Richard’s Neighborhood

Oh my....here are some videos of dogs greeting their masters who have been gone for months in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I am sobbing by the time I see this last one. Don't tell me that animals don't have "opinions" or "emotions". WOW.

12 November 2009
When Europe's comet chaser Rosetta swings by Earth tomorrow for a critical gravity assist, tracking data will be collected to precisely measure the satellite's change in orbital energy. The results could help unravel a cosmic mystery that has stumped scientists for two decades.
 
Since 1990, scientists and mission controllers at ESA and NASA have noticed that their spacecraft sometimes experience a strange variation in the amount of orbital energy they exchange with Earth during planetary swingbys. The unexplained variation is noticed as a tiny difference in speed gained or lost during the swingby when comparing that predicted by fundamental physics and that actually measured after the event.  
 
Tiny unexplained speed variations
 
The unexplained speed variations are extremely small: NASA's Galileo satellite experienced an increase of just 3.9 mm/s above the expected value when it swung past Earth in December 1990. The largest unexpected variation - a boost of 13.0 mm/s - was observed with NASA's NEAR spacecraft at its Earth swingby in January 1998. On the other hand, variations seen at the swingbys of NASA's Cassini in 1999 and Messenger in 2005 were so small that they lay within the bounds of uncertainty.
 
 

	ESTRACK New Norcia 35m deep space antenna: tracking Rosetta to detect unknown speed anomaly

ESA's Rosetta has made two Earth swingbys, in 2005 and 2007. It too, experienced the strange anomaly. Frustratingly, Rosetta sped up by an unexplained 1.8 mm/s during the first passage, but experienced no slowing or speeding in 2007. No one knows what will happen on 13 November 2009 for Rosetta's third and last Earth swingby: scientists are stumped.

"It's a mystery as to what is happening with these gravity events. Some studies have looked for answers in new interpretations of current physics. If this proves correct, it would be absolutely ground-breaking news," says Trevor Morley, lead flight dynamics specialist working on Rosetta at ESOC, ESA's European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany.
 
 
ESA researchers study Rosetta
 
Together with ESA colleague and orbital mechanics specialist Frank Budnik, Morley co-authored a scientific report in 2006 that studied the Rosetta anomaly during the 2005 swingby and listed possible causes.

These range from tidal effects peculiar to the near-Earth environment, atmospheric drag, or the pressure of radiation emitted or reflected by the Earth, to much more extreme possibilities, such as dark matter, dark energy or previously unseen variations in General Relativity, one of the most fundamental and well-tested theories of modern physics.
 
 

	NASA 70m Deep Space Network antenna, Goldstone, California

One American research team, led by ex-NASA scientist John Anderson, is even looking at the possibility that Earth's rotation may be distorting space-time - the fundamental fabric of our Universe - more than expected, thus affecting nearby spacecraft. But there is as yet no explanation how this could happen.

Before even considering such exotic explanations, all the usual causes of spacecraft speed errors have been thoroughly eliminated by numerous investigations conducted over the years at both ESA and NASA. Software bugs, calculation errors, tracking uncertainties and other, much more mundane, causes have all been systematically eliminated or accounted for, leaving the speed anomaly maddeningly unexplained.
 
 

	“As it stands now, no one knows what's behind this - it really is a mystery.”

NASA's Pionneer 10 & 11 similarly affected
 
Scientists at a number of universities and research centres in Europe, the US and Japan have worked on the anomaly problem over the past years. The Earth swingby anomaly has been compared to another unexplained anomaly - one experienced by NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft.

As they travel on trajectories that will take them eventually into interstellar space, both have experienced an unexpected acceleration directed toward the Sun, which has yet to be explained.
 
 
Watching through the night
 
At ESOC on 13 November, the mission control and flight dynamics teams will be watching closely as ESA's 35m New Norcia station in Australia tracks Rosetta during the closest approach, expected at 08:45:40.0 CET, followed - after a visibility gap of 20 minutes - by ESA's 15m Maspalomas station.

The tracking activity will generate highly precise data that will record whether the spacecraft speeds up or slows down more or less than expected. Deep space ground stations operated by NASA, at Canberra, Australia, and Goldstone, California, will also observe the spacecraft before and after closest approach.
 
 

	ESA/NASA Cassini-Huygens swings by Earth 1999, slowing unexpectedly

"We are using as many ground stations as are available to maximise the amount of swingby data we record. The more data we get, the better the chance that we may eventually come up with an answer," says Morley.

The data is keenly awaited by scientists on a number of continents, who are hoping to see whether the anomaly is present and whether an explanation is finally possible.
 
 
"As it stands now, no one knows what's behind this - it really is a mystery. And your prediction as to whether Rosetta will experience any swingby speed anomaly at all on 13 November is as good as anyone's," says Morley.
 

Vox used to be such a fun place to blog. But it has become home to several mean-spirited people who think that racism is OK.

Good news:

Yesterday Ben and I were asked by our old roommate Talena if we could watch Osa the chihuahua this weekend while there is construction done in her new apartment! =)

To celebrate, I'm including some videos of Ben and I spending time with Osa.

This is Ben making Osa sing:

It's fun to make her howl because she purses her lips.
AND she starts to hack/cough like she's a smoker.

But my NUMBER ONE FAVORITE THING to do is this:

I'm still waiting for the day she leaps up and bites me in the face.
But I think she's too sweet for that.

I think I'm more of a dog person now.
I had a bad cat experience at my last apartment with Gordo. He was too needy. Shed too much.  Ate too much, ate when nervous, ate until he vomited. It all made me not want to leave my room.

Dogs are so much better, I think.

In other good news, Ben J. was featured on Daily Candy yesterday!
It is an AMAZING write-up.
I am v. proud.

P.S.
I might do a self portrait later...

My DSL is repaired but will only work if I'm hooked up to the modem via an ethernet cable.

I've tried, for an hour this morning and another hour tonight, to configure the Linksys wireless router (which I installed and have previously reconfigured a couple times). It comes up as configured and connected but won't let me go anywhere - everything times out.

I think the problem is internet security settings... that I have them configured, somewhere, for the wireless router too. I've checked, disabled, and/or reset everything I can think of but still can't get internet access via my wireless router.

Yes, it is making me insane.

I'm putting it out here now...even though it's only November...
I mean if you can listen to Christmas music in Walmart in October...you will LOVE this!

Silent Monks "sing" the Hallelujah Chorus....

Rhode Island legislators learned yesterday that Gov. Carcieri vetoed the gay funeral rights bill that passed in October.

The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Rhoda Perry and state Rep. David Segal, would have added “domestic partners” to the list of people legally authorized to make funeral, cremation or burial arrangements for their deceased partners. Heterosexual married couples already have these rights.

The Providence Journal reported that the bill was proposed after one man was unable to retrieve the body of his late partner from the state medical examiner for weeks because they weren’t married or next-of-kin.

Gov Carcieri’s veto message, said:

“This bill represents a disturbing trend over the past few years of the incremental erosion of the principles surrounding traditional marriage, which is not the preferred way to approach this issue.

“If the General Assembly believes it would like to address the issue of domestic partnerships, it should place the issue on the ballot and let the people of the state of Rhode Island decide.”

The bill defined a domestic partner as someone who was in an “exclusive, intimate and committed relationship” with the deceased person and had lived with them for at least a year. The bill also said the couple had to be financially “interdependent” by joint mortgage, shared credit card or domestic partnership contract.

Gov. Carcieri said the bill would allow the decisions of a “partner” of a year to take precedence over “traditional family members.” He said a “one year time period is not a sufficient duration to establish a serious bond between two individuals.”

Rep. Segal said Carcieri took his opposition to same-sex marriage too far. He and Sen. Perry plan to override the veto.

Segal also said, “‘I think the man is heartless and this has become a bad joke that has carried on for far too long.”

Even in death we get NOTHING!

I think that gay people should leave their spouses in the morgue and let the state pay for the burials until it is Bankrupt.