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AstronomyCast doesnt quite hit it with me. Its hosted by two people who do the question and answer routine on a topic each week and I'd rather just hear one of them talk about the subject instead of one of them pretending to know nothing about the subject and asking questions. Its all a matter of taste but I find it a bit too packaged and distracting. Like it was trying to be a conversation but came out awkwardly like a script. The information is always top notch and interesting stuff but the style of the show is not my cup of tea. The Jodcast recently asked its listeners whether they wanted the "objects in the sky for the upcoming month" to be read as a question and answer thing and they voted for one person to talk about it. As I say its a matter of taste so I pointed out a couple of other shows, in case the one I wasn't so keen on, put people off podcasts - theres a big sky out there and there's lots of different podcasts too.

I could mention a few more in addition to
AstronomyCast http://www.astronomycast.com/ top quality show with different subjects explored in depth with a teaching mission that will leave you much better informed than anything on tv ever will. The pedogogic style doesnt suit me but thats just my taste.

"Slacker Astronomy" http://www.slackerastronomy.org/wordpress/ Practising astronomers interviewed and in-depth subjects discussed by enthusiastic experts, they crack abysmal jokes about technical things which might seem a little silly (or incomprehensible) but the unscripted enthusiasm appeals to me.

The "Jodcast" http://www.jodcast.net/ Science staff from Manchester Universities Joderal Bank radio telescope bring us astronomy news, a themed mini drama, the night sky this month, topical discussion and an oft repeated desire for their theme tune to be redone in a heavy metal version. Well connected on Facebook et al, join in the fun.

there are

NASA Blueshift http://astrophysics.gsfc.nasa.gov/outreach/podcast/wordpress/ A bit slick the last time I listened, with soundbite interviews instead of a bit more detail from a single person. Most NASA stuff is a bit "wow look at that" without too much depth so I only come back to it infrequently. However it is probably perfect for the younger listener and they will probably be hooked by its friendliness.

"Astronomy a Go Go" http://astronomy.libsyn.com/ is the best observing podcast on the net bar none with Alice Few. It may prove a little intimidating to newcomers but the website is also the best general resource for amateur astronomers who want to do observing IMHO. Alice is so thorough and easy on the ear that you could easily play this one three or four times to get yourself fully up to speed on what might be worth doing in the coming month with your observing time. Solid gold this one.

Planetary Radio http://www.planetary.org/radio/ from the Planetary Society is great if you are into rockets and the exploration of the solar system as opposed to deep space. Always an interesting listen with news features, an opinion spot from the self styled "Bill Nye the planetary guy" and loads of enthusiasm for exploring.

365 days of astronomy http://365daysofastronomy.org/ has a few days left to run with a choice of 365 short programs from this The year of Astronomy - The ones from this year best heard now by browsing through the programs to find ones on subjects you are interested in, but the good news is that they are set to carry on with their volunteer generated 5 to 10 minute programs in 2010. Head on over and make a program for them yourself!

The Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures http://www.astroso

The Planetary Society has an interesting FAQ on this subject: http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/innovative_technologies/pioneer_anomaly/update_20050720.html

Also explains why it is seen with Pioneer 10 and 11 and not Voyager 1 or 2 or other more "modern" spacecraft.

From the FAQ: The Pioneers are spin-stabilized spacecraft. The Voyagers are three-axis stabilized craft that fire thrusters to maintain their orientation in space or to slew around and point their instruments. Those thruster firings would introduce uncertainties in the tracking data that would overwhelm any effect as small as that occurring with Pioneer. This difference in the way the spacecraft are stabilized actually is one of the reasons the Pioneer data are so important and unique. Most current spacecraft are three-axis stabilized, not spin stabilized.

To my knowledge many species of bacteria can survive indefinitely in practically any environment, but not while actively metabolizing. I am curious whether any of the species the article is talking about could actually survive and spread, if they would just stick around for a while and die out, or if they would only survive in a dormant state.

Bacteria definitely exist on Earth that can reproduce under conditions that exist somewhere on Mars, an example are the chemosynthetic bacteria found deep underground and are nourished by geothermal energy: http://www.planetary.org/news/2006/1027_Bacteria_Found_Thriving_Deep.html

What this study is establishing is whether it is possible to recover viable organisms from the near-surface soil. Such organisms might thrive below the reach of the surface lander's probes, but still have inactive spores brought to near the surface through water welling up from deeper down (and possibly other processes). Evidence of surface water outflows have been found in various spots on Mars.

It's possible, but my impression is that most scientists think it's unlikely--- Mars's poorly shielding atmosphere would probably have led to any lifeforms on our probes being killed off within hours at most.

An alternate interesting observation is that large meteor impacts appear to eject enough material to transfer lifeforms between planetary bodies.

Yes. Allow me to reiterate that, yes.

I would kiss my children and young grandchildren goodbye. Wave to the ex-wife. Kiss my main squeeze goodbye and squeeze her ass a little.
Wave goodbye to all of them, and get my ass on the craft.

And while I'm up there, I'd find my way up to the Martian Arctic, and find the Phoenix. And decode my sons name engraved on the DVD.

Did I say HELL YES!

A couple of hundred years?!? I don't think you appreciate the scale we're talking here to the nearest solar systems. The fastest probes we've ever launched took like 9-10 years just to reach the edge of the solar system--just a few light *hours* away. The nearest solar systems are several light *years* away. So you're not looking at a few hundred years--more like tens of thousands of years. Not only that, but we also don't have the math or craft to hit anything with the kind of precision that far away, and no way to stop them once they get there even if you could make it.

You're right. And that was a stab in the dark on my part (it is by and large a joke post honestly). But when I said solar sail, I meant pretty big ones. Like this article mentions you might be able to net an acceleration of 1 millimeter per second per second acceleration from the sail. Maybe that's not reasonable but after nine years, you'd already be traveling a million kilometers per hour faster than when you left our system. With a solar sail, Voyager and other craft would have reached the end of our system much faster.

The sail would then, at a little bit before the half way marker, be flipped backwards so that the membrane would actually slow the ship down on its approach to Alpha Centauri. It would slow to a relative stop near the planet and (assuming everything survived) would use its thrusters for the only purpose they have -- plummeting it to the planet revolving around Alpha Centauri. Then you just need to wait another decade for the data to return to earth. Relatively quick, yes? Extra-solar expeditions need to be thought of in terms of generations not years so why don't we get started now?

I haven't worked all the math out but considering what solar sails might be able to do for us, you can't just compare this to existing craft and draw your metrics from that. Those craft only had initial boosts and will not accelerate.

Also, my diagram had a laser. You forgot to point out that that is unnecessary weight and power usage.

Links to related articles at Planetary Society:
http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/targetearth/tunguska.html
http://www.planetary.org/about/press/releases/2008/0626_Target_Earth_How_Prepared_Are_We.html

Links to related articles at Planetary Society:
http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/targetearth/tunguska.html
http://www.planetary.org/about/press/releases/2008/0626_Target_Earth_How_Prepared_Are_We.html

This artist's rendition of the explosion graced the back cover of this month's The Planetary Report (from The Planetary Society). It illustrates how the bolide likely blew up above the ground and hence produced no crater. The artist is Don Davis.

This artist's rendition of the explosion graced the back cover of this month's The Planetary Report (from The Planetary Society). It illustrates how the bolide likely blew up above the ground and hence produced no crater. The artist is Don Davis.

. but so far we haven't seen ANY of the HD footage...

http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2007/11/20071107_kaguya_e.html
http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/kaguya/hd.html

A lot are downsampled, but I'm guessing the HD footage is available in some way. I just picked the first couple search results.

I don't know about the tape machine but I read they had to restore one of the only available machines left to working order before beginning at all. Luckily they managed to fix it. I'm guessing you can't just use any read head or machine for any tape.. either that or it does processing that would be expensive and infeasible to recreate in software. I'm sure they would have gone an easier route if there was one. These aren't dumb people. The tape reader didn't cost them $300k (or anything) so there's no point to including that.

As for a lunar rover, lunar orbiting robotic satellites would be a much better way if you want to film the entire surface of the Moon. JAXA's Kaguya is doing that and the Indian Chandraayan I believe too. For example, Mars is bigger than the Moon, but the Mars Rovers haven't seen that much of Mars as an overall percentage.

Also:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/masterCatalog.do?sc=LUNARRO

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is a Moon orbiting mission scheduled to launch in May 2009. The first mission of NASA's Robotic Lunar Exploration Program, it is designed to map the surface of the Moon and characterize future landing sites in terms of terrain roughness, usable resources, and radiation environment with the ultimate goal of facilitating the return of humans to the Moon.

It will have a high-res camera. I don't see any specs though.

Until we can determine whether or not there is life on Mars the LIFE project ( http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F07%2F1447217&from=rss http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/life/ ) which has a high risk of contaminating Mars with Earth life needs to be stopped. The risk was large earlier but this clearly makes it unacceptable.

For instance I seem to remember hearing (but can't verify so take with a grain of salt) that the selected proposal was very similar to the proposal Griffin himself advocated in one of his theses. Whether he did or not the credibility of the ESAS is already somewhat questionable given that it's rejection of the previously preferred approach coincided with Griffin's appointment. In this context the accusations made by people involved in the process that Griffin had already decided on the desired answer seem reasonably credible.

You're probably thinking of this report which Griffin was co-leader of, which presented the inline SRB design which eventually became the Ares I, and concluded it was superior to all the other launch alternatives. The report came out in 2004, a year before Griffin became NASA Administrator.

The amount of space research and propulsion/vehicle research that NASA could finance if it abandoned the ISS or better yet put man space flight on hold until launch technology improved is enormous... Useful human presence in space requires cheaper launches and the money NASA wastes on manned exploration now could fund an amazing amount of research into new launch technologies.

I'm going to have to disagree on this one. In fact, it's looking like things like COTS missions to the ISS are going to do more for making launches cheaper than anything else NASA's done in the past 20 years.

The Planetary Society has a very interesting article about the five years the rover Spirit has been on Mars. And I wrote this one about the Mars rovers in Dutch.

The Planetary Society blog has a composite picture of Spirit from two years ago and today which shows starkly just how much dust has accumulated.

As the NASA article mentions, you can find more info from the Phoenix team's official website: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/

Also, the Planetary Society has done a great job following the mission, and there's an extremely detailed update one of their members wrote based on a phone interview with the Phoenix project manager shortly after the last contact with Phoenix was made last week.

Here's a quick summary: Phoenix has been reducing operational tempo for several weeks. In anticipation of having too little power to run the robotic arm and inability to communicate in late November for a few weeks as Mars passes behind the sun, they hurried sample delivery to a few more TEGA ovens for analysis, but they still had one oven-load left to analyze when the dust storm hit that dropped power levels below a sustainable point. However, despite that, they had already met all of their operational objectives. The extra data would have been a bonus.

When they saw the dust storm coming, they tried to power down almost all non-essential systems, but weren't quite in time. As a result, the batteries drained completely and it "browned out." The next day, the batteries charged enough to wake up in what they call "Lazarus mode" and try communicating, but it likely missed the relay window with the orbiters. Over a couple days, they got some intermittent communications, and were hoping to be able to send instructions to properly time the wake-up for best chance at communications and best utilization of what little solar power its getting each day, but apparently that hasn't yet succeeded. They were hoping to get temperature and soil conductivity measurements periodically, and maybe even a few pictures of CO2 ice starting to cake up in the area.

It may still be in Lazarus mode, or something may have failed due to the thermal contraction of the electronics (ex: solder and circuit board material expand at different rates...too extreme of a temperature shift and things start popping apart) ending it for good. There is still some hope that Phoenix will survive the frigid temperatures and even the weight of a meter-thick layer of CO2 ice to awaken in the spring. That's what Lazarus mode was created for, but the hope of that has always been very small.

There's a really interesting tidbit about a microphone that's part of the descent camera. On a whim they tried to use it a couple weeks ago to record wind sounds, but it didn't start up. Then one of the team members had a conversation with blind man who pointed out that he'll never see a picture of Mars, so he had really been hoping the microphone would work so he could experience it through sound. That really motivated the team to try the microphone again, but unfortunately, it sounds like they didn't have a chance with that either.

I've been following this mission on a nearly daily basis since landing. It's been neat to see Phoenix in action, and no doubt a busy few months for the team. I'm sure they'll feel somewhat relieved to return to living by a 24 hour clock and have the leisure to analyze all the data and the 25,000+ pictures it returned. I'll never forget the shot Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter got of it drifting down to the surface with Heimdall Crater in the background. In my opinion, it's one of the top 10 space images ever. The MRO team even claims that if you look really close at the full size version, you can see a black-spec a few hundred pixels beneath the lander that is the just-released heat shield falling away.

Well done Phoenix.

Note that MESSENGER used solar sailing to correct its trajectory for this flyby:

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001674/

Could this be the cause of the Pioneer Anomaly ?

I heavily doubt it, the Pioneer Anomaly is essentially a very small but unexplained forced. I'm not a physicist but I'm not sure how you plan to link radioactive decay rates with small forces.

There are many things we don't know about physics ... yet. Until we have a unified field theory, you're going to have a hard time linking them.

Could this be the cause of the Pioneer Anomaly ?

See Emily Lakdawalla's pre-encounter blog piece for the Planetary Society, and follow-ups as the data's arriving.

They flew over the south pole at a range of 30km at 50,000 relative speeds. The relative movement was so fast that they had to turn the entire s/c to point backwards before closest approach. There are some superb ("amateur") animations on the UMSF thread. (large, though, 60Mb or so each.) The realtime simulation is really mind-blowing. Just watch Enceladus scudding through the FoV of the ISS camera just after c/a. Superb, superb work by the Cassini team (as always!) This is certainly one of the biggest set-piece events of the entire mission after orbit insertion, others being Huygens, the first Titan flyby (that data took a lot of time to interpret, indeed the radar data is still being puzzled over as each narrow swath appears after another flyby - it's hard to do imaging through that pesky yet oh-so-interesting methane atmosphere) and the Iapetus encounter.

"'scuse me, 'scuse me, officer JPLNazi coming though... "

...vast regions of Mars contained rivers and lakes...

This has been OLD NEWS since the Viking orbiters, more than thirty years ago, though thanks to the demands of the mass media, the goldfish-like attention spans of the general public and the rigours of academic tenure, publishing, and funding rounds (not to mention PR teams at academic institutions, who often seem to know jack shit about the subject they're writing a press release on) it gets recycled every time there's a water-related Mars discovery. I'm sure I've seen three or four water-related stories based on MER (rover) research, then there's the Mars Express data, Mars Odyssey's spectrometer data (hint: why do you think Phoenix happened to land somewhere where there's water ice 5cm below the surface - luck?). Oh yeah and of course Phoenix is just about to drop ice scrapings into the TEGA oven and cook out any water, carbonates, in fact everything else that vaporises at less than 1000 degrees C.

The significant aspects of the two new papers (one in Nature, on in Nature Geoscience) are indeed the phyllosilicates, more commonly known as clay minerals. (if you're thinking of the clay in your back garden, imagine it after lying in an Antarctic dry valley for a three plus billion years, in a near vacuum, and hammered with UV. To the layperson this is what Arthur Dent would have identified thusly: "well, it's rock, isn't it?" It adds to the evidence for medium-term (up to 10^6 years) periods of free-standing or flowing water on the surface at essentially every scale, from regional morphology such as flash flood outflow channels, river deltas, coastlines and the like down to rock formations that are clearly indurated, contain silica minerals (google 'Spirit Tyrone') or haematite (blueberries, which are concretions formed in water-saturated rocks) and vugs (voids left by water-soluble crystals.) When you wet particular kinds of rocks that Mars is known to have a lot of, you get clays (phyllosilicates) as a result.

By the way the NASA image isn't

"colour enhanced"

-- that's CRISM data overlaid on a visible-wavelengths image. (CRISM is a spectrometer and is the instrument that ID'd these minerals.)

...standing pools, which are conducive to the formation of basic organic matter.

This statement is, uh, mistaken. What it's getting at is the notion that long periods of exposure to water is generally considered to be probably very very important if not essential to early life. ("organic matter" would be anything with a carbon atom in it, e.g. coal, plastic, methane, oil... it's one of those words that means something totally different in particular scientific context. Like "metals" (tho' that means at leat three different things to different sciences...)

Much much more at a popular search engine near you.

Messenger may not even have a visible spectrum camera.

Hey how about you open your cake hole only when you've made sure you know what the fuck you're talking about. Obviously if I said there were red, green and filters on this probe that means that it has a "visible spectrum camera". Here's the list of filters on the probe by the way.

Make a Donation Specify Project: Solar Sailing

Rather than complain about stale stories, link to newer ones. You may even get modpoints for it. Anyhow, here's the best update I've found so far:

http://planetary.org/blog/article/00001501

They are having problems getting the soil to go through the screen. Although one of the pod doors (insert HAL jokes) didn't open all the way, the soil appears to have reached the screen based on the images. They dumped an extra-large load to compensate for the jammed door. The problem is that the sensors did not detect any soil going through the screen. They are now trying to figure out if its the nature of the soil (clumpy?) or an instrument problem.

If its an instrument failure, fortunately they have 7 other "ovens" to try. Redundancy is nice.

Also, at least one false-color image has already been generated from combining photos with different filters.

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001461/

It looks pretty spectacular.

There are plenty of people advocating for space exploration, both manned and otherwise (myself among them!): http://www.spacecoalition.com/ http://www.sciencedebate2008.com/www/index.php, http://marsproject.com/, http://www.seti.org/, http://www.committee4spaceadvocacy.org/, http://www.planetary.org/home/ People are advocating. The problem is that no one is listening. Our country has been deaf to the benefits of space research for 20 years now, and it's not going to change. It's only going to get worse as our kids get dumber and stop getting math, science, and engineering degrees. Is my generation going to be the last to take a shot at it? I sure hope not. But unless it gets some serious attention, and soon, the United States is finished as a space-faring nation.

I may be the odd man out here by supporting space & NASA (I work Orion CEV, though not a civil servant) while also being a slashdot user, but I still stand by my beliefs.

I will first start by providing a handful of links to other advocate groups, spin-off pages, etc., then go into why I personally support it, and finally go into where I see room for improvements.

The Links
The Planetary Society
The Coalition for Space Exploration
Space.com
NASA Spin-off Library
NASA @ Home and City

Now on to why I personally support manned space: I will try to keep it short and high-level. (No particular order to the numbering)

1. Study of survival in harsh environments.
I both fear & assume that one day our planet will eventually become an extremely harsh environment to survive in. I feel that the more we know about biology and microbiology issues such as water & food purification (ISS, Shuttle Purification, Water and Food Analytical Laboratory (WAFAL)) within limited and harsh environments, the better off we could be when we reach that time in our existence. (There are also many other areas of study that go along with survival than life sciences, such as human physiology.)

2. Colonization of other moons and planets.
Essentially this goes along with #1. It would be nice to have some options and prior knowledge when Earth is nearing its end.

3. Origin of our Planets.
I believe the more we know and understand about the origin of our planets the better. If we can somehow "prove" our origin and debunk the majority of Religious views I feel we will be better off. I believe Religion to be the root cause of the majority of wars and violence on this planet. I also believe that people who are barley surviving often resort to violence to help themselves survive.

4. Costs vs Return.
Here I'm just going to sum-up this page. NASA's budget is 0.7 of 1% of the nations total. We spend about $9 Billion per month killing other humans. "In 2002, the commercial space industry contributed more than $95 billion in U.S. economic activity".

4.Spin-Offs.
While it may be a sub-set of the other advantages, I still believe the majority of Spin-offs benefit humans "down here".


Where can we improve?
(Again, no particular order)

1. Public Relations.
I believe the public needs more knowledge coming from the space community about both the benefits and obstacles of space exploration. I believe many of the reasons people have a negative attitude about it is because they are ill-informed. Stop playing with space food on TV and making everything look like a cake-walk, and show the real low-level experiments being ran up there. THIS is what will inspire people!

2. Inspire our Youth.
Again, this goes along with #1. With politicians trying to get more math and science students just by cutting funds here, adding funds there (Obama, I'm looking at YOU), you still won't be motivating people to work hard and study these subjects. The one thing that actually got me (mentally) through college was my goal of working on the space program. With no motivation and inspiration, you will loose students in these subjects, not gain them!

3. Expand Robotic\Un-manned Space.
I believe that expanding our robotic side of space exploration will have an overall benefit, but needs to co-exist with the manned

• http://www.planetary.org/home/ The Planetary Society
  
• http://www.marssociety.org/ The Mars Society
  
• http://www.nss.org/ The National Space Society
  
• http://www.seds.org/ Students for the Exploration and Development of Space
  
• http://www.space-frontier.org/ Space Frontier Foundation
  

There is an advocacy group for space exploration.

http://www.planetary.org/home/

The Planetary Society has excellent programs and pushes for further exploration of space.

If you are really interested, join. I really had an interest in the solar sail to propel probes into deep space.

They should sell one of the rovers to any institution willing to pay for it rather than let it die a slow death of neglect. A deployed rover with a proven track record is better than an $800 million shot that might arrive and land successfully.

The Planetary Society immediately comes to mind as a serious buyer. They launched the Cosmos 1 Solar Sail on an all-private budget of $4M. The mission failed due to hardware problem (hey, it really is rocket science), but it proved that private charitable organizations are quite capable of raising $4M for space exploration.

The Planetary Society was also instrumental in getting the word out (and raising funds to rescue the data) regarding the Pioneer Anomaly.

More important than the funding angle is the political one, but the Planetary Society has worked extremely closely with NASA over the past 30 years. The collaboration has been sufficiently close that they've actually flown hardware on the ill-fated) Mars Polar Lander. The Society's work with NASA on Spirit and Opportunity goes all the way back to when the rovers were named in the first place, as well as the calibration target" for the rovers' cameras.

In other words, $4M isn't just a business possibility, the handover of a rover from NASA to the Planetary Society is a political possibility too.

They should sell one of the rovers to any institution willing to pay for it rather than let it die a slow death of neglect. A deployed rover with a proven track record is better than an $800 million shot that might arrive and land successfully.

The Planetary Society immediately comes to mind as a serious buyer. They launched the Cosmos 1 Solar Sail on an all-private budget of $4M. The mission failed due to hardware problem (hey, it really is rocket science), but it proved that private charitable organizations are quite capable of raising $4M for space exploration.

The Planetary Society was also instrumental in getting the word out (and raising funds to rescue the data) regarding the Pioneer Anomaly.

More important than the funding angle is the political one, but the Planetary Society has worked extremely closely with NASA over the past 30 years. The collaboration has been sufficiently close that they've actually flown hardware on the ill-fated) Mars Polar Lander. The Society's work with NASA on Spirit and Opportunity goes all the way back to when the rovers were named in the first place, as well as the calibration target" for the rovers' cameras.

In other words, $4M isn't just a business possibility, the handover of a rover from NASA to the Planetary Society is a political possibility too.

They should sell one of the rovers to any institution willing to pay for it rather than let it die a slow death of neglect. A deployed rover with a proven track record is better than an $800 million shot that might arrive and land successfully.

The Planetary Society immediately comes to mind as a serious buyer. They launched the Cosmos 1 Solar Sail on an all-private budget of $4M. The mission failed due to hardware problem (hey, it really is rocket science), but it proved that private charitable organizations are quite capable of raising $4M for space exploration.

The Planetary Society was also instrumental in getting the word out (and raising funds to rescue the data) regarding the Pioneer Anomaly.

More important than the funding angle is the political one, but the Planetary Society has worked extremely closely with NASA over the past 30 years. The collaboration has been sufficiently close that they've actually flown hardware on the ill-fated) Mars Polar Lander. The Society's work with NASA on Spirit and Opportunity goes all the way back to when the rovers were named in the first place, as well as the calibration target" for the rovers' cameras.

In other words, $4M isn't just a business possibility, the handover of a rover from NASA to the Planetary Society is a political possibility too.

They should sell one of the rovers to any institution willing to pay for it rather than let it die a slow death of neglect. A deployed rover with a proven track record is better than an $800 million shot that might arrive and land successfully.

The Planetary Society immediately comes to mind as a serious buyer. They launched the Cosmos 1 Solar Sail on an all-private budget of $4M. The mission failed due to hardware problem (hey, it really is rocket science), but it proved that private charitable organizations are quite capable of raising $4M for space exploration.

The Planetary Society was also instrumental in getting the word out (and raising funds to rescue the data) regarding the Pioneer Anomaly.

More important than the funding angle is the political one, but the Planetary Society has worked extremely closely with NASA over the past 30 years. The collaboration has been sufficiently close that they've actually flown hardware on the ill-fated) Mars Polar Lander. The Society's work with NASA on Spirit and Opportunity goes all the way back to when the rovers were named in the first place, as well as the calibration target" for the rovers' cameras.

In other words, $4M isn't just a business possibility, the handover of a rover from NASA to the Planetary Society is a political possibility too.

According to an article on The Planetary Society website the flyby effect is much better established than the Pioneer anomaly, because it's been seen on 3 different spacecraft and has been measured two different ways. But there's also this similarity: all the spacecrafts that have shown anomalies are on a hyperbolic trajectory. This is a very unusual trajectory, but all the Earth flyby missions and the Pioneers are on a hyperbolic path. A clue maybe?

You should keep an eye on unmannedspaceflight.com (forum) and planetary.org (huge monthly updates with one due soon).

Many of us don't think the gee-whizz eye-candy coolness factor of watching someone bounce round the moon on TV is actually worth the enormous opportunity cost of what could have been done with that money if it wasn't wasted on manned missions. The Shuttle's landing tomorrow morning after a ten day mission that cost $1.3 billion. Consider that the incredibly successful Mars Exploration Rovers cost less than half that over the entire four years and counting mission, and have made fantastic breakthrough scientific discoveries as well as producing some amazing eye-candy.

(And incidentally those are all "amateur" images produced from the raw data stream, thanks to JPL/Cornell/Steve Squyres' wonderful policy to release it as it arrives.)

The Planetary Society published this (pdf) in collaboration with Griffin (he's listed as one of nine members of the 'study team') before he became head of NASA. The Planetary Society got their guy in and he's following the plan they sold to the administration and Congress. What the fuck is going on here?

If the peanut gallery over at the Planetary Society start jerking the Government's chain over settled NASA policy they're going to get stuff defunded. Most of our leading presidential candidates will take any excuse they can find to snatch away the funding and use it to buy votes some other way.

A screenshot of Saturn's rings? Don't you think that's a little redundant?
There already are some very nice pictures of the real Saturn.
Here's a wonderful look of the rings from above.

On a slightly related note, here's the physics of supersonic solar plasma flows, the termination shock, the heliopause and Voyager, all demonstrated in your kitchen sink. Superb stuff courtesy of The Planetary Society. "Really baked my noodle" - Satisfied customer.

I thought so too.So I googled and found this. May be redundant now tho.

http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/saturn/atlas.html

The thing is, they *didn't* move it. Slashdot horribly botched and distorted the reporting of the original article by Emily Lackdawalla in its header. Slashdot calls it "doctored". Emily calls it nothing of the sort.

What happens is that the spacecraft are moving around the moon and capturing long strips of images beneath them along their orbit. In this case, there were 19 strips. To make a single coherent image out of them, you have to stitch them back together. Anyone who's ever used a panorama stitching tool like Hugin is familiar with this: you pick keypoints, and the software rotates and distorts all of the component images to try and get them to match up. The problem is that the spacecraft is moving, and they don't know all of the topographic data below, so you're inherently going to get what are called "parallax errors". This results in what is commonly called a "misstitch" or "stitching error" -- effects such as a crater being duplicated. An extreme example of parallax error in ordinary photographic stitching can be found here.

Now, there are two different standards for image releases. The standard, for scientific releases, is to not blend the seams between the strips, so that it's easier to see what was a single source image. The standard for public releases is to blend the seams so that everything looks prettier. Blending is not a big deal; it's not like someone goes in with an airbrush and adds whatever the heck they want. It happens automatically in modern stitching tools; all you typically need to do is check a checkbox. Well, this being a public release, they blended the seams.

The only thing that Emily faults them for is for their scientist mistaking a stitching error for an actual feature. It's a silly little mistake, but it's certainly not "doctoring". Emily then expresses hope that they'll release the raw data, and apparently, it looks like they're planning to do just that.

It's a major insult to take a large number of people's hard work and accuse them of faking it. You don't get much more serious of a charge in the scientific community than that. There's a lot of justified indignation at people who accuse the moon landings of being faked. The people who worked on the Apollo program deserve an apology from the CTs for slandering their work. They'll never get it, but they deserve it.

The Chang'e team likewise deserves an apology from Slashdot for doing the exact same thing.

I read the article and it stated that the crater in question was of a lower resolution with different lighting angles, taken from a 1994 image. So that does hint at some sort of deliberate manipulation.

No, that's not what the article said. People were claiming that the whole photo was copied from the 1994 image, and the analyst determined that couldn't be the case because of the lighting angles and resolution.

The "new" crater appears to have been moved from another portion of the current image, close enough that a stitching error could explain it. Lakdawalla's own post. linked from the article, describes her analysis in more detail. The image is stitched together from smaller photos, and there are other features near the crater which don't match the older US photo. She worked out where the seam probably was, slid the image along it, and everything lined up.

this story is baloney.

Except it doesn't appear to be a correct analysis. I can easily see the difference in the lighting and composition, but there still appears to be an extra/moved crater in the Chinese photo.

Two issues:

1. Is it copied?
2. What's up with the new crater?

The analysis concluded that it's not copied, and concluded that the moved crater can be explained by a mistake stitching the components together. If you look at that article, you'll note that the new image is missing a small crater in one place, and has an extra small crater a little ways away, and there's an odd indentation around it. She figured out where the seam probably was, shifted the parts a bit, and they line up perfectly.

Put it this way - a massive, well funded programme might be able to do a successful manned mission by the early 2030s. (That's NASAs current working timeframe in their design reference mission plans.) By then I think it's going to be pretty clear that the Greenland ice-shelf's going fast and that you're looking at 7m sea-level rise in the next few decades. Now, you need to pretty much evacuate and abandon all those nice expensive cities that everyone's got their capital tied up in, which are all along the coasts and naviagable (tidal) rivers. Whoa, and international trade just collapsed cos there's no shipping industry left to speak of (what with all the ports being under water, and all.) Now, pretend you're the King of America. What are you going to spend your rapidly diminishing tax take on - apart from a fortified retreat in the rockies, that is?

an extra planet outside the orbit of Uranus. Never found that one either, right?

Nope. We got fooled by a "dwarf planet", but we've gotten that straightened out now.

So, yeah, we're still looking for that much-postulated ninth planet.

Obviously, you think about something else here. You do not consider some obsevations valid (specifically these at odds with EU&V - Electric Universe & Velikovsky).

And I see nothing dogmatic about science. Only people screaming "dogma!" that I see are cranks that try explaining for other and themself why their theories are not recognized as valid. God forbid that is because of errors and wrongness of said crackpot theories!

http://www.planetary.org/news/2006/1216_Stardust_Samples_Rewrite_History_of.html

I wonder whether this is the missing piece of the puzzle of how Iapetus got it's leading face spattered with fine dust particles? The PSoc blog says the event that caused the dark contamination of the ice occurred , yes, aeons ago...

Lamely replying to my own post, Honeybee logo in situ, Planetary Society article quoting Steve Squyres, the PI, on how cool that is :)