#On par with explaining planetary orbits

[sea-salted-wolverine]

Why have I had to explain the northern lights 4 times today? Specifically to Alaskan about why we can't see this solar storm? Did we not all learn about this in 4th grade?

[sciencespies]

These 9 places on Mars could be the target for SpaceX's first Starship missions

https://sciencespies.com/space/these-9-places-on-mars-could-be-the-target-for-spacexs-first-starship-missions/

These 9 places on Mars could be the target for SpaceX's first Starship missions

SpaceX is scouting for prime real estate to populate Mars, according to a database of NASA spacecraft photography.

The database entries suggest the rocket company, founded by the tech mogul Elon Musk, is looking for relatively flat, warm, and hazard-free places to set down its coming launch vehicle, called Starship.

A scientist at the University of Arizona later confirmed the existence of SpaceX’s landing site-scouting project.

SpaceX is developing Starship – a towering two-stage rocket ship – to land 150 tons and up to 100 people at a time on Mars, with the first missions starting in the mid-2020s.

Each candidate landing site is a place where frozen water may be buried under just a bit of red dirt and thus accessible to robots and people. That ice could, in theory, be mined, melted, and turned into precious supplies such as water, air, and rocket fuel.

The space-history writer Robert Zimmerman first posted about the images on his site, Beyond the Black, after perusing a fresh batch of data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Zimmerman noticed several photos with titles that included the words “Candidate Landing Site for SpaceX Starship”.

“To put it mildly, it is most intriguing to discover that SpaceX is beginning to research a place where it can land Starship on Mars,” Zimmerman wrote, adding that each site was a probable location to find buried ice.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. However, the images are authentic requests from the company made through a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

SpaceX is considering at least 9 landing sites for Starships

The new pictures came from HiRISE, a telescope operated by the University of Arizona that’s mounted on the MRO spacecraft. The telescope’s camera can photograph surface features at a resolution as fine as 1 foot per pixel – three times the resolution that Google Maps provides of Earth and on par with spy satellites.

HiRISE, however, can only take so many sizable images per orbit and beam them tens of millions of miles back to Earth. So scientists must file image requests for locations of interest to them months in advance. 

(NASA/USGS/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) via Google Earth Pro; Business Insider)

Above: An elevation map of Mars showing the nine candidate landing sites SpaceX is considering for its first Martian voyages of Starship.

Though Zimmerman highlighted four Starship landing sites in the HiRISE catalogue, Business Insider found image requests for nine SpaceX-related locations. We plotted them (above) by inputting the data into Google Earth.

All of the Starship image requests were filed by Nathan R. Williams, a planetary geologist at NASA JPL.

Williams has previously requested dozens of images in support of NASA’s coming Mars 2020 rover mission, which will attempt a landing in Jezero crater. He has also asked for dozens of photos to support SpaceX’s now-defunct Red Dragon mission to Mars.

“He was bound by a nondisclosure agreement with SpaceX and could not comment,” Zimmerman said after contacting Williams about the Starship image requests. (Neither Williams nor NASA JPL immediately responded to Business Insider’s request for comment.)

The HiRISE site shows that, on April 29, Williams requested 18 different images of Mars related to Starship. Specifically, he asked for two images each per site – each from a slightly different angle – to build stereo anaglyphs pairs. Such pairs can reveal finer 3D details about a location, including its terrain and landing hazards.

Of the nine locations Williams asked HiRISE to observe, six have published images, two are not yet published, and one has yet to be imaged.

Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist and director of the Planetary Image Research Laboratory, confirmed the project after the publication of this story.

“Under direction from JPL, the HiRISE team has been imaging candidate landing sites for SpaceX,” McEwen told Business Insider in an email. “This effort began in 2017, initially for the Red Dragon lander, and is continuing for their Starship vehicle.”

The landing sites are all relatively flat, warm, boulder-free and presumably icy

Musk has said in recent years that he wants SpaceX to help build a self-sustaining city on Mars by the mid-2050s – partly as a way of “backing up” humanity like a hard drive.

To do that without going bankrupt, though, he needs a lot of Starships and an ability to refuel them on the Red Planet.

The company hopes to make Starship fully reusable – the first such rocket of its kind – to lower launch costs by a factor of 100 or even more than 1,000. Refuelling on Mars is key to making Musk’s scheme work, which is why SpaceX chose methane as its fuel of choice.

By using solar (or perhaps nuclear) energy, Musk says, a process called the Sabatier reaction could turn water and carbon dioxide in the thin Martian atmosphere into methane. That fuel, along with oxygen extracted from the water, could be used to refuel Starships for return flights to Earth as well as provide breathable air and drinking water.

Eight of the nine possible landing sites are located on the border of two major regions called Arcadia Planitia (to the north) and Amazonis Planitia (to the south):

(NASA/USGS/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) via Google Earth Pro; Business Insider)

McEwen said the candidate landing sites “are concentrated at low elevations in the northern middle latitudes, in places where there is evidence for shallow ground ice.”

That strip of Mars is thought to hide massive, rapidly buried glaciers that remain mostly preserved after millions of years.

Some evidence for this is in the shape of nearby craters, which appear to sink after a meteorite impact because they expose ice to Martian air, which is about 1 percent as thick as Earth’s.

Functionally that is a vacuum, causing the now-exposed ice to sublimate away into the air in the same way a block of dry ice does when it warms up.

(NASA/JPL/University of Arizona; Business Insider)

Above: One line of evidence for ice on Mars are impact sites. Ice exposed to the thin martian air sublimates into a gas and collapses soil around the original crater.

SpaceX’s presumed candidate sites are also flat and relatively free of boulders, which are objects that you definitely do not want your spacecraft to land on or crash into.

The sites are also distant from Mars’ super-frigid polar caps, are a bit warmer, see quite a bit of sun (important for gathering solar energy), and are relatively low-laying. Because air sinks and gets denser at lower elevations, this might help Sabatier machines more efficiently suck in carbon dioxide and manufacture methane fuel for Starships.

SpaceX is just beginning to test Starship, though

At this stage, SpaceX has not completed a Starship capable of reaching orbit, let alone landing on Mars. The company has also not explained how it plans to mine ice, build permanent habitats that recycle resources, or even keep people alive during the journey to and from Mars.

But SpaceX has a solid start: It has built and thoroughly tested new methane-burning Raptor engines. SpaceX also strapped one such engine to an early prototype, called Starhopper, and soared it more than 490 feet, or 150 meters, into the air above South Texas on July 25.

Workers are now building two bigger, orbit-capable prototypes: Starship Mark 1 in Boca Chica, Texas, and Starship Mark 2 in Cocoa, Florida. Musk tweeted on Friday that the company would attempt to launch them about 12.4 miles into the air in October and then around Earth “shortly thereafter.”

If all goes according to the CEO’s “aspirational” timeline, the rocket company could be launching passengers around the moon and missions to Mars in the mid-2020s.

Musk also plans to update the world on SpaceX’s latest design for Starship and plans for the launch system on September 28. It’s possible he may also say more about where and why, exactly, the company plans to land its first interplanetary Starship missions.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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#Space

[oceanembraced]

NEPTUNIAN STAR SEED ( AND THE FATED RELATIONSHIP TOWARDS URANUS) META: #1

getting around to these a million years late but.

first of all;      they’re all lesbians harold. now, getting the meme out of the way, time for the actual meta.

 ◤ ╰ ♆ ╮                   the reason why uranus neptune are often grouped as a pair rather than an individual ( for example, in the musicals, all senshi have a solo song par uranus and neptune, who instead have numerous duets together; beautiful warriors, uranus and neptune. holy soldiers of orleans, uranus and neptune. harsh st. cry. destined couple & eye of the storm. )        is because they have twin star seeds.                         uranus and neptune, in astrological terms,   are considered TWIN planets.  

        ((   in that, both are ice giants, of almost the same size, having formed in a way that modern day science cannot explain.   ( aka. at the distance away from the sun, they shouldn’t of had the gravitational mass to create ice giants, and thus would have most likely formed closer to the sun ( i.e around the point jupiter is and eventually migrated into a larger orbit around the sun. )  but,   the makeup of both planets is effectively the same, having been created at the same time, thus making them ‘twin planets.’       none of the other planets were created at the same time, or with the same features ; jupiter being the oldest planet, followed by saturn and the rest of the outer planets, with the inners forming later ;; ))

               two planets created at the same time, from the same materials, meant that their sailor crystals were in fact one of the same. two parts, that whilst not incomplete by themselves, created something greater than a whole when together. THUS, because of this, the cycle of rebirth of the seeds must also go in pair.    the uranian star seed cannot be reborn without the neptunian star seed, and vice versa. if one holder was to die prematurely than the crystal would be held in the galaxy cauldron till it pair returned, so that they could be reborn together.   the two seeds would always be born in the same solar system ( only since the fall of the silver millennium, on the same planet) and in the same time period. Whilst the seeds have actually be born as twins before, the two are often born into hosts in the same year with a few months apart. ( i.e haruka was born on january 27th of one year, whilst michiru born roughly a month later on march 6th. )   the two are in a constant cycle ; being able to be reborn as soon as both have returned to the cauldron,      thus,    the two have been born infinite times even if there was no danger that called for the planetary guardians.

  the nature BETWEEN the star seeds is heavily linked by strings of fate – it will always be the thickest, brightest link between the two holders regardless of what it is. this connection is not always      romantic, nor is it always positive, but the two will always have the most profound effect on each others life in some shape or form.

          the standard relation is partners,    as previously mentioned,    when they come together they work better – as is their elements. the sea and wind are cohesive so that their attacks become far more effective, and thus they often work together, than apart.    the romantic relationship between haruka and michiru is because of their own feelings and not because of the influence of uranus and neptune –              they are linked together by fate, yes,  and their star seeds do pull them together, so that they will always find each other,   but their romance is because of haruka and michiru.    had they not have been uranus and neptune, perhaps they never would have met,   but their star seeds simply draw them together --  

              or as eternal eternity puts it ;

                        We repeat thousands of eternities                         In the boundless, lonely darkness                               I’ve been looking for you                                          All my life                    As I’ve been led by the force of attraction                          Like untangling our red threads

                the two twin star seeds mean that uranus and neptune, in every life, are linked to each other and will find each other, as they repeat eternally in their cycle of being reborn together.   whether the two find love,       or any other emotion,        is down to how the hosts of the star seeds interact in that life and what forces shape them.   in that,  they possess their own free will in how their story plays out, but they can never not meet.    ( unless one of them dies, which has happened, and then that era must wait for the second to die, to try again in another life. )

                  thus,      their romantic relation perhaps does deviate from their mission, but is a common side effect due to how their star seeds and their planetary protectors came to be.      in part, it makes them stronger.     swearing off of each other in order to protect the princess would in fact make them worse as protectors, without each other to complement flaws and strength of the others.       

 tl;dr :         uranus and neptune are twin planets,  and thus their star seeds are twinned in their rebirth cycle.   the planetary hosts are always reborn in pairs in the same time period, and are fated to interact in someway.    often,   with the intensity of the bond between the two, and the intensity of what they have to deal with, this takes the form of a romantic relationship -- which does not hinder, but enhance their capabilities. thus, making them swear off romance a dumb idea. they are a pair, and forever fated to be one in every life, regardless what shape that may take.

            whilst both are incredible on their own, they are far stronger together, and thus fated to be together, always,  just not always as romantically involved but gosh darnit harold, let them be lesbians.   ◢

[makingscipub]

Climate change metaphors: Crimes, detectives and fingerprints

For quite a few years I have written about metaphors in climate change, such as the metaphors of the greenhouse and the footprint. There is one metaphor I overlooked, and that is the one of the ‘fingerprint’. While the carbon footprint metaphor was used in order to get people to act on climate change, making them aware of how much greenhouse gases they emit and to take responsibility for their emissions, the fingerprint metaphor seems to have been used to talk about the evidence that is accumulating for the fact that greenhouse gases are ‘responsible’ for anthropogenic climate change in the first place.

I was reminded of this when seeing two recent climate change opinion pieces discussed on twitter. One was by Gavin Schmidt, entitled “How scientists cracked the climate change case”, published in the New York Times on 24 October. The article has a wonderful fingerprints illustration/animation, nicely visualising the fingerprint metaphor. The other article was by Andrew Dressler and Daniel Cohan, entitled “We’re scientists. We know the climate’s changing. And we know why”, for the Houston Chronicle published on 22 October. Both articles use the metaphor of the ‘fingerprint’ and of climate scientists as detectives.

This set my metaphor detective whiskers twitching and I rummaged around a bit on both Scopus, for scientific articles on climate change or global warming using the fingerprint metaphor and on Nexis, for media articles doing the same. I’ll first tell you what I found, before coming back to a closer look at the two articles mentioned above.

Tracking the fingerprint metaphor in science and the media

Scientific articles (as recorded in Scopus) seem to have started using the fingerprint metaphor in the early 1990s, that is, around the same time that I found the first fingerprints of the fingerprint metaphor in the media.

In the scientific articles, the word ‘fingerprint’ is sometimes used like an ordinary metaphor at other times like a scientific jargon term, as the following randomly selected headlines show: “Observed and simulated fingerprints of multidecadal climate variability and their contributions to periods of global SST stagnation”, “A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems”, “Fingerprints of global warming on wild animals and plants”, “Record temperature streak bears anthropogenic fingerprint“, “Correlation methods in fingerprint detection studies”, etc….

On Nexis, the first media article using the fingerprint metaphor was published in 1989. The journalist used it in a negative way in a comment on the early work by Bill McKibben, his book The Death of Nature. It appeared in Newsweek and was entitled “The Death of an Illusion” (23 October 1989). The author of the review, Geoffrey Cowley, writes: “When dealing with the causes and consequences of the greenhouse effect, McKibben displays a firm grasp of modern planetary science.  Yet his larger theme — that human life is different from the rest of life, and that nature ceases to exist once it bears our fingerprints — reflects a willful ignorance of the same science.”

Cowley argues that nature did not end “when cars and factories started raising the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  It ended 2 billion years ago, when photosynthesizing bacteria started polluting the planet with oxygen.”

Here ‘fingerprint’ is still used very loosely to talk about the imprint left by humans on nature.

A couple of years later, in 1991, the metaphor is used in its current form in an article published in The New York Times by William K. Stevens, entitled “Global warming: Search for the signs” (29 January). He points out: “[Climate scientists] are struggling to answer a crucial question: how can a greenhouse warming of the climate be recognized and distinguished from natural warming? They are focusing their detective efforts on various subtle changes that a greenhouse warming would be expected to induce. These signs are known collectively as the greenhouse ‘fingerprint.’”

The article lists a number of ‘fingerprints’ which distinguish greenhouse warming from natural fluctuations in the climate system, such as global temperature patterns, sea surface temperatures, water vapor in the atmosphere, changes in seasonality, rainfall patterns and so on.

After that the use of that metaphor climbed steadily and is now quite ubiquitous (searching for ‘climate change’ and ‘fingerprint’ on Google gives you 3,940,000 results).

The metaphor can, of course, still be used in articles critical of climate science and of climate scientists who are doing the detective work, as for example in this article published in The American Spectator entitled “The Great Hoax”, published at the time of ‘climategate’ on 16 December 2009 (a framing that is still very much with us today). It says under the section heading: “Man-Caused Global Warming Proved False”:

“Even the UN’s own climate models project that if man’s greenhouse gas emissions were causing global warming, there would be a particular pattern of temperature distribution in the atmosphere, which scientists call ‘the fingerprint.’ Temperatures in the troposphere portion of the atmosphere above the tropics would increase with altitude, producing a ‘hotspot’ near the top of the troposphere, about 6 miles above the earth’s surface. Above that, in the stratosphere, there would be cooling. But higher quality temperature data from weather balloons and satellites now show just the opposite: no increasing warming with altitude in the tropical troposphere, but rather a slight cooling, with no hotspot, no fingerprint. Game over. QED.”

The flexible use of a ubiquitous metaphor

So, what about the two articles by Schmidt and Dressler/Cohan, how do they use the metaphor of the fingerprint. At this point I need to point out that this metaphor is actually a metaphor cluster using the whole semantic field of detectives following tracks, finding fingerprints, finding suspects, culprits or criminal, solving a crime and so on. In this context, climate scientists are framed as detectives and indicators for anthropogenic climate change as fingerprints left behind by various suspects, etc.

Schmidt starts his article by pointing to the planet as “the biggest crime science”, indeed he points out that the “biggest crime scene on the planet is the planet”. He talks about the drivers of recent climate trends and how to find out about them: “It comes down to the same kind of detective work that typifies a crime scene investigation, only here we are dealing with a case that encompasses the whole world.” The question is how to find the suspects for this planetary crime: “Scientists have no shortage of suspects for the causes of climate change.” He lists some and says: “Each of these events left a unique fingerprint of change on the climate system […]. To track down the culprit of any one specific climate change involves piecing together the contemporaneous fingerprints and tracking them back to the plausible causes.”

He notes that there “some new suspects too”, mainly linked to human activity. The climatic changes brought about can now be studied with “a new array of tools’ developed by climate scientists working “like forensic detectives”. Using these tools it has become clear that “the current warmth is impossible to explain without human contributions. It is on a par with the likelihood that a DNA match at a crime scene is purely coincidental.” He concludes by saying quite categorically: “The forensics have spoken, and we are to blame.”

Now to the Dressler/Cohan article. They try to explain why scientists are so confident in their assessment that human activities are to blame for climate change and say: “To understand why we are so confident, it’s useful to think about climate change as a whodunit. Climate does not change by itself, so scientists are detectives trying to solve the mystery of what has been warming the Earth for the past century.”

And: “the first thing that scientists do is study these mechanisms to see if they could be the culprit.” They go through various non-human mechanisms that could be the culprits, like the sun and points out: “The Sun, however, has an airtight alibi — we have direct measurements of the output of the Sun from satellites, and we observe that the Sun has not gotten any brighter. One suspect down.” What about the earth’s orbit? “Earth’s orbit changes too slowly and is now in a phase that should be slowly cooling temperatures. Another suspect down.” The same goes for volcanoes. “There is an entire list of suspects that scientists have looked at, and they have not identified a single viable one. With one exception — greenhouse gases.” They then describe greenhouse gases as the world’s dumbest criminal:

“Police shows sometimes feature the “world’s dumbest criminal” — who doesn’t wear gloves, leaves fingerprints all over the house, drops his wallet at the crime scene, is caught on videotape exiting the crime scene, brags to his friends that he committed the crime — and when he is finally arrested has evidence of the crime in his pockets.

Carbon dioxide is like the world’s dumbest criminal — it leaves evidence all over the place that it’s guilty. He concludes by saying “In this whodunit, you would have no choice but to arrest carbon dioxide for warming the planet.”

Both Schmidt and Dressler/Cohan use the detective/fingerprint metaphor but, as we have seen, in very different ways! For example Schmidt uses the word ‘fingerprint’ three times, while Dressler/Cohan use it only one time. Schmidt uses the word ‘forensic’ twice, but Dressler/Cohan don’t use it at all. Dressler/Cohan use the words ‘criminal’ and ‘police’, words that are not used by Schmidt, both articles talk about ‘crime’ etc.

Conclusion

The metaphor cluster associated with the word ‘fingerprint’ has a long tradition. It emerged as soon as climate science became a matter of public debate, at the end of the 1980s. It has become ubiquitous and can be used flexibly and creatively. At a time when evidence and expertise are under threat, it’s a useful and handy metaphor for evidence gathering and for following that evidence to the most logical conclusion.

So, of course, I have to end with a quote from Sherlock Holmes: “You will not apply my precept,” he said, shaking his head. “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? We know that he did not come through the door, the window, or the chimney. We also know that he could not have been concealed in the room, as there is no concealment possible. When, then, did he come?” Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four, ch. 6 (1890)

      The post Climate change metaphors: Crimes, detectives and fingerprints appeared first on Making Science Public.

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