Thanks to a link from the most excellent Tara at Aetiology, I found out that Science magazine gave me some props. Cool!

Update: Woops! I should have said, Tara got the news from Orac.

I’m on the road today, winging my way to DC to give a talk at Goddard Space Flight Center, my old stomping grounds. Well, I never stomped there, really. Actually, it’s more like I actually fled from there, but still, it’ll be fun to be back for just the day.

Anyway, a few months ago I did an interview for a podcast with my old bud Chris Pirillo, who runs the wildly successful Lockergnome website. I met him when he was hosting the show "Call for Help" on what was then "TechTVB" but has now horribly mutated into "G4" (a web search on our names together, with the name of the show, will yield some interesting results).

Anyway, Chris asked if I’d talk to him on his equally wildly successful podcast, and I said sure. So to keep you entertained in my absence, here it is. It’s fairly long. I haven’t even listened to it yet! I plan on it while I’m on the plane. If it stinks, then I’m pretty sure it’s Chris’s fault.

Update: D’oh! I did a dumb thing– I didn’t check the date on the article. This happened over two years ago! I thought this story was familiar, but didn’t have time to check up on it, and wanted to get it up on the blog so others could see it. Well, lesson learned on my part. Sorry about this, folks.

Did a meteorite hit in eastern India, injuring people?

According to this BBC article, a fireball fell from the sky on March 25, setting fire to houses and injuring three people (there is also another, earlier, article saying 20 people were hurt).

It sounds legit, but I’m not actually convinced. Most of the time, these reports turn out to be exaggerated or even false. And in general, meteorites don’t cause fires unless the incoming meteoroid is really big. Accurate information on this is very hard to come by.

If anyone finds more info, please leave a comment here! I am always interested in following up on events like this.

Given that the vast majority of my readers are in the US, I waited until the last minute to post about the eclipse tonight, seeing as how it’s happening over Africa and Asia. Also, I’m lazy.

The eclipse starts around 08:30 Universal Time and runs through about noon UT (in 03:30 - 07:00 Eastern US time). Granted that’s a wee bit late at night for us here in the States (stupid Earth, turning its back on the eclipse!), but you can still watch it live on the web.

First, if you’re not sure about what an eclipse is and how they work, then head over to Sky and Telescope webpage which has loads of info.

If you want to watch it over the web, there are lots of resources. Here are a few good ones:

• NASA (yes, NASA)
• The Exploratorium, a great kids science exploration place in San Francisco. For the uber-geeks, the Exploratorium also has a feed that will go into Second Life. Wow.
• The Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California
• Lots more webcams are listed on the Sky and Tel website.

By the way, there is a lot of misinformation about eclipses. For example, there has never been a single reported case, ever, or total, permanent blindness from looking at the Sun. You can be partially blinded, but you’d have to work pretty hard to go totally blind. Still, looking at the Sun without correct protection is not too bright (hahahaha) because you can do some damage. Again, Sky and Tel has a list of ways to view an eclipse safely.

Also, if you’re pregnant, it’s still OK to watch, despite some really weird rumors (bottom of that page).

As a followup to my run-in with a Playboy bunny (oops, more googleness), I give you here a clip from an interview I did with my local news station, KFTY Santa Rosa, a couple of years ago on the vernal equinox.

So in my usual manner, I get in to my office in the morning after dropping the Little Astronomer off at school, plop my bag onto my desk, start up my coffee, and grab my phone to listen to my phone messages.

The normal morning ended there. But in a good way. Well, a weird way at first, but then good.

One of the messages was from a woman with a New Jersey accent. Here it is in its entirety:

Hi Phil. I was just reading your article on the equinox and the egg. You mentioned it’s a hard boiled egg. Try standing a raw egg up on that day. That’s the way it goes. It’s a raw egg not a hard boiled egg. Have a good day.

That’s it. No name, no specifics. The caller ID listed the number as being from Jersey, so that matched the accent, but I had no clue who the person was. I wasn’t even sure what article she was talking about! The message was left shortly after last week’s spring equinox, when this legend gets attention. I have my egg standing article on my website, of course, but I also wrote one for Night Sky magazine.

So I had a laugh over that, wondering who this person was and how she got my number.

Then I checked my email.

DEAR DR. PHIL PHLAT [sic]:

YOU’RE A KILL JOY!

IN REGARD TO YOUR ARTICLE:
AOL Research & Learn: Night Sky - The Equinox and the Egg

P.S. THE EGG SHOULD BE RAW, NOT HARD BOILED. THAT’S CHEATING!
BUNNIES KNOW THESE THINGS! LOL!

Buh-Bye
BUNNYJOEY(ON HEF’S LEFT)

I must say, the last line certainly caught my attention. "Bunny"? "Hef"? I am but a man, and so I felt the need to investigate. I don’t open attached images, and my website mailer won’t let me see them anyway. So I did a search on "bunnyjoey", and voila:

OK then. I’m not sure when that picture was taken, but then, I’m not sure I care.

And yes, I am clearly not above using sex in this blog. Duh. But I also figure that using the words sex, Playboy, and bunny in this blog entry are bound to get it to rise a bit in Google. In that vein I should mention the link above about using sex in this blog contains nudity (sorta) and which, of course, means someone in the picture is naked.

I wonder how popular this particular blog entry will become? Think of this as a scientific experiment in social marketing. Oh, and did I mention that I saw the movie XXX with Vin Diesel? No? Yeah, that XXX, not a great movie, and Vin Diesel is kindof a boob, but it’s worth mentioning at least twice here. Yes. Maybe three times. XXX.

Anyway, I replied back to BunnyJoey and told her a hard boiled egg spins well, but yes, a raw egg is what you need if you want to stand one up (I’ll note that I never mentioned in the article that you should try this with a hard boiled egg– and incidentally, the article on AOL was a reprint of my Night Sky article). We’ve been exchanging lighthearted emails (she’s interested in what I know about Orion’s belt– given that Mrs. Bad Astronomer sometimes reads these entries, I’ll note that I avoided the obvious and steered Joey to my friend Jim Kaler’s pages about those stars).

OK, so not much astronomy in this entry, but what the heck. I’m human, despite being a scientist, so sex I like to mix it up naked sometimes and write about other things Playboy bunny. I obviously have no ulterior motives.

The Dawn mission to asteroids Ceres and Vesta is back on!

Last month, NASA canceled the mission due to "technical issues and cost overruns". This happened amidst a flurry of other science mission delays and outright cancellations. Needless to say, this caused quite a bit of anger in the scientific community, not the least of which was coming from the Europeans, who had invested money and time in the mission, and who had not been consulted by NASA before the decision was made to cancel it.

A Co-Investigator of Dawn, Mark Sykes, went so far as to write a letter to Congress pleading Dawn’s case. Perhaps that helped; a few days later an official appeal was filed to NASA, and it was reported that NASA was reconsidering the cancellation.

Today, in a telephone press conference, NASA announced that the Dawn mission is being reinstated. The launch is planned for the summer of 2007, perhaps June-July, arriving at Vesta in 2011 and moving on to Ceres in 2015.

There was an independent assessment team that looked over the decision to cancel Dawn. There were some issues with the propulsion and other spacecraft systems, as well of course with funding. They were able to review these issues, and decided that the spacecraft team was handling these problems sufficiently, and that the mission could go forward.

Here is the official statement from NASA:

The reinstatement resulted from a review process that is part of new management procedures established by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. The process is intended to help ensure open debate and thorough evaluation of major decisions regarding space exploration and agency operations.

“We revisited a number of technical and financial challenges and the work being done to address them,” said NASA Associate Administrator Rex Geveden, who chaired the review panel. “Our review determined the project team has made substantive progress on many of this mission’s technical issues, and, in the end, we have confidence the mission will succeed.”

The people at NASA on the telecon were careful to say that this shows the strength of the appeal process and how missions can be reviewed — and I agree — but that still begs the question: why was the mission canceled in the first place, if upon review everything looks okay? It sounds like communication between the NASA decision-makers and the mission project teams needs to be improved. This whole ordeal caused a lot of grief in the scientific and international community, especially the manner in which it was canceled. I hope that the people involved can learn from what happened here, and avoid this sort of thing in the future. Given how many other missions have been on or may yet still be on the chopping block, we might very well find out. No other missions, however, have as yet started an appeal process.

Personally, I think Dawn is an awesome mission and I’m thrilled it’s back in the game. We know quite a bit about the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, but we’ve never had a dedicated mission to see any close up, get good images, and determine the surface composition. The science is fascinating and important– and don’t forget, the Earth is occasionally hit by asteroids, and so more knowledge about them translates directly into better information on how to stop one if it’s on its way in. Plus, the mission has an advanced propulsion system called an ion drive, which uses a powerful electric field to fling ionized atoms out its back end, propelling the spacecraft forward. It’s extremely cool technology, since it’s a lot more efficient than chemical rockets, and can achieve far higher velocities.

I am very happy NASA changed its mind — cancelling Dawn was a mistake, pure and simple, and this successful appeal bodes well for the future. NASA has to make some tough decisions about where to spend its relatively small budget, which is made worse by new pressures to design and build the new Crew Exploration Vehicle, and to eventually go back to the Moon. These are all important ventures, but they must not come at the expense of the science. Exploration and science are two sides of the same coin, and one cannot be supported by gutting the other.