Just like the earth, the sun has north and south magnetic poles. And just as the earth’s poles flip every now and then, the sun also undergoes regular magnetic reversals. But whereas the earth’s cycle takes thousands of years to complete, the solar magnetic cycle only takes about 11 years. It happens the sun is just now stirring from its quieter phase, a sort of solar nap, which lasts two or three years and has been particularly deep this last time around. The sleeper has awakened:

The solar flare began at 3.48 am EDT and was recorded an X6.9 class on the three class scale used to measure the strength of solar flares. The recent solar flare is three times larger than the previous flare of this solar cycle — the X2.2 that occurred on Feb. 15, 2011. The weakest flares are rated C-class, medium sized flares are M-class while the strongest type of solar eruptions are rated X-class. Solar activity waxes and wanes over an 11-year sun weather cycle.

That’s a big event. It’s not coming towards us, space is big and the earth is tiny, but if it were it could mean big trouble. The last time a really large coronal mass ejection hit our planet was in 1859. The flux induced current in nascent communication systems, taking out entire telegraph networks, and created the most powerful heavenly display’s ever recorded:

From Maine to the tip of Florida, vivid curtains of light took the skies. Startled Cubans saw the auroras directly overhead; ships’ logs near the equator described crimson lights reaching halfway to the zenith. Many people thought their cities had caught fire. Scientific instruments around the world, patiently recording minute changes in Earth’s magnetism, suddenly shot off scale

 The first battle of the 2012 election season is being fought today, in 2011. The state of Wisconsin is holding 6 recall elections today. Up for grabs are half a dozen state senator seats, the recalls were fueled by protests and anger over Republican Gov Scott Walker’s policies. Sites to follow results, which will not begin streaming in until polls close at 8 PM Central Standard Time (CDT), can be followed here. My colleagues at Daily Kos will also be updating results as fast as they come in. @WeRWisconsin will be live tweeting on Twitter.

(AP results here, and they’re starting to move fast)

The races are, in no particular order other than district:

• District 2: Robert Cowles (GOP) 58% vs Nancy Nusbaum (Dem) 42%       93% of precincts in
• District 8: Alberta Darling (GOP)49% vs Sandra Pasch (Dem)  51%              63% of precincts in
• District 10: Sheila Harsdof (GOP) 58% vs Shelley Moore (Dem) 42%         98% of precincts in
• District 14: Luther Olson (GOP) 52% vs Fred Clarke (Dem) 48%                 100% of precincts in
• District 18: Randy Hopper (GOP) 50% vs Jessica King (Dem)  50%                 87% of precincts in
• District 32: Dan Kapanke (GOP) 45%% vs Jennifer Shilling (Dem) 55%    82% of precincts in

Update: told AP called D 18 for King. Seems awful close to be calling that one … but if so it’s a race for control between Darling and Pasch. Holy Crap!

Democrats need to win at least three of these elections against the GOP incumbant to gain control of the WI Senate. And even in the event democrats do take three senate seats, there are two recall elections against incumbant democrats in the weeks ahead. Winning three seats — in districts mostly drawn by the GOP and held by them for years — and not losing any next month is a tall, tallorder.

 

Wow, the dems took two seats and scared the pants off a couple more incumbents. I guess I’ve grown pessimistic in my old age.

Little did you know, the whole time the fossil fuel industry and their various enablers were busy as bees deflecting and denying the growing consensus of climate science, they actually had a noble motive. Just like an iceberg, the majority of this brilliant scheme was invisible to the uninformed eye.

Satire aside, this might actually work if things get really dire:

A French engineer has come up with an unusual solution for drought: Towing icebergs down from polar regions to solve chronic water shortages in the Horn of Africa, where more than 12 million people are currently living without clean water. George Mougin, 86, first proposed the idea as an engineering graduate in the early 1970s. Together with Saudi prince Muhammad al-Faisal and polar explorer Paul-Emile Victor, Mougin formed the company Iceberg Transportation International …

Satire back on: It’s all incredibly obvious, isn’t it Mandrake? Fluoridated water sapping and impurifying the precious bodily fluids of billions? Western industry loads carbon into atmosphere, global warming creates polar amplification and the cryosphere warms dramatically. The Arctic ice cap shrinks, southern ocean currents change, massive bergs approaching the size of small states calve off, Greenland glaciers quicken their relentless march to the sea adding more floating reservoirs of pure fresh, unfluoridated water. And, when the shifting climate becomes severe enough to start depriving the world’s poorest nations of that sweet elixir of life, when the rainwater is turned off and the fresh water that once drained freely into crystal clear streams from magnificent glacier and snowy mountaintop disappears, philanthropists step in and save them with the water ice finally liberated by our mighty sages of industry from their ancient icy fortresses of solitude.

And we science minded, reality-based writers and researchers and activists had to try to screw it all up by revealing the rise in global temperatures before the plan could mature. Shame on us.

And what’s more, she loves me (Warning, Politico link ahead):

Rick Perry intends to use a speech in South Carolina on Saturday to make clear that he’s running for president, POLITICO has learned. According to two sources familiar with the plan, the Texas governor will remove any doubt about his White House intentions during his appearance at a RedState conference in Charleston. It’s uncertain whether Saturday will mark a formal declaration …

Well of course it’s not the announcement. This is the announcement that an announcement may be coming. The next announcement will announce the date of the announcement, the announcement after that will confirm or postpone the announcement date. This is how things are done politically these days. It gets maximum press and maximum contributions.

NASA just completed awarding 30 contracts for cutting edge and, in some cases, risky research projects. NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, or NIAC, handed out the $100,000 grants for visionary proposals covering everything from power systems to the growing problem of debris in space:

The winning proposals were chosen from a field of hundreds based on their technical merit and potential impact, as well as their scientific team and cost estimates. “The ones being selected today really were the cream of the crop,” said Jay Falker, NIAC program executive. He said they involved new concepts that hadn’t been investigated before by NASA.

I think one of the coolest is the 3-D “printer” concept:

3-D printers that could crank out parts for spacecraft and space stations – from wrenches to screws – all while in orbit is becoming one step closer to reality. A company called Made in Space has completed a successful testing period of two 3-D printers on multiple NASA flights, with a scaled-down wrench becoming the first-ever tool printed in partial zero gravity.

We had a strange, strange problem here at FreeThoughtBlogs over the last day and a half. The spirit of a dead site rose again to haunt our new server. I believe Blogfather Ed has exorcised most of the poltergeists from our virtual home now. Remaining spectres could cause posting to be a bit light today and tomorrow. My apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. 

 

And now for a quick test post, from the always delightful Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly:

Bachmann, who apparently wasn’t kidding, believes raising the debt ceiling — i.e., authorizing the Treasury to pay our bills — caused the downgrade. She also doesn’t understand what a “blank check” is — how can it be blank and be worth $2.4 trillion? — or the effect it had on the process. The fact is, nothing contributed more to the downgrade than the approach adopted by Michele Bachmann and people who share her truly ridiculous worldview.

It’s funny, it’s witty, and it’s true. One can envision Bachmann and her willfully ignorant ilk saying thewill soon speak of the 5000 countless lives lost in Obama’s Iraq adventure.

From Dynamics of Cats, a great article on what happens to planets as a star leaves the main sequences and shrinks to a white dwarf:

if the mass loss is sudden, “impulsive”, the planet generally goes onto an eccentric orbit, possibly hyperbolic for mass loss of ~50% or more, depending on the original eccentricity of the orbit and where the planet is along the orbit. This scenario was considered by Blaauw in 1961 and is often referred to as a “Blaauw kick”.

Under the right conditions, planets orbiting large stars could eventually break free of their shrinking primary. Hard to know how often that happens. but there are a lot of large stars and our understanding of exo solar systems via Kepler and ground based work indicates planets are common. Over time that could lead to a galaxy with no small number of rogue worlds drifting quietly through interstellar space. I wonder what they might be like?

Remember ‘lo these many blogs years ago, when mere second guessing of a President or a national policy was treason? My how the times have changed. Today, the greatest self-described red, white and blue patriots are positively giddy at the prospect of shutting down the US government or wounding its credit. From Mother Jones:

You’d think that was the case if you were in the crowd at a tea party rally in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, on Sunday morning. The Tea Party Express rolled into that northeastern city as part of its tour to bolster the six GOP state senators facing recall elections on Tuesday. But the most shocking moment of the event wasn’t the vitriol spouted by tea party leaders, which has dominated news of the tour stops in recent days. Instead it was the cheers that erupted when one of the Tea Party Express’ speakers described the recent downgrade as the tea party’s fault.

According to the debut of the Science Channel’s Curiosity program, Did God Create the Universe?, the answer is no. The program ends the question at an appropriate place, the edge of human understanding defined by the Big Bang. That scientific finale, at least for now, notes that if there was no time before the Big Bang, then there was no time in which an antecedent could have existed.

The program begin with a quick jog through the classic work of Anaxagoras (I think) who inferred not just the spherical shape of the earth and the moon and the cause of lunar eclipses, but the existence of distant suns in the form of stars. Hurtling past Galileo and Einstein, the one hour show quickly introduced Stephen Hawking and the origin of space-time. Some may think the program was too gentle, but several commercial breaks had spots for a Christian dating service where viewers were told something like “Sometimes you’re waiting on God, when He’s saying it’s your turn to make the next move”. Apparently we can’t clearly discern the handiwork of a creator in the fabric of the cosmos, even with x-ray observatories and infrared detectors painting the earliest universe with particles of invisible light. But he’s real involved in our sex lives … Let’s just say that commercial helped present the show in a more flattering light!

There was a nice panel following the program featuring several cosmologists including my old friend Sean Carroll. Sean, who blogs at Cosmic Variance for Discover Magazine, made some great points, such as “Does your idea of God affect the universe?” He was nice enough to respond via email, telling me, “It was great to see Stephen Hawking on Discovery stating explicitly what many cosmologists believe, that there’s no room for God in explaining the universe.”

The program is worth watching, fun for the whole skeptical family. But for me the panel discuission following was the best part. I give that portion two opposible primate digits up!

An article in the Orlando Sentinel last week provides a great snapshot into the struggle between old space and new. At issue is the SLS, nicknamed the Senate Launch System:

The rocket and capsule that NASA is proposing to return astronauts to the moon would fly just twice in the next 10 years and cost as much as $38 billion, according to internal NASA documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel. The money would pay for a new heavy-lift rocket and Apollo-like crew capsule that eventually could take astronauts to the moon and beyond. But it would not be enough to pay for a lunar landing — or for more than one manned test flight, in 2021.

The SLS is a proposed Saturn V level booster rocket that can loft around a quarter million pounds into low earth orbit and hurl an impressive 100,000 lbs in Trans-lunar injection. A wonderfully convenient, twisting figure eight making close passes over the earth and the moon once a week. But the controlling parameter in space exploration isn’t just development cost, it’s the cost per payload pound. If multiple launches of a smaller rocket can put way more mass into space at the same or lower cost than the SLS, it makes sense to go with it. If that same vehicle could be available for cargo next year, and manned flights in another year or two, all for the cost of a few hundred million a launch, it’s a good deal.

Space Exporation Technologies, or SpaceX, has such a vehicle in late development right now. They developed a smart schedule where the Falcon 9 booster is used to ferry cargo to the International Space Station, allowing SpaceX engineers to tweak the technology at a profit. Within just a few years the Falcon could carry the Dragon capsule; a next generation vehicle far more advanced than the Apollo command spacecraft. Boeing is embarking on a similar program with its Delta rocket series. Half a dozen other companies, traditional and new space, are hot on their heels.

I’m all for rockets, big ones, little ones, medium-sized ones. There’s no end of places for them to go, whether they carry people or probes, a vast solar system beckons. It’s just that the SLS will probably never fly given the bare development schedule, the high cost, and unpredictable future political priorities. It’ll probably die on the vine, death by a thousand budget cuts, just like it’s predecessor, the Ares V and the ambitious Constellation program. Worse, the longer it lasts the more funding it will pull from other NASA programs. The reason it keeps surviving policy changes and the deficit cutting mania so popular in DC is because the SLS delivers one payload immediately: sweet, sweet federal dollars to traditional aerospace and institutional players in the states and districts of protective politicians.