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Maybe there is hope for the future!

Posted by Far_view on Saturday, January 13, 2007 11:46:19 PM
There are some neat pictures and a short video at the Blue Origin public web site. This is the vertical take off / vertical landing sub-orbital space ship that Jeff Bezos (of Amazon.com fame) is building. This is the kind of technology that can really get us into Space! As cool as Rutan's Space Ship One was, I still see it as kind of a stunt. This vertical take off / vertical landing technology has real potential for scaling up to be true orbital spaceships.
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more on the fireball

Posted by Far_view on Friday, January 05, 2007 1:00:30 AM
Apparently the local Fox affiliate filmed the fireball that I saw this morning.  Also, it was apparently a Russian booster rocket and not a meteorite.  Part of it apparently survived the passage through the atmosphere and crashed in Wyoming!
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Fireball!!!

Posted by Far_view on Thursday, January 04, 2007 9:05:51 AM
I walked out my front door at a little after 6:00 this morning to take my dog on our morning walk and what should I see out in the northern sky, but a tremendous fireball!!! It was awesome! I don't know if fireball (singular) is the right term for it since whatever it was had fragmented and was streaming from northeast to southwest with multiple streaks of streaming fire. It really was amazing. I thought about running back into my house to grab a camera, but I didn't want to miss any of it. On the channel 9 morning news, they said that there had been reports of a triple sonic boom so whatever it was apparently made it to the lower atmosphere. Good timing for me to be out there to see it!
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backlash against the global warming "jihadists"

Posted by Far_view on Thursday, December 21, 2006 6:18:41 PM
Here is a good post by someone at the U. of Colorado discussing a backlash against the global warming fanatics.
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Interesting Mars results from the 2006 AGU Fall Meeting

Posted by Far_view on Saturday, December 16, 2006 4:41:32 PM
I just got back yesterday from the Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco. It was a good meeting with a lot of neat Planetary Science results (among lots and lots of other geoscience results of course). I am biased of course but I think some of the most interesting stuff was from the Remotely Sensed Mineralogy of Mars sessions on Tuesday morning (part 1 and part 2). There were lots of good results in those sessions from OMEGA, THEMIS, and TES. I had a talk in the second session with early results from an analysis I'm doing under the Mars Data Analysis program on the Mawrth Vallis region. On Wednesday, there were some early results from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Some of the early CRISM results over Mawrth Vallis dovetail nicely with what I've seen in the publically released OMEGA data. The early HiRISE images are stunning. There's one locale called Mojave crater which has channels which for all the world look like they were carved by rainfall fed channels. On Thursday afternoon we had the Mars Exploration Rover sessions. I didn't have a talk for those sessions, but was a co-author on a couple of the presentations. It was like a public forum "end of sol" session. The telecon end of sol sessions that we have are good, but there is definitely something to be said for having people together in the same room. It wasn't necessarily all MER science team people talking to each other either. There were some presentations by non-team members doing work with the publically released data.

It ought to be a good year for Mars science what with all the data coming down from MRO and with plans ramping up for the Mars Science Lab mission. This summer there will also be the Seventh International Conference on Mars in Pasadena so that should be very interesting as well.
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new NASA goal

Posted by Far_view on Monday, December 04, 2006 11:48:04 PM
Today NASA put out a longer term goal beyond just going back to the Moon in the form of a "permanent" lunar polar base. It seems to me that might be a tad premature since recently there has been some contradictory findings about whether or not there is water ice in the permanently shadowed craters in the lunar polar regions. Be that as it may, I have been thinking more and more that going back to the Moon might just be a dead end... it could sap funds and people's enthusiasm and delay us from other deep space destinations- namely Mars and the Near Earth Asteroids. Some alternatives to the Moon as a destination for human exploration were recently suggested by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA). There's a Space Review article on this topic here and the IAA report itself is here. I think the good thing about the Orion spacecraft architecture that is currently being developed is that it is not necessarily Moon-specific. If, as a result of the 2008 presidential election, the decision is made to re-orient the program from the Moon to first check out the Sun-Earth L2 point or some near Earth asteroid, I believe that could be done fairly efficiently. I really think such a reprioritization of goals might be in order, but nobody has asked me (!).
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piece in the UK Telegraph re war with Islam

Posted by Far_view on Monday, November 27, 2006 6:27:39 PM
I was looking at the Real Clear Politics web site and followed the link to the following piece in the on-line Telegraph by Janet Daley vis-a-vis our war with radical Islam. I think the key paragraph is the following:

"What is being demanded is the surrender of everything that Western democracy regards as sacred: even, ironically, the freedom to practise one's own religion, which, at the moment, is so useful to Muslim activists. We are forced to accept the Islamist movement's own estimation of the conflict: this is a war to the death, or until Islamism decides to call a halt."

This woman really gets it... there is no negotiating with these people... we either defeat them, convert to Islam, or die.
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ostriches at Brown University

Posted by Far_view on Tuesday, November 21, 2006 11:32:40 PM
It is just incredible to me that with all that is going on in the Middle East. With Iran on the verge of getting nuclear weapons, with Islamic nut-jobs running wild in Iraq, and today with the assassination of a Christian member of the Lebanese cabinet and Lebanon's government on the verge of being taken over by Hezbollah (and through them control by Syria and Iran). With all this horrible news and all the hate and discord sown by radical Muslims, liberals in this country just don't see it. In fact it is like their heads are screwed on backwards. White is black, up is down. Everything is 180 degrees out of phase. On his transterrestrial.com blog, Rand Simberg notes that Brown University has disinvited a former Muslim speaker who is critical of Islam. Mr. Simberg poses a number of appropriate questions such as:

"Does the Brown Muslim student group have the same compunctions about bringing in a Jewish speaker who criticizes Judaism?"

Good grief! Every place in this country should be screaming to the rooftops about the threat posed to us by radical Islam, but instead liberal hoseheads at Brown just plant their heads deep in the sand like good little ostriches.
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the science vs. religion issue

Posted by Far_view on Monday, November 13, 2006 8:43:40 PM
It is weird how some days, you'll hear a lot of related things or have a common theme common up in conversations or communications. Today, for me, that was a lot of science vs. religion stuff. Someone at work e-mailed around to everyone at work the following Newsweek story, about the "Beyond Belief" conference at the Salk Institute in LaJolla, Calif. I thought it was pretty inappropriate for that to be e-mailed around, but be that as it may. I also heard on Dennis Prager's radio show a discussion based on that sage philosopher Elton John's comments that he thought that religion should be banned. Then on the O'Reilly Factor, Bill was interviewing the head of the American Atheists organization.

I'm not the most religious person, but I think that religion can play a very positive role in people's lives and believe that people should be free to worship as they wish (so long as its not radical Islam!). People like Richard Dawkins are very aggressively anti-religion. For people, such as myself, who are adherents of the scientific method and want a wider dissemination of science education amongst the public, I think it is extremely counter-productive to be so aggressively against religion because that will only turn people off.

I also see that in the world today Western Civilization is at war with radical Islam and the only way we are going to win that conflict is if we are more committed to out ideals than they are to theirs. I think that without the strength of our Judeo-Christian ideals we don't stand a chance against the Islamo-fascists. For people like Dawkins to be fighting against Judeo-Christianity is, to me, to be seeking to slit our own wrists.
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my reaction to the Nov. 7 elections

Posted by Far_view on Thursday, November 09, 2006 4:25:09 PM
Well, the election results really frustrated me. Those results, and things I’ve heard on the radio and seen on TV have really turned me off. I just can’t believe out incredibly stupid people were in New Jersey to first elect that scumbag Corzine, who basically bought first his senate seat and then the governor’s seat… who lied to them saying he wouldn’t raise taxes and then raising taxes. So on the heels of Corzine’s betrayal they go ahead and vote in his crony, Menendez???? What IDIOTS! I’m disappointed that real stars like Rick Santorum and Michael Steele lost in their Senate races. Some of the best House members lost too… J. D. Hayworth and Curt Weldon. Then listening to the commentary yesterday and today from people like Laura Ingraham and Rush is the same old, “oh the Republicans weren’t conservative enough”. Yeah… right. No one can tell me that a big reason for Jim Talent losing wasn’t his opposition to embryonic stem cell research and that Michael J. Fox ad that his opponent ran against him (and Rush’s over the top criticism of the ad). Then I got sick yesterday of Bush because the very day after the election he fires Rumsfeld. Look… he should either have stuck with the guy or fired him a couple of months ago (Dick Morris says that if he had fired him a few months ago, he could have kept Congress… now it just looks like he’s caving). I’m sure I’ll be angry as hell in the months to come in Colorado with a Democrat governor and a Democrat legislature. It is going to become like f***ing New Jersey in Colorado with Democrats in charge of both the statehouse and the governor's mansion. Today I got pissed off all over again with George Allen conceding. I'm hearing people on the radio praising him. Not me, to me he's a quitter. You know if the shoe was on the other foot that George Soros would be sending in lawyers to get the Democrat over the top. Why can't Republicans fight? I don't care if analysts have told him that there aren't enough votes there, he should fight just to make liberal moneybags like Soros spend more of their ill-begotten gains in the legal contest.
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disturbing glee

Posted by Far_view on Friday, November 03, 2006 6:03:34 PM
I had lunch with people at work. I know they're pretty much all liberals and usually I just try to keep my mouth shut when they start going off, but it was really too much today. They were just gleeful over the news about this evangelical minister, Ted Haggard, being implicated with a male prostitute and drugs. Now, I am not very religious and, in fact, I strongly disagree with the really hard core religious people who want to have things like Intelligent Design taught in schools. Still, I can't say that I take any pleasure when I see someone like this Haggard guy caught up in a scandal... but obviously the folks I was at lunch with do... they thought it was terrific. One woman said how great it was when hypocrites were exposed. This was too much for me so I said, "oh, you must have gotten a kick out of John Kerry's hypocrisy about the troops this week". Of course, that set them off. "Oh... John Kerry was just telling a joke." "John Kerry was a soldier... he supports the troops." Yeah... right. I said it just exposed how much he looked down on our troops. That was just like throwing rubbing alcohol on a fire. Voosh! It ultimately settled down. I supposed I shouldn't get into arguments with those people. I'm not going to change anyone's mind, but sometimes I just feel the need to confront them.
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My favorite recent HiRISE image

Posted by Far_view on Saturday, October 28, 2006 11:17:45 PM
I continue to be blown away by the quality, clarity, and awesomeness of the images being returned by the HiRISE camera on MRO. I was just looking at some images released October 5. My favorite of that bunch is this one of layers in the putative delta in Holden Crater. Wow!!! Just at an aesthetic level, the interplay of the light-toned layered rocks emerging from the dark mantling sands and dunes. It is just incredible. I was a little skeptical about how much more we would get from the 30 cm resolution of HiRISE vs. the 1.5 m resolution of MOC, but it really is a big difference.
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Lecturing at Sussex County Community College, Newton, NJ

Posted by Far_view on Monday, October 16, 2006 11:56:02 PM
I'm not seeing a whole lot of comments on these posts but on the off chance that someone is perusing the blogs and is interested in Mars... as part of my trip to the NJ / PA area, I'll be giving a lecture this Friday night (Oct. 20) on the Mars Exploration Rover mission. A posting on that event is here.
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Mars going into solar conjunction

Posted by Far_view on Friday, October 13, 2006 5:44:03 PM
Mars is going to be passing behind the Sun within the next couple of weeks and during that time we will have limited communications with Spirit and Opportunity.  Spirit is still sitting at its "Low Ridge" winter-over site.  Actually we are emerging from the Martian winter so solar energy available to the rovers is increasing.  After conjunction I think the plan is for Spirit to make a very short drive (a "bump") so that we can get some different material in the robotic arm's work volume.  Opportunity is still sitting on the "Cape Verde" promontory (a visualization of the rover sitting on that promontory can be viewed  here).  Over the period of conjunction (during which we will have very limited communication with the rovers) Opportunity will be collecting a great panorama of Victoria Crater.  So it will be a slow period for the rovers.  It will give us a chance to catch our collective breath since after conjunction the pace of activity will pick up again.
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Sci Fi Weekly did run my letter

Posted by Far_view on Tuesday, October 10, 2006 8:46:00 AM
Sci Fi Weekly did run my letter on the Battlestar Galactical premiere. I'll probably get flamed next week. Bring it on!
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