Meanwhile, in Space
Yesterday, Saturn time (if such a thing can be said to exist considering the mind-rending effects of special relativity and the illusion of simultaneity), the Cassini spacecraft released the Huygens probe, which, on January 14, California time (see above) will hard-land (read: crash) on Titan, hopefully answering some of the many questions which have arisen about the smog-covered world (like where the hell all of that plastic came from.) The release manouver was extremely hazardous, involved big springs, and could have easily sent the $3.3 billion spacecraft tumbling off into deep space, never to be heard from again. But it went off so smoothly, our favorite outer solar system robot pair was upstaged in the mainstream press by the launch of a Russian cargo ship carrying dim sum to the intrepid-but-starving astronauts of the ISS. The moral: JPL rocks.
Oh yeah, speaking of rocks, the most dangerous asteroid ever discovered was found this week, scoring an unprecedented 4 on the Torino impact danger scale (read: be kinda concerned, but don't start buying stuff on credit just yet.) Subsequent observations will either rule out the danger or set April 13, 2029 as the kickoff date for the Mad Max home game.
Happy Holidays!
Next stop for Cassini is the strange, two-toned moon Iapetus. In Arthur C. Clarke's novel version of 2001: A Space Odessy, the climactic encounter with the monolith was set on Iapetus instead of in orbit around Jupiter, but Stanley Kubrick changed the plot because it was too hard to simulate Saturn's rings. Clarke, a resident of Sri Lanka for many years, escaped the horrific tsunami unharmed.
Oh, and asteroid 2004 M4 will narrowly miss the Earth in 2029.
You wanna know how freakin' cool JPL is? They had float in the Tournament of Roses Parade shaped like a giant freakin' robot! Remember: everything's cooler with giant robots!
Posted by El Destructo at 2:25 to 
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