efaardvark

First inflation wrecks my savings, then the stock market tanks my 401k, now this.  2022 has not been a good year for my retirement plans. 

No association of Viagra and Cialis with reduced Alzheimer’s disease risk.

Oh no!  Another casualty of 2022!
Somehow I missed the announcement of Greg Bear’s passing.  (Probably sick and/or sleep deprived.)  Bear was one of my favorite authors.  If you haven’t read “Blood Music” then do so.   Even Better than Clarke’s “Childhood’s End”.  Bear was right up there with Niven in my estimation.

https://www.geekwire.com/2022/greg-bear-1951-2022-science-fiction-writer/

Time to retire one of my many caps…

NASA retires InSight mars lander mission

SWOT in Earth orbit and KPLO in Lunar orbit.  And home in time for lunch!  "Nominal" is a good word.

Was up all night at work supporting the Artemis sploosh and lunar flashlight launch/initial ack.  Got home at about noon and crashed.  I’m just opening my eyes from a ~4hr nap & my body’s in that totally confused jet lagged shift-worker state.  Hungry, but is it breakfast time or dinner?  Is the rainy dimness coming thru the window morning?  Or night?  Think I’ll start by rebooting my brain with coffee.  

Been sick since last Wednesday.  Not covid according to tests but not fun either.  Recovering now but still pretty tired and last night's / this morning's level 1 event at work - supported remotely - didn't help.  Feel like I need to sleep for a week.

Ack thtbbft!

So you thought photoshoping was messing with people's heads?  Take a look at what NeRFs can do...
 

Old enough to remember.   

Looks like of the two cubes that I liked, OMOTENASHI and NEAS, neither one is looking too good.   

OMOT was a JAXA-sponsored lunar lander that was supposed to have landed on the moon this morning via (intentional) “lithobraking”.    It may or may not have done so.  Unfortunately it hasn’t been heard from since it was deployed last week so nobody knows for sure.  The other JAXA mission, EQUULEUS, seems to be functioning as expected however.

The other one I liked was the Near Earth Asteroid Scout.  Or as I liked to call it the rainbow sail mission due to its propulsion & maneuvering system.  It was supposed to use a new type of solar sail to visit a couple near-earth asteroids but it too has not been heard from since deployment.

So far 4 of the 8 cubesats have had problems post-deployment.  (Artemis itself seems to be doing well.)

Artemis's "Outbound flyby" happens tonight (pacific time)!

https://www.nasa.gov/specials/trackartemis/

So far 3 of the 8 cubes are having trouble.  Not only that but some of the recovery efforts have created problems in the ground data system for other projects.  (Like James Webb.)   At least Artemis itself seems ok for the moment.  These next couple months until Orion comes back down are going to be a lot of work.

All I can say is it'd better get off the pad this time!

https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

Found out a coworker tested + for C19 so I’m getting myself tested as well.  No symptoms <knock knock> but I’ve got a big week ahead at work and an 82yo mother in memory care that I have to visit regularly & I need to know.

Modern Chinese saying, "We're all in the same bus.  It just hasn't rolled over yet". 

Now this is cosplay! 

Trick or treat!

Some days it just isn't a good idea to leave your house.  

Went to visit my mom last night for Saturday evening dinner.  She's in a memory care / assisted living situation and when I got there they were doing a karaoke(?) activity.  I'm not a great singer myself but this was ... something else.     At least everyone seemed to be having a good time. 

Talking with a co-worker who doesn't like the ocean.  He won't go near it.  He won't travel by ship.  He won't go to the beach.  He doesn't even like flying over it.  The weird thing is he has no problems with a swimming pool or river.  He's a really good swimmer in fact.  Even used to be a lifeguard for the pool at a nearby YMCA.  So I asked him why he's afraid of the ocean.  He said, "I'm not afraid of the ocean.  I afraid of big things in the ocean." 

Just read that there may be enough uranium in coal that it might actually be marketable.  Of course uranium isn't flammable so when you burn the coal the uranium just winds up in the ash pile with the rest of the unburnables, like cadmium, arsenic, and lead.  But that's ok because the regs say it is. 

BTW, I never understood why radioactive material is EVIL while stuff like arsenic is ok.  I mean, just the fact that it is radioactive means that at least it'll all go away.  Eventually.  That's what "half life" means.  Something that has a half life of 10 years will be half gone in 10 years.  As opposed to the arsenic which will be around literally forever causing trouble.

Not that I'd want to eat either one of course. 

A hallway at work with robotic vehicles pained on the walls.  I think that one at the end looks distinctly tachikoma-ish...

Got up, got dressed/showered/ready for work, drove in, parked, walked the few blocks to the SFOF, grabbed a cuppa, then sat down in my assigned seat at the console, only to have the director call a launch scrub.  Hadn’t even finished my coffee.

Well, it isn’t like I don’t have other things I need to do as well.  I just hope we don’t have another power failure at home like we’ve had for the last 2 days.

Over 60 webex hours in 4 days.  Isn't that a violation of OSHA rules or something?

So Artemis-1 is (hopefully) launching on the 29th.  On it will be 8 smaller cubesats, which will be deployed by Artemis at 2 "bus stops" on its way to the moon.  The cubesats will then find their own ways to fulfill their various missions, with NASA's Deep Space Network of tracking stations providing the data link for them all.

Or at least that was the plan.  Someone recently realized that with 9 new spacecraft all vying for time on the DSN's already overbooked downlink stations it might be a good idea to see what additional options for tracking time might be available in the world in case something doesn't go as planned and one or more of the cubesats wind up needing additional tracking time due to problems post-deployment.  Yeah.  So now, only a couple weeks before launch, we're doing cross-support testing with the European Space Agency to make sure that's at least an option.

Let's see, 8 cubesats x 5 ESA tracking stations, uplink and downlink, call it 5 data rates and 2 or 3 different encoding schemes per sat.  Maybe 10-12 hours of testing per cubesat if we're quick about it.  Then there's equipment and manpower availability to allocate and schedule, factoring in the time zones of the various mission operations centers (JAXA, Italy, Goddard, etc.), the stations (Goonhilly, New Norcia, Cebrerus, etc.), and of course JPL in California.

Um.. how long did you say we had to finish this?