The film The Last Days on Mars has been released in the UK and is being released in the US today on Video on Demand and on Dec. 6 to theaters:
I’ve had these book review links in my queue for weeks and finally posting them. I’m reading several books for review myself and will try to say something about them soon.
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Anatoly Zak, who runs the RussianSpaceWeb.com website, has a book out on the Russian space program and industry and its getting good reviews:
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Jeff Foust writes about a new autobiography of Stephen Hawking : Review: My Brief History – The Space Review
My Brief History is not just a play on words, but an accurate description: it is a short (less than 150 pages, with pictures) autobiography by Hawking, describing his life from his modest childhood through his academic pursuits and personal challenges. His decision to study cosmology, he writes, was rooted in a childhood interest in model trains and complex board games: “an urge to know how systems worked and how to control him,” something he says his studies of the universe now satisfy. “If you understand how the universe operates, you control it, in a way.”
Former NASA space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale spoke at the von Braun Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama this week : Keynote speaker at von Braun Symposium says NASA needs to ‘try new strategies’ – al.com
Unfortunately, due to the govt shutdown, there were no NASA officials there to hear him say this:
“The current plan is fragile in the political and financial maelstrom that is Washington,” Hale said. “Planning to fly large rockets once every three or four years does not make a viable program. It is not sustainable.
“Continuing to develop programs in the same old ways, from my observations, will certainly lead to cancellation as government budgets are stretched thin. It is time to try new strategies.”
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More space policy links:
Today is Say ‘HI’ to Juno! Day in which amateur radio operators can send a message to the Mission Juno probe:
NASA’s Juno spacecraft will fly past Earth on October 9, 2013 to receive a gravity assist from our planet, putting it on course for Jupiter. To celebrate this event, the Juno mission is inviting amateur radio operators around the world to say “HI” to Juno in a coordinated Morse Code message. Juno’s radio & plasma wave experiment, called Waves, should be able to detect the message if enough people participate. So please join in, and help spread the word to fellow amateur radio enthusiasts!
This animation shows how Juno uses the earth’s gravity to get an assist
And this video has a description of the flyby from Juno team members:
The JunoCam on the spacecraft is also taking pictures of the earth.
Update: Bill Nye of the Planetary Society gives a his explanation of how the probe uses the earth to get a boost to Jupiter:
Update 2: The fly-by may help solve a mystery: ESA and NASA stumped by cosmic mystery / Operations – ESA
Engineers hope that the new measurements will unravel the decades-old ‘flyby anomaly’ – an unexplained variation in spacecraft speeds detected during some swingbys.
“We detected the flyby anomaly during Rosetta’s first Earth visit in March 2005,” says Trevor Morley, flight dynamics expert at ESA’s ESOC operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany.
“Frustratingly, no anomaly was seen during Rosetta’s subsequent Earth flybys in 2007 and 2011. This is a real cosmic mystery that no one has yet figured out.”
The next Humans 2 Mars Summit will take place on April 22-24, 2014 at George Washington University (GW).
2014 H2M is being co-sponsored by the George Washington University and the Space Policy Institute at GW.
H2M 2014 will continue the discussion started at the 2013 H2M Summit to explore how humanity can land on Mars by the 2030’s. This event will feature discussions on new concepts of Mars architectures, updates on science missions and objectives, planetary protection, In Situ Resource Utilization, human factors, international cooperation, and a myriad of other topics.
The Summit examines the question
What do we need to land humans on Mars by 2030? If you want to know the answer, we invite you to join us at the Humans to Mars Summit.H2M will be a comprehensive Mars exploration conference to address the major technical, scientific, and policy-related challenges that need to be overcome to send humans to Mars by 2030. This summit will be one of the most authoritative and diverse Mars exploration conferences ever held, with involvement of key contributors from NASA, industry, the science community, and non-traditional players. Expect to rub shoulders with both established aerospace leaders as well as newer commercial space entity leaders.