This weekend, starting Friday, I’m volunteering with The Planetary Society at the USA Science & Engineering Festival. Should be a grand ol' time. Come by and check it out!

It made me very happy to read that the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array is back in action searching for extraterrestrial signals. I have long been a proponent of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and while the big iron approach can be cinematic, history has shown it’s not the most sustainable way to go about blue sky projects in the face of mercurial Congress-critters.

This is why the Allen Array is so cool. It’s a large and growing collection of relatively inexpensive small dish antennas that, when their powers are combined, constitute a world-class multi-purpose observatory. I have a soft spot in my heart for this scrappy sort of scientific enterprise, having scoured suburban Florida looking for 10-foot dishes during college so I could build a modest (okay, very modest) radio telescope. My plan was to use it simultaneously to map the galactic core at radio frequencies and participate in SETI through the upstart SETI League. With the help of a friend and her father’s truck, I obtained a suitable abandoned dish and somehow convinced my school’s facilities organization to mount it for me on a 16' galvanized steel pipe behind the Psychology building. In said building I was given use of a closet into which I crammed a donated computer and used Icom receiver. I even obtained a very low-noise pre-amplifier and feedhorn to mount at the focus of the telescope.

And then life happened. Thesis, graduation, job. I’m not sure if the telescope ever saw first light. I left the equipment in the hands of a very capable fellow, but I have my suspicions the project didn’t survive the inevitable tide that physically reconfigured the campus in the ensuing years. I’m afraid to ask.

So, hats off to the SETI Institute for keeping on keeping on.

Happy Halloween!

Good tidings from Manned Missions LLC Global Headquarters. Did you see the successful launch of NPP? It’s good news for the folks keeping long term climate data records. We needed some good news on the Earth observation front; the community is still stinging from the loss of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory and it seems our ozone situation up north is getting as bad as in the south.

We also have the launch of the Mars Science Laboratory coming up in about a month. An exciting Fall lineup, I’d say.

And, of course, it’s Halloween. I’m not much of a costume and candy kind of guy, but I like to honor it in my own way. In the spirit of the holiday and to honor successful space launches past and future, I present Manned Missions' first game, The Last Martian Harvest.

For the denizens of the Northern Hemisphere, an age of darkness has begun.

No, I’m not talking about the U.S. general election cycle. Today is the Autumnal Equinox!

I have a soft spot in my heart for equinoxes because the Vernal Equinox is commonly used as a principal axis for Earth-centered inertial (ECI) reference frames, and those reference frames are important in satellite work. And without satellites, all our lives would be just a little less exciting.

As it turns out, the Martian Vernal Equinox was only a few days ago: September 13 at 14:25 UTC. This means the Martian northern polar cap is now experiencing more sunlight each day and its C0₂ is subliming into the atmosphere. The southern cap, on the other hand, is seeing less and less sunlight and condensing large amounts of C0₂ to the planet’s surface. Plan your ski trips accordingly.

The Martian North Pole from within the Mars Exploration Engine

The advantage of being one of the early users of the Mars Exploration Engine is that improvements to the software come thick and fast.

Do you like how I spun that?

So, yes, a performance update is available for download. If you are downloading new datasets like crazy, it’s totally worth it, I promise. My main focus with this minor release was improving the speed of the application while downloads are happening in the background. And, boy howdy, is it better. See for yourself!

As per usual, let us know here at Manned Missions LLC Global Headquarters if you have any problems. Happy downloading!

As promised, scale bars!

Ready for download.

Ryan Anderson of Cornell and the Martian Chronicles Blog was kind enough to mention the Mars Exploration Engine in a recent post. You can see in the very cool video he made a soon-to-be released feature: scale bars. More on that in a minute. His post is right this way.

Meanwhile, I had my own presentation to give on Monday, and I showed the video below. It covers the same region of Gale Crater as Ryan’s video, but you can see how things look quite different when you tweak the engine’s color sliders a little bit. I was going for atmosphere, whereas clarity is a bit more important for Ryan’s purposes — this is science, after all — so you can see deeper and get a better overview with his video. Anyway, here’s what I showed:

So, about those scale bars. They’re pretty much what you’d expect, except they have the added feature of being able to turn off the labels and tick marks. Is that a removed feature? Anyway, the upshot is, aside from measuring things, you can draw a bunch of scale bars in succession to get a path along the ground.

But when we’re in serious mode, we can figure out how far apart Spirit’s backshell and parachute are at the landing site:

And how far away the landing platform is from the backshell:

And, finally, how far away Spirit’s final resting place is from the platform where it started its long roll:

Keep your eyes peeled for an engine update in the next couple of days containing the scale bar feature. If you can’t wait to get to Mars, you can go ahead and purchase the engine now; the update will be a free download for all previous buyers.

I just pushed an important update to the engine that will significantly improve download performance in some cases. Get it while it’s hot!

Aside from bug fixes, what’s coming down the pipeline between now and the next milestone?

• Performance improvements.
• Many more datasets. Tell me which ones you’d like to see and I’ll add them to the queue. (contact@mannedmissions.com)
• Some cool features that for now will remain Très Secret.

What would you like to see?

The Mars Exploration Engine is a way to view HiRISE Digital Terrain Models. Well, that’s what it was. While I was still staring in slack-jawed amazement at the first DTM I processed, my brain turned back on and started asking me questions:

Brain: Hm. Something’s missing. How big is that bit of scenery over there?

Me: Woah.

Brain: I’m on my own, aren’t I?

My brain quickly realized it’s really hard to gauge the scale of things in a totally alien environment. So it thought dropping a human-sized version of the Manned Missions logo into a crater might be instructive. It was wholly inadequate to the task:

The spaceman recedes into a speck before you’re even halfway across this rather modest crater; there’s not much difference between being 200m away and being 1km away.

I awoke from my stupor and shouted, “Empire State Building!”

You’re invited to try it out for yourself!

Just a quick post to pay homage to one of the classics. This book has been with me since 2001 when I had my first serious job out of college. And by “serious” I mean sitting at a desk all day in mustard-yellow carpeted cubicles. I’m on my annual readthrough, but this time I’m taking notes! Watch out!