Meeting This Sunday Sept 29

All:

Fall is in the air, the nights are getting longer, and it is time for another monthly meeting!

As always, 6:30, Spaghetti Warehouse, Plano, off of Rt 75 and 15th street, this Sunday, September 29.

There is lots to discuss, including Curiosity’s discovery of a mild, wet Mars past, a lack of methane in the present, Voyager 1 officially leaving the solar system (!), and our plans for activities going into next year. With the convention in Houston, I bet we can have a lot of local attendance, and with us being close, we probably are well positioned to help out with the convention planning!

Hoe to see many of you at this Thursday’s AIAA talk by Todd Barber of JPL on Curiosity. Remember – if you are going, it is not at ‘our’ Spaghetti Warehouse, but the one in Arlington.

See you Sunday!

Kurt

Zubrin Quoted in NYT and DMN

In the September 20th edition of The Dallas Morning News, there was an article about Curiosity’s failure to detect significant methane in the Martian atmosphere. The article was originally published in the Sep. 19th edition of The New York Times. In it, Bob Zubrin was quoted as follows:

“If it had found methane, that would have been killer,” Zubrin said, referring to Curiosity. “Yes, it’s disappointing in that we didn’t get a pony for Christmas. But it doesn’t mean there aren’t ponies out there.”

Thanks to Zubrin, we can now imagine Martian ponies roaming the canyons of Valles Marineris!

You can read the complete article at the following NYT webpage:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/science/space/mars-rover-comes-up-empty-in-search-for-methane.html

Meeting Minutes for August 2013

All:

On August 25, 2013 we had our regular monthly meeting, with six members in attendance. Mark, who had attended the convention, was unable to make it, as he was at a tweet-up for MAVEN! We are looking forward to hearing more about that at the next meeting.

We discussed the moon day activities, as well as the convention, and our T-shirt sales. All of our t-shirts did sell, but with the new, higher prices from Zazzle, our existing price of $25 left us with only a narrow profit to spend on club activities. We will probably need to look for other vendors or raise prices next year. It also might make sense to go for a full 50 shirts to get the discount, as we sold out the 40 we got without even any sales to the local chapter (which also means I need to order online to keep my collection complete!).

We also discussed how to get our compilation of past Mars Society papers going again, and I think we have a plan! It is good to see us setting out on this project again.

This was my first Mars Society meeting after a missing several (the monthly meeting, Moon Day, and the national convention) while I mended from surgery. It was good to be back with everyone!

Till next month!

Kurt