Not Meant To Work, Just Meant To Be

When George Bush announced his "Return To The Moon" proposal in the midst of the 2004 election campaign, it sank like a rock from the American collective consciousness. Some felt the whole idea of building a Lunar base in preparation for a Mars Mission was a distraction; some felt that revisiting 30 year old achievements was about as exciting as looking at your wife's knees (ie. not very); and some felt the purpose of the proposal was merely to be a proposal, a political tool Bush could whip out whenever he was accused of being anti science.

Turns out we were all right. The Bush plan is "starting to crumble" from a lack of funding and a lack of enthusiasm among both the public and space planners:

It's becoming painfully obvious that the Moon is not a stepping-stone for manned Mars operations but is instead a stumbling block," says Robert Farquhar, a veteran of planning and operating planetary and deep-space missions.

[...]

[The Planetary Society] is co-hosting the invitation-only VSE replanning session with Stanford. A lot of people going to the meeting believe "the Moon is so yesterday," says [Lou] Friedman, head of [The Planetary Society].

"It just does not feel right. And there's growing belief that, at high cost, it offers minimal engineering benefit for later manned Mars operations."

Exactly. You didn't even need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.

As an alternative, a growing corps of scientists, engineers and astronauts is arguing that, once Bush is gone out the door, efforts should be directed towards an Asteroid mission, a mission to the LaGrange points, and a "direct to Mars" project.

As with so many things Bush-related, the early OOs will turn out have been wasted time for NASA and the American space effort.

No Such Luck

For those of us who like to watch shit go BOOM! in the heavens, the announcement that

An asteroid nearing Mars will not crash into the planet later this month...

...is surely sad news. Ah well! To cheer people up, here's a youtube clip portraying what would happen if a Japan-sized space rock ever struck the Earth again. The narration is in Japanese.

Warming On Mars, Redux: It Ain't The Damn Sun!

Rather, the one degree temperature increase seen on the surface of Mars over the past 30 years can be attributed to a change in the planet's albedo (ability to reflect sunlight):

Research indicates that as the dark areas on Mars [blue in the map above] expand and darken over time, its albedo decreases, and its surface air temperature rise. Large surface areas, some almost twice the size of the continent of Africa (over 34 million square miles), have been observed to darken or brighten by 10 percent or more, which speaks to the magnitude of these global surface changes.

And if your local Denier keeps nattering on about warming on Neptune, or on the moons of Saturn, or wherever, tell them that you have it on good authority that it's getting colder on Yer-Anus.

Solar Kismet

Today both Ezra and Greg from The Politic try to retail the same bit of nonsense about global warming on planet Earth being primarily sun-driven. Their evidence? A similar phenomenon appears to be occurring on Mars. However, on the very same day they makes these claims, an honest-to-goodness scientific paper appears that refutes them:

Mars is a very windy place--so windy, in fact, that bright, oxidized martian soil is being scoured away by martian winds and dust devils to reveal darker, sub-surface soil with the end result of making the whole planet warmer. Mars is experiencing its own brand of climate change. Is this related to planet earth's greenhouse gas driven climate change? No. Is understanding the process important for our understanding of how planets evolve and change over time? Absolutely.

The post from Greg at The Politic seems particularly dishonest, as the article he quotes from actually includes the same explanation of the Martian warming phenomenon as is given above. Or perhaps Greg has ADD and is incapable of reading a newspaper article to the very end.

Incidentally, when you hear these stories about Global Warming on Mars, or Titan, or Pluto being proof that the same phenomenon on Earth is due to "solar cycles", just remember, you don't have to look at Mars or Pluto to see what the Sun is up to. You can simply take direct measurements of the Sun itself, as these people have been doing for years. And guess what? Solar output has remained more or less constant during this time.

Conservatives On Mars?

From The Beeb:

Scientists studying pictures from Nasa's Odyssey spacecraft have spotted what they think may be seven caves on the surface of Mars.

[...]

The caves may be the only natural structures capable of protecting primitive life forms from micrometeoroids, UV radiation, solar flares and high energy particles that bombard the planet's surface.

In fact the Mars Odyssey has even snapped pictures of one of our primitive Martian brothers peering from the entrance to his cave!

Oh My God! They're Hideous!!!

h/t to Jeff for finding this picture of Ezra Levant. Come back soon, Jeff, things are looking up.