Space.com is reporting that:

THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 2005

Launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been officially reset for Friday morning. The launch team will start a fresh countdown this evening, leading to liftoff at 7:43 a.m. EDT (1143 GMT).

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will join three other satellites currently in orbit around Mars. It will take higher resolution photos than any mission previous to this, and has ground penetrating radar to look for water. It also will be able to send data back at a much faster rate than previous interplanetary spacecraft.

I set my alarm early this morning so I could watch the landing of the space shuttle Discovery at 5:12 AM local time. It wasn't too long after I switched on the cable news that that I heard the familiar double sonic boom shaking my house and briefly awakening my wife and one of my daughters. The shuttle's route toward its landing at the nearby Edwards AFB (I live just a few miles south of it) was a little different this time around. NASA decided to alter their route so they didn't fly over Los Angeles, just in case the worst were to happen. It seemed like the bang-bang of it dropping subsonic was louder than normal for us in the Antelope Valley thanks to that.

But nothing went wrong this time and Discovery landed safe and sound. Within the next couple of days maybe I'll get a glimpse of the shuttle flying back toward Florida, perched atop its carrier 747 aircraft.

MSNBC reports:

HOUSTON - As the shuttle Discovery prepared on Friday to leave the International Space Station, NASA scheduled its next shuttle mission for Sept. 22 provided it can find a quick fix to falling fuel tank foam that has grounded the rest of the orbiter fleet.

Seems like more good news.

I was awakened at about 2:30 AM with ideas, oddly enough for next week’s newspaper article that I wrote on Thursday; I write a weekly article for a small paper in Northern California.

It was an added paragraph to conclude the thing. I did the article on 2003 UB313, the newly discovered planet beyond Pluto and the issue of whether to call it a planet, or for that matter, whether Pluto is really a planet, or just one of the estimated 100,000 Kuiper Belt Objects that are out there (about 600 found so far, including the very large Quaoar and Sedna, plus this new object and another (2003 EL61) 70 per cent Pluto’s size that was announced the same day). The addition to the article was to point out that the conflict is a conflict between categories. We have the traditional category called “planets” and this new category called “Kuiper Belt Objects” and that’s the source of the conflict.

I thought that perhaps--and this is what woke me--that a resolution of the conflict would be to simply refer to Pluto, Sedna, Quaoar, 2003 UB313 and the other new object, 2003 EL61, should be designated Kuiper Belt Planets; after all, we have what are called the “terrestrial planets” which are Mercury-Mars and the “gas giants” which are Jupiter-Neptune; seems a nice compromise solution to me. And since I can write anything I care to in the article, why not? So that’s what I did at 2:30 in the morning. Odd thing to be awakened from a dead sleep to write down I suppose.

Well, I changed internet service providers today, abandoning the company that I've used the last eight years. The reason I left the company I was with was because the service had deteriorated radically in the last month. My DSL connection was going down at least once a day, sometimes as often as three times a day, for hours at a time. Technical support, which is now in India, was very polite, but could never resolve the problem. After all they merely follow a script and have little idea on what to actually do, and there was no way to get to someone who might actually be able to think outside the script. So, today, my local cable company hooked me up. I find that my connection is now six times faster, the tech people are local, and it works. Oh, and it costs only a third as much as my old ISP. Maybe I should have done this years ago, but I am a creature of habit and it takes a lot to make me change. I've been with the same bank, for instance, for thirty years. If something isn't broken I tend to keep it.

The LA Times reports this morning that the US is going to pull out of 13 German bases, removing 6100 troops. But that will still leave about 50,000 troops in that country. What a quagmire Germany has been. Where's the exit strategy? We've been in Germany now for 60 years. Mission accomplished? When is World War II ever going to end?

Okay, this is really exciting. Besides the earlier announced Kuiper belt object that is about 70 per cent the size of Pluto, most likely, Cal Tech has since announced the discovery of what, by all measures (assuming that Pluto is to be classed as a planet), must now be classified as our Solar System's tenth planet, since it is larger than Pluto. This comes from NASAwatch.com, by way of Cal Tech:

Planet larger than Pluto has been discovered in the outlying regions of the solar system.

The planet was discovered using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego, Calif. The discovery was announced today by planetary scientist Dr. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., whose research is partly funded by NASA.

The planet is a typical member of the Kuiper belt, but its sheer size in relation to the nine known planets means that it can only be classified as a planet, Brown said. Currently about 97 times further from the sun than the Earth, the planet is the farthest-known object in the solar system, and the third brightest of the Kuiper belt objects.

"It will be visible with a telescope over the next six months and is currently almost directly overhead in the early-morning eastern sky, in the constellation Cetus," said Brown, who made the discovery with colleagues Chad Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz, of Yale University, New Haven, Conn., on January 8.

Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz first photographed the new planet with the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope on October 31, 2003. However, the object was so far away that its motion was not detected until they reanalyzed the data in January of this year. In the last seven months, the scientists have been studying the planet to better estimate its size and its motions.

"It's definitely bigger than Pluto," said Brown, who is a professor of planetary astronomy.

Scientists can infer the size of a solar system object by its brightness, just as one can infer the size of a faraway light bulb if one knows its wattage. The reflectance of the planet is not yet known. Scientists can not yet tell how much light from the sun is reflected away, but the amount of light the planet reflects puts a lower limit on its size.

"Even if it reflected 100 percent of the light reaching it, it would still be as big as Pluto," says Brown. "I'd say it's probably one and a half times the size of Pluto, but we're not sure yet of the final size.

"We are 100 percent confident that this is the first object bigger than Pluto ever found in the outer solar system," Brown added.

The size of the planet is limited by observations using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which has already proved its mettle in studying the heat of dim, faint, faraway objects such as the Kuiper-belt bodies. Because Spitzer is unable to detect the new planet, the overall diameter must be less than 2,000 miles, said Brown.

A name for the new planet has been proposed by the discoverers to the International Astronomical Union, and they are awaiting the decision of this body before announcing the name.

For more details, go to this at Cal Tech.

A hundred fifty new planets and counting discovered already beyond our solar system, over 600 Kuiper Belt objects, and now this! Exciting times for a space geek like me.

Another world has been discovered in our Solar System, according to a report by New Scientist

Astronomical detective work led to the stunning discovery of a large new world beyond Pluto – and hiding in plain sight. The object could be the biggest in the Kuiper belt of rocky objects that orbit the outer reaches of the solar system.

The first data made public about the object suggested the object could be up to twice the size of Pluto, but newly revealed observations indicate the object is about 70% Pluto's diameter.

The find suggests more such objects are waiting to be discovered and is likely to reignite the fierce debate about what constitutes a planet.

It looks like this object, as yet unnamed, also has a small moon. You can check out the full article here.

MSNBC.com is reporting that:

SPACE CENTER, Houston - NASA Administrator Mike Griffin said Friday he hasn’t given up on launching another shuttle this year, despite suspending flights until the agency can stop foam insulation from snapping off and threatening the spacecraft.

He said he has set up a “tiger team” to try to solve the problem as quickly as possible. “We don’t expect this to be a long drawn-out affair,” he said by telephone from Washington in a briefing with reporters in Houston.

That's good news, I think.

I watched a new show on the Sci-Fi channel tonight that I had seen advertised and thought might be interesting. It’s called Master Blaster. Apparently each week there is a contest between two teams to launch something with high powered rockets. Tonight, the teams launched a play house, with a wicked witch dummy on top and Dorothy on the inside in a re-creation of sorts of the scene from the Wizard of Oz. The requirement was to see which team could launch the house the highest, getting it to spin at least 3 times on its axis, launch the witch off the roof, and then recover the house with Dorothy safe on the ground.

Neither team succeded in launching the witch or in a safe recovery. Both teams had their parachutes fail. What determined the winner was the launch height and since one team sent their house twice as high as the other, that’s the team that won. The loosing team then had to dress up like the characters from the Wizard of Oz and dance across a field.

I found it all rather amusing. Great TV it probably is not. Next week they are supposed to launch giant lawn darts (ten feet long or so) and try to hit bull’s-eyes painted in a field.

Meanwhile, in the world of serious rocketry, NASA has decided to once again ground the shuttle fleet once Discovery returns, until they can solve the problem of stuff falling off the external tank on launch. Apparently a rather sizable chunk fell off this time, though thankfully it didn’t hit the orbiter, so all should be well for re-entry. It is of course best that they be careful and get this issue solved, though it is a disappointment that it remains a problem for them.

A beautiful launch, right on time this morning; the Discovery is safely in orbit. Way to go!

I am really frustrated and unhappy. My ISP, who've I've been with since 1997, has been very unhelpful of late. My connection has been going down at random, with no explanation, for hours at a time. I call and call and sit on hold for a half hour or more; the tech people I talk to are very nice, but they don't make anything better, offer no explanation and simply apologize for my inconvenience. Very nice of them. So come Monday, I'm going with a different ISP since they can't seem to make me happy and really are doing nothing to try to keep me as a customer. As far as I can tell, they really don't much care. I suspect that the primary problem is with who they subcontract with: Verizon, who has a monopoly in the area. They are the only phone company here and there is no alternative. I blame all the government agencies responsible for allowing such monopolies to exist. I blame Verizon for being a horribly incompetent company. I'm a patient man. My patience is used up. May they all rot on voice mail hold forever like I've had to the last several days.

According to MSNBC.com today:

NASA engineers believe they have isolated the fuel-gauge malfunction that stopped last week's countdown toward the shuttle Discovery's launch, and with Tropical Storm Franklin headed north, the launch team is set to begin a new countdown Saturday for a Tuesday launch.

Good news.

According to NASAWatch.com the Space Shuttle Discovery is now scheduled for launch on Tuesday, July 26, 2005:

Editor's note: NASA has set next Tuesday, 26 July as the next launch attempt for STS-114. Launch is planned for 10:34 am EDT. No fueling test will be performed. The cause of the sensor anomaly seems to be a grounding issue.

This seems like good news.

James Doohan, who played Scotty on the original Star Trek series and in seven Star Trek movies, died early today. He was 85. I met him a couple of times when I was in graduate school at UCLA. I drove a shuttle bus to and from a private parking lot at the Burbank Airport (now the Bob Hope Airport) and he happened to park with us when I was on duty so I got to drive him to his plane. About a week later, he came back when I was on duty again. He was working on the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home at the time.

He was very nice, though grumbled a bit about being type-cast as Scotty. At the time, he drove a nice white Jaguar. He also tipped well.

Of all the famous people I got to meet while I worked there, meeting him was the highlight, since I'm a huge Star Trek fan.

Today is also the 36th anniversary of the moon landing, July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong became the first human being on the moon. Buzz Aldrin followed him onto the surface shortly thereafter.

Google has decided to celebrate the first moon landing by offering us Google Moon, something similar to Google Earth:

Google Moon

Make sure you zoom in all the way. It's amusing.

It now appears that the earliest that the Space Shuttle Discovery can be launched is July 26. They still can't figure out what's wrong with the sensor. MSNBC.com is reporting that:

Discovery's sensors have been acting up for months: The system flunked one tanking test in April, then passed another one in May. Then Discovery's tank was swapped in June for a newer heater-equipped tank, and the launch team had thought the problem was solved. During last week's countdown, however, one sensor started exhibiting bad readings on an intermittent basis.

Now that the tank is empty, the sensor seems to be working as expected — complicating NASA's troubleshooting efforts.

"It's difficult to find a glitch that won't stay glitched," Parsons said.

If the troubleshooters are unable to find the source of the problem, NASA managers could reconsider their rules to allow for a launch even if one of the four low-level sensors isn't working, Hale acknowledged. "We're thinking about it," he said. But for the time being, the mission management team was putting aside that scenario, pending the outcome of the upcoming tests

Isn't that the way it is with our cars? Or computers? Something goes wrong, but as soon as we call the repair person, the problem can't be found.

Another thing that annoys me and is a pet peeve is well expressed by Jeff Jarvis on his blog, discussing the London terror bombings and terrorism in general:

Yes, to call them "terrorist" gives them too much justification.

Look at it this way: Would you have tried to understand Edgar Ray Killen, the convicted Ku Klux Klan killer in the Mississippi Burning murders? Would you have explained his cultural shame at losing the Civil War and called him an insurgent or a militant or even a terrorist? Would you have blamed his grandparents for teaching him to have no respect for black people? Or would you simply condemn his hate and his act? The answer, of course, is C. So why should it be any different when condemning the crimes of these murderers?

LATER STILL:

A suicide bomber in a fuel truck blew himself up beside a Shiite mosque on Saturday evening in a town south of Baghdad, killing at least 58 people and wounding 86, the police said.

And what separates this from the bombing of a Mississippi black church?

Murder is murder.

My thoughts exactly.

I watched the season premiers of Stargate: SG1, Stargate Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica last night. I enjoyed them. But it seems unlikely that any of those programs will have the impact on popular culture that Star Trek has had. As I saw asked on one Trek website, how likely is it that anyone will ever look at some new gadget and comment, "wow, that's like something out of Battlestar Galactica"? And yet people will invoke Star Trek that way, not to mention the little catch phrases, like "beam me up" that have entered the lexicon.

I have pet peeves.

One of them involves Communism. A few months ago the LA Times wrote a front page article about a retirement home for old communists; it was a glowing piece. I wrote them a nasty letter that they actually published. Today, I got the new issue of the National Geographic (August, 2005) and at the end, they did a piece on a commune called East Wind in Missouri. They wrote the following:

"We thought we were going to change the world," says Deborah, 56, one of the group of friends who left Boston in 1973 to create East Wind. Back then it was still possible to believe a socialist revolution was sweeping the globe. "The east wind is prevailing over the west wind," said Mao Zedong in 1957, when he was chairman of the People's Republic of China. His vision of socialism blowing away capitalism gave East Wind its name and helped inspire its mission...

Such things puzzle me immensely. It is unlikely they’d publish a similar article about a neo-Nazi group in Idaho, calling them say “fascists” or “old rightists,” or speak nicely about their being inspired by Hitler’s Mein Kampf while waxing nostalgic over their lost causes. Why is it that murderous thugs on the far left evoke such feelings of warmth that they can’t even call them what they are: communists? What makes dictators and those who worked for their evil and unworkable cause worthy of such fawning? It is, frankly, disgusting. Marxism is as bad as Nazism and deserving of equal opprobrium. Mao is responsible for slaughtering at least 50 million of his citizens while oppressing the rest, sending millions to slave labor camps, and depriving all of them of basic freedoms. The Soviet Union slaughtered nearly as many, oppressed a dozen other countries, and sent millions to the Gulag. And yet if people walk around in a T-shirt with a picture of Mao or Che, that's okay for a lot of people. Personally, such an idea should feel as offensive as walking around wearing a T-shirt with Hitler or Goering on it.

I am one of apparently a relatively small number of people who very much enjoyed Star Trek: Enterprise which was cancelled at the end of this, its fourth season on UPN. Well the Emmys were announced today and the show has been nominated for three, all in technical categories, specifically:

Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup For A Series, Miniseries, Movie Or A Special (Prosthetic) - Michael G. Westmore, Makeup Supervisor, and his team have been nominated in this category every year since 1991 and have won the award four times. This year their work on "United" was honoured. Enterprise will compete against Nip/Tuck, as it did last year, as well as Carnivale, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers and MADtv.

Outstanding Hairstyling For A Series - Michael Moore and his team of stylists will compete against Carnivale and MADtv in this category as well, plus Alias, American Dreams and Deadwood. The two-part episode "In a Mirror, Darkly" was singled out for this nomination.

Outstanding Stunt Coordination - Vince Deadrick Jr. was selected for his management of the stunts in Augments episodes "Borderland" and "Cold Station 12". Alias was also cited in this category, along with 24, ER and The Last Ride.

Interestingly, these were the only three Emmy nominations that UPN received this year. So they have cancelled what was apparently their best quality program. Rather typical of a network, I suppose. Like the comedy Scrubs,, which received four Emmys. But of course, NBC cancelled it this year, too.

Ah well. At least Numb3rs was renewed on CBS.