Only three more centuries of LEO silliness

One problem with the International Space Station is that it had to be International, and one such nation was Russia. For a long time Russia was the cheapest manufacturer of rockets to get up there. This meant that the ISS orbit had to be tilted. Worst of all there's a patch of nonmagnet in the south [UPDATE 7/15 which blows bubbles at us]. In orbital dynamics what starts north must come south.

"Today" (I know, it's 21 June as I poast) we got word that anomaly is going away. In AD 2320. But still!

This comes from an archaeology of pottery, Ceramic I assume. So from 7000 BC onward. Ceramics are available in Jomon pre-Japan before then but they weren't looked at. Our time is tagged most like to 600 BC.

Planet to planet

Gary "XRM" Johnson has words about planet-to-planet propulsion. With a focus on Mars/Earth but also applicable to Venus/Earth.

He boils it down to I_Sp. If I_Sp is chemical - under 500 [N/N] seconds - the fuel will likely all be used by the time you get there. Note that high-thrust solutions like entering/leaving Hohmann tend to the low I_Sp, although overall Hohmann will net you the least overall δV. This means you'll need to make the fuel at the destination. Energy too, I might add. Deimos is looking VERY good here!

Matters get better with 1974 NERVA, 800 s. I don't know that we got NERVA (legally) but we're getting close-enough to that with our HALEU options. 1300 s also exists but, as Johnson points out, these are low-thrust. Honestly I'd leave that to the outer system.

Also from the Earth side, he'll say (later) that propellant should be provided from our own Deimos, namely Luna.

What this means for Venus colonists is that, er, there's not a lot of propellant to be had there. But if you've been reading here early 2011 you knew that. I was hoping to net hydrogen from the planet's coma.

The melting ramjet

As the Nowicki ramjet runs Mach 3-10 through hydrogen, not only the oxidiser will be heating up. Ex Rocket Man explains. To the extent Sabine hadn't already.

The ramjet solution runs into problems (in low pressure, 200 K temperature) Mach 6. If the 200 K is at 2 bar and pure hydrogen... how well does 2 bar hydrogen gas conduct away the heat? My guess is "pretty well". But if we mix this with oxygen gas like Nowicki wanted...

The XRM recommends "one shot ablatives". I think this means flakes of skin that are allowed to fall off the rocket's hull. Maybe a skin of water ice? It wouldn't flake off - it would just steam off. That's more initial mass of course but Nowicki was already allowing for that when he suggested bringing an oxidiser.

No soup for neutron-stars

Two years ago I called shens about whether Quark Soup exists. Last year the Lead Radius Experiment (Pb-R-Ex, pronounced "prex" I guess) cast further doubt. Zaven Arzoumanian's team at NICER, and others, looked at pulsars J0030 then J0740; Arzoumanian promised some results on a third pulsar at that time. [h/t Nyrath's twitter.]

Neutron-star radii can actually be measured, even from this distance. Their magnetic poles - like ours - don't always align with their rotational poles. Such are "pulsars" which send X-Rays our way. Then we know their rotation-period... to the nanosecond. Apparently when the magnetic pole runs on the other side of the pulsar, the gravity of the ex-star bends the radiation just so. Now we got radius, and gravity. Even if the ex-star doesn't have planets or other companions (Kepler, yo!), which some do.

As for which pulsar they want next, formal publication is slow. I had to dig in the arxiv. Turns out: this one's famous. They're looking into J0437−4715, the closest (at about 391.79 light years away) and brightest. (Told you pulsars are measurable... and that publication is slow.) As to why NICER didn't measure it yet, maybe that's because it's in an orbit with a white dwarf perhaps muddying the readings.

LOW MASS 10/24 This might be a quark star.

Saint Thomas' children

I wish I'd had this article in 2009 - István Perczel, on the Malayalam liturgical tongue. It's Aramaic. I've actually attended a Malayalam Episcopal service; I was struck by the Aramaic elements in it.

Perczel explains what happened here. Basically the Portuguese made a mess, introducing Catholicism as the correct Christendom to all those brown bumpkins. Many, many MSS were burned or at least left to rot uncopied. At the same time, the trade routes were opened so all the Near Eastern Christians found out about their wayward brothers. Some of them still spoke Aramaic as a first language - Edessene Syriac. So the Jacobi chuch of Antioch sent men, the Nestorians sent men, and then Catholics sent men to the Nestorians who showed up in India as Syriac-speaking Catholics. Oh and some Anglicans (somehow) horned in on the Jacobi racket as "fellow" not-Catholics.

What a mess! I'll admit to not making much sense of what happened in south India over the centuries.

One weird factor is that the south Indians demanded copies of what the Portuguese had stolen from them. Some traders brought in Syriac, Arabic, and Latin apocrypha - still not entirely lost to the world as of 1600ish AD. (Yes, by now the Indians were using AD and not AG, and even their Jacobites weren't using AG.) So this stuff got copied / translated into Syriac and endured in India. So when you read a Syriac apocryphon in India, you are often not reading the original text but something longago copied into Arabic (sometimes Latin) and then back-translated. One wonders whatever was made of the Pseudo Methodius over there.

The external lung (half of it)

With h/t to Glenn Reynolds, Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation. Our lungs are internal membranes. If we don't even need to use lungs (temporarily), firstly those on a transplant-list can, er, wait that bit longer.

I'd also call this good for hibernators in space except that, I think, a more-pressing issue is the decaying muscles and brain.

More important: what about scrubbing chemicals OUT of the blood? This starts with carbon-dioxide and, honestly, carries on to urea.

Overall good news, just incomplete news.

Fusion, the energy of the future

Fusion is still the energy of the future and likely to remain so, says Daniel Jassby. Again.

Jassby has the attention of Dr Woit because he used to work at the Princeton physics lab, whence the Ebrahimi-Alfven drive and, someday, fusion propulsion. The lab is a good 'un and has done much excellent work. Just not in sustainable fusion power, down here on Earth.

Jassby argues that magnetic confinement fusion is a dead end, looking mainly at ITER in France; and that fusion research should pretty-much scrap the whole idea. C.F. research can move on to inertial confinement, with lasers. This is (mainly) what's been in the news the past year. Jassby doesn't wetblanket "ICF" as such... but. He does see ICF as such an infant technology that it will take another generation to mature.

Unsure where beams come in, here.

Meanwhile ToughSF was last week pointing out that fusion reactions are still, like, radioactive and stuff. Neutrons, mainly; also tritium. So there will still be nuclear waste, and hazard.

TOKAMAK 7/25: Better magnets... for a dead tech. Maybe they can use that for something useful, like a fusion NERVA.

COLD 8/19: Well that didn't happen last year.