With our eyes on a proposed interstellar future, we don't want to neglect the real challenges of preserving the steps taken along the way. I'm thinking about this because of a post on an astronomy list (thanks to Larry Klaes for the pointer) by Richard Sanderson, who is curator of physical science at the Springfield Science Museum (MA). Sanderson is worried about the media upon which we store our information, and for good reason. Here's the issue in a nutshell: The difficulties that future historians may encounter are related to the ephemeral nature of digital information and the media used to store it. I can visit an old monastery in Europe, find a giant leather-bound astronomy book from the 17th century, blow off the dust, open it, and read the pages (provided I can read Latin). The only tools required are my eyes and hands. But imagine someone living in the 23rd or 24th century who finds an old box of computer diskettes or CDs. Even if the diskettes haven't been corrupted and the...

There are several reasons to keep an eye on Rosetta, the European Space Agency's mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In 2014, the spacecraft will go into orbit around the comet before deploying a lander to the nucleus. Watching changes as the comet heads toward the Sun should prove interesting indeed, but these short term effects take place within a provocative longer-term context. For aboard Rosetta is a 2.8-inch diameter disc inside a small glass sphere containing some 6000 pages of information. The subject: The languages of planet Earth, many of which will disappear before century's end. The synergy here is fascinating. The Rosetta Stone, one of the most impressive objects in the British Museum when you realize what you're looking at, contains inscriptions that include Egyptian hieroglyphics, Demotic and classical Greek. The Greek, readily understood by linguists, helped researchers unravel the meaning of the hieroglyphics, a pioneering task performed 200 years ago at the...

Hanny's Voorwerp, that odd object discovered by Dutch school teacher Hanny van Arkel via the Galaxy Zoo project, has provoked press reaction all over the world. And Chris Lintott, a key player in the Galaxy Zoo's ongoing survey of galaxies, notes the uneasiness he feels in discussing theories about the object before the paper that attempts to explain it has even gone through peer review. The speed with which the Internet allows science to be discussed can be disconcerting, as Lintott makes clear in the latest edition of the Space Carnival, conducted this week by David Chandler at his Next Generation site. Now the Galaxy Zoo is doing good science in an obviously public fashion. Anyone can sign up to participate in the classification of the images of one million galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and that makes participating computer users scientific collaborators. Seeing this, the Galaxy Zoo blogs about its work out of a sense of obligation to its contributors, but...

The latest Carnival of Space is now available at the Mars Odyssey blog, where Nancy Houser has gathered space-themed materials from the past week, many of them dealing with the question of perchlorates on Mars and the implications of that possible discovery. I'll send you straight to the Carnival for the perchlorate story, where many bloggers dissect it. My usual practice is to focus on Carnival items that connect to our theme here on Centauri Dreams -- articles about deep space starting with the outer planets and moving to regions beyond. This week the entry that fits that bill is Brian Wang's article in NextBigFuture on radiation shielding. Although Brian couches this work in the context of solutions to radiation exposure following nuclear attacks, it's also true that a drug that is 5000 times more effective at reducing the effects of radiation injury than the drugs we currently use has interesting space implications. The experimental drug, intriguingly named Nanovector Trojan...