Chris Lintott’s Universe

The main point of our visit to the Goddard Space Centre a day or two ago was to catch up with the team behind the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is now less than a year from launch. Obviously we were following some more prestigious British visitors, but they were extremely nice to us anyway. It’s a shock to realise that the Apollo era data just isn’t good enough to plan for a manned return to the Moon, and so LRO’s task is to create the ultimate lunar map from an orbit just 50km above the lunar surface. The impact of these pictures should be spectacular; they’ll show such fine detail that we should be able to see the tracks left by the lunar rovers the Apollo astronauts used. The spacecraft parts are being assembled at Goddard now, and we were allowed to get up close and personal with the spacecraft bus (the chassis, essentially). I’m now paranoid my jinx will strike, but they do seem to know what they’re doing. I promised I’d plug their website, which is here.

Andy has an interesting take on the Gemini crisis. It’s essentially a salient reminder that it’s the government and not the STFC that’s responsible for the loss of funding. That’s true, but the thing that scares me about the Gemini decision is that the apparent lack of consultation. Instead of asking the astronomical community to save £4 million, they’re just planning to shut of access to one of our major facilities. That isn’t how these decisions are supposed to be made.

There’s a response from Gemini themselves, which is best summarized as ‘putting a brave face on it’. It’s so depressing to be writing about such things instead of results like these.