‘So in my usual manner, I get in to my office in the morning after dropping the Little Astronomer off at school, plop my bag onto my desk, start up my coffee, and grab my phone to listen to my phone messages.

The normal morning ended there. But in a good way. Well, a weird way at first, but then good.

One of the messages was from a woman with a New Jersey accent. Here it is in its entirety:

Hi Phil. I was just reading your article on the equinox and the egg. You mentioned it’s a hard boiled egg. Try standing a raw egg up on that day. That’s the way it goes. It’s a raw egg not a hard boiled egg. Have a good day.

That’s it. No name, no specifics. The caller ID listed the number as being from Jersey, so that matched the accent, but I had no clue who the person was. I wasn’t even sure what article she was talking about! The message was left shortly after last week’s spring equinox, when this legend gets attention. I have my egg standing article on my website, of course, but I also wrote one for Night Sky magazine.

So I had a laugh over that, wondering who this person was and how she got my number.

Then I checked my email.

DEAR DR. PHIL PHLAT [sic]:

YOU’RE A KILL JOY!

IN REGARD TO YOUR ARTICLE:
AOL Research & Learn: Night Sky – The Equinox and the Egg

P.S. THE EGG SHOULD BE RAW, NOT HARD BOILED. THAT’S CHEATING!
BUNNIES KNOW THESE THINGS! LOL!

Buh-Bye
BUNNYJOEY(ON HEF’S LEFT)

I must say, the last line certainly caught my attention. "Bunny"? "Hef"? I am but a man, and so I felt the need to investigate. I don’t open attached images, and my website mailer won’t let me see them anyway. So I did a search on "bunnyjoey", and voila:

OK then. I’m not sure when that picture was taken, but then, I’m not sure I care.

And yes, I am clearly not above using sex in this blog. Duh. But I also figure that using the words sex, Playboy, and bunny in this blog entry are bound to get it to rise a bit in Google. In that vein I should mention the link above about using sex in this blog contains nudity (sorta) and which, of course, means someone in the picture is naked.

I wonder how popular this particular blog entry will become? Think of this as a scientific experiment in social marketing. Oh, and did I mention that I saw the movie XXX with Vin Diesel? No? Yeah, that XXX, not a great movie, and Vin Diesel is kindof a boob, but it’s worth mentioning at least twice here. Yes. Maybe three times. XXX.

Anyway, I replied back to BunnyJoey and told her a hard boiled egg spins well, but yes, a raw egg is what you need if you want to stand one up (I’ll note that I never mentioned in the article that you should try this with a hard boiled egg– and incidentally, the article on AOL was a reprint of my Night Sky article). We’ve been exchanging lighthearted emails (she’s interested in what I know about Orion’s belt– given that Mrs. Bad Astronomer sometimes reads these entries, I’ll note that I avoided the obvious and steered Joey to my friend Jim Kaler’s pages about those stars).

OK, so not much astronomy in this entry, but what the heck. I’m human, despite being a scientist, so sex I like to mix it up naked sometimes and write about other things Playboy bunny. I obviously have no ulterior motives.’

The Dawn mission to asteroids Ceres and Vesta is back on!

Last month, NASA canceled the mission due to "technical issues and cost overruns". This happened amidst a flurry of other science mission delays and outright cancellations. Needless to say, this caused quite a bit of anger in the scientific community, not the least of which was coming from the Europeans, who had invested money and time in the mission, and who had not been consulted by NASA before the decision was made to cancel it.

A Co-Investigator of Dawn, Mark Sykes, went so far as to write a letter to Congress pleading Dawn’s case. Perhaps that helped; a few days later an official appeal was filed to NASA, and it was reported that NASA was reconsidering the cancellation.

Today, in a telephone press conference, NASA announced that the Dawn mission is being reinstated. The launch is planned for the summer of 2007, perhaps June-July, arriving at Vesta in 2011 and moving on to Ceres in 2015.

There was an independent assessment team that looked over the decision to cancel Dawn. There were some issues with the propulsion and other spacecraft systems, as well of course with funding. They were able to review these issues, and decided that the spacecraft team was handling these problems sufficiently, and that the mission could go forward.

Here is the official statement from NASA:

The reinstatement resulted from a review process that is part of new management procedures established by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. The process is intended to help ensure open debate and thorough evaluation of major decisions regarding space exploration and agency operations.

“We revisited a number of technical and financial challenges and the work being done to address them,” said NASA Associate Administrator Rex Geveden, who chaired the review panel. “Our review determined the project team has made substantive progress on many of this mission’s technical issues, and, in the end, we have confidence the mission will succeed.”

The people at NASA on the telecon were careful to say that this shows the strength of the appeal process and how missions can be reviewed — and I agree — but that still asks the question: why was the mission canceled in the first place, if upon review everything looks okay? It sounds like communication between the NASA decision-makers and the mission project teams needs to be improved. This whole ordeal caused a lot of grief in the scientific and international community, especially the manner in which it was canceled. I hope that the people involved can learn from what happened here, and avoid this sort of thing in the future. Given how many other missions have been on or may yet still be on the chopping block, we might very well find out. No other missions, however, have as yet started an appeal process.

Personally, I think Dawn is an awesome mission and I’m thrilled it’s back in the game. We know quite a bit about the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, but we’ve never had a dedicated mission to see any close up, get good images, and determine the surface composition. The science is fascinating and important– and don’t forget, the Earth is occasionally hit by asteroids, and so more knowledge about them translates directly into better information on how to stop one if it’s on its way in. Plus, the mission has an advanced propulsion system called an ion drive, which uses a powerful electric field to fling ionized atoms out its back end, propelling the spacecraft forward. It’s extremely cool technology, since it’s a lot more efficient than chemical rockets, and can achieve far higher velocities.

I am very happy NASA changed its mind — cancelling Dawn was a mistake, pure and simple, and this successful appeal bodes well for the future. NASA has to make some tough decisions about where to spend its relatively small budget, which is made worse by new pressures to design and build the new Crew Exploration Vehicle, and to eventually go back to the Moon. These are all important ventures, but they must not come at the expense of the science. Exploration and science are two sides of the same coin, and one cannot be supported by gutting the other.’

‘Back on March 10, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter successfully entered orbit around Mars (so it could do reconnaissance). Once the orbit was established, scientists and engineers needed to make sure everything was okay before turning on the cameras, but finally on March 24 they got their first image. Here it is!

Actually, this is only a tiny piece of the full image. This image shows an area of Mars about 1.5 x 1.5 kilometers on a side. The full image is 50 x 23.6 kilometers (and would be 20,000 x 9500 pixels in size, so forgive me for not displaying it here). The image displayed above is actually resized, so it’s not at full resolution– click it to see the highest res version of the image.

There’s lots of cool stuff to see. It looks to me (but I’m not an expert) like that gully has had multiple episodes of flooding of some liquid (water? lava? clathrates?), or either freezing or evaporating to leave that step-like structure. You can see lots of craters too.

It’s always hard to tell when looking at Mars what scale you’re seeing. Craters come in all sizes, and the weird features look too weird to guess at their size. In this case, we know that the scale of this image about 2.5 meters per pixel. It’s hard to see the pixels in that image, so the scale is still hard to see. Let’s zoom in on the medium-sized crater in the lower left and see if that helps.

You can see the pixels pretty well now. I measure the crater as being about 12 pixels across, making it 12 x 2.5 = 30 meters across.

OK, read that again: 30 meters across. That’s small. Positively tiny. I’m used to thinking of craters being kilometers across, but this one is smaller than a football field! In fact, take a look at this picture:

This is a satellite image from Google Earth of a baseball field not too far from my house. You can see cars lining the streets to the east, to give you a sense of scale. That image is at the same scale as the crater image above. Comparing them, you can see that the crater would pretty much fit in the infield (the circular wedge lined with dirt) of the baseball field.

Look at that again. A decent runner could stand on the edge of the rim of the crater and run straight across it in just a few seconds. Geez, I could. That’s how small that crater is. Each pixel is about the size of a car.

May I remind you that that crater is on Mars? You know, the planet, the one really far away?

Wow. The camera that took this image — called HiRISE, for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera — is the most powerful ever flown to Mars. But this gets better: MRO is still in a highly elliptical orbit. Engineers are slowly lowering the spacecraft (by repeatedly dipping it into Mars’s atmosphere!) to put it in a "mapping orbit". So in a few months the orbit will drop enough that the camera will be able to take images at a resolution of 28 centimeters per pixel. That means that if those cars were on Mars, MRO would be able to see people in them. 30 cm is about the size of a human head, more or less, depending on the head.

Wow again. I can’t wait to see pictures at that scale. What will they reveal? The rovers have done a magnificent job, but Mars is big and they’re slow: we only have super-high-resolution images of a very small fraction of Mars. MRO and HiRISE together will map a large portion of Mars with incredible detail– even better than you can get with Google Earth. Will there come a day when we have another planet mapped better than we do our own?

Maybe when that day comes, Earth won’t be referred to as “our own” any more. I think we may just have to include other planets in that list.’

Update: The upgrade is finished, and I am now running the spiffy new version of WordPress. If you have any problems or see any weirdnesses, please leave a comment for this entry. If you don’t have any problems, then please don’t post! That’ll make it easier on me to fix things. Thanks! –The BA

I am upgrading the blog to the latest version of WordPress. This will take me a little while, so please bear with me. Sunday is typically a low-traffic day for the blog, which is why I’m doing it now.

‘So in my usual manner, I get in to my office in the morning after dropping the Little Astronomer off at school, plop my bag onto my desk, start up my coffee, and grab my phone to listen to my phone messages.

The normal morning ended there. But in a good way. Well, a weird way at first, but then good.

One of the messages was from a woman with a New Jersey accent. Here it is in its entirety:

Hi Phil. I was just reading your article on the equinox and the egg. You mentioned it’s a hard boiled egg. Try standing a raw egg up on that day. That’s the way it goes. It’s a raw egg not a hard boiled egg. Have a good day.

That’s it. No name, no specifics. The caller ID listed the number as being from Jersey, so that matched the accent, but I had no clue who the person was. I wasn’t even sure what article she was talking about! The message was left shortly after last week’s spring equinox, when this legend gets attention. I have my egg standing article on my website, of course, but I also wrote one for Night Sky magazine.

So I had a laugh over that, wondering who this person was and how she got my number.

Then I checked my email.

DEAR DR. PHIL PHLAT [sic]:

YOU’RE A KILL JOY!

IN REGARD TO YOUR ARTICLE:
AOL Research & Learn: Night Sky – The Equinox and the Egg

P.S. THE EGG SHOULD BE RAW, NOT HARD BOILED. THAT’S CHEATING!
BUNNIES KNOW THESE THINGS! LOL!

Buh-Bye
BUNNYJOEY(ON HEF’S LEFT)

I must say, the last line certainly caught my attention. "Bunny"? "Hef"? I am but a man, and so I felt the need to investigate. I don’t open attached images, and my website mailer won’t let me see them anyway. So I did a search on "bunnyjoey", and voila:

OK then. I’m not sure when that picture was taken, but then, I’m not sure I care.

And yes, I am clearly not above using sex in this blog. Duh. But I also figure that using the words sex, Playboy, and bunny in this blog entry are bound to get it to rise a bit in Google. In that vein I should mention the link above about using sex in this blog contains nudity (sorta) and which, of course, means someone in the picture is naked.

I wonder how popular this particular blog entry will become? Think of this as a scientific experiment in social marketing. Oh, and did I mention that I saw the movie XXX with Vin Diesel? No? Yeah, that XXX, not a great movie, and Vin Diesel is kindof a boob, but it’s worth mentioning at least twice here. Yes. Maybe three times. XXX.

Anyway, I replied back to BunnyJoey and told her a hard boiled egg spins well, but yes, a raw egg is what you need if you want to stand one up (I’ll note that I never mentioned in the article that you should try this with a hard boiled egg– and incidentally, the article on AOL was a reprint of my Night Sky article). We’ve been exchanging lighthearted emails (she’s interested in what I know about Orion’s belt– given that Mrs. Bad Astronomer sometimes reads these entries, I’ll note that I avoided the obvious and steered Joey to my friend Jim Kaler’s pages about those stars).

OK, so not much astronomy in this entry, but what the heck. I’m human, despite being a scientist, so sex I like to mix it up naked sometimes and write about other things Playboy bunny. I obviously have no ulterior motives.’

Just a quick note: I will be interviewed for three hours on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory tonight. The show starts at 10:00 11:00 p.m. Pacific time Saturday night, and runs until 2:00 a.m. Saturday night/Sunday morning Sunday night/Monday morning. We’ll be talking about a lot of the topics I’ve written about here: NASA, George Deutsch, Saturn, WMAP, the SpaceX launch failure, Stardust, and certainly the new Mars orbiter– I’ll have a longish blog entry up about that tonight by the time the show airs.

Many radio stations stream the show, so take a look at the affiliate list to see which ones do. I’m pretty sure the Canadian station CFUN does, for example.

‘The SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket was lost after launch due to a fuel leak from an as-yet undetermined problem. However, even right after launch the leak is pretty obvious:

29 seconds after launch the engine shut down automatically. The rocket went up due its momentum for a short time, then fell back to Earth… landing just 250 feet from the launch pad! Bummer. Amazing, but a bummer. The good news is it fell on a reef offshore, so the rocket parts can be recovered and examined. SpaceX has already said they will forge onward. I say good for them!

Incidentally, the satellite the rocket was lofting fell through the roof of a nearby machine shop when it came down. Scary (I mean, yikes!), but that means they can recover it, too. I doubt they can fix it; it fell from a long way up. Not exactly orbit, but enough that it may not be salvageable. We’ll know more soon.’