TYB
Happy Constitution Day
September 17, 2024
We the People
Constitution Day commemorates the formation and signing of the U.S. Constitution by thirty-nine brave men on September 17, 1787, recognizing all who are born in the U.S.
or by naturalization, have become citizens.
On September 17, 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention met for the last time to sign the document they had created. We encourage all Americans to observe this important day in our nation's history by attending local events in your area. Celebrate Constitution Day through activities, learning, parades and demonstrations of our Love for the United State of America and the Blessings of Freedom Our Founding Fathers secured for us.
https://www.constitutionday.com/
Hundreds of Hezbollah Members Wounded When Pagers Explode
17 Sep 2024
Hundreds of alleged members of the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror organization were wounded on Tuesday when their pagers, which apparently had been hacked, exploded simultaneously in Beirut and elsewhere in Lebanon.
Reuters reported:
Hundreds of members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, including fighters and medics, were seriously wounded on Tuesday when the pagers they use to communicate exploded, a security source told Reuters.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.
A Reuters journalist saw ambulances rushing through the southern suburbs of the capital Beirut amid widespread panic.
Residents said explosions were taking place even 30 minutes after the initial blasts.
The Times of Israel posted social media clips showing the moments of detonation (content warning).
The explosions of the pagers appeared to injure the individuals wearing the pagers, but not necessarily the other people nearby.
The astonishing attack occurred hours after Israel declared that the safe return of residents to its northern cities was one of four fundamental goals of the war.
That, in turn, implied that Israel was preparing to go to war in Lebanon.
In addition to wounding or killing Hezbollah fighters, the attack may also disrupt the organization’s communications by forcing it to ditch the pagers and use other systems that are less efficient or even more susceptible to hacking.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/09/17/graphic-content-warning-hundreds-of-hezbollah-members-wounded-when-pagers-explode/
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
September 17, 2024
Melotte 15 in the Heart Nebula
Cosmic clouds form fantastic shapes in the central regions of emission nebula IC 1805. The clouds are sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from massive hot stars in the nebula's newborn star cluster, Melotte 15. About 1.5 million years young, the cluster stars are scattered in this colorful skyscape, along with dark dust clouds in silhouette against glowing atomic gas. A composite of narrowband and broadband telescopic images, the view spans about 15 light-years and includes emission from ionized hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen atoms mapped to green, red, and blue hues in the popular Hubble Palette. Wider field images reveal that IC 1805's simpler, overall outline suggests its popular name - the Heart Nebula. IC 1805 is located about 7,500 light years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Chinese National Charged for Multi-Year “Spear-Phishing” Campaign
Updated September 16, 2024
Song Wu, a Chinese national, has been indicted on charges for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft arising from his efforts to fraudulently obtain computer software and source code created by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (“NASA”), research universities, and private companies.
“Efforts to obtain our nation’s valuable research software pose a grave threat to our national security,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan.
“However, this indictment demonstrates that borders are not barriers to prosecuting bad actors who threaten our national security.”
“Once again, the FBI and our partners have demonstrated that cyber criminals around the world who are seeking to steal our companies’ most sensitive and valuable information can and will be exposed and held accountable,” said Keri Farley, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta.
“As this indictment shows, the FBI is committed to pursuing the arrest and prosecution of anyone who engages in illegal and deceptive practices to steal protected information.”
According to U.S. Attorney Buchanan, the indictment, and other information presented in court:
Song allegedly engaged in a multi-year “spear phishing” email campaign in which he created email accounts to impersonate U.S.-based researchers and engineers and then used those imposter accounts to obtain specialized restricted or proprietary software used for aerospace engineering and computational fluid dynamics.
This specialized software could be used for industrial and military applications, such as development of advanced tactical missiles and aerodynamic design and assessment of weapons.
In executing the scheme, Song allegedly sent spear phishing emails to individuals employed in positions with the United States government, including NASA, the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Army, and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Song also sent spear phishing emails to individuals employed in positions with major research universities in Georgia, Michigan, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio, and with private sector companies that work in the aerospace field.
Song’s spear phishing emails appeared to the targeted victims as having been sent by a colleague, associate, friend, or other person in the research or engineering community.
His emails requested that the targeted victim send or make available source code or software to which Song believed the targeted victim had access.
According to the indictment, while conducting this spear phishing campaign, Song was employed as an engineer at Aviation Industry Corporation of China (“AVIC”), a Chinese state-owned aerospace and defense conglomerate headquartered in Beijing, China.
AVIC manufactures civilian and military aircrafts and is one of the largest defense contractors in the world. Song Wu, 39, of China is charged with 14 counts of wire fraud and 14 counts of aggravated identity theft.
Song faces a maximum statutory sentence of 20 years in prison for each count of wire fraud. Song faces a mandatory, two-year consecutive sentence in prison if convicted of aggravated identity theft.
Members of the public are reminded that the indictment only contains charges.
The defendant is presumed innocent of the charges and it will be the government’s burden to prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.
This case is being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the NASA – Office of Inspector General.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Samir Kaushal is prosecuting the case.
Within the National Security Division, this matter is being handled by Trial Attorney Tanner Kroeger of the National Security Cyber Section with assistance from the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.
This case is being coordinated by the Disruptive Technology Strike Force, an interagency law enforcement strike force co-led by the Departments of Justice and Commerce designed to target illicit actors, protect supply chains, and prevent critical technology from being acquired by authoritarian regimes and hostile nation-states.
Under the leadership of the Assistant Attorney General for National Security and the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement, the Strike Force leverages tools and authorities across the U.S. Government to enhance the criminal and administrative enforcement of export control laws.
For further information please contact the U.S. Attorney’s Public Affairs Office at USAGAN.PressEmails@usdoj.gov or (404) 581-6016.
The Internet address for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia is http://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/pr/chinese-national-charged-multi-year-spear-phishing-campaign
Reaching New Heights to Unravel Deep Martian History!
Sep 16, 2024
The Perseverance rover is reaching new heights as it ascends the rim of Jezero crater (over 300 meters in elevation higher than the original landing site)!
The rover is now enroute to its first campaign science stop Dox Castle (image in the far ground) a region of interest for its potential to host ancient Mars’ bedrock in the exposed rocks on the rim.
Impact craters like Jezero may be the key to piecing together the early geologic history of Mars, as they provide a window into the history of the ancient crust by excavating and depositing deep crustal materials above the surface.
Crater rims act as keepers of ancient Martian history, uplifting and exposing the stratigraphy of these impacted materials. Additionally, extreme heat from the impact can encourage the circulation of fluids through fractures similar to hydrothermal vents, which have implications for early habitability and may be preserved in the exposed rim bedrock.
With the Perseverance rover we have the potential to explore some of the oldest exposed rocks on the planet.
Exploring such diverse terrains takes a lot of initial planning! The team has been preparing for the Crater Rim Campaign these last few months by working together to map out the types of materials Perseverance may encounter during its traverse up and through the rim.
Using orbital images from the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) instrument, the science team divided the rim area into 36 map quadrants, carefully mapping different rock units based on the morphologies, tones, and textures they observed in the orbital images.
Mapping specialists then connected units across the quads to turn 36 miniature maps into one big geologic map of the crater rim.
This resource is being used by the team to plan strategic routes to scientific areas of interest on the rim.
On Earth, geologic maps are made using a combination of orbital images and mapping in the field. Planetary scientists don’t typically get to check their map in the field, but we have the unique opportunity to validate our map using our very own robot geologist!
Dox Castle will be our first chance to do rim science - and we’re excited to search for evidence of the transition between the margin and rim materials to start piecing together the stratigraphic history of the rocks that make up the rim of Jezero crater.
https://science.nasa.gov/blog/reaching-new-heights-to-unravel-deep-martian-history/
55 Years Ago: Space Task Group Proposes Post-Apollo Plan to President Nixon
Sep 16, 2024
The Apollo 11 mission in July 1969 completed the goal set by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth before the end of the decade.
At the time, NASA planned nine more Apollo Moon landing missions of increasing complexity and an Earth orbiting experimental space station.
No firm human space flight plans existed once these missions ended in the mid-1970s.
After taking office in 1969, President Richard M. Nixon chartered a Space Task Group (STG) to formulate plans for the nation’s space program for the coming decades.
The STG’s proposals proved overly ambitious and costly to the fiscally conservative President who chose to take no action on them.
On May 25, 1961, before a Joint Session of Congress, President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to the goal, before the decade was out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.
President Kennedy reaffirmed the commitment during an address at Rice University in Houston in September 1962.
Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who played a leading role in establishing NASA in 1958, under Kennedy served as the Chair of the National Aeronautics and Space Council.
Johnson worked with his colleagues in Congress to ensure adequate funding for the next several years to provide NASA with the needed resources to meet that goal.
Following Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, now President Johnson continued his strong support to ensure that his predecessor’s goal of a Moon landing could be achieved by the stipulated deadline.
But with increasing competition for scarce federal resources from the conflict in southeast Asia and from domestic programs, Johnson showed less interest in any space endeavors to follow the Apollo Moon landings.
NASA’s annual budget peaked in 1966 and began a steady decline three years before the agency met Kennedy’s goal.
From a budgetary standpoint, the prospects of a vibrant, post-Apollo space program didn’t look all that rosy, the triumphs of the Apollo missions of 1968 and 1969 notwithstanding.
Less than a month after assuming the Presidency in January 1969, Richard M. Nixon appointed a Space Task Group (STG), led by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew as the Chair of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, to report back to him on options for the American space program in the post-Apollo years.
Members of the STG included NASA Acting Administrator Thomas O. Paine (confirmed by the Senate as administrator on March 20), the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology.
At the time, the only approved human space flight programs included lunar landing missions through Apollo 20 and three long-duration missions to an experimental space station based on Apollo technology that evolved into Skylab.
Beyond a general vague consensus that the United States human space flight program should continue, no approved projects existed once these missions ended by about 1975.
With NASA’s intense focus on achieving the Moon landing within President Kennedy’s time frame, long-term planning for what might follow the Apollo Program garnered little attention.
During a Jan. 27, 1969, meeting at NASA chaired by Acting Administrator Paine, a general consensus emerged that the next step after the Moon landing should involve the development of a 12-person earth-orbiting space station by 1975, followed by an even larger outpost capable of housing up to 100 people “with a multiplicity of capabilities.”
In June, with the goal of the Moon landing almost at hand, NASA’s internal planning added the development of a space shuttle by 1977 to support the space station, the development of a lunar base by 1976, and the highly ambitious idea that the U.S. should prepare for a human mission to Mars as early as the 1980s.
NASA presented these proposals to the STG for consideration in early July in a report titled “America’s Next Decades in Space.”
Still bathing in the afterglow of the successful Moon landing, the STG presented its 29-page report “The Post-Apollo Space Program: Directions for the Future” to President Nixon on Sep. 15, 1969, during a meeting at the White House.
In its Conclusions and Recommendations section, the report noted that the United States should pursue a balanced robotic and human space program but emphasized the importance of the latter, with a long-term goal of a human mission to Mars before the end of the 20th century.
The report proposed that NASA develop new systems and technologies that emphasized commonality, reusability, and economy in its future programs.
cont.
https://www.nasa.gov/history/55-years-ago-space-task-group-proposes-post-apollo-plan-to-president-nixon/
NASA rover peers up at space, sees strange Mars moon and distant Earth
September 17, 2024
Robotic Martians can see blue Earth in Mars' sky.
The Curiosity rover, a car-sized NASA robot looking to find evidence of past habitability on the Red Planet, recently snapped an image of Mars' misshapen moon, Phobos, and Earth next to each other.
"It's the first time an image of the two celestial bodies have been captured together from the surface of Mars," the space agency explained.
In the photo below, you can spot a ridge of Mars' Mount Sharp at the bottom of the image.
The upper right contains both Phobos — a moon 17 miles long — and Earth, which from some 200 million miles away appears as a bright speck of bluish light. (The second image is a blown-up view of the two objects.)
"From the rover's perspective, the inset area would be about half the width of a thumb held at arm's length," NASA explained.
The Curiosity rover captured this image on Sept. 9, 2024, during its 4,295th Martian day (called a "sol") on Mars.
It's been rumbling over Martian terrain for over 12 years, and is currently ascending the 3.4-mile (5.5-kilometer) high Mount Sharp, a place that once experienced dramatic Martian floods.
Compared to our moon, which appears almost perfectly round, Phobos is misshapen.
It's not massive enough for its gravity to form a sphere. What's more, Phobos has been hit time and time again by potent space rocks.
"Phobos was nearly shattered by a giant impact, and has gouges from thousands of meteorite impacts," NASA noted.
The glaring impact site is Stickney crater, which is 5.6 miles (nine kilometers) wide.
As Curiosity continues its long slog up Mount Sharp, its robotic sibling, the Perseverance rover, is sleuthing the irradiated Martian surface for past evidence of microbial life.
This means "chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago," the agency said.
Still today, no evidence of life has been found on Mars — though NASA has spotted some compelling geologic leads.
It's clear, however, that the now-desert planet once teemed with lakes and rivers, back when it was a warmer, more hospitable, world.
https://mashable.com/article/mars-nasa-image-phobos-earth-curiosity-rover
U.S. finds energy 11,000 km away, but not in space: It’s boiling and it was created together with the Earth
09/17/2024
The global energy crisis is always making headlines, but the U.S. may have found a good solution. In a country 11,000km away, a new hydrogen project may be on the horizon. Uzbekistan is the country that the U.S. wants to help achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. They’ll meet this ambitious goal together by booting up a green hydrogen production program that will use renewable solar, wind, and hydropower to make the sought-after gas.
After the Paris Agreement, the U.S. found a way to combat climate change in a country on the other side of the world
The Paris Agreement happened on December 12, 2015. It was a historic day for the fight against climate change. The participating countries agreed to keep the world from heating up to mitigate the effects of a warming climate. To do this, every country in the world promised to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within the next 100 years. Uzbekistan gained a lot of attention for starting up clean energy projects to meet their goals.
Even though Uzbekistan is on the other side of the world from the U.S., the more powerful country is using its resources to boost green energy production in the Central Asian country.
Here are some of Uzbekistan’s country statistics:
Size of 447,400 sq km, slightly bigger than California
Has 36.5 million people
Median age of 28.9 years
Exports natural gas, textiles, and hydrogen
Uzbekistan has untapped wind and hydropower potential, making it a key country in which to explore green hydrogen production.
USAID is giving Uzbekistan millions of dollars to develop a Green Hydrogen Hub for the future of clean energy
USAID is an agency that funds development projects all over the world. The organization is currently spending millions of dollars to help Uzbekistan develop a Green Hydrogen Hub.
This project will focus on producing, storing, and distributing hydrogen for various green energy projects. It may take up to fifteen more years before the hydrogen project is fully up and running.
Through the Green Hydrogen Hub project, Uzbekistan has developed a new master’s degree with a focus on hydrogen production.
The country will need a huge amount of infrastructure to get up to speed with the world’s hydrogen demands.
On a positive note, Uzbekistan plans to use renewable power to create hydrogen, which will keep the process from releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Scientists are championing hydrogen as the answer to the world’s climate problems, but they need a place to make it
It would be great if the world could run purely on solar and wind energy, but that’s not realistic. Industries such as manufacturing and shipping need more powerful sources of energy, and hydrogen could be the answer.
When hydrogen burns, it only creates water vapor, which is safe to release into the atmosphere. One of the issues with hydrogen is that it doesn’t occur naturally. Scientists have to make hydrogen in a lab.
It takes a lot of energy to make hydrogen, and Uzbekistan is committed to keeping the process green and sustainable.
If the new facilities for hydrogen production use only wind, solar, and hydropower to make hydrogen through electrolysis, then the country will manage to minimize greenhouse gas emissions and achieve carbon-neutral energy output.
The green energy sector is fairly new in Uzbekistan, which is why the U.S. is eager to fund projects in the country.
Places with smaller populations seem to be having an easier time switching to sustainable energy from sources such as the sun, wind, rivers, and hydrogen.
Uzbekistan is home to a vibrant manufacturing industry, and producing local hydrogen is a good plan to boost the local economy and increase exports.
https://www.ecoticias.com/en/us-funds-hydrogen-energy-project/6419/
Auroras galore! Severe geomagnetic storm sparks stunning northern lights across US
September 17, 2024
Better late than never.
Rolling in about 6 hours later than predicted, a huge plume of plasma and magnetic field from the sun, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into Earth, triggering a severe geomagnetic storm.
The CME hit around 7:41 p.m. EDT (2341 GMT) on Sept. 16, triggering a dazzling northern lights display visible as far south as the Texas Panhandle.
The CME was released during a colossal X-class solar flare eruption on Sept. 14.
The X4.5 solar flare peaked at 11:29 a.m. EDT (1529 GMT) and was the fifth largest solar flare of the current solar cycle.
CMEs carry electrically charged atoms, known as ions. When these ions collide with Earth's magnetosphere, they can trigger geomagnetic storms — major disturbances in Earth's magnetosphere.
During such storms, the ions interact with gases in Earth's atmosphere, releasing energy in the form of light.
This light is observed as the northern lights, or aurora borealis, in the Northern Hemisphere, and the southern lights, or aurora australis, in the Southern Hemisphere.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) classifies geomagnetic storms using a G-scale that measures their intensity, ranging from G1 for minor storms to G5 for the most extreme ones.
NOAA had previously issued an alert for possible G3 conditions on Sept. 16, these were then superseded by even more severe G4 conditions around 10:57 p.m. EDT (0257 GMT on Sept. 17).
The strong geomagnetic storm conditions experienced last night were relished by aurora chasers across the U.S. (those who were still awake anyway).
Dakota Snider caught a stunning display in the skies above Kingman, Arizona last night.
"The surprise of seeing red pillars with your naked eye, through an almost full moon, in Arizona last night had me so excited!" Snider told Space.com in an email.
"This solar cycle has been incredible over the last year," Snider continued.
cont.
https://www.space.com/severe-geomagnetic-storm-auroras-northern-lights-harvest-moon