Chekt and TYB
The last Democrat RFK Jr. | The Roseanne Barr Podcast #60
https://rumble.com/v5a6wtg-the-last-democrat-rfk-jr.-the-roseanne-barr-podcast-60.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li1TvqdjBCw
'World's oldest calendar' discovered carved into ancient monument
August 8, 2024
A devastating ancient comet strike in Turkey appears to be etched into what may be the world's oldest lunisolar calendar, assuming the event happened in the first place.
Archaeologists recently reinterpreted markings on a stone pillar at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, the site of one of the world's oldest ancient farming communities.
The Mesopotamian site is roughly 12,000 years old, dating to the beginning of the Holocene that marks the most recent epoch of Earth since the glaciers retreated.
"Ancient people may have created these carvings at Göbekli Tepe to record the date a swarm of comet fragments hit Earth nearly 13,000 years ago — or 10,850 BCE," the University of Edinburgh in Scotland said Tuesday (Aug. 6) in a statement.
The research is led by the university's Martin Sweatman, who has published before on the infamous comet event that is said to have kickstarted agriculture, among other knock-on effects on ancient Earth.
But not everyone agrees the comet strike happened.
Sweatman's research includes chemical engineering and statistical mechanics as well as studies in archaeoastronomy.
His team's work made headlines in 2021 when they suggested a comet slammed into our planet 13,000 years ago based on finding a lot of platinum in sites of North America and Greenland.
(Platinum can be formed in areas of high temperatures, including in the case of meteor strikes.)
The theory of the comet strike event, called the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, dates back to a 2007 peer-reviewed paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences led by nuclear physicist Richard Firestone, according to the New York Times Magazine.
The theory remains debated by specialists to this day, some of whom say (for example) that the findings could account for a rapidly cooling climate that was not necessarily sparked by a comet fall.
Sweatman's 2021 paper said these counterarguments were from a "small cohort of researchers" whose claims are "poorly constructed."
Yet the debate is in fact fairly wide-ranging and mainstream, according to a 2018 report in Science News, as experts continue to examine aspects such as why there is no suspect crater linked to the Younger Dryas impact, and what remnants the comet may have left behind.
Assuming the comet impact was true, Sweatman's group says they re-examined a set of V-shaped symbols carved across several pillars at Göbekli Tepe.
Their work suggests that if each V was a single day, the community accurately marked the 365-day solar calendar.
Adding credence to this theory is a special entry for the summer solstice, "represented by a V worn around the neck of a bird-like beast thought to represent the summer solstice constellation at the time," the researchers wrote in the University of Edinburgh release.
"Other statues nearby, possibly representing deities, have been found with similar V-markings at their necks."
Additionally, two enclosures (labeled C and D in the study) are made up of 11 T-shaped pillars.
When interpreted alongside other archaeological sites in the region that gave special significance to the number 11, the study team says this is evidence that the inhabitants of Göbekli Tepe were also tracking the 11 full phases of the moon in a 365-day solar year.
As for the comet strike, the team says the evidence for that lies on what they call Pillar 18, located in Enclosure D.
The pillar is a person-like or anthropomorphic shape that has a horizontal "head" and a vertical "body", according to the peer-reviewed study in Time and Mind.
Also visible on the pillar is a belt buckle and fox-pelt loincloth that is drawn in the possible shape of a comet, the researchers say.
The possible comet shape on Pillar 18 may be reminiscent to that of the Nebra sky-disk, a second millennium BCE artifact unearthed in modern-day Germany, the study team argues.
The disk shows the moon, sky, a grouping of stars that could be interpreted as the Pleiades and (perhaps most contentiously) a comet.
The comet, if it is indeed on the disc, is represented by a "long, curved shape incised with parallel lines," the Göbekli Tepe team writes.
But the comet hypothesis is not fully agreed upon by researchers of Nebra; others have suggested it depicts a mythological boat or a rainbow, Astronomy Magazine wrote in 2021.
Or the shape may be an aurora borealis, according to a short report in Physics Today that same year.
https://www.space.com/comet-strike-13000-years-ago-world-oldest-solar-calendar-gobekli-tepe-turkey
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-plasma-persistent-radio-emissions-fast.html
Big Bubble of Plasma in Space Shoots Fast Radio Burst Toward Earth
August 8, 2024
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are one of the most recent open mysteries of modern astrophysics.
Within a few milliseconds, these powerful events release an immense amount of energy, among the highest observable in cosmic phenomena.
FRBs were discovered just over ten years ago and mostly arise from extragalactic sources.
Their origin, however, is still uncertain and there are huge ongoing efforts by the astrophysics community around the world to understand the physical processes behind them.
In very few cases, the rapid flash that characterizes FRBs coincides with a persistent emission, which is also observed in the radio band.
A new study led by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) has recorded the weakest persistent radio emission ever detected for an FRB so far.
The subject of the study is FRB20201124A, a fast radio burst discovered in 2020, whose source is located about 1.3 billion light-years away from us.
Along with INAF researchers, the collaboration involves the Universities of Bologna, Trieste and Calabria, in Italy, and the international participation of research institutes and universities in China, the United States, Spain and Germany.
The observations were performed with the most sensitive radio telescope in the world, the Very Large Array (VLA) in the United States.
The data enabled scientists to verify the theoretical prediction that a plasma bubble is at the origin of the persistent radio emission of fast radio bursts.
The results are published today in the journal Nature.
"We were able to demonstrate through observations that the persistent emission observed along with some fast radio bursts behaves as expected from the nebular emission model, i.e. a 'bubble' of ionized gas that surrounds the central engine," explains Gabriele Bruni, INAF researcher in Rome and lead author of the new paper.
"In particular, through radio observations of one of the bursts that is nearest to us, we were able to measure the weak persistent emission coming from the same location as the FRB, extending the radio flux range explored so far for these objects by two orders of magnitude."
This research also helps narrow down the nature of the engine powering these mysterious radio flashes.
According to the new data, the phenomenon is based on a magnetar (a strongly magnetized neutron star) or a high-accretion X-ray binary, i.e. a binary system consisting of a neutron star or black hole, accreting material from a companion star at very intense rates.
In fact, winds produced by the magnetar or the X-ray binary would be able to "blow" the plasma bubble giving rise to the persistent radio emission.
There is therefore a direct physical relationship between the engine of FRBs and the bubble, which is located in its immediate vicinity.
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The motivation for this observing campaign came from another work led by Luigi Piro of INAF, who is also a co-author of the new paper.
In their earlier work, the researchers had identified the persistent emission in this FRB's host galaxy, but they had not yet measured the position with sufficient precision to associate the two phenomena.
"In this new work, we conducted a campaign at higher spatial resolution with the VLA, along with observations in different bands with the NOEMA interferometer and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GranTeCan), which allowed us to reconstruct the general picture of the galaxy and discover the presence of a compact radio source—the FRB plasma bubble—immersed in the star-forming region," adds Piro.
"In the meantime, the theoretical model on the nebula had also been published, allowing us to test its validity and, finally, to confirm the model itself."
Most of the work focused on excluding that the persistent radio emission comes from a star-forming region, and is therefore not physically linked to the FRB source.
For this purpose, the NOEMA observations in the millimeter band measured the amount of dust, which is a tracer of "obscured" star-forming regions, whereas GranTeCan optical observations measured emission from ionized hydrogen, which is also a tracer of the star formation rate.
"Optical observations were an important element to study the FRB region at a spatial resolution similar to that of radio observations," notes co-author Eliana Palazzi from INAF in Bologna.
"Mapping hydrogen emission at such a great level of detail allowed us to derive the local star formation rate, which we found to be too low to justify continuous radio emission."
Most FRBs do not exhibit persistent emissions.
Until now, this type of emission had only been associated with two FRBs—both, however, with such a low brightness that did not allow to verify the proposed model.
FRB20201124A, instead, is located at a large but not excessive distance, which made it possible to measure the persistent emission despite its low brightness.
Understanding the nature of the persistent emissions allows researchers to add a piece to the puzzle about the nature of these mysterious cosmic sources.
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Commerce Department preparing to turn on initial version of space traffic coordination service
August 8, 2024
The Department of Commerce remains on schedule to begin the initial version of its space traffic coordination service by the end of September while it works to add capabilities to it.
In an Aug. 6 presentation at the Small Satellite Conference here, Christine Joseph, policy advisor in the Office of Space Commerce, said phase 1.0 of the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, will be turned on in September, maintaining a schedule that the office outlined more than a year ago.
That initial version of TraCSS will be open to a limited number of beta testers, who will use it through the existing Space-Track.org system operated by the U.S. Space Force.
Those beta users will get conjunction data messages, or CDMs, generated by TraCSS every four hours through Space-Track. That screening is twice as frequent as currently provided by Space-Track.
“The plan for phase 1.0 is that we have that backbone, that operating infrastructure, set up,” she said. “Of the course of the next year for phase 1, we’ll be adding in more capabilities.”
Those capabilities, added though a series of quarterly updates, range from bug fixes to the additional of space situational awareness data from commercial providers to supplement what TraCSS receives from the Defense Department and ephemerides from operators of satellites. The service will also bring on additional beta users during those upgrades.
That approach, she said, is also intended to make sure what TraCSS offers meets the needs of users.
“One of the things we’re trying to do with TraCSS is to take a phased, agile development approach: starting very small, building incrementally in capabilities, getting feedback from users along the way and making adjustments.”
By phase 1.4, scheduled for about a year after the rollout of phase 1, TraCSS will have its own interface to replace Space-Track; the office released a request for proposals for that “presentation layer” for TraCSS Aug. 1.
Joseph said the Office of Space Commerce is working with the Defense Department on coordinating the transition of civil space traffic coordination services. “We’re coordinating very closely with the Department of Defense both on best practices and lessons learned,” she said, with multiple technical and policy working groups meeting weekly “to minimize any disruptions to spaceflight safety services.”
That means that the current Space-Track service will continue for the foreseeable future.
“Space-Track.org is not going away this year.
Please do keep signing up for Space-Track.org,” she said.
https://spacenews.com/commerce-department-preparing-to-turn-on-initial-version-of-space-traffic-coordination-service/
Euclid Galaxy Zoo – help us classify the shapes of galaxies
01/08/2024
In its mission to map out the Universe, Euclid will image hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies.
In November 2023 and May 2024, the world got its first glimpse at the quality of Euclid’s images, which included a variety of sources, from nearby nebulas to distant clusters of galaxies.
In the background of each of these images are hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies.
For the next six years, the spacecraft is expected to send around 100 GB of data back to Earth every day.
That’s a lot of data, and labelling that through human effort alone is incredibly difficult.
That’s why ESA and Euclid consortium scientists have partnered with Galaxy Zoo.
This is a citizen science project on the Zooniverse platform, where members of the public can help classify the shapes of galaxies.
Euclid will release its first catalogues of data to the scientific community starting in 2025, but in the meantime any volunteer on the Galaxy Zoo project can have a glimpse at previously unseen images from the telescope.
The first set of data, which contains tens of thousands of galaxies selected from more than 800 000 images, has been made available on the platform, and is waiting for you to help classify them.
If you partake in the project, you could be the first to lay eyes on Euclid's latest images.
Not only that, you could also be the first human ever to see the galaxy in the image.
The Galaxy Zoo project was first launched in 2007, and asked members of the public to help classify the shapes of a million galaxies from images taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In the past 17 years, Galaxy Zoo has remained operational, with more than 400 000 people classifying the shapes of galaxies from other projects and telescopes, including the the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.
These classifications are not only useful for their immediate scientific potential, but also as a training set for Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms.
Without being taught what to look for by humans, AI algorithms struggle to classify galaxies. But together, humans and AI can accurately classify limitless numbers of galaxies.
At Zooniverse, the team has developed an AI algorithm called ZooBot, which will sift through the Euclid images first and label the ‘easier ones’ of which a lot of examples already exist in previous galaxy surveys.
When ZooBot is not confident on the classification of a galaxy, perhaps due to complex or faint structures, it will show it to users on Galaxy Zoo to get their human classifications, which will then help ZooBot to learn more.
On the platform, volunteers will be presented with images of galaxies and will then be asked several questions, such as ‘Is the galaxy round?’, or ‘Are there signs of spiral arms?’.
After being trained on these human classifications, ZooBot will be integrated in the Euclid catalogues to provide detailed classifications for hundreds of millions of galaxies, making it the largest scientific catalogue to date, and enabling groundbreaking new science.
This project makes use of the ESA Datalabs digital platform to generate a large number of cutouts of galaxies imaged by Euclid.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid/Euclid_Galaxy_Zoo_help_us_classify_the_shapes_of_galaxies
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/09/nasa_boeing_sls/
Report slams Boeing and NASA over shoddy quality that's delayed SLS blastoff
Fri 9 Aug 2024
Boeing and NASA have come in for scathing criticism from federal investigators, who examined the next generation of Space Launch System rockets.
A report from NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG), released Thursday, considered progress of Space Launch System (SLS) version 1B – the rocket hoped to lift off in 2028 and carry the equipment needed to establish a base on the Moon. A key part of the craft is a new booster section, dubbed the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS), which will boost the cargo capacity of the SLS by 40 percent.
If Boeing can build it.
After a two-year study of NASA's assembly facility in New Orleans, the inspectors found Boeing staff made numerous errors – including substandard welding on oxygen tanks, and metal and Teflon shavings left inside the liquid hydrogen tank.
Those messes delayed the program by seven months.
The OIG found a low level of skill among production workers.
Low staff retention was another issue, attributed to two factors: pay that's lower than industry standards, and the New Orleans location of the facility – which made it hard to attract talented workers.
Boeing received 71 Corrective Action Requests over the two years – a much higher figure than is normal according to the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA).
Many of the errors Boeing made were the same kind of quality control fails that have hurt its commercial airplane manufacturing operations: self-certifying shoddy work, not tracking jobs so that repairs can be checked, and "unacceptable environmental conditions."
"We found that Boeing's quality management system does not meet industry standards in core stage production," the report states.
"Given Boeing's quality management and its related workforce challenges, we are concerned these factors could potentially impact the safety of the SLS and Orion spacecraft including its crew and cargo."
This is a high-stakes program. The first three Block 1 SLS systems will put US crews on the Moon for the first time in half a century and, if all goes well, enable creation of a base on our sole natural satellite.
NASA's not exactly blameless in all this
If the program misses its schedule, Boeing won't be the only one wearing blame.
The report notes that NASA has changed made decisions that delayed the program and helped it to sail beyond initial budgets.
The report notes that work began on Block 1B in 2014, when it was expected to be the vehicle for the second mission in the Artemis program.
But NASA decided to switch Block 1B to the fourth mission – more than doubling the cost of its contract with Boeing.
Currently the estimated costs for the Block 1B build from NASA are around $5 billion, but according to the inspectors this will rise to around $5.7 billion because of cost overruns and planned changes to the program.
Similarly, the development costs of the EUS were forecast at $962 million, but have since risen to $2.8 billion by 2028.
A large part of that change is attributable to the aerospace agency shifting funding to cover cost overruns in the Artemis I development process.
The report also criticizes management of the project and its various problems.
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"Without a formal cost and schedule baseline at critical milestones, the Agency was limited in its ability to assess adherence to budgets and timelines, and Congress and other stakeholders lacked visibility into the Block 1B's increasing costs and schedule delays," it reads.
The OIG suggests four ways to improve matters:
Establish a training program for Boeing contractors to ensure quality control is up to standard;
Implement financial penalties for Boeing if it fails to meet quality standards;
Draw up a detailed timeline for the development of EUS and ensure it is followed;
Work with the Defense Contract Management Agency to ensure compliance.
NASA agreed with three of those points, but is unwilling to charge Boeing if the contractor fails to meet quality standards.
"NASA non-concurs. NASA interprets this recommendation to be directing NASA to institute penalties outside the bounds of the contract," the agency argued.
"Instituting financial penalties outside the bounds of the contract subverts the control process of the contract."
Maybe someone at NASA should ask Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams – the two Boeing Starliner test pilots who might be stuck in space until next year – how they feel about that.
A new hope?
The report comes at an unfortunate time for Boeing's new CEO Kelly Ortberg, who started work on Thursday. Ortberg, a qualified mechanical engineer who has spent most of his life in aerospace, was lured out of retirement at 64 to fix Boeing's corporate problems.
His first move was to return Boeing's corporate headquarters to Seattle and spend his first day on the production floor speaking with staff.
"Restoring trust starts with meeting our commitments – whether that's building high quality, safe commercial aircraft, delivering on defense and space products that allow our customers to meet their mission, or servicing our products to keep our customers running 24/7," he is quoted as saying in a statement.
"It also means meeting our commitments to each other and working collaboratively across Boeing to meet our goals.
People's lives depend on what we do every day, and we must keep that top of mind with every decision we make."
The CEO is apparently quite popular at Boeing, as his management style elevates engineering.
It's clear Boeing has a serious quality problem, and the OIG report backs that up. Ortberg has a lot to clean up – not least those metal shavings in fuel tanks.
Boeing declined to comment on the report, referring The Register to NASA's statement.
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Gaia spots possible moons around hundreds of asteroids
08/08/2024
ESA’s star-surveying Gaia mission has again proven to be a formidable asteroid explorer, spotting potential moons around more than 350 asteroids not known to have a companion.
Previously, Gaia had explored asteroids known to have moons — so-called ‘binary asteroids’ — and confirmed that the telltale signs of these tiny moons show up in the telescope’s ultra-accurate astrometric data.
But this new finding proves that Gaia can conduct ‘blind’ searches to discover completely new candidates, too.
“Binary asteroids are difficult to find as they are mostly so small and far away from us,” says Luana Liberato of Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, France, lead author of the new study.
“Despite us expecting just under one-sixth of asteroids to have a companion, so far we have only found 500 of the million known asteroids to be in binary systems.
But this discovery shows that there are many asteroid moons out there just waiting to be found.”
If confirmed, this new finding adds 352 more binary candidates to the tally, nearly doubling the known number of asteroids with moons.
Asteroids are fascinating objects, and hold unique insights into the formation and evolution of the Solar System.
Binaries are even more exciting, enabling us to study how different bodies form, collide and interact in space.
Thanks to its unique all-sky scanning capabilities, Gaia has made a number of important asteroid discoveries since its launch in 2013.
In its data release 3, Gaia precisely pinpointed the positions and motions of 150 000+ asteroids — so precisely that scientists could dig deeper and hunt for asteroids displaying the characteristic ‘wobble’ caused by the tug of an orbiting companion (the same mechanism as displayed here for a binary star).
Gaia also gathered data on asteroid chemistry, compiling the largest ever collection of asteroid ‘reflectance spectra’ (light curves that reveal an object’s colour and composition).
The 150 000+ orbits determined in Gaia’s data release 3 were refined and made 20 times more precise as part of the mission’s Focused Product Release last year.
Even more asteroid orbits are anticipated as part of Gaia’s forthcoming data release 4 (expected not before mid-2026).
“Gaia has proven to be an outstanding asteroid explorer, and is hard at work revealing the secrets of the cosmos both within and beyond the Solar System,” says Timo Prusti, Project Scientist for Gaia at ESA.
“This finding highlights how each Gaia data release is a major step up in data quality, and demonstrates the amazing new science made possible by the mission.”
ESA will further explore binary asteroids via the forthcoming Hera mission, due to launch later this year.
Hera will follow up on NASA’s DART mission — which collided with Dimorphos, a moonlet orbiting the asteroid Didymos, in 2022 as an asteroid deflection test — to produce a post-impact survey of Dimorphos.
It will be the first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system.
Gaia helped astronomers view the shadow cast by Didymos as it passed in front of more distant stars in 2022, an observing technique known as stellar occultation.
The feasibility of this technique has been drastically improved by Gaia’s asteroid orbits and ultra-precise star maps in recent years, proving the mission’s immense value for Solar System exploration.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia/Gaia_spots_possible_moons_around_hundreds_of_asteroids
https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202349122