Starship Asterisk*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Planets wrote:
<<The Planets, Op. 32 is a seven-movement, orchestral suite by the British composer Gustav Holst, written between 1914 and 1916. The first complete public performance took place on 15 November 1920, with the London Symphony Orchestra. The suite has seven movements, each of them named after a planet and its corresponding Roman deity:

• 1. Mars, the Bringer of War
  2. Venus, the Bringer of Peace
  3. Mercury, the Winged Messenger
  4. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
  5. Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
  6. Uranus, the Magician
  7. Neptune, the Mystic

The order of the movements corresponds to increasing distance of their eponymous planets from the Earth. Some commentators have suggested that this is intentional, with the anomaly of Mars preceding Venus being a device to make the first four movements match the form of a symphony. Critic David Hurwitz offers an alternative explanation for the piece's structure: that "Jupiter" is the centrepoint of the suite and that the movements on either side are in mirror images. Thus:

• "Mars" involves motion and "Neptune" is static;
  "Venus" is sublime while "Uranus" is vulgar, and
  "Mercury" is light & scherzando while "Saturn" is heavy & plodding.

This hypothesis is lent credence by the fact that the two outer movements,
"Mars" & "Neptune", are both written in rather unusual quintuple meter.

"Neptune" was the first orchestral piece of music to have a fade-out ending. Holst stipulates that the women's choruses are "to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed", and that the final bar (scored for choruses alone) is "to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance". Although commonplace today, the effect bewitched audiences in the era before widespread recorded sound—after the initial 1918 run-through, Holst's daughter Imogen (in addition to watching the charwomen dancing in the aisles during "Jupiter") remarked that the ending was "unforgettable, with its hidden chorus of women's voices growing fainter and fainter... until the imagination knew no difference between sound and silence". A typical performance of all of the seven movements lasts for around 50 minutes.

Pluto was discovered in 1930, four years before Holst's death, and was hailed by astronomers as a new planet. Holst expressed no interest in writing a movement for it—he had become disillusioned by the popularity of the suite, believing that it took too much attention away from his other works. In August 2006, the International Astronomical Union for the first time defined the term "planet", which resulted in a change in Pluto's status, from a planet to a dwarf planet. Thus, Holst's original work is once again a complete representation of all the extraterrestrial planets in the Solar System.>>

emc wrote:Reminds me of an eyeball. Kinda like Mars is looking for something… say… trouble… know what I mean? What are them Martians so opposed to anyway? Probes marring their landscape perhaps? Parking illegally… people starring all the time… gawking at their keen ability to hide. Reckon them Martians got plenty to be opposed to. I mean would you like it if some alien outsider landed their nosey robotic self in your front yard without a permit or not even so much as a “do you mind if I land my nosey spacecraft in your yard and do some diggin…?”

http://weblogs.marylandweather.com/2010/01/lorton_meteorite_falls_into_ow.html wrote:
Lorton meteorite falls into ownership fight

<<You knew this had to happen: The Lorton, Va. doctors whose office was drilled by the meteorite that fell from the sky Jan. 18 are now in a battle with their landlord over the ownership of the Lorton meteoritespace rock. The docs donated the meteorite to the Smithsonian, and according to this morning's Washington Post, the Smithsonian gave them $5,000 as an expression of their gratitude (and recognition that the stone is worth far more on the commercial market). But now the landlord is asserting his rights as the owner of the land where the meteor fell. He claims the rock is his, and he may have the law on his side. For now, the Lorton meteorite remains at the Smithsonian. Four-and-a-half billion years drifting in space, and it ends in an all-too-human scrap over property and money.>>

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002324/ wrote:
Opportunity's thousand-year-old crater
By Emily Lakdawalla | Jan. 29, 2010
Please donate to support our blog, website, and podcast.

<<Since leaving Marquette Island on sol 2,122, Opportunity has been barreling southward on her journey toward Endeavour crater. On her horizon for the last several sols has been a very small but very fresh looking crater named Concepción.

Concepcion crater (Opportunity sol 2138)

Credit: NASA / JPL / mosaic by Emily Lakdawalla

How do I know the crater is "fresh?" The ejecta is very very blocky and is mostly resting on top of the surrounding soil. There's certainly no evidence that the sand ripples have marched over the blocks, so the crater formed since the time that the Meridiani dunes have last moved. However, it didn't form yesterday, or its center wouldn't be filled with dust.

So how do we know this thing is 1,000 years old? Matt Golombek was kind enough to explain things to me. In an abstract that he and several coauthors will be presenting at this year's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, he explains the process by which they arrived at the age of a different set of craters visited by Opportunity, the so-called "Resolution" cluster. This included craters referred to as Resolution, Adventure, Discovery, and Granbee, which Opportunity visited from sols 1,818 to 1,854. They used three different methods to estimate when the ripples in Meridiani last moved to be approximately 100,000 years ago; and the Resolution cluster is superposed on the ripples with no evidence of being deformed by ripple motion, so it's younger than 100,000 years old.

• 
  Concepcion crater from HiRISE___The Resolution cluster of craters

Matt told me that the Resolution cluster "has no rays, which have been found for the very youngest craters that have impacted in Meridiani (and elsewhere). The Concepción crater has what look like degraded dark rays in HiRISE images, so we would say it is younger than the Resolution cluster.... but not as young as other very fresh impacts in Meridiani that have both bright and dark rays." These very fresh, bright-and-dark-rayed impacts have not been visited by Opportunity. You can perform statistical analyses to arrive at an age estimate for them of some decades old. Concepción's morphology -- having degraded rays -- places it intermediate in time between the Resolution cluster and these other very fresh craters, or between several decades and about 100,000 years old. Thus the age estimate for Concepción of about 1,000 years old. It's not exactly a definite age -- Matt told me "all of these ages should be considered as nothing more than educated guesses, but they do provide some constraints.">>