Posts Made By: K. Michael Malolepszy

At Mcdonald observatory in Texas, the Struve 82" scope has a 55mm Takahashi LE in the focuser for visual observing. Quite a nice eyepiece! Very comfortable to use. See my post at

http://www.astromart.com/forums/viewpost.asp?forum_post_id=406654&poll_id=&news_id=&page=

K. Michael M.

Interesting opinion by noted space policy commentator Rand Simberg... KMM

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Obama’s Conservative Space Policy

Short version, human spaceflight policy is one of the few things that Obama seems to be getting right, at least from a conservative standpoint.

Long version at

http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=24483

Interesting opinion by noted space policy commentator Rand Simberg... KMM

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Obama’s Conservative Space Policy

Short version, human spaceflight policy is one of the few things that Obama seems to be getting right, at least from a conservative standpoint.

Long version at

http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=24483

The Huffington Post FEBRUARY 7, 2010

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/buzz-aldrin/president-obamas-jfk-mome_b_448667.html

Buzz AldrinAstronaut, Apollo 11 mission; Best-selling author of "Magnificent Desolation"
Posted: February 3, 2010 08:49 PM

President Obama's JFK Moment

Thank you, Mr. President.

That's what we should say to President Barack Obama in light of his Fiscal Year 2011 space budget for NASA. The President courageously decided to redirect our nation's space policy away from the foolish and underfunded Moon race that has consumed NASA for more than six years, aiming instead at boosting the agency's budget by more than $1 billion more per year over the next five years, topping off at $100 billion for NASA between now and 2015. And he directed NASA to spend a billion per year on buying rides for American astronauts aboard new, commercially developed space vehicles-that's American space vehicles. Other NASA funds will go into developing and testing new revolutionary technologies that we can use in living and working on Mars and its moons.

The rest of the piece is at the above URL.


KMM

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

March 3, 2010

Double-dip Arctic Oscillation, and update on Antarctica

In February, Arctic sea ice extent continued to track below the average, and near the levels observed for February 2007. Ice extent was unusually low in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic, and above normal in the Bering Sea. Meanwhile, Antarctic sea ice reached its summer minimum, near the average for 1979 to 2000.

Overview of conditions

Arctic sea ice extent averaged for February 2010 was 14.58 million square kilometers (5.63 million square miles). This was 1.06 million square kilometers (409,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average for February, but 220,000 square kilometers (85,000 square miles) above the record low for the month, which occurred in February 2005.

Ice extent was above normal in the Bering Sea, but remained below normal over much of the Atlantic sector of the Arctic, including the Barents Sea, part of the East Greenland Sea, and in the Davis Strait.

Perhaps hope is not lost:

http://nasawatch.com/archives/2010/04/is-a-human-spac.html

Is A Human Space Flight Compromise Emerging?

By Keith Cowing on April 5, 2010 9:00 PM

Keith's note: Only a week and a half remain before the much-anticipated Space Summit at NASA KSC on 15 April. While no public mention has been made as to venue, agenda, participants, audience etc., there does seem to be a general consensus forming behind the scenes as to what sort of rethinking might be acceptable to all parties with regard to where NASA human spaceflight is going.

This is the consensus that seems to forming in and among NASA, OSTP, and NSC: Ares 1 and 5 remain cancelled. Orion is continued - but in a "Lite" variant designed to ferry people to and from ISS. This "Orion Lite" would fly on human-rated EELVs and would be, in essence, a government competitor to what NASA is also encouraging the so-called "Merchant 7" (SpaceX, Orbital et al) to develop. The commercial activities would remain unchanged from what was announced in February. Meanwhile, NASA will continue to fly the Space Shuttle albeit at a stretched out rate (2 or so flights/year) while ET production is restarted.

Andreas Saldivar said:

I read this article tonight. I agree with Armstrong and others that the US abandonment of manned space flight is wrong as well as sad. If we go down this road it will be, IMO, 20 years before a US launched manned mission. Very disappointing.

Andreas

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36476183/ns/technology_and_science-space/

In slide 5 he says,"We now know that the Ozone changes were not caused by human CFCs"... huh?

That 2005 paper is talking about increases in ice mass
in Greenland interiors - something that isn't necessarily
inconsistent with AGW, which predicts higher water evaporation
and precipitation rates, producing more snow in places like
Greenland. This paper says that it it "possible" that ablation
in coastal areas may be offset by winter accumulation, but is
by no means shown to be the case by the ERS data sets under
consideration in that 2005 paper.

From the conclusions in that paper:

----

In conclusion, we have presented new evidence
of (i) decadal increase in surface elevation
(È5 cm/year) within a study area
comprising most of the Greenland Ice Sheet,
1992 to 2003, caused by accumulation over
extensive areas in the interior of Greenland;
(ii) divergence in elevation changes since the
year 2000 for areas above and below 1500 m,
with high-elevation increases and low-elevation
decreases, the former in contrast to previous
research (10, 13); and (iii) negative correlation
between winter elevation changes and the NAO
index, suggesting an underappreciated role of
the winter season and the NAO for elevation
changes—a wild card in Greenland Ice Sheet
mass-balance scenarios under global warming.

There are, however, caveats to consider.
First, we cannot make an integrated assessment
of elevation changes—let alone ice volume
and its equivalent sea-level change—for the
whole Greenland Ice Sheet, including its outlet
glaciers, from these observations alone, because
the marginal areas are not measured
completely using ERS-1/ERS-2 altimetry (see
Fig. 1). It is conceivable that pronounced
ablation (e.g., 10, 11) in low-elevation marginal
areas could offset the elevation increases
that we observed in the interior areas. Second,
there is large interannual to decadal variability
in the high-latitude climate system including
the NAO, such that the 11-year-long data set
developed here remains too brief to establish
long-term trends. Therefore, there is clearly a
need for continued monitoring using new satellite
altimeters—including advanced ones with
improved ice-sheet ranging in steeper coastal
areas—and other remote-sensing and field observations,
together with numerical modeling
to calculate the mass budget through net losses
and net input from snow (33).

----

KMM

Dave Snope said:

That is a 60cm INCREASE in thickness over 11 years. And they point out that the only areas losing ice are coastal areas, and that is due to normal ocean warm oscillation cycles. But since the coastal phenomenon is all you will read about in the major newspapers and hear about on the major networks, most of the world will remain uninformed.

Averaged over the study area, the increase is 5.4 T 0.2 cm/year, or
È60 cm over 11 years, or È54 cm when corrected for isostatic uplift.

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/MattCronin-Mar21-07-d/Johannessenetal05-GreenlandIceFinal.pdf

I think I'll take what ever Chris Horner says with a grain of salt. What else do you expect him to say and do? He's doesn't have a science background - he's an attorney. He makes his living as an advocate of industry - hardly an impartial judge of the merits of the arguments involved.

KMM

Dave Snope said:

This morning in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Competitive Enterprise Institute is filing suit against NASA, calling the erstwhile space agency to account for its nearly three-year stonewall of access to internal documents exposing an abuse of taxpayer funds to advance the global warming agenda.
Gavin Schmidt

Along the way to this point, we have begun revealing how NASA is running a third-party advocacy website out of NASA facilities, at taxpayer expense, to assail “skeptics� and promote the highly suspect basis for a specific policy agenda.

This campaign also helped to elevate the particular fiefdom in question (James Hansen’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS) in terms of budget and stature. It has also elevated the scientists involved, professionally, at the expense of the taxpayer they are working to stick with the biggest economic intervention in our history

H/T WUWT

Where does that Obama & Holder quote come from? I don't see it in the washington examiner article you have a link to..

KMM

david elosser said:

Californians are so upset over Arizona's tough new discriminatory and racist immigration laws, they want to make it easier for illegals to gain access into California, especially the Los Angeles area. They have allowed the government of Mexico to open its first office dedicated to printing and providing documents for illegal Mexicans (whose only desire, of course, is simply to live the better life here in the US.)

"This is a huge step in the right direction," President Obama told LA-Times reporters. US Attorney General Eric Holder was also pleased: "I have looked into this and, although I havn't read the lease agreements, the new Mexican office is perfectly legal." he told CNN World News Tonight. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said she is not worried about any possibility of terrorists gaining easier access into the US: "This is simply overblown," she said, "categorizing these people as terrorists is simply racist, and I won't tolerate it."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Mexico-opens-California-office-to-provide-ID-for-illegals-95434969.html

David E