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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 16 July 2024
[space] Five of Saturn’s Moons in a Group Portrait … ‘On July 29, 2011, Cassini captured five of Saturn’s moons in a single frame with its narrow-angle camera. This is a full-color look at a view that was originally published in September 2011’
21 March 2024
[space] What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back? … The fascinating story of why the Space Shuttle had a combination lock on it’s exit hatch. ‘After learning a hard lesson regarding cabin pressure and complicated locking mechanisms in the Apollo 1 fire, NASA had designed the Shuttle hatch to open outward. It was a relatively simple procedure, requiring little physical force, as the hatch opened into the vacuum of outer space.’
2 July 2023
[space] Bicycle Racing In Space Could Be A Thing … Hard science fiction gives us the possibility of MAMIL’s in space! ‘…the idea for the space bike comes from a short story called Grand Tour by Charles Sheffield, who was a mathematician, physicist and writer of hard science fiction. The story is about an annual race called the Grand Tour du Système. The route starts out from low Earth orbit going to Lagrange point 4 (L4), a location along the Moon’s orbit where the Earth’s and Moon’s gravitational fields conspire to provide a stable position. From L4, the route continues halfway to the Moon and then returns to Earth orbit. Altogether it’s around 600,000 kilometers long.’
25 June 2023
[space] Mars and it’s smallest moon Deimos (from r/spaceporn) … ‘The UAE’s Hope spacecraft captured Mars’ smaller moon, Deimos, from a distance of about 62 miles (100 km). This Deimos image is the 1st-ever high-resolution view of the far side of the little moon…’
25 October 2022
[space] Saturn: 1993 – 2022 … Go Look at this visualisation of Saturn’s 22yr Orbit Round the Sun which recently completed. ‘Constructed from individual images made over 29 Earth years, the split panorama is centered along the ecliptic and crossed by the plane of our Milky Way galaxy.’
26 April 2022
[space] The Hubble Space Telescope Hasn’t Burned Out Yet … How is Hubble doing after 32 years in space? ‘We are closer to the end of Hubble’s mission now than we are to its beginning. Someday, probably at the end of this decade, the space telescope will stop working. The people who manage Hubble’s time are already working with astronomers around the world to make sure they make the most of the years left, Jennifer Wiseman, a senior project scientist on the Hubble mission, told me. They’re asking: “What’s important to do with Hubble while we still have Hubble?”’
30 December 2021
[space] Billionaires Explain Why Space Is The Next Frontier … ‘I would like to ruin space for everyone.’
8 November 2021
[space] Unwrapped: Five Decade Old Lunar Selfie … A 1969 selfie of Neil Armstrong captured from the reflection in Buzz Aldrin’s helmet. ‘ The original image captured not only the magnificent desolation of an unfamiliar world, but Armstrong himself reflected in Aldrin’s curved visor. Enter modern digital technology. In the featured image, the spherical distortion from Aldrin’s helmet has been reversed. The result is the famous picture — but now featuring Armstrong himself from Aldrin’s perspective.’
2 August 2021
[apollo] Here’s an unprecedented look at Apollo 13’s damaged service module / Apollo 13: Enhanced images reveal life on stricken spacecraft … Ars Technica and BBC News takes a look at a collection of digitally remastered photos from the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission. ‘While working on Apollo 13 images, Saunders said he was struck by how calm Lovell and the other two crew members, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, appear. Much of the film he worked on was shot in the lunar module, after the oxygen tank exploded. The crew was exhausted, it was cold, and the astronauts found themselves in the gravest of situations. And yet they appeared to be in good spirits.’
21 July 2021
[apollo] Alan Shepard smacked golf balls on the Moon – and now we know where they landed … It turns out that golf on the Moon is harder than you’d imagine. ‘Image specialist Andy Saunders recently analyzed archival stills taken by the astronauts with their Hasselblad cameras, as well as video from the lunar ascent module as it lifted off from the surface. Saunders managed to identify not only Shepard’s golf balls, but also his footprints from his stance and his divots. By comparing these to more recent satellite images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Saunders was able to measure the distance on Shepard’s second shot. The result? A rather tame 40 yards (120 feet).’
19 July 2021
[space] The little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station … The true story of how Salyut 7 was saved after a total systems failure in orbit whilst uncrewed.
They floated in with their flashlights and their winter coats, and found the station cold and dark, with frost along the walls. Savinikh tried to turn the lights on-nothing, not that he expected anything. They took off their gas masks-they were making it even more difficult to see around the darkened station, and there was no smell of fire. Savinikh dived to the floor and opened the shade covering a window. A ray of sunlight fell on the ceiling, illuminating the station a little bit. They found the crackers and salt tablets that were left on the table by the previous crew-part of a traditional Russian welcoming ceremony that is still performed on the ISS today-as well as all the onboard station documentation neatly packed and secured to its shelves. All of the ventilators and other systems that normally hummed noisily were off. Savinikh recalls in his flight journal “it felt like being in an old, abandoned home. There was a deafening silence pressing upon our ears.” 16 July 2021
27 May 2021
[space] The First Interstellar Comet Ever Detected Was Lonely … Understanding sad comet 2I/Borisov. ‘Borisov is unlikely to skim by another star. More than one astronomer told me that the chances are nearly zero. The distances between stars are simply too big. “If you had a collision between the Milky Way and another Milky Way, you could collide the galaxies and no two stars would ever hit,” David Jewitt, an astronomer at UCLA who studies comets, told me. Astronomers believe Borisov coasted alone for hundreds of millions of years, even billions, through space before reaching us. “In that amount of time, you might pass by one star,” Jewitt said. “So for Borisov, maybe this is it.”’
3 February 2021
[space] The Uncensored Guide To ‘Oumuamua, Aliens, And That Harvard Astronomer … A rational look at the interstellar visitor Ê»Oumuamua. ‘When it made its closest approach to the Sun, it was moving incredibly fast: up to 88 km/s, or three times the speed that Earth orbits the Sun. But we were lucky to image it at all. It was small (only about 100 meters long), faint, and very red in color, similar to the Trojan asteroids we see in orbit around Jupiter. Its color is different from the icy bodies we know of, failing to match up with comets, Kuiper belt objects, or even centaurs, and follow-up observations revealed a certain amount of boring-ness to ‘Oumuamua, as it displayed no molecular or atomic absorption or emission features.’
17 December 2020
[space] A Rocket From 1966 Has Found Its Way Back to Earth’s Orbit … ‘Chodas sent out an email alert to his fellow astronomers around the world so everyone could help track 2020 SO’s progress over the next few months as it moved closer and closer to Earth. Follow-up spectroscopy observations yielded insight into the object’s composition, and the spectrum data was consistent with the stainless steel used to manufacture Centaur rocket boosters in the 1960s. But the hypothesis wasn’t yet a slam dunk, although the small discrepancies in the data could be explained by the weathering of the steel after 54 years of exposure to harsh space weather…’
14 September 2020
[space] What happens to your body when you die in space? … Just how do you deal with a corpse in space? … ‘The realistic options for a deceased crewmember-cannibalism, cold storage in the trash room, being freeze-dried and shaken into a million frozen flakes-lack the dignity we associate with the majestic endeavor of spaceflight. But Wolpe doesn’t think humankind will have a hard time adjusting to the harsh realities of posthumous treatment in space. We already accept that Earthbound explorers may suffer indignities if they die in the field. Wolpe sees Mount Everest as a perfect Earthly analogue for the future Mars missions: when people die, their bodies just stay there. Forever.’
23 July 2020
[moon] NASA and the Secrets of Moondust … What can moondust tell us about the origins of the Moon and Earth? ‘In the next year, Sehlke, along with other scientists and their teams, will receive tiny lunar samples, untouched for close to 50 years, that were collected during the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions. Some were frozen or stored in helium-filled containers shortly after arriving on Earth. One sample has never been exposed to Earth’s atmosphere; it was packed and vacuum-sealed on the moon by the last astronauts to walk on the surface, in 1972. Sehlke and other researchers still have many questions about the workings of the moon-even about the popular hypothesis for its creation, which doesn’t completely add up-and searching for answers within these pristine samples is a thrilling prospect.’
21 July 2020
14 July 2020
[apollo] How a long-gone Apollo rocket returned to Earth … The story of an asteroid that turned out to be a Apollo rocket from 1969. ‘They made a startling discovery: J002E3 appeared to be covered in paint – specifically, white, titaniumoxide (TiO2) paint. According to Kira Jorgensen Abercromby at California Polytechnic State University, who also studied J002E3 while at the Air Force Maui Optical & Supercomputing observatory, “What we saw were features in the spectral data that matched other upper-stage rocket bodies launched during a similar time frame [to the Apollo missions] and the data also matched typical features found in organic paints that looked like TiO2.” This information pointed toward a very specific object as the identity of J002E3: a spent third stage from an Apollo-era Saturn V rocket, which were historically covered in this specific kind of paint.’
26 June 2020
[space] Happy Little Crater on Mercury … Somewhere else in the solar system for Dr. Manhattan to visit.
22 August 2019
[space] NASA’s Voyagers Grow Weaker Each Year … How the Voyager probes are still running after 40 years in space. ‘Engineers also shut off a heating component that keeps one of Voyager 2’s instruments warm enough to function in the frigid cold of space. Turning off a heater buys the mission four watts, the same amount it loses in a year. After months of deliberation, scientists decided that sacrificing this instrument, which last year helped confirm that the spacecraft had left the solar system, was worth it. Unlike the others, this instrument can point only in certain directions. Some other instruments have, incredibly, tolerated the loss of their heaters, sometimes for years.’
5 August 2019
[space] Greetings, E.T. (Please Don’t Murder Us) … Steven Johnson on the Pros and Cons of attempting to contact Extraterrestrial Civilizations. ‘Drake leaned forward, nodding. “It raises a very interesting, nonscientific question, which is: Are extraterrestrial civilizations altruistic? Do they recognize this problem and establish a beacon for the benefit of the other folks out there? My answer is: I think it’s actually Darwinian; I think evolution favors altruistic societies. So my guess is yes. And that means there might be one powerful signal for each civilization.” Given the transit time across the universe, that signal might well outlast us as a species, in which case it might ultimately serve as a memorial as much as a message, like an interstellar version of the Great Pyramids: proof that a technologically advanced organism evolved on this planet, whatever that organism’s ultimate fate.’
21 July 2019
[apollo] Classified Apollo 11 anomaly threatened to crash first moon astronauts … How a problem with the Service Module almost killed all the Apollo 11 Astronauts close to home. ‘About 15 minutes before the astronauts splashed into the Pacific Ocean, the CSM fully separated into its two parts. This was necessary because only the command module (which held the crew) had a heat shield. The heat shield protected the astronauts by deflecting and absorbing the scorching energies created by plowing through Earth’s atmosphere at about 25,000 mph – more than a dozen times as fast as a speeding bullet. The service module became useless and posed a collision risk after the two parts separated, so it was supposed to skip off Earth’s atmosphere like a stone thrown across a pond. But it did not.’
19 July 2019
[apollo] The Underappreciated Power of the Apollo Computer … Alexis Madrigal on the Apollo Guidance Computer. ‘To maximize the built-in architecture, Hamilton and her colleagues came up with what they named “The Interpreter-”we’d now call it a virtualization scheme. It allowed them to run five to seven virtual machines simultaneously in two kilobytes of memory. It was terribly slow, but “now you have all the capabilities you ever dreamed of, in software,” O’Brien said.’
17 July 2019
[apollo] Astronauts Falling on the Moon…
30 April 2019
[tech] Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people … How Microsoft PowerPoint contributed to the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. ‘Typing text on a screen and reading it out loud does not count as teaching. An audience reading text off the screen does not count as learning. Imagine if the engineers had put up a slide with just: “foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data.” Maybe NASA would have listened. Maybe they wouldn’t have attempted re-entry. ‘
4 April 2019
[space] Apollo astronauts left their poop on the moon. NASA ought to go back for that shit. … Is there life on the Moon feft behind in astronaut’s excrement that was jettisoned from Moon Landers? … ‘After Neil Armstrong descended from the Eagle lander, becoming the first human to set foot on the moon, the very first picture he took on the surface shows, yes, the moon’s cratered surface, but also a white jettisoned trash bag (or jett bag). I can’t confirm there are feces in this particular bag (Buzz Aldrin declined to comment for this story), but there’s definitely one like it on the moon that contained or still contains human waste, according to the NASA History Office.’
24 July 2018
23 July 2018
[moon] How the Earliest Images of the Moon Were so Much Better than we Realised … The story of how images taken by a Moon Orbiter in 1966 were saved from obsolete analog media. ‘Since 2007 the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has brought back 2000 images from 1500 analog tapes. The first ever picture of an earthrise. As Keith Cowing said “an image taken a quarter of a fucking million miles away in 1966. The Beatles were warming up to play Shea Stadium at the moment it was being taken.”’
22 July 2018
[space] First contact: what if we find not organic life but ET’s AI? … More interesing hypotheticals on alien hunting. ‘The most challenging task for a nursery-room AI would be how to expose its collective of savants to the complexity of the real-world environment. Nature isn’t just about meeting fixed goals; it’s full of noise, randomness and trillions upon trillions of interacting pieces. For example, from the very instant an embryo forms, it is exposed to constant variation. First just a few cells, it senses the world purely from a molecular point of view. As the embryo develops organs to register light, sound, touch and smell, the portals to experience – and their complexity – expand. In short, the way for a species to make a better AI is to let that AI and its components explore the messy Universe. As complex and nourishing as a single planet can be, a cosmos filled with worlds offers millions, billions, even trillions of natural test tubes, each with its own tale of natural selection and chance. Spreading savant AI pieces across the stars offers a way to exploit these endless natural experiments and sensory inputs.’
21 July 2018
[space] NASA astronaut Ellison Onizuka’s soccer ball that survived the Challenger explosion … the moving story of a long forgotten football from the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and the family that sent it back into space.
Clear Lake High School principal, Karen Engle, got an email from a parent. He was leaving a booster club meeting and stopped to look at the ball, remembering it from so long ago. He figured it should have its own display case, and he offered to build it. 20 July 2018
[spaceships] On the Taxonomy of Spaceships … An attempt to classify types of fictional spacecraft. ‘There are lots of different ship classes in science fiction, and I’m not talking about the designated name for a particular frame (like Victory-class or Firefly-class). I’m talking about classification of ship roles; or ship types. You have your cruisers, your destroyers, your frigates and corvettes, your dreadnoughts, and all sorts of other roles. But something that always confused me is exactly what the differences are between them. If you had shown me two ships and claimed one was a destroyer and one was a cruiser I wouldn’t have really understood what that actually means and what roles they employ in a battle. How is a battleship different from a battlecruiser? Is there any difference between a star cruiser and an assault cruiser, and if so what is it?’
19 July 2018
[space] For all we know, aliens could be as careless with space junk as us … Interesting approach to discovering aliens by looking for evidence their garbage in space. ‘However, while it is looking like humankind may soon be able to spot the biomarkers of exolife, spotting a technologically advanced civilisation continues to present a challenge. Astroboffin Hector Socas-Navarro proposes that rather than looking at the exoplanet itself, researchers turn their attention to the “Clarke Exobelt” (CEB). This is an area around the planet touchingly named after Arthur C Clarke, who proposed using a geostationary orbit around the Earth for satellite communications in a 1945 paper.’
18 July 2018
[aliens] Fermi paradox: why haven’t we found aliens yet?… An attempt to answer a (currently) unanswerable question.
…the idea that intelligent life is extremely rare in the universe feels completely counterintuitive. We exist, along with other intelligent life like dolphins and octopi, so we assume what we see must be extrapolatable beyond Earth. 17 July 2018
[books] 55 Essential Space Operas from the Last 70 Years … Great list of Sci-fi books… ‘Use of Weapons, by Iain M. Banks – Though it technically kicked off in the late ’80s, Iain M. Banks Culture novels could be said to be the genesis of what came to be known as the New British Space Opera in the ’90s and 2000s. An twist on utopian space operas, The Culture presents a future where benevolent AIs govern everything, genetic engineering has resulted in immortality and perfected human design, and the most powerful faction in the universe (next to the energy beings) is the Culture, a group of cheerful collectivists with massive, heavily armed sentient starships. Banks’ imaginative world design and massive scope is paired with an iconoclastic and anarchic sense of humor for a modern classic.’
16 July 2018
[space] Cinema Space Tribute …
7 May 2018
[space] Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design … ’34. (Roosevelt’s Law of Task Planning) Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.’
9 April 2018
[space] Exploring the Secrets of Soothing Spaceship Sound … a look at the soothing white noise of fictional spaceships … ‘In the intervening years, Snell has taken it upon himself to sample and loop the ambient hums of dozens of science fiction ships, building an unlikely but sizeable YouTube presence of over nine million views and over a hundred videos. Whether it’s the calming tone created by the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation, or the throbbing pulse of Dr. Who’s Tardis, Snell aims to shine a light on an important element of science fiction that most people don’t often think about-what the spaceships sound like.’ [via MetaFilter]
28 December 2017
[comics] Comics Legend Jack Kirby Worried That Our Attempts to Contact Aliens Might Attract a ‘Tiger’ … Unsurprisingly, the creator of Galactus was concerned about SETI. ‘I would have included no further information than a rough image of the Earth and its one moon. I see no wisdom in the eagerness to be found and approached by any intelligence with the ability to accomplish it from any sector of space. In the meetings between ‘discoverers’ and ‘discoverees,’ history has always given the advantage to the finders. In the case of the Jupiter (Pioneer) plaque, I feel that a tremendous issue was thoughtlessly taken out of the world forum by a few individuals who have marked a clear trail to our door. My point is, who will come a-knocking – the trader or the tiger?’
5 September 2017
[apollo] How Verbs and Nouns Got Apollo to the Moon … a look at how the Apollo Guidance Computer worked … ‘An entire mission to the Moon was run by the Apollo guidance computer, from checking the guidance platform alignment and firing the engines. All told, it took about 10,500 keystrokes to get to the Moon and back, and every one of them was entered into the guidance computer’s “display and keyboard” interface, affectionately referred to as the DKSY (pronounced like “diss-key”). There were three on board – two in the command module and one in the lunar module – and all three offered information simply and concisely in numeric coded messages or by a series of warning lights.’
30 August 2017
[moon] The Moon’s Origin Story Is in Crisis … new science is causing the story of the moon’s creation to be reevaluated … ‘The astronauts chiseled bits of the moon from the boulder. Then, using a rake, Schmitt scraped the powdery surface, lifting a rock later named troctolite 76536 off the regolith and into history. That rock, and its boulder brethren, would go on to tell a story of how the entire moon came to be. In this creation tale, inscribed in countless textbooks and science-museum exhibits over the past four decades, the moon was forged in a calamitous collision between an embryonic Earth and a rocky world the size of Mars. This other world was named Theia, for the Greek goddess who gave birth to Selene, the moon. Theia clobbered Earth so hard and so fast that the worlds both melted. Eventually, leftover debris from Theia cooled and solidified into the silvery companion we have today. But modern measurements of troctolite 76536, and other rocks from the moon and Mars, have cast doubt on this story. In the past five years, a bombardment of studies has exposed a problem: The canonical giant-impact hypothesis rests on assumptions that do not match the evidence. If Theia hit Earth and later formed the moon, the moon should be made of Theia-type material. But the moon does not look like Theia-or like Mars, for that matter. Down to its atoms, it looks almost exactly like Earth.’
7 August 2017
[space] The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe … a wonderful profile of the team managing the Voyager Probes on their long journey into interstellar space … ‘Even though they simulate every patch with software, there is plenty of room for human error. Far more often, hardware fails for no evident reason. In 1998, Voyager 2 reacted to a command by going silent. For 64 hours straight, the flight team studied the specific instruction – consisting of 18 bits, or 1s and 0s – that preceded the blackout. Bits have been known to ‘‘flip” to the opposite value, changing the instruction the same way that swapping a single letter turns ‘‘cat” into ‘‘cut.” The question was: What instruction had they accidentally given and how could they undo it? At last, modeling the outcome of each possible bit, they discovered one that turned off the exciter, which generates the spacecraft’s radio signal; when they turned it back on, the transmissions resumed.’
9 March 2017
[space] Io over Jupiter from Voyager 1 … Looking at this stunning picture of Io over Jupiter is about as close as I get to religious awe …
8 March 2017
[space] Heat and Ashes: The Untold Story of the Apollo 1 Fire … Remembering Apollo 1 – 50 years later … ‘The legacy of the Apollo fire of 1967 is preserved in history books and lengthy documentaries. But the sheer horror and emotional intensity of having three colleagues-for many in the program, three close friends-suffocate in a burning capsule while scrambling to save them, hasn’t been as well preserved. The severity of that moment has become a footnote in the public consciousness, faded by the decades that have passed and overshadowed by the incredible achievements of the Apollo program that followed. But for those like Henry Rogers who experienced the tragedy firsthand, the trauma of January 27, 1967 left scars, and a deep sense of regret that’s difficult to capture all these years later…’
25 January 2017
[space] Martians Might Be Real. That Makes Mars Exploration Way More Complicated … A look at the job of the woman whose job at NASA is to make sure we don’t kill Martians before we find them … ‘If alien life exists, researchers will of course want to study how it originated and evolved-to glimpse what planetary scientist Chris McKay calls a “second Genesis.” And to prevent false leads, humans have to be careful not to muddy space with our own trail of bacteria. Another less official rationale for today’s planetary protection policy is ecological-you might even call it anticolonial. Essentially, Conley’s office serves to prevent NASA from doing to Martians what European explorers did to Native Americans with smallpox. Because Mars lacks Earth’s history of abundant life, it has that much more raw material for Earth’s bacterial stowaways to devour-should any of them, say, come into contact with water, find a niche they can survive in, and start to reproduce. “The whole planet is a dinner plate for these organisms,” she says. “They will eat Mars.” Conley wants to make sure we at least know whether Martian life exists before we introduce an invasive species that will wipe it out.’
4 January 2017
[moon] The Dark Side of the Moon … go read this powerful profile of Buzz Aldrin …
You smile at him, your face opening the way every single face in the entire world opens when it encounters him. Because he is: Buzz Aldrin. And we are: mankind. 28 December 2016
[space] The Wold Newton Meteorite … the history behind a meteorite that crashed into Yorkshire in 1759 and later fell into fiction … ‘In addition to almost killing a farm labourer and kickstarting the modern scientific study of meteorites, the “EXTRAORDINARY STONE” which fell to Earth two centuries ago was also the catalyst for some of the most inventive and influential crossover fiction of the twentieth century. If you’re are a fan of Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula novels, Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or even Bryan Talbot’s Grandville, or Showtime’s Penny Dreadful then you have the Wold Newton Meteorite to thank. All these worlds filled with characters from different novels, films, and TV series owe a huge debt (acknowledged by both Newman and Moore, I might add) to the writing of Philip Jose Farmer…’
31 October 2016
[space] How NASA Fights to Keep Dying Spacecraft Alive … a look at how the working lives of space probes end … ‘Maybe there’s another way of looking at the “deaths” of NASA’s deep space probes. After all, even after we lose contact with all five, they will still be speeding away from the solar system toward distant stars. In the vacuum of space, there’s nothing to corrode or degrade the spacecraft other than the occasional stray particle, meaning there’s every possibility that these probes will still be out there somewhere millions of years from now. By then, it’s entirely possible that the last humans in existence will be the couple carved onto the Pioneer plaque, those photographed for Voyager’s Golden Record, and Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh, an ounce of whose ashes are aboard New Horizons.’
24 June 2016
[space] The sounds of starships … Metafilter on using the ambient engine sounds of fictional spaceships as white noise … ‘The background engine noises of iconic science fiction spaceships can be remarkably soothing. That is why Spike Snell created 12-hour sound loops…’
14 December 2015
[space] American satellite started transmitting 46 years after being abandoned in 1967 … the remarkable story of a derelict satellite that’s starting operating again … ‘Phil Williams G3YPQ from near Bude noticed its peculiar signal drift caused by its tumbling end over end every 4 seconds as the solar panels become shadowed by the engine. ‘This gives the signal a particularly ghostly sound as the voltage from the solar panels fluctuates’ Phil says. It is likely that the on board batteries have now disintegrated and some other component failure has caused the transmitter on 237Mhz, to start up when its in sunlight.’
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