I talked about the Rosetta swingby of Mars over the weekend, and the images that have been returned from it. Well, more are coming in! The European Space Agency just released a very cool animation of the martian moon Phobos moving across the face of Mars as seen by Rosetta.

Download the 35kB animation.

Sorry, I don’t know how (or even if it’s possible) to embed an AVI file into the blog. So download it and take a look; it’s cool. On the ESA page linked above are other images of Mars, including an interesting (but not spectacular) 3D anaglyph (red/green) image of Mars.

Update (Feb. 27): a couple of more blogs have mentioned the debate, so I added ‘em at the end.

So you know I debunk people who think that NASA faked the Apollo Moon landings. That’s right there on my left sidebar.

And if you read this blog, you know I was on Penn Jillette’s radio show a few weeks ago debating Joe Rogan (yeah, the "Fear Factor" guy) about the Moon hoax. If you don’t know this, then please read Part I of this saga, and then of course Part II.

So here’s Part III.

You can download the podcast of this from Penn’s Radio Free FM website (or you can get a direct download of the mp3, or go to a web page where it is embedded).

Give it a listen. But here’s my take.

After spanking Joe in the first session , we decided to do another one to move on to other ideas about the conspiracy theory. Basically, in the first show Joe started off with his big claims that the landings may have been faked. So this time we started with me saying why I thought it was real. I talked about the rocks brought back, and Joe stopped me with a story about Werner von Braun going to Antarctica, supposedly to collect lunar meteorites to pass off as Moon rocks.

Things basically ran off the rails right then. I wasn’t familiar with the story (I had heard von Braun went, but not any details). I was able to debunk this story quickly enough– it doesn’t make any sense to send von Braun to Antarctica to collect rocks. Why send your chief rocket scientist to collect rocks?

But Joe started going off about von Braun being a Nazi (which is not necessarily true– he worked for the Nazis, but we don’t know he was a Nazi himself). I was trying to remain rational, and I called Joe on his logical fallacy — poisoning the well — but he’s very aggressive, and was rattling stuff off quickly enough that he was able to throw me off a bit.

The rest of the show is like that; Joe made some claims, I generally had answers but my timing was thrown off by his manner, which was very different than in the first show. I shouldn’t have let that get to me, but I did.

I’ve received a lot of email from folks who have listened to the podcast and most people were supportive of my performance, though there have been a couple of people who have taken me to task for not being better prepared. I was thinking the same thing after the interview itself, but now, listening to it again, I don’t feel so badly anymore. I think I did pretty well. I do have an advantage over Joe — I’m right, after all! — but he has a lot more rhetorical practice, of course. He’s a standup comic, and an actor, and a TV show host and is a lot more aggressive than I am. On radio, that makes up pretty well for being wrong!

A lot of the email I’ve received have had bad things to say about the way Joe acted on the radio. I can see where they’re coming from. He was a lot more aggressive than in the first show, interrupted me a lot more, and he was bringing up stuff too quickly for me to be able to answer, and when I did try to answer he stepped on what I was saying. That’s aggravating, but that’s radio. Which brings up a point.

As a debate, I think I was able to handle most of what he was dishing out — not all, but most. But this wasn’t a debate, it was a radio show, and so his aggressive manner and rapid-fire attack makes it sound like he has more going for him than he really does. When you really look at the evidence he brought up, it’s all circumstantial at best. It sounds good on radio, but it’s really mostly empty air. As I’ve said for years, it’s easy to bring up a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense, but it takes time to show why it’s wrong. On a radio, there simply isn’t that kind of time. That’s the reason I prefer not to debate stuff like this on the radio or on TV. You can be right, but still look like the other guy owned you. It’s not an argument that will be won or lost on the evidence. If it were, the Hoax folks would lose before they step foot in the studio.

I could go on and on about the details of the show. But you can listen for yourself. Listening to it again, I can see where I could have made a better point, or taken the discussion in a different direction, or nailed Joe due to his fallacious reasoning and moving of the goalposts. Maybe next time I will — one thing that irritates me about these conspiracy theories is the tendency to get bogged down in details. But it generally pays to take a step back and look at the overview, see what the logical conclusion is to any given claim. If we do a Part III– and honestly, I hope we do (Penn, you reading this?) — maybe I’ll be able to do that.

If you’re curious about what others have to say about this, there are several discussions of the "debate" on the web:

1. James Randi’s bulletin board
2. There’s a thoughtful discussion going on at the Bad Astronomy/Universe Today bulletin board

New!

3. George Hrab, a very totally cool d00d, gives me my props.

New!

4. The PennFans.net bulletin board has a short thread.
5. Joe Rogan’s bulletin board WARNING: really really REALLY NSFW
6. The Straight Dope Message Board
7. Church of the Everlasting Groove
8. Forward Thoughts
9. Walsfeo

I mean, an image taken from space. From NASA’s MODIS Earth-observing satellite, to be specific:

Too cool. But hey! Who hit Maine with a asteroid?

I know, it’s Sebago Lake, and there’s a part that’s not round all frozen over on the right making it hard to see, so the rest looks round like an asteroid impact, but if I said all that it’s not as funny, OK?

Tip o’ the toque to Fark.com

Ah, is there anything more wonderful than being locked in the warm embrace of someone you love? The emotion, the beauty of the moment, the attraction you feel… but wait! Is that pull you feel really from your Significant Other, or is it due to… the Moon?

Just how strong is the gravity from the Moon compared to someone right next to you?

Well, listen to Q & BA Episode 4: "The Gravity of the Situation" and find out!

Viewing options:

Watch it right here, right now!

Watch it on YouTube.

Watch it on Google video.

Download it directly from LibSyn.

Download the audio only version from LibSyn.

Subscribe via iTunes.

Show notes

The Question:

The question was sent in by Jesse C. of Doylestown, PA: "Does a person standing beside you have a greater gravitational pull on you than the Moon? I recently heard someone mention it. It sounds like a bunch of malarkey… but is it true?"

If you want to the calculations for yourself, then start with

where lower case m is your mass, upper case M is the mass of the object (the Moon, the other person, etc.), R is the distance between the two of you, and G is a constant. When you divide the force from the Moon by the force from the person, your mass and the constant divide out (your mass divided by your mass = 1). For the masses of the planets and such, go to The Nine Planets.

Images:

Mu Cephei is from Davide De Martin’s Sky Factory

Eta Carinae is from NASA/Hubble/AURA.

The Sun and Earth are from NASA (the Earth shot is from the fantabulous MESSENGER Earth flyby).

The pictures of the Flatiron/Rocky Mountains and of me fishing in Kansas are courtesy of, um, me.

And since I know people will ask: The T-shirt is available from the FSM website.

… and one more link. Guess why?

Rosetta is the name of a European probe that, in the year 2014, will approach a comet and put a lander down on its surface.

As if that’s not cool enough! But other things are afoot. Getting to a comet isn’t easy, and Rosetta is taking a tortured path through the solar system, passing by Mars once and Earth three times!

The Mars swingby occurred Saturday, and was picture perfect. And I mean that literally. When it passed the Red Planet it took some amazing shots:

This was taken before the slingshot maneuver, and it was taken by the navigation camera– it’s not even a science camera! When Rosetta gets close to the comet which goes by the tongue-twisting name of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the images it returns will be killer.

But Mars provides a pretty stunning backdrop too. You can find a color shot of the whole planet here, which I don’t find quite as nice as the greyscale one. Somehow, the greyscale image looks almost three dimensional. I really like that one.

Another cool one was taken showing a high atmospheric cloud on Mars seen from the side:

But perhaps the best one is this:

This was taken when Rosetta was just a few minutes from closest approach to Mars, when it was only about 1000 kilometers (600 miles) over the surface. You can see some details on the ground, and the probe itself is easily visible; that’s a solar panel extending off to the right. It’s like taking a picture out the side window of your car when you’re driving past something cool. But that’s not a car, it’s a space probe, and it’s going considerably faster than highway speeds.

Imagine! From millions of kilometers away, these scientists and engineers threaded the thinnest of imaginable needles, putting Rosetta exactly where it needed to be for the next leg of its trip — a close encounter with Earth in November of this year.

As always, the wonderful Emily Lakdawalla has the latest info at the Planetary Society weblog. She also has guest bloggers, scientists from the European Space Agency who are writing their personal views of these events as they happened. It’s the next best thing to sitting there with them.

And we’re not done yet! Rosetta is on its way back in this direction, but New Horizons is still heading out toward Pluto, and Jupiter is looming large in the windshield. Emily has tons of info and pictures about that as well!

Well, it makes as much sense as anything the Discovery Institute has ever said.

The 20th anniversary of this doomed star appears to be bringing out the memories in folks. Steve Maran — astronomer, press officer for the American Astronomical Society, author of Astronomy for Dummies, and the man largely responsible for helping my PR career out when I was just getting started — has written a little slice of history from his memories of that day in 1987 when a star bloomed in the southern skies.

There is a meeting in Aspen right now for astronomers who study SN87A. I toyed with the idea of going, but without any funding to support me that idea didn’t last long. I’m hoping to hear stories (OK, gossip) from the meeting eventually, and if I do I’ll post ‘em.

Don’t forget to read Jennifer Ouelette’s blog about it too. She’s a great writer.