Well, my fellow Americans, here we are. Election Day.

I suspect that people who have followed me for a while know which way I lean, and by lean I mean tilted way over to the blue end of the spectrum. But even if I were in the middle, or even red/right-leaning, I’d see this election as a choice between a Republic, if we can keep it, and a dictatorship that would end America as we know it.

And that’s no exaggeration. We know what Trump is like; we had four devastating years from him. And this time he has made it clear he will be much, much worse. Just the fact that he’s entertaining the idea of RFK Jr. playing a big role in his Administration is a four-alarm-fire red-alert holy yikes situation; there isn’t a brain-dead anti-science conspiracy theory that chucklehead doesn’t believe in. Chemtrails? Check. Fluoride in water causing damage? Check. Vaccines cause autism? Check. I wouldn’t be surprised if he mandated NASA prove the Earth is flat.

But that’s just the tip of the very chilly iceberg. I need not enumerate Trump’s Hitler rhetoric, the love of totalitarians, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the racism, the bloodlust, the desire to jail American citizens in violation of the First Amendment. And on and on.

Oh — SCOTUS justices Alito and Thomas, both far-right ideologues who, in a happier world, would have no more responsibility than making spittle-flecked Tiktok videos that get a dozen views, are rumored to want to retire soon. A Harris win means we might pick up two seats in the Court, especially if the Senate swings left. That’s absolutely critical; a lot of recent damage could be mitigated.

By the time you read this I will have already cast my ballot. I am happily voting for Harris/Walz, Tim Kaine for Senate, and Gloria Tinsley Witt for the House. Straight blue.

We still have this opportunity to save this country, quite literally. I very very much hope we do.

Tomorrow — Wednesday, November 6, 2024 — the amazing Parker Solar Probe will swing by the planet Venus in a gravity assist maneuver that will put it in its final orbital configuration around the Sun.

The probe was launched in 2018, designed to drop close to the Sun and study the solar wind (the stream of subatomic particles from the Sun) in situ, as well as lots of other cool science about our nearest star. To do this it has to get as close to the Sun as possible, which is hard. Earth orbits the Sun at a velocity of about 30 kilometers per second, so a lot of that sideways motion has to be erased from the probe to get it to drop closer to the Sun. It does that by very carefully passing Venus. The probe gives up some of its energy to the planet, dropping it closer to the Sun.

It’s done this six times since launch. Tomorrow is the seventh and final pass. The spacecraft will zip past Venus at the incredibly low distance of just 376 kilometers above the surface, barely above the atmosphere! The closer the probe gets, the more efficient the maneuver, so mission controllers are skimming the top of the air there to make sure they get as much out of this last pass as possible.

Parker has a scientific instrument on-board called the Wide-Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, or WISPR, which detects visible light (the kind we see) as well as a bit of near-infrared. It will take images of the planet as it passes.

Now here’s the thing. Venus has a very thick atmosphere that’s opaque to visible light (it’s highly reflective, too, which is why Venus is so bright in the night sky; it’s out now after sunset in the southwest and already astonishingly bright). The air is mostly carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and so the temperature on Venus is a broiling 460° C — actually, broil in an oven is only about 260° C, so this is way past broil. That’s enough to make Venus glow brightly in the infrared, at a wavelength of around 5 microns. WISPR can’t see out that far in the spectrum, but Venus is so bright in the infrared that during the last Venus maneuver the camera still saw details of the surface right through the clouds as the planet glowed in infrared! I wrote about that back in BAN Issue #408.

 That’s amazing, and I expect we’ll see some cool stuff again this time.

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