According to Colwell

The Dawn spacecraft successfully launched yesterday en route to two of the largest asteroids in the solar system. Ceres, the largest asteroid and now termed a “dwarf planet”, like Pluto, under the new IAU nomenclature, has one-quarter the mass of the entire asteroid belt. Dawn’s other target, Vesta, is a bit smaller It will first visit Vesta, arriving there in September 2011 and orbiting along with it for about 6 months before using its low-thrust ion propulsion system to put it on a rendezvous course for Ceres with a February 2015 arrival.

Asteroids are interesting objects because they are leftover building blocks from the era of planet formation. Those objects, called planetesimals, ended up becoming part of a planet or an asteroid if they had rocky composition or a comet if they were primarily icy. That is, comets and asteroids are both leftover planetesimals that didn’t make it into a planet due to the whims of dynamics over the past 4.5 billion years or so. Of course, every now and then, an asteroid or comet takes the plunge into a planet, such as the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impact into Jupiter in 1994 or the infamous asteroid that struck the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago, beginning a really bad year for a lot of species. Dawn will give us a look at two of the largest of these leftover planetesimals. Both Vesta and Ceres are large enough to be differentiated, meaning that the dense metals have sunk to the center (like on the Earth and other planets). Interestingly, we actually have samples of Vesta here on the Earth. Vesta’s basaltic (lava-like) crust has a recognizable and distinct spectrum that matches certain classes of meteorites. Just as some meteorites are fragments of the planet Mars, identified by the relative abundances of isotopes of gases characteristic of Mars’ atmosphere, certain meteorites can be traced to Vesta by their spectra. Dawn is basically a mission of exploration to learn as much as possible about these two protoplanets, hopefully providing clues to the conditions at the dawn of the solar system in the process.

Our new state has confirmed its decision to hold its presidential primary election on January 29, 2008. Aside from the inevitable presidential campaign fatigue that the accelerated primary schedule is forcing on us, the primary problem with this schedule is that it violates the rules of the Democratic National Party and thus appears to prohibit Florida from having any delegates at the national convention next summer. Candidates have promised not to campaign in Florida because of the rules violation (the rule required Florida hold its primary February 5 or later, so for some reason Florida has decided one week was too much). One possible explanation for this ridiculous turn of events is that the Republican-led state legislature forced the early schedule to allow GOP candidates more face-time with Florida voters than the Dems, thus perhaps giving them an edge in the general election. However, the Dems in the state legislature have generally gone along with the plan to schedule the election early. Personally I would rather not have any primaries anywhere before March. I think we’re going to be sick of our next president from overexposure before he or she even takes office.

This lighthearted romp imagines an episode in the life of the French playwright and actor Moliere that serves as inspiration for many of his later plays. Familiarity with his plays would have added an extra layer of appreciation for the movie (so I gathered from Anne-Marie’s reaction), but even being woefully ignorant of his works, the movie is still quite enjoyable. Moliere is plagued by a simultaneous gift and scorn for farce. He yearns to produce serious theater but is absolutely terrible at it. He learns, through his extended stay at the manor of a wealthy aristocrat, that comedy can be used to explore human truths just as well. Moliere, played by Romain Duris, is employed by Monsieur Jourdain to train him to act so that he can impress a young widowed Countess with whom he is besotted. Jourdain is buffoonish and deluded by his own dreams of impressing the pretty Countess even though she is snobbish and unappealing and his own wife is both beautiful and interesting. Moliere lives in their mansion pretending to be a priest educating Jourdain’s daughter so as not to arouse the suspicions of Madame Jourdain. He arouses something else entirely. The framework for a farce is thus built into this episode of Moliere’s life, and in the imagination of the screenwriters Laurent Tirard and Gregoire Vigneron, the storey of Jourdain’s rehabilitation inspires Moliere’s later plays.

The latest sign of the decline of civilization can be seen in this humorously presented snippet from “The View” where one of the hosts proudly proclaims ignorance about whether the Earth is flat.

Here’s another stunning picture of the bright-dark terrain boundary on Iapetus. Prior to this encounter, we only had a distant global view of the satellite showing the leading hemisphere (in its orbital motion around Saturn) to be quite dark and the trailing hemisphere to be mostly bright (like most icy moons at Saturn). These new images show black deposits near the boundary that should help us uncover the origin of this material. Click the picture to go to the full resolution image and caption.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

I hope that my future never depends on eyewitness testimony. Years ago I heard about this study in The Skeptical Inquirer (among many others that scientifically demonstrate just how unreliable eyewitnesses are). A recent article in the New York Times provided this link to the original video. Watching it is even more incredible than I thought it would be on reading it. Knowing what the video is, the test doesn’t work, so I won’t say anymore here. Just watch the video and try to be sure to count every successfully completed pass of a basketball between people wearing white shirts only. The experiment only works if you concentrate on successfully counting the passes by the white team.

Here are just a couple of the amazing pictures showing the dichotomy of bright and dark terrain on Iapetus, imaged now by Cassini in high resolution for the first time. See www.ciclops.org or saturn.jpl.nasa.gov for more pictures.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

This is a great shot of Iapetus’s equatorial ridge. This doesn’t look anything like a tectonic feature, emphasizing its origin in tidal forces on the bulk body of the moon. Very cool!

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Data from Cassini’s unique close encounter with the unusual large moon Iapetus yesterday will be downlinked today and tomorrow. The spacecraft went into safe mode last night, but indications are that virtually all Iapetus data is intact and the spacecraft continues to be healthy. Safe mode is entered into by a spacecraft when it encounters a situation that its software is not anticipating. When that happens the spacecraft shuts down non-essential systems and goes into a safe pointing attitude to insure power (in the case of spacecraft with solar panels) and communications with the Earth. Safe mode is our friend, and while we’d generally like to avoid it to avoid interruptions to normal operations, safe mode is just the spacecraft looking out for itself. When it’s a billion miles from home, better safe than sorry.

My Best Friend stars the ubiquitous (in French cinema, anyway) Daniel Auteuil as a fast-dealing antique and art collector who is accused by his soft-spoken business partner of having no friends at all and no ability to make a friend. Scandalized by the audacity of the accusation, Francois (Auteuil) makes a 200,000 Euro bet with his partner Catherine that he will present his best friend to her in ten days. Described this way, the setup sounds like a distinctly Hollywood gimmick. But the movie is pure French in tone. Auteuil does his usual splendid job of creating a likeable character, even when the character is so manifestly unlikeable. He initially takes on the task of finding a friend in the same way he looks for a good buy in the art and antiquities market. He tries to get expert advice from sociable people. He performs experiments at the department store and in the park. He attempts to throw money at the problem. Of course these efforts don’t go very far and it is late in the 10-day game that he realizes he may have inadvertantly gained a friend in the amiable taxi driver Bruno (played by French comedian Dany Boon (yes, really)). He’s so excited that he’ll win his bet that he fails to realize what having a friend and being a friend mean. If it sounds a bit trite, perhaps it is. It is the kind of comedy that leaves you smiling more than laughing. Thankfully, though, there is no sermonizing message on the meaning of friendship, just a frank (pun intended) portrayal of different characters who need friendship, even if one of them doesn’t realize it.

As a side note, we saw this at the Enzian Theater and Cafe in Winter Park, one of the few places in Central Florida where it is even possible to see a foreign movie. We were a bit spoiled by the dozen-or-so screens showing independent and foreign movies in the Denver-Boulder area. The Enzian is a dinner theater for movies, with a full dinner menu and waiter service at your table while you watch the movie. For lighthearted fare like this movie, that works great. For more emotionally involving movies, though, I think the ambience, with its soft lighting and rustle and bustle of waiters, would be a distraction.