When Water Usage and Prices Are Controlled by Government

Living in Italy, Americans were shocked to learn that they couldn’t drive their cars in Verona on certain days if their licenses ended in odd numbers and on other days if their licenses ended in even numbers. Caught driving on the wrong day, the penalty was stiff. It was the bureaucrats’ way of dealing with pollution that affected air quality, soot deposits on marble statues, and buildings in town.  

In Modesto, California, the city deals with water shortages, whether real or imagined, by giving citations and fines to odd-numbered addresses that water lawns on Tuesdays when only even-numbered addresses can use sprinkler systems.

“We have two seasons of enforcement and so we entered the new season several weeks ago,” Modesto City spokesperson, Thomas Reeves said. “There are strict days; three days a week that you are allowed to water and it’s the same for a residential unit or a business.” https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2019/05/30/nurses-get-drenched-during-demonstration-hospital-warned-about-water-use/

As always, one-party state environmentalist California is ahead in curbing and controlling use of resources. It has enacted in 2018 Cal2022 water use controls they call “water-efficiency standards” in preparation for the manufactured global warming now turned into a profitable climate change industry. “The rules are aimed at water districts to cut per capita water usage.” This will eventually force individual customers into compliance.

By 2022, each person will be allowed to use 55 gallons per day and by 2030, 50 gallons per day. To put in better perspective, if you take an 8-minute shower, 17 gallons of water are used. A load of laundry uses 40 gallons, and a bathtub can hold 80 to 100 gallons of water.  

An old dishwasher uses 10 gallons of water per load. A new dishwasher with standards put in place in 2013 uses 5 gallons of water. An Energy Star certified dishwasher uses as little as 3 gallons of water per load. It is alleged that a full load of dishes washed by hand uses 27 gallons of water.

An older model top-loading washing machine uses 30-45 gallons of water, depending on the model. Front-loading and high efficiency washing machines use 15 gallons of water per load.

Sacramento Suburban Water District offers toilet rebates, complimentary showerheads, and complimentary faucets.  They are required to perform stress tests on their water leaks. A representative said, “Right now we lose up to 30 percent of urban water just to leaks in the system.” If a water district does not comply, the fines are $10,000 per day. https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/06/08/new-california-water-law-restrictions-shower-laundry/

Conservation of resources and natural habitats are a noble goal and we should try to conserve as much as we can. But micromanaging people’s lives does not work so well, it ends up in tyranny.

I can still vividly remember having to bathe by boiling a pot of water on the stove, going days and weeks without a bath, having to do without water altogether, especially in summer time when the communist government that controlled everything decided to clean the water tanks of rust and mineral deposits while we trekked to the water truck parked conveniently five blocks away to get a bucket of water at a time for drinking and cooking. The globalists who want to stop electricity use and other modern conveniences use in the third world today would have been pleased that we did not have dishwashers or washing machines.

And the United Nations declared its megatrend campaign for water for sustainable development (everything now must be sustainable this and sustainable that), one of the 17 goals of Agenda 21 now morphed into Agenda 2030 – water and sanitation for all. https://www.webuildvalue.com/en/megatrends/facing-the-problem-of-water-scarcity.html

We did protect the environment from pollution because nobody had cars except the elites, we just took buses and trains everywhere or walked. We did not have dishwashers or washing machines. Yet the environment was terribly polluted – the air, the soil, and the rivers. The commies did not care about spoiling the environment on an industrial scale.

As Dave Foreman of Earth First said, “We must make this place an insecure and inhospitable place for Capitalists and their projects – we must reclaim the roads and plowed lands, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.” What a primitive life that will be!

The government can certainly try to control consumption behavior by law and economically through price controls. It has done so and still does with various problems and consequences. Put in simple economic terms, when the quantity supplied is less than the quantity demanded, shortages result.

Governments can micromanage the use of a resource and restrict it through price controls. But government intervention into the free market by law can affect negatively many sectors and subsectors of the economy that need a lot of water to produce their output (paper, agriculture, orchards, vineyards, gardens, livestock) or service (hospitals, water parks, pools).

After 1971, when President Nixon decided to experiment with price controls, the economy experienced a plague of shortages - it seemed to be “running out of nearly everything.” When price controls ended in 1974, most of the shortages disappeared.

Price controls cause favoritism and corruption, enforceability problems, auxiliary restrictions, and limitations of volume of transactions.

When shortages or surpluses are created due to price controls, someone gets to buy or sell the limited quantity available. This can lead to discrimination along various lines, political favoritism, and corruption in government.

We had artificially low prices in the economy run by the Communist Party of Romania which resulted in long lines and favoritism of the communist elite class which was able to buy scarce commodities in their own special stores while the rest of us were on the Ceausescu diet.

Inevitably consumers must pay higher prices to suppliers. It is more insidious in industries where numerous suppliers exist. It is hard to monitor the behavior of so many sellers and their attempts to circumvent the law.

New laws may add auxiliary restrictions in order to enforce the original restrictions. So, the marketplace becomes more complex and more controlled by the legal system and suffocating government rules.

A classic example are the laws in New York City which ban conversion of rent-controlled apartments into condominiums. When rent-controlled apartments were enacted, the shortage of affordable apartments increased as landlords remodeled apartments into office space which allowed them to charge whatever rent the free market allowed instead of the low government controlled-rent on apartments.

Last, but not least, government intervention in the market, can lead to misallocation of resources. One example is the Russian farmers who used to feed their animals bread instead of unprocessed grains because price ceilings kept the price of bread very low. Why would they want bread to be so low priced? Because bread was a main staple in the Russian diet and kept them from going hungry on the rationed food in the stores.

It is true that the developed world contributes to the wasteful utilization of resources, including water. But do we need the daddy government micromanaging the behavior of everything we do?

Do elected bureaucrats have the right to protect a tiny fish, the delta smelt, to the detriment of millions of humans whose crops were devastated during a drought season while the government dumped fresh water into the ocean?

We could do better in conserving in many areas but showering with a bucket of water is not one of them. We could follow the late dictator Hugo Chavez’s advice to take 3-minute showers, but I am not so sure he followed his advice as he became rich beyond any socialist dictator’s dreams. His left his daughter billions when he died.

A Progressive Migration to Conservative States

Liberals from California and smaller blue states are exerting their influence on the electoral process in red states, determined to flip them to blue, and, by and large, are succeeding with the exception of the most recent election in Georgia’s 6^th district where Democrats spent over $23 million, the most in the history of the House of Representative elections ever.

I’m still scratching my head trying to understand the insanity of 144,000 low information Americans from Georgia who voted for the Democrat candidate Jon Ossoff, a French President Macron look-alike, even though he did not reside in their district and did not have much of a platform.

No amount of cash, air time, dishonest claims, speeches, and other shenanigans Hollywood and progressives around the country engaged in, convinced the rest of the well-informed Georgia voters to elect Jon Ossoff.

Someone comically wrote that “Snowflakes are crying their Ossoff in their parents’ basements’” after the results of the election determined that Ossoff lost.

Trying to cajole young voters who had just graduated from high school, frustrated that conservative parents interfered with their attempts to reach potential 18-year old voters living in their parents’ basements, voters who have no idea who runs the political world and our lives into the ground, Democrats complained to the compliant press that parents were mean and unresponsive to their frequent calls and attempts to brainwash their offspring to vote for the Democrat candidate.

The socialist Democrat platform was well articulated by candidates like Bernie Sanders. Vote for collectivism and social justice, he told his young and naïve followers; when I lose, I can buy an expensive sports car and a second home in Vermont while you dopes are driving tin cans or old cars with the “Feel the burn” and “Coexist” bumper stickers on and lay your head on your parents couch in the basement after a hard day’s work as baristas at Starbucks.

Democrats from progressive states have deep pockets which they spend on Millennials and other misinformed and brainwashed young people who, for $15 and hour, a “living wage,” will go anywhere dressed in black, with face masks, like the cowardly anarchists and fascists that they are, and will destroy someone else’s property in the name of “social justice” and “equality.” The not-so-feminine and self-described nasty women dress in vagina costumes like vile idiots. They attack people who disagree with their insanity and demonize our duly-elected President with vitriolic hate.

Progressives have been moving to conservative states in droves, changing the face of the electorate and flipping parts of a red state into blue, eventually succeeding in flipping the entire state to the progressive agenda by dominating in a few very populous cities. Thus, a state like Virginia, because of its heavy concentration of communists and other fellow travelers in the northern part, it has elected a fellow progressive governor, senators, and other representatives despite the fact that the rest of the state is very much conservative.

Former Rep. Allen West, who was redistricted out of his seat by his own Republican party who did not like his America-first stance on many issues, compared this exodus of progressives and invasion of conservative states to the Muslim Hijra which is also taking place all over the world as we speak, including the United States. By far they are succeeding in colonizing western civilization beyond their wildest dreams, both in Europe and here at home.

If you add into the mix the illegal vote of so many aliens who have crossed our border unlawfully or were brought here by the Obama administration, one can see how elections are swayed in the direction of the Socialist Democrat Party which now runs or heavily influences all the blue states, our government, the military, the fake main stream media, all the technology monopolies, social media outlets, publishing houses, academia, schools, Christian churches, the legal system, and the Deep State.

What conservatives are left with is the alternative media and talk radio with voices like Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, and TV personalities like Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity. Nobody is sure how long that will last. Liberals, the intolerant bunch that they are, operate on the following predilection - you have a right to say what you want, as long as you agree with me.

We were lucky that Georgia conservatism won this battle. Will we be lucky next time and win the war? Most Americans have been lulled into a false sense of security, have food on the table, air conditioning, heat, water, in-door plumbing, multiple sports channels, a home sweet home and, as long as nobody bothers their daily routines, they don’t care who is in charge of their global enslavement. So they vote in more of the same corrupt politicians for both parties.

Many go to church and bend over backwards to appease the few atheists and their fellow travelers who demand “separation of church and state” in schools but say nothing when special accommodations are made for Muslim children and their prayer needs.

American Christian children are being indoctrinated into Islam by the Common Core curriculum in public and private schools, and are forced to go to the bathroom with a pedophile/mentally deranged person who pretends or “feels” that he is a she.

What else can possibly go wrong with our great country, the former “shining city on the hill,” that is being tarnished day by day by influential anti-American groups with huge coffers?

Democrats' Love Affair with Communism

A bill narrowly passed the house in California, repealing part of the law enacted during the Cold War era in our country’s history when communists were really active and infiltrating our government, attempting to overthrow it.

The bill proposed to eliminate the section which allowed the firing of public employees if they were members of the Communist Party. The bill now goes to the Senate and its author, Democrat Assemblyman Rob Bonta, hopes that it will pass. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/article-4486550/California-end-ban-communists-government-jobs.html

“Assemblyman Randy Voepel, a Southern California Republican who fought in the Vietnam War, said communists in North Korea and China are still a threat.”

Assemblyman Travis Allen, also a Republican, said that “this bill is blatantly offensive to all Californians. Communism stands for everything that the United States stands against.”

Why the Cold War era laws suddenly need changing is puzzling to other Republicans in the California legislature. It should not surprise anyone, given the fact that California is now ruled by a one party system, the Democrats; they have become advocates for communism, illegal aliens, and a sanctuary for law breakers.

Judging by the communist stance of academia on campuses around the country and the curriculum taught in our public schools, the Antifa fascist anarchists, Black Lives Matter, SEIU, and other “progressive” organizations around the country, communism is their way to attain social, environmental, and gender justice, an utopia that the U.N. is pushing through its many octopus organizations.

Why communism? The youth in this country have been taught revisionist history for a long time. Many have been purposefully asleep, in a drug stupor, or absent during their history classes. Communist teachers with an agenda of their own have glossed over the atrocities that various totalitarian communist dear leaders have committed against their own people.

Communism has been repackaged as globalism, global citizens, no borders, no national language, no culture, and no sovereignty under the rule of a few billionaire elites and the United Nations. And the Democrat Party has been hijacked and is run by communists who are no longer hiding their destructive agenda. Atheists are pushing hard for communism since atheism is the communist state’s sanctioned religion.

In a recent PragerU video, Dennis Prager wondered, “Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism?” If you consider the almost 100 million victims of communism and the six million victims of the Nazis, why is Nazism always cited as evil but communism praised? https://prageru.com/courses/history/why-isnt-communism-hated-nazism

Dennis Prager explained that communism “enslaved entire nations, Russia, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and much of Central Asia. They ruined the lives of well over a billion people.”

Prager gave the following reasons why communism does not have the evil reputation Nazism has:

1.      “Widespread ignorance of the communist record”

Leftists (not liberals) have never loathed communism, they teach communism as a viable and desirable solution to crony capitalism.

2.      “The Nazis carried out the Holocaust”

The communists killed many more of their own people but they never carried it out in the systematic genocide that the Nazis have engaged in against every woman, man, and child of Jewish descent

3.      “Communism is based on nice sounding theories, Nazism is based on heinous sounding theories”

Teachers have focused their attention on the horrifying atrocities of Nazism and the academia glossed over the evils of communism, calling them “perversions of true communism.”

4.      Germany took responsibility for the evils of Nazism and attempted to make amends for the atrocities committed while the Russian did not apologize for Lenin’s or Stalin’s horrors such as the Holodomor in Ukraine.

Lenin, the father of Soviet communism, is treasured in Russia today. “People still deny, by assertion or implication, Stalin’s holocaust,” said Russian historian, Donald Rayfield, from the University of London. Mao Zedong is still honored in China.

5.      “Communists murdered mostly their own people. Nazis killed very few of their own fellow Germans.”

In the “world opinion” of academic circles, murdering your own countrymen does not carry the same weight as murdering people from other nations.

6.      The left considers the ‘last good war’ fought as WWII.

Lefties do not look at wars against communist regimes as ‘good wars.’ Thus academia considers the Vietnam and Korean Wars against communism as bad wars and the soldiers who fought in them were spat upon when returning home. But Jane Fonda, who sympathized with the Vietnamese and took pictures of herself on their tanks, was glorified by the left.

WWII was a ‘good war’ because the Nazis had occupied many European nations that were subsequently liberated at the end of WWII.

Most high school and college students have no idea what happened to millions of innocents under communism, despite testimonials from many of the survivors of communism. And we were saddened to see anarchists in D.C. cowardly photographing their arms and hands while flipping the Victims of Communism Memorial. http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/28/leftists-flick-off-memorial-dedicated-to-victims-of-communism/

Young leftists mocked those who tried to educate by telling them the truth. They have been so thoroughly brainwashed by their schools that they no longer discern rational thought. They see themselves so diversely open-minded, yet their brains had fallen out long time ago.

 

 

Replacing the EPA

“It’s time for the national EPA to go. The path forward is now clear and simple: A five-year transition from a federal government bureaucracy to a Committee of the Whole composed of the 50 state environmental protection agencies.

Jay Lehr, Ph.D.
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

To those who say this would fail to adequately protect the public’s health or the environment, I urge you to reflect on the poor job currently being done by EPA, and then to meet some of the men and women staffing state EPA offices and see for yourself the sophistication, commitment, and resources they have to do the job. You will not remain doubters for long.”                 -  Jay Lehr, Ph.D.

 

Dr. Jay Lehr, Science Director at the Heartland Institute, gave a speech at the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness conference in Ontario, California, on the topic of “Replacing the EPA.” The author of more than 500 articles and editor of 30 books captivated the audience with his bold proposal to eliminate and replace the mammoth Environmental Protection Agency with a smaller organization composed of a committee of six individuals chosen from all 50 states. He called his plan “Addition by Subtraction.”

In his opinion, the 15,000 employees based in Washington, D.C. and in regional offices around the country “do not do useful work whatsoever.”  Dr. Lehr names himself the “most competent person on the planet” to write a proposal for the elimination of the EPA, saving the taxpayers $6.2 billion annually and improving the environmental protection” because he is the “only scientist alive that played a major role in establishing the EPA.”

Among the many pieces of legislation Dr. Lehr helped write are included the Water Pollution Control Act (later renamed the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Surface Mining and Reclamation Act, Clear Air Act, Federal  Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act, and Comprehensive  Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (now Superfund).

Dr. Lehr admits in his proposal, “Replacing the Environmental Protection Agency,” that “these acts worked well in protecting the environment and the health of our citizens, with the exception of Superfund, which proved to be too overreaching and wreaked havoc with U.S. business as company operating within the law were fined countless dollars and required to pay huge sums after the fact for clean-up of waste disposal that had been within the law at the time of the activity.” (pp. 1-2)

Viewing his plan as penance, Dr. Lehr found it appropriate and fitting that the person who helped form the EPA (December 2, 1970) should contribute to its dismissal via a plan that took him two years to develop. Dr. Lehr was happy to announce that Governor Scot Walker of Wisconsin, presidential candidate, has adopted this entire EPA replacement plan.

EPA regions of the U.S.

Dr. Lehr served on a panel in 1968 which was tasked by the director of the Bureau of Water Hygiene in the U.S. Department of Health to study the potential to expand the bureau’s oversight into a full environmental protection organization.” The panel succeeded and the EPA was created. He wrote that around 1981 “liberal activist groups recognized EPA could be used to advance their political agenda.”

Referring to England, Lehr quoted Samuel Adams, who wrote on Jan. 20, 1772 in the Boston Gazette, “If the public are bound to yield to obedience to the laws to which they cannot give their approval, they are slaves to those who make such laws and enforce them.”

Unfortunately today, it is not just the EPA, but many other agencies whose unelected officials produce endless regulations, Lehr added. We have an “over-criminalization in this country” because of endless regulations people have no idea exist, rules that Americans “probably break at least once a week.” He continued, “There are now in the federal regulatory handbook, 200 volumes of 80,000 laws, and 300,000 regulations written by various agencies with the EPA number one offender.”

James Madison warned us in the Federalist papers that … “laws should be made by men of their own choosing. If the laws are so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood,” then we have a serious problem.

Dr. Lehr believes that we are subjected today to so many laws that few people can track. “Big Business, Big Government, and Big Special Interests collude to make such laws” that give them advantage over the competition. “We have a warped economy,” Lehr said, “where the rich get richer, with the rest having less opportunity because the big three are gaming the system to gain political influence… They get privilege.”

Enabling the big three who handicap competitors and take full advantage of public subsidies, “EPA is all but a wholly owned subsidiary of liberal activist groups." Its rules account for about half of the nearly $2 trillion a year cost of complying with all national regulations in the U.S.” (Wayne W. Crews, Ten Thousand Commandments, Washington, D.C.:  Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2014)

Calling it a “rogue agency,” Dr. Lehr proposed to replace, not fix the EPA, by systematically dismantling it and replacing it with a Committee of the Whole of the 50 state environmental protection agencies. National EPA could be phased out over five years, said Dr. Lehr. “The Committee of the Whole would determine which regulations are actually mandated in law by Congress and which were established by EPA without congressional approval.” (Replacing the Environmental Protection Agency, Jay Lehr, Ph.D., The Heartland Institute, p. 7)

He proposes that “the EPA research laboratories should be left in place at the national level to answer scientific questions, and even these laboratories must be substantially reorganized.” (Ibid, p. 6)

Specifically, 10 regional offices would be established, cutting back the budget from $8.2 billion to $2 billion a year, and reducing staff from over 15,000 to 300 in the national EPA headquarters in Topeka, Kansas. Of the 300 employees working, there will be six delegate-employees from each of the 50 states.

When asked how he would deal with the potential growth of the new EPA, Dr. Lehr admitted that this detail has not been worked out yet. The chairman of the Committee of the Whole would be elected by the 300 delegate-employees to a three-year term.

The drawdown would be:

-          Year One – all employees would be told of the five-year transition period to allow them time for alternate employment; all 300 new employees would transfer, start working, and decide assignments to various subcommittees

-          Year Two – Offices of Policy, Administration and Resource Management, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance will be relocated from Washington and from regional offices to Topeka

-          Year Three – Offices of Air and Radiation and Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention would transfer to Topeka

-          Year Four – Offices of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, and Offices of Water would be moved to Topeka

-          Year Five – Offices of Chief Financial Officer, General Counsel, Environmental Information, and the Office of the Administrator would also move to Topeka.

Transition members would be assigned periodically to Washington, D.C. and to regional offices to study the activities of the existing branches. If attrition is high early on, transfer of responsibility may be earlier than planned. Each state would be allocated $20 million to augment the new responsibilities.

Dr. Lehr, as one of the founders of the EPA, believes strongly that his plan can be implemented “efficiently and quickly.”

 

 

 

 

JPL and Its Spacecraft Exploratory Missions

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

On a recent trip to California, I was constantly reminded of what is wrong with California, a state whose economy was so booming decades ago that, had it been a stand-alone state, it would have been the world’s sixth largest economy.  Looking at this state now, ravaged by years and years of Marxist policies, open borders, unchecked illegal immigration, anchor babies, multiculturalism, insane diversity rules, sanctuary cities, multi-lingual school system, illegal voting, tax everything and tax again, and environmentalist-driven water use plans including but not limited to dumping billions of fresh water into the ocean in order to save the Delta smelt while orchards and fields are starved for water and trees and crops have long dried out.

California is more concerned with smoking habits if you take into account expensive signs posted everywhere announcing in big, bold letters to those who can read English, “Warning: Birth Defects – Tobacco smoke is known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.”

California is so protective of animals and planets, even wolves and planet Earth need lawyers. Earthjustice was offering their services through a beautiful ad at the airport for the traveling endangered wolves culled by indiscriminate killing.

California was the golden state, the sunshine state, but the gold has long run out, the luster is now tarnished, perhaps golden brown on account of all the dead grasses from the three-year drought.

The new Cassini spacecraft JPL lab
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

California still does something right, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.  For over fifty years, JPL‘s robotic missions have explored every planet in our solar system. Today, in addition to monitoring Earth and exploring the solar system, JPL “probes deep space in our galaxy and outward to the greater universe.” Managed by the California Institute of Technology for NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center for domestic as well as international entities.

JPL built many firsts:

-          Mariner 2 in 1962, the first successful interplanetary spacecraft

-          Mariner 9 in 1971, the first spacecraft to orbit another planet (Mars)

-          Voyager 2 in 1979-1989, the first tour of the outer planets

-          Galileo in 1997, the first orbit of Jupiter

-          Cassini in 2004, the first orbit of Saturn

-          Deep Impact in 2005, the first comet impact

-          Voyager 1 in 2013, the first spacecraft to reach interstellar space

Cassini is a cooperative mission of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, with other hundreds of scientists and engineers from Europe and the U.S.  The spacecraft’s final orbits have been named the Grand Finale.

The orbiter Cassini, the largest interplanetary spacecraft built by NASA was launched on October 15, 1997, from Cape Canaveral in Florida, with a Huygens probe aboard owned by the European Space Agency. In 2017, when the Grand Finale spacecraft falls into Saturn’s atmosphere, it will end twenty years of extraordinary mission of exploring Saturn, its rings, Titan, icy satellites, and the magnetosphere. During the first decade of orbiting, 500 gigabytes of scientific data were beamed to Earth through NASA’s Deep Space Network; Cassini made 200 orbits of Saturn, 132 close flybys of Saturn’s moons and discovered seven new moons.

Top discoveries of Cassini include:

-          Huygens probe onboard Cassini parachuted to Titan, the first such landing on a moon in the outer solar system

-          Icy plumes were found spraying from “tiger stripe” fissures on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons

-          The moons on Saturn were active and dynamic – showing how planets and moons form

-          Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has rain, rivers, lakes, and seas and is surrounded by thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere, perhaps similar to what Earth’s was like long ago

-          Images of the northern storm of 2010-2011 which covered Saturn for months

-          Radio-wave patterns are not tied to Saturn’s interior rotation

-          Images of vertical structures inside the rings piled more than 2 miles high

-          Titan’s prebiotic chemistry

-          Giant hurricanes at both Saturn’s poles

-          North polar hexagon of Saturn

By the end of its 20-year mission, the new Cassini probe assembled with a much larger antenna will make “detailed maps of Saturn’s gravity and magnetic fields, revealing how the planet is composed on the inside,” how much material is in the rings, and perhaps elucidate the mystery of how fast the interior of the planet is rotating. It will take pictures of rings and clouds and “sample icy ring particles being funneled into the atmosphere by Saturn’s magnetic field.”

JPL also monitors the Earth’s climate through its GRACE-FO (Follow On in 2017) by tracking Earth’s water in motion with more precise measuring instruments than its predecessor GRACE.  Tracking variations in gravity which was assumed to be caused by the movement of water, JPL monitors changes in underground water storage, water stored in lakes and rivers, soil moisture, ice sheets and glaciers, and sea levels caused by adding water to oceans.

NASA's Aquarius spacecraft

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

 

As a man-made global warming skeptic, I was interested in the mission of Aquarius. According to JPL’s museum, Aquarius provides data to “improve computer models” to help “researchers better understand our climate.” NASA’s Aquarius takes 300,000 measurements per month “to advance our understanding of ocean salinity’s role in Earth’s water cycle, ocean circulation, and climate.”

The spacecraft assembly area for the new Cassini was exhibiting a huge meringue pie-like spacecraft. The huge room was at the time deserted.

The Science Division of JPL included four areas of research:

-          Understanding our Universe (from the Earth to the Planets and Beyond)

This included theoretical studies, observations, laboratory experiments, data analysis, advanced instrument development focused on current or future NASA missions.

JPL states, “Research areas include studying the causes and effects of climate change on Earth, the origin and nature of planetary bodies, the search for life beyond Earth, and the nature and evolution of the universe – all vital scientific issues being addressed by NASA.”

-          Earth Science

“JPL Earth scientists conduct research to characterize and understand the atmosphere, land, and oceans on our home planet in order to make better predictions of future changes through the use of observations to improve models. Our wide-ranging research topics include studies of the composition of the atmosphere with a focus on greenhouse gases, air quality and ozone; the global water, carbon and energy cycles, including clouds, snow, ice and vegetation; ocean circulation and interactions between oceans, atmosphere and sea ice; and earthquake fault systems, volcanic eruptions, and the composition of Earth’s surface.”

-          Planetary Science

Understanding origins, evolution, structure of planets, satellites, and smaller bodies in the solar system; geology and geophysics of terrestrial planets, particularly Mars, satellites, planetary atmospheres, comets, asteroids, properties of planetary ices, chemistry, astrobiology, search for water beyond Earth; and instrument development for future missions.

-          Astrophysics and Space Sciences

Studying the Sun and its heliosphere, solar wind, formation of stars,  formation of planetary systems, exoplanets, formation, structure, and evolution of our own galaxy, distant galaxies, the Universe; development of instruments to “characterize astrophysical objects including exoplanets, proto-planetary disks, interstellar molecular clouds, distant galaxies, black holes, and the Cosmic Microwave Background, the relic radiation from the Big Bang.”

Mars was explored by twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity which found evidence of long-term water near their landing site in 2004. Sojourner studied rocks, dust, and weather on Mars during its 1997 mission. Opportunity’s mission found that a meteorite had crashed into a 65-foot basin (Eagle Crater) previously covered by a “body of salty water deep enough to splash in.” These Mars rovers ranged in size from a footstool (Sojourner), golf cart (Opportunity and Spirit), and an SUV (Curiosity).

Mariner 10 (1973-1975 missions) visited the scorched Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. The rover found that “some deep craters may contain deposits of water ice hidden from the heat of the Sun.”

According to JPL, “Venus shows what happens when a heavy carbon dioxide atmosphere and thick clouds smother the surface of a volcanic world. The clouds absorb heat from the Sun and from the surface and prevent it from escaping. As a result, a runaway greenhouse suffocates the planet. Volcanic eruptions have built low-level mountains, pancake-shaped domes and ancient rivers of lava.” The Magellan mission and Earth-based radars help draw the map of Venus.

JPL’s satellite Explorer 1 began its survey of Earth in 1958. The only planet that is largely covered by salt water, Earth has only 2.5% fresh water. According to JPL, over two-thirds of this fresh water is frozen in the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland. “Less than 1% of Earth’s fresh water is accessible for direct human use.”

Earth’s crust, divided into tectonic plates, carries the ocean and land on “their backs” so to speak. Earth is wrapped in an atmosphere made up “almost entirely of nitrogen, a smaller amount of oxygen, and other gases.” It is this combination that supports life on earth.

When reading this quote from JPL, Dr. Klaus Kaiser added, "One of these 'other gases' is carbon dioxide (CO2) on which all life on earth depends!"

JPL tracks through its Jason 1 and Jason 2 the movement of warm waves of water east across the Pacific every few years called El Nino, measuring “the changes in sea surface height to an accuracy of 3.3 centimeters (about 1.3 inches).”

Earth-observation satellites monitor the land, ocean, ice, and atmosphere. It can see, for examples, how the Mississippi River Delta water carries soil to the sea, creating mudflats and marshlands. Same satellites can monitor hurricanes, their size, intensity, wind speeds, and motions. JPL’s orbiting ASTER instrument can show soil erosion to shorelines.

Apollo 17 (1972) took the first ever full view picture of Earth and the first-ever photograph of Earth’s south polar regions taken from space. In 1978 SEASAT “set the stage for today’s ocean-observing satellites.”

A U.S.-French oceanography mission called TOPEX/Poseidon measured “global sea surface height from 1992-2005. It provided data about the heat stored in the ocean, and the speed and direction of the currents.”  This information provided short-term weather and global climate variations. Could this be considered a base-line measurement?

To continue the work of TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason 1 was launched in 2001. This satellite monitors “global ocean circulation, studies interactions between the ocean and atmosphere, improves global climate predictions, and monitors events such as El Nino.”

Launched in 1999, SEAWINDS “senses ripples caused by winds near the ocean’s surface. Knowledge of wind speed and direction helps scientists understand climate and weather patterns, changes in Arctic sea ice and icebergs, and variations in snow and soil moisture levels on land.” (Museum archives)

The most complete high resolution digital topographic database of Earth was mapped by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) on the 11-day flight aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, the manned-space program that was scrapped by the Obama Administration.

And there is our closest celestial neighbor, the Moon, magnificently desolate and covered in millions of craters created by the impact of asteroids and comets. JPL discovered in recent times that the Moon “holds at least small amounts of water.” Galileo surveyed the moon during its 1992 passing to Jupiter.

Galileo spacecraft

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

 

Galileo used a 400-Newton retrorocket to slow it down enough to be captured into orbit. The propulsion system was provided by Germany and built by Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm (MBB).

JPL crashed three Ranger spacecraft into the moon’s surface. Surveyor missions were able to soft-land on the Moon and Surveyor 7 photographed the rim of Tycho Crater. This landing paved the way for humans to land on the Moon, proving that a spacecraft “would not sink into the lunar surface.”

According to JPL archives, the 1969 Apollo 12 lunar landing was made by astronauts within 200 meters (656 feet) of Surveyor 3.

Venus was explored by Magellan from 1989-1994 and was able to map its surface from orbit even though its atmosphere was very thick. Flight controllers tested a maneuver called “aero-braking.”

Our solar system, moving through space at 250 kilometers (155 miles) per second, is part of the Milky Way Galaxy, and was born about 4.6 billion years ago.  The Sun, one of more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, is orbited by eight major planets, their moons and rings, asteroids, comets, and dwarf planets.

“The Sun gives off energy created by reactions in a nuclear furnace at its core. That power plant supplies virtually all the energy for our solar system. Our star sustains life and affects climate processes on Earth. Violent transfers of matter and energy from the Sun to the Earth, such as solar flares, can disrupt our communications systems and endanger astronauts.” (JPL Museum Archives)

Genesis collected between 2001-2004 samples of the solar wind – a stream of charged particles flowing out from the Sun. It returned them to Earth for analysis in laboratories.”

Comets contain in their nucleus “the oldest material in the solar system.” JPL’s Deep Space 1 spacecraft passed by Comet Borrelly in2001 and sent back interesting photographs of jets forming a coma of dust and gases.  “A comet is a time capsule from the formation of the solar system.” Comet Hale-Bopp wowed millions in 1996-1997 with its “tails of dust and blue plasma stretching across the sky for weeks.” In the year 4385, this comet will come close to the Sun again.

Meteorites collected from Antarctica and around the globe are metal or stone fragments that fall to Earth from asteroids, Earth’s Moon, Mars, or comets.

JPL tracks asteroids, pieces of smaller planetary bodies made of rock.  Most are found in the Asteroid Belt and some have orbits that bring them in close proximity to Earth. They can be a few meters to over 900 kilometers across. The second most massive asteroid is Vesta (530 km across). Most asteroid orbit the Sun in the Asteroid Belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and is made up of gas and clouds with ammonia crystals and other ices. Jupiter’s strong gravitational pull keeps her moons and rings in check.  Voyager 1 discovered Jupiter’s ring and the volcanoes on it.

Galileo Galilei looked at Saturn through his telescope in early 17^th century and declared that Saturn had “ears.” Voyager 1 spacecraft photographed with high resolution this giant planet made of gas. The Hubble Space Telescope took clear photographs that elucidated the mystery of its atmospheric composition. Using data from Cassini’s ultraviolet-sensitive instrument, a colorized version of Saturn’s rings was drawn. Among the many moons embedded in Saturn’s rings, scientists at JPL have studied Enceladus and Titan. Apparently Enceladus’ ice volcanoes spray frozen particles into space through geyser-like vents. Titan has a smog-like atmosphere which it is believed to resemble the “primordial Earth.”

The “ice giant” Uranus shrouded by methane was visited by Voyager 2. Uranus has the coldest atmosphere of all the planets hence his moniker of a frigid world. “Uranus orbits the Sun on its side.”

Voyager 2 visited Neptune in 1989 and its moon Triton, with its “coldest surface in the solar system.” A “cantaloupe terrain” and “geysers that spout dark material from beneath its surface of nitrogen ice” were also discovered. A “near twin to Uranus,” Neptune has an atmosphere composed of hydrogen and helium with traces of methane.

Pluto, a dwarf planet and member of the Kuiper Belt, is a frigid world two-thirds the diameter of Earth’s Moon, with a methane ice surface and a very thin atmosphere. Pluto makes one trip around the Sun in 248 years.

JPL's empty control room

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

 

The Space Flight Operations Facility, a National Historic Landmark since 1985, controls dozens of missions. Each team of controllers is responsible for communications to and from their assigned spacecraft via the sensitive antennas of the Deep Space Network. These antennas swivel on their bases and track spacecraft from horizon to horizon, dividing the earth into three sections, both listening and talking to their targets. The largest antennas are 10 stories tall with dishes 230 feet across.

The Space Flight controllers coined a phrase that allows one to say, once I visited the Space Flight Operations Facility, “I’ve been to the center of the Universe.”