☄️ 🇺🇸 🚀 NASA’s Psyche Mission to Fly by Mars for Gravity Assist

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft will get a boost from Mars on Friday, May 15, passing just 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) from the planet’s surface at some 12,333 mph (19,848 kph). The spacecraft will harness the planet’s gravitational pull to speed up and adjust its trajectory toward the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, one of the more unusual objects in our solar system.

Launched on Oct. 13, 2023, the Psyche spacecraft relies on a solar-electric propulsion system and the inert gas xenon for propellant, gradually gaining speed over the course of its long journey. Psyche’s mission planners are using the Mars flyby to save propellant, letting the planet’s gravity do some of the work instead of the propulsion system alone. But gravity assists like these also offer opportunities for missions to practice and to calibrate their science instruments.

Psyche’s operations team plans to use the spacecraft’s multispectral imager to capture thousands of observations of Mars. The images will provide valuable data and help the team hone techniques they will need when the spacecraft approaches and begins orbiting the asteroid Psyche in late 2029.

Mars won’t initially look like the illuminated reddish disk seen in so many photos of the planet. “We are approaching Mars at a very high phase angle, which means we are catching up with the planet from its night side with only a sliver of sunlight creating a thin crescent,” said Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University in Tempe. “The thin crescent on approach and the nearly ‘full Mars’ view after we fly past create opportunities for the imaging team for both great calibration observations as well as just plain beautiful photos.”

It’s possible that Mars may possess a faint dusty ring, or torus — the result of micrometeorites striking the surfaces of the planet’s two moons, Phobos and Deimos, and ejecting dust particles into space. The Sun’s alignment with Psyche and Mars may cause dusty material to scatter sunlight, making it visible in the processed observations.

📎 NASA

A small New Jersey town election in 2011 with only 4 candidates and 86 total votes was stolen with electronic voting machines. They knew it was rigged because they knew all the voters. They took it to court and they won because the outcome was proven to be rigged.

- Vivian Henry: 34 votes
- Mark Henry: 33 votes
- Cynthia Zirkle: 10 votes
- Ernest Zirkle: 9 votes

The Zirkles contested the results. 28 voters later signed affidavits, under oath, stating they had voted for the Zirkles, which would have flipped the outcome.

The case went to court, Zirkle v. Henry. The court ultimately reversed the results. The Zirkles were declared the winners, 34–33, and the Henrys lost.

This is the exact reason why we can NOT trust electronic voting machines. The people running the election on-site or in a completely off-site location can rig the results.

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🇳🇱 In the Dutch small town of Leusden (8,600 inhabitants), the plan to accommodate 110 adult male asylum seekers triggered massive protests.

The accommodation was to be built right next to the hockey club for young girls!

The previous year, 17-year-old Lisa had been killed by an asylum seeker in Duivendrecht (5,300 inhabitants).

More than 3,000 residents (35%) signed a petition against the project. Nevertheless, a court approved the construction on the grounds that “humanitarian obligations” took precedence.

Residents then protested for three weeks, night after night. The government ignored them.

On the day of the move-in, the situation escalated:

The accommodation was set on fire by desperate locals, and demonstrators also blocked access to the fire brigade.

🔗 Martin Sellner