When I was your age ... A million Pluto fans!

I've already ranted at length in this space on my feelings about the IAU's decision last year -- in my opinion, silly and misguided -- to demote Pluto from planetary status (For example, my postings here and here). And I knew that it was an issue that had attracted a lot of interest from the public, and especially students, far beyond the level of public interest in most astronomical subjects. I was struck at the time by how quickly it became fodder for cartoons and even songs written about the ex-planet.
But I hadn't realized just how powerful that level of interest was.
Last week, I joined the popular online social networking site Facebook, because I had read about some other journalists joining the site and finding it useful. Almost immediately, my page on Facebook began showing me the names of "groups" on the service that I might be interested in, based on the groups I had already signed up for. And the very cute name of one of those groups immediately caught my eye: "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet."
As soon as I went to that group's page, it blew my socks off. The other groups I had joined had a few dozen members, or a hundred or so. One of them even had a few thousand. But the Pluto group already had 950,000 members! In the days since then, it has now surged across the million-member mark.
Talk about striking a nerve!
I later read an article about the group (here ) that says within a few weeks of its founding last year, it had become the second-most-popular group on the whole Facebook site. Most of the top groups have more predictable subjects -- political or social causes -- but this one was a big surprise. Passions run very strong about poor little Pluto -- as I had predicted, but even more than I expected.
Alan Stern, lead scientist for the New Horizons mission that's on its way to Pluto and now a top NASA official, has been leading the charge to overturn the IAU's misguided decision, and I wish him well. I think nothing substantive is likely to happen until the IAU has its next general meeting in 2009, but maybe the movement will have gained enough steam by then to get the decision changed.

Google me to the moon

A big new prize was announced today, which may help to spur further development of private space vehicles the way the $10-million Ansari X-Prize did three years ago. (See one of my stories here about the winning SpaceShipOne).
Coming from the same folks, the new $30-million Google Lunar X-Prize will be awarded to the first private company to send an unmanned rover vehicle to the moon, travel at least 500 meters on the surface, and send back lots of pictures of its activities to Earth. Alan Boyle has lots of details in his story today on MSNBC.
Among those who may try for the prize is Armadillo Aerospace, the odds-on favorite to win $2 million next month at the Lunar Lander Challenge in New Mexico. Armadillo's Pixel has already demonstrated that it's capable of winning the prize, as long as nothing goes disastrously wrong between now and then. (See my story on that today at Technology Review)
Things are really heating up in the private space arena, as I've been predicting for years. This could be the busiest year yet, and next year even more so.

Another step toward a new age

Elon Musk's Falcon 1 rocket made a very impressive takeoff today, setting a series of records and making Space Exploration Technologies only the second company ever to send a privately-financed rocket into space (after Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, which flew SpaceShipOne to 100 km three times in 2004). In the process, it set a variety of records, including the highest flight of a private rocket, at 300 km.
The flight ultimately failed, as the second stage went into an oscillation that caused the engine to shut down prematurely. But Musk is confident that the most important objectives were achieved -- a successful first stage liftoff and flight, second-stage separation, fairing separation, second-stage ignition and initial stable flight.
The live webcast was very impressive, showing the whole flight from an onboard camera -- a trick even NASA only learned to do relatively recently. I hope they post a copy of it on their website ( www.spacex.com )

SpaceX will be trying again

After their first launch of the Falcon 1 rocket went awry seconds after liftoff a year ago (March 24), Space Exploration is about to try again. This time, they've even got a live webcast covering the event. (It's at http://spacex.com/webcast.php )
Unfortunately, today's attempt was halted at T minus 1 minute 30 seconds, and it's not clear what the cause was. Such things are normal and expected in the rocket biz, especially with a brand new design. Nothing to worry about. They've scrubbed for today, but they've said they could reschedule for another try tomorrow or the day after.
Kimbal Musk, brother of SpaceX founder and president Elon Musk, keeps a nice firsthand blog on launch events, from right there on Kwajelein Atoll in the Pacific, where these intial tests are being carried out (see it here: http://kwajrockets.blogspot.com/ ). The operational launches will be from spaceports in the US.
Here's a view of the pad, from the live webcast:

Amazing photo of shuttle and ISS

An amateur astronomer in France, Thierry Legault, took this amazing picture yesterday (full-size version here) of the International Space Station and the space shuttle Atlantis, which had just separated from it in preparation for its return to Earth. Legault managed to catch the pair just as they passed in front of the sun, providing a stunningly clear silhouette that shows the newly-installed solar panels on the ISS.
Legault has been taking amazing telescope pictures for years, and has previously taken several shots of airplanes passing in front of the sun, as well as of eclipses and other more usual astronomical subjects, and has written a book (in French) about astrophotography. He has a great collection of pictures on his own website.
Thanks to spaceweather.com, a wonderful website where I first saw this photo.

Pluto blues

I just came across this new song about the IAU decision last week to downgrade Pluto from planet to dwarf planet. It's called "They Demoted Pluto," and I think it's a remarkably well-done and apt song. My kudos to Jimmy and the Keyz.
At least people are talking passionately about a scientific (sort of) issue! How often do you hear a catchy song with lines like this:
"God, I hate the IAU
They demoted Pluto
What's a guy like me to do?
They demoted Pluto..."

Retreating from crazy, IAU proposal is now just bad

I should point out that my diatribe below about the crazy IAU proposal being debated this week is already obsolete, since an amendment to the original definition was adopted earlier today that would trim the number of planets from the proposed 53 (masquerading as 12) down to just 8. This decimation of the population was accomplished by adding one simple phrase, that the object must dominate its region of space. That immediately knocks out Ceres (part of the asteroid belt), and Pluto, Charon and 2004 UB313 (parts of the Kuiper Belt). So instead of gaining 44 planets, the solar system loses one, namely Pluto, and everybody who cares at all about this is just going to be very ticked off (except Neil Tyson of New York's Hayden Planetarium, who had already made the decision to go to just 8 planets).
It's an improvement over having 53 planets, which obviously nobody was going to take seriously, and eliminates the craziness of including Charon, and the weirdness of including Ceres. But really, what's the point?
Defining the "region" that must be dominated by a planet is intrinsically arbitrary. So why bother? If we're going to have an arbitrary definition, on a matter that affects culture far more than it does science, why not use the arbitrary decision that fits harmoniously with what culture has overwhelmingly agreed on, and is simpler and easier to rememeber to boot? Accept anything bigger than Pluto, or (virtually the same thing) bigger than the nice round 1,000 km radius, and everybody's happy. Kill off Pluto as a planet, and no scientific purpose is served, but lots and lots of people will be very angry. That's the choice that the astronomers in Prague now seem to be heading toward, like lemmings streaming toward a cliff.
Clark Chapman, an asteroid and comet specialist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder and someone who has spent a lot of time researching and thinking about the way astronomy is communicated to the public, agrees with the size-cutoff idea, as does Michael Brown, the discoverer of the "tenth planet." But almost nobody else has spoken up publicly for this simple, commonsense solution. Here's what Clark said about it in a recent email he sent me:
"Because the public is interested and involved, and because historical precedent is important, the solution I preferred (and sent last week to some of those involved in the Prague discussions) would have been to accept the nine planets we have had for most of a century, and add anything as big or bigger than Pluto to the list of planets."
Too bad he's not in Prague. I'm not sure if Brown is or not. We'll see what happens.

pluto comix

Cartoonists have been having a field day with the IAU planet debate. Many of them have used it as a foil for political satire about Bush being on another world. Here's a selection.
And here's one that's actually relevant to this discussion: http://www.cagle.com/news/Planets/images/matson.gif

Astronomical lunacy

When is a moon not a moon? Well, apparently it's when a bunch of astronomers get together and get so far off in their little ivory tower that they lose all touch with common sense.
The proposal being considered this week at the International Astronomical Union's meeting in Prague has a lot of things wrong with it -- like the fact that it instantly expands the number of planets from 9 to about 53, and tries to conceal this fact from the public by claiming it's only an expansion to 12 (Michael Brown, discoverer of the "tenth planet" temporarily named Xena, explains this all very clearly HERE). This is a surefire way to guarantee that nobody will ever take this loony idea seriously. But the craziest part of the whole proposal is its attempt to reclassify Pluto's moon Charon as a planet.
The overall definition of a planet being offered, that it's anything round that orbits a star, is one of the four main proposals that have been out there, and which I have described elsewhere (HERE is my summary of the proposals, from an artucle I wrote in New Scientist last year. I think it's still about the clearest summary of the different ideas that I've seen anywhere, if I do say so.) The definition they chose is probably not the worst idea that's been floated, but it certainly isn't the best one.
But then, completely out of left field, unrelated to any of the discussion that's been going on relatively soberly for more than a year, the IAU committee just made up a whole new, incredibly esoteric and geeky criterion having to do with whether the center of mass of the system is inside or outside the planet's surface, and thus -- poof! A wave of the wand -- Charon is suddenly a planet, which nobody had ever suggested seriously before. There's simply no way a rational person in touch with the world could have made such an outrageous, nonsensical leap. Nobody wanted it, nobody understands it. There was no reason for it.
So, the upshot is that, as I said before, the whole fiasco is just going to end up being totally ignored by everybody, and rightly so. The astronomers can crawl back to their ivory towers, and the rest of us can go along as though nothing had happened -- except that millions of schoolkids around the world will be confused out of their minds, and many of them will figure out that astronomers are just fools.
What is a continent? It's not something geologists debate about. There is no rational definition. Why is Europe a continent? Because of history. Why is Australia the smallest continent, and Greenland the biggest island? Because we say so -- there is no pretense that there's a rational basis for putting the cutoff in size where we do, we just do. Nobody's going to try to change it, nor is anybody going to try to claim there's a rational basis for it. We just live with it.
The astronomers had a chance to provide a definition that would have made everybody happy -- and I do mean everybody, except perhaps the most pointy-headed of the astronomers themselves. Everybody understands that A) any definition is going to be at least somewhat arbitrary, and B) that astronomers themselves, in their actual work, don't give a hoot about such semantic distinctions, it's really only the public at large who are affected by any of this. So why not act accordingly, by adopting a basic philosophy of trying to screw things up as little as possible? And it turns out there's a very, very easy way to do that, provided as a gift by mother nature.
It so happens that Pluto is a bit more than 1,000 km. in radius (1,150), while the asteroid Ceres, Pluto's moon Charon, and most Kuiper Belt objects are well below this threshold (Ceres, which would be a planet under the IAU's silly scheme, is just 450). The new "tenth planet" discovered by Michael Brown last year, at about 1,500 km radius, is bigger than Pluto.
So since any definition is going to be arbitrary anyway, why not just accept the nice, convenient round number of 1,000 km radius, and declare that anything bigger is a planet, anything smaller is an asteroid or comet? Period, end of story. Simple definition, and very easy to remember, no confusion. And that means the solar system has just grown by one, from nine planets to ten. That's a result that anybody can accept -- we've added new planets several times before as new discoveries were made, most recently with the discovery of Pluto in 1930. It's a normal part of the process, and instead of turning people off about crazy astronomers, would actually make people excited and upbeat about astronomy. There's a new planet! There might be more still to be discovered! (Though not a huge number, at least not within our capacity to discover anytime soon.)
A rational answer, a simple definition that would make everybody happy. But nobody is even seriously considering it. I've loved astronomy all my life, I know and respect many, many astronomers and consider many of them my friends, including most of those involved in this stupid debate. But I think they've totally lost their minds, and if they go ahead with this nonsense they will lose public respect, big time. Too bad for them. I hope they come to their senses, but I think the chances of that are virtually nil.

And now it's gone

As expected, the asteroid 2006 HZ51, discovered last Thursday, has already been removed from the potentially hazardous objects list. It was taken down just after noon today, after additional observations ruled out any possibility of impact.
That's the outcome everyone expected, of course, as I explained in my original posting (below). It has now been moved over to the "list of removed objects" page. All 165 of its possible impact dates have now been ruled out.
But, as I said then, what was interesting about this case, as with so many objects that come and go from the list, is that it helps to focus our thinking about the whole issue of possible impacts, and often a newly-discovered object has interesting, unique features that illustrate different aspects of how we might respond to a real threat. In this case, the fact that there was a potential impact so soon -- just over two years away -- highlighted just how unprepared the world still is today for such a threat. If there had been a real risk, there would have been almost nothing we could do about it, with so little lead time. That underscores the importance of thinking ahead, planning, and doing the necessary research and testing so that we might have a way to respond, even to a short-term hazard (although two years would be a tough one, even with much greater advance preparation).
Anyway, once again the planet is safe for now. Phew.