The NASA press release uses the words "confirms" and "identified" (water in a soil sample). It is the press' use of the word "Discover" in it's headlines over and over that causes the problem. Water can be identified (or not) in every Mars sample from now to eternity. It doesn't mean that each time water is found it is a "discovery". It's sad to see the press, of all organizations, misuse language.

The boiling cauldron does not relate to what conditions are now, but what might have been in the past when and if Mars was warmer, and deep down underground, like next to a hot volcano.......

I don't know...I'm torn between being happy that the mainstream press pays any attention at all to UMSF discoveries, and the fact that it's always distilled to the lowest common denominator, which is often wrong.

IMHO, all but truly egregious errors are forgiveable; at least people know that things are happening, and hopefully enough curiosity is stimulated thereby for them to learn more (which of course is easier then ever now with the Net.)

A few planets have actually been confirmed as planets, with their true masses known. The Transit method results in most of these. A planet passes between us and it's star, and thus we know the inclination. The true mass of a planet detected by radial velocity is equal to

true mass = minimum mass / sin( i),

Where i is the inclination of the planet in degrees. A planet with an edge-on orbit is 90 degrees, and face-on orbit is 0 degrees. Planets with near face-on orbits transit their stars, and thus we can detect this and determine the inclination, and thus their true mass. Hence, we know if it's really a planet or not. This is no longer inference, this is proving. Most of the 307 planets are just candidates, but a few are known to be planets.

Gravitational microlensing provides yet another way to determine the true mass of a planet. In this method, a solar system passes between us and a background star, and through gravitational lensing, the background star's light is bent. If there's a planet in the lensing system, it will show up in the pattern of the light distortion. As this is a function of true mass, planets detected with this method are, without doubt, planets.

WASP-1 b (Transit method)
WASP-2 b (Transit method)
WASP-3 b (Transit method)
WASP-4 b (Transit method)
WASP-5 b (Transit method)
WASP-6 b (Transit method)
WASP-7 b (Transit method)
WASP-8 b (Transit method)
WASP-9 b (Transit method)
WASP-10 b (Transit method)
WASP-11 b (Transit method)
WASP-12 b (Transit method)
WASP-13 b (Transit method)
WASP-14 b (Transit method)
HD 149026 b (Transit method)
HD 189733 b (Transit method)
HD 209458 b (Transit method -- First planet known to transit)
2M1207 b (Direct detection via infrared imaging)
Upsilon Andromedae b (Spitzer direct detection provided constraints on inclination)
HD 17156 b (Transit Method)
Epsilon Eridani b (HST astrometry)
Gliese 436 b (Transit method)
XO-1 b (Transit method)
XO-2 b (Transit method)
XO-3 b (Transit method)
XO-4 b (Transit method)
CoRoT-Exo-1 b (Transit method)
CoRoT-Exo-2 b (Transit method)
CoRoT-Exo-3 b (Transit method)
CoRoT-Exo-4 b (Transit method)
CoRoT-Exo-5 b (Transit method)
HAT-P-1 b (Transit method)
HAT-P-2 b (Transit method)
HAT-P-3 b (Transit method)
HAT-P-4 b (Transit method)
HAT-P-5 b (Transit method)
HAT-P-6 b (Transit method)
HAT-P-7 b (Transit method)
HAT-P-9 b (Transit method)
TrES-1 b (Transit method)
TrES-2 b (Transit method)
TrES-3 b (Transit method)
TrES-4 b (Transit method)
Lupis-TR-3 b (Transit method)
SWEEPS-4 b (Transit method via HST)
SWEEPS-11 b (Transit method vi HST)
OGLE-TR-56 b (Gravitational microlensing)
OGLE-TR-211 b (Gravitational microlensing)
OGLE-TR-132 b (Gravitational microlensing)
OGLE-TR-113 b (Gravitational microlensing)
OGLE-TR-111 b (Gravitational microlensing)
OGLE-TR-182 b (Gravitational microlensing)
OGLE-2003-BLG-235L b (Gravitational microlensing)
OGLE-2005-BLG-071L b (Gravitational microlensing)
OGLE-2006-BLG-109L b (Gravitational microlensing)
OGLE-2006-BLG-109L c (Gravitational microlensing)
MOA-2007-BLG-192-L b (Gravitational microlensing)
TW Hydrae b (Planet inclination determined via interaction with protoplanetary disk).
PSR B1257+12 A (Pulsar timing, detection planet-planet interactions)
PSR B1257+12 B (Pulsar timing, detection planet-planet interactions)
PSR B1257+12 C (Pulsar timing, detection planet-planet interactions)


The others are candidates, whose true masses are unknown.

My point is that we have been inferring the presence of water on Mars for a long time, with increasing confidence, using tests that explain its presence (e.g., hydrogen in the soil detected from orbit, etc.). I guess what I'm trying to say is that when do we absolutely, unambiguously state that something is "proven"? I would argue that some people might claim that microlensing or transit methods are still only indirect indicators that an extrasolar planet is present...they won't believe it until they see it with their own eyes. Heck, we knew that there was water vapor (in the form of clouds) in Mars's atmosphere, we even saw the chunk of ice under Phoenix after it landed - but we were unwilling to state with confidence that there was indeed water on Mars until we had separated out its elemental hydrogen and oxygen. For all I know, there may be people who would claim even after the TEGA results that there could be some other explanation for what was produced in the experiment. They won't believe it until they can melt the water themselves and run it over their hands.

All I'm saying is that we humans, especially non-scientists, have a hard time believing something until we actually experience it first hand. Witness the number of people who still don't believe Apollo happened - and that is something that is provable. I won't even get into evolution - or for that matter, the pathogenic ("germ") theory of disease. Although they explain almost everything we see, they are still only theories.

Many people are much more willing to interpret their senses or perceptions than to trust in theories. I saw it, therefore it must be what I think it was. I think that's the basis for the other 99% of the internet!!

There are lots of compounds containing H, and several that can form clouds or sublimate under martian atmospheric conditions.
However, there is only one molecule that melts at 0 oC and has a molecular weight of 18.
Case closed

Something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPi588QohEg

That does it. I'm gonna send Chuck Norris over to kick her ass.

He no longer makes house calls. She'll have to make an appointment at his clinic.

<aghast> Of course. How could I forget??!</aghast> Chuck Norris does not kick one's ass on demand; it must be presented for appropriate treatment at a time & place of his own choosing!

EDIT: just got off the phone with Pat Sajak. We have her last known address, which of course I have transmitted to Chuck Norris. It's only a matter of time now. (Chuck Norris employs a very persuasive global staff that will convince her to make an appointment at a convienient time....for Chuck Norris.)

From a BBC caption of a Full Moon...

"The moon will appear high in the night sky"


Don't full moons appear on the horizon, just after sunset ?............

BTW tonight the full moon will appear bigger as it is closer to the Earth.

Wouldn't the moon, after having appeared on the horizon, continue to rise until it was 'high in the night sky'?

Edit: Oh, I get it. You mean "appear" as in "spring into sight". I guess "appear" in the BBC caption should be taken to mean "be present (at some point)".

Yeah - that one's a bit more semantics. Although being the BRITISH Broadcasting Corporation, and this being a transient astronomical event - it's cloudy. So the correct headline would be "Unusually bright moon to be obscured by cloud"

Doug

So then the full moon might 'spring into sight' high in the night sky, through a gap in the clouds.

The full moon, being opposite the sun, has the reverse of the sun's seasons. In the summer the sun at noon is significantly higher above the horizon than it is at noon during the winter. The reverse is true of the moon, at midnight during the winter the full moon is much higher above the horizon than it was during the summer.

Just to get it all somewhat straight...

The "full Moon" occurs when the Moon is 180 degrees around from the Sun in Earth's skies. That doesn't happen at sunset/moonrise at every point on Earth. In fact, the Moon is only exactly 180 degrees around from the Sun for a split-second. Of course, the *apparent* amount of the visible lunar surface that is sunlit is such that the Moon *appears* full for most everyone around the globe for 15 or so hours on either side of its exact moment of "fullness."

Which brings us to "appear." The verb doesn't just mean to become visible after not having been visible. It also is used to specify in what particular place you can see an object. For example, you often see picture captions with language like "Dione appears in the lower left portion of the image, with Saturn's cloudtops in the background." Or "The rock in question appears in the right-center portion of this image, taken on Sol 743."

When I walk outside well after sunset and see the Moon high in the sky, I can say that "the Moon appears very high, large and bright tonight" without the Moon having been invisible to everyone, everywhere up until the moment I stepped out the door...

-the other Doug

Due to the geometry of the furniture orientation and the bedroom skylight, during a few of the winter months and at fuller phases, the moon will shine through the skylight and hit me square on the face in the early morning hours. Although it's not an official full moon name, I usually refer to this as the "Annoying Moon".

For all practical purposes, this moon "suddenly appeared high in the sky" from my observation point on the pillow.

Score one for the BBC....

Sounds like the ancient Aztecs constructed your home.

!

I just saw Benjamin Button... a pretty good movie, I thought, but when they showed the Moon over the water, it was a mirror image!

Phil

EDIT: this post was entered by my impudent daughter Annie

After 5 years, Mars rovers still going

"Not all of it has been triumphs. A spacecraft carrying an earlier version of the rovers blew up when it was three days from landing on Mars. Successes still amaze Christensen, though, particularly the landing of these rovers."

Huh? What on earth are they babbling about? The TES-instrument on Mars Observer maybe?

At least it wasn't that damn Apollo image they always use with Mare Crisium in the center.

Not to be outdone, UPI published a story today with a caption for the stock MER-on-the-surface painting that was not only clearly written before the MERs landed but also gives Spirit's touchdown date as Jan 3, 2003.

Well, they only had 5 years to correct this...or is it six?

I think one of the reasons for a lot of this dumb reporting is the attitude by the media that with just a little background or by reading one or two articles they can understand anything complex. Listen to Del Palmers audio clips of funny moments and there are two really dumb questions at the end. What's really telling is that in both cases the reporters don't even realize how absurd their questions are. One reporter is interested in the possibility of Meridiani water indicating that perhaps Schiaparelli and Lowell really did see water in their so-called canal observations (a mere hundred or so years ago). The other wants to know if there is going to be definitive proof of life on Mars within the subsequent three weeks.

I don't fault these two guys as members of the public for considering scenarios based on limited discussions of Mars they have learned through popular culture. But for pete's sake, the editor should know enough to send someone who has a superficial inkling of the current understanding of the science involved. While it would be nice for each of them to have a science correspondent, I understand the budget realities of staffing. But with a thing this big on the horizon all they really needed to do was sit someone down with a recent book in the weeks preceding the event. Having worked with the press for so long, I really think there is an arrogance that they know or can know about any topic in a detailed way very easily. Sometimes I think I'd like to hang around a journalism school to try to understand this phenomenon.

Overheard on CBS Radio this afternoon:

"It was so cold in northeastern Ohio last night that residents saw the Northern Lights, which are normally visible only at much colder polar latitudes."

I hear and read this everywhere. In a recent BBC TV programme about (Joanna Lumley) going to northern Norway in search of the northern lights a so-called local expert said that they wouldn't be expected for a few days as the weather was 'too warm'. There is a reference in the lyrics of Harry Partch's composition "US Highball" to the northern lights being indicative of cold weather. Apart from cold correlating with clear skies there can't be anything in it (can there?) How did this very prevalent myth get going?

I don't quite know if this counts, but did anyone catch Griffin calling Phoenix a rover today during his goodbye speech? :\

I can't see any causative link, Nigel; the 'air' @ auroral altitudes is barely thick enough to even transmit the effects of temperature as we're used to thinking of it. I'd say the myth was borne of the fact that the latitudes at which aurorae are commonly visible (maybe 60 deg north or better) are usually pretty chilly at night anyhow. Plus, cold air is usually also quite still air, which enhances visibility unless there's an inversion.

Wow, AA, did he really say that?? I'll have to listen to the sppech.

From Reuters today, boldface is mine:

"One of the "errors" that Galileo made, which Galluzzi suspects may have been attributed to his bad eyesight, is that he believed Saturn was not perfectly round but may have had an irregular, inflated side.

With his 20-power telescope and with his eyes in bad shape he might have mistaken Saturn's gaseous ring to surmise that it was formed of one planet with two moons as satellites."

I'd possibly have given the author a pass if he was referring to the F-ring alone, but he wasn't, of course.

Why is it not mentioned in the article that Saturn really is flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator? There's no way to know from the article if the fault lies with the reporter, or that Galluzzi guy.

It's enough to make a far side/dark side purist's head explode.

NASA Sees Far Side of the Sun
"After all these years," (mission scientist) Guhathakurta quipped, "we're finally getting to see the dark side of the sun."

A guy can have some fun, can't he? But at the risk of confusing the mainstream press.

Never expected to be able to post a PERSONAL example here, but it happened today..!

I had a call from a BBC reporter yesterday. She didn't start well. "I understand you're a big UFO expert?" she said. Sigh. "No, I'm the exact opposite... I'm an anti-UFO expert... I'm an astronomer. I think you want someone else, sorry." "Oh," she said, momentarily lost, then came back with "So, can you comment on a UFO story for me?" Always happy to help out a reporter, especially when it's a chance to set them straight on something going on "up there", so when she told me about recent reports of "UFO activity" in Cumbria, specifically about "orange lights seen over Sellafield on January 24th" I told her that many people mistake Venus (now clearly visible to the naked eye) and the Space Station for UFOs. (Indeed, ISS made a very bright pass over Cumbria on Jan 24th, so there you go...) I also said that people often mistake Iridium flares for UFOs, and explained that these are bright flares in the sky caused by sunlight briefly reflecting off the solar panels of satellites high above the Earth.

Just look what she wrote.

Click to view attachment



(link to article - I've asked the reporter to correct it, but no sign of that yet http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cumbria/7884144.stm )

Ahh, those visible mobile phone signals always make ME think I'm seeing things, too.

Sometimes when I get up at night and it's too dark to see my way around, I reach for the amazing cell phone that Stu gave me while he was here. I then hit the speed dial button for the nearest Iridium satellite and presto! the room is lit up by orange flashes as they make their way out of the phone, around the corner, down the hall and up the chimney.

Ah, I see it's been corrected now... glad I grabbed a screen-shot!

And I need that phone back Dan; best torch I ever bought!

Looks like some sort of correction has been made to the article on the web. What I was actually looking for was the ability to comment on the the web article. We could have had some fun, but maybe they only allow commentary on articles written by semi-competent reporters.

Maybe it's just that they only allow commentary from British ISP's? The Guardian allows commentary.

...sorry, Stu, but I'm dyin'! Dan, I gotta borrow that phone; I'm in San Antonio now & my reception sucks for my conventional cel, I need the LaserLink!

On a serious note, I guess...what the hell??? This was written and presumably proofread by someone else before it was published; do other people (not us) actually see cel-phone transmissions? I am completely confounded by this error, probably more so than by the usual misconceptions that plague descriptions of UMSF activities.

No, no, no need... she was really nice when I emailed and pointed out the error, and I like to think she just mis-heard me over the phone, so no harm done, I just thought it was funny, that's all.

( Besides, if I was to be responsible for a BBC reporter being given a hard time it would jeapordise my own radio Outreach work, so we'll leave it at I think. )

By Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
"NASA can land a spacecraft on a peanut-shaped asteroid 150 million miles away, but it doesn't come close to hitting the budget target for building its spacecraft, congressional auditors say." (my bold)

My first reaction was:
Imagine. You work for JAXA, you toil long and hard on the almost miraculous mission that is Hayabusa only to have it turned into an example of NASA can-do-ism which is spread around the world on the AP press wires.

Then I remembered the NEAR landing on Eros.

Still, a lot of people are going to make the connection with the more recent Hayabusa mission

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechn...ed-on-Mars.html

The amount of fail in this article hurts. I'll leave you to enjoy them yourself, but meanwhile...

We have images taken of the back of this thing - Sol 1367

Dan's calib Pancam
http://www.lyle.org/~markoff/pds/257/2P247...P2415L257C1.JPG

a raw frame
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all...CCP2415L7M1.JPG

Normally I don't mind kooky articles like this one - but it doesn't even describe the rover, its mission, its achievements. It just copies and pastes from a paradolia infested forum and makes a 'story' out of a rock.

If this was The Express or The Mail or The Sun....I'd have expected it. But THE TELEGRAPH?

"a panoramic NASA camera known as Spirit."
It hurts...

Looks like a generic "and finally" inch-high snippet from below the fold on p12, just before the Court Circular. It doesn't seem to be saying "OMG alienz?!", anyway, it's saying "Hey, look, the Internet is full of kooks!" (Not exactly news, I grant you, but it's the Snoreygraph after all...) For full-on, fist-in-teeth cringe factor, the BBC radio "Today" programme contains more epic failure than that article, six days a week...

Well, there's a LITTLE bit of tongue-in-cheek in the article...but not nearly enough, and the errata are another issue. I take it that our UK members have submitted appropriate critiques to the editor?

Didn't one of the presenters ask if the recent downturn in solar activity and deep solar minimum was caused by human activity?

Yeesh...really???

For once I'm glad that the US mass media generally ignores space science; if they can't add signal, then at least have the decency not to introduce noise!

This quote would have been extremely helpful in some work meetings I have been attending!

Yesterday's Times - it has been corrected now but the comments from readers at the bottom of the page give the game away!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6337727.ece

I was surprised to see this irritating Mars myth reappear in my morning funnies. But there may be more to the story....
Click to view attachment
Some of the comments here are funny:
“'Every year. Every fracking year.' (Phil Plait, astronomer).... Someone, please! In the name of astronomers’ blood pressure all over the world. Make it stop already."

"Brings to mind what Ernie Kovacs once said.'Even though the moon is only one seventh the size of the earth, it’s further away.'"

But this comment seems to be from the comic writer himself:
"Relax, folks. It’s just using this internet myth as a storyline. Let it play out."

If so, it may be interesting to follow along.

... and the prize for most stoopid criticism of NASA in ages goes to the guy I write about in this post...

http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/2009/05/2...he-point-idiot/