Friday, March 28, 2008
It's a lot easier to get Congress to create popular new initiatives than
to pay the cost of keeping them up. The most popular tourist attraction
in the Capital is the Washington Monument; if Congress threatens to cut
its operating budget the Park Service announces it will have to close the
Monument. Told on Tuesday that the cost of the Mars Rover mission must be
cut 40%, Steve Squyres of Cornell, the PI, announced that either Spirit or
Opportunity would have to be euthanized or at least hibernate for the rest
of the fiscal year. Are they kidding? The cyber generation has bonded
with the rovers. Designed for a three month lifetime, the cuddly rovers
have been going for four years, living on sunshine and never complaining
about the cold nights. You might as well announce that the National Zoo
plans to cut expenses by tossing the panda cubs into the pirana tank.
That was clear to, Michael Griffin, NASA Administrator, and on Wednesday
he ordered the budget cut rescinded immediately.
We know Michael Griffin immediately overrode the decision, but we don't
yet know who ordered the cut in the Mars rover budget in the first place.
NASA Chief Scientist Alan Stern then announced his resignation. Maybe he
he had ordered the money be taken out of the Rover. Stern joined NASA
less than a year ago as head of the Science Mission Directorate. The NASA
staff was still trying to absorb the news about Stern's resignation when
it was revealed that NASA's chief scientist, John Mather, had submitted
his resignation. A senior astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight
Center in Maryland, and an adjunct professor of physics at the University
of Maryland, Mather shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with George
Smoot (WN 6 Oct 06) . However, it was
just a coincidence that the resignations of Stern and Mather came so close
together. Mather told WN he had resigned to devote more time to
preparations for the James Webb Space Telescope, and said his resignation
was not at all abrupt.
WN reported in January that a Japanese astronaut was training with a world-
champion boomerang thrower to see if a boomerang can circle in zero
gravity (WN 25 Jan 08) .
We are pleased to announce that Takao Doi has now conducted the experiment
and reports that “it flew the same way it does on Earth.” The experiment
does helps to put the ISS in perspective.
The hope was to raise the profile of science in the campaign. So far,
science has no profile at all. I can't recall it coming in the campaign.
Organizers have not quite given up on an 18 Apr debate in Philadelphia,
but it's not looking good. The only thing that's clear so far is that
this is a lousy way to pick a President.
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