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

I was intrigued about why the names of those tiger stripe cracks are middle eastern cities. Googling I found this article which notes that there is a convention of naming features on this moon after places in the Arabian Nights. The page is cool and tells you what a sulcus is. And there's is a link on that page to a giant 6mb map with names of features on it.

One side of Iapetus is dark, the other as bright as snow. As Iapetus moves in its orbit around Saturn, the dark side faces forward, and many scientists think that the moon swept up the dark material, which might originally have come from another moon. There are some more great shots on another Planetary Society blog entry, and of course on the Cassini raw images feed from NASA.

The untold story of the MER rovers is the triumphant vindication of Steve Squyres' then unprecedented decision to allow the raw imagery to be automatically thrown up on the net virtually as they came in - so that in some cases, the amateur mosaics, panoramas and other post-processed images were sometimes out before the official JPL team had even seen the raw data. Indeed someone even wrote an application specifically to pull down, process and render the raw data. (Yeah, it's GPL'd :) )

Another piece: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070402_mm_ma rs_caves.html

Another piece: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070402_mm_ma rs_caves.html

A Princeton-led research group has discovered an isolated community of bacteria nearly two miles underground that derives all of its energy from the decay of radioactive rocks rather than from sunlight.

This type of bacterium, approximately four micrometers in length, has survived for millions of years on chemical food sources that derive from the radioactive decay of minerals in the surrounding rock, making it one of the few creatures known that does not depend on sunlight for nourishment.

These will survive any surface conditions, until the heat penetrates two miles deep.

http://www.planetary.org/news/2007/0720_The_2007_M artian_Dust_Storm_Crisis_for.html mentions that the storm has cleared the solar arrays of dust, so they're perfectly capable of collecting whatever light passes through the current dust. Good summary and up to date.

I find that the best blogs are the ones where there isn't an "original article" at all, or the "original article" is a scientific paper in a field that requires explanation, or an article that requires a lot of context to make sense of. My two favorite blogs are the Planetary Society's and Juan Cole's. In the Planetary Society's case, you get a lot of things like what the audience was asking about at conferences and what the presenters replied in addition to the meat of their presentations. A good example is this post on a presentation at LPSC on Enceladus. Juan Cole's blog is on the other side of the spectrum; he starts with articles on the Middle East, but uses his extensive knowledge of the background of the region to put them into context and fix inaccuracies. Lately, though, he's taken to more of just reporting the news, which is a shame. He shines when he serves as a *corrector* of articles, not a reporter of them. For example, his series on the inaccurate translation of Ahmadinejad as threatening to "wipe Israel off the map" (that idiom doesn't even exist in Persian; Ahmadinejad was quoting Khomeini that the "occcupying regime in Jerusalem should be erased from the pages of time" -- something he later compared to how the Soviet Union has been similarly "erased". Hardly a call for genocide like people make it out to be; it wasn't even a "threat" or call for any sort of action on the part of Iran, no more so than a Cold War-era American saying "The world would be better if the Soviet Union just disappeared" would be a threat). I also enjoyed his bit about the complexities of defining the sea lanes in the Shaat al-Arab.

I think what people are more complaining about is the Daily Kos style blog, where someone finds some obscure or not-obscure tidbit in the news and then rants on it without adding anything new that you couldn't get from reading the article and knowing the general background of the subject. If I just want that sort of info, I'd go to a place like Cursor.org where you just get a little summary of what the article's about by each one.

On the Planetary Society blog page, Emily Lakdawalla has completely demolished this assertion, showing the "nearly-true color" version of the image (the one shown is highly colorized), and the context image showing where on the sloped wall of the crater this "pooling water" is supposed to be.

On the Planetary Society blog page, Emily Lakdawalla has completely demolished this assertion, showing the "nearly-true color" version of the image (the one shown is highly colorized), and the context image showing where on the sloped wall of the crater this "pooling water" is supposed to be.

If you read the preprint (PDF), you'd note that luckily, one of the caves actually was imaged with the floor sunlit, giving the authors the ability to calculate the depth of that particular cave. This was covered on May 23rd on the Planetary Society blog.

That's the real problem here. It's not just moving at interplanetary speeds; it's moving at interstellar speeds. When it approaches a star, it's going to be accelerated towards it. The kinetic energy of impact will be crazy-high. Plus, 40,000 years of ionizing radiation on a thin-hulled body? Not exactly an environment conducive to life.

On the other hand, it doesn't take human launched stages to get bacteria from Earth to other planets. In fact, odds are, we've already had bacteria from Earth touch down alive on Titan. The K-T dinosaur-killing impact alone launched about 600 million rocks from Earth into space. As we now know, Earth rocks tend to be infested with microorganisms, and most rocks that are ejected won't kill the bacteria on the inside (spalling has already been demonstrated to be gentle enough). The sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars bear the brunt of the impacts. Mercury and Mars impacts are harsh, due to tenuous atmospheres. Venus impacts are more gentle, but obviously, Venus is a hellish inferno. However, Jupiter can eject fragments further, and that's where things get interesting. About 100 objects strike each Galilean satellite However, with their weak to nonexistent atmospheres, they hit very hard -- 8-40 km/s. You'd be lucky to have even proteins survive. However, Titan has a huge atmosphere, ideal for aerobraking. From this one impact, about 30 Earth meteorites hit Titan within a few million years. They enter the atmosphere at 5-20 km/s, brake, break into fragments, and the fragments hit the surface intact.

Summary:

"That's food for thought -- could Earth have seeded Titan with microbial life? If Gladman's simulations are correct, the material has definitely gotten there in the past. Gladman added, in conclusion, that "if you ever had atmospheres on any of the [presently] airless satellites, they could have acted as aerobrakes" just like Titan's would today."

Actually, centrifugal force *can* work that way, but it generally only does for small bodies like asteroids. There's even one double asteroid (Antiope) that is believed to have been split from a single body by centrifugal force.

If they were in Tartarus Colles, they well might drive over a bridge :)

GMT offset of Mars... let's see, carry the one... I'd say about i ?

They couldn't even if they wanted to because "to hit a bullet with another bullet while watching from a third bullet" is hard.

Sagan applies physicalist thinking to this problem. He constructs two linear curves, both based on strictly deterministic thinking. Such thinking is often quite legitimate for physical phenomena, but is quite inappropriate for evolutionary events or social processes such as the origin of civilizations. The argument that extraterrestrials, if belonging to a long-lived civilization, will be forced by selection to develop an electronic know-how to meet the peril of asteroid impacts is totally unrealistic.

Sagan applies physicalist thinking to this problem. He constructs two linear curves, both based on strictly deterministic thinking. Such thinking is often quite legitimate for physical phenomena, but is quite inappropriate for evolutionary events or social processes such as the origin of civilizations. The argument that extraterrestrials, if belonging to a long-lived civilization, will be forced by selection to develop an electronic know-how to meet the peril of asteroid impacts is totally unrealistic.

For free I was able to have my signature orbiting Saturn. It's been there awhile, too. This pipsqueak private satellite has a 100-1 shot of even making it to Mars orbit.

And Valentine's Day? Let's just say my hotties call me Titan.

Well, you are fine right up until a and b...

See, we have a control, another planet that is very similar to ours in terms of planetary scale and it's ice caps are melting too.

http://www.planetary.org/image/flammarion_MarsTerr esduCiel.jpg

current:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/ 1997/09

Go back farther to Huygen's observations in the 17th century and they are smaller again. Seems to be reacting to something OTHER than human interaction.

Thus, you observation about Sun cycles makes a lot more sense as the root cause.

So, if humans are making it worse, and likely they are, then if we try and fight the cycle we may tip it too much in the OTHER direction?

Pretty old stuff.

Just because they just now put a flyover-perspective, color-coded image on their website doesn't make this news.

There was a microphone on the Mars Polar Lander, but it was lost with the failed ship.

The Planetary Society successfully extracted audio from the Huygens probe to Saturn's moon Titan.

There was a microphone on the Mars Polar Lander, but it was lost with the failed ship.

The Planetary Society successfully extracted audio from the Huygens probe to Saturn's moon Titan.

You seem to forget the we (the US) have seen inside Mir. It was a carnival of danger and reckless management.

And at which point did NASA become a paragon of good management?

A desperite crash landing of a probe can hardly be compared to the "giant leap" of Apollo.

A desperate crash? You need to read up on the soviet lunar programme. I count 5 probes impacting/landing before july 1969 - Luna 2, 5, 7, 8, 9 and 13.

Nonetheless, you can expect most of the spacefaring nations of the world to be grovelling for a piece of Project Constellation.

Seeing that NASA has already ruled this out, then no - I wouldn't expect that.

On both the whistling and the quote, I'm just quoting the Planetary Society's reporter, Emily Lackdawalla. Don't get mad at me for quoting someone who saw a presentation on it and is certainly qualified to comment.

No, but earlier pics did show a really nifty natural bridge from a collapsed lava tube.

I wonder if the "injured" Mars Rover will continue to "live" come spring on Mars - once the sun comes out and its solar panels activate.

Turns out my information is out of date. Ceres most likely has differentiated layers, and is generally more interesting than previously thought.

Due to the use of the thrusters, any acceleration that could be due to the pioneer anomaly is buried in the noise and essentially unmeasurable with the voyager spacecraft. This is mentioned e.g. here or here.

Here's some of the sources I use...

For general stuff, News@Nature is fairly good, although much of their content requires a subscription.

There's also a few blogs I regularly read which are quite good at offering in-depth analysis of recent scientific news in specific fields:

* Space science: Planetary Society's blog (note that the main author, Emily Lakdawalla, is on maternity leave, so at the moment there's some guest-authors of varying quality)

* Biology/evolution: Carl Zimmer's The Loom

* Pharmaceuticals: In The Pipline

* Future tech trends: http://futurepundit.com/

What's not getting mentioned in this light-hearted article, or the commentary, is the disastrous 2007 NASA budget. The idiotic "Vision for Space Exploration" coming out of the White House has made honest defenders of NASA's science initiative look like fools for declaring that science would not be cut. Well, it wasn't cut, it was eviscerated.

For everyone who doesn't have anything intelligent to say... here's someone who does: the Planetary society has a good report on the findings at http://www.planetary.org/news/2006/0414_First_Venu s_Express_VIRTIS_Images_Peel.html

gr8

  Here is the first part of the experiment you suggested. It turns out that the appropriations committee that handles Nasa's budget has experience some serious changes this year and as such we may see so new "spending" habits with future budgets, who knows. However, the individuals that currently sit on the appropriations committee responsible for NASA as of March 2006 is as follows:

Link to committee membership source
http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/0323_US_Congres s_Reorganizes_Committees_to.html

Link to Nasa Budget
http://www.nasa.gov/about/budget/AN_Budget_04_deta il.html

Nasa Appropriation Committees

Senate Committee on Appropriations
Full Committee:
Thad Cochran (R-MS) Chair,
Robert Byrd (D-WV) Ranking

Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science:
  Richard Shelby (R-AL) Chair,
  Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) Ranking

House Appropriations Committee
Full Committee:
Jerry Lewis (R-CA) Chair,
David Obey (D-WI) Ranking

Subcommittee on Science, State, Justice, and Commerce, and Related Agencies:
Frank Wolf (R-VA),
Alan Mollohan (D-WV) Ranking

Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation
Full Committee:
Ted Stevens (R-AK) Chair,
  Inouye (D-HI) Ranking
Subcommittee on Science and Space:
Kay Bailey-Hutchison (R-TX), Chair
Bill Nelson (D-FL) Ranking

House Committee on Science
Full Committee,
Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) Chair,
Bart Gordon (D-TN) Ranking

Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics:
Ken Calvert (R-CA), Chair -
Mark Udall (D-CO) Ranking

Nasa Budget:

See Link (PDF Warning)
http://www.nasa.gov/about/budget/AN_Budget_04_deta il.html

NASA does collect money from technology it produces and distributes, but its real ROI is in the general US economy (and beyond). Its US ROI is well documented, ever since the big investments of the 1960s. One sample reports only NASA Life Sciences R&D ROI on $64M 1972-1997 is $1.5B. That's a better than 20-fold ROI, unheard of in other industries, especially at that scale. And that's not even including military returns from rocketry/telemetry R&D and actual launches/deployment. Plus the diplomacy and science recruitment growth, which is hard to measure, but has a dollar cost by other means.

NASA is cheap, and hugely beneficial. Not to mention the various strategic benefits from staying ahead of our foreign propaganda competitors like Russia, China, India and Japan.

Senator Proxmire, is that you?

To hear complaints of "cost overruns" for this mission, knowing well the role that the upper NASA management played in adding to those costs is grating on the ear, I must say. I suggest to read these links for details of the Dawn mission from Mark Sykes, the director of the Planetary Science Institute, writing to the House Science Committee Chair on Friday: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=19838 and his interview with the Planetary Society: http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00000475/ As for technical problems, yes there were things that were critical to address, but the Dawn Independent Assessment Team, who gave their report to NASA in late January, stated that the Dawn mission was no different in their mission development from any other successful space mission in their late stage of development and they gave a recommendation to finish the project and launch. Another example of the misinformation of the Dawn problems are the much-talked about xenon tanks, which were, in fact, tested at twice their designed conditions when they failed, and on the day of the cancellation, NASA had a letter from the project (at JPL) stating that all xenon tank problems were solved. Please remember that all Dawn instruments were built and more than halfway through the spacecraft integration at the time of the cancellation, so the Dawn spacecraft was ~95% constructed. And not only dollars were spent, but significant amount of euros too, because two of the three Dawn instruments were European, instruments paid for by NASA's international partners: the German Aerospace Agency and Italian Space Agency.

Well, I don't believe anyone has tested an actual sail in space yet. The physics is fairly straightforward though, we know how momentum exchange should work with photons and solid particles, of course. We have a pretty good handle on photon and charged particle flux from the sun. Radiation pressure has been demonstrated in the laboratory.

Let's see... the Planetary Society says that solar wind contributes less than 1% (http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/faqs.html).

There have also been laboratory experiments with simulated solar wind and photon pressure. So yes, the solar wind does contribute something, though not much. Which, I believe, is what I said. Note also that the line you quoted, while literally correct, is also taken out of context. The original poster claimed that solar sails fly on the solar wind. I disagreed, but instead of saying "you idiot, you read too much science fiction" (sort of like you did), my reply was more along the lines of "you're right, the solar wind does contribute, but photon pressure provides most of the energy."

Everyone believing it will fly on schedule, please stand on your head.

The first mission:
Mission name: ST9 (Space Tech 9)
Tentative launch date: 2010-2011

Then we have more:
Mission name: Heliostorm
Tentative launch date: 2016-2020
Mission name: SPI (Solar Polar Imager)
Tentative launch daMission name: Interstellar Probe
Tentative launch date: 2031-2035

These are science. As we all know, the US gubmint don't hold with that science stuff. And does anyone out there believe that NASA have any clue what they'll be doing five years from now, let alone 25-30?

Remember the two year delay on the James Web Space Telescope (successor to Hubble) announced back in November? That's nothing. In addition to the congressional criticism of the no-science budget, we have things like:
http://www.newscientistspace.com/channel/human-spa ceflight/dn8689-nasa-to-divert-cash-from-science-i nto-shuttle.html
(Feb. 7) Wherein we learn that the Terrestrial Planet Finder has been delayed indefinitely, and more, such as "The budget announcement was "extraordinarily depressing", says Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a non-profit organisation in Pasadena, California, US, which promotes solar system exploration. "I would almost describe it as 'anti-science NASA' now, with these kinds of deep cuts." Seven missions, or areas of research, or listed as cancelled or postponed. Of the postponed, all but one is indefinitely.

The Planetary Society has a statement here:
(Feb. 16)
http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/space_a dvocacy/budget_statement.html
with gems like, "The Bush Administration's proposed 5-year budget for NASA, just submitted to Congress, is an attack on science. The proposed budget directs three billion dollars (over five years) away from robotic exploration of the solar system to continue to operate the shuttle. Last year the Administrator said, "not one thin dime" would be so directed. Now we learn it is 30 billion dimes."

and

"In addition, a devastating 15% cut to science research funding -- including likely cuts to some approved 2006 research programs -- is being applied across all Earth and space science disciplines, and 50% is being cut from astrobiology research! This attack on basic science ironically comes at a time when the President announced in his State of the Union speech his intention "to double the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years." Apparently the physical sciences do not include either Earth or space sciences."

If you think the much advertised "Vision for Space" is really going to get us back on the moon, then to Mars, you may be in for a surprise as well. Yes there's been all the talk about the new heavy lift and crew exploration vehicles. Even methane engines, so we can 'live off the land'. Guess again, and see:
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/The_Moon_Program _The_NASA_Administrator_Is_Really_Planing_For.html
(Feb. 14). No methane engines, the Crew Exploration Vehicle diameter has been resized to five meters (can now be lifted by existing hardware), which the authors suggest was done to put the Crew Launch Vehicle on the chopping block. The Cargo Delivery Vehicle is gone, so we can't send control gyros to ISS after the shuttles retire in 2010. "This implies that the ISS won't be there at that time - or at least that NASA will not be supporting it."

So far, most popular reporting implies that science is being scrapped for Shuttle/ISS. That would be bad news, after the "not one thin di

For more information on the cancelled science mission see The planetary Society which has been fighting Congress for science mission funding for years. You don't have to be a member to help out.

No private company is going to fund MERs. No private company is going to fund Gravity Probe B. No private company is going to fund Cassini.

Sort of like how no private organization would fund a solar sail or experimental Martian greenhouse? Granted, the solar sail's rocket failed and the Mars Oasis project was suspended (for the time being), but hopefully we'll see such private space research projects become more common as launch costs decrease. I'd love to see a space-based equivalent of the Howards Hughes Medical Institute, funded by geeks raised on sci-fi.

Actually what I submitted was something entirely different: I highlighted Griiffin's comment that "NASA's human spaceflight programme ... had served to define the US as a world 'superpower."' (As if that were what NASA is for!) I wished to emphasise that this focus on human spaceflight was at the expense of real science, and quoted Louis Friedman, director of the Planetary Society, who said: "I would almost describe it as 'anti-science NASA' now". My point was that NASA is sacrificing substance for style - or politics for science.

Maybe Zonk works for NASA, or the US Government - certainly he spun the story in a way that would make Scott McLellan proud. It's one thing for /. editors to edit submissions, but if they're going to wholly distort my meaning I'd rather they took my name off the story, thanks all the same.

It's amazing how earthlike Mars often appears. This site should produce some great science. Home Plate looks more like Meridiani than Gusev.

Another big source of publicity was the planetary society, http://planetary.org./ They deserve a lot of the credit for getting this mission finished, finally. Their web site on the New Horizons mission also has some great info, at http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/new_horizo ns/

Another big source of publicity was the planetary society, http://planetary.org./ They deserve a lot of the credit for getting this mission finished, finally. Their web site on the New Horizons mission also has some great info, at http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/new_horizo ns/

may also provide an opportunity to solve a question that's been vexing many; should Pluto even be counted as a planet or just a small body as part of the Kuiper belt.

Frankly, spending 800 million USD to figure out how to classify a body is probably not worth it by iself. However, knowing if and why there is a difference between Pluto and other Kuiper objects is definitely a worthy goal.

Here is more info on the probe's problematic political history:

http://space.com/spacenews/businessmonday_041004.h tml

http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/advocac y_and_education/pluto/pluto_campaign_timeline.html

The stolen "nuke tape" fiasco at the Los Alamos National Laboraty almost delayed or reduced the delivery of the radioactive power cell. I've read later that they met their goal eventually.

The reason they don't use image recognition software is that it won't work in this case. In order to use this kind of software to work, they would need to "teach" it what particle track looks like, using existing particle tracks. But here's the problem: particles like this have never been collected, so nobody knows exactly what the tracks will look like! The sample images that they're using to train users are approximations, created by particle accellerators shooting particles into aerogel. This is close enough to teach humans, but not good enough to teach a machine. So right now distributed computing is the only known way to find these particles. You can read all about this at http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/innovat ive_technologies/stardustathome/stardustathome_sto ry.html.

As pointed out here , Stardust uses the same re-entry method and was built by the same contractor (LockMart) as the Genesis probe which cratered into the Utah desert in 2004 (Sarcastic photo caption: "Thud!"). An investigation revealed that the gravity switches (sensors which are to detect the probe's deceleration in the atmosphere and trigger parachute deployment) were the most likely installed in the "incorrect orientation," which sounds like bureacraticese for "backwards."

No kidding...especially since they were built by the same contractor (Lockheed Martin Denver).

The failure of Genesis was tied to a badly designed placement of deceleration sensors, a design flaw which Stardust is apparently free from (but I'm sure there will still be some serious hand-wringing on the 15th).

More details here.