How’d you like to visit Mars? You can. After setting out 21 months ago on a seven mile journey to Endeavour crater, the Mars Rover is now more than halfway to its destination. At present, it is traveling over an endlessly flat dune field that extends almost as far as the eye can see.

In this cropped version of the rover’s view from yesterday, you can faintly see the rim of the crater on the horizon. The full 360 degree image is even more amazing, showing a stark but truly beautiful desert. Notice also the completely lifeless nature of this terrain. There is no place on Earth, even in the Sahara, that is this lifeless.

The Obama Administration announced a new space policy on Monday, downloadable here.

The policy seems big on international cooperation and studying the Earth’s climate. See this article by Tariq Makik for a nice summary.

Though the policy also proposes going to the asteroids and Mars, the take-away quote for me is this: “As established in international law, there shall be no national claims of sovereignty over outer space or any celestial bodies. The United States considers the space systems of all nations to have the rights of passage through, and conduct of operations in, space without interference. Purposeful interference with space systems, including supporting infrastruction, will be considered an infringement of a nation’s rights.”

In other words, no planetary body, no surface land, can be owned by anyone. Sounds like communism to me. It also sounds amazingly naive and childish.

On June 21, 2010, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published an article, “Expert credibility in climate change”. The paper’s stated purpose was to compare the credibility of scientists who are skeptical of human-caused global warming with those who accept it. One of the paper’s authors, James Prall, also maintains a blog where he has published the full list of skeptical scientists.

As far as I can tell, the article’s actual goal, far more ugly and insidious, was to create a blacklist of global warming skeptics, which can then be used as a sledge hammer to destroy their reputations and careers as well as make it difficult if not impossible for them to publish in scientific literature.

Very ugly and stupid. Roy Spencer, climate scientist, sums it up nicely. So does researcher Roger Pielke Jr.

Fortunately, it appears in general that the blacklist is not getting a lot of play in the press. However, here is a perfect example of how this list can and was intended to be used to smear and discredit any scientist who expressed skepticism about global warming.

It is downright disgusting that any respected news organization would give this blacklist such enthusiastic coverage.