The first instance of social distancing on Florida beaches

"Hey Jeanie Tony is off on a mission and he told me to take care of you. So I have this big bottle of sun tan lotion to spread on you so you don't burn."
"Back off Captain Healy. I don't burn. I am a Genie. Why don't you go rub up on Emily your next door neighbor. I bet she will like that."
"That's the seventies Jeanie. You are getting ahead of yourself."
"Nobody is getting any head so fuck off why don't you!"

NASA takes photos of the Sun

We don't talk about NASA much these days. I remember when I was a kid we were all about the astronauts and the research that NASA was doing and going to the moon and stuff.

NASA has released photo's of the Suns surface that are really interesting. From the press release:

“These unprecedented pictures of the Sun are the closest we have ever obtained,” said Holly Gilbert, NASA project scientist for the mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “These amazing images will help scientists piece together the Sun’s atmospheric layers, which is important for understanding how it drives space weather near the Earth and throughout the solar system.”

“We didn’t expect such great results so early,” said Daniel Müller, ESA’s Solar Orbiter project scientist. “These images show that Solar Orbiter is off to an excellent start.”

They issued photo's of little "campfires" that are mini solar flares that must have a significant effect on the earth. It is all very interesting.

When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut. Not for the ticker tape parades. Not for finding new things. Not to go where no man had gone before. I wanted to be an astronaut for one reason and one reason only:

How much can he reasonably expect to defund?

"Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.

Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.

This would mean the elimination of Nasa’s world-renowned research into temperature, ice, clouds and other climate phenomena. Nasa’s network of satellites provide a wealth of information on climate change, with the Earth science division’s budget set to grow to $2bnnext year. By comparison, space exploration has been scaled back somewhat, with a proposed budget of $2.8bn in 2017.

Bob Walker, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said there was no need for Nasa to do what he has previously described as “politically correct environmental monitoring”.

“We see Nasa in an exploration role, in deep space research,” Walker told the Guardian. “Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission.

“My guess is that it would be difficult to stop all ongoing Nasa programs but future programs should definitely be placed with other agencies. I believe that climate research is necessary but it has been heavily politicized, which has undermined a lot of the work that researchers have been doing. Mr Trump’s decisions will be based upon solid science, not politicized science.”

Trump has previously said that climate change is a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese, although on Tuesday he said there is “some connectivity” between human actions and the climate. There is overwhelming and long-established evidence that burning fossil fuels and deforestation causes the release of heat-trapping gases, therefore causing the warming experienced in recent decades.

Walker, however, claimed that doubt over the role of human activity in climate change “is a view shared by half the climatologists in the world. We need good science to tell us what the reality is and science could do that if politicians didn’t interfere with it.”

It could put us back into the ‘dark ages’ ... Space research is a luxury, Earth observations are essential

Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research

It’s understood that federal government scientists have been unnerved by Trump’s dismissal of climate science and are concerned that their work will be sidelined as part of a new pro-fossil fuels and deregulation agenda. Climate scientists at other organizations expressed dismay at the potential gutting of Earth-based research.

Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said as Nasa provides the scientific community with new instruments and techniques, the elimination of Earth sciences would be “a major setback if not devastating”.

“It could put us back into the ‘dark ages’ of almost the pre-satellite era,” he said. “It would be extremely short sighted.

“We live on planet Earth and there is much to discover, and it is essential to track and monitor many things from space. Information on planet Earth and its atmosphere and oceans is essential for our way of life. Space research is a luxury, Earth observations are essential.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-earth-donald-trump-eliminate-climate-change-research

Live feed view of Earth from the International Space Station

Link

Dead Sea from the Israel side (Link)

"The moon passed between Nasa's Deep Space Climate Observatory and the Earth"

Link to source

TampaRay said.. 2 hours ago*

In case anyone was wondering, the Deep Space Climate Observatory, also known as DSCOVR, is a relatively new satellite. Launched on February 11th, 2015 on board of a Falcon 9 rocket, DSCOVR is in alissajous orbit at the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrangian point. Its mission is to study solar phenomena as well as the climate of Earth.

We received the first pictures of Earth from DSCOVR on July 6, 2015, a little after a hundred days after DSCOVR was launched. In addition to the pic op posted, you can view the dedicated website NASA set up for all pictures taken by DSCOVR. I particularly like this gif of the moon transiting the Earth taken on July 16, 2015.

"Antarctica is actually gaining ice, says NASA"

"Is global warming over? Not quite, scientists say. But new study results show the fallibility of current climate change measuring tools and challenges current theories about the causes of sea level rise."

A new NASA study found that Antarctica has been adding more ice than it's been losing, challenging other research, including that of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that concludes that Earth’s southern continent is losing land ice overall.

In a paper published in the Journal of Glaciology on Friday, researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Maryland in College Park, and the engineering firm Sigma Space Corporation offer a new analysis of satellite data that show a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001 in the Antarctic ice sheet.

That gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.

Climate scientists caution that these findings don’t mean it’s time to start celebrating the end of global warming. More than anything, the paper shows how difficult it is to measure ice height in Antarctica and that better tools are needed...

For now, the study authors say, these findings challenge current explanations for sea level rise, much of which is attributed to melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

"We're kind of running the anchor leg with Pluto to finish the relay"

"It's showtime for Pluto; prepare to be amazed by NASA flyby"

"What NASA's doing with New Horizons is uprecedented in our time and probably something close to the last train to Clarksville, the last picture show, for a very, very long time," says Stern, a planetary scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

It is the last stop in NASA's quest to explore every planet in our solar system, starting with Venus in 1962. And in a cosmic coincidence, the Pluto visit falls on the 50th anniversary of the first-ever flyby of Mars, by Mariner 4.

Yes, we all know Pluto is no longer an official planet, merely a dwarf, but it still enjoyed full planet status when New Horizons rocketed from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 19, 2006. Pluto's demotion came just seven months later, a sore subject still for many.

Never before seen images of Pluto captured by spacecraft

NASA contracted rocket explodes after takeoff

The announcer states, "That main engine's at 108%." Kaboom.

The unmanned cargo rocket was intended to resupply the International Space Station.

"NASA finds mysterious signal... "

"We know that the dark matter explanation is a long shot, but the pay-off would be huge if we're right," Esra Bulbul, leader of the study and a fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told NASA. "We're going to keep testing this interpretation and see where it takes us."

Mysterious X-ray signal intrigues astronomers. Could it be dark matter? http://t.co/l3cDZI1XBi @chandraxray pic.twitter.com/7tNrKkoI0l

— NASA (@NASA) June 24, 2014

"Jack Kinzler, Skylab’s Savior, Dies at 94"

Obituary excerpt...

Mr. Kinzler saved (Skylab) with a parasol.

When Skylab shed its shield, most of the proposed solutions entailed a spacewalk, with all its inherent dangers. To Mr. Kinzler, that was an unattractive prospect: The commander of Skylab’s crew, Charles Conrad Jr., known as Pete, was his next-door neighbor and friend.

What was needed, Mr. Kinzler knew, was a fix that could be done from the inside. He learned that Skylab had an airlock — a narrow passage meant for use as a camera port — near the site of the damage. It might be possible, he thought, to build a kind of flat, collapsible shade tree, which could be extruded through the airlock and, once outside, made to bloom.

He phoned a sporting-goods store and ordered a set of fiberglass fishing rods. The salient thing about them was not that they caught fish, but that they telescoped.

To build his prototype, Mr. Kinzler arranged four rods like the ribs of an immense umbrella, securing one to each side of a piece of parachute silk roughly 24 feet square. Folded, the parasol would just fit into the airlock. Once extruded, its canopy could be snapped open by means of springs.

Normally, Mr. Kinzler said in interviews, the design, building and approval of such novel equipment might take NASA six months. His parasol was ready in six days — six days in which he and his staff of more than 100 lived, worked and slept in the Johnson Space Center.

 

The finished parasol, built from telescoping aluminum tubes and silver-and-orange fabric of nylon, Mylar and aluminum, was stowed aboard the crew’s Apollo spacecraft. At 9 a.m. on May 25, the crew — Commander Conrad, Joseph P. Kerwin and Paul J. Weitz — took off from the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Just before midnight they docked with Skylab, where the interior temperature was approaching 130 degrees Fahrenheit; wearing spacesuits, they could work there for short periods.

On May 26, after ensuring the station was free of hazardous gases, crew members pushed the parasol through the airlock and released the canopy. It did not open fully — it remained partly puckered — but in the end that did not matter.

Over the next few days, Skylab’s inside temperature fell to a companionable 70 degrees. Shedding their suits, the astronauts completed their 28-day mission.

For his work, Mr. Kinzler received the Distinguished Service Medal, NASA’s highest honor.

By the time he saved Skylab, Mr. Kinzler was already an experienced unfurler. In the late 1960s, as the United States raced to put a man on the moon, NASA officials asked him to suggest what that man might do to mark the occasion once he got there.

Plant a flag, Mr. Kinzler said, and leave a plaque.

'Nasa says Mars mystery rock ‘appeared’ from nowhere'

"A mysterious rock which appeared in front of the Opportunity rover is “like nothing we’ve ever seen before”, according to Mars exploration scientists at Nasa."

"Experts said they were “completely confused” by both the origins and makeup of the object, which is currently being investigated by Opportunity’s various measuring instruments."

"Astronomers noticed the new rock had “appeared” without any explanation on an outcrop which had been empty just days earlier. The rover has been stuck photographing the same region of Mars for more than a month due to bad weather, with scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California monitoring the images it sends."

 

"We had driven a metre or two away from here, and I think the idea that somehow we mysteriously flicked it with a wheel is the best explanation," Squyres said. Squyres is the lead Mars Exploration rover scientist.

 

Where do you think this rock came from? Unserious answers welcomed.

"US must beat China back to the moon: Entrepreneur"

Bigelow is applying to the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to amend a 1967 international agreement on the moon so that a system of private property rights can be established there. "When there isn't law and order," he said, "there's chaos."

Bigelow said he believes the right to own what one discovers on the moon is the incentive needed for private enterprise to commit massive amounts of capital and risk lives. "It provides a foundational security to investors," he said.

The big danger here isn't a fear of private enterprise owning and maximizing profitable benefit from the moon," he said. "The big worry is America is asleep and does nothing, while China comes along, lands people on the Moon, and decides, 'We might as well start surveying and laying claim, because who is going to stop us?'"

Does the possibility of China beating America back to the Moon worry him? "A lot. ... Tell me something that they don't have significant interest in," he replied. "Name something."

By CNBC's Jane Wells. (video at the link)