With the successful mission of Atlantis under its belt, NASA is looking toward a Hubble servicing mission.

This makes me happy. I have decidedly mixed feelings about these last few Shuttle missions, but if Hubble gets upgraded — and there are two advanced and very cool cameras that have been sitting in a warehouse for years now waiting to be taken up — then that means the waning years of the Shuttle were good for something.

NASA’s Associate Administrator Mary Cleave, who famously canceled the Dawn mission minutes after a meeting with Congress about science cutbacks, is leaving NASA. This means a job position is opening up, as well as a few others.

I wonder if I should apply…? Nah. They can’t afford me; it would take a substantial fraction of NASA’s budget to get me to move back east. Plus, I doubt they’d like my position on science subjects. But it’s fun to dream.

So on Saturday September 23^rd at 04:03 a.m. (or Friday night at 9:03 p.m. for me in the Pacific time zone) the Sun will cross from the northern celestial hemisphere to the southern one, and most people will say it’s the start of autumn in the northern hemisphere.

I don’t say that, I say it’s the middle of autumn. But I have to explain this four times every fracking year, so instead of saying it again I’ll just point you to the blog entry I wrote in the spring about seasons and equinoxes and eggs.

Tip o’ the artist’s beret to BABloggee Steve Kluge for the great diagram!

For your Friday amusement:

Best.

Evah.

Via Pharyngula. Please keep the comments clean, folks.

Update (mar 26 2008): The link has been updated, since the old one is now 404.

On Monday at 6:30 p.m. I’ll be in Oakland, California talking Bad Astronomy smack to the Bay Area Skeptics. You can get more info on my calendar page or on the the BAS page for the talk. I’m pretty sure it’s free, but then, you get what you pay for.

Cool high-energy astronomy news: the Large Area Telescope (or LAT), the main instrument for the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) is ready to be mounted on the spacecraft. GLAST is a joint NASA/Department of Energy mission due to launch next year, and will observe super-high-energy explosions and other titanically energetic events like galaxy collisions and black holes gobbling down matter. I work on the education and public outreach for GLAST, so I’m happy. If it works, I’m funded for a few more years.

Here’s what the LAT looks like as it sits in a clean area (to prevent dust and other contaminants) at the Naval Research Lab just outside Washington, DC:

The picture is fuzzy due to the clear plastic curtains separating the LAT from the dirty outside air. I always think those clean rooms look like restaurant walk-in coolers.

One funny thing: in the press release, Steve Ritz, the project scientist (read: big science cheese) for GLAST said this:

The Large Area Telescope is a unique and beautiful new instrument for science…

I hope he didn’t mean that literally– here’s an image of the LAT from a few months back:

Cool? Yes. "Beautiful"? Bzzzzt.

Still, it’ll do amazing stuff, giving us pictures and spectra of incredible events that, until even a few years ago, were totally unknown to us.

And don’t forget to add GLAST to your MySpace page!

Update (Sep. 22, 2006): I’m getting lots of visitors from Slashdot and Fark. Welcome! Also, NewScientist.com has a short article about these images as well, and talks a little bit about how the Mars Express scientists got emails from people asking them to image Cydonia because they "don’t believe NASA". Not that these new images will change their minds! I heard Hoagland was on Coast to Coast AM last night — as I predicted in this blog entry below– whining about the new images too. I’ll have to get a copy of that segment!

Longtime BABloggee John Parejko clued me in to a European Space Agency press release today about new images from Mars. The Mars Express took images of the Cydonia region on the Red Planet, where antiscientist Richard Hoagland claims there is a giant "Face on Mars".

Here’s the overview of the region:

The region is pretty cool, actually. There are craters, buttes, and lots of other interesting eroded features. Note the scalebar at the bottom: it represents 10 km (6 miles). There is a pretty nice high-res image available, too (warning: 2.1 Mb file). The actual data from the orbiter has a resolution of about 14 meters per pixel! To put that into context, 14 meters is about the size of one side of a tennis court. Mars Express wouldn’t get great shots of Anna Kournikova playing tennis, but that’s still pretty impressive.

You can see the face near the center of the image. Here’s a higher-res closeup:

Even better, Mars Express took multiple images from different angles, allowing a 3D perspective image to be built. Here’s that:

[sarcasm]
Wow, it’s just overwhelmingly like a face, ain’t it? Golly!
[/sarcasm]

Or not. Sure, it looks a little like a face, but not a whole lot. Of course, if you’ve based an entire website on the idea that it really is a Face, and that there is a city near it, and this holds the key to a new type of physics that will allow you to build faster-than-light drives, control hurricanes, and tear toilet paper exactly along the perforations, then you might be motivated to say it still looks like a face.

But I’ve seen better faces in my shower curtain. To me, that 3D image looks more like the guy who gets hit by the toxic waste at the end of "Robocop" than a real, human face.

So if you have any sense of reality, you’ll look at it, laugh at how it kinda sorta looks like a face, and move on with your life.

I have to say that I like the way the press people handled the whole "Face" mythology in their press release. They were rather gentle, but still made it clear that this whole thing is nothing more than a modern myth. They also never link to Hoagland’s site, which will no doubt steam him. Stay tuned, though; I’m sure he’ll be on Coast to Coast AM soon enough talking about how the Europeans are in on the cover-up by NASA.

Sigh. As usual, my work will never, ever be done.