In the latest Planetary Society Hangout (February 14, 2013), Emily Lakdawalla of the Society and Courtney Dressing of Harvard talked “about just how common Earth-sized exoplanets may be in our neighborhood”: Planetary Society Weekly Hangout, Thu Feb 14 1200PT/2000UT: Courtney Dressing – The Planetary Society –
PlanetCast: Live Coverage of the Encounter With Asteroid 2012 DA14
Join Planetary Society Director of Projects Bruce Betts for live webcast coverage of the encounter with Asteroid 2012 DA14. This 45-meter asteroid will pass within 27,000 kilometers of Earth. Also on hand will be the host of Planetary Radio, Mat Kaplan.
Friday, February 15, 2013
11:15am to at least 12:00pm Pacific Standard Time / 1930 to 2000 UTC
Go to : http://planetary.org/planetcast
You’ll see:
Bruce will also answer your questions about this and other Near Earth Objects (NEO) as he explains how the Planetary Society backs efforts to detect, track and eventually deflect NEOs that threaten our planet. It may be the biggest show in space this year.
Don’t miss it!
Regards,
The Planetary Society Staff
* Note: Telescope feeds provided by JPL will be dependent on weather conditions from the various observatories throughout the world.
The sequestration storm will soon hit NASA:
Update: If these comments to the Space Politics posting are correct, then commercial crew will be cut less than it initially seemed and SLS/Orion will be cut more. The numbers are complicated by questions over reconciling the percentage cuts with the funding under the continuing resolution (CR) , with what the administration originally requested for 2013, and whether the cuts apply to the whole fiscal year or to what remains.
The cut will apparently be taken from the Presidents request of over $800M for commercial crew and no from the amount in the CR of about half that. So it will result in a cut of about a quarter, which is a lot but it doesn’t zero out the program.
Here is an AvWeek item about the cuts: Cuts Would Hit Commercial Crew Efforts Hard – Aviation Week.
Dennis Wingo announces a crowdsourcing campaign to fund the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP). This technoarchaeology (“mining the past to support science in the future”) seeks to recover images from recorded on analog magnetic tapes from the five NASA lunar orbiter missions between 1966 and 1967.
The South by Southwest (SXSW 2013) festival (March 8-17, Austin Texas) combines “original music, independent films, and emerging technologies”. This year there will be a
panel on “Crowd-sourcing the Space Frontier” will include Anousheh Ansari, who visited the International Space Station in 2006 and was name sponsor for the Ansari X-Prize in 2001, and Citizens in Space project manager and citizen-astronaut candidate Edward Wright.
More at Citizen Astronauts, Space Entrepreneurs to Speak at SxSW