BACK IN THE DAY... Around 7 years ago this month, I started posting journal entries talking about Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones. Little did I know, Attack of the Clones was gonna be the least watchable of the Star Wars prequels...let alone the whole Star Wars film saga itself. Of course, I’m just posting this particular Blog to give me an excuse to show this hot screenshot of Natalie Portman as Padmé Amidala, and that cool wallpaper of the clones fighting on the planet Geonosis. Wow. That was the only highlight of the movie.

That, and Yoda doing a Sonic the Hedgehog (with a lightsaber) impersonation against Count Dooku. That is all.

FAREWELL PHOENIX, WE HARDLY KNEW YE... Earlier today, NASA declared the Phoenix Mars mission a success, after ground controllers lost radio contact with the lander 8 days ago:

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(Official Press Release)

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased communications after operating for more than five months. As anticipated, seasonal decline in sunshine at the robot's arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander's instruments.

Mission engineers last received a signal from the lander on Nov. 2. Phoenix, in addition to shorter daylight, has encountered a dustier sky, more clouds and colder temperatures as the northern Mars summer approaches autumn. The mission exceeded its planned operational life of three months to conduct and return science data.

The project team will be listening carefully during the next few weeks to hear if Phoenix revives and phones home. However, engineers now believe that is unlikely because of the worsening weather conditions on Mars. While the spacecraft's work has ended, the analysis of data from the instruments is in its earliest stages.

"Phoenix has given us some surprises, and I'm confident we will be pulling more gems from this trove of data for years to come," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Launched Aug. 4, 2007, Phoenix landed May 25, 2008, farther north than any previous spacecraft to land on the Martian surface. The lander dug, scooped, baked, sniffed and tasted the Red Planet's soil. Among early results, it verified the presence of water-ice in the Martian subsurface, which NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter first detected remotely in 2002. Phoenix's cameras also returned more than 25,000 pictures from sweeping vistas to near the atomic level using the first atomic force microscope ever used outside Earth.

"Phoenix not only met the tremendous challenge of landing safely, it accomplished scientific investigations on 149 of its 152 Martian days as a result of dedicated work by a talented team," said Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Phoenix's preliminary science accomplishments advance the goal of studying whether the Martian arctic environment has ever been favorable for microbes. Additional findings include documenting a mildly alkaline soil environment unlike any found by earlier Mars missions; finding small concentrations of salts that could be nutrients for life; discovering perchlorate salt, which has implications for ice and soil properties; and finding calcium carbonate, a marker of effects of liquid water.

Phoenix findings also support the goal of learning the history of water on Mars. These findings include excavating soil above the ice table, revealing at least two distinct types of ice deposits; observing snow descending from clouds; providing a mission-long weather record, with data on temperature, pressure, humidity and wind; observations of haze, clouds, frost and whirlwinds; and coordinating with NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to perform simultaneous ground and orbital observations of Martian weather.

"Phoenix provided an important step to spur the hope that we can show Mars was once habitable and possibly supported life," said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Phoenix was supported by orbiting NASA spacecraft providing communications relay while producing their own fascinating science. With the upcoming launch of the Mars Science Laboratory, the Mars Program never sleeps."

The University of Arizona leads the Phoenix mission with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin Corporation in Denver. International contributions came from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark; the Max Planck Institute in Germany; the Finnish Meteorological Institute; and Imperial College of London.


(Phoenix Landing Video...which I made last May.)

Well— At least the robotic arm will no longer be pouring dirt onto the Phoenix DVD. Accidentally, that is.




All images courtesy of NASA / JPL - Caltech / University of Arizona / Texas A&M University / Lockheed Martin

PHOENIX Blog Entries Archive:

May 8, 2007
July 28, 2007
August 3, 2007
August 4, 2007
August 8, 2007
October 25, 2007
April 11, 2008
April 25, 2008
May 1, 2008
May 11, 2008
May 18, 2008
May 24, 2008
May 25, 2008
May 27, 2008
June 18, 2008
August 4, 2008

OBAMA WINS THE PRESIDENCY... I voted for McCain this morning. Even though all signs for the past few weeks pointed to the Senator from Chicago winning the election by a landslide (364 to McCain's 163 with the electoral votes), I voted for the ‘maverick’ from Arizona for the sole fact I was rooting for him since the presidential primaries last January. Oh well.

I have a message for Obama: Good luck the next 4 years, don’t do anything foreign-wise to make the gas prices go back up (I would actually tell that to McCain if he won. Whatever) and keep to your word... Don’t F*CK UP NASA’s human spaceflight program. That is all.



UPDATE (November 4, 8:22 PM PST): Props to McCain for giving a great concession speech to his supporters in Arizona.

UPDATE #2 (November 4, 9:17 PM PST): Obama's acceptance speech was pretty darn good, too.

AND THAT'S A WRAP! I just read on Michael Bay's official website that he completed filming on Transformers 2 last week. Awesome! Here's hoping that we do see a teaser trailer for it sometime this month (in front of the next James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace, anyone?)...and that Industrial Light & Magic has been working on the visual effects for quite some time now, so that we'll see some really awesome robot shots in the trailer. *Crosses fingers.*

By the way, the Screen Actors Guild can now have its stupid strike. Unless, of course, Michael Bay has to do a re-shoot, or has several scenes that require ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement). If those are the cases, then keep that federal mediator on payroll, SAG.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, EVERYONE! Don’t know what I’ll be doing tonight (seeing as how I’m currently feeling sick, maybe I’ll just stay home and hand out the usual apples with razor blades in ‘em. Just kidding), but I do know what I’ll be having for a hardy meal before the day is over:

Pork chops with pumpkin pie as a dessert.



Just kidding again. Maybe.

UPDATE: I got this cool little image in an e-mail by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory yesterday. It shows, in case you couldn't figure it out yet, a black cat hitching a ride on the Cassini spacecraft, the planet Saturn (which Cassini is actually orbiting right now) as a ghost, and Saturn's moon Titan as a pumpkin. Nice.

PHOTOS OF THE DAY... Wow. I do remember gas prices being that low...

CLASS OF 1998 REUNION... Last night, I attended my 10-year high school reunion at a restaurant in Pasadena. Pretty much a lot of my former classmates who I talked to before yesterday were apprehensive about showing up at the event. Of course, if any of you have already attended your get-together, you would know why. What would you tell them if you still lived at home? What would you say if they asked you about your job, which wouldn’t exactly be the most exciting or prestigious occupation out there (one of my old classmates used the term: "Not being accomplished yet")? What if you run into people who you didn’t get along with in high school a decade ago? For the most part, there was no reason to worry about these issues. My reunion went off really well!



Even without boozing up to feel relaxed for the event, it was easy to approach almost everyone at the restaurant. Even if it was people who I didn’t talk to AT ALL back in my alma mater, they were very friendly when I walked up to them to start a conversation. Granted, the conversation was brief ("Hi. What’s your name again? I’m Richard. So what’ve you been up to? Just work? Me too. All right, talk to you later")...but the fact everyone bonded last night was what made the reunion an awesome experience. And do I even need to mention how this helped make it easier for me to walk up to hot girls who I didn’t talk to that much in high school and take photos with them? There was one girl who I couldn’t approach for a pic (since she was sitting next to her fiancé on a couch for much of the night), but that’s okay. I was able to take a pic with this other girl (let’s call her Mandy) who was a cheerleader back in high school, and helped organize the reunion. Thanks Mandy...you did a great job!



All-in-all, I am extremely glad I attended the reunion. And that was the sentiment shared by a lot of my old classmates who showed up as well. Some of the other dudes who were considered "jocks" back in high school were cool to talk to, and I got along with one of my, um, former friends who I stopped talking to back in 2004. He’s pretty successful right now... Owns a local motel (which he said he’s gonna tear down and turn into a suite) and several Subway restaurants. I’ll feel envious when he or his family starts buying In-N-Out or Yogurtland shops. Of course, I think a lot of other people would feel envious about that too, haha.



AN ADVICE FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE YOUR REUNIONS COMING UP:

GO TO THEM. The most common remark when you ask someone if they’re going to their get-together—especially in this Age of Facebook and MySpace—is "Why bother? All the people who I’d want to see, I still talk to." Trust me... When you show up to your reunion, that mentality will go away, and you’ll be walking around the room taking pictures and wanting to know what your fellow classmates have been up for the past decade. And you’ll realize that it’s such a great experience to reminisce about the good ol’ days...when all we had to worry about was who to ask to the Prom or when to start that book report...and not about buying a house and then facing foreclosure, or who to vote for who would be suitable to handle today’s crappy economic situation and the war on terror.

I’m looking forward to 2018...

ABOVE: The green line marks the path traveled by the New Horizons spacecraft as of
12:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time, on October 23, 2008. It is 1 billion miles from Earth.
Click here to view the official webpage showing where New Horizons is in space.
(AU stands for Astronomical Units, in case you're wondering.)

NEW HORIZONS Update... Alan Stern, the head scientist for NASA’s New Horizons mission, posted an article on the main website today talking about various mementos that were placed on the spacecraft prior to its launch in January of 2006. Stern revealed the inclusion of the nine items during a speech he gave in the Udvar-Hazy Center (where, off-topic, Tranformers: Revenge of the Fallen filmed four months ago) at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The speech was held during the induction ceremony for the full-size New Horizons model (below) that now hangs from the ceiling of the Udvar-Hazy Center.



Click on the link in the previous paragraph to see what the nine items are. Of those nine, there is one memento that sticks out for me: The compact disc bearing the names of 434,738 people who submitted their monikers through the Internet between February and September of 2006. Even though my name is now safely on Mars onboard the Phoenix lander, orbiting our Moon onboard Japan’s Kaguya lunar orbiter, and heading towards the Asteroid Belt on the Dawn spacecraft (and will hopefully soar into space onboard three more spacecraft that are scheduled to launch in 2009. I’ll mention them around the time they launch, haha), it’s New Horizons that I wish I had my name on. Not that I don’t care about having my name on the probes listed above... I’m really grateful that those space missions provided the opportunity to have the public make its mark on them.



If you go to this journal entry, you’ll see how shocked I was when I found out that I could’ve sent my name to Pluto, and beyond. There was one online article that mentioned how people who submitted their names for New Horizons were pretty much securing some kind of "eternal legacy" for themselves and people they knew whose names they also provided...since New Horizons will eventually leave our solar system—and like Voyagers’ 1 and 2—head for the stars.



Mr. Stern himself mentioned in the article linked in the first paragraph that New Horizons will "fly among the stars and literally outlive the Earth itself." ARG. There was suppose to be a twin mission for New Horizons, known as New Horizons 2 (hope you didn’t try to guess the name too hard), which would’ve did a flyby of Uranus before venturing out into deep space. Unfortunately, this flight never got past the planning stage due to various reasons (one is listed here). It’s gonna be a while till NASA does another outer planet mission where the spacecraft departs our solar system. And when NASA does, I’ll be sitting at my computer...waiting to type my name and submit it to be sent off into the cosmos.

That was corny, I know.

NEW HORIZONS Blog Entries Archive:

September 26, 2005
December 19, 2005
January 7, 2006
January 17, 2006
January 19, 2006
April 12, 2006
June 15, 2006
February 27, 2007
October 22, 2007
June 8, 2008
October 23, 2008

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THE 2008 WORLD SERIES... I’m rooting for Tampa Bay to win it all in the next 2 weeks. Thank you Rays, for unintentionally avenging the Anaheim Angels (don’t say a word, Arte Moreno) last night. F**K THE RED SOX.


Doug Pensinger / Getty Images