The Bad Astronomy Newsletter

Bad Astronomy Newsletter #20

Contents:

1. Perseids peak on August 12
2. More Planet X stuff
3. Streamed Australian radio interview
4. Red Rover
5. Subscribe/Unsubscribe info

1) Perseids peak on August 12

The Perseid meteor shower is probably the most dependable shower of the year. It comes to a peak on Monday night/Tuesday morning August 12/13 this year. If you are in North America, you should take a chance and look for them on Sunday night/Monday morning as well. If you are in Europe, you are favored for the best peak Monday night. Expect to see roughly 60 meteors per hour from a dark site. From my own light-polluted area (I can see 4th magnitude stars easily from my back yard, but not much fainter) I might see 20 or so per hour, just to give you an example.

Meteors are best seen after local midnight, when the dark part of the Earth is facing into the direction of travel. This is like watching a rain shower while driving; more drops hit your front windshield than the rear one. So after midnight is the best time to watch. Get yourself a lawn chair and watch the skies!

For more info, try the Sky and Telescope website or Astronomy Magazine's website.

For general information about meteors and showers, go to Gary Kronk's site.

2) More Planet X stuff

I have been adding to my webpages about Planet X. Mark Hazlewood, one if the propagators of this pernicious piece of Bad Astro, has taken notice of me, and is now posting unflattering commentaries about me on his newsgroup with some regularity. Oh well, turnabout is fair play. I guess if I disagree with him, I must be a Government Disinformation Agent, bent on making sure the public doesn't find out about this non-existent planet that won't kill us all next May.

Confused? Well, the fact that Planet X is an issue at all confuses me a bit too. Read all about it here.

3) Streamed Australian radio interview

I was interviewed about misconceptions in astronomy for an Australian radio broadcast a few weeks ago. They have streamed the interview online, and it includes bad astronomy comments from other folks as well. You can listen online.

4) Red Rover

Yesterday as I write this, I was at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for a meeting about astronomy education. We took a brief tour of the facility after lunch, which was cool because I have never been to JPL before. We went to the observation deck over a clean room. A clean room is a workshop where equipment is built; it is called "clean" because the environment inside is tightly controlled. The air is filtered very vigorously to prevent dust particles from contaminating optical surfaces, for example.

So we were looking down on the clean room, and people wearing funny white suits (to prevent their clothes from generating dust; the outfits are called "bunny suits") were scurrying around fussing over weird-looking devices. It occurred to me after a moment that what we were seeing was really and truly something being sent into space. That was cool enough, but then we were told what was being built: a rover that will be sent to Mars next year. Called MER (Mars Explorer Rover), it will be the next step in Mars exploration. You may remember the Pathfinder mission, which sent the rover Sojourner to Mars. The MER rover is much larger, the size of kid's wagon, and will be far more mobile than Sojourner.

The spacecraft will use the Martian atmosphere to slow itself initially. Then it will use a parachute to slow even more. After that, it surrounds itself with giant airbags, and will use those to absorb the impact as it hits the surface. After it comes to a stop, the bags will deflate. The lander itself is basically a tetrahedron, a four-sided pyramid. The sides will open up like a flower, creating a platform for the rover.

In the clean room we saw the frame of the rover, as well as three of the petals that will open up.

Let me reiterate that standing there looking down on this stuff was *very* cool. It's not often you can stand five meters from something going to another planet. If we could get more people to actually see these things, NASA funding might not be in so much trouble.

For more info about the MER missions, try these sites:

http://athena.cornell.edu/

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/future/2003.html

and for Pathfinder info go to the Pathfinder site.

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Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
badastro@badastronomy.com
http://www.badastronomy.com