3 reasons to be outraged by Congressional stonewalling of commercial crew
EXCERPT: This week NASA Administrator Charles Bolden stepped up his war of words on Congress, saying the space agency had to extend a pricey contract with Russia through 2019 for crew transport due to under-funding of the commercial crew program. You may like Bolden, or dislike him. You may like his boss, President Obama, or you may hate him. You may like NASA's human exploration plan, or you may have questions about its viability. But you should know this for a fact: Commercial crew, a program allowing SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft and rockets to put U.S. astronauts into orbit, deserves full funding. Here are three reasons why Congressional under-funding of commercial crew is especially duplicitous....
NASA: Seats on Russian rockets will cost us $490 million
India to launch 9 US satellites in 2015, 2016
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Explosions on Jupiter's Polar Auroras --"Triggered By Moon Io's Massive Volcanic Activity"
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/201...ivity.html
EXCERPT: On Earth, bursts of particles spewed by the Sun spark shimmering auroras, like the Northern Lights, that briefly dance at our planet’s poles. But, on Jupiter, there’s an auroral glow all the time, and new observations show that this Jovian display sometimes flares up because of a process having nothing to do with the Sun. [...] Both [telescopes] Hisaki and Hubble witnessed explosions of the planet’s aurora despite the solar wind’s calm, suggesting that it’s the Jupiter-Io interaction driving these explosions, not charged particles from the Sun, according to the new study.
[...] Io is the only known place in the Solar System with volcanoes erupting extremely hot lava like that seen on Earth. Because of Io's low gravity, large volcanic eruptions produce an umbrella of debris that rises high into space. Such outbursts can send material hundreds of miles above the surface. The recent eruptions resemble past events that spewed tens of cubic miles of lava over hundreds of square miles in a short period of time.
[...] In the aurora-making interaction of Jupiter and Io, volcanoes on the small moon blast clouds of electrically charged atoms (ions) and electrons into a region surrounding Jupiter that’s permeated by the planet’s powerful magnetic field, thousands of times stronger than Earth’s. Rotating along with its rapidly spinning planet, the magnetic field drags the material from Io around with it, causing strong electric fields at Jupiter’s poles. The acceleration of the ions and electrons produce intense auroras that shine in almost all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum but most brightly in high-energy bands, like ultraviolet light and X-rays, that are invisible to unaided human eyes....
EXCERPT: This week NASA Administrator Charles Bolden stepped up his war of words on Congress, saying the space agency had to extend a pricey contract with Russia through 2019 for crew transport due to under-funding of the commercial crew program. You may like Bolden, or dislike him. You may like his boss, President Obama, or you may hate him. You may like NASA's human exploration plan, or you may have questions about its viability. But you should know this for a fact: Commercial crew, a program allowing SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft and rockets to put U.S. astronauts into orbit, deserves full funding. Here are three reasons why Congressional under-funding of commercial crew is especially duplicitous....
NASA: Seats on Russian rockets will cost us $490 million
India to launch 9 US satellites in 2015, 2016
- - - - - - - - -
Explosions on Jupiter's Polar Auroras --"Triggered By Moon Io's Massive Volcanic Activity"
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/201...ivity.html
EXCERPT: On Earth, bursts of particles spewed by the Sun spark shimmering auroras, like the Northern Lights, that briefly dance at our planet’s poles. But, on Jupiter, there’s an auroral glow all the time, and new observations show that this Jovian display sometimes flares up because of a process having nothing to do with the Sun. [...] Both [telescopes] Hisaki and Hubble witnessed explosions of the planet’s aurora despite the solar wind’s calm, suggesting that it’s the Jupiter-Io interaction driving these explosions, not charged particles from the Sun, according to the new study.
[...] Io is the only known place in the Solar System with volcanoes erupting extremely hot lava like that seen on Earth. Because of Io's low gravity, large volcanic eruptions produce an umbrella of debris that rises high into space. Such outbursts can send material hundreds of miles above the surface. The recent eruptions resemble past events that spewed tens of cubic miles of lava over hundreds of square miles in a short period of time.
[...] In the aurora-making interaction of Jupiter and Io, volcanoes on the small moon blast clouds of electrically charged atoms (ions) and electrons into a region surrounding Jupiter that’s permeated by the planet’s powerful magnetic field, thousands of times stronger than Earth’s. Rotating along with its rapidly spinning planet, the magnetic field drags the material from Io around with it, causing strong electric fields at Jupiter’s poles. The acceleration of the ions and electrons produce intense auroras that shine in almost all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum but most brightly in high-energy bands, like ultraviolet light and X-rays, that are invisible to unaided human eyes....