WEEKLY WHINE

Tip the scale

Check it out! Someone's going to build the world's largest scale model of the Solar System!

Of course, building a large scale model sort of defeats the whole purpose of a scale model to begin with. But, you know, whatever.

Anyway, the Sun will be located at Jodrell Bank Observatory. If the objects are built to the same scale as the distances, the Sun would be a hundred metres high. Hey, why not? Just construct a thirty floor office building and call it artistic science. If nothing else, it would offer a good pickup line. "Hey, baby. I work in the Sun."

Many of the other planets are to be built at various schools around the UK. They are going to include park benches and a "circular orbital path", which, apparently, is something that you can run around and pretend to be Mars Global Surveyor. Or you can run straight into the planet and pretend to be Mars Climate Orbiter.

They're also including comet 1P/Halley and some asteroids in there. No word on whether they're going to move 1P/Halley through London as it recedes toward the Kuiper Belt.

Speaking of the Kuiper Belt, how do you model that? Sprinkle ice about a thousand kilometres from Jodrell Bank? The Irish and the French might not be too happy about that.

Elsewhere in the week's space news, NASA has put out a white paper explaining the decision not to perform any further Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions. They told us nothing we didn't already know: you can't get to the ISS from HST's orbit, there's plenty of new stuff in development to replace HST, you'd have to have a second Shuttle stack ready to fly a rescue mission if the tiles on the first one break. Besides, just how much work do we have to give to astronaut John "Your Friendly Neighbourhood HST Repair Guy" Grunsfeld?

And returning to the UK, the National Audit Office said that the British National Space Centre didn't make enough fuss about the risks inherent in landing on Mars when they asked for government money for Beagle 2. What, everyone thought that the only reason two of every three Mars missions have failed is that they weren't British? Because you have to say "right-o" instead of "roger"?

And another reference to the Martian surface has us talking about hematite. The little round things that Mars Exploration Rover B found on the surface, the ones that everyone's calling blueberries, seem to contain hematite, which, on Earth at least, tends to form in wetness. Added to their shape, it's looking more and more like Meridiani Planum used to have liquid water on the surface. So how do we get it back? "Heeere, water. Come here, water. I've got a nice low lying basin for you. That's a good water. Who's my big wet water? Who's my big wet liquid water? It's you!"