Cheese Ends, 20230918

Welcome to another addition of cheese ends.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

Water on the Moon

 

The moon has hematite.

 

What’s interesting about this is hematite is a form of rust—a product of iron interacting with oxygen and water. The moon is airless. How did it get there?

 

Chandrayaan-1 has a Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument (adorably known as M3.) that detects the spectra that reflects off minerals. It detected the spectra of minerals on the poles of the Moon. In so doing, scientist Shuai Li found the signature of iron oxide in the form of hematite. Without air, hematite on the Moon is... unexpected. (Cue Spock raising his eyebrow.)

 

The model proposed by LI and others was that oxygen from Earth’s upper atmosphere was drawn out by the Earth’s trailing magnetic fields, the magnetotail. Then, when the orbit of the Moon intersected this area, oxygen was deposited, driving the formation of hematite. However, hydrogen from the same source was also deposited. Hydrogen inhibits hematite formation. It turns out the magnetotail inhibits hydrogen during certain phases of the Moons orbit, allowing oxygen to be deposited directly. 

 

But there also needs to be water. It’s considered that fast moving dust particles could dislodge water particles could release water deposited on the surface, freeing them to interact with the oxygen and the iron to form hematite. Or, possibly, the energy of the protons of the solar wind could have a role. More research was needed.

 

This was back in 2020.

 

In September 2023, the same team discovered water formation in the same magnetotail where the oxygen was coming from. The high energy electrons of the magnetotail allow formation of water molecules directly, without any contribution from the solar wind. When the Moon passes into the magnetotail, it is shielding from the solar wind but not from solar photons, giving an the magnetotail an opportunity to deposit water on the Moon’s surface.

 

Chandrayaan-3

 

The big news recently is India’s landing of a surface probe and rover on the south pol of the Moon. This is terrific for a few reasons. For one thing, human beings actually landed a probe on the south pole: something that has never been done. For another, this brings the number of countries that have successfully landed any working probe on the Moon’s surface to four: China, USA, Russia, and India.

 

Spreading the wealth is a good thing.

 

Chandrayaan-3 recently completed is 14-day mission—the length of a lunar day—and the data is still being digested. I looked for more information and found scraps so I’ll delay a deeper discussion until there is more data forthcoming.

 

China Expands its Deep Space Network

 

It takes big, sensitive radio telescopes to keep in contact with probes and human operations in space. Radio isn’t that great at carrying information compared to higher frequencies and the transmissions are limited by the equipment sent. 

 

China has been using its Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) network to both track its material and to investigate black holes, the dynamics of our galaxies, and the like. The VLBI technique tracks receipt of signals in time. In this way, a virtual telescope of the size of the separation between the telescopes can be achieved. 

 

I want to talk about this for a moment. Not the achievements of India and China directly, but the way we’re stovepiping the process. Each country has its own space process. There’s a fair amount of cooperation that can be helped or hindered by the country of origin. Russia is now cozying up to China and North Korea using its space program as the proverbial carrot. China is largely going its own way. India breaks both ways. Europe mostly cooperates with the USA but not always.

 

Science is based on complex competitive/cooperative relationships. Scientists and teams compete with one another to gain information and cooperate to achieve those goals at the same time. This process utterly depends on the free flow of information. Restrict that flow in the name of national prestige and science itself is restricted.

 

There are also economic issues involved. It took the cooperation of many countries to build the ISS and the Large Hadron Collider. When the USA tried to go it alone with the Superconducting Super Collider, we failed. The cost was too high. We couldn’t get cooperation from other countries because it was promoted as an American product.

 

There’s a limit to how much a single country—USA, China, or any other—can do. No single country is responsible for the gross domestic product of the world. The world GDP is estimated as 105 trillion dollars for 2023. The US component is about 27 trillion and China’s about 19 trillion. As technology becomes more evenly dispersed, that world GDP is going to increase and both the US and China relative contribution will lessen. The cost of the LHC  was about 5.1 billion dollars. That’s not even visible in the world GDP. 

 

True space exploration, the founding of settlements across the solar system, cannot be achieved by a single country. It’s only a way of exporting conflict and failure.

 

Okay. Enough soap boxing.

 

Planet of Iron

 

Gliese 367 is a red dwarf star about 31 light years from Earth. It has been named Ananuca. GL 367 b—or Tahay—is an exoplanet that is orbiting close to it. It has an orbital period of only 7.7 hours. It’s so close it’s tidally locked and its atmosphere has been stripped away. What’s left is a rock that only presents one scarred face to its sun at all times.

 

What’s interesting about it is that it is very dense—nearly twice as dense as Earth—as if it were essentially just an iron core orbiting its sun. 

 

Two hypotheses suggest themselves. It’s possible that Tahay was once a significantly larger planet with an appropriately larger iron core but some cataclysm ripped the outer covering off. Or, Tahay was born in a particularly iron rich section of the initial proto-planetary disk. Planetary origin models don’t handle either scenario all that well.

 

Summer of 2023 Hottest on Record

 

Yeah. Things are getting hotter. More and more energy is being driven into the land, sea, and air. More bigger and stronger storms, deeper droughts, heavier floods, happened. More are coming. When you put more and more energy into a system, that energy gets expressed. I can’t believe this is a surprise to anybody.

 

This is one of those things that have to be done together. Me: I’d like the luxury to send people elsewhere in the solar system rather than being force into it because we burnt our planet to the ground.

 

It amazes me this has become so political. It’s like standing in the crosswalk of a busy street arguing the existence of the car coming to run us down. 

 

State of the Farm: September, 2023. The Problem of Scale.

Be careful what you wish for.

 

(Yes, yes. Another State of the Farm entry. I’m in Wisconsin. Sue me.)

 

Some years ago, I discussed the problem of abundance. At the time, I was concerned with production from tree products such as chestnuts and Cornelian Cherries. That particular year we had good crops from several of our fruit trees and thought pretty good of ourselves. But, then, these were tree products that have their own issues and fecundity.

 

While we could do some things such as spraying and fertilizing, there wasn’t all that much we could do to help the trees. Weeding? Not an issue. Pests? Sometimes but for many years we haven’t had much of a problem. 

 

In the garden, however, we had much more control and, therefore, felt the failures much more keenly.

 

Over the last few years, we’ve started attempting to address the problems of producing calories at scale. By this, I mean that we are trying to make a dent in the sustenance of the household. Trying to take the garden to a fun project that is good in the summer to an effort that actually makes a dent in the grocery bill.

 

This year we put everything we learned to use and now it’s time to evaluate how we did.

 

We put our caloric faith in beans, squash, and potatoes. Other crops came and went and a couple—I’m looking at you, sugar beets—are still experimental. But those three are intended to feed us.

 

We learned a lot from beans but I can’t say we were a rousing success. We planted bush beans, pinto beans (which are a kind of bush bean), runner beans, and pole beans. We also had record-breaking heat waves and, as I said in a previous entry, found out that beans don’t set fruit in high temperatures. When the temperatures began to drop, we started to get beans and we’re letting them dry some on the vine before we determine the yield. I’m not hopeful.

 

In retrospect, I think I planted too densely. While the Great Bean Tunnel looks cool, it’s not really all that productive. It was, however, a nice place to sit in the heat.

 

We had similar problems with the squash. The zucchini never really set fruit—we’re still trying to find out why. Other people we know had tons of the stuff but we didn’t get much. We had a lot of squash germination problems that we’ll need to address. Germination problems all around. We do have some squash but, again, I don’t think we handled scale well there either.

 

Potatoes were a fair success story. We have about a 3/1 return on investment. Not as good as I would have preferred but significantly better than breaking even. We planted a white and a red potato. (I forget the varieties at the moment.) The reds did well but the whites didn’t. We got many tiny potatoes. I understand that this is in style at the moment but I would rather have had more literal poundage than pretty plate decorations.

 

Other crops did better. Amazingly, we were able to grow two cabbages—usually, they’re eaten to the bone. And we had some cold crops that did well. Basil did well and the sugar beets appear—without yet being harvested—to have done quite well. Melons are always questionable.

 

Interestingly, the melons and cucumbers both seemed to have something that looked like a squash borer problem. All of a sudden, a whole stalk of cucumber would die off. I never found the culprit. This was mostly because of the density of planting and the random nature of the melon/cucumber growth. Every stalk crossed every other one on the trellis. It looked nice but it made tracing back the problem difficult.

 

If I have learned any lesson this year, it was that I planted too densely. I wanted to grow everything. But, while it was cool to grow a couple of cabbages, each cabbage was a circle three feet in diameter and produced a single “fruit.” It was space I could have used for more staples. I think I need to limit my experiments and turn more space over to calorie crops.

 

I planted nine different kinds of melons very close together. When I got fruit,  I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. The runner beans and pole beans were also planted too densely. Both layered up to the point that some beans were shadowed by their neighbors and didn’t produce as well.

 

It was ambition, pure and simple. I blame society.

 

Many pickles were canned. Lots of tomatoes were sacrificed to the vegetable gods to form sauce. Much applesauce and dried apples were made. Ten gallons of Cornelian Cherry wine is percolating even as we speak. If you can hear me talking or are speaking to me right now, I’d suggest visiting a professional.

 

So: more planning next year. This year, raise a glass and pass the potatoes.