backlash against the global warming "jihadists"

Here is a good post by someone right here at the U. of Colorado discussing a backlash against the global warming fanatics.

Interesting Mars results from the Fall AGU meeting

I just got back yesterday from the Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco. It was a good meeting with a lot of neat Planetary Science results (among lots and lots of other geoscience results of course). I am biased of course but I think some of the most interesting stuff was from the Remotely Sensed Mineralogy of Mars sessions on Tuesday morning (part 1 and part 2). There were lots of good results in those sessions from OMEGA, THEMIS, and TES. I had a talk in the second session with early results from an analysis I'm doing under the Mars Data Analysis program on the Mawrth Vallis region. On Wednesday, there were some early results from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Some of the early CRISM results over Mawrth Vallis dovetail nicely with what I've seen in the publically released OMEGA data. The early HiRISE images are stunning. There's one locale called Mojave crater which has channels which for all the world look like they were carved by rainfall fed channels. On Thursday afternoon we had the Mars Exploration Rover sessions. I didn't have a talk for those sessions, but was a co-author on a couple of the presentations. It was like a public forum "end of sol" session. The telecon end of sol sessions that we have are good, but there is definitely something to be said for having people together in the same room. It wasn't necessarily all MER science team people talking to each other either. There were some presentations by non-team members doing work with the publically released data.

It ought to be a good year for Mars science what with all the data coming down from MRO and with plans ramping up for the Mars Science Lab mission. This summer there will also be the Seventh International Conference on Mars in Pasadena so that should be good too.

new NASA goal

TodayNASA put out a longer term goal beyond just going back to the Moon in the form of a "permanent" lunar polar base. It seems to me that might be a tad premature since recently there has been some contradictory findings about whether or not there is water ice in the permanently shadowed craters in the lunar polar regions. Be that as it may, I have been thinking more and more that going back to the Moon might just be a dead end... it could sap funds and people's enthusiasm and delay us from other deep space destinations- namely Mars and the Near Earth Asteroids. Some alternatives to the Moon as a destination for human exploration were recently suggested by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA). There's a Space Review article on this topic here and the IAA report itself is here. I think the good thing about the Orion spacecraft architecture that is currently being developed is that it is not necessarily Moon-specific. If, as a result of the 2008 presidential election, the decision is made to re-orient the program from the Moon to first check out the Sun-Earth L2 point or some near Earth asteroid, I believe that could be done fairly efficiently. I really think such a reprioritization of goals might be in order, but nobody has asked me (!).