Kate Rauner's Blog, page 12

Here’s a reminder that space is still risky #NASA #ISS #Space

Last week, the Soyuz capsule docked at the International Space Station sprung a coolant leak. The cause seems to be uncertain, but could be from impact by a micrometeor or fleck of space junk. The astronauts are safe and the ISS mission is proceeding, but…

The Soyuz is a complicated beast in three modules

Roscosmos said a panel of experts would determine later this month whether the Soyuz MS-22 capsule could be safely used by the crew for its planned return to Earth or if it should be discarded and replaced… The capsule was scheduled to carry some of the space station’s crew back to Earth in March as part of regular rotations. apnews.com

Loss of coolant raised the capsule’s temperature to 30 degrees Celsius (86 F) and even higher in the equipment section until experts found a work-around, but what might happen during a re-entry? So far, the Soyuz control systems look okay.

But this is a reminder that even such a routine, ho-hum space mission as the ISS is dangerous. When astronauts move farther away from Earth, to the Moon or someday to Mars, they’ll also be farther away from possible rescue missions. That’s a sobering thought as NASA plans Artemis II, the next step in returning people to the Moon.

Are you a mosquito magnet? Plus books for the holidays, scifi and more #amreading #ebooks

Happy Holidays! Looking for good reads to get you through the season? Scroll down for book offers… but first… mosquitoes.

Summer seems far away for me, but I ran into an explanation for why you may attract mosquitoes and their annoying bites. It’s got to do with your skin glands, and it’s mostly genetic.

Warmer skin attracts mosquitoes, so stay cool. Certain foods and vitamins are rumored to repel the little beggars, but the evidence isn’t convincing.

Still, how foods interact with your personal chemistry may be unique, so if you’ve found a solution, let us all know in the comments. I’ll rely on the drier climate of my home in the American Southwest, and on a bottle of DEET.

Read a nice summary of the mosquito evidence by clicking here, and good luck in your summer excursions.

Now, on to the books!

Despite the cartoon image, these are not for little kids – they’re for you. Kids aren’t the only ones who have fun. Get them fast! This Story Origin promotion ends January 15th! Click here now!

Head into space with these stories. Get them fast! This Story Origin promotion ends January 15th! Click here now!

Tons of free and discounted ebooks – all genres! Share this one with friends everywhere. Check out the complete Smashwords End of Year Sale catalog – click here now

For you, who scrolled all the way down, here’s a special offer. 25% off the usual kindle price for two days only! December 15 and 16.

Join a colony on Saturn’s deadly moon, but be warned – survival is not their destiny. Click here now.

Thanks for reading! Give the world a gift this season, and help others find good reads – post a review.

Enjoy the outdoors while winter chills those pesky mosquitoes

Artemis 1 isn’t the only Mission to the Moon #NASA #moon

Artist’s rendering of the Lunar Flashlight in action.

Giant rockets and media grabbing flights aren’t the only missions getting us ready for the Moon. The Lunar Flashlight launched Sunday, December 11. About the size of a briefcase, the little craft will never return to Earth.

The Lunar Flashlight made a record of its own. Instead of hydrazine, it launched using a less toxic propellant that is safer to transport and store. One of the mission’s goals is to demonstrate this technology for future use.

Another goal is to use a reflectometer equipped with four lasers to study the distribution of surface water ice on the Moon for potential use by future astronauts.

The plan to return humans to the Moon is starting to sound very serious. Read more about the Lunar Flashlight and how to follow the mission by clicking here.

Until boots hit the lunar regolith, you need science fiction to visit the Moon. Hurry up and read this story before reality overtakes fiction:

Newly minted pilot Winnie Bravo is brash, reckless, and more than a little annoying as she sets out to prove herself. Capturing a stealth probe that’s destroying satellites seems the perfect way to demonstrate her talents, but the mysterious craft escapes. Now, someone at her corporation’s lunar base is willing to kill to stop her. Click here now and join Winnie in Earth orbit.

Artemis 1 is coming home #NASA #Artemis1

Artemis 1 has flown a terrific test mission – no crew for the test, but this is the ship that will carry astronauts back to the Moon.

The Artemis 1 capsule will splash down off the coast of Baja California around 12:40 p.m. ET on Sunday (Dec. 11) wrapping up its nearly 26-day deep-space trek with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California. space.com

As you can imagine, NASA has been testing every aspect of the mission for years. Here’s a test of the capsule’s recovery, with the nice weather I am wishing to NASA. What we’re all expecting on December 11th.

We’ll be closer to the Moon than ever after this recovery. Perhaps, someday, like science fiction predicts, the Moon will be Earth’s Eighth Continent.

Your Mother Could Also Be Your Uncle #genetics #lgbtq #biology

It looked so simple in my high school textbook: X and Y chromosomes, XX for females and XY for males. But nature won’t cooperate. As genetic testing becomes more common, both for fun and for medical reasons like organ transplants, science is discovering reality is more complex.

Chimeras get their name from ancient mythologies about animal/human mashups. This image is neo-Hittite.

In recent decades, DNA studies have opened a new view on the messy biology of human reproduction… a genetic shuffle that can take a complicated course. That leads to outcomes ranging from triplets to miscarriages (which are thought to result from DNA abnormalities in about half of all known cases). One of those curious paths might lead to chimerism, where in an unknown number of cases, genes from a “vanishing twin” end up mixed in with those of a surviving sibling. grid.news

One case comes from a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Once mistakes or contamination in the lab were ruled out in a paternity test, the surprise remained:

The mother had an XY genetic signature predominate in her blood and saliva samples, confusing the paternity test. But her hair and cheek cells showed a preponderance of XX cells. This kind of mixed assortment of chromosomes in different types of tissues, which grow separately starting early in pregnancy, is a signature of chimerism. The appearance of that Y chromosome from a lost twin and other chimeric genes were what had confused the paternity test result. grid.news

In that case, the father was confirmed to be the father… so what to call the extra Ys? Uncle?

Data is limited, but studies so far suggest as many as 30% of us singletons may have had a twin that disappeared before birth. Perhaps 10% of us contain tissues with different genetics than the rest of our body. Sometimes, the genes create stripes of differently pigmented skin, but usually, the truth is hidden inside. In the past, chances are, no one would ever have known, and human ova and sperm can pass the unusual genetics on to a child. Your mother could, indeed, also be you aunt or your uncle.

Thanks to Don Vergano for his article in grid-news.

Find more on chimeras in plants, animals, and humans in Wikipedia.

Sometimes, I Can’t Resist an Inside Joke #author #amwriting

But I’m brave… or foolish… so pretty-please read my books… click here

Thanks for the meme, Neil D’Silva

Moon will Occult Mars – unaided eye astronomy #astronomy #citizenscientist

I’m just getting this out in time! The Moon will occult Mars on December 8, 2022, and most of the USA, Canada, and western Europe will see it, weather permitting. Wednesday, 07 Dec 2022 at 21:13 MST (04:13 UTC). There are many articles if you search the internet.

[Described from Washington State.] It will begin with the disappearance of Mars behind the Moon at 19:35 MST in the eastern sky at an altitude of 28.5 degrees. Its reappearance will be visible at 20:40 MST at an altitude of 41.4 degrees. in-the-sky

The Moon won’t be hard to find, and Mars looks like a bright reddish star, so you’ll need no fancy equipment or special training.

What does this event mean? Well, nothing, really. Planets and moons in our solar system all orbit, roughly but not exactly, in the same plane around the Sun. From Earth’s vantage point, they move through groups of stars we call the zodiac, and sometimes they appear to be very close or one may obscure another. That’s an optical effect, like when someone walks in front of the TV when you’re trying to watch. Their movement doesn’t effect the TV in any way, or Mars, in the case of this occultation.

I enjoy star gazing with my unaided eye. Laying out on the deck, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for meteors to flash by, keeping track of planets and phases of the Moon, and even spotting satellites. Hardly the cutting edge of science, but satisfying. Enjoyable. Fun. A very special occultation is a total solar eclipse, and I’ve traveled three times in my life to observe one. Outstanding.

The event also brings two of my science fiction book series together: Winnie Bravo, Space Pilot chases a mysterious probe around the Moon, and Colony on Mars explores a near-future settlement on the Red Planet. Check them out along with my other books on my web site: Click here to go to Kate Rauner Author

Speed of Light – I’ve never seen it explained this way #physics #science

The speed of light in a vacuum is a constant – a serious constant that never varies no matter your frame of reference. I can write the words, but the concept is hard to grapple with. My intuition has been crafted here on the surface of a pretty little planet where there is always something that can go faster than something else. But forget intuition.

The most common explanation for this cosmic speed limit is that as an object goes faster and faster, its mass increases. And this explanation makes some sense. After all, it’s harder to push a mountain than a pebble. If the mass of objects become infinite as they get closer to the speed of light, it makes sense that you cannot break that speed barrier — it would take infinite energy to accomplish. BigThink.com

I can read those words too… but… mass gets bigger?

Einstein, the year he completed his dissertation and published four groundbreaking papers. The guy was quite something.

How about this: You can move through space, like intuition tells you. And you move through time (though you can’t control that rate, not as a clock measures it.) Einstein said, any object is traveling through both space and time: through spacetime. Part of its journey is through space and part is through time. That’s not so hard.

When the theory was pushed harder, what was revealed was that every object travels through spacetime at a single speed — the speed of light. From one of Einstein’s professors, mathematician Hermann Minkowski

The maths are beyond my abilities, but… okay. “If you move at fixed speed, you can move in any direction you want, but in no direction can you move faster than that fixed speed. And it’s identical in spacetime.”

Objects move in spacetime at the speed of light. A stationary object isn’t moving through space at all, so the object is moving through time at the speed of light. Furthermore, an object moving through space at the speed of light has no speed left over to move through time.

Thus, the absolute maximum speed an object could move through space or time individually is also the speed of light. Note that this idea also explains the weird features of relativity, like time slowing down for an object as its speed gets faster and faster. An object traveling more through space is traveling less through time.

So, that’s it. The real reason you cannot travel through space faster than light is because you are always traveling through spacetime at the speed of light. The best you can do is transport all your effort into moving through space; but, once you have pushed all your motion in the space direction, there just isn’t any more speed left. BigThink.com

I’ve quoted a lot from the article because I’m still absorbing the “wow.” Now, I need time to let it settle into my brain (at the speed of light.) Of course, I still don’t know why there is a limit to the speed of light, but (hand-wave) that’s just somewhere in the math. Thanks to Don Lincoln for his article.

Scope on the Skies – great #astronomy resource #homeschooling

Over thirty years ago, a fine science teacher named Bob Riddle began writing a column about astronomy for the middle school journal, Science Scope Magazine. Following retirement, Bob just couldn’t stop. You’ll find a directory of all his articles here: 32+ Years of Scope on the Skies.

I especially enjoyed Bob’s latest edition: Where on Earth is Mars? Various organizations have created Mars-analogues to prepare for real-life trips to the Red Planet. Research crews have visited the Atacama Desert in the South American country of Chile, Devon Island’s Haughton crater, Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys, and more. Find these locations on your Earth globe. (You have one, don’t you? I have two You can also search on the internet. Which Mars analogue site would you like to visit?)

Before astronauts travel to Mars, they’ll need to know how to grow food, extract fuel, and build habitats.

Constructing with locally sourced materials like sandstone, and the use of the 3-D printer, would eliminate the need to ship a lot of construction materials and save launch weight as well. What would this be like, to print in 3-D the things you need? Coincidentally, SciFi author Kate Rauner has written a five book series about colonizing Mars with a major part of the colonization and its future dependent on the use of 3-D printing technology. Bob Riddle

You can find your own free PDF copy of Bob’s November/December article, Where on Earth is Mars, by clicking here.

Thanks, Bob, for calling out my Mars colonization series. Until humans set boots on the Red Planet, we’ll rely on scifi to take the journey. My settlers must survive on the Mars that science is showing us as they try to build a new home for themselves and humanity. Hurry and read the books before real-life overtakes fiction.

Check out the first book in the series, Glory on Mars, by clicking here. Available for purchase in all major digital formats from your favorite online stores, and as a paperback. See you on Mars!

Science Fiction eBook Deals Are Here #BlackFriday #SmallBusinessSaturday #scifibooks

25NOV2022: Happy Black Friday! The traditional start to the Xmas holiday season, followed the next day by Small Business Saturday, and you can’t get an author-business much smaller than me.

Black Friday lures shoppers off the sofa with discounts, but get my latest space adventure without moving more than your clicking thumbs, and the kindle ebook is FREE. FREE on Saturday too. Hurry and claim your copy now before the turkey leftovers lure you away. My Canadian friends have a real advantage. They celebrated Thanksgiving in mid-October and have their wits about them today.

Claim your free copy of Winnie Bravo, Space Pilot: Lunar Base now, and check out my other science fiction books too.

eBooks priced as stocking stuffers and print editions too. Great for the holiday Kindle Reader you may be giving or receiving. Need a last minute gift? No supply chain delays for eBooks.

Find the links below, and scroll to the bottom for a stunning collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories by four award-winning authors – me and three special friends. The eBook is FREE.

A young pilot is brash, reckless, and more than a little annoying as she sets out to prove herself. Capturing a stealth probe that’s destroying satellites seems the perfect way to demonstrate her talents, but the mysterious craft escapes. Now, someone at her corporation’s lunar base is willing to kill to stop her. CLICK HERE NOW

Find more of my books with easy links:

Colonize Mars in our near-future, join a cult on Saturn’s moon Titan, and gallivant through near-Earth-space with a newly minted pilot. Science fiction and fantasy, full novels and short stories. Click here now.

As promised, here’s an award-winning collection of short science fiction and fantasy:

FREE eBook available in all major digital formats from your favorite online stores. Click here now.

Happy Holidays to everyone around the world!

Krampusnacht

St. Nicholas Day

Feast of the Immaculate Conception

Hanukkah

St. Lucia Day

Santa Lucia

Las Posadas

Winter Solstice

Festivus

Christmas

Kwanzaa

Osaka

New Year’s Eve

Best wishes for 2023!