Chang'e 2: an update

The story of the tracking of the Chang'e 2 probe actually begins with images taken by a Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) telescope at the Mount Lemmon Observatory in Arizona. CSS scans the skies near each new moon, looking for asteroids and comets. The emphasis is on finding asteroids that might hit the earth.

One problem in doing this is that to a telescope, an asteroid and a probe or piece of space junk look very much alike. Each appears as a slowly moving "star" in the image. Fortunately, Earth-orbiting objects are usually moving very fast and in certain ways that enable them to be recognized as man-made right away. But high-orbiting probes and space junk can be tougher to classify right away.

On a related subject, has anyone ever done "There Ain't No Stealth in Space" the tune of "There Ain't No Cure for Love"?

crap

I think I just deleted someone's actual comment while nuking spam. Sorry, whoever it was. It was not intentional.

Mindwebs: Treasure Hunt and The Sound Machine

Treasure Hunt

Yeah, I don't have much to say about this one except to say it's not often I encounter a Joseph Green story these days. He was mostly active as a writer in the 1960s and 1970s; only ten of his 40+ stories post-date 1980, although one of them was published in 2011.

The anti-war angle is interesting, given this:



[added later]

Had I only looked at Green's website I would have seen he has a number of recent publications I overlooked. They can be found here.

The Sound Machine

And the moral of this is "don't ask questions unless you are sure you can tolerate the full range of answers."

Mindwebs: Subjectivity and TheSnake and TheFly

Subjectivity

Skipping quickly past the sexual politics of this vintage Spinrad, I have to ask "did anyone else started muttering "That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp," during the litany of failed missions? I cannot sortout whether the predictability of this story is because I know how SF of this era works or because I remember reading it 40 years ago.

The two interesting things about this Hallucinogenic Drugs Save the Day tale is that it's from 1964, so kind of early for that sort of story, and that it was published in John W. Campbell's Analog.


The Snake and The Fly

The first one is creepy but I don't know that I'd call it fantasy or SF. Horror, maybe?

The second one.... well, it filled out the half hour.