OK, not really. But the folks from MESSENGER, the probe that passed Mercury recently, have released lots of images and made some scientific announcements, too. The image that really struck me was this one:

This is near the center of a vast region on Mercury called Caloris Basin. The radial cracks — called The Spider by the MESSENGER team — are very cool, and nothing like them has ever been seen before. Caloris Basin is an impact feature. Something very large hit Mercury a long time ago, carving out a major hole, which filled with molten rock (or whatever Mercury is made of). Over time, the floor of the basin cracked…

There are many cliffs on Mercury due to the shrinkage of the planet (the pool water was cold!). As the planet cooled and solidified, the crust settled, creating the network of scarps and cliffs. I wonder if the Spider is something along those lines. I’m sure Emily is feverishly writing even as I type this. (Update: Indeed she was!)

The impact crater in the middle of the lines is weird too. The odd shape must be due to the cracks themselves; clearly the crater formed after the cracks (it overlays them). The surface around there must be a total mess. I’ll be very curious to see the high-res images once MESSENGER settles into orbit in a few years. Many of the craters on the planet have odd shapes, and I just bet that’s due to the surface being cracked everywhere. That would play havoc with what would ordinarily be nice, round craters.

Besides that image there was lots of science released; they measured Mercury’s magnetic field, took ground altimetry data, and even observed a giant cloud of sodium blowing off the planet (it was known before from ground-based data, but this is much better resolution — there’s nothing like being there).

Once MESSENGER becomes a moon of Mercury, expect to see lots of very cool stuff from a very hot planet.

NASA has set the next Space Shuttle launch for February 7 at 2:45 p.m. However, a kinked hose may put the kibosh on it. We’ll see. Fraser has more.

When I read that, I was excited: I’ll be in Florida that day! But then I saw the time, and realized I’ll be on a plane heading back home. Drat. I’ve only seen one Shuttle launch and it was hawesome. I’d love to see another before they’re all gone. Maybe I’ll make a pilgrimage to see the Hubble servicing mission launch…

I have to think the answer to this question is yes.

My thoughts on young-Earth creationism are well known on this blog. It’s completely and utterly wrong; the Earth is far more than 6000 years old, and the claims made by creationists to back up their claims are incredibly easy to disprove.

Yet it’s on the rise, it seems, with major Presidential candidates kowtowing to such nonsense. And then we have incredibly bilge like the Creation Museum… and the rest of the world has taken notice.

At least they interviewed a religious man who puts creationism in its place.

Still, it’s getting hard to avoid the idea that it’s increasingly embarrassing to be an American these days. Despite our many proud achievements, are we known for our silliness? Moon hoax believers, psychics, and creationists. Is this how the world sees us?

If you are a citizen of some other country, then please leave a comment. What are your thoughts? Do your news outlets, magazines, radio, and other media portray us as fringe lunatics? Our own media here are irritatingly isolationist, making it hard to get a sense of what the rest of the world actually thinks.

Here’s your chance. This will be a biased sample, of course, but let’s hear it. How does your country view America?

I don’t think any psychics are real. There is no evidence whatsoever that they exist, and it’s very clear — if you actually look for the evidence — that all the most famous psychics are frauds, deliberately or otherwise.

So it’s very nice to see an Australian TV show go the extra mile (in this case, thousands of miles) to not only expose one such fraud, but to make sure she doesn’t get away with scamming people in the UK either.

This was a great debunking of Loretta Williams, a fraud who has been stealing millions of dollars from people for several years — by selling them candles for $2000! I’d love to actually see a US show do an expose like this.

My only complaint: they contact an Australian psychic (President of the Australian Psychics Association) who talks about how people should not have to pay extra for a reading from real psychics.

HAHAHAHAHAHAhahahahahaha. Psychics are funny. So cluelessly ironic.

Tip o’ the wizard’s hat to my dear friend Richard Saunders for this.

Will the Moon Hoax dumbosity ever end?

No, of course not. As long as people lack critical thinking skills, and are lazy, it won’t.

Why Phil, you are asking, what do you mean by "lazy"? I mean that nearly every hoax claim can be debunked with just a few minutes of investigation. Yet most people don’t bother. Of course, it’s daunting when the conspiracy theorists flood you with a bazillion dumb claims, but sometimes you just take ‘em one at a time.

The latest comes from that bastion of antiscientific nonsense, Rense.com. In an article on that website, Ted Twietmeyer claims that an image from Apollo 16 is questionable. What’s really questionable, however, is Twietmeyer’s ability to do any actual investigation.

He found a picture from Apollo 16:

Click to embiggen, or get a nice hi-res 1Mb version.

About this picture, Twietmeyer says:

This is about a pole standing on the Moon placed there by Apollo 16. It may be the flagpole, but that cannot be determined by this photo.

What? Of course it can be determined. What a ridiculous thing to say! If he had done any actual work –even a trivial amount — he would have found everything he needs to explain this picture.

Incredibly, and unlike most Moon Hoaxers, he gave the catalog name of this picture: AS16-115-18557. About thirty seconds of searching yielded me the transcript of what was happening on the surface of the Moon when that picture was taken. From this, I learned that the pole is actually what’s called a double-core penetrometer, and not a flagpole. This is a device that allowed the astronauts to get deep samples of material from below the lunar surface.

Twietmeyer didn’t bother to find out what the pole actually was, which is really pretty shoddy research. After all, it maybe just might play into the picture, dontcha think? As he says:

What’s so amazing about this pole? Incredibly, the astronauts were able to hammer this into the ground without ever getting near it.

Well, that depends on what you mean by "near". The nearest bootprint in the photo looks to be about two feet or so away. What can we make of this?

Well, another thirty seconds on teh googles gave me this image of the entire device:

This picture (click for a better version) is from a simulation of the use of the device, so the astronauts could practice using it. Look at the picture. The astronaut is standing a couple of feet back from the penetrometer, allowing him to use the side of a rock hammer to pound in the pole. He can’t stand too close to it because of the limited movement of the spacesuit; he has to stand back to be able to reach it.

Also, reading the transcript linked above, I saw that Charlie Duke at first used his hands to ram the penetrometer into the surface. Then he moved off and let John Young use a hammer to pound it in the rest of the way. It looks to me from the picture taken on the Moon that Duke used his left hand to get the pole deep enough so that it would stand up, then moved around to let Young whack at it. Before Young actually hammered it, Duke took the picture. The footprint is sideways in the picture; it’s entirely reasonable that Duke stood sideways to it when he hand-drove it into the surface. In fact, if you look at the hole the penetrometer made, the shape of the hole is consistent with Duke having stood sideways; the hole is an oval aligned left/right, as you’d expect if Duke were on the right, using his left hand to drive in the pole.

That’s it. There’s your big conspiracy.

I love how Twietmeyer tries to make this sound so conspiratorial. He talks about zig-zag threads of dust where someone brushed over footprints… in his mind, that means someone was covering up evidence of the faker’s shoe prints. In real life, those are most likely just streamers of dust from the astronauts boots as they moved around; the dust travels farther on the Moon than on Earth due to the low gravity and, more importantly, the lack of air and therefore air resistance.

He also goes out of his way to ask why don’t we see a picture of the astronaut’s face (I presume he means that of John Young, whose legs we see in the picture). Um, Ted, they were taking a picture of where the penetrometer was penetrating. As I have said a zillion times, one reason the astronauts went to the Moon was to take pictures of the Moon. In this case, they wanted a record of the surface around the device. Who cares what the astronaut looked like at that moment?

Sheesh. That’s very typical of these guys; say something that sounds profound, sounds like there’s a big mystery. But when you pull back the curtain, you find these guys are full of sound and fury, but they signify nothing.

It’s funny– it took quite a bit of effort for Twietmeyer to edit that photo, write up that page, and make all those silly claims. It would have taken far less effort to get the actual truth! It was trivial for me to find the answer.

I often wonder what these guys are thinking, what their motivation is. But in the end, what matters most is that they are wrong, and it’s really really easy to show. I hope that the more people laugh at these silly antics, the more marginalized these goofballs become.

Tip o’ the sun visor to Fraser for sending me this!

So I’m still trying to sort my life out after the craziness of last week, and the news has piled up. Here’s a quick rundown of two cool things. I’ll have more later.

1) SpaceX, a private space company and the first to have a (mostly) successful rocket launch, has done their first multi-engine test. Here’s the deal: they have a smallish rocket called the Falcon 1. They are working on the next-generation rocket, the Falcon 9, which will be big enough to take people into orbit. The F9 will use nine engines total, wrapped around the base of the rocket. These engines, called Merlin, generate about 90,000 pounds of thrust each, so nine of them will make about 800,000 pounds of thrust. While that’s only a quarter of the thrust of a single Shuttle solid rocket booster, the F9 is considerably lighter, so it’ll be enough. This is very cool news! I’m a supporter of space privatization, at least for doing things like "routine" access to low Earth orbit.

2) The New Horizons probe is making its way to Pluto, the biggest of the Kuiper Belt objects (or the only planet to have been kicked out of the club, depending on how you feel). From 3.6 billion kilometers away it snapped this image of the tiny iceball (click to embiggen). It only looks like a dot because Pluto is dinky, and terribly far away; from that distance it’s only about 0.1 arcseconds across. That’s the size of a single Hubble camera pixel, for example. Or, to give you a better idea, it’s the size a ping pong ball would look like if it were 60 kilometers away!

Emily has the scoop on this if you want more details.

I know, religious pareidolia is such an easy target. But seriously, people make themselves look a little, um, weird when they claim a rotten potato is a sign from God.

Now honestly, let’s say you’re God. And you want to send someone a signal, letting them know that you’re thinking of them, and that they should be better people. So, do you make a sign in the heavens, or part a sea, or heal the sick?

No. You appear in a tater. As the owners say:

Pastor Renee Brewster and her husband Bishop Winston Brewster are a very spiritual couple. But the site of their savior in a potato has reinvigorated their faith and their desire to help others.

“That’s Jesus on the Cross. Just looking at it I don’t have to convince,” said Renee.

Well, the apparition does look a little bit like Jesus, but she said Jesus is on the cross. One small problem: the arms are spread out, but there’s no cross. And it looks like he’s standing on some sort of pedestal, which I don’t think the Romans provided. But people see what they want to see, and the owner of said spud is a very religious person.

Which makes me laugh a bit: the word "pareidolia" has the word "idol" in it. I think the Bible has something to say about that.

The owners froze the section of the potato with the Savior in it, which I suppose is better than selling it on eBay. After all, the love of money is the root of all evil.

Normally, after making an awful joke like that, I’d say "You know the deal: what do you see?" but honestly, I don’t see what else this looks like (except for a hole in a potato, but what do I know). If you do see something else, leave a comment.

And remember, like the Bible says… "the tuber shall set you free."

Tip o’ the masher to Jon Voisey.