80 million, 24% of Americans are immune!
NASA’s Perseverance Rover to land on Mars by skycrane on Feb. 18
NASA’s next flagship Mars rover Perseverance will land on the Red Planet about the time you read this.
On Feb. 18, the Mars rover Perseverance will attempt a daring skycrane landing similar to one aced by its predecessor Curiosity August 2012, and an epic NASA video shows exactly how it’ll be done.
Skycrane is a landing method where the very high velocity of the spacecraft is slowed by a succession of methods involving friction with the very light atmosphere, ending in a big parachute, from which the craft lowers itself gently toward the surface on its own rockets firing downward. The final step is cables fed slowly from the rocket platform letting the craft down to the surface.
The new 4K Perseverance landing video opens with a shot of Mars, soon followed by Perseverance streaking towards the surface after separating from a protective backshell.
None of the skycrane sequence can be controlled or adjusted from the earth as the time for a radio signal from Earth to Mars is about 20 minutes. Perseverance must make its own decisions about the landing steps based on weather, its distance from and observations of the surface terrain.
NASA dubbed the similar skycrane Curiosity rover’s landing in 2012 a harrowing “seven minutes of terror” as it had never been done before. The rover had to nail its entire landing sequence on its own, from atmospheric entry and parachute release to an unprecedented rocket-powered hover maneuver as Curiosity was lowered to the Martian surface, because the sequence happened faster than a signal could reach Earth from Mars.
Perseverance will have much the same approach, but the terror is still there as not every landing mission to Mars has never made it safely to the surface.
Watch artist’s video of planned landing at:
Radio Shack’s AA Batteries are most power at lowest cost
Surprisingly, the Radio Shack AA alkaline batteries provided better power than many others in a recent test of may brands and they’re among the lowest-priced at 33 cents, $19.99 for a 60-pack.
The next best is Energizer Max Alkaline AA with slightly more power at 52 cents from Walmart 48-pack for $24.98.
Almost as good is regular CopperTop Duracell alkaline.
Most lithium batteries have more, some only a little more power than alkaline batteries but their higher cost makes them much more expensive per unit of power.
Lease your Yakima basin water rights?
Trout Unlimited is working to lease landowner water rights in Yakima River Basin in low water years, funded by Dept. of Ecology.
The leased water would be used to help maintain minimum flows in the rivers and streams to protect trout and other fish.
Apple and Google have issued urgent security updates
Users of Google’s Chrome browser have faced three security concerns over the past 24 hours.
On several versions of Mac OSX, a local attacker may be able to get control of the machine.
Most Chrome users and Apple Mac OSX and iOS users should update their machines immediately.
Local vaccination sites learn when vaccines
will arrive
Though Pfizer and Moderna vaccines rate of manufacturing and shipment has been planned and ongoing under the Warp Speed program for months, Washington State has only now learned how to inform local vaccination sites when vaccines will arrive three weeks in advance.
Recall that Inslee refused to accept or coordinate with a vaccine approved under Trump.
Up to now, local hospitals, clinics and other vaccination sites only learned what was coming when they arrived.
It’s official: Farfarout is our solar system’s most distant known object.
The planetoid dubbed Farfarout was first detected in 2018, at an estimated distance of 140 astronomical units (AU) from the sun — farther away than any other object.
One AU is the average Earth-to-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers. For perspective, Pluto orbits at an average distance of about 39 AU.
Farfarout’s inherent brightness suggests a world roughly 250 miles wide, only about one-tenth as big as the moon, barely enough to qualify for dwarf planet status. But the size estimate assumes the world is largely made of ice, and that assumption could change with more observations.
Higgs Boson Decay found
Scientists have spotted the first evidence of a rare Higgs boson decay, expanding our understanding of the strange quantum universe.
In 2012, scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland won a Nobel Prize in Physics with a breakthrough finding: they detected the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle predicted by the Standard Model of physics nearly 50 years prior. The Higgs boson doesn’t live very long, quickly decaying into smaller particles like two photons (light particles).
Now, researchers have found evidence for a rare Higgs boson decay in which the subatomic particle decays into either a photon and a pair of electrons, or a photon and a pair of muons with opposite charge.
Dave Bunting