Blogs / Bad Astronomy

In 1999, NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, sent to the unexplored south pole of Mars, was lost just before it was supposed to land. It is unknown what happened, but it’s assumed the debris (or the simply uncommunicative probe) is on the surface of Mars.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking lots of incredible high-res images of the planet, including the likely areas where MPL hit. However, that’s a lot of data to sift through! So the HiRISE folks have put the data together, and they’re asking you, me droogs, to help them look. Maybe you’ll be the first person to see the doomed spacecraft since it was lost!

The NCSE is reporting (via an AP article) that an antiscience academic freedom bill has died in Alabama. These bills are a pox on the country, popping up in state legislatures everywhere. They purport to allow teachers freedom to teach controversies, but that’s creationist slang that really means violating the First Amendment and teaching religion in schools.

The Alabama bill’s cause of death is unclear; the article merely says it was because it didn’t pass in the House where it was introduced. I’d love to hear that the politicians had epiphanies and realized that passing it would irreparably damage students’ ability to learn, but I suspect it’s far more likely to have been due to some arcane parliamentary issue.

And lest you think this kind of garbage is quarantined to the U.S. south, I heard last night after my talk from some college students in the audience that Michigan is considering just such an unconstitutional bill. You don’t get much farther north than that.

I have to hand it to Expelled producer Mark Mathis: he has guts. No ability to tell the truth at all, but he has guts. He showed up at the offices of Scientific American with a copy of the crockumentary in hand, and let the folks there take a look.

Needless to say, they weren’t overwhelmed by the accuracy of the movie. In fact, "savaged" wouldn’t be too strong a word to use. Check out the reviews there for a bit of schadenfreude. The interviews with John Rennie and Eugenie Scott (both past TAM attendees!) are particularly enlightening.