Tim Cavanaugh wrote an editorial on JPL and Charles Elachi before the Phoenix landing.

But for at least the last decade, the glamour of space travel has increasingly been shaped by machine-driven research -- the heart-stopping photos of star formation from space-based telescopes, the stunning close-ups of Saturn's rings and the surface of Titan from the Cassini-Huygens probe and the weird anthropomorphizing of the cute little rovers.

Cute little rovers? Those are workhorse mobile field geologists!

He quotes Dr. Elachi as saying we have 19 spacecraft operating in space right now. I hadn't realized we had so many! Go us...

JPL's Phoenix Mars Lander successfully touched down on the Red Planet yesterday. Very exciting!

My girlfriend and I went to Griffith Observatory to watch the landing, as they had a special show setup.

They were showing NASA TV in the Nimoy Theater, which was filled up rather quickly. They also projected it on a screen outside in the gallery.

It was nice to see such a big crowd there to watch! And needless to say, there was a great round of applause and excitement when it was announced that a signal had been received from the surface!

Two weeks ago, we also went to the JPL Open House. The Mars Science Lab mockup was out for show. That'll be our next Mars encounter!

It looks like JPL is going to join the blogging age, and have a Phoenix Landing Blog. That should be fun. The first post went up Monday...

As you can see, landing Phoenix on Mars is a massive team effort that requires a great deal of coordination and attention to detail. Over the next week we'll hopefully offer some insight into those details as we post blog entries from various members of the team. On landing day I'll be providing frequent updates following the action at JPL and in mission control at JPL during landing, so be sure to check back often to see the latest on our approach to the red planet.

I took a quick look around and didn't see an RSS or Atom feed. Hmmm...

They started putting up the Pathfinder, MER, and Phoenix models in the mall again yesterday. I expect there's lots of stuff happening on-lab on Sunday. I plan to go to Griffith Observatory to watch the landing events.

As seen at NasaWatch...

Steve Squyres on the Colbert Report

From Asa, I saw that NASA had directed JPL to get ready to hibernate one of the Mars rovers in order to save money. Fortunately, someone realized that that would penny-wise and pound-foolish, so NASA changed its mind.

The order sent a shudder through the rover operating office at JPL in La Cañada Flintridge and through the wider science community that views the rovers as one of NASA's most glittering successes during a time when the manned exploration program has suffered tragedy and delay.

LA Times

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin gave a speech last week at the Goddard Symposium, and his speech mentioned quite a bit about what's going on in NASA lately and what the current thinking about future work is.

I noticed that he gave mention to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which will carry an instrument I worked on at JPL, the DIviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment. It's an instrument very similar to the Mars Climate Sounder on MRO.

LRO is set to launch later this year from the Cape.

Space shuttle Endeavour lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 2:28 a.m. EDT on March 11, 2008, on a mission to deliver a Japanese laboratory component and robotic arm system to the International Space Station.

STS-123 Launches (NASA)

NASA and ESA both had huge launches in the last couple of days. Endeavour launched overnight, only the second night launch since Columbia in 1993, and ESA launched the ATV on Sunday.

Europe's new orbital cargo ship has launched from French Guiana on a mission to resupply the space station. The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is the biggest and most complex spacecraft Europe has ever tried to put in orbit.

Huge space truck races into orbit (BBC)

I came across a great blog article with a ton of photos showing the Space Shuttle mating and launch transformation.

Some of those photos are really awesome.

Check them all out.

I was reminded earlier this week about the status pages for the Mars Rover, for Spirit and for Opportunity. Spirit just finished its drive to its winter location, tilted to its optimal position relative to the sun so it can get the most solar energy that it can.

In honor of reaching that position, Geoff Landis, one of the drivers, posted a sonnet:

We cannot pause to follow up:
we move or die. We cannot stop.

Space Shuttle Atlantis landed successfully earlier this week from the STS-122 mission. The Astronomy picture of the Day for Tuesday was a gorgeous shot of the astronauts working on the Columbus Space Station module.

Make sure to check out the high resolution shot.

As seen on the Planetary Society's blog, Mars wishes you a nice day.

This picture of a crater resembling a "happy face" was acquired by the Context Camera (CTX) on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on January 28, 2008. The unnamed crater is about 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) across. It is located among the Nereidum Montes, north of the Argyre basin, near 45.1°S, 55.0°W. North is toward the right and sunlight illuminates the scene from the upper right. Credit: NASA / JPL / MSSS

Image above: As dawn breaks over the Space Coast of Florida,
space shuttle Atlantis stands poised for launch. Photo credit: NASA TV

STS-122 is scheduled to launch at 11:45 PST today. You can follow the launch proceedings on NASA's Launch Blog. Atlantis is carrying Columbus, the European research facility for the International Space Station. It's a big important piece!

Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic rolled out SpaceShipTwo last week, what is expected to be the first commercially-available space travel. What I wouldn't give for $200,000!

It's a really impressive concept. And it's just a darn beautiful design, too. Wired has a good story on the risks for such travel, as well as some funny videos of potential passengers taken during training.

I am a custodian of a great human adventure. So says the LA Times, so it must be true.

I don't want to be "victimized by a shabby crowd of apprentice Torquemadas." I mean, who would? But, as they say, "the folks with the pocket protectors ... turn[ed] out to be the ones with the right stuff."

Hey, who knew. MIT has an instrument on the Voyager 2 spacecraft! Evidently, the Plasma Science instrument is still going strong. The one on Voyager 1 died before it reached the termination shockwave, but Voyager 2 just crossed it recently, and the instrument is working pretty well.

But with Voyager 2, the Plasma Science instrument not only detected the boundary, making detailed measurements of the solar wind's temperature, speed and density as the spacecraft crossed through it, but it actually encountered the shockwave repeatedly. Because the outflow of the solar wind varies with changes in the sun's activity level, building up during large solar flares and quieting during lulls in sunspot activity, the boundary itself pulsates in and out. These pulsations can wash across the craft multiple times, just as a boat landing onshore may cross the ocean's edge multiple times as waves crash in and then recede.

While Voyager 1 apparently made a single crossing, Voyager 2 apparently crossed the boundary five times, producing a wealth of new data. It's even possible that if there are large variations in that solar outflow, the shock layer "could push past Voyager again," says Richardson.

Sometimes you just get lucky. According to the New York Times,

The lame wheel on the NASA Mars rover Spirit has proved an invaluable science tool, turning up evidence of a once habitable environment, scientists said Monday.

Turns out that scientists found something they weren't looking for because of the crippled wheel. Lots of science happens that way!

The press release from work says

The puzzle is what produced a patch of nearly pure silica -- the main ingredient of window glass -- that Spirit found last May. It could have come from either a hot-spring environment or an environment called a fumarole, in which acidic steam rises through cracks. On Earth, both of these types of settings teem with microbial life.

Go rovers, go! About time to hibernate for the Martian winter, too.

Meanwhile, orbiting the planet, MRO continues to do its work. I worked on the Mars Climate Sounder, which is taking measurements on Martian climate. And CRISM took some funky photos of the Martian moons.

Discover Magazine has an interview with Burt Rutan, he of SpaceShipOne fame.

NASA does hundreds of wonderful things. They send robots all over the solar system. They have scientists doing all kinds of stuff. Some of it is good work. The stuff that JPL [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California] does is fabulous work.

...But I have a tremendous amount of respect for what JPL does. NASA did some phenomenal research during the 1960s in response to [Yuri] Gagarin [the first cosmonaut], and very quickly we were driving cars and playing golf on the moon. That is something that made me very proud to be an American who sent taxpayer funds to that NASA.

So I guess we escape his disdain for the general NASA, a.k.a nay-say, culture. I wrote about my feelings on his nickname back when I saw SpaceShipOne fly.

As soon as I make my second million, though, I'm signing up with Virgin Galactic.

The Pasadena Star News has an editorial about the JPL being sued over privacy concerns

Creative minds aren't at their best in an 8-to-5 environment. Throughout their undergraduate and graduate studies, the scientists and engineers have grown used to all-nighters and brainstorming sessions. JPL is a 24-hour campus as well - rovers on Mars and probes Advertisement to the asteroid belt don't run on mundane Earth time, nor do they take any time off. As the rest of us sleep, there are always teams of mission controllers in front of computer screens sending instructions to machinery millions of miles from home.

...But we're proud of the chutzpah shown by the 28 JPL scientists, engineers and staffers who have questioned some of the details of the almost absurd intrusions on privacy the new background checks involve. They have filed a lawsuit seeking some relief from aspects of the ongoing investigations into every federal employee.

Pasadena Star News

The editorial basically says that the case merits close examination, but it really doesn't state an opinion, one way or another.

This is the way all news stories about space should be written! And look, it's written by a JPL scientist, even!

The Dawn project welcomes you to deep space! Dawn is operating smoothly on the fourth day of its 8-year adventure. Like new parents, its extremely proud and greatly sleep-deprived Earthbound mission operations team is carefully monitoring its every move.

http://www.space-travel.com

Dawn launched last week, and we've got the signs of congratulations up at both entrances!

All I have to say about Google sponsoring the Lunar X-Prize mission is, Awesome! Those X-prize guys really know how to get sponsors and people involved in reaching technological challenges. And having a private company land on the moon will be pretty impressive, if someone can do it by 2012.

We're going in. The robotic Opportunity rover currently rolling across Mars has been prowling around the edge of the largest crater it has visited since landing over three years ago. It has been studying Victoria crater and looking for a way in. Now scientists on Earth have decided to take a calculated risk and plan to send Opportunity right into this ancient Martian crater over the next few weeks. Pictured is Cape St. Vincent, part of the wall of Victoria Crater next to where Opportunity will descend. The wall itself appears to contain clues about the Martian terrain before the impact that created Victoria crater, and so will be studied during the daring descent. Above the crater wall, far in the distance, lies a relatively featureless Martian horizon.

Astronomy Picture of the Day - 3 July 2007

Go, little rover, go!

Asa points to the recent article about Spirit discovering more evidence of past Martian water. I could pull a life-lesson out of the discovery, one of those when life gives you lemons... types of lessons. The reason that the water evidence was found is because one of Spirit's wheels is busted now, and dragging it along the ground exposes deeper soil types. How about that!

And Opportunity is still running around, too. Phoenix launches in about 3 months. I didn't work on it, but the engineers and scientists reached frenetic pace on it a few months back. ATLO is still going on.

JPL is having its 2007 Open House this weekend. The banners and food stands and tents are already going up all over work. I believe we entertain over 100,000 people in two days, which is pretty darn impressive.

For a while yesterday, we had a lot of helicopters circling over work. None of us knew why. Come to find out, there was a bear wandering around the arroyo. Go figure!

Last night, I went up to Griffith Observatory with some friends, to catch talks by George Takei and Ray Bradbury on the occasion of Yuri's Night. The newly renovated Griffith Observatory is really nice. An underground exhibit hall was dug out of the ground in front of the Observatory and then covered over. There's a scale model of the eight planets in the Solar System, and the Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon Theater. It was all very well setup.

They really play up NASA and JPL, too. The shuttle bus shows a video that mentions JPL sending mentions to every planet in the Solar System. (Which we can say now that Pluto has been demoted) All of the stations devoted to the planets has imagery from JPL, as well as the always popular scales that tell you how much you weigh on Jupiter.

Memo to ITWire: JPL is not in Texas. I know these American states get quite confusing, and Texas has some great aerospace centers. But JPL is nowhere near Houston!

A collaboration between NASA and the Advanced Research Project Agency, the InterPlaNet project is underway at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Houston, Texas.

Other than that, it was a neat article about interplanetary data transmission. Google to the rescue!

The Pasadena Star-News ran an article about JPL's supercomputing capability on Monday. The article caught my eye since my structural analysis has started using one of the JPL supercomputers in the past year or so. We're running some of our bigger structural models through a software package called Nastran that runs on Cosmos, the 1024-node supercomputer mentioned in the article.

It's rather amazing, really. Every time I set up a job to run, it occurs to me that I'm harnessing so much computing cycles. I mean, the biggest job I've done is one that took about 6 hours to complete, running on 32 processors. The article talks about the literal modeling of universes, far beyond the matrix manipulation I do. Pretty awesome.

The supercomputing group is fond of reminding people that they're #88 in the recent top 500 list of supercomputers. And the article does mention that we'd like a new one!

I guess I missed this story when it got posted originally. But, I have friends who keep me in the know, so now I won't be ignorant about the Houston Texans cheerleader who is also a NASA contractor.

Williams, a small-town Kansan, is an assistant project manager on the group that figures out how to keep the international space station habitable.

I'm not really sure what that means. How much dumbing-down does SI do for its readers? I mean, really. Is she helping to make sure toilet supplies don't run out, or is she working with potable water recycling, what? Come on, SI, give me a break.

I wanted to know who had lamer pick-up lines, rocket scientists or football players, and Williams said she couldn't answer -- her team doesn't interact with players.

I dunno. I wish I were your derivative so I could lie tangent to your curves has got to beat anything else, it's my tried and true line!

With the announcement yesterday about MGS finding evidence of flowing water on Mars, we had a number of news vans parked out front at work. The deer probably weren't disturbed too much, however.

One of my first thoughts on reading the news story about a geologist saying they had evidence of recent water activity was similar to John Scalzi's. "Recent" to a geologist (areologist?) has a completely different connotation than to a normal person. But as it turns out, it was within the last seven years or so, which is recent enough.

Car & Driver's article on Spirit and Opportunity has been posted on their website.

If the 300-million-mile flights were on target, if the landings were smooth, if the rovers could extricate themselves from the landers, and if a million other ifs all came to pass, the rovers were expected to drive barely a half-mile under remote control from Earth before going kablooey. It was hoped that evidence that Mars once had liquid surface water would be discovered in 90 Martian days

I do remember all the bated breaths and worries glances we gave each other at work 23 months ago. The article brings those memories back, to be sure.

So perhaps in a few years, once we have our moon base up and running, we might have to worry about Mars looking like this:

Some software is actually pretty good by any standards. Think of the Mars Rovers, Google, and the Human Genome Project. That's quality software!

Bjarne Strousup

The San Francisco Chronicle has an update on the status of our two Mars rovers.

Defying all the odds, the gutsy Mars rover Opportunity is still trundling tirelessly across the Red Planet's rugged landscape and making new discoveries of ancient water 2 1/2 years after it bounced to a landing on a mission designed to last only three months.

The word trundle always makes me think of the Stainless Steel Rat books by Harry Harrison, since it was used several times in there, and I was impressionable at a child.

Anyways, Steve Squyres is still keeping himself busy. Spirit is a bit lamer than his brother, but he's still chugging along. Go Rovers, go!

Jim Bell, who is the lead guy on the MER PanCam team, has a book coming out soon called Postcards From Mars.

Over 150 lavish full-color-process prints bring the colors and textures of Mars to vivid life on the page. Four of the most impressive pictures are presented in their entirety as gatefold images—which extend over three feet in width—providing a view of the surface of another planet unprecedented in its detail and clarity.

It looks like some great photos, something neat to stick on the coffee table or show to your kids! Amazon.com has it available for pre-order.

One of my friends emailed today, and was rather indignant that one of her planets was getting taken away. I suppose ending the anbiguity about Pluto is a good thing, precision is an engineer's second best friend after all. But there's something to be said for tradition, too.

The new standard still bothers me, though. I mean, if we're ever going to be able to chart the galaxy, we need clear standards. And "sweeping the lane" is not precise at all. Oh well, they're only astronomers after all, not engineers.

Voyager 1 passed the 100 A.U. mark this week. That's 100 times farther from the sun than the earth is, more than 9.3 billion miles away. It's the most distant man-made object in the Solar System, launched in 1977.

So, to commemorate, JPL gave out pins to all its employees. They're very nice pins. I have a drawer at work where I put them, along with all the missions patches and stickers that we get. I imagine that once I leave JPL or retire, I'll put them in a book, or Lord willing, give them to my grandchildren or something.

I occasionally run across some colleagues who actually worked on the Pioneer and Voyager missions. It's so cool to think about the spacecraft functioning for three decades. Several engineers in my group routinely talk about working on the design for the Galileo spacecraft which was built in the early 80's, and was delayed by the Challenger accident. I've been at JPL for 8 years now, and it's hard to imagine being there for 20. Great place to work.

Roving Mars is finally coming to Southern California! It will be showing at the IMAX theater at Universal CityWalk starting this Friday, August 18, 2006. Gosh, it sure took long enough.

I saw it at the screening they did for JPL employees at the California Science Center, and thoroughly enjoyed it. So I recommend it highly! It amused me to no end that the movie closes with the rover rotating its cameras towards the ground as twilight falls over Mars, and the narrator intoning, "and then one day, Spirit will go to sleep and not wake up..."

As seen at Digital Spy, Beyond, the TV show set at JPL, doesn't seem to be commissioned for the 2006-2007 season. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it doesn't sound good. Oh well...perhaps it will get picked up.

I saw this mentioned on our internal newsboard yesterday:

Recently one actor passed on the lead role in a one-hour Fox drama, and another actor took the gig.

There's nothing remarkable about that, except that the first actor is white, and the second actor is black.

And that's exactly how it should be, according to Adrian Lester, the black actor from England who just took the lead role in the Fox sci-fi pilot “Beyond,” in which he’ll play the head of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

Three black men take the lead... [Chicago Tribune]

Maybe I need to add a category just for Beyond.

Filming for the pilot episode of the TV show, Beyond, set at a pseudo-JPL, took place at CalPoly this weekend.

I think the filming was mentioned in the April 11 edition of the paper. Since the small note on the home page will likely expire in a couple of days, I'll copy most of the note:

LUCIAN FONG/The Poly Post

A prop covers the Voohis Park sign on Saturday and Sunday during the filming of the pilot episode for “Beyond,”a new sci-fi TV show on Fox. The fourth floor of the CLA building, the inside of the engineering building and several streets around campus were used as locations...

http://www.thepolypost.com

Just as Numb3rs takes place at the fictional Southern California technical university (CalSci), it appears from the photo that JPL gets renamed the Rocket Propulsion Laboratory. Actually, that's probably a better name, considering that it's been several decades since we actually did any jet propulsion...

Susan Kitchens is a much better writer than I am. Where I just spewed a bunch of thoughts last week about the JPL-based TV show, Beyond, she went and wrote a much more coherent post about it. She also caught something I didn't, more details about the casting. Here are some excerpts

Luther: 30's, German Male with a German accent. This nerdy German technician in surgical attire explains a critical problem with the engine assembly. Must have a German accent.

Babe: 20's, Caucasian Female. Hot and sexy, this young woman makes out with Matt at the observatory. No rocket scientist, she puts Matt off with her prosaic response to the cosmos.

Astrophysicist #1: 50's, Male, Any Ethnicities. Bearded, professor-type. This astrophysicist confers with Morris about a fireball that was reported some time ago.

Amber: Late 20's, African-American. A daily guard at the JPL gate.

My Entertainment World

That links to the Google cache of the page, since it seems like they scroll off monthly and I couldn't find a permanent link.

Just in case anyone is wondering, a prosaic response to the cosmos is a big turn-off for me, so the next time I make out with a Babe at the observatory, I'll be looking for one with a more, umm, non-prosaic response.

And a German tech? That makes it sound like a VW or BMW car commerical. Ja, der engine ist critical!

And I'm much relieved to see that the JPL security guards are represented. That means someone actually might be paying attention to what actually goes on at the Lab. We can only hope...

This TV show might turn out to be rather amusing when it airs in the fall.

Merrin Dungey (Kelly on "The King of Queens") has landed a role in the drama pilot, about the scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

the futon critic

And I've only found vague plot summaries. IMDb says that it involves "a radical plan to deflect a pathogen-infected meteor currently on a collision path with the Earth". Futon critic has all the cast info together.

At least it's not as near as bad as Three Moons Over Milford

The happily married mother of two teenagers, [Janet] finds her sedate suburban existence rudely disrupted when a meteor crashes into the moon, fragmenting it into three parts, any of which could plummet towards Earth and destroy the planet at any given moment. The strong-willed [Janet] is trying to pretend that nothing is amiss, but meanwhile all around her are melting down, including her scientist husband, who quits his job as the president of a huge biotech company and goes mountain climbing in Africa with no thought to the financial devastation of his family.

the futon critic

Let's hope that they actually do some on-location shooting at JPL. That'd be cool. Some coworkers and I have been trying to come up with some engaging dialog. First, it's a trifle worrisome that all these descriptions mention scientists and not engineers. Does Fox realize the difference? It's critical! Second, we're hoping that Beyond will introduce Cog E into the national lexicon. Personally, I'm just waiting to hear what kind of technical jokes get stuck in the script.

Finally, David Nevins described it as "it's going to be a smart ensemble drama about scientists who must become action heroes". I think he's implying that the engineers are already action heroes, and that the scientists are finally going to join the team. I think he could have been a bit more tactful, but you know those Hollywood types.

According to My Entertainment, shooting started last week.

Phil Plait has a fantastic post comparing the resolution of the first images from MRO's HiRISE instrument and Google Maps. Comparing the size of Martian craters to baseball fields is a stroke of genius.

Found via 2020hindsight.com

More on Beyond, the TV show set to take place at JPL

Seth Gabel (Adrian Moore on "Nip/Tuck") and Adrian Lester (Mickey Stone on "Hustle") have both joined the cast of the pilot, a thriller set at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They'll play David, a scientist, and Morris, the head of the research lab, respectively.

So the scientist is a young'un, 28 years old or so. And he's saving the world during the newest space race. Hmmm, sure, that coulda been me a few years ago, I suppose. Just substitute engineer for scientist, of course. Wouldn't want to get that mixed up.

Google Mars show various resolutions of the Martian surface, with elevation, visible, and infra-red contours available. That's pretty awesome. Spirit and Opportunity are there still, running strong!

Seizing the idea, Peter Pesti offers Google Map Europa for Jupiter's moon. Wowzers...

We had a lot of rain over the weekend here in Pasadena, and it was chilly. The snow level on the mountains was really low, low enough that Mojave Airport had snow. That's really rather amazing. I didn't check to see how rare that is, though. The photos are nice.

Via Asa Dotzler, I got to watch a magnificent montage of photos from the Hubble Space Telescope.

I'm not sure what I think about this. The names seems somewhat, ummm, different than normal. I mean, the rovers are named Spirit and Opportunity, neither of which is even close to any kind of mythology.

A huge step up from NASA administrator Mike Griffin's 'Apollo on steroids' tag, the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) has been christened 'Altair' - named after a variable double star in the constellation Aquila.

NasaSpaceFlight.com - NASA closing in on naming new fleet

The third annual "Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day" on Thursday, February 20, 2003, marked the introduction of a major Web resource for current and prospective female engineers. The Women in Engineering Organization is the first Web site to organize information about educational and career opportunities and programs for female engineers into one central clearinghouse, aiming to help girls and women continue to explore the field of engineering beyond a one day experience.

Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day

I quipped to my colleague today, "How about Introduce an Engineer to a Woman day?" I think I'd jump at that. :P

Occasionally, one of my friends will ask me. "Whatever happened to those rovers you guys sent up to Mars?" And I get to respond, "Oh, they're still running around!" And if you've not kept up, the reason for the battery longevity turned out to be the Martian winds, in the form of dust devils.

And it gradually began to dawn on the Earth-bound rover operators what was happening: wind from the passing dust devils was blowing away any dust that had accumulated on the solar panels, giving the rovers a new lease on life with each passage.

Devilish weather on Mars | csmonitor.com

Hey, it's National Engineers Week! When I grow up, I want to design roller coasters. :P

Not to mention the fact that the Jelly Belly factory ranks right up there with the Golden Gate Bridge. I amuse myself easily.

Sci Fi Wire -- The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel

Fox on Feb. 1 gave a green light to the SF drama pilot Beyond, from writer David Self (Road To Perdition), Variety reported.

Twentieth Century Fox TV and Imagine TV are behind the thriller, which takes place at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A global crisis helps launch a new race to space as the show opens, the trade paper reported.

Wow, let's race to space! Although, if it's a manned race-to-space, I'm not sure why JPL would be involved, but hey, better than nothing. Maybe we could get someone to say, "I'm not a rocket scientist, but I play one on TV!"

Making Roving Mars Difficult To See | NASA Watch

Meanwhile, people who work at JPL (on the actual ongoing rover mission itself) have to travel hundreds of miles to the bay area (Dublin, San Jose, or San Francisco) to see it - even though there are IMAX theaters all over southern California.

I was disappointed that there was nowhere to see Roving Mars this weekend around here. I guess I'll just have to wait until Harry Potter gets pushed out.

Xooglers: Word

Orthogonal

Engineers are always talking about things being orthogonal to each other. The first time I heard the term, I thought it meant something like '11-sided'� It doesn't. I've read the definition many times. I still don't really get it, which didn't stop me from casually dropping it into conversations with engineers.

I love it!

I happened to notice some of the recent "unofficial" names for geographic landmarks for Spirit and Opportunity. Among the mix are "Tennessee Valley" and "Cumberland Ridge". The next thing you'll know is that the TVA will be building dams on the canals up there!

"Larry's Lookout" and "Husband HIll" are a couple of the others...

Woo-hoo, Cassini!

While cruising around Saturn in early October, Cassini captured a series of images that have been composed into the largest, most detailed, global natural color view of Saturn and its rings ever made.

From Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations. It's gorgeous!

See also MSNBC's story.

Professor Hall, who teaches at Virginia Tech, recounts a visit by Commander Brian Binnie, one of Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne pilots.

He mentions something that I was also slightly bothered by, when I drove up to Mojave to see a couple of the SpaceShipOne flights.

Later in the evening he gave an entertaining 90-minute lecture with powerpoint slides and embedded video to an audience of at least 1000 folks. Needless to say, he charmed the crowd with his anecdotes about the development, test, and successful flights of SpaceShipOne. He got quite a bit of laughter when he presented his one-chart description of "The Other Space Agency": Nay-Say.

Professor Hall insightfully notes that Binnie's comaprison of the Space Shuttle's $30M crew compartment door and SpaceShipOne's $20 door is not exactly comparing apples with apples, when you remember the functional and operational requirements that each had to meet.

In summary, much of his talk was fascinating, illuminating, and inspiring. But a substantial bit in the middle seemed to be based on the premise that anything that makes my competition sound bad makes me look good. In general, I disagree with that premise, and I hope that many of the VT students in the audience recognized the less-than-graceful tone that it set. I would rather that he had focused on the many challenges that the Scaled Composites team faced and how they overcame them, rather than spending time denigrating NASA and other X-Prize competitors.

Amen! NASA got repeated mentions by the announcers at the SpaceShipOne flights, as well as by Burt Rutan and the other various aerospace industry dignitaries. Much more often than not, those comments were derogatory, derisive, or dismissive.

Now, I'm among the first to admit and herald the accomplishments of Scaled Composites, and many other private enterprises. And certainly NASA has quite a bit of bureaucratic bloat. But personally, I don't belive that Scaled would be where they are now without a significant amount of the research and development that NASA performed over the past four decades or so. I know people who would disagree with that statement, and even say that NASA has hindered, rather than helped, aerospace development, in particular, manned spaceflight. But that's tough to prove. Just like with any technical area that the government is involved in, many people forget how much money is poured into research and development, not merely for end products, but for the tools and the knowledge to keep moving forward.

That's similar to a question someone once asked me about the Mars rovers. If MER is so much more successful than the Mars Pathfinder rover, why didn't we build MER in 1998? The easy answer is that we didn't know how. Pathfinder proved the air-bag landing concept for a small payload, which enabled the larger MER vehicle. Pathfinder demonstrated very limited autonomous driving control, which improved to allow Opportunity to drive tens of meters on its own. And, as my elementary school principal was fonding of saying, so on and so forth.

All of that to say, that while Scaled may trumpet their complete lack of explicit government funding, I'm sure there's much that was accomplished through indirect means. Purely from a programmatic view, Edwards AFB provided a lot of support, in the form of tracking, etc. But, more importantly, much of the general engineering knowledge about aerodynamics, thermodynamics, propulsion, guidance & control, etc. that went into the design and operation of SpaceShipOne probably came about through NASA research.

And please don't take this as any sort of put-down to the accomplishments of the SpaceShipOne team. Frankly, I'm jealous. They deserve all the accolades that they've received and more. They successfully demonstrated an extremely novel and inexpensive concept, within a short amount of time. I just wish that sometimes, they didn't make it out to be a zero-sum game, where they can only succeed at NASA's cost.

Yes, I'm deliberately avoiding the question of whether NASA should limit itself to research and development at the expense of exploration, maybe another time...

From the Space News Blog comes a story on Huygens' final journey to Titan:

One year after Mars Express' arrival at Mars, the mighty rules of celestial mechanics have again set Christmas as the date for a major ESA event in deep space.

At 1.25 billion km from Earth, after a 7-year journey through the Solar system, ESA's Huygens probe is about to separate from the Cassini orbiter to enter a ballistic trajectory toward Titan, the largest and most mysterious moon of Saturn, in order to dive into its atmosphere on 14 January. This will be the first man-made object to explore in-situ this unique environment, whose chemistry is assumed to be very similar to that of the early Earth just before life began, 3.8 billion years ago.

My office-mate has been working on some of the last minute dynamics analysis for the Cassini-Huygens separation. Sometimes, the shear distance Cassini has traveled sets me back - fully an order of magnitude longer in travel time than the Mars rovers, nearly seven years to arrival. And she's working pretty darn well, too!

So if you're not complete distracted on December 25, you might want to keep an ear open for word from JPL on Cassini's status.

Vis Susan Kitchens at 2020hindsight.org comes a pointer to Nature's Canvas:

In a splendid portrait created by light and gravity, Saturn’s lonely moon Mimas is seen against the cool, blue-streaked backdrop of Saturn’s northern hemisphere. Delicate shadows cast by the rings arc gracefully across the planet, fading into darkness on Saturn’s night side.

The part of the atmosphere seen here appears darker and more bluish than the warm brown and gold hues seen in Cassini images of the southern hemisphere, due to preferential scattering of blue wavelengths by the cloud-free upper atmosphere.

What a gorgeous photo...

Space Daily

Spirit remains in excellent health and has survived more than 300 martian days on the red planet. With the Sun still relatively low on the horizon in the early spring season on Mars, rover drivers are forced to seek driving routes that keep the rover and its solar panels tilted northward for energy reasons.

Go, little rover, go!

I just came across this and I think it's rather cool: Jupiter's Rare Triple Eclipse :: Astrobiology Magazine :: Search for Life in the Universe

Jupiter has four moons roughly the same size as Earth's Moon. The shadows of three of them occasionally sweep simultaneously across Jupiter. Viewing the triple shadows in 2004 was special, because two of the moons were crossing Jupiter's face at the same time as the three shadows.

Scaled Composite's entry in the Ansari X Prize competition seems to be leaving the others far, far behind. Their third powered flight last week took the craft 80% of the way to what NASA considers an altitute inhabited by astronauts.

In a post-flight statement from the company, the SpaceShipOne team reported that their space plane flew to 212,000 feet altitude, almost 41 miles. NASA awards astronaut status to anyone who flies above 50 miles in altitude.

Private Rocket SpaceShipOne Makes Third Rocket-Powered Flight

Mars Rovers in Autumn: A Life and Death Drama on the Red Planet

Although the NASA robots are mechanized twins at birth, each has a distinct personality, Wallace observed.

Undergoing testing here on Earth prior to Mars sendoff, Wallace felt that Spirit exhibited a tendency to be less well-behaved, the more adventurous of the two vehicles. "Opportunity tended to kind of toe the line...a little more staying inside the lines," he related.

A classic case of anthropomorphization. Spirit must be the younger twin.

The Salt Lake Tribune -- Stunt pilots prepare to catch space probe

DUGWAY PROVING GROUND -- Hollywood stunt pilots spent Thursday hovering over the west desert in helicopters to practice for their $200 million catch later this year.

The main event takes place Sept. 8, when the NASA Genesis probe drops a capsule carrying solar wind particles over the Utah Test and Training Range. The tiny payload -- the weight of a few salt grains -- could help scientists determine our solar system's origin.

NASA is using stunt pilots? Wow...And Genesis was the first mission that I worked on at JPL to launch. I have an emotional connection. :)

Slate has a neat article about NASA's Planetary Protection Officer and what he does. We grouse a lot about the heavy requirements on our Mars landers for thermal bakeout, but it is all for a very good reason: we simple don't want to contaminate Mars with any of our Earthly microbes.

In addition to setting standards for extraplanetary cleanliness, John D. Rummel is also working on Earthly containment:

Rummel's other big challenge is designing and building a suitable containment facility for the analysis of Martian samples. Sometime next decade, NASA hopes to complete a mission that can return up to a kilogram of Martian rock to the Earth. Though there's only a tiny chance that such a sample will contain an organism, let alone one that might cause a nightmarish scenario out of The Andromeda Strain, NASA doesn't want to take any chances with the future of the human race.

I'm practically crying I'm laughing so hard. opportunitygrrl and spiritrover are LIveJournal bloggers.

Read about her crush on Stardust, who is glad he's not on Mars. Just like a guy, all insensitive. And Pathfindress is a bit jealous. Meanwhile, GOES_Sat got some flowers from FUSE_Sat. *satellite singing*

Cassini_Saturn is a bit older, of course, but that doesn't make him more mature! And the two old fogies are VoyagerProbe and Voyager_at_90au. Nothing like the good ol' days.

[Seen via 2020 Hindsight]:

Camillia Zedan's student astronaut journal is great reading. Here's a quick quote:

Teamwork is a big thing around JPL. At the Science Downlink Assessment Meeting (SDAM) today, I noticed three things. First, how well someone from each group would explain to the others so that they would be able to understand what other things are going on with the rover. Second, how well each group functioned and interacted within their teams. And finally, I noticed how comfortable the chairs are within JPL, prompting the question: “Where d’you get them chairs, Peter?” So, now, I must find Peter.

She's right. I don't know if it's OSHA-required, or maybe a CA-state regulation, but I had to read through ergonometric recommendations before my chair was ordered. And wow, it's comfortable, alright.

Being an established media organization does have its advantages! While my little list of Opportunity's wake-up songs was grabbed from the JPL website and was quite incomplete, Space.com got complete lists for both rovers.

Ah, but will they keep them up-to-date? I rather doubt it.

John Updike has a poem in the New Yorker for Spirit and Opportunity. Very cute.

Responded Opportunity,
“My bounce was not so bad,
But now they send me out to see
These dreary rocks, bedad!”

[Via Martian Soil]

I read through the status reports for Opportunity and culled this list of wake-up songs used by the rover flight controllers.