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.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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DISCOVERmagazine.com: Latest Articles on Space - DISCOVER Blogs: The Loom
February 12th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
And also remember that the History Channel series The Universe airs Tuesdays at 9.00pm Eastern Time (check local listings)
February 12th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
And also, Cosmos on the Science Channel at 9 PM Eastern!
February 12th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Holy crap, that NOVA episode is a must-see! Thanks for the tip — really fantastic sounding stuff…!
February 12th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Just FYI - Nova will repeat later in the week on the PBS World channel, and The Science Channel replays the astronomy docs on Sunday afternoons!
February 12th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
And of course they schedule this stuff opposite American Idol….
February 12th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Ah damn, not in Australia, although there was an interesting program here in Perth the other night, interviewing Aldrin, Kranz and others that spent an hour talking about near misses with the Apollo 11 program (it was called Apollo 11… I think)
February 12th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Plus you can watch most pbs shows online after a couple days the are aired on tv.
February 12th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
I’m going to play Devil’s advocate here for a minute. I just watched Astrospies, and it seems that the Government admits a secret military space program, then denies it. And everyone wonders why conspiracy theories abound? I’m afraid all a program like this will do, BA, is keep you busy for years to come! This will just feed the conspiracy nutters.
February 12th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Peter says: “Holy crap, that NOVA episode is a must-see! Thanks for the tip — really fantastic sounding stuff…!”
I agree, but that whole “mysterious covert program” setup in the beginning seemed a bit overdone. When I did the chapter on MOL for “Spaceship Handbook” I found tons of stuff on the program (although not much, naturally, on the “mission module” contents).
- Jack
February 13th, 2008 at 3:59 am
Am I the only person who read “Astrospies” as “Apostrophies“?
February 13th, 2008 at 6:33 am
I’m a Science/Military/Discovery Channel geek, and was lucky enough to catch Tank on the Moon last night. Absolutely astounding that anybody could put together something like that 30+ years ago. (spoiler - it wasn’t really a tank, but the program name makes a lot of sense)
Now I have to go find the next showing of “Apostrophies” (sort of).
February 13th, 2008 at 6:39 am
The Lunakhod documentary was a quite interesting show. I do wish that they had given some focus on the so-far failed attempts at precisely locating Lunakhod-1 on the lunar surface by the various lunar laser ranging groups.
Seems like APOLLO (Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation) would have been a good group to talk too. Given that they have done measurements off of the Apollo 11, 14 and 15 plus Luna 21 (Lunakhod 21) their viewpoints would have been interesting.
Off subject a second: I haven’t read through Phil’s “moon hoax” debunking materials in some time (my family lived the moon program, we never doubted it because our fathers and grandfather did it) but the reflectors precise location are well known and thus the locations of Tranquility Base as well as the 14 and 15 landing sites are very precisely known. Shouldn’t take the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter more than a few minutes to find and photograph them, eh?
February 13th, 2008 at 8:27 am
I’ve kind of wondered what the BA thinks of the History Channel series “The Universe.”
The narrator has read some things that sound a bit off to me, and a recent one referred to the possibility of “Cyrofiles” [sic] living on Saturn’s moons.
maybe it was “Cairo-philes?!”
February 13th, 2008 at 8:38 am
If you’re interested in the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, don’t miss Dwayne Day’s rundown of it, posted last Monday at the Space Review site: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1057/1
Dwayne’s a historian who’s done lots of research on military space programs and reconnaissance satellites, among other things.
February 13th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Charles, while the site can be photographed, it’s sad to say that these people won’t accept that as any kind of evidence. They’ll state that “of course we put THINGS on the moon.. just not men.”
And then it’ll all be handwaved away.
Our resources are limited with regards to Nasa and the missions it undertakes. I would hope that , if they do take pictures, they do it for other reasons than to just attempt to prove to the hoaxers that we were really there.
February 13th, 2008 at 9:46 am
@dusty59,
I haven’t watched the program, but they are likely referring to “cryophiles” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryophile
Literally, “cold loving” organisms. I imagine they would have said such things _could_ live on Titan, not that they _are_ living there.
When we find places in the Solar System where earth-life could survive, it’s tempting to think there is life already there, but until we know more about the circumstances of the origin of life here it’s a bit of a leap to expect it to happen in a relatively hostile environment. It seems reasonable to assume that earth-life only conquered the extreme environments of Earth after starting in more hospitable surroundings.
February 13th, 2008 at 10:44 am
I watched the “Astrospies” segment, which was good but not great, then switched to the History Channel Universe segment on supernovas. Which I thought was truly awful. Lots of meaningless graphics (explosions, more explosions, still more explosions), but no real content. Unless, of course, it came after the first 15-20 minutes which was when I gave up.
February 13th, 2008 at 11:55 am
As long as we’re on the topic of viewing, The DVD of In the Shadow of the Moon comes out on Friday.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000XJ5TPE/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
February 13th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Oh man, thanks so so much for the heads-up on the NOVA episode. The section on the Russian orbiting spy station was like something out of a 60s James Bond movie; unbelieveably cool stuff.
February 13th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Jarrod, a good point, but part of NASA’s mission is also to serve the public interest. I would think that displaying photographs of the old lunar landing sites that are of great historical interest would fall within that, and would be of great general interest to the public at large. Besides, the locations are known because the mirror locations are known, and it would probably not be a great deal of trouble to take the photos at some point during the LRO’s lifetime. And unless I am mistaken, NASA once said that they were going to photo the sites anyway.
If the naysayers want to claim that even those resulting photos were hoaxed, so be it. They lost a lot of credibility with me a long time ago anyway, so what they prattle on is i
February 13th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
@ Wayne:
thanks, yes; guess I made my point poorly. was joking about the “Cairo” thing.
Just seems for such a slickly produced series there are some odd errors.