Free Republic

Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) said on CBS’s “Sunday Morning” that former President Donald Trump represented “a failure of character,” which is changing the psyche of our nation. Anchor Norah O’Donnell said, “You were once the party’s nominee, and now you’re a pariah in the Republican Party.” Romney said, “Yeah, that’s saying it in a gentle way, yeah. I mean, yeah, no question. I don’t really have a home in my party. I come from a tradition of, you know, Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush and George W. Bush and John McCain. Those are the people that have shaped...

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy launches the Psyche mission. The orbiter mission will explore the origin of planetary cores by studying the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche. 16 Psyche is the heaviest known M-type asteroid. The mass of the payload is 2,600 kg. Instantaneous Launch Window: October 13th at 10:19AM EDT (14:19 UTC)

The Psyche spacecraft was supposed to launch toward its namesake, a bizarre metallic space rock in the main asteroid belt, between August and October of this year. But issues with Psyche's flight software made it impossible to hit that window... Psyche will still launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as previously planned. 2022 liftoff would have delivered Psyche to its asteroid target in early 2026. But a 2023 launch requires a different trajectory, pushing the arrival back to August 2029... NASA's Janus smallsat mission, which is designed to study two separate binary...

An illustration of the Psyche asteroid. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU) If you wanted to do a forensic study of the Solar System, you might head for the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. That's where you can find ancient rocks from the Solar System's early days. Out there in the cold vacuum of space, far from the Sun, asteroids are largely untouched by space weathering. Space scientists sometimes refer to asteroids – and their meteorite fragments that fall to Earth – as time capsules because of the evidence they hold. The asteroid Psyche is especially interesting, and NASA is sending a mission...

NASA will head to asteroid 16 Psyche - long thought to be the core of a dead planet - in 2022 to determine if it really contains enough metal that it's worth $10,000 quadrillion and could make every person on the planet a billionaire. But one new study suggests it's more likely a pile of rubble. The research, published in Planetary Science Journal, suggests that 16 Psyche is 82.5 percent metal, 7 percent low-iron pyroxene and 10.5 percent carbonaceous chondrite. It could also have a bulk density, or how much empty space is inside, at 35 percent. Those figures are...

The study, which was published today in The Planetary Science Journal and presented at the virtual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences, paints a clearer view of the asteroid than was previously available. At about 140 miles in diameter, Psyche is one of the most massive objects in the main asteroid belt orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Previous observations indicate that Psyche is a dense, largely metallic object thought to be the leftover core of a planet that failed in formation. Becker observed the asteroid at two specific points in its rotation to view both sides...

Scientists want to visit the unique metal asteroid, because they believe that it could actually be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet that broke apart due to violent collisions. The mission's findings could shed light on the formation of our solar system ... NASA says launching the Psyche spacecraft will cost it approximately $117 million, and according to SpaceNews, it's the agency's first mission that will fly on top of a Falcon Heavy as its primary payload.

NASA is preparing to explore a mysterious asteroid made of metal, the US space agency has announced. The value of all the nickel and iron that NASA believes makes up 16-Psyche’s oddly-shaped space rock in the asteroid belt’s outer reaches is estimated at $10,000 quadrillion. This is a massive sum, but NASA’s Psyche mission, which has now received approval to enter the final development stages before manufacturing begins for its 2022 launch, is actually after a much bigger prize – revealing how Earth's origins. NASA researchers believe asteroid Psyche is key to understanding how planetary bodies are formed. This is...

FULL HEADLINE: The $10,000 quadrillion asteroid: Experts reveal how iron, nickel and gold makes 16-Psyche so valuable as NASA prepares to visit it in 2026 Three times further away from the sun than the Earth lies an enormous lump of metal.  Around 252km in diameter, the metallic 'M-class' asteroid 16 Psyche is the target of NASA's next mission to the belt of giant rocks that encircles the inner solar system. And the space agency now plans to visit it much sooner than originally planned. Not only has the launch has been brought forward one year to the summer of 2022,...

Psyche, NASA's Discovery Mission to a unique metal asteroid, has been moved up one year with launch in the summer of 2022, and with a planned arrival at the main belt asteroid in 2026 -- four years earlier than the original timeline. “We challenged the mission design team to explore if an earlier launch date could provide a more efficient trajectory to the asteroid Psyche, and they came through in a big way,” said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This will enable us to fulfill our science objectives sooner and at a...

Jewish extremists have gone too far, and it's time to put a stop to them once and for all. Their attacks have become an epidemic, from the north to the south of Israel - and here are just four shocking illustrations from this month alone. Last week, a mob of Jewish youths attacked a group of 11- and 12-year-old schoolgirls, hurling firebombs at their bus near Hevron, in an attack which only failed to cause death or serious injury because attacks against Arabs in the area are so frequent they almost all reinforce their vehicles against rocks and firebombs as...

Psyche, Nous; Faith and Reason: The Classic View By “classic view” we mean to denote the epochal legacy of ancient Greek philosophy, and the epochal genius of thinkers who could and did “isolate” psyche as a bona fide constituent of Reality. Instantly, there seems to be two problems. How is “Reality” to be defined? Who’s doing the “defining?” For answers to such questions, we must have access to Nous. This incredibly compact Greek word is usually translated into English as Reason. But the Greek nous carries other meanings as well: c.f., reason; mind; intellect; self-reflective consciousness; logic; creative will; truth....

The Israeli Embassy in the U.S. had a field day after the Iranian state-run Fars News Agency used a made up report by the satirical news site The Onion, and passed it off as what they presumed to be real. The fake report stated that a new Gallup poll showed that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was overwhelming preferred over President Obama by rural white Americans. The Onion headline, “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama”, was immediately picked up by Fars and hours later the news agency ran an identical story. The Israeli Embassy found this all too amusing,...

David Remnick on CSPAN-2 David Remnick, author of "The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama" Q&A should follow soon.

Bangalore's hi-tech enclaves are an oasis of excellence With its economy growing at more than triple the speed of Britain's, India has become a global leader in information technology and other hi-tech products. But how has this been possible in a country where poverty is so widespread and where more than a third of people are still illiterate? In the words of Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, "the danger of India moving in the direction of being half California and half sub-Saharan Africa is a real one." The contrast between hi-tech, silicon enclaves such as Bangalore and the primitive...

In the first of a series of features to mark one year to go before the Beijing Olympics, the BBC's Michael Bristow finds China determined to win gold on home soil. The school is training some of China's best young sporting talent At Beijing's Shichahai Sports School, children as young as six are training hard to be the Olympic stars of tomorrow. Along with several thousand others, the school is part of a sports machine that aims to bring glory to China through sporting success. And success comes no more glorious than the Olympic Games, to be held in...

The Platonic Soul It is fitting to give Plato the first word on the question, “What Is Man?” For Plato was the first thinker to isolate man out of his connection to clan and tribe, making the human individual -- man as he is in himself -- a proper subject of investigation. This shift of attention to the individual psyche marks a decisive, revolutionary break with the characteristic habits of thought of the ancient world, the cosmological consciousness, which conceived of man mainly in terms of his connections to units larger than the individual, and envisioned a cosmos filled with...