Insight into the story behind the emails that have been surfacing out of the Columbia investigation, courtesy of author and ex-MOD contractor James Oberg.

James Oberg quoted on bad reporting of email what-iffing

] China has revealed further details of its plans to
] explore the Moon - the first unmanned probe could be
] launched by 2005, say officials. They also hinted that
] the motivation for the missions is to mine the Moon's
] resources.
]
] The lunar program, named Chang'e after a legend about a
] fairy that visits the moon, would be in three phases.
] First an orbiter would be sent to the Moon, followed by a
] lander, and then finally a sample return craft.
]
] "We will be able to embark on a maiden unmanned mission
] within two and a half years if the government endorses
] the scheme now,'' Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of
] China's lunar exploration programme, told The People's
] Daily.

New Scientist - China's moon plans

Fifty years to the day from the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of its co-discoverers has caused a storm by suggesting that stupidity is a genetic disease that should be cured.

Stupidity should be cured, says DNA discoverer - New Scientist

"We all felt like we needed to put on 'hard hats'! The sky was absolutely full of meteors," recalls astronomer Jim Young of JPL's Table Mountain Observatory. Earth had just plunged into a debris stream trailing comet Tempel-Tuttle; the resulting meteor storm, the 1966 Leonids, was literally dazzling.

This weekend it could happen again.

On March 1, 2003, around 2154 universal time (UT), our planet will encounter a stream of dusty comet debris "only 12,000 km from Earth. That's as close as the Leonid debris stream was in 1966," says Bill Cooke of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center's Space Environments Team.

Earth is approaching a cometary debris stream that might trigger an unusual Antarctic meteor shower this weekend | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference

Decius wrote:
] ] A Russian space capsule now docked at the international
] ] space station will be used to bring the space station
] ] crew back to Earth now that the U.S. shuttle fleet is
] ] grounded, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said today.

And so it begins -

It would seem that next two expedition crews are currently undergoing Soyuz training now, and have been trimmed from 3 to 2 crewmembers. The worst part of this is that it means that ISS science is going to slow to the barest minimum since Exp1. Just maintaining the ISS is a full-time job for two crewmembers. These potentially exciting research expeditions have been relegated to skeleton crew status.

Honestly, I think they should have taken up the current expedition's offer to leave them up there for an extended mission to study long duration spaceflight. At least then, there would be a scientific silver lining in this dense cloud layer.

RE: HoustonChronicle.com - Russian craft to bring space station crew home

crankymessiah wrote:

] ] What was apparently the spacecraft's last signal was
] ] received January 22 by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's
] ] Deep Space Network. At the time, Pioneer 10 was 7.6
] ] billion miles from Earth; the signal, traveling at the
] ] speed of light, took 11 hours and 20 minutes to arrive.

The most signifigant LOS in history, if you look at the long view. One day, we will travel further than this and still be gathering data... Plus, it's a good lesson in relativity - Ask yourself how hold you will be in 31 years, and then consider the times and distances listed above...

RE: CNN.com - Pioneer 10 falls silent after nearly 31 years - Feb. 25, 2003

Of course, after the shocking headlines and buried at the very end of the story is ...

"In response to Dittemore's request for the e-mails, Robert C. Doremus, a NASA employee at Johnson, on Feb. 11 summarized the earlier exchanges and concluded that Daugherty and three other engineers, on the afternoon before the breakup, agreed "we were doing a 'what-if' discussion and that we all expected a safe entry."

The emails themselves are fascinating, and much more informative than the media, not to mention without precedent. Most stories in the news we are fed lines preceded by "Sources report... " or "We have learned..."

In this case one can download the PDFs and read the actual sources for yourself.

HoustonChronicle.com - NASA foresaw tragedy, but gave no warning

New official website of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

CAIB

A JPL release about solving "Stuart's Event" - the direct observation of an asteroid impact of the lunar surface.

JPL News Release - NASA Solves Half-Century Old Moon Mystery

Mysterious gullies on Mars appear to have been etched by melting snow, a finding that offers promising new places to search for signs of life on the red planet, a scientist reported Wednesday.

New pictures collected by NASA's Mars Odyssey space probe show formations that seem to be remnants of thick snow packs that once draped the slopes of craters, cliffs and other areas.

HoustonChronicle.com - Scientist: Mars may have snow formations