Curiosity

Next Monday – with a bit of luck – the latest Mars rover mission will land on the red planet without mishap and begin its battery of scientific experiments. NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, otherwise known as Curiosity, is due to touch down inside the giant Gale crater, which lies on the Martian equator, and once the rover gets itself into gear, it will trundle off to investigate a great mountain of debris in the crater which was named Mount Sharp but is now officially called Aeolis Mons.

Walter Frederick Gale, by the way, was a 19th century Australian astronomer and Mars observer, who like Percival Lowell thought he was able to see canals on the planet’s surface. Robert P Sharp was a geologist who worked for NASA, and the Aeolis quadrangle is one of the 30 subdivisions of the Martian surface, named after Aeolia, the floating island home of Aeolus, the ancient Greek god of the winds.

I find Curiosity a very pleasing and apt name for this mission. I hope that Aeolus will smile on this latest venture, and that the rover will survive the landing and set out, like a nuclear-powered robotic Mini Cooper, to solve a few more of the red planet’s mysteries – CosmOnline has a good article about the mission here.

Perhaps in future centuries they will build a museum for all the brave little machines we have sent to explore the deserts of Mars – they could call it the Hall of the Rovers. Or maybe each one will remain at its last resting place when the batteries finally ran out, and become the centre of its own miniature museum – each one a shrine to the perpetually ingenious and inquisitive human spirit.

New Transcripts from the Climate Debate

One of my current interests is making transcripts out of interesting (to me) bits of audio and video I find on the internet, mostly to do with climate change. One of my favourite sources is BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, which often has good interviews related to this subject and where items seldom last longer than about 6 minutes, making them very quick and straightforward to transcribe.

Here are a few from last week, which saw the Department of Energy and Climate Change, here in the UK, appear to emerge victorious from a battle with the Treasury over cuts to subsidies for onshore wind farms. I say “appear to” emerge victorious, because it looks as though DECC may be conceding that natural gas will play an important part in electricity generation beyond 2030. And that means that carbon targets will be missed.

Before the Today programme excerpts, here’s an item from BBC Radio Scotland, with MP Tim Yeo of the Commons’ Energy and Climate Change Committee describing the rift with the Treasury. And here he is on Radio 4 the same morning. Two days later, Ed Davey – the UK Secretary for Energy and Climate Change – is talking here on Radio 4 and answering (well, actually doing his best to avoid answering) questions on the subject. Finally, an item of related business news here, with Martin Wright, Chairman of the Renewable Energy Alliance giving his reaction to the proceedings.

All this, I realise, will be mostly of interest to fellow die-hard followers of the climate debate.

For anyone reading this blog who finds that topic about as interesting as watching concrete set, there will be a post on a different subject along shortly!