According to Colwell

You have to like a comic book movie that casts Robert Downey Jr. as the superhero and Gwyneth Paltrow as the plain jane unnoticed assistant. Jon Favreau, my co-star from Deep Impact, directs this entertaining action outing. Downey (Downey Jr.?) plays Tony Stark, the genius son of one of the creators of the atomic bomb. After graduating from MIT at 17, the young Stark followed in his father’s footsteps by creating high-tech weapons for Stark Industries. One of the likable aspects of this movie is how cheerfully unlikeable Stark is. Downey Jr. (Downey?) can make an unlikeable, obnoxious, selfish, womanizing, amoral, weapon-building genius likeable like no other. And it’s not just because he poses for pictures with the troops in Afghanistan who are taking delivery of Stark’s latest and greatest missile system that promises to rain unprecedented destruction on the countryside.

One thing leads to another, and next thing you know Stark decides maybe he can use all those clever robots and computers in the basement of his palatial L.A. home for something more constructive than weapons. As Iron Man, Stark flies around in a high-powered form-fitting metal suit complete with, well, weapons, a heads-up display, and a bluetooth cell phone. The plot revolves around the double-dealings of Stark Industries with the bad guys and the good guys, perpetuating war for the sake of arms sales and Tony’s transformation from CEO to Iron Man. The action is entertaining, but what sets the movie above the run-of-the-mill flying superhero movie is the devil-may-care attitude of Stark, who is clearly having as much fun as the audience.

Not surprisingly, the titular smart people of this movie aren’t so smart. Or to be more accurate, they’re smart about some things (Victorian literature and whatever you need to know to get a perfect SAT score), and incredibly dumb about just about everything else, especially how to get along with other people. What is surprising, and disappointing, is that they are also not very interesting. Dennis Quaid plays Lawrence, a curmudgeonly professor at Carnegie Mellon desperately trying to get his book published and just as desperately trying to become head of his department, even though he dislikes everyone else in it. Ellen Page plays Vanessa, his 17-year-old daughter who has learned how to be a pompous ass intellectual from her father. Her mother is dead, and her brother is at college and is the token normal person in the family. An accident in the opening act sets up Lawrence with Janet, a young doctor (Sarah Jessica Parker) and brings his “adoptive brother” Chuck into the household. Thomas Hayden Church brings the only funny moments with his deadpan observations, but they are scattered too thinly throughout the movie. Quaid plays the grump so convincingly that it is hard to believe Janet’s interest in him. She was a student of his long ago, so perhaps she remembers a kinder, gentler Lawrence. But no, we are told that he was just as pompous then as now and was even responsible for making her change her major from English to Biology. That obviously worked out for her, but as Chuck points out, “if you tell someone they’re stupid they’re probably going to hate you.” Lawrence spends his life telling everyone but Vanessa exactly that. Vanessa is a high-strung overachiever who doesn’t know how to have fun. Chuck tries to show her, triggering another bizarre and unbelievable relationship. I wanted to like this movie and found much to like about it. The performances are solid, and I was rooting for Lawrence and Vanessa to turn their lives around. But the script is thin and the pace slow. Interesting conversations are begun and then abandoned, giving the movie an incomplete feel.

NASA has formally approved a two-year extension to Cassini’s mission at Saturn. While not a surprise (we’ve been planning the extended mission for nearly two years, and are a significant way through the process of the detailed observation plans for that time period), it is welcome news. The nominal mission ends June 30 of this year, four years after Cassini arrived at Saturn. The extended mission takes Cassini through Saturn’s equinox and nearly doubles the number of orbits or “revs” of Cassini around Saturn. Each rev brings close observing opportunities for Saturn’s atmosphere as well as its retinue of moons. Ring observations will be particularly hectic at the beginning of the extended mission (which hopefully will soon be known as the Equinox Mission), and then again around equinox as Cassini observes the thermal response of the rings as the Sun moves from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere of Saturn. The equinox period is also when shadows cast by small vertical warps in the rings will be longest and easiest to observe, providing new measurements of the dynamics of the ring system.

Coming up: further discussions of what we can learn with an extension of the mission after the two-year Equinox Mission.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter with its powerful HiRISE camera onboard came within 6000 km of one of Mars’s tiny moons, Phobos, providing some of the best images yet of this moon.

The Stickney crater on Phobos imaged from MRO. Credit: NASA/JPL/Univ. Arizona.

The large crater on the right, called Stickney, is comparable to the size of the moon, suggesting that had the impactor that formed the crater been a little more massive (or traveling a little faster) it would have shattered the moon, leading to a debris ring around Mars. Phobos survived that impact, but its fate is sealed. Because Phobos orbits Mars in less than a Martian day (only 7 hours and 40 minutes compared to the Martian day of about 24 hours and 40 minutes), it races ahead of the tidal bulge that its gravity produces on Mars. This tidal bulge then produces a torque that, unlike that of the Earth on our Moon which is causing it to move slowly away from the Earth (because the Moon orbits the Earth much slower than the Earth rotates, causing it to lag behind the tidal bulge it raises on the Earth, expressed by the ocean tides) retards the motion of Phobos causing it to spiral inward toward the planet. This will cause Phobos to hit Mars in less than 100 million years. Before that happens it is likely to be torn apart by tidal forces making a debris ring around Mars which itself will quickly decay into Mars’s atmosphere.

Phobos, like Mars’s other moon Deimos, is likely a former asteroid, captured into orbit around Mars through a combination of tidal dissipation and perhaps atmospheric drag from an earlier, denser Martian atmosphere. Although Phobos orbits quite close to Mars, its small physical size means that it is not able to fully block the Sun as seen from the surface of Mars. Nevertheless, the Mars rover Opportunity took this series of images showing Phobos transiting in front of the disk of the Sun. Phobos’s aspherical shape can be clearly seen in silhouette.

Phobos transits the Sun

Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell.

Ken and Ray are a pair of hitmen cooling their heals in Bruges, Belgium, on the orders of their boss following their latest hit. Ray (Colin Farrell) is wound-up, nervous, and acts like a kid being dragged around a museum by his parents in the person of Ken (Brendan Gleeson). Ken looks and acts like a friendly uncle to the squirming Ray, scolding him when he misbehaves and trying to calm him as Ray complains about being stuck in Bruges. It’s rather quaint until we are reminded of the gruesome business the pair have just completed back in England and the psychopath, Harry Waters, who sent them there. This dark comedy definitely comes down on the dark side of the spectrum, but there is something sweetly naive and endearing about Ray, even as he decks an American at a restaurant for complaining about Chloe’s (Ray’s date) cigarette smoke. The American (who actually is Canadian (just his luck)) wonders why he and his wife should have to die because of the (smoke-blowing) arrogance of Chloe. Ray points out that’s probably what the Vietnamese thought before decking the pair and escorting Chloe home. Ray is frequently very much like a five-year-old with no impulse control and fierce fighting skills, but a childish sense of right and wrong. It falls to Ken to help Ray grow up before it’s too late.

Alan Stern resigned as NASA’s Associate Administrator of the Science Mission Directorate. In his short tenure as AA Alan had embarked on an ambitious program to overhaul how SMD operates. Speaking from the perspective of a university researcher, his changes to the Research and Analysis programs were a great improvement: faster and better communication between NASA HQ and proposers, longer terms for typical awards coupled with new “on-ramps” for young researchers, new science programs to capitalize on the new exploration initiative, and new programs for small space experiments, such as sounding rocket experiments. Of course, anytime there is something “new” without an increase in the budget means there’s going to be a cut to something “old”. Alan addressed the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences meeting last October and said that in a zero-sum budget environment, his plan to get new missions and programs started was to hold the line on budget overruns on existing programs. Many high profile missions are running over their budgets. His departure suggests that he may not have had the flexibility he needed to deal with those cost overruns. Hopefully some of the changes he did manage to institute during his short tenure will persist into the new administration.

Earlier this month a paper was published showing evidence of rings around Saturn’s moon Rhea. This would be the first case of rings or other natural material orbiting a planet’s moon, though asteroids and Kuiper belt comets have been observed to have natural satellites. The Cassini project issued a press release announcing the results. The press release is titled “Saturn’s Moon Rhea Also May Have Rings” and includes phrases like “this is the first time rings may have been found around a moon”. The careful wording stems from the nature of the observation and the lack of a visual confirmation of the rings (so far, at least). Among Cassini’s dozen instruments are charged particle detectors that measure the energy and abundance of electrons in Saturn’s magnetosphere. Moons plowing through the magnetosphere usually leave a wake in the magnetosphere - a region downstream of the moon that is relatively depleted in charged particles. On one of Cassini’s close flybys of Rhea, however, the Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument (known as MIMI) detected localized regions near Rhea with fewer electrons, indicating that some material near that region absorbed those electrons. The most intriguing aspect of the MIMI measurements is that the instrument detected dips on each side of the moon at locations consistent with the electron absorption being produced by a circular ring around Rhea. Rhea itself, while large, is a relatively unremarkable moon (putting aside the issue of its possible rings).

Cassini image PIA09841 of the moon Rhea.

The next most intriguing aspect of the discovery is that no images show any material orbiting Rhea. That doesn’t mean there aren’t rings. Cassini’s cameras (like all cameras) see the surfaces of things. The more surface area something has, the easier it is to see it with a camera. MIMI, however, indirectly measures the mass of an object. The more massive it is, the better it is at absorbing electrons. So the objects that absorbed MIMI’s electrons must be relatively large. To have enough dust particles to produce the observed absorptions, those particles would have been detected by Cassini’s cameras. The puzzle is compounded because larger particles would naturally produce dust as a byproduct of meteoroid bombardment on the larger particles. We are left with a mystery wrapped in a conundrum. Future observations of Rhea are planned. Images with greater sensitivity may reveal the rings. Cassini’s dust detector will sample the dust population near Rhea during Cassini’s extended mission. Stay tuned.

This lighthearted romp of a movie follows the dowdy and down-on-her-luck governess Miss Guinivere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) through 24 hours in London on the eve of World War II. Desperate for work, she takes the place of another worker from an employment agency to become the social secretary for Delysia Lafosse, a flighty aspiring American actress. Amy Adams plays Delysia with an almost irresistible effervescence. She lives in the penthouse sweet of a wealthy bar-owner, Nick, while seducing a young play producer in the hope of getting a lead role. Lurking in the wings is her true love, Michael (Lee Pace of Pushing Daisies). There is little suspense over the eventual outcome, but a lot of fun on the way there.

Today Cassini flies only 50 km over the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and grazes the edge of the water vapor geysers spewing ice from cracks near the moon’s south pole. NASA has set up a blog to chronicle the flyby here, where there is detailed information on the geometry and promises to be some exciting images and results in the next day or two.

This tense heist thriller is based on the true story of a London bank robbery in 1971. Four days after the robbery, the U.K. government issued a “D-notice” that requests the media to stop reporting on the story. The media complied, meaning that relatively little is known about the actual robbery. This gives the movie a fair amount of leeway while still maintaining a claim of veracity. Not that it really matters. The story as told in the movie, however much it might deviate from or adhere to the actual events, is gripping and taut. Jason Statham plays Terry, a car mechanic with a petty crime past who, with his mates, jumps at the chance to make one big score and get out of small-time crime and low-income labor. That chance is served up by Martine, played by Saffron Burrows. Martine is a model and one-time friend of Terry’s who gets busted for a drug offense. A government official tells her that if she can steal some compromising photos of a member of the royal family that is held in a safe deposit box at a London bank, she’ll be free and clear. The problem is that it must be done with no official government involvement, so the bank job must still be pulled off in spite of the best efforts of the bank and the police to prevent that sort of thing.

What no one bargained for is that lots of people have a tendency to put embarrassing and compromising material in their safe deposit boxes, and many of them can get extremely upset when that material goes missing. Pulling off the robbery is not the most challenging aspect of the operation. The movie is tense and suspenseful, and I have to confess that the link to a real bank robbery added to the intensity for me. Some aspects of the movie are certainly fiction, but the basic events and historical figures are real.