Blogs / Bad Astronomy

‘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.’

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Well, I have some good news to share after the bad news of the Space-X launch: James Randi is doing much better. I was just voice-chatting with him over the web, and he’s feeling "better every day". He looks a little thin (he did lose some weight) but he is clearly on the mend. His beard is a little shorter than it was– the doctors had to trim it a bit during his tribulations, but it’s still Randi under all that white hair. We even got in a few barbs at Sylvia Browne’s expense. Speaking of which, he’s still on the job, dogging her and making sure people know what a fraud she is.

We only chatted for about 15 minutes, but it was great to see him, and to see him looking so well after what must have been a frightful experience. Clearly, critical thinking and skepticism do a body good!

But you don’t have to believe me about how well he’s doing– he has a new voice message on his website (and he sounds even better than he did on his last voice message).’

‘Update (14:44 Pacific): It’s confirmed, the vehicle was lost. SpaceDaily.com has reported:

Update (14:40 Pacific time): SpaceDaily.com is reporting the launch failed, but no details as yet.

Quick update: It launched! The video was very cool, but cut out less than a minute into the flight. I’m trying to find out what happened.

OK, so we have a final (?) launch time for the Space-X rocket Falcon 1– 14:30 Pacific time (about a half hour from now as I write this). You can view it live webcast from the Space-X website.’

This may be the most important page on the internets: how to cut through the endless phonemail systems of various businesses so you can get an actual human on the other end: GetHuman.

Of course, if you email me you just get a ‘bot that replies back saying, “404 Human Not Found.”

I was just notified by a coworker that California congressman Adam Schiff made a speech about NASA budget cuts on the House floor on March 16. This is an interesting speech; he makes some excellent points. It may not shock you after reading it to learn that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab is in his district.

He specifically points out NuSTAR, a mission I’ve discussed in this blog before. I was on the NuSTAR team, and it was cancelled just two weeks before the final proposal was submitted to NASA. I don’t have time now to discuss this at length, but at some point I’ll tell that NuSTAR story.

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BABlog reader Fernando Rodriguez at San Luis Potosí, México, pointed out to me an image (via digg.com) of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon… sorta. It’s actually an amazingly rendered computer graphic by Andrea Bertaccini, obviously a very talented computer artist. I could tell right away it was fake; on the real one you can see lunar dust all over Aldrin’s suit. There are other telltale signs. Can you figure them out? The comments on digg.com have lots of hints, and a side-by-side comparison of the real image and the artwork.

The computer image was posted on the CG Society of Digital Artists forum, and in fact they have a huge number of incredibly cool images there. Go take a look.’

‘I noticed today that the sitemeter on this blog (on the right hand side, near the bottom of the list of stuff there) says that the BA Blog passed the 500,000 visitors mark. I installed it on May 22, 2005, so it started counting at that time. In fact, my own web statistics package says the number should be higher, but I’m not overly concerned about it. The point is, a lot of folks come here!

And in fact I know more people have visited, because I didn’t install the sitemeter for a couple of months after I started the blog. The first blog post was on March 13. I missed my first anniversary! I’m really not much for arbitrary celebrations, so it’s not a big deal to me, but it’s nice to know that after a full year plus some, the Bad Astronomy Blog is still going.

When I started it, I wanted to write about astronomy, the parts of it that enthrall me and make me want to learn more about it every day. But as time went on, things got more complicated. It’s almost impossible for me not to inject opinion into what I write, and from talking to people it seems that this is the very thing that they like about what I write. The Universe is cold, dark, and deep; yet for me astronomy is a very personal endeavor. So my own take on it is inevitably going to come out in my writing.

But then the attacks on science kept coming. Of course I would blog about the Moon hoax, or astrology, or the face on Mars. But as the attacks started coming from higher levels, from people who were not just gnats in a storm but actual wind-makers, I knew I had to speak out. My first few entries about this seemed pretty tame compared to what I’ve written lately, but at the time I felt really tentative about it– even nervous. I’m glad I did it though. Every day I am more appalled at what I see going on in the seemingly permanent war on reality, and every day I take a deep breath and feel the stronger for fighting it.

I’ll add that one of the main reasons I started writing for The Huffington Post is that I knew it would increase the audience, get more people aware of not just science, but of those who would destroy it. An entry I wrote the other day (mentioned here) got onto the front page of HuffPo as well:

These issues are not just the blatherings of some blogger somewhere; these are critical issues which affect us, our friends, our family, and our future. This is not hyperbole. This is cold, hard fact.

It’s been a year, and more than a half million visits. But I have a lot more to say, and you can count on me saying it here for some time to come.’