NASA News #4 A Common Problem

Ethan has taken the week off, so we'll only be looking at a handful of article from the NASA site.

First Commercial Moon Delivery Assignments to Advance Artemis (link)

In preparation for the planned landing of astronauts on the moon - supposedly a mundane activity given NASA's exemplary track record in that regard - Artemis is sending sixteen scientific payloads to the moon for investigation.

The NDL is a LIDAR-based (LIght Detection And Ranging) sensor composed of a three-beam optical head and a box with electronics and photonics that will provide extremely precise velocity and range sensing during descent and landing of the lander that will tightly control navigation precision for a soft and controlled touchdown on the Moon.

That hardly seems necessary when a soft and controlled touchdown on the moon can be flawlessly performed (several times) with an unstable single-engine lander, a flight computer with less memory than the modern toothbrush, and some good old-fashioned American stick jokeying.

SEAL will investigate the chemical response of lunar regolith to the thermal, physical and chemical disturbances generated during a landing, and evaluate contaminants injected into the regolith by the landing itself. It will give scientists insight into the how a spacecraft landing might affect the composition of samples collected nearby.

Why is this necessary? We learned from Apollo that the lander will impart zero thermal or physical disturbances to the powdery surface, and any chemical contamination should easily be checked with the eight hundred pounds of moon rocks returned to the Earth.

SCALPSS will capture video and still image data of the lander’s plume as the plume starts to impact the lunar surface until after engine shut off, which is critical for future lunar and Mars vehicle designs.

No, it is not critical at all. You just make a standard exhaust nozzle and put the engine right in the crew compartment, which someone can use as a seat. It's not that difficult. Why does NASA act as if the Apollo landings never happened?

NIRVSS will measure surface and subsurface hydration, carbon dioxide and methane – all resources that could potentially be mined from the Moon -- while also mapping surface temperature and changes at the landing site.

What about the temperature measurements taken by Apollo? Surely they would be informative. Let's follow up with that in an article titled Learning from what Apollo astronauts left on the moon.

So Nagihara decided to examine all the temperature data collected through 1977. Sadly, the tapes that recorded these measurements were missing. This is a common problem. During the Apollo era, data were housed at the individual labs of scientists. Many measurements were never properly archived.

So not only were the original communications and navigation tapes all lost, but the scientific data is lost too! Thus, the Artemis mission has been forced to reproduce all that valuable data as if the Apollo landings had never happened at all.

For Hottest Planet, a Major Meltdown, Study Shows (link)

Massive gas giants called "hot Jupiters" — planets that orbit too close to their stars to sustain life — are some of the strangest worlds found beyond our solar system. New observations show that the hottest of them all is stranger still, prone to planetwide meltdowns so severe they tear apart the molecules that make up its atmosphere.

Called KELT-9b, the planet is an ultra-hot Jupiter, one of several varieties of exoplanets — planets around other stars — found in our galaxy. It weighs in at nearly three times the mass of our own Jupiter and orbits a star some 670 light-years away. With a surface temperature of 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit (4,300 degrees Celsius) — hotter than some stars — this planet is the hottest found so far.

Now, a team of astronomers using NASA's Spitzer space telescope has found evidence that the heat is too much even for molecules to remain intact. Molecules of hydrogen gas are likely ripped apart on the dayside of KELT-9b, unable to re-form until their disjointed atoms flow around to the planet's nightside.

In this article you'll read claims that hydrogen molecules are "ripped apart" on a faraway exoplanet, and quotes from the graduate student who was the lead author, but no link to the article itself. As is often the case, I had to go searching for it. I don't believe I have ever given commentary on any academic paper without providing a link to it, because I want you to know I'm not lying and to make it easy for you to verify for yourself. Why does NASA not do the same?

Anyway, here is the article (pdf). By my count, there are 22 authors representing 17 institutions and 51 bibliographic references to produce a paper that runs at about 5 pages if images and figures are removed. Does it really take four researchers and ten citations per page for this kind of analysis? Of course not. From our perspective (meaning the non-academic viewpoint) the excessive list of authors and references is amusing, but something we skim over to get to the substance of the article. In their world, consensus means factual, thus those signalers of consensus (author and citation lists) are given more attention than the substance of the article.

The first paragraph of the introduction reads,

Hot Jupiter phase curve observations have led to a wealth of data on energy transport in highly-irradiated planets. This information has spurred the development of theories to describe the resulting trends. The most influential hypothesis has been that the irradiation level is the primary factor controlling energy transport, with hotter planets having shorter radiative timescales and thus less heat redistribution. Lower heat redistribution would lead to increasingly larger phase curve amplitudes and smaller offsets. These trends with irradiation temperature are robust predictions that are born out in models with varying levels of sophistication.

Sophistication is just a synonym for complexity. Now, read the beginning of the next paragraph.

Recent phase curve observations, however, have shown deviation from these trends, which suggests that the radiative timescale may not be the only important factor controlling heat redistribution on hot Jupiters.

To normal people, the second paragraph would seem to refute the first. How are the predictions of the preferred hypothesis robust when multiple observations contradict it? If you can understand this little 2-paragraph dilemma, you understand the big problem with cosmology, which is that the preferred hypotheses remain "robust" no matter the extent of contradicting evidence. Once established, bad ideas are almost impossible to kill, and usually result in more bad ideas needed to keep the equations balanced.

The gist of the paper is that, upon observing both the day and night sides of the planet, it was determined that the night side is too hot to be accounted for by standard heat convection. Thus, they've hypothesized that hydrogen molecules are disassociated on the hot side and then recombining on the cold side. The effect is akin to the heat of vaporization seen in standard thermodynamics, such as when water is vaporized in a boiler and then transported to radiators, where the condensation of the steam releases much more heat than in systems with only hot water.

It is worth keeping in mind that these same astronomers don't even understand our own cold Jupiter. They don't understand why the polar regions are so hot (even during their local winters) or why the planet emits much more radiation that it receives from the sun. Despite the what the title of the paper says, no evidence actually exists of this hypothesized heat of molecular dissociation. The existence of the problem is not evidence of the hypothesis. In this case, there is no evidence at all about the broken hydrogen molecules. But it was the best idea they could come up so that's all the evidence that is needed! (Can you imagine if our normal-people jobs were held to such low standards?) The whole paper amounts to an exercise in creative writing. It is a few pages of pretty graphs floating on a canvas of creative prose, bookended by a block of co-authors on one end and a block of citations on the other. The goal is to make the bookends so formidable that no one will dare question the contents the sits between them.

NASA's Kepler Witnesses Vampire Star System Undergoing Super-Outburst (link)

A new search of Kepler archival data has uncovered an unusual super-outburst from a previously unknown dwarf nova. The system brightened by a factor of 1,600 over less than a day before slowly fading away.

The star system in question consists of a white dwarf star with a brown dwarf companion about one-tenth as massive as the white dwarf. A white dwarf is the leftover core of an aging Sun-like star and contains about a Sun's worth of material in a globe the size of Earth. A brown dwarf is an object with a mass between 10 and 80 Jupiters that is too small to undergo nuclear fusion.

The brown dwarf circles the white dwarf star every 83 minutes at a distance of only 250,000 miles (400,000 km) – about the distance from Earth to the Moon. They are so close that the white dwarf's strong gravity strips material from the brown dwarf, sucking its essence away like a vampire. The stripped material forms a disk as it spirals toward the white dwarf (known as an accretion disk).

I can't find the paper for this one, but we know the convention. Most of those confident numbers are not actually observed but are inferences taken from a model of the mechanism they believe to have caused the unexpected super-outburst. You can probably guess what that mechanism is, too. (Hint, it's the same one they use to explain nearly every unexplained phenomena in the cosmos.)

Theories suggest that a super-outburst is triggered when the accretion disk reaches a tipping point. As it accumulates material, it grows in size until the outer edge experiences gravitational resonance with the orbiting brown dwarf. This might trigger a thermal instability, causing the disk to get superheated.

Yep, good old-fashioned accretion disks show themselves again. How do they explain the observed outburst? You see, a tipping point is reached when a gravitational resonance triggers a thermal instability. (In other words, they have no idea.)

"These dwarf nova systems have been studied for decades, so spotting something new is pretty tricky," said Ridden-Harper. "We see accretion disks all over – from newly forming stars to supermassive black holes – so it's important to understand them."

Correction: they see accretion disks nowhere. They hypothesize about accretion disks all over. Very big difference. But in their world, a hypothesis is as good as an observation, so long as there are enough co-authors listed. Seeing is believing but, to them, believing is seeing.

How Earth Climate Models Help Scientists Picture Life on Unimaginable Worlds (link)

Yes, this is a real headline from the NASA site, but is anyone surprised anymore? The same climate models that tell us Manhattan is currently underwater are sure to tell us a lot about planets so far away that they cannot be seen directly - only inferred by their effect on a host star.

In scanning the cosmos with large ground-based and space telescopes, astronomers have discovered an eclectic assortment of worlds that seem drawn from the imagination.

It's their symbolism, not mine, but I won't contest it. It's interesting how often their metaphors are inadvertently revealing. It's like a deep truth try to claw out however it can.

Models such as ROCKE-3D begin with only grains of basic information about an exoplanet: its size, mass, and distance from its star. Scientists can infer these things by watching the light from a star dip as a planet crosses in front of it, or by measuring the gravitational tugging on a star as a planet circles it.

These scant physical details inform equations that comprise up to a million lines of computer code needed to build the most sophisticated climate models. The code instructs a computer like NASA's Discover supercomputer to use established rules of nature to simulate global climate systems. 

That is a good description of the problem. A few scant data points are fed into models with up to a million lines of code. The result is... pretty much whatever you want it to be. If you're "established rules of nature" are really just establishment rules of nature, then your results align with the consensus and they give you money.

Discovering life on distant planets is a gamble, Del Genio noted: “So if we want to observe most wisely, we have to take recommendations from climate models, because that’s just increasing the odds.”

This is utter nonsense. They're just trying to find a way to latch on the climate change funding narrative. The only odds that are increased here are the the odds that more grant money will be incoming. Even if it somehow made sense that earthly climate models would help with the exoplanet searches, our climate models are wrong so they would only hinder progress. It's like saying that to find Earthlike planets, we need to factor in the polling models that showed Hillary Clinton taking an easy win. Not only does it make no sense, but it would still be wrong even it if did.

New Mission Will Take 1st Peek at Sun’s Poles (link)

Solar Orbiter, a collaboration between the European Space Agency, or ESA, and NASA, will have its first opportunity to launch from Cape Canaveral on Feb. 7, 2020, at 11:15 p.m. EST. Launching on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, the spacecraft will use Venus’s and Earth’s gravity to swing itself out of the ecliptic plane — the swath of space, roughly aligned with the Sun’s equator, where all planets orbit. From there, Solar Orbiter's bird’s eye view will give it the first-ever look at the Sun's poles.

An interesting probe that's about to launch. I don't have any predictions to offer, but expect that any novel observations made will only contrast the standard solar model (as has already occurred with the Parker probe).