More Doctor Who news: folks in the UK who went to the cinema this week got to see a new trailer for the Doctor Who Season 4. If you’re a fan, then this is a pretty cool trailer. Spoilers ho!

Ood! Donna! Martha! And yes, Rose, though that looked to be a clip from an old episode. Still. Mmmmmm, Rose.

But no Sontarans? Oh well, I can wait. Oops! There are Sontarans; I mistook them for Jidoon.

What’s funny is how this stuff is released. A film trailer is a great idea, but these folks really need to drop these on teh intertoobs in high quality. The Trek trailer was on YouTube for like two days before it hit the official site. That’s just silly. Doctor Who has an international audience, so they should really be letting us see what we want! Old media still just doesn’t get it.

Tip o’ the sonic screwdriver to BABloggee Stuart Lowe.

Lots of stuff going on this week, and I’m having a hard time keeping up. So briefly…

1) Damaris reports that the blanket issue on Atlantis is OK, and it can return to Earth safely as-is. Phew!

2) The UK government recently — and stupidly — decided to yank funding for a breathtaking number of scientific projects, including the magnificent Gemini Telescope. They may be rethinking that now.

3) The star Tau Boo A B (heh heh heh) just underwent a magnetic reversal, just like the Sun does ever 11 years. The reversal was pretty rapid, occurring in less than a year. Pamela and Fraser both wrote about it, and you can read the journal paper itself if you care to. Tau Boo B has a giant planet orbiting it very close in, and it appears that the gravitational interaction of the planet with the star has sped up the star’s rotation, and that might be linked with the rapid magnetic reversal. Cool. It’s unknown how long the cycle lasts, so more observations are planned.

4) Speaking of Pamela and Fraser, they have a new AstronomCast podcast up, about stellar populations and the creation of heavy elements.

5) The Very Large Array, a complex of 28 radio astronomy dishes made famous in the movie "Contact", is halfway done with an ambitious project to bring them up-to-date with cutting edge tech. I visited VLA a few years ago, and was very impressed with just the coolness of it, nevermind the incredible science it has produced over the decades. The new technology will make the array 10 times more sensitive than it was before and cover more of the radio spectrum.

6) My buddy Michelle Thaller from the Spitzer Space Telescope stars in a very cute videocast for kids about black holes, warring spaceships, and yes, a cute robot sidekick. The production quality of this video is very good, and I think kids will like it! Click the "Spaceship Spitzer" link to see it. The "Skinfrared" videos are very cool too. The music is great!

I am loving this. Scientists and engineers have collaborated on a system which can give real-time information on incoming solar flares, blasts of radiation that can harm astronauts and even incur damage on Earth.

The Sun has a magnetic field which is tied in, connected, with the material making up the Sun’s surface. The magnetic field can shape the material, which in turn can coil up and tangle the loops of magnetism piercing the Sun’s surface. Like tightly compressed springs, the loops of magnetic energy can build up huge amounts of energy, and this energy can be released in an explosion of mind-numbing scale called a solar flare.

The details are complex, but the explosion dwarfs the entire Earth’s nuclear arsenal. If the flare is aimed our way, a wave of high-energy subatomic particles marches across the solar system, slams into our magnetic field here on Earth, and can cause all sorts of havoc. The particles can irradiate astronauts, and can induce electrical currents on the Earth’s surface, disrupting power grids.

Obviously, it would be helpful to know when something like that is headed our way.

It so happens that a flare gives us a warning before the particle blast wave gets here. Electrons in the flare can be accelerated to huge speeds, just a hair under the speed of light, and they arrive on Earth as much as an hour or so before the main bulk of the particle radiation. By detecting these electrons, a warning can be sent out to any astronauts performing an EVA (spacewalk), or, in the future, who happen to out on the lunar surface. An hour may not seem like much, but it’s enough time to get back inside the space station or protective structure if it’s needed.

The electrons are detected by the COSTEP (Comprehensive Suprathermal and Energetic Particle Analyzer) instrument on board SOHO, that venerable bastion of NASA and ESA solar science. It has been capable of detecting these electrons for years, but only in the past few weeks has this turned into a real-time method of alerting people on an incoming flare.

Space weather — the variable nature of the particle and electromagnetic radiation streams from the Sun — is an important business. Multi-million dollar satellites can get fried by solar flares or the even more dangerous Coronal Mass Ejections, not to mention the danger to astronauts’ health (which I mentioned twice, actually). Having a real-time warning will be one of the most useful tools in the kit for space travelers and those who tend to them. This is a fantastic step forward in our exploration of space!

And I have to mention… I wrote an entire chapter about dangers from the Sun in my upcoming book Death from the Skies. I had a lot of help from solar scientists, and it really gave me an appreciation for just how important — and dangerous — solar flares and CMEs are. That no doubt has fueled my enthusiasm for hearing this news!

The proposed NASA budget for fiscal year 2009 looks pretty good at a glance: more money overall, and funding for some new lunar and astronomical missions. That’s why I praised it.

But I may have spoken too soon. While the new budget is a boon to many missions, it may be a disaster for Mars exploration. As The Planetary Society points out, the budget for Mars exploration over the next few years has been cut dramatically. And I mean dramatically: the total expenditure in the Fiscal year 2009 Presidential request is $386 million, which sounds like a lot, until you find out the Mars funding for FY 08 was $626 million!

Robert Braun, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, has some choice words on this topic. Future Mars missions look to be in trouble. No mission is planned for 2011, and the probe planned for 2013 may be delayed. Getting to Mars from Earth relies on the orbital dance of the two planets, so delays in building spacecraft literally translates into adding years of postponement to each mission. Both the Bush Administration, Congress, and NASA have made pledges to continue exploring Mars, but now it looks like the White House is backing out of its promise.

However, Congress must approve the President’s budget request, and historically they always wind up fiddling with it. Congress made it clear that Mars funding has a lower limit to it, a limit that is nowhere near met by this budget proposal. Hopefully they will rectify this situation.

This is only tangentially related to Doctor Who, but Christopher Eccleston, who played the Doctor for the first season of the revival, will be in a movie about… G.I. Joe. It’s difficult to overestimate the amount of suck this movie will contain, but having Eccleston in it will mitigate that somewhat. He’s a terrific actor. His appearance on "Heroes" was cool, though he was totally wasted in "The Seeker", which was awful.

Still, there’s not much chance I’ll go see it. And I had a G.I. Joe when I was a kid. Maybe if they can get Billie Piper to be in it too…

It’s been a couple of months (I’ve been busy, like I’ve said), but it’s time once again for Where Has The BA Book Been.

I have a couple of friends, fellow skeptics named David and Carol, who live in Seattle. I saw them again at TAM 5.5, and as usual I didn’t have enough time to talk to them (despite the restaurant we ate at being incredibly slow; I suspect some of the customers who were there when we were are still waiting for their food). But we did talk about Seattle, and how I got sick there the last time (they came to a talk I was supposed to give, but a norovirus had other ideas, and that’s still the one and only talk I have ever canceled). I also regaled them with a tale of the Central Market and the monkfish, and we all had a laugh.

Obviously, they remembered that story. Hence the picture:

If you live in Seattle (or Austin), you need to shop at Central Market. They don’t carry my book, but they do have the ugliest and scariest fish you can imagine.

Oh, a postscript: David took this picture of me at TAM 5.5. It’s not as bad as it looks.

So, do you own a copy of the book? Take a picture of yourself holding it in some fun location, send it to me, and I’ll post it here!

I was going to post on this, but Emily beat me to it: two space exploration shows are on tonight (Tuesday February 12). One, "Tank on the Moon", is about the Soviet lunar rover missions (the Lunakhods), and the other, "Astrospies", is about astronauts used to spy on other countries. Emily has the details. Both shows look like lots of fun, so I’ll be tuning in.