Ceres

What are those bright spots on the surface of Ceres? 
Oh, I know! Aliens! Or possibly Flash Gordon.

Space probe Dawn arrived at Ceres last Friday, which is what got me started on the whole space probe thing. Ceres is the largest lump of rock in the asteroid belt. It's about 600 miles in diameter, which means its gravity is only about 3% of what we have here at home. Jump hard and you probably won't come down. NASA put Dawn in orbit around Ceres, which means it must be moving dead slow.
    Ceres played a prominent role in Science Fiction story I read about a zillion years ago. The rebels (or the enemy faction, I can't recall exactly) had their headquarters on Ceres. They had surrounded the rock with a multitude of smaller rocks, which they had placed all in different orbits. The idea was only those who knew the plan would be able to negotiate a path through these hurtling asteroids to the surface. Kept the riff-raff away.

Brave New World

Tried to pick up some 60 watt light bulbs at Hank's this evening. No regular incandescents to be found. This was the closest. Looked at the box, looked on the web, but I couldn't figure out what trick they were using until I picked up this image. Halogen, that's the trick. Now that I have seen it in the picture I can see it on the actual box. $8 for a pack of four. Amazon wants $6.50. I can't even tell if $2 a bulb is expensive or not. The price of light bulbs used to not even register, they were an incidental and cost so little they might as well be free. Of course, a six pack of beer used to cost $1. Now they want $10. Kwiky Mart used to only keep $20 in cash on hand. Now they keep $50.

    Speaking of beer, I've been drinking Stella Artois lately, but tonight I noticed that they have reduced the size of their bottles from 12 ounces to 11. I was suspicious when the 22 ounce bottles started showing up. Now my suspicions are confirmed. The anti-fun people are still trying to put the screws to us, one ounce at a time.

     And Finally is still trying to get their bulb to market. Previous post on the subject.

Space, the Final Frontier

Reading about yet another space probe I got to wondering how many there are, which led me to Wikipedia's list of active Solar System Probes. There are a bunch, and just perusing it I wasn't getting a very good picture, so I chopped and hacked and stuffed it into a spreadsheet, and thence I got this graph. It's not perfect, but it does give you an overview of what's going on.
    The numbers across the bottom are the year. The right end of the blue bars shows when the probe was launched. The end of the red bar shows when it arrived at it's destination. The difference is the length of time in transit. Some are very short. One probe made it to Mars in six months. Some of them, like Cassini, take a very long time to reach their target. Rosetta was the ESA probe sent to chase down that comet. Messenger went to Mercury. New Horizons is heading for Pluto.

Girls with Guns

Female soldiers celebrate the International Women's Day by taking part in a drill on the Yongxing Island, the Xisha Islands on the South China Sea, March 8, 2015. (Xinhua/Zhao Xianghu)

Communists were always in favor of equal rights for women, hence women in the army. And they are celebrating International Women's Day, which I suppose is a good thing for women to do. But celebrating by 'taking part in a drill'? Not my idea of a celebration, but then I'm not part of the same demographic as these folks. You may not notice the canteens hanging from the pistols (it is kind of a busy picture), but filling those canteens with water could make it a bit of a challenge, especially if you were trying to shoot and hit something.
     But the best part about this picture is the location:

Right in the middle of the South China Sea.

Solar Dynamics Observatory

Magnetic Flux on the surface of the Sun. NASA photo.

Solar material traces out magnetic fields emanating from the surface of the sun. They show up as white lines in this image that was made by combined data from two sensors.

The SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory) is in a geosynchronous orbit, but it is not stationary relative to the Earth's surface like the communications satellites. The plane of its orbit is inclined relative to the Earth so that it almost always has the sun in view. However, in three months things will have changed 90 degrees and the satellite will now be passing through the Earth's shadow once a day.

One of two antennas dedicated to round-the-clock reception of data from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Each antennae is almost 60 feet in diameter. Photo by Tim C. Gregor.

The SDO is dumping a terabyte of data through a dedicated downlink, using a pair of antennaes at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. While the satellite is not perfectly still relative to the Earth, it doesn't move very fast. Since it is geosynchronous, the longitude doesn't change, but since the orbit is inclined, the elevation is going to slowly oscillate with a period of a year. You could probably get by with going out and adjusting the antennae with a wrench once a day.

A terabyte of data used to be large. Now you can buy 3 terabyte disk drives for $100. Still, SDO is going to be filling them up quickly, dumping a boat load of data down the link every day, day after day, year after year. And this is just one satellite. NASA must have a really big server farm.

IP Theft is Pervasive

Paige Nickless, a baker, preparing to add cream filling to the cruffins.

JIM WILSON / THE NEW YORK TIMES

Recipe theft in San Francisco, reported in the New York Times, sent to me via California Bob, Jr.

New Jackie Chan?

Freddie's vacation in London takes an unexpected turn. Via Brent Newhall