Schedule Summary: President Joe Biden will attend a launch event and then participate in the G20 Summit. ALL TIMES EDT 6:00 AM Receive daily briefing – Hilton Rio de Janeiro Copacabana 8:00 AM…

Back in 2007, I talked with Rob Manning, engineer extraordinaire at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he told me something shocking. Even though he had successfully led the entry, descent, and landing (EDL) teams for three Mars rover missions, he said the prospect of landing a human mission on the Red Planet might be impossible. But now, after nearly 20 years of work and research — as well as more successful Mars rover landings — Manning says the outlook has vastly improved. “We’ve made huge progress since 2007,” Manning told me when we chatted a few weeks ago in 2024. “It’s interesting how its evolved, but the fundamental challenges we had in 2007 haven’t gone away, they’ve just morphed.” Image of the Martian atmosphere and surface obtained by the Viking 1 orbiter in June 1976. (Credit: NASA/Viking 1) The problems arise from the combination of Mars’ ultra-thin atmosphere—which is over 100 times thinner than Earth’s — and the ultra-large size of spacecraft needed for human missions, likely between 20 – 100 metric tons. “Many people immediately conclude that landing humans on Mars should be easy,” Manning said back in 2007, “since we’ve landed successfully on the Moon and we routinely land human-carrying vehicles from space to Earth. And since Mars falls between the Earth and the Moon in size and in the amount of atmosphere, then the middle ground of Mars should be easy.” But Mars’ atmosphere provides challenges not found on Earth or the Moon. A large, heavy spacecraft  streaking through Mars’ thin, volatile atmosphere only has just a few minutes to slow from incoming interplanetary speeds (for example, the Perseverance rover was traveling 12,100 mph [19,500 kph] when it reached Mars) to under Mach 1, and then quickly transition to a lander to slow to be able to touch down gently. Universe Today publisher Fraser Cain’s video about the challenges of landing Mars, with more details in this article. In 2007, the prevailing notion among EDL engineers was that there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth, but there is actually too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the Moon by using propulsive technology alone. “We call it the Supersonic Transition Problem,” said Manning, again in 2007. “Unique to Mars, there is a velocity-altitude gap below Mach 5. The gap is between the delivery capability of large entry systems at Mars and the capability of super-and sub-sonic decelerator technologies to get below the speed of sound.” The largest payload to land on Mars so far is the Perseverance rover, which has a mass of about 1 metric ton. Successfully landing Perseverance and its predecessor Curiosity required a complicated, Rube Goldberg-like series of maneuvers and devices such as the Sky Crane. Larger, human-rated vehicles will be coming in even faster and heavier, making them incredibly difficult to slow down. Rob Manning, Chief Engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Sky Crane for landing rovers on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Keck Institute “So, how do you slow down to subsonic speeds,” Manning said now in 2024 as the chief engineer at JPL, “to get to speeds where traditionally we know how to fire our engines to enable touchdown? We thought bigger parachutes or supersonic decelerators like LOFTID (Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator) tested by NASA) would allow us to maybe slow down better, but there were still issues with both those devices.” “But there was one trick we didn’t know anything about it,” Manning continued. “How about using your propulsion system and firing the engines backwards —retro propulsion — while you are flying at supersonic speeds to shed velocity? Back in 2007, we didn’t know the answer to that. We didn’t even think it was possible.” Why not? What could go wrong? “When you fire engines backwards as you are moving through an atmosphere, there’s a shock front that forms and it would be moving around,” Manning explained, “so it could come along and whack the vehicle and cause it to go unstable or cause damage. You’re also flying right into the plume of the rocket engine exhaust, so there could be extra friction and heating possibilities on the vehicle.” All of this is very hard to model and there was virtually no experience doing it, as in 2007, no one had ever used propulsive technology alone to slow and then land a spacecraft back on Earth. This is mostly because our planet’s beautiful, luxuriously thick atmosphere slows a spacecraft down easily, especially with a parachute or creative flying as the space shuttle did. “People did study it a bit, and we came to the conclusion it would be great to try it and find out whether we could fire engines backwards and see what happens,” Manning mused, adding that there wasn’t any extra funding laying around to launch a rocket just to watch it come down again to see what happened. A SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket poised to launch Dragon from Cape Canaveral. Credit: NASA But then, SpaceX started doing tests in attempt to land their Falcon 9’s first stage booster back on Earth to re-use them. “SpaceX said they were going to try it,” Manning said, “And to do that they needed to slow the booster down in the supersonic phase while in Earth’s upper atmosphere. So, there’s a portion of the flight where they fire their engines backwards at supersonic speeds through a rarified atmosphere which is very much what’s like at Mars.” As you can imagine, this was incredibly intriguing to EDL engineers thinking about future Mars missions. After a few years of trial, error, and failures, on September 29, 2013, SpaceX performed the first supersonic retropropulsion (SRP) maneuver to decelerate the reentry of the first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket. While it ultimately hit the ocean and was destroyed, the SRP actually worked to slow down the booster. NASA asked if their EDL engineers could watch and study SpaceX’s data, and SpaceX readily agreed. Beginning in 2014, NASA and SpaceX formed a three-year public-private partnership centered on SRP data analysis called the NASA Propulsive Descent Technology (PDT) project.  The F9 boosters were outfitted with special instruments to collect data specifically on portions of the entry burn which fell within the range of Mach numbers and dynamic pressures expected at Mars. Additionally, there were visual and infrared imagery campaigns, flight reconstruction, and fluid dynamics analysis – all of which helped both NASA and SpaceX. To everyone’s surprise and delight, it worked. On December 21, 2015, an F9 first stage returned and successfully landed on Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral, the first-ever orbital class rocket landing. This was a game changing demonstration of SRP, which advanced the knowledge and tested the technology of using SRP on Mars. View of SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage approaching Landing Zone 1 on Dec. 21, 2015. Credit: SpaceX “Based on the analyses completed, the remaining SRP challenge is characterized as one of prudent flight systems engineering dependent on maturation of specific Mars flight systems, not technology advancement,” wrote an EDL team, detailing the results of the PDT project in a paper. In short, SpaceX’s success meant it wouldn’t require any fancy new technology or breaking the laws of physics to land large payloads on Mars. “It turns out, we learned some new physics,” Manning said. They found that the shock front ‘bubble’ created around the vehicle by firing the engines somehow insulates the spacecraft from any buffeting, as well as from some of the heating. EDL engineers now believe that SRP is the only Mars entry, descent and landing technology that is intrinsically scalable across a wide range and size of missions to shed enough velocity during atmospheric flight to enable safe landings. Alongside aerobraking, this is one of the leading means of landing heavy equipment, habitats and even humans on Mars. But still, numerous issues remain unsolved when it comes to landing a human mission on Mars. Manning mentioned there are multiple unknowns, including how a big ship such as SpaceX’s Starship would be steered and flown through Mars’ atmosphere; can fins be used hypersonically or will the plasma thermal environment melt them? The amount of debris kicked up by large engines on human-sized ship could be fatal, especially for the engines you’d like to reuse for returning to orbit or to Earth, so how do you protect the engines and the ship? Mars can be quite windy, so what happens if you encounter wind shears or a dust storm during landing? What kind of landing legs will work for a large ship on Mars’ rocky surface? Then there are logistics problems such as how will all the infrastructure get established? How will ships be refueled to return home? “This is all going to take a lot of time, more time than people realize,” Manning said. “One of the downsides of going to Mars is that it is hard to do trial and error unless you are very patient. The next time you can try again is 26 months later because of the timing of the launch windows between our two planets. Holy buckets, what a pain that is going to be! But I think we’re going to learn a lot whenever we can try it for the first time.” And at least the supersonic retropropulsion question has been answered. “We’re basically doing what Buck Rogers told us to do back in the 1930s: fire your engines backwards while you’re going really fast.” 2007 article: The Mars Landing Approach: Getting Large Payloads to the Surface of the Red Planet The post The New Mars Landing Approach: How We’ll Land Large Payloads on the Red Planet appeared first on Universe Today.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is a small galaxy, just a tenth of the Milky Way’s mass. It is about 160,000 light years away, which is remarkably close in cosmic terms. In the southern hemisphere it spans the width of 20 Moons in the night sky. While the galaxy seems timeless and unchanging to our short human lives, it is, in fact, a dynamic system undergoing a near collision with our galaxy. Now astronomers are beginning to observe that process. The LMC is unusual for a dwarf galaxy because it’s unusually dense. Based on stellar motion within the LMC, it appears to have a rather small halo surrounding it. This has led some astronomers to argue that the galaxy is not in orbit around the Milky Way. Instead, it is simply passing our galaxy, having made its closest approach. As the galaxy passed through the large and relatively dense halo of the Milky Way, some of the LMC halo would have been stripped away, trailing behind it in a diffuse tail. It’s a likely scenario, but proving it has been a difficult challenge. The halo of the Large Magellanic Cloud is too dark and diffuse for us to observe directly. But this new study has finally observed the LMC halo thanks to some distant quasars. Plot of the observed LMC halo. Credit: Mishra, et al Quasars are powerful beacons powered by supermassive black holes in distant galaxies. Though they are billions of light-years away, their light can be easily observed by radio telescopes and space telescopes such as the Hubble. Using Hubble data, the team looked for quasars in locations where the LMC halo was likely to be. In this way, the light of those quasars would pass through the halo before reaching us, and some of the quasar light would be absorbed by the halo. By measuring the spectra of 28 quasars in the LMC sky region, the team was able to make the first mapping of the small galaxy’s halo. Assuming the LMC had a large halo similar to other small galaxies before its flyby of the Milky Way, the team estimates that the LMC has only held on to about 10% of its original halo. The rest of the halo now streams behind the galaxy like a comet’s tail, though that has yet to be observed. In the future, the team would like to use more quasars to further map the LMC halo, particularly in the front region where the halo is directly colliding with that of the Milky Way. Such work will help us better understand what happens when galaxies interact and how that can affect the evolution of those galaxies. Reference: Mishra, Sapna, et al. “The Truncated Circumgalactic Medium of the Large Magellanic Cloud.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.11960 (2024). The post The Large Magellanic Cloud Survived its Closest Approach to the Milky Way appeared first on Universe Today.

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Politics Will RFK Kibosh Ozempic? The potential HHS secretary has sent mixed messages about popular new weight-loss drugs. Credit: image via Shutterstock When Donald Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday, pharmaceutical and processed food companies’ stock tanked. The environmentalist and pharma skeptic suspended his presidential campaign to be considered for a health czar position in the Trump administration, capitalizing on his long-standing skepticism of the connections between Big Pharma, Big Food, and Big Government. At his October 27 Madison Square Garden rally, Trump said Kennedy should “go wild” on reforming the largest department by budget in the federal government. Now he’s ready for the shiny prize—the top spot at HHS. That is, if he can survive the hazing from the Trump team: he was photographed over the weekend grimacing over a Big Mac in the boss’s private plane. Kennedy’s “make America healthy again” plan starts “tomorrow,” said Donald Trump, Jr. Should he make it through the nomination process, Kennedy plans to follow Trump’s mandate to remove “corruption” from HHS-led regulatory agencies such as the FDA and “end the chronic disease epidemic,” in large part by removing the highly processed foods that he believes lead to many Americans’ poor state of health. One highly popular drug is at the confluence of these mandates for deregulation and healthy alternatives: Ozempic. It and its class of sister drugs prescribed for weight loss are being sold as a magic pill (or shot) for lowering America’s rates of obesity, a condition that is said to increase the risk for many of the diseases Kennedy wants to eradicate. But would Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” program take the drug-skeptical, food-as-medicine approach to weight loss mainstream, or turn it into another conspiracy theory? On the one hand, Kennedy’s line on health care seems to follow the libertarian-populist, anti-establishment approach of the second Trump administration. He has supported abortion access throughout pregnancy and wants the FDA to stop its “aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma,” as he tweeted last month. He also said that he would purge “entire departments” of the FDA to get drugs approved faster and allow more experimental treatments.  He intends to “level the playing field” on the price of drugs, citing Germany’s much lower prices for Ozempic because of the country’s system for drug price negotiation. “While Berlin negotiates prices on behalf of all Germans, Washington can’t do the same,” he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. “Legislators should cap drug prices so that companies can’t charge Americans substantially more than Europeans pay.”  Questions remain about the actual effects of lowering drug costs: Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, has argued that lowering list prices actually fails to increase access and lower costs for consumers (a claim that Bernie Sanders and the Senate HELP Committee dispute). There’s also a large off-label market of versions of the drugs with varying levels of reliability. The FDA allows pharmacies and online providers such as Hims & Hers to produce compounded or “copy” versions during drug shortages like the one declared for semaglutide (the medication in many of the new weight-loss drugs). A black market for even wilder concoctions flourishes on social media and by word of mouth. How Kennedy-style price caps would affect these operations remains to be seen, but—barring a major change in supply from the main producers—one could expect even more competition for the drugs and the possibility of more scarcity, and thus more under-the-table dealing. While weight-loss drug companies don’t seem in much danger of losing interest from consumers, then, Kennedy’s plans for downsizing the FDA do seem to be making Novo Nordisk and friends nervous about future approvals, prices, and access. “There is concern on agency resources, commentary on [weight loss drugs] and also vaccines,” Michael Yee, an analyst at Jefferies, told the Financial Times after the nomination. Kennedy isn’t going to take down Ozempic. But he’s no cheerleader like Bernie Sanders, who preaches the “human right” to health care and argues that Novo Nordisk should lower its prices so Americans can access the drugs “they need to lead healthy, happy and productive lives.” In fact, Kennedy said last month that Novo Nordisk is “counting on selling it to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs.” Sanders’s moral duty is Kennedy’s health hazard.  This belief that obesity is a bigger problem than a lack of the right drug prescription is why much of the MAHA program is about not drugs but food. “Most people with diabetes or pre-diabetic can be cured with good food,” Kennedy said in an October interview on Fox News. “The first thing I’d do [is] tell the cereal companies to take all of the dyes out of their food.” To some, this plan may seem to come from out of the blue. But it echoes an argument among whole-food advocates and nutrition scientists that the existence of additives and prevalence of processing in Americans’ food lead to conditions and diseases such as hypertension, heart disease, and cancer—the same things for which obesity itself is often blamed. Kennedy, to take one recent example, has accused American Froot Loops of being less healthy than the Canadian version because of dyes that he says have been shown to cause hyperactivity in children (something the FDA disputes). On food as opposed to drugs, then, Kennedy wants more regulation, not less. In his September Wall Street Journal op-ed, he proposed following the European Union in banning more pesticides, removing soda and highly processed foods from the SNAP program (and school lunches), and reforming crop subsidies to “get off of seed oils” and fight “artificially cheap” prices on products such as high-fructose corn syrup and refined flour. He would also forbid direct-to-consumer drug advertising—something those familiar with the “O-o-o-ozempic” jingle know would affect Novo Nordisk and friends significantly. One obvious obstacle for MAHA is that many of these proposals will look too EU for many Americans and will risk triggering an outcry similar to Michael Bloomberg’s legendary big-soda ban backlash. And there will be political headwinds as well: Ultra-processed foods will be defended by anti-poverty advocates as essential for those who live in food deserts or otherwise lack the means to purchase and prepare healthy foods. Americans’ right to “free choice” in their food supply will be invoked. Then there’s the FDA itself, which has gone all in on weight-loss drugs for children as young as 12 years old for perpetual use, on the assumption that since previous interventions haven’t worked, preventing a lifetime of obesity is worth a lifetime of medical dependency. Many question whether these sweeping changes are within the HHS secretary’s power to enact. But Robert Califf, the current FDA commissioner, told cancer researchers recently that it’s “totally within the law for the president or the HHS secretary to overrule the entire FDA.”  Beyond the legality of his efforts, then, a man who acknowledges that he’s taking on Big Pharma, Big Food, and Big Government at the same time should already be aware that he is the David to three Goliaths. But there’s a fourth: public perception. And that might be the determining factor for whether natural foods or Novo Nordisk wins out as the preferred method for fighting obesity in America. There’s some evidence that Kennedy won over a number of wellness influencers on social media by acknowledging “how sick our country is,” as Mary Margaret Olohan reported in the Daily Caller. Yet some commentators in prominent publications have gone wild against Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism, his position on the causes of AIDS, his backing of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as Covid-19 treatments, and his support for raw milk. How one responded to Covid may well start mapping onto how one sees Ozempic—and Oreos. If Americans take a potential Secretary Kennedy’s guidance with a grain of salt, they may end up skipping the weight-loss shot. The two options aren’t mutually exclusive: Weight-loss drug users have been shown to be far more successful when they change their eating habits in addition to taking the medications. But with millions using the new weight-loss treatments on- and off-label and a projected 13 percent of the population expected to be taking them in the next five years, Americans seem to be in the market for a stronger—if not necessarily better—drug. The post Will RFK Kibosh Ozempic? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics What Has Changed? Things don’t usually happen overnight, but the Trump re-election is a watershed moment. (Twitter) Things don’t often change overnight. Change tends to happen slowly, then fast, in small increments and then big jumps—but rarely does one night matter that much. So it is with the election; America did not change overnight as it reelected Donald Trump president, but the election of Donald Trump did mark a significant milestone of change in America. There are some quick and easy changes to note. Most polling shops should just close up: They are worthless. The election the polls told us would be down to a skin-of-our-teeth tie ended up a solid blowout, with Republicans taking the presidency, the Senate, and the House. Polls are seemingly unable, after three presidential elections, to dig into the thoughts of Republicans in general and shy Trump voters in the specific. Whatever it is, whatever methodology is challenged by these voters, the polls are of little value. It’s a joke now seven swing states later to remember CNN the night before the election touting some “solid gold” poll showing Trump would lose Iowa. Identity politics seems to have run its course. Harris did not run heavily on her multiple identities as a black and Asian woman until near the end, where she switched to her Sunday church accent. (It was ripe for an Saturday Night Live parody, except SNL was fully onboard the Harris campaign bus and not willing to risk insulting anyone with an “edgy” parody.) The campaign dragged out a tired-looking Barack and a boyish-looking Michelle to chew out black dudes for not voting for Kamala (as if being chewed out was a good election strategy.) There was barely a flamboyant gay or trans person in sight on Harris’s team, unlike the showpiece drag queens Biden attached to himself—remember the guy in the red dress with the bright red lipstick and shaved head? In the end America elected an old, wealthy, white, Republican, (semi-)Macho Man. Read the room, Dems. There’ll be changes in the bureaucracy of Washington, either via Elon Musk, RFK Jr., or the use of Schedule F. Trump will again fill any Supreme Court vacancies, this time with a Republican Senate unlikely to challenge his choice in confirmation hearings. As in Term One, this may prove to be one of Trump’s most transformational accomplishments. It’s doubtful the mainstream media learned anything from its work on the 2024 election, given that it did not learn much from its failures in 2016 and 2020. Change there is unlikely. Across the mini-spectrum from CNN to the Atlantic, the MSM unabashedly promoted Harris at every chance, and bashed Trump whenever possible. All pretext was discarded, right down to dear SNL, who gave Kamala free, puffy air time the weekend before the election, a move so grotesquely out of line that parent network NBC was forced by FCC pressure to hand over two minutes of expensive commercial time to Trump. Even as they were reporting Trump’s victory, CNN and MSNBC kept injecting little digs about him being a fascist and all that. In its obituary for the 2024 campaign, the New York Times wrote, “For the first time in history, Americans have elected a convicted criminal as president. They handed power back to a leader who tried to overturn a previous election, called for the ‘termination’ of the Constitution to reclaim his office, aspired to be a dictator on Day 1 and vowed to exact ‘retribution’ against his adversaries.” They still don’t get it. The media and Democrats face a forced change of view about January 6. The events of that day never mattered much, despite efforts by the media and the Democratic establishment to replay things in every format possible. “The real America becomes Trump’s America,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University. “Frankly, the world will say if this man wasn’t disqualified by Jan. 6, which was incredibly influential around the world, then this is not the America that we knew.” Indeed, it was not the America they knew; it was an America more concerned about food prices and interest rates than settling political mud fights. The results of November 5 should be seen, among other things, as a referendum on events like January 6. They never mattered except to some elites and their media. Can we hope never to speak of them again? The election should hopefully change the view of those elites toward the more than half of America who voted for Trump. The election vindicates Trump’s argument that Washington has grown out of touch, that America is a country weary of war, crazed immigration, and political correctness. Can we as a nation now stop being offended so readily and stop calling everything in turn racist or, the other magic word no one understands, fascist? Does every discussion need to include a clause, “but what about the trans people?” Maybe they can take care of themselves for a while.  “The Trump presidency speaks to the depth of the marginalization felt by those who believe they have been in the cultural wilderness for too long and their faith in the one person who has given voice to their frustration and his ability to center them in American life,” said Melody Barnes, the executive director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy. Elections do indeed matter. The Democrats tried to defeat Donald Trump in every way possible—by any means necessary—before the election. They impeached him twice, indicted him 88 times, and attempted to murder him twice. Despite efforts to force him off the ballot in multiple states, he stayed on the ballots, aided by a judicial system that had not fully drunk the Kool Aid. One of the most significant things to have changed, or that we now acknowledge as changed, having had the MRI of an election with a clear outcome, is the permanence of Trumpism. There’ll be books and dissertations defining it, but it is clear whatever it is that Trump is, it is a large part of the American body politic now. Not only did Trump capture the usual red states; he flipped some blues and even in urban areas where he did not win, racked up high scores, 40 percent or more. The polls obviously missed all this, but the reality is there are a lot of Trump supporters—a mandate for change—and it even looks like he won the popular vote. Trump is indeed about divisions in America, but more about understanding, acknowledging, and profiting from them than creating them himself. He is unlikely to know how to heal them; it is something it is time to learn to live with and govern over, not simply wipe away half the electorate as garbage or deplorables. They are us. There is little need to worry about Trump seeking retribution or misusing the military; much of that was theater, off-the-cuff remarks or attempts to rile up the crowds. Look to his first term and past the crying around January 6, and you’ll see how he’ll govern in round two. And get used to it, because Trumpism is now the Republican party platform. The half-assed attempts to seize control of the party by the Never Trumpers and the neocons failed completely. With J.D. Vance as the candidate in 2028, the Trump legacy will dominate modern American politics well beyond that of Reagan. The 2016 election wasn’t a fluke; 2020 was. The post What Has Changed? appeared first on The American Conservative.