On Monday, December 4, NASA will unveil its architecture for the return to the Moon. I’m very curious about this, of course! I support going back to the Moon, but there are a lot of caveats in my mind — like not stepping on the throat of science to do it.

Along with this release they’ll discuss their global exploration strategy. I’ll be politic here and say that this could be made a lot clearer by NASA, so I hope this press conference will help.

If you have some time, and feel like kicking back and listening to scientists talk science, then here are some fun podcasts:

1. For the "Are We Alone" radio show I did an interview about sci-fi monsters with Lori Marino. You can listen to that as an MP3 or as a WMA file.
2. Also for "Are We Alone", my regular "Brains on Vacation" bit asks the question "Does prayer work?" The answer: nope. MP3, and WMA.
3. Jill Tarter, also of SETI, and who swears that she is not the basis of the character Ellie Arroway from Sagan’s novel "Contact", was in New Zealand and gave a talk on the search for little green men. I haven’t listened to it yet, but Jill is fun and I expect it’s pretty good.

The UK newspaper "the Sun" is not exactly a bastion of journalistic integrity — it’s a bit like the Weekly World News with a Monty Python accent. So I’m not too surprised that it would have some stupid stories in it, but one they had on their site today really anger me. It’s short, and here it is in its entirety:

AN [sic] asteroid big enough to wipe out mankind is overdue and could strike at any time, scientists fear.

It was thought an impact of the size that wiped out the dinosaurs happened only once in ½million years.

But new evidence studied in Australia suggests a hit equal to 500 Hiroshimas occurs every 1,000 years — and the last was 4,800 years ago.

First off, which scientists? No names, nothing. That’s some journalism!

next, "wipe out" is way too strong a phrase. An asteroid big enough to every human on Earth would have to be roughly 10 kilometers across or bigger, and we have most of those charted (half the near-Earth asteroids bigger than 1 km have already been charted, and 90% is the goal by the end of 2008). Yeah, we’re scared of them — you’d have to be nuts not to be — but we also know that none that big are headed our way in the immediate future.

The really scary ones are the smaller ones — a few hundred meters across — that can come in undetected and kill millions of people if they impact over a city or near a coastline. That would be a disaster of unprecedented proportions for humanity– but it wouldn’t cause an extinction event.

So strike one for The Sun.

Second, it’s not thought that an impact like the dinosaur killer happens every 500,000 years. If that were true, we wouldn’t be here! The last big impact of that size was… when the dinosaurs were wiped out. The average time between impacts like this is about 200 million years (see page 10 of David Morrison’s paper "Earth Sterilizing Impact"). It’s true that an impact that could destabilize civilization happens every million years or so, but this is different than an extinction-level event.

Strike two.

The last sentence in the article is accurate. I already discussed this before. There is some evidence to suggest we get hit more often than previously thought, but the evidence is scanty. A lot more data are needed.

But what really irritates me is the idea that we are "overdue" for an impact. That’s garbage. Impacts are a stochastic process; they’re random. We could get hit tonight by a big one, or it might be a million years from now. They don’t happen like clockwork, so the impact frequency is a statistical one, like saying how often you get heads when you flip a coin. You have a chance of getting heads every time you flip it, but you cannot say with certainty that you will the next time. And if you flipped tails last time, it doesn’t mean it’ll be heads the next.

The same with asteroids. The idea that we get a big impact every millions years or so doesn’t make asteroids rain down on a schedule.

Asteroid impacts are scary, and there is absolutely no need to make them any scarier by fear mongering like this. Worse, it adds to the "cry wolf" problem that is already plaguing impact scientists — whenever a potentially hazardous asteroid is announced, and sails past us, the public get that much more inured to the real threat from these things (even when scientists are saying the right things). It doesn’t help to have gas thrown on this fire by irresponsible journalism.

OK, the Mars pictures are very very cool. But did you know that we have satellites orbiting a closer planet?

Yeah, duh. Earth!

The Landsat satellites have been around a long time (34 years) taking important data about our home planet.

And now you can watch! The USGS has created the EarthNow! Landsat Image viewer, which displays a scrolling continuous image of the Earth as seen from Landsat 5 and 7. I’ve tuned in a few times and have yet to see a live image, but it does say when the next pass of the satellite will be.

There is something vaguely hypnotic with watching the Earth roll by underneath you. At 250 meters per pixel you won’t see too many man-made features (at least not individual ones) but just the terrain itself is relaxing. As I write this, coincidentally, the image passed right over my house! I couldn’t even make out the city of Santa Rosa, which is a decent sized place. I could see Point Reyes and the Farallon islands though. Pretty cool.

All in all, the Mars images are cooler. The higher resolution makes them prettier, and, after all, they’re from another planet! But Earth still ranks high on the list of places I like to live and look at.

Sure, it’s snarky and resorts to ad hominems, but Sylvia Brown is a bad, bad person, so Rebecca’s narrative of a trip to see this scammer is a great read. It has some NSFW language, however. I think Rebecca is in many ways NSFW.

And she still has calendars, too.

Update: As Emily points out in the comments below, these are not the latest images, and will not be updated. Go to the HiROC site for more images. I will also note that their big images are in JPG 2000 format, and they recommend using ExpressView. I installed it and it’s messing up my PC! So install with caution.

With the news from Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) looking bleaker every day, you might want to take a look at some fantastic news from MRO: the folks who work on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera have created an online image viewer.

And lemme just say, Holy Haleakale!

This. Site. ROCKS.

The camera’s full name is the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, and they ain’t kidding. The resolution is simply incredible. Each image pixel represents 55 centimeters (20 inches) on the martian surface! Half a meter!

Take a look at this one; it’s Cerberus Fossae (image TRA_000827_1875), a trough on Mars:

That’s the whole HiRISE image, but at drastically reduced scale: the original image I downloaded at full res was 30 megabytes (!) and was 11852 x 9444 pixels (!!). It took several minutes to download. The image I’m displaying here has been reduced in dimension by a factor of about 25 in each direction (that’s over 600 in area), and further compressed as a JPG.

So if that’s the low-res version, what’s the high-res look like? Well, here is a tiny subsection:

The original picture is so frakking big I lost track of where I got this subsection. Somewhere like a third of the way in from the left. This image is also JPG compressed; click it for the uncompressed version. You can see rocks and wind ripples in the dust (I love that part). It’s still hard to get the scale of this, so here is yet another subsection with just some of the rocks in it, blown up so you can see the pixels:

Remember, those pixels are half a meter across. The rocks in the image aren’t much bigger than what you can see in some gardens. I see glacier-dropped granite blocks far bigger than that all over northern California! The ripples in the image are spaced a meter or two apart, like what you might see at the beach.

WOW.

These pictures are beyond superb. They are high art. And it gets better! On the HiRISE site, you can pan and zoom in on the images. This is really slick, and fun to do. It’s like Google maps, for Mars! They have lots of different terrain (hmmm, we may need a different word for that) like craters, troughs, plains, and some very nifty layering near the north pole.

And maybe even coolest (which is saying a lot) they have a full map of the planet at the bottom which you can pan and zoom, and the positions of the HiRISE images are labeled.

Fan – freaking – tastic. Coolest thing I’ve seen in ages.

And it just gets better; they’ll add more images as they come in. They’ll only be mapping 2% of the surface of Mars, but that’s going to add up to a vast amount of data. When the high-res data came back from MGS, the scientists literally could not keep up with the data flow. A lot of amateur Marsophiles found interesting and scientifically valuable phenomena in the images. The same thing will happen here, guaranteed. So start looking!

Calling all astrophotographers!

In October, a star in Cassiopeia brightened suddenly. It brightened from magnitude 11.5 to 7.5, a factor of about 40. The star was not the type known to do this, so astronomers are puzzling over it. It might have been a microlensing event, where the gravity of an object between us and the star acts like a lens, amplifying the star’s light. This would be an extremely rare and fantastically cool event, so if you have any images of the constellation taken in October, please see that link above. You can also contact the American Association of Variable Star Observers.

I went online to the Digitized Sky Survey and created this image of the star in question, GSC 3656-1328 (field of view = 0.5 degrees, coordinates = 00 09 22, +54 39 44 (2000)):

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Almost any wide field picture of the constellation may be helpful (the star is in the western part). If you have one, post a comment below. If you have one online, post a link! Also, you can post images to the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today bulletin board. That’s a great place to see other images and talk about them. You should check it out if you have Cassiopeia pix or not!

Tip o’ the dew shield to DaveP’s Astronomy.