We will be out of town for a bit so Audrey can attend a planetary gettogether at JPL and we all do some needed recreating. The beach comes to mind as does a rendezvous with Susan and Doc M. One thing we plan on doing one the way back to Las Vegas is driving parts of the ‘Mother Road,’ Route 66. So, kicks on the return trip.
Only Mad Dogs and Archaeologists vacation in the Mojave in July. 
I haven’t been through Nipton, Cima or Amboy for a while. High time to take Ian there. A group of us used to go that route when the ESRI Conference was still in Palm Springs.
Ghu! That was a dozen years ago… mutter, mutter
It may well be that I will be able to update from the hotel, but I don’t want to count on it. We’ve been disappointed before.
We should be back on the 2nd or 3rd of July.
[trying to do the categories for this post really illustrates to me that a major reorg is long over due]
Nuts. I’ll let others closer to the effort comment.
Mars rover’s broken wheel is beyond repair [New Scientist]
Mission managers have given up hope of fixing a broken wheel on NASA’s Spirit rover and will simply have to drag the wheel on future drives. The glitch means NASA must avoid terrain with loose soil as it maps out a route to a safe winter haven for the rover.(…)
[E]ngineers have lost hope that the wheel can ever recover again. Recent tests at a range of voltage levels failed to produce any movement in the wheel. “It’s just not responding,” says team member Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, US. [more]
But hey, Spirit has lasted how long past its project date? 
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I am a couple of days behind the curve, but I saw this at Susan’s and wanted to pass this along…
Getting more funding for NASA Space Science
Rep John Culbertson put out an urgent call for people to write letters to fellow congressional appropriators about ways to add funds back to the NASA science budget (the Science budget for FY 07 has been gutted).
- pull funds from areas that the OMB has declared “wasteful,” “obsolete” or “duplicative.”
- give NASA $1billion from a 6.8billion stash of Homeland Security Funds that haven’t been spent in 3 years (”In other words, make Homeland Security spend $1 billion of their unspent surplus before we give them another $1 billion, and use that $1 billion now where it is needed most for the nation’s security in the future – for scientific research and planetary exploration that NASA is now canceling.”)
Culbertson is really pulling for the Europa mission, which has been declared the single most important mission to the outer planets, and is being pretty much starved out of existence. [2020Hindsight]
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter doing its Mars Orbit Insertion that is. Mission news is here.
A big ‘thank you’ to Susan for live-blogging it.
Let’s talk about something besides quail hunters.
Spirit Mars Rover Reaches ‘Home Plate’: Formation Has Researchers Puzzled [space.com]
NASA’s Spirit Mars rover has arrived at a site dubbed “Home Plate” within Gusev crater. But what the robot found has left scientists puzzled.
As the Mars machinery relays images of the area, the sightseeing has sparked healthy debate within the team running the mission. (…)
“I think it is one of the most picturesque views that we have encountered in either mission thus far,” said Jim Rice, a Mars Exploration Rover Project science team member at Arizona State University in Tempe.
The drive was well worth the effort, Rice told SPACE.com. The outcrop now being studied is layered, but “we’re not sure what it is yet.”
Tasking Spirit’s robot arm to being intensive scrutiny of the area is underway, Rice said. “It is a spectacular scene with Home Plate and all the ridges and buttes.”
“Is Home Plate cool or what?”, said Larry Crumpler, Research Curator, Volcanology and Space Sciences at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
As a Mars rover science team member, Crumpler said deliberations within the team about what they are viewing “have been the closest thing to passionate debate that I have seen yet.”
For his part, Crumpler said that he refuses to accept one spectacular interpretation: “Namely, that it is a volcanic vent structure.”
Crumpler said more detailed rover images are needed.
Home Plate has been a target for Spirit since shortly after the robot landed on the red planet in January 2004. The feature stood out in overhead images taken by Mars Global Surveyor’s Mars Orbiter Camera. It stood out as a bright, nearly circular spot in the Columbia Hills region, Crumpler explained.
“It has a shape when seen from above that is reminiscent of a playa or evaporite basin…so that has made it a point of possible interest in a mission seeking evidence for past water on Mars,” he said.
Just trying to catch up on some things…
I’m getting fairly adept at filling out applications for archaeologist postions at various federal agencies at the USAJobs website. I wish I was getting adept (some practice) at saying, “why yes, I’d love to come in for an interview.” [edits]
It never ceases to amaze me that a 4-year old boy and his Dad both think that peanut butter and jelly is the best lunch ever. For the curious, that’s freshly ground peanut butter with strawberry preserves on wheat bread. Ian even eats the crusts.
Audrey is all setup for tomorrow’s poster session. It’s amazing how good a post-travel nap you can get when you don’t have one ear cocked for little 4-year old voices.
Doug has a great pointer to a Geology.com Google Maps hack that displays the locations of several large meteor impact craters. At first, I wrote “terresterial meteor impact craters” before I remembered that JMARS is a whole ‘nother thing. JMARS is a geographical information system for Mars.
I think Alwin’s kitchen whiteboard idea is really worth exploring.
“December is here again. Seems to happen about the same time each year.” [Dave Rogers] I keep encountering variations on this (Thanksgiving, a birthday, etc.) and it just cracks me up every time. Who knew I was an easy mark for chronological humor?
Christmas song mondegreens. Mondegreens are a series of words resulting from the mishearing of a statement or song lyric. Not quite the caliber of rock and roll mondegreens like “the girl with colitis goes by,” “the Revered Bluejeans” or “’scuse me while I kiss this guy,” but it’s a start.
