen and water and then go.

Maybe from here.

Course, knowing where it is is one thing. Knowing how to extract it efficiently is quite another.

A colony would certainly multiply the complexity. NASA became accustomed, in the 1960's, to simply overpowering the limitations. It's feasible if you're willing to expend the resources. SpaceX has established what modern manufacturing and more precise manufacture can do. But a Mars mission, and return, demand far more. I'm working from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... The delta V from earth to LEO can be estimated at about 10 kilometers/second, including drag. The delta V from LEO to Mars is approximately 4.3 km/s. Then landing on Mars is roughly 4.1 km/s. Then taking back _off_ from Mars is about 4.1 km/s. Then returning to Earth LEO is roughly 4.3 km/s. The return to Earth from there, I'll assume is an entirely distinct, much smaller system, essentially passengers, and can use aerobraking.

There are economies available: the payload landed on Mars would be much smaller than the payload sent to Mars orbit, and much of the payloads can be discarded at various steps. That is the basis for multi-stage rockets and multi-stage missions of many types. But our experience with moon landings need not apply well to this. The numbers for a moon landing are much less demanding. From Earth to LEO is still 10 km/second. From Earth LEO to the moon's LEO is only 1.31 km/s, and from there to the moon's surface is only 1.87 km/s. And all the fuel, both for propellant and the energy to expel the propellant to gain thrust, still has to be lifted to LEO. One has to build the equivalent of Saturn V's in space, to launch to and return humans from Mars.

There are many approaches to deal with the numbers. The simplest, as you've mentioned, is not to return the astronauts from the surface of Mars. That is an enormous simplification. If we can assure them a supply line, it need not even be a suicide mission. Another is to do the spacecraft manufacture, and possibly even fueling, from LEO on top of an existing industrial infrastructure. Water for propellant and energy stored as fuel is the issue there. This brings us very rapidly to solar sail technologies. Solar sails could, in theory, provide propellant payload free interplanetary missions, with _much_ faster flight times, on the order of 2 months. A very good NASA study in 2004, at https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/..., laid out the broad requirements. The most efficient rocket propelled orbits, Hohmann orbits, give flight times of roughly 8 months.

If I may say, I do _not_ understand why NASA is not more actively pursuing solar sail technologies. Not only for space missions, but as solar mirror energy sources. They can be in orbits that do not obscure sunlight, they do not produce ecology destroying waste, and they could easily outproduce all of Earth's current energy production. There are very real difficulties harvesting the energy, and preventing them from being focused as weapons against Earth targets, but it can _scale_ in ways that wind, solar cell, or biofuels simply cannot. Optical astronomers will hate them, but the stable technologies for solar mirrors should provide very reduced cost for orbital telescopes, as well.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacest...

The link is in a Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft that docked with the ISS on June 6th and brought up Sergey Prokopyev, Alexander Gerst and Serena M. Auñón-Chancellor.

I will be interested in hearing what the "more comprehensive long-term repair" will be as I presume the spacecraft will be returning to earth at some point with the astronauts and since the leak is located in a part of the spacecraft that does not return to Earth (I'm guessing it burns up in the atmosphere) then I can't imagine anything more than keeping the opening from propagating will be required.

It will be interesting to hear what is the source of the leak - it is apparently 2mm in diameter and I'm wondering if this would be a meteorite or a piece of space debris.

Try here:

https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/

and here:

https://history.nasa.gov/afj/

      where they have listened extensively to many of the tapes, and transcribed and added explanations. If you want to know what was going on live, that is the place to start.

Try here:

https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/

and here:

https://history.nasa.gov/afj/

      where they have listened extensively to many of the tapes, and transcribed and added explanations. If you want to know what was going on live, that is the place to start.

The article says 170 tapes with 30 tracks, it does not say how long any of them are or that they were only recording 30 tracks at one time. 5,100 tracks is all it gives you. The NASA release mentions these are "surviving tapes" and also says there is a lot more audio that hasn't been digitized. It also hints at transcriptions, perhaps coming to the Explore Apollo site at some point.

The labels have things like "Flight Director (L)" and "Flight Director (R)" taking up two tracks on a tape. Some of the ones I have opened up sound like they are data (the labels are the same for every tape and do not match the contents). I also found one with some folks that sound Australian (maybe) troubleshooting something.

I imagine "T880" is a tape label (I get 24 audio tracks for that one), followed by which Historical Recorder was used and potentially which reel on the recorder (U and L look a lot like Upper/Lower to me), then the channel. Unsure on the timestamp, except it appears to be sequential (T889 has channel 17 from 01-42-10_10-12-10 and 10-12-10_18-21-28, but there is silence in the first and talking in the second).

Now that we have pictures of moon buggy tracks and the gear left behind on the moon...

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_p...

...as well as things like this newly-released thousands-of-hours of audio, do any of the moon hoaxers start to lose their resolve?

Or to them, is it still just part of a huge ongoing conspiracy involving thousands of men and women that continues to live on nearly 50 years later?

I read a NASA report on this fire last year, so I know the detailed sequence of events, and the conditions of the accident.

In space the Apollo command module was supposed to be at 0.2 bar pure oxygen, since the one-component gas at low pressure made the capsule engineering easier. Since the system set up to only handle oxygen, on the ground it was filled with pure oxygen at 1.0 bar. The exercise the crew was going through was supposed to be as close to launch configuration as possible. NASA had not spent much effort analyzing the module furnishings for flammability, and there was widespread use of Velcro, which was the primary fuel for the fire.

The capsule door opened inward, and the pressure was equalized with the outside so that there was no pressure on the door.

When the fire started the heat rapidly increased the pressure in the module so that it was not possible to open the hatch. There were pressure relief valves, but they were too small to handle the rising pressure. The timeline was extremely short.

Stage one (0 to 24 seconds) - start of the fire and initial spread:
0 seconds: voltage surge that is believed to correspond with the short that ignited the fire
10 seconds: the first voice indication of the crew of a fire.
24 seconds: the pressure blew open the hatch (which did not open outward, it was a gross integrity failure). The pressure had risen to almost 2 bars at that point.
Stage two (24 to 30 seconds) - "This stage was characterized by the period of greatest conflagration due to the forced convection that resulted from the outrush of gases through the rupture in the pressure vessel... Evidence of the intensity of the fire includes burst and burned aluminum tubes in the oxygen and coolant systems at floor level.": 28 seconds: last voice signal from the crew.
Stage three (30 to 36 seconds) - "characterized by rapid production of high concentrations of carbon monoxide... unlike the earlier stages where the flame was relatively smokeless, heavy smoke now formed": The fire burned out due to lack of oxygen at this point. During this stage, less than half a minute from when the fire was first noticed the crew would have inhaled a lethal dose of carbon monoxide.

See this summary.