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OSIRIS-REx sample capsule lands in Utah
"Classification and Composition of the Fukang Meteorite
[...]The Fukang meteorite is significant for several reasons. First, it is a rare and exceptionally beautiful example of a pallasite. Second, its composition and structure provide important information about the processes that occurred in the early solar system, specifically about the formation and evolution of asteroids. Finally, the Fukang meteorite’s large size and high quality have made it highly sought-after by collectors, and it has commanded prices upwards of $2 million at auction."
Jeff Foust September 24, 2023
The OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule after landing in the Utah desert Sept. 24. Credit: NASA/Keegan Barber
Updated 6:30 p.m. Eastern with comments from post-landing briefing.
KIHEI, Hawaii — A capsule from a NASA spacecraft landed in the Utah desert Sept. 24, completing a seven-year mission to return samples from a near Earth asteroid.
The sample return capsule from the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx, spacecraft touched down in the Utah Test and Training Range at 10:52 a.m. Eastern. The landing took place 10 minutes after the capsule, traveling at 44,500 kilometers per hour, entered the Earth’s atmosphere, four hours after the capsule separated from the main spacecraft.
The landing took place three minutes earlier than the nominal timeline for the capsule’s return. NASA said on the landing webcast that the main parachute opened at a much higher altitude than planned: about 6,000 meters versus the expected 1,500 meters.
At a post-landing press conference, project officials said that while a drogue parachute did deploy in advance of the main parachute, there was not clear how well the drogue performed, as there was no visual confirmation that the drogue had inflated.
“Something in our sequence may or may not have behaved itself exactly the way we expected it to, but the subsequent things in the sequence made up for it,” said Tim Priser, chief engineer for deep space exploration at Lockheed Martin, which built the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. “At the end of the day, when that main chute deployed, it basically corrected anything that may have happened ahead of it.”
The capsule landed about eight kilometers from the center of the final landing ellipse, which extended 12 by 30 kilometers, said Mike Moreau, deputy project manager for the mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. That was not unexpected, he said, as forecasted atmospheric variations predicted a landing to the east of the center.
The capsule itself was in good condition after landing, said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, who was part of the team who recovered the capsule. “There was no sign of any damage or distortions of the heat shield and backshell that we could see,” he said, beyond the expected charring of the exterior from reentry. “We pretty much stuck the landing.”
The recovery team took the capsule to a temporary clean room at the Dugway Proving Ground for initial work to remove the capsule’s heat shield and backshell. Eileen Stansbery, chief scientist at the Johnson Space Center, said there was no sign in that initial work that any of the asteroid samples collected had leaked out of the canister containing them inside the capsule.
A team that included Dante Lauretta (right), principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx, examines the sample return capsule after landing. Credit: NASA/Keegan Barber
NASA launched OSIRIS-REx in September 2016 .. https://spacenews.com/atlas-5-launches-nasa-asteroid-sample-return-mission/ .. on an Atlas 5, and the spacecraft arrived at Bennu in 2018. After studying the asteroid’s surface from orbit, scientists selected a location on the surface to perform a “touch and go” maneuver where the spacecraft would descend the surface, briefly plunging a sampling device into the surface to collect material from the asteroid before retreating.
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[Insert: Two posted by Mark (F6) in 2017
OSIRIS-REx Views the Earth During Flyby
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2017/osiris-rex-views-the-earth-during-flyby
UA scientists thrilled with OSIRIS-REx photos of Earth as it heads to asteroid
http://tucson.com/news/science/ua-scientists-thrilled-with-osiris-rex-photos-of-earth-as/article_1a2ad85c-3342-5530-9757-471aed9a98a5.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d3tg5iz0IWLuCYMc9lbWdtFapWZ0M?ned=us&hl=en
By my shaky count numbers 77 and 78 down in his post headed - The Theft of Our Values
With many God yes or no videos .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=135270144]
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That sampling maneuver took place in October 2020 .. https://spacenews.com/osiris-rex-touches-down-on-asteroid/ .. and worked almost too well, gathering so much material from the surface of Bennu that engineers accelerated the stowage of the sample container into the return capsule .. https://spacenews.com/osiris-rex-safely-stores-asteroid-sample/ .. after images showed some material leaking into space.
Project officials said that while they were not able to measure how much material was in the sample canister, they believed they far exceeded the mission requirement of 60 grams of material. Lauretta said at a Sept. 22 briefing that the mission estimated the capsule carried 250 grams of material, plus or minus 101 grams. “Even at the low end of that end estimate, we’re well above our mission requirements,” he said.
The sample container will be transported to a curation facility at the Johnson Space Center Sept. 25. Once there, scientists will begin a meticulous process to remove the samples to avoid contamination and allow scientific study to begin. NASA cautioned, though, that the effort may be put on hold if there is a federal government shutdown .. https://spacenews.com/nasa-ready-for-osiris-rex-sample-return/ .. because of a lapse of funding on Oct. 1.
Lauretta said at the post-landing briefing that some initial analysis of samples could begin as soon as Sept. 26, when the canister is opened and some dust on its surface is collected.
The main OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which performed a maneuver 20 minutes after capsule separation to safely by by Earth, will now begin an extended mission called OSIRIS-APEX. It will travel to another near Earth asteroid, Apophis, arriving shortly after the asteroid makes an Earth flyby in 2029.
Lauretta will remain focused on the sample analysis of a mission he has been involved with for nearly two decades, when Lockheed Martin and the University of Arizona proposed partnering on an asteroid sample return mission. “It was like meeting an old friend that I hadn’t seen for a long time,” he said of encountering the capsule after landing. “I knew we had done it. We had pulled it off.”
https://spacenews.com/osiris-rex-sample-capsule-lands-in-utah/
Technological marvels. Amazing isn't it. Huge kudos to all involved.
The CDC didn’t say vaccinated people are more at risk of a new COVID variant than the unvaccinated
"FDA clears new Covid boosters: 5 things to know
The new shots are expected to be available later this week, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention signs off. "
Misrepresentation continues. See
"What has not been made widely known is that the COVID shots are associated with negative effectiveness of infection, meaning a vaccinated person is more likely to become infected and transmit the virus to others compared to an unboosted or unvaccinated person."
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172922433
Clarification of that misrepresentation here:
A medical worker receives his third dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine shot at a vaccination center in the
complex of the Tokyo Skytree, the tallest structure in Japan, Thursday, Jan. 6, 2022, in Sumida ward of Tokyo.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn’t say vaccinated people are more likely to get a
new COVID-19 variant than those who are unvaccinated, as some online claim. Rather, it said the variant
may be more likely to affect people with existing immunity than previous variants.
(AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
By Melissa Goldin
Published 8:12 AM GMT+10, August 29, 2023
CLAIM: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that a new COVID-19 variant is more contagious among vaccinated people than those who are unvaccinated.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. In a risk assessment summary .. https://www.cdc.gov/respiratory-viruses/whats-new/covid-19-variant.html .. published Aug. 23, the CDC wrote that the BA.2.86 variant may be more likely to infect people with existing immunity to COVID-19, either from vaccinations or prior infections, than previous variants. It did not say that vaccinated people are at a higher risk than the unvaccinated.
THE FACTS: Social media users have in recent days misrepresented the public health agency’s guidance on BA.2.86, after the new variant emerged in mid-August.
“BREAKING: CDC says new COVID variant is more contagious among vaccinated people than those unvaccinated,” reads a post shared on Instagram and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
As of Monday, one tweet that shared the post had received more than 15,000 likes and more than 7,500 shares.
But this is a distortion of the CDC’s current understanding of BA.2.86. The agency has not said that those who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 are more likely than unvaccinated people by the new variant. Rather, it said those who’ve been vaccinated or previously infected may be more susceptible than they were to prior variants.
“Based on what CDC knows now, the large number of mutations in this new variant raises concern that BA.2.86 may be more capable of causing infection in people who have previously had COVID-19 or who have received COVID-19 vaccines,” the agency said in a statement, bolding the word “or.”
Those making the false claim are misrepresenting the CDC’s Aug. 23 risk assessment .. https://www.cdc.gov/respiratory-viruses/whats-new/covid-19-variant.html#:~:text=Last%20week%2C%20a%20new%20variant,of%20SARS%2DCoV%2D2. .. for the variant, which said: “BA.2.86 may be more capable of causing infection in people who have previously had COVID-19 or who have received COVID-19 vaccines.” It elaborated near the end of the assessment that “the large number of mutations in this variant raises concerns of greater escape from existing immunity from vaccines and previous infections compared with other recent variants.”
In its statement, the agency said that it is still closely monitoring the variant but that it is “too soon to know the real-world impacts on immunity” and encouraged people to stay up-to-date on their COVID-19 vaccines.
As of Aug. 23, BA.2.86 had been reported in the U.S., U.K., Denmark, South Africa and Israel, according to the CDC.
___
This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-covid-variant-vaccinated-unvaccinated-cdc-895117372555
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COVID-19: The Unvaccinated Pose a Risk to the Vaccinated
By D'Angelo Gore
Posted on September 21, 2021 | Updated on September 25, 2021
Q: How do people who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19 pose a risk to people who have been vaccinated?
A: An unvaccinated person who is infected with COVID-19 poses a much greater risk to others who are also unvaccinated. But vaccines are not 100% effective, so there is a chance that an unvaccinated person could infect a vaccinated person — particularly the vulnerable, such as elderly and immunocompromised individuals.
FULL QUESTION
How can the unvaccinated possibly pose a threat to the vaccinated? How does that work? What is the risk exactly?
FULL ANSWER
The question above was not asked by a SciCheck reader; it was posed by Tucker Carlson on his Fox News show on Sept. 13.
At the time, Carlson was discussing the Sept. 9 speech in which President Joe Biden announced that he had directed the Labor Department to develop a temporary emergency rule for businesses with 100 or more employees that would require workers to be fully vaccinated or be tested for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus at least once a week.
“The bottom line: We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers,” Biden said. “We’re going to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by increasing the share of the workforce that is vaccinated in businesses all across America.”
Carlson argued that Biden’s proposal was about controlling Americans — not about public health — and questioned why the vaccinated needed to be protected.
“Virtually every sentence of the speech reinforced a single point again and again. And it was this: Your fellow Americans are dangerous to you,” Carlson said in the segment, clips of which have received around 1 million views on Facebook and Instagram. “They could kill you. And that includes your family, it includes your friends, it includes the people you sit next to at work. All of these people are threats to you and only the Biden administration can save you.”
“Think about that for a moment,” Carlson continued. “Does it make sense? If the vaccine works — and they assure us adamantly that it does work and they punish us if we question how well it works — then how can the unvaccinated possibly pose a threat to the vaccinated? How? What exactly is the risk exactly to the vaccinated from the unvaccinated? Joe Biden didn’t tell us the answer. He didn’t tell us because he doesn’t know. No one knows. There is no answer.”
It’s not the first time that Carlson has cast doubt on the effectiveness of the vaccines. But experts told FactCheck.org that unvaccinated people with COVID-19 are a potential threat to people who have been fully immunized against the disease.
“When people ask me, ‘What’s the worst thing that anti-vaccine people say,’ it’s when they say, ‘What do you care what I do? You’re vaccinated,'” Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us in a phone interview.
Offit said that thinking is based, in part, on the incorrect assumption that the vaccines are 100% effective at preventing an infection or illness, which is not true of any vaccine.
The Risk
Although all of the vaccines approved and authorized for use in the United States are effective at preventing symptomatic disease, so-called “breakthrough” cases of COVID-19 after vaccination are to be expected — perhaps even more so now because of the more contagious delta variant of the virus.
More - https://www.factcheck.org/2021/09/covid-19-the-unvaccinated-pose-a-risk-to-the-vaccinated/
GOP Impeachment Inquiry - Luckovich Cartoon
Kids Are Not Born Selfish. Here's How To Keep Them That Way.
Yep, that pretty well sums him up. As we all know, we are al products of our early environment. Then we mature differently. That also depends to different extents on the different environments we each inhabit. Trump at least accepts he has not matured much since first grade.
Experts share their advice for parents who want to raise altruistic, empathetic children.
By Caroline Bologna
Jul 28, 2020, 06:01 PM EDT
Thanasis Zovoilis via Getty Images
Our kids have had an exceptionally bad hand dealt to them the past few months. They’ve been unwittingly separated from their entire social structure, their classrooms and all sense of normalcy. And parents have certainly struggled (to put it mildly) to keep up. So how can parents use this time at home ? whatever that looks like ? to teach their children other important life skills and foster their emotional intelligence? Enter EQ Not IQ, a package from HuffPost Parenting.
Many believe that humans are inherently selfish ..
https://iep.utm.edu/psychego/#:~:text=Psychological%20egoism%20is%20the%20thesis,can%20have%20ultimately%20altruistic%20motives. , but recent psychological research suggests this is not necessarily the case ..
https://michigantoday.umich.edu/2020/07/23/children-show-altruism-at-a-young-age/ .
University of Michigan researcher Felix Warneken has spent 17 years studying toddlers, and he’s learned that kids display altruistic behaviors from a very young age.
“What we’ve found is kids have a spontaneous biologically based tendency to care about others,” he told HuffPost. “They help early on, and they do that spontaneously without being asked, offered a reward or observed by their parents. This makes us believe that human nature is not purely selfish, but we’re equipped with some altruistic inclinations that can be elicited.”
Still, adults play a role in guiding kids as they grow older and learn to balance their sense of altruism and personal interests. So how can parents and caregivers support these natural tendencies and raise altruistic children? Read on for 12 expert-backed tips.
Talk about feelings.
“‘Altruism,’ defined as care and devotion to the service of others, starts with a basis of ‘empathy,’ or the ability to understand the feelings of another,” Aila Malik, a “kindness activist” and author, told HuffPost.
To help kids develop empathy, parents should emphasize emotional intelligence .. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ways-raise-emotionally-intelligent-kids_l_5f1064e7c5b619afc3fe45c1 . Teach children to identify their feelings and process them. Create space for everyone in your family to feel comfortable expressing and discussing feelings in everyday life. Make EQ as much of a priority .. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teach-kids-emotional-intelligence-eq_l_5f04b938c5b63a72c339bcd2 .. as IQ from an early age.
“Debrief ‘big feelings’ so that they can remember what it feels like to be stretched and stressed,” advised Malik. “Talking about the feelings can sometimes help them to identify those moments in other people.”
Share different perspectives.
As kids develop emotional intelligence, they become better at putting themselves in others’ shoes and understanding other experiences and perspectives. Parents can promote this skill through meaningful conversations.
“At any age, having a conversation about a real-life social conflict is one of the best ways to teach empathy and selflessness,” explained clinical psychologist and author Jenny Yip. “Helping your child process that conflict will allow them to be able to see more than one side of the story. If your child saw a classmate being teased, help your child understand how that classmate felt by talking about it.”
“You have to be able to model the ability to think outside of yourself
and think about the welfare of others.”
- Clinical psychologist and author Jenny Yip
She added, “Ask your child questions: ‘How would you feel if that was you?’ When I’m working with my own kids, I always ask: ‘What can you do to help your brother feel better?’”
Keep it age-appropriate.
Keep these conversations developmentally appropriate and don’t fret too much if your children don’t automatically want to let others play with their toys.
“For preschool-aged and kindergarten-aged children, the concept of being separate from others is just developing and the emphasis could simply be sharing and being fair,” said neuropsychologist and author Amy Serin. “Conversations around simple daily life ? like taking a lot from a bowl of food at the dinner table when there are three more people who might want it ? can go a long way into developing awareness of other people’s needs and wants without giving everything up that the child wants.”
Model what you want to see.
[...]
Acknowledge a balance.
Serin emphasized that there’s a middle ground between pure selfishness and pure selflessness.
“Parents should not demand that their children give up everything for others because that could lead to co-dependent behaviors in adulthood such as denying that you have needs and giving up too much for someone else,” she said.
“In other words, taking turns and allowing everyone to have a fair amount of time on a swing would be an example of that healthy balance,” she added. “There is a balance of meeting your own needs and being kind and generous towards others as children mature into adulthood.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-to-raise-unselfish-altruistic-kids_l_5f1f3ae6c5b69fd4731053b5
In reading that the first bit about talking about emotions i couldn't help but think, huh, none of that was encouraged in our family. My father was one who didn't express his feelings, as probably more fathers were in those days. Also, his "if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all" early became worse than hearing a hungry mosquito close at hand.
The 'put yourself into others shoes', to me seems the best and easiest part of it all.
