Recently in The Solar System Category

"Within 40 small craters, one to nine miles wide, they estimated 600 million metric tons of water. Perhaps most notably, 'It has to be relatively pure,' said Paul Spudis, the principal investigator for the instrument that made the discovery."

By way of a friend, scientists find more evidence of lots of water on the moon. "That is significant, because the ice in these craters could be easily tapped by future lunar explorers -- not just for drinking water, but also broken apart into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel." Hmm. Maybe it's time to start thinking of ways to get up there...

"In April, the world will celebrate the quinquagenary of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, so it seems a good time to take stock of the silence. Three new books tackle the issue in three different ways. One, an immensely readable investigation of the SETI enterprise (with a surprising conclusion); the second, a technical guide to what we should be looking for and how; and the third, a left-field argument that the alien question has already been answered."

In New Scientist, Michael Hanlon surveys three new books about the continuing search for alien life, and attempts to grapple with the Fermi paradox."Today it is rare to meet an astronomer who doesn't believe that the universe is teeming with life. There is a feeling in the air that light will soon be shed on some of science's most fundamental questions: is Earth's biosphere unique? Do other minds ponder the universe?"

"I was inspired a great deal by the work of Simon Page and his astrology series. If anyone enjoys this style of art I would highly recommend they check out his work. I also drew ideas from old Art Deco style prints and vintage science fiction posters from the 1960/70's." The LA Weekly talks with Justin Van Genderen, designer of the spiffy minimalist Star Wars posters above.

"The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon. There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all." As expected (and feared) earlier this year, the Obama administration's proposed NASA budget for the next five years cancels any and all plans to go to the moon anytime soon. "'We certainly don't need to go back to the moon,' said one administration official."

Sigh.

Ok, first off, the administration official who uttered the last sentence should be filed away next to Mr. Left of the Left and Ms. Pajamas as people who should no longer speak for the White House in any capacity whatsoever. Full stop, end of story. Putting my speechwriter cap on for a second: In most any political situation, ridiculing the dreams of an entire generation does not make for particularly good messaging.

Anyway, anonymous WH official aside, NASA administrator Charles Bolden sounded a better note about all this: "We're not abandoning anything. We're probably on a new course but human space flight is in our DNA. We are not abandoning human space flight by any stretch of the imagination. We have companies telling us they're excited to get humans off this planet and into orbit. I think we're going to get there and perhaps quicker than we would have done before."

And, to be clear, the administration's NASA budget increases the agency's funding by $6 billion over the next five years. The new budget ups research and development spending into cheaper heavy launch mechanisms, emphasizes more robotic exploration missions and observational experiments into climate change, extends the life of the ISS (although, with only five more shuttle missions remaining, other nations will have to help service it), and works to promote the various commercial space enterprises moving along right now.

All of this is well and good, but it would be nice to see some recognition of the civic importance of manned space flight by this administration. In their words, NASA is scrapping Constellation on account of it being "over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation due to a failure to invest in critical new technologies." And, given that we still had a lot of the expenditures before us, I suppose now was as good a time as any to kill the program if it's not the right direction to go in.

That being said, how many more times are we going to do this? We keep stopping and starting and stopping and starting our post-Shuttle plans for space, so that now, after five final shuttle missions this coming year, we will longer have the capability anymore as a nation to send men and women into orbit. "If implemented, the NASA a few years from now would be fundamentally different from NASA today. The space agency would no longer operate its own spacecraft, but essentially buy tickets for its astronauts." Forty-one years after we first reached the moon, that's just plain sad.

Ultimately, the central finding of the Augustine commission's final report, released this past October after extensive study of NASA's current situation, is a sound one: "The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources." In other words, we've been trying to talk the talk without walking the walk. If we're going to get serious about manned space flight, we need to stop piecemealing NASA and start making manned exploration a funding priority.

In total, the agency is slated to get $100 billion over the next five years. To put that number in perspective, that's less than a fifth of our defense budget for 2011 alone, and that's going by the most conservative numbers around -- NASA's five-year budget could be closer to a tenth of next year's defense spending. (For its part, the Augustine commission set a price tag of $3 billion a year to get serious about manned exploration.)

If we had put anywhere near that kind of money into exploration and R&D over the years, would we now be in this position, where we face the Hobson's choice of replicating expensive 50-year-old launch tech or being completely grounded as a nation? The lack of thinking about our long-term priorities sometimes is staggering to me. I've said this before, but I still believe it holds true: Short of possibly genomic research and advances in AI, nothing we do right now will matter more centuries or millennia hence than establishing a presence off-world...if we even have that long. Not to get all Jor-El up in here, but we really have to start getting serious about this.

"Although that panel suggested a $3 billion boost to NASA's $18.7-billion-a-year budget in order to take a firm next step in human space flight, Obama's support for a $1 billion bump next year represents a major coup for the agency given the ballooning deficit and the continuing recession. And NASA just won a $1 billion boost from Congress for 2010 in a bill signed by the president." By way of another friend, President Obama backs increased funding for NASA's new heavy launcher. "The president's decision to go with the second option is a major departure from his 2010 budget plan, which called for a 5% increase in 2010--the boost just approved by Congress--but then remaining flat through 2014."

Good, although I do wish he'd gone the full $3 billion. In the great scheme of things, not much we do is of larger importance than manned space flight. And 10,000 years from now, people aren't going to remember or much care how many Joint Strike Fighters we built in the Twenty-Tens. But they will know whether or not we took significant steps to leave the cradle and move off-world.

"'The discovery opens a new chapter in our understanding of the moon,' the space agency said in a written statement." It's official: Data from NASA's LCROSS impact of a few weeks ago confirms the recent findings of Chandraayan-1: It ain't Hoth or Rura Penthe, but there is a "significant amount" of water on the moon, like, ice-field size.

"The amount of water they found in the plume was a couple of hundred kilograms in total, but that indicates there is a lot more still lying on the surface. They don't know how much exactly just yet." (As we found out recently, the same might also hold true of Mars.)

"'The full understanding of the LCROSS data may take some time. The data is that rich,' said Colaprete. 'Along with the water in Cabeus, there are hints of other intriguing substances. The permanently shadowed regions of the moon are truly cold traps, collecting and preserving material over billions of years.'" I'm very reminded of James Hogan's Inherit the Stars right now. Also, it's probably about time to start taking lunar exploration a bit more seriously again, eh?

"The European Space Agency is seeking volunteers for a 520 day mission to Mars. The trip will begin in early 2010 and include 30 days on the surface of the red planet. The only requirements are that candidates must be 20-50 years old, in good health and no taller than six feet. You must be able to speak English or Russian and have experience in medicine, biology or engineering. You also must be a resident of one of the ESA Member States, which rules out Americans, but not our Canadian brothers & sisters."

Down and Out in Paris or London (or Toronto)? Well, if you're short of cash and heavy on free time, it seems the ESA is running a 520-day Mission-to-Mars simulation. Please don't be alarmed just because this is how Capricorn One starts. "If you're interested in volunteering, more information can be found here." (RT @Joe Hill.)

"'The space program began the day humans chose to walk out of their caves,' says Chang Díaz. 'By exploring space we are doing nothing less than insuring our own survival.' Chang Díaz believes that humans will either become extinct on Earth or expand into space. If we pull off the latter, he says, our notion of Earth will change forever."

With that red meat for the space cadets among us, the Smithsonian's Air & Space Magazine surveys current theoretical endeavors in propulsion mechanics, including nuclear-based rocketry and fusion. "I grew up watching Apollo, and the systematic and well-thought-out march to that. And they did it. When you look into pioneering topics, there are those people who don't want to touch it because it's too far out there. But if it's mature enough for you to at least start asking the right questions, and you do an honest job, then you can be a pioneer."

"'If you're willing to wait until 2028, you've got a heavy lift vehicle, but you've got nothing to lift,' she said. 'You cannot do this program on this budget.'" President Obama's Human Space Flight Plans Committee is set to announce that getting back to the moon by 2020 is not feasible given current budgetary constraints, and Mars is definitely out of the question. "The final list of options...will include some variation of a lunar base down the road. But the committee is most animated by what it calls the 'Deep Space' option, a strategy that emphasizes getting astronauts far beyond Low Earth Orbit but not necessarily plunking them down on alien worlds.'" Which basically sounds like unnecessarily strapping astronauts to normally-unmanned fly-by missions -- Not sure I see much point in that.

Honestly, this is pathetic. As I said here, it's time to raise our expectations of what we can achieve in space, and fund manned exploration of the solar system accordingly. Particularly given how much we're blowing on the Pentagon's space toys at the moment, we could stand to spend a bit more on one of the most important collective human endeavors still before us.

"So why do tech geeks love space? Though they may have the resources -- a trip to space will now set you back some $45 million -- this can't be the full answer: You don't see Donald Trump or P. Diddy signing up for an astro-mission. What makes it worth it for the tech geeks?" The Big Money's Julia Ioffe tries to ascertain why dot.com miliionaires pay out the nose for space travel. Uh, because it's there?

"'There's a documentary called Orphans of Apollo that's stated this well,' he explained. 'There's a generation of us, who are the tech leaders of today, who were universally inspired to go into science and technology because of the NASA Lunar Space Program. And the reason the movie is called Orphans of Apollo is because, in many ways, we feel orphaned by the fact that the space industry has not done a good job of capitalizing on that momentum of what many of us believed were the first steps into space, carrying the mission of human space flight farther and farther into deep space.'"

"'Houston, Hubble has been released,' Atlantis commander Scott Altman radioed Mission Control. 'It's safely back on its journey of exploration as we begin the steps to conclude ours." The crew of STS-125 re-release the Hubble into high orbit, their epic repair-and-upgrade mission accomplished. "'We have literally thousands of astronomers out there around the world waiting to use these new capabilities,' Morse said. 'And they are chomping at the bit to get their data.'" Great work, Atlantis.

Update: Spiffy pic above -- and many more like it -- courtesy of Boston.com's The Big Picture and Hal at Blivet.

"'An automated rendezvous does all sorts of things for your missile accuracy and anti-satellite programs,' said John Sheldon, a visiting professor of advanced air and space studies at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. 'The manned effort is about prestige, but it’s also a good way of testing technologies that have defense applications.'" In order to keep pace with the increasingly proficient Chinese space program, President-elect Obama may be considering retying NASA to the Pentagon, "because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency’s planned launch vehicle, which isn’t slated to fly until 2015...Obama has said the Pentagon’s space program -- which spent about $22 billion in fiscal year 2008, almost a third more than NASA’s budget -- could be tapped to speed the civilian agency toward its goals as the recession pressures federal spending."

Hmm. On one hand, I would think making NASA yet another fiefdom of the Pentagon would greatly facilitate its ability to lock down the funding it needs for various exploratory endeavors, recession or no. And if the types of conveyance vehicles NASA needs are basically sitting around gathering dust in some Pentagon-owned warehouse next to the ark of the covenant, well then it only makes sense to combine the two programs. No need to reinvent the, uh, rocket.

On the other hand, putting the brass in charge is probably going to have deleterious effects on the types of projects NASA pursues in the future. And, in a perfect world, there's something to be said for having a civilian space program completely outside the purview of the military. In fact, now that i think about it, won't combining the Pentagon and NASA space programs cut back on the types of international cooperation that have guided our efforts in space in recent years? GIven the current economic climate, I guess this is the best way for NASA to continue pursuing its goals in the short term. Still, there could well be trouble ahead.

"The last Twitter post said it all: "01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000."" Or, in other words, Ground Control to Phoenix Lander: You've really made the grade. Having seemingly succumbed to the Martian winter at last, the Mars Phoenix Lander is pronounced deceased by NASA. "NASA official Doug McCuistion counseled people to view Phoenix’s end as 'an Irish wake rather than a funeral. It’s certainly been a grand adventure.'...While some followers said farewell to Phoenix in computer language today, others kept it simple. 'Good bye Phoenix, I love you :(,' said user patach."

Europa, Enceladus...Titan? The ESA's Cassini-Huygens probe discovers a liquid lake on Saturn's largest moon, although it's definitely not water. ""Detection of liquid ethane in Ontario Lacus confirms a long-held idea that lakes and seas filled with methane and ethane exist on Titan." [Via Quiddity.]

"Fact:...The density of Saturn is so low that if you were to put it in a giant glass of water it would float." And another pilfered link, which I meant to post last week: Megg of Quiddity points the way to 10 Cool Facts about Space (although, to paraphrase The Smiths, some facts are cooler than others.)

NASA prepares a probe, named Phoenix, to dig for water on Mars. "Upon reaching Mars in May 2008, the spacecraft is to land just as the winter ice begins to recede around the polar cap."

In "world of the future" news, NASA announces it plans to establish a permanently-staffed base camp on the moon by 2024, preferably at one of its poles. (Here's the rationale.) A moonbase within 18 years? I'm all for it...just keep an eye out for monoliths and make sure Sean Connery runs a tight ship.

If you believe they put "a" man on the moon, then there's nothing up my sleeve, and nothing is cool. Also, you'll have no problem with the recent update to Neil Armstrong's famous first words there. Score one for the lunar grammarians.

Sorry, Virginia (and all the other kids out there who just memorized the solar system): As the dust dies down at the recent astronomer's conference, word comes to light that Pluto has in fact been demoted to "dwarf planet," a status it'll hold with UB313 (Xena) and Ceres.

At a meeting of 2,500 astronomers in Prague to determine the appropriate definition of "planet" (in part due to the Xena challenge), it appears Pluto might soon be reclassified as a "dwarf planet" (as opposed to a "terrestrial planet" (Earth, Mars) or a "gas giant planet." (Jupiter, Saturn)) rather than fully being demoted to non-planet status. Said one proponent of the plan: "I think we have done something that will make the Plutocrats and the children of the United States happy."

"'We certainly have not convinced the community, and that's been a little bit disappointing,' said David McKay, a NASA biochemist and leader of the team that started the scientific episode." Ten years later, CNN summarizes the simmering scientific dispute over a Martian meteorite, and the possible (albeit now seemingly quite unlikely) signs of life within.

The European Space Agency releases the first new pics from their recent "Express" mission to Venus. The Venus Express probe entered Venusian orbit on Tuesday.

After discovering a disk of gas, dust, and rubble orbiting a pulsar, astronomers believe they've figured out how planets are made. "It shows that planet formation is really ubiquitous in the universe. It's a very robust process and can happen in all sorts of unexpected environments."

"'The idea is to look at Mars and not think of it as a mysterious alien place,' Christensen said." Along the lines of Google Moon, one can now journey to Google Mars.

"I think that this mission will re-write the science books on Mars." More happy space news following the discovery of water on Enceladus: NASA successfully pilots the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter into Martian orbit. "It was picture perfect. We could not have planned it any better." (Phew...looks like everyone successfully converted to metric this time.)

"All these worlds are yours, except Europa...oh, and Enceladus." In very big news, NASA announces that Cassini has found water plumes on Enceladus, Saturn's moon. "This finding has substantially broadened the range of environments in the solar system that might support living organisms, and it doesn't get any more significant than that...I'd say we've just hit the ball right out of the park." What's more, "unlike Europa, which researchers believe harbors a vast ocean beneath kilometers of thick ice, Enceladus' water may be just below the surface."

More James Cameron news: Harry of AICN has a wide-ranging conversation with the director which, if you can get past the usual Knowlesisms, reveals that Project 880 is in fact Avatar, and that Cameron has been working with NASA on a "Live Video Stereo Motion Image" (3-D) camera for the next Mars Rover.

The LA Times examines the beginnings of the second lunar space race, which will involve, among others, the US, Europe, China, and India. "Some researchers even have a name for the first lunar city: Jamestown, in honor of the first English settlement in the New World."

I've been extremely derelict in my space coverage around here lately. So, as a quick catch-up: Welcome back, Stardust, and Godspeed, New Horizons.

"To become a multiplanet species, we must master the skills of extracting local resources, build our capability to journey and explore in hostile regions, and create new reservoirs of human culture and experience. That long journey begins on the moon -- the staging ground, supply station and classroom for our voyage into the universe." Astrophysicist Paul Sputig eloquently makes the case for a return to manned lunar exploration.

"Suppose the asteroid is traveling 60,000 miles per hour. You want to make it 60,001." Concerned by the possible 2036 impact of 99942 Apophis, two clever NASA astronauts have developed a tractor beam of sorts to pull asteroids off a possible collision course. Namely, send a relatively small (20-ton) ion-powered spacecraft to intercept and hover near the offending asteroid, and then let gravity work its mojo. "Even as the spacecraft counters the asteroid's gravity, he said, its own gravity will pull the asteroid out of orbit."