Environmental News

For most of those, even two digits is fantasy. I'll presume that like many display fields, rounding is more of a display thing than a realistic indicator.

 

Orbital parameter figures are known to many digits. For an example, here are the parameters of yesterday's close rock, along with uncertainties expressed as 1-sigmas:
JPL Small-Body Database Browser

These uncertainties should shrink significantly as the number of observations increases and the "data-arc span" gets longer. But sizes are commonly known only from the apparent brightness. For dim objects, this measure is necessarily coarse.

 

Wasn't it 2017 - Earth had its 1st flyby from out Beyond our galaxy?

This Interstellar traveler was roughly 400 yards long. Its trajectory was mapped & I don't recall which Galaxy they speculated that it came from, but after its arrival, our own star hurled it back out in another direction. Photo taken was very blurry, so they took creative license in cleaning it up. It differs from the common asteroid shape too.
.

 

It was merely from beyond our solar system, not from another galaxy. It was moving faster than solar escape speed, that is how we know it was a visitor from elsewhere. But it wasn't moving fast enough to be unbound from our galaxy.

That image is purely artistic license. The actual photos revealed only a single point of light, too small to be resolved into any shape, which varied in brightness over time (rotating object) consistent with something that long and narrow. In theory it could have even been a sphere with a white side and a very dark side, but that would also be quite wild.

 

But if it's not from our solar system, and not from another galaxy, that would mean it came from .........

.

 

A technical advantage of this mode is that it is far easier to isolate the receiver from the transmitter. This isolation is essential for listening to weak signals at the limit of the receiver's thermal electron noise, and is a tough problem when both pieces of equipment are sitting next to each other and sharing the same antenna and feed lines. It gets really hard when the transmitter is sending out megawatt pulses.

 

And Trump has offered Putin some firefighting assistance. Just a couple months after cutting firefighting assistance to the socialist state of Kalifornia.

 

I'll link just one article here, and save the rest for another forum:

LATimes: Trump opens new war with California over wildfires, seeking to slash payments for firefighting on federal land

"As California prepares for what some officials fear will be another devastating fire season, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Forest Service are withholding reimbursements that state fire agencies say are owed for battling wildfires on federal lands last year.

Instead of fulfilling California’s full $72-million reimbursement request, the Forest Service conducted an audit of the California Fire Assistance Agreement and now accuses the state of overbilling.
...
Under the current assistance agreement, which runs from 2015 to 2020, the state calculates those costs by averaging the salaries, benefits and other indirect expenses tied to the work of firefighters, according to Cal OES Fire Chief Brian Marshall.
...
As a result of the audit, the federal government is now withholding more than $9 million of the original $72 million reimbursement request. ..."

Apparently Uncle Sam owns 60% of California's forested lands. I don't yet see figures for portions burned or distribution of ignition points.

 

Boeing 737-MAX / MCAS update. After newly strengthened FAA testing, digging far deeper than before (and beyond the entire modern 737 flight history), revealed more serious problems in June, Boeing is fundamentally changing the flight control software architecture to make it more fault tolerant, detecting a greater scope of faults..

Not simply just using both sensors and both flight computers (before the grounding, only one used at a time, alternating between flights) to detect stuck or faulty sensors, but also dual computers monitoring each other to detect other errors such as cosmic ray bit flips in critical places. (The FAA was carefully spear fishing here, not just applying random bit flips.) When they don't agree, rather than causing a dive or uncommanded action, they will take no action and hand control back to the pilots.

Newly stringent FAA tests spur a fundamental software redesign of Boeing’s 737 MAX flight controls

 

Nice charts. Ok, I only read the abstract and looked at the charts.

Hidden in there, levelized cost of offshore wind has really come down the most in the most recent years. Encouraging sign where there is a more steady supply of renewable energy, day or night.



Also, pretty cool:

 

Looking at longer trends, the steep 2010-2012 drop appears to have caught back up to the prior trend.



I have been following solar PV for good while, but don't recall any particular technology improvement at the time.

My best guess is economies of scale. Germany really started deep incentives for solar around that time and U.S. federal solar tax credits were getting going then as well. China, of course took off rapidly with PV deployments as well.