Monthly Archives: September 2007

The Bourne Ultimatum

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I saw this several weeks ago, and the details have faded from memory, but as action hero movies go, this one is a good one and seems to be part of a new trend to make our superheroes less super, more vulnerable, and at least a tad more believable. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is the spy movie counterpart to Batman: haunted by demons of the past, not much of a talker, and unparalleled in hand-to-hand combat. In this third movie installment of the Bourne franchise, both Joan Allen as the good CIA boss and Julia Stiles as the good CIA agent are back, and that’s a welcome change from the habit that many serials get into (such as 007) where each movie requires a new leading lady. Also refreshing, neither Stiles nor Allen plays a leading lady in the Bond sense. I found this movie gripping and entertaining. Director Paul Greengrass makes liberal use of handheld cameras. In fact, Bourne is able to get a steadier look through his ridiculously high-powered spy scope than us poor schmucks get at most of the action in the movie, so much does the frame jerk around. But that’s part of what makes a fairly straightforward action flick more engaging: we are struggling to keep up with the action almost as much, it seems, as Bourne is.

I was astonished to hear some time after I had seen the movie that Bill O’Reilly had labeled this movie unpatriotic, presumably because it mentions that the U.S. Congress is supposed to have oversight of the CIA and there are some corrupt CIA agents. This movie is so far from being anti-American that it gives me a sick feeling to imagine what kind of America O’Reilly dreams of when he says that this is a movie that the “America-haters” will love.

Security at JPL

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I go to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena two or three times a year these days, though in the past it has been as often as 6-8 trips per year. JPL runs the Cassini mission to Saturn, and twice a year the Project Science Group (PSG) meeting takes place at JPL. The PSG is the forum for the exchange of information between scientists and engineers and project managers running the mission. Here is where we discuss things such as the shape of the extended mission, the priorities for spacecraft resources, the prioritization of observations, and the resolution of difficult conflicts on how to run the mission. Because Cassini is an international mission, there is a signficant fraction of the PSG membership that are not U.S. citizens. JPL is run by the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), one of the premier universities for science and engineering. This makes it technically a university environment, but it has a special arrangement with NASA that makes it almost like a NASA center. As such, new requirements from the Department of Homeland Security are being imposed on everyone who works at JPL (roughly five thousand employees) as well as contractors and regular visitors (such as myself) who want to keep their badges that allow access to the lab without going through a cumbersome admission procedure and being escorted around the lab by someone who certainly has much better things to do. These security restrictions, among others, are gradually building an iron curtain around American academia and threatening to isolate the U.S. and stifle scientific collaboration across borders.

A group of JPL employees has filed a lawsuit against NASA and CalTech because the new requirements for a badge require employees to forfeit essentially all rights to privacy. Since I’m not a JPL employee I don’t think I have grounds to join the lawsuit. I had been waffling about whether to sign away my rights and get the new badge. I’ve now decided to keep my privacy and add to the ridiculous hassle of handling visitors at JPL in the hope that it will help make the case that it’s a total and ridiculous waste of time to have these badging requirements.

Iapetus Coming Up

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Cassini’s first and only targeted flyby of Iapetus is coming up on September 10 with a closest approach of a little over 1600 km. Iapetus is the second largest of Saturn’s moons, and it is also quite distant from Saturn. The distance by itself is not what makes it tricky for Cassini to get there, rather it is the inclination of Iapetus’s orbit relative to Saturn’s equatorial plane. A reasonably large orbital inclination, combined with the large size of its orbit, means that Cassini needs to get to a difficult spot (high above the equatorial plane at a large distance from Saturn) unless it encounters Iapetus at one of its two orbital nodes (places where its orbit crosses the equatorial plane). In the case of this particular targeted flyby Cassini is in fact fairly high above Saturn’s equatorial plane (about 600,000 km) when it flies by Iapetus (which will be about 3.2 million km from Saturn at the time). In the two-year extended mission of Cassini (still not formally approved by NASA, by the way), there simply was not enough time to put an Iapetus flyby into the tour because large orbits are slow and therefore eat up a lot of the available time. This is an unfortunate consequence of planning only two years instead of three.

At any rate, we do have an excellent flyby coming up with some spectacular “photo op” images planned along with detailed scientific observations. Iapetus is notable for the large ridge extending at least one-third of the way around the planet on the equator and its bimodal distribution of colors: roughly half the moon is quite bright (like Saturn’s other icy moons) and the other half is among the darkest surfaces in the solar system. There will be a special session of the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in Orlando in October devoted to Iapetus (the session was named “The Yin-Yang Body” by yours truly to reflect this unusual color distribution).

Pearized or Polarized

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Last week in southern California I was shopping for sunglasses and was confronted with a choice I hadn’t anticipated: polarized lenses, or pearized lenses? I played it safe and went for the polarized lenses, so if you need some of the hard-to-find and fruity pearized glasses, they might still be there at the Glendale Galleria.
funny sunglasses