69 years ago today (feb 20)

[Skywise]

Sixty-nine years ago today, on Feburary 20th, 1943, a fissure
opened in the cornfield of Dionisio Pulido in Michoacán, Mexico.
This fissure grew a cinder cone over the next several years to
a height of about 1400 feet. Now known as Parícutin, this volcano
has not erupted since 1952.

Brian
--
http://www.skywise711.com - Lasers, Seismology, Astronomy, Skepticism
Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?

[kolldata]

I have a memory of a drawing of the event seen in a grade school text
or newspaper ? farmer with plow/ox, lava spilling from ground 200'
feet distant....to fit in frame. What did Dionisio have to say abt
this...

expletive deleteds ?

did he sue ?

[Weatherlawyer]

On Feb 20, 3:42 am, Skywise <i...@oblivion.nothing.com> wrote:
> Sixty-nine years ago today, on Feburary 20th, 1943, a fissure
> opened in the cornfield of Dionisio Pulido in Michoacán, Mexico.
> This fissure grew a cinder cone over the next several years to
> a height of about 1400 feet. Now known as Parícutin, this volcano
> has not erupted since 1952.
>

> --http://www.skywise711.com- Lasers, Seismology, Astronomy, Skepticism

> Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?

I knew this wasn't going to be about Felix Tilley's hat size or IQ.
But I had supposed it might contain something more interesting than
the above.

How about the fact that none of the volcanoes in the region are
considered "live". Evidence -if not proof, that volcanoes are
suspended by water.

[kolldata]

local noise sez it marked a major turning poiint in his life.

[Don in Hollister]

On Feb 20, 12:39 pm, kolldata <datak...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> local noise sez it marked a major turning poiint in his life.

Hi Mike. If that were true then how is it that volcanoes under the
ocean continue to erupt? Don

[Weatherlawyer]

On Feb 20, 8:31 pm, Weatherlawyer <weatherlaw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 20, 3:42 am, Skywise <i...@oblivion.nothing.com> wrote:
>
> > Sixty-nine years ago today, on Feburary 20th, 1943, a fissure
> > opened in the cornfield of Dionisio Pulido in Michoacán, Mexico.
> > This fissure grew a cinder cone over the next several years to
> > a height of about 1400 feet. Now known as Parícutin, this volcano
> > has not erupted since 1952.
>

> > --http://www.skywise711.com-Lasers, Seismology, Astronomy, Skepticism

> > Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?
>
> I knew this wasn't going to be about Felix Tilley's hat size or IQ.
> But I had supposed it might contain something more interesting than
> the above.
>
> How about the fact that none of the volcanoes in the region are
> considered "live". Evidence -if not proof, that volcanoes are
> suspended by water.

Scoria cones are generated by Strombolian eruptions, which produce
eruptive columns of basalt tephra generally only a few hundred meters
high. Many scoria cones are monogenetic in that they only erupt once,
in contrast to shield volcanoes and stratovolcanoes.

An exception is the Cerro Negro volcano in Nicaragua, which is the
Earth's most historically active scoria cone. It is one of several
parasitic cones on the northwest flank of Las Pilas volcano. Cerro
Negro has erupted more than twenty times since it was born in 1850.
Its most recent eruptions were in 1992 and 1995.

> http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/scoriacone_page.html

I am afraid I don't have a link to a discussion of what I said about
the range of these dry cones in the region. I vaguely remember reading
of it some year or so back. I was doing my own research on the volcano
so it maybe somewhere on my blog. I am not sure.

I got it off the net though with very little trouble.



The problem, with my blog is that I can't help but choose stupid
titles for them which makes research of them difficult.
Sorry.

[Weatherlawyer]

Are you asking me Donald?

> How about the fact that none of the volcanoes in the region are
> considered "live". Evidence -if not proof, that volcanoes are
> suspended by water.

There are plenty of water sources supplying the deep vents. Even so,
they tend to die off after a few decades. It is a process not yet
researched but tends to follow the summary of Galapagos volcanoes.

Or you could choose to believe in plate tectonics if you you like.

[Weatherlawyer]

Oops.

[Weatherlawyer]

On Feb 20, 3:42 am, Skywise <i...@oblivion.nothing.com> wrote:

> Sixty-nine years ago today, on Feburary 20th, 1943, a fissure
> opened in the cornfield of Dionisio Pulido in Michoacán, Mexico.
> This fissure grew a cinder cone over the next several years to
> a height of about 1400 feet. Now known as Parícutin, this volcano
> has not erupted since 1952.

Fifty years ago, on February 20, 1962, John Glenn became the first
American to orbit the Earth. He also was one of the first humans to
study the planet from space.

Just 5 minutes and 44 seconds after launch, Glenn offered his first
words about the view from his porthole: “This is Friendship 7. Can see
clear back; a big cloud pattern way back across towards the Cape.
Beautiful sight.”

Three hours later, at the beginning of his third orbit, Glenn
photographed this panoramic view of Florida from the Georgia border
(right, under clouds) to just north of Cape Canaveral. His American
homeland was 162 miles (260 kilometers) below. “I have the Cape in
sight down there,” he noted to mission controllers. “It looks real
fine from up here. I can see the whole state of Florida just laid out
like on a map. Beautiful.”

Glenn rocketed into space atop an Atlas rocket in a spacecraft dubbed
Friendship 7. He reached a speed of 17,500 miles per hour as he made
three orbits and traveled 75,679 miles in just under five hours. Along
the way, he saw a dust storm and fires in Africa. He observed the glow
of moonlight on the cloud tops and the ocean. He saw the wake of a
ship and the different colored waters of the Gulf Stream. He saw a
“brilliant blue band” on the horizon—the thin, fragile atmosphere of
Earth.

In his official report written after the mission, he offered some
highlights:

It was surprising how much of the earth's surface was covered by
clouds...The different types of clouds—vertical developments, stratus
clouds, and cumulus clouds—are readily distinguished...Only a few land
areas were visible during the flight because of the cloud cover...

As I came across the United States, I could see New Orleans,
Charleston, and Savannah very clearly. I could also see rivers and
lakes. I think the best view I had of any land area during the flight
was the clear desert region around El Paso on the second pass across
the United States. I could see the colors of the desert and the
irrigated area north of El Paso.

Just off the east coast of Africa were two large storm areas. Weather
Bureau scientists had wondered whether lightning could be seen on the
night side, and it certainly can...Lightning could be seen flashing
back and forth between the clouds, but most prominent were lightning
flashes within thunderheads, illuminating them like light bulbs.

After splashing back down in the Atlantic Ocean near Grand Turk
Island, Glenn described his flight with understated eloquence: “It was
quite a day. I'm not sure what you can say about a day in which you
see four beautiful sunsets in one day, but it's pretty interesting.”

> http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=77201

[Brian]

>> http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?idw201

Things have not advanced that much. They are still sending people into
space with a rocket that looks like a giant firework.

--
Regards Brian

[Weatherlawyer]

On Feb 24, 6:51 am, Brian <bcl...@es.co.nz> wrote:
>
> Things have not advanced that much. They are still sending people into
> space with a rocket that looks like a giant firework.

Rockets don't need to be rocket shaped. They are not going "all that
fast" at take off. The air envelope that plays havoc with
slipstreaming is only a real problem for re-entry. And they come in
arse backwards for that.

Come to that, titanium and even aluminium materials on the first
stages is not worth the expense as the cost of the fuel and containers
if made of steel or whatever, is far less than cost of conventional
designs.

I imagine military concerns promote the need for small and powerful as
opposed to large and plentiful. Either that or they are just damned
stupid. I can't imagine future "shuttle" designs will be as badly
engineered as the last lot.

Let's hope so at least.

[Belba Grubb]

On Feb 19, 10:42 pm, Skywise <i...@oblivion.nothing.com> wrote:
> Sixty-nine years ago today, on Feburary 20th, 1943, a fissure
> opened in the cornfield of Dionisio Pulido in Michoacán, Mexico.
> This fissure grew a cinder cone over the next several years to
> a height of about 1400 feet. Now known as Parícutin, this volcano
> has not erupted since 1952.

Here it is up close in the 21st century: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSevliR92So

I wonder where the next one in that monogenetic field will emerge. At
least today, we have better monitoring equipment, so there will be,
hopefully, more warning.

Barb

[Skywise]

I see you are as knowledgeable about aerospace as you are about
quakes and weather.

Brian
--
http://www.skywise711.com - Lasers, Seismology, Astronomy, Skepticism

[Belba Grubb]

On Feb 26, 1:40 pm, Skywise <i...@oblivion.nothing.com> wrote:
> I see you are as knowledgeable about aerospace as you are about
> quakes and weather.

?

Barb

[Weatherlawyer]

I believe he is attempting irony.

At take-off the air pressure diminishes immediately. Of course air
pressure becomes a problem as soon as 60 mph. Battleships manage half
that through a much stickier medium.

But they remain in it almost all their working lives.

Rockets, not.

It was an argument proposed around the time the shuttle was being
granted development funds. IIRC, a German firm working at a launch
site somewhere in Africa were using off the shelf parts to produce
motors.

The USA didn't give much thought to developing alloys for use in high
temperature situations but spent a lot of cash on the tubes they did
come up with. None of them really fit for purpose.

Even the boosters the Shuttle eventually ended up with caused major
problems to the vehicles they were handling; sloughing ice debris onto
the painfully inadequate insulation for example.

The USSR went to extremes with their metalurgy, developing turbines or
whatever that could actually handle most of the heat involved. (The
Apollos used up a considerable quantity of fuel as coolant.)

Titanium is produced in a very elaborate chemistry laboratory -as
opposed to iron which is produced in smelters requiring no more than
fire-brick replacement every few weeks. The chemistry involved can be
reproduced in any hearth without much danger of burning the house
down.

With scale of production, iron metalurgy followed Moores Law 2 or 3
hundred years ago.

All a spaceship has to do is reach escape velocity. Its rate of
acceleration is immaterial. Obviously the power to weight ratio is the
main concern. Stream lining need not be. In fact the larger the
fuselage, the exponentially larger the payload.

Which was in reply to the sensible Brian's remark about the shape of
incendiary devices these days, a lifetime of space travel since the
V2.

John Glenn went up in a converted missile. Such things need to be
aerodynamic, performing similar fuctions to attack aircraft.

Well OT:
Space capsules have typically been smaller than 5 meters in diameter,
although there is no engineering limit to larger sizes. As the capsule
is both volumetrically efficient and structurally strong, it is
typically possible to construct small capsules of performance
comparable in all but lift-to-drag ratio to a lifting body or delta
wing form for less cost. This has been especially pronounced in the
case of the Soyuz manned spacecraft. Most space capsules have used an
ablative heat shield for reentry and been non-reusable. The Crew
Exploration Vehicle appear likely, as of December 2005, to be a ten-
times reusable capsule with a replaceable ablative shield. There is no
limit, save for lack of engineering experience, on using high-
temperature ceramic tiles or ultra-high temperature ceramic sheets on
space capsules.
Mercury capsule internal diagram

Materials for the space capsule are designed in different ways, like
the Apollo’s honey-combed structure of aluminum. Aluminum is very
light, and the structure gives the space capsule extra strength. The
early space craft had a coating of glass embedded with synthetic resin
and put in very high temperatures. Carbon fiber, reinforced plastics
and ceramic are new materials that are constantly being made better
for use in space exploration.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_capsule

This is a re-entry vehicle thus subject to greater stress and heating
than a launch vehicle. Also it is going a lot faster with very limited
fuel to slow it down through the 20 or so miles of air that does all
the damage.

My OP on this thread was about the first and second stages of a
spacecraft.

[Skywise]

Weatherlawyer <weathe...@gmail.com> wrote in news:2ed89826-1170-4a9b-
b189-f62...@9g2000vbq.googlegroups.com:

> I believe he is attempting irony.

Irony, yes. Attempting, no.

> At take-off the air pressure diminishes immediately. Of course air
> pressure becomes a problem as soon as 60 mph. Battleships manage half
> that through a much stickier medium.

Maximum aerodynamic pressure (Max Q) on the Space Shuttle is about
60 seconds after liftoff. Before reaching this point, the SSME's
(Space Shuttle Main Engines) are throttled down to 72% to reduce
the pressures on the orbiter and prevent it from 'overspeeding', in
the aerodynamic sense. At about 72 seconds, the engines are then
brought back to their full cruise power of 104%. This moment is
marked in the communications you hear during launch as the call "Go
at throttle up" indicating that all systems are nominal at this point.

So no, the air pressure does not diminish immediately. Well, yes,
the static air pressure, but due to the acceleration of the craft
the dynamic pressures rise until max Q at which point they then
begin to diminish. This occurs with all rockets.

> (The Apollos used up a considerable quantity of fuel as coolant.)

No fuel is "used up". It circulates through and around the engine
to act as coolant before being used by the engine.

In the SSME's, the temperature in the combustion chamber is about
6,000蚌 (about 3,300蚓). This is higher than the boiling point of
both iron and titanium, and just shy of the melting point of
tungsten, the element with the highest melting temperature.

In the Apollo F-1 engines, kerosene was used as the fuel which
burns a couple hundred degrees cooler than the liquid hydrogen
of the SSME's. In both cases liquid oxygen is the oxidizer.

No material can withstand both the pressures and temperatures that
are required for this task, so obviously some form of cooling is
necessary.

In the case of the F-1, the 'relatively' cool exhaust from the
gas generator which powered the turbopumps was injected into the
exhaust nozzle to create a 'cool' layer between the walls of the
nozzle and the hotter main exhaust gasses. The gas generators
use some of the fuel to power the turbopumps which supply the
engine with it's fuel and oxidizer. The exhaust is then used
for the cooling process as a beneficial by-product. Hardly wasted.

In the case of the SSME's, which are much more complex than the
F-1, the cooling is done solely by circulating the hydrogen in
and around the parts. Any exhaust from the 'pre-burners' which
drive the turbopumps is used in the main combustion chamber as
part of the combustion process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSME
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-1_%28rocket_engine%29

Oh, here's a cool video of a new engine being tested. Icicles
form on the nozzle!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eM1mNNdguA

> Titanium is produced in a very elaborate chemistry laboratory -as
> opposed to iron which is produced in smelters

Granted, producing titanium from it's ore involves more effort
in it's production than iron/steel, known as the Kroll process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroll_process

However, it's still a large scale industrial process, hardly invocative
of the typical image of a 'laboratory'.

Here's an excellent video all about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsdRo5jvnXo

Reduction of iron ore is also a large scale industrial process
that involves complex chemistry. It's just much easier to do
since you don't need to use expensive magnesium, don't need to
do the process under vacuum, and doesn't use dangerous chlorine.

BTW, there is a recently developed process which promises to
make titanium production cheap.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFC_Cambridge_process

> requiring no more than fire-brick replacement every few weeks.

More like years. Think about it. Are you really going to shut
down that expensive blast furnace every few weeks for maintenance?
Instead, you design the thing to keep running as long as possible.
Time = money. (except for you liberal commucrats)

> All a spaceship has to do is reach escape velocity.

If you want to leave the Earth altogether, yes. If you want to
simply orbit, you can go quite a bit slower. Orbital velocity is
less than escape velocity.

> Its rate of acceleration is immaterial.

Well, not really. Other factors are involved which dictate the
rate of acceleration. It's pretty complex.

In fact, it _really_ is rocket science!

> Stream lining need not be. In fact the larger the
> fuselage, the exponentially larger the payload.

In space, aerodynamics usually don't matter. But not always. Even
in the typical low Earth orbit, there is still some air. That's why
the ISS needs periodic boosts of it's orbit. Atmospheric drag.

But getting payloads up from the ground you still have to travel
through the atmosphere to get there. Aerodynamics still plays a
roll. It's still very important. If it wasn't, then why are all
launch vehicles aerodynamic?

Think about it, the more aerodynamic the vehicle is at launch,
even though it's only important for a few minutes, the less
fuel needed to launch a given payload.

Surely you're not telling us that you are smarter than all them
thar rocket scientists?

[Belba Grubb]

On Feb 27, 7:08 pm, Skywise <i...@oblivion.nothing.com> wrote:
> Weatherlawyer <weatherlaw...@gmail.com> wrote in news:2ed89826-1170-4a9b-
> b189-f627c69af...@9g2000vbq.googlegroups.com:

>
> > I believe he is attempting irony.
>
> Irony, yes. Attempting, no.

So, you really didn't care about Paricutin, then?

Barb

[Skywise]

Belba Grubb <trungsi...@yahoo.com> wrote in news:bd4ce503-03d2-44f1-a930-
5ef64d...@cj6g2000vbb.googlegroups.com:

> So, you really didn't care about Paricutin, then?

eh?

[Belba Grubb]

On Feb 27, 4:24 pm, Weatherlawyer <weatherlaw...@gmail.com> wrote:

> My OP on this thread was about the first and second stages of a
> spacecraft.

Ah, that explains it, then.

Poor Paricutin. None of its ejecta was sufficiently ballistic,
apparently, and now that it isn't erupting, nobody wants to talk about
it any more. :)

That's a superb You Tube video I linked to, by the way, whether you
just like hill/volcano climbing and pretty views, or are interested a
closeup look at a cinder cone (and weathering) and a panorama of a
monogenetic volcanic field (I wish they didn't pan around so fast).
It's hard to tell on camera, but it seems much, much bigger than the
ones just west of Albuquerque (the only cinder cones I've ever
climbed). Also, after a look at the surrounding countryside,
Paricutin doesn't seem so unique as it at first glance via the
news...but still just as fascinating (The Norteno soundtrack on the
video is nice, too.)

Barb
-------------
"Anyone who thinks the art of conversation is dead ought to tell a
child to go to bed."
-- Robert Gallagher