**NASA**

**Mars Viz**

**October 12, 2004**

**1:00 p.m. CDT**

[Overview]{.underline}

1.  Stephenie Lievense (JPL) discusses Imagine Mars, and how it could be
    done in museum settings.
    [http://imaginemars.jpl.nasa.gov](http://imaginemars.jpl.nasa.gov/)

2.  Please remember to report attendance figures for your Mars
    Viz-enabled events.
    [http://muse.jpl.nasa.gov](http://muse.jpl.nasa.gov/), click on
    Report Impact. Enter your e-mail address to get a list of the events
    you advertised on the Mars webpages.

3.  NASA TV coverage of Titan flyby on October 26 begins at 6:30 p.m.
    PDT; press conferences scheduled Oct 27 and 28.

4.  After Huygen's descent on January 14/15, Cassini will have about 15
    close flybys of Saturn moons in 2005, every month but May and June.
    Schedule will be e-mailed and posted.

5.  Deep Impact scheduled for launch Dec 30, 2004; impact at Comet
    Tempel 1 on July 4 UTC 2005

6.  Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter scheduled for launch August 10, 2005.

Coordinator At this time, the call is being recorded. If you do have any
objections, please disconnect at this time. You may begin when you're
ready.

Anita We have with us Steph Lievense, the project coordinator for
Imagine Mars. Now that things have calmed down a little bit and she has
become a mother and come back, she is ready to get going with Imagine
Mars again and wanted to take the opportunity to tell you a little about
that and maybe field some questions about how to implement that in your
programs if you choose to do so.

Stephenie I don't know if the folks on the line know anything about
Imagine Mars. Could you let me know if you do?

Ken I would say I don't.

Pat We're all ears.

Stephenie Imagine Mars is a program that was started about three years
ago, and it builds off the success of a program called the Mars
Millennium Project. Is that familiar to anyone? No. The Mars Millennium
Project was under a different administration and got tens of thousands
of kids to do these projects that were their imagined community on Mars.
It's a pretty open-ended project. So we renamed it the Imagine Mars
project. It is mostly Web-based, meaning everything a teacher or project
leader would need is on the Web to run one of these projects. We're
really targeting elementary school teachers and after school programs.
Where I think you can fit in is by making this available to your teacher
communities and also possibly doing programs in your museums on an
after-school type basis.

Basically, the project leader gets the students to go through five
different steps in considering their own community, what works, what
doesn't work, and then building a community on Mars. The idea is to make
it an art project. So one of the coolest things about Imagine Mars is
that it tries to get different people in the community **thinking**
about what life would be like on Mars, so an artist, a scientist, an
engineer, maybe an architect, all **talking** **together** about what
would a community be like on Mars. Now that's if the leader has the
initiative or the time to find leaders in their community to do that.

The project can be small or large, and the project leader asks students
to **reflect** about their community, what works, what doesn't; imagine
what a community could be like on Mars; discover about Mars---how would
things have to be different? There's no oxygen on Mars. It's freezing
cold. What would they have to build to accommodate those circumstances?
**Create**. Maybe they want to show their community by doing a play
about it or writing an article or developing a newspaper that would be
from their community on Mars. Some students have put together have
dances that this is what dance would look like on Mars.

Then finally, **share**. We ask the students to share by posting it in
the project gallery, which is an online area where a couple pictures and
a brief description about the project goes, and any student that posts
to the gallery then we will set up a live chat for them with scientists
and artists, an engineer, whomever they'd like. So that's the motivation
to get teachers to take the extra step and post their project online.

The project can take on a number of different forms. It's a little bit
unstructured for teachers to get it into their curriculum however it
works for them. What we're trying to do is, we get back into the
community and try to get more folks doing projects and enjoying this
adventure. We offer things like chats. The nice thing for me is this is
my only job right now. So I can be a huge partner with anyone who wants
to do this project\--setting up resources for them, working with a
teacher to design the project that's just right for their classroom,
etc., and I want to do that. So if you know of any opportunities or any
teachers that are especially creative or looking for a way to integrate
science and humanities into their classroom, I'd love you to share this
with them or give them my name. I'd be happy to work with them as much
as they'd like to make a project that works in their classroom.

I don't have a good sense of whether this would work for you
particularly in your museum, meaning not passing it on to your teacher
community, but doing it yourself. Are there opportunities for that?

Carolyn A museum is about---I hate to say this---revenue. So we're not
paid to teach, no matter whether anybody comes or not. So what we have
to figure out is, what is the product that would drive attendance for
some special event? If we can put that all together, then it makes sense
for us. If it's something we do to help teachers and we can't charge
them for it, then I can't allocate it.

Stephenie Right. It's not at the top of your list.

Carolyn I can't allocate somebody to work on it because how am I going
to pay their salary if they're not bringing in money? We're one of the
few museums who get nothing from the government.

Anita What I was envisioning, Carolyn, is you could make it one of your
days or half days or something where your revenue is from people coming
in the gate because you can pull in local experts on various things. You
could even pull in your local City Council to talk about how you govern,
just anything that you think about what makes a community.

Stephenie I've got to tell you, it is pretty cool to get adults talking
about what a community might be like on Mars, and the different kind of
adults, like Anita said, a civic leader, but then an architect, someone
who's looking at it from a different perspective.

Anita Or a nutritionist.

Stephenie It makes for an interesting conversation.

Anita It's a real community event about your own community and then
extrapolating that to Mars Now, how you make that revenue generating . .
. I guess I have the swell idea that it would be possible to invite
people to come to and---

Carolyn Pay to participate.

Stephenie Pay something, yes.

Carolyn It's tricky. We do lecture series of all kinds of sorts, and it
never ceases to amaze me what people will willingly pay for and what you
can't give away. I don't know if government officials in a city the size
of Houston would embrace this as something they really wanted.

Stephenie Kay Tabola and Jackie Allen (at NASA Johnson Space Center) are
the other leaders of this project. We're working really closely. So
that's another avenue, Carolyn, is they're right there to help do
something.

Carolyn Both of them are wonderful to work with, but for us, the
question always is, what you need is to drive attendance and have a Mars
Day. We had a very successful Mars Day last year here. To that extent,
that makes sense. And if you looked at what you were packaging both as
an extended program in a classroom, which I think it should be extended
because kids need to get engaged in the project. If you could have us
work with you on coming up with a one-day life on Mars, government on
Mars, being on Mars, thinking about living someplace else, whatever you
call it, then museums do one-day events. That would be a Saturday
program that we could easily implement with volunteers. Then it makes a
lot more sense.

Stephenie We do have those ready to go. We have some pre-packaged, you
can do this in a couple hours, already figured out Imagine Mars
projects.

Carolyn Are those online?

Stephenie Yes, they are. They're in the gallery. They're online in a
small format. If you wanted the detail how to do it, I'd have to work
with you on that, Carolyn. We're working to get them online and the
details how to do it, but they're not there yet.

Carolyn We do space once a year. We have a group called Yuri's Night
Out. They like to do something at the museum. So we do a daytime
program. If they're already going to be here as volunteers to do
something, this is a theme that we can incorporate. We already have them
in place.

Stephenie This would fit very well with that.

Carolyn The other thing that we could do, we're now working with a
science café. We do a science café once a month on various topics, and
in fact, the subject for the one last month was the art of science. What
you could do is, if you had a good roundtable discussion like the week
before a one-day program at the museum, you might generate a little more
interest if you could get some good speakers that would talk on these
issues and then move into a one-day thing. That would be cool.

Stephenie So are you saying at your museum, you do use cafes?

Pat Actually, this is Rice University in conjunction with the science
museum of Houston. I know a number of cities now have science cafes, and
we help co-sponsor them. The one we did on Moon/Mars last April was so
packed that we were glad that the fire marshal didn't come by. We had
people out in the street, it was so well attended. So all the ones we do
on space are really well attended.

Stephenie I think this would fit nicely for that, and that's a good idea
to have something that precedes the event at the museum.

Pat Then the other issue is, our Mars Society is actually pretty active
here in Houston, and they have a speaker's group. We allow them to be
here at Rice. We co-sponsor a number of their talks, and again, that
might be something that they would be interested in helping to run.

Stephenie Another good idea. So it sounds like museums would be most
interested in having some kind of a pre-packaged activity set for their
volunteers to do in an afternoon.

Pat Yes, to think about it, I think I will be correct in saying in the
context that museums have a space day. They have events days. I think
when we do our things for summer camp, we're so very sensitive to what
works with younger kids. Our camper population stops at age 12. Nobody
comes older than 12, so under 12, they're less interested in the
government. They would more like to make stuff.

Stephenie Actually, the classes that seem to work the best are third,
fourth, fifth grades. It's not necessarily government. It's community,
and there's lots of angles you could go. Like one of the most fun
activities we did here at JPL when we had an Imagine Mars day was
thinking about what kind of food you'd take to Mars and then designing
packaging for the food. The kids were real creative. They thought well,
there might be a lot of people from different parts of the world that
settle the first community on Mars, so they made sure that the packaging
had pictures on it that denoted what was inside instead of words. That
was real creative. So just thinking about the weight of the food that
you're going to take and what's nutritional versus what's not, and we
had a nutritionist come in and lead the kids through this project. It
was pretty cool, and they seemed to like it a lot.

Anita The other cool part of that kick-off was they got the
choreographer Debbie Allen involved in thinking about it with her dance
troupe, what it would be like to move on Mars. They came in and
demonstrated with a tumbling track and their own dance movements
simulating one-third gravity. So everybody got into that, dancing around
in slow motion.

Danielle This is Danielle from the Brown Foundation in Southern
California. I was wondering, we wanted to do another Mars public day
event kind of where we bring in our community. The subject was sports
because we've been taking the Mars children to ... Yes, how sports would
be affected, soccer, basketball, because students, even at very young
ages---third and fourth and fifth grades---and their parents are very
involved in soccer. Drawing that attention because a soccer ball is
actually a buckyball, the carbon 60 molecule anyway.

Anita We have the astronauts playing soccer on the space station if
you'd like it.

Danielle Yes, see. That'd be great.

Stephenie That'd be great, and there's also a litho out that's called
the Lunar Games. So that's one-sixth G.

Pat That's Pat Rawlings' art.

Danielle We're at elementary schools quite a bit, like for instance,
tomorrow we'll see about 5,000 students at the Convention Center.
Finding giveaways or things to give teachers or I could make up a flyer
to give them information where to go, but can I download something from
you? Do you have a page that somewhere I can follow this?

Stephenie Yes, I can get you a page. I'll probably e-mail it to you. Can
I do that?

Danielle Yes.

Stephenie I do have a whole bunch of postcards. Where are you going to
be?

Danielle The Riverside Convention Center. It's the Congressional Science
and Technology Conference. Thursday is actually elementary school.
Tomorrow is middle school.

Stephenie That'd be fun to come by and check out.

Danielle Thursday, the speaker is the woman that's the head of the SEITI
Institute, Dr. Jill Tarter. I just know Jodie Foster played her in the
movie. The gentleman from The Profiler who's the actor. He has a science
page, so he's also a speaker. Interesting what they do sometimes.

Stephenie Can you tell me what your e-mail is?

Danielle Sure, dqm@artscience4all.org.. Now, what I was going to show
tomorrow, many people participate in this, and I was planning on showing
the students the last Mars images and Mars tic-tac-toe, and all the
successful popular things that kids just go, wow, fun, great, I love it.
I was looking at, when you were talking about the art part. We have a
traveling science museum, and we have a couple local artists come to us
and say you should promote the arts and ... some drawing paper and
paints. I know this sounds crazy, but this is just the way the world is,
right? We implement things as we go along sometimes, but our local
Riverside city arts program gave us some funds to do something with the
arts. That's actually the mayor's ball, but he wanted to do something
with the arts, so I was thinking, hey, what a way to talk about with the
city council governing Mars or the arts on Mars.

Stephenie Absolutely.

Danielle ... and the sports part, but then, what kind of supplies, just
some paintbrushes and have them painting and designing?

Stephenie Yes, there's lots of stuff we could do. They could paint a
mural of their imagined community on Mars. We had kids do an
advertisement for coming to live on Mars. It could be something from a
magazine. We had kids design postcards, the first postcards from Mars.

Danielle Yes, maybe we'll get the school district to make that a
competition and see how it works.

Stephenie That's the final project after they've talked about and done
other activities to think about Mars.

Danielle Yes, I would definitely love to talk to you about that, and
then also, we did a couple of Mars public days this year at the
beginning of the year with the landing, and we had about maybe 700 to
1,000 people show up to each one.

Stephenie Awesome.

Danielle We didn't have any speakers from NASA, but we'd love it.

Stephenie Sure.

Danielle We had just the Planetary Society folks come out, and some of
the student winners come out and speak. The public just went crazy for
that, said, do that again. Get more people out, the experts out that can
talk about this. I guess this is because JPL's about an hour and a half
away, and people love your open house day when it happens. I know
finally it was successful this year.

However, for some reason, there's big interest, especially now with all
the space flight stuff happening in this area in the high desert, on the
front page of the news every day. ... Anyway, it's a big topic, and
everyone supports NASA, and that's what we all want to see. Teachers
just want to know what they can get, and the principals I've found were
very interested in some of these Mars assemblies that we've been doing.
They haven't allowed any assemblies in years, but if it has something to
do with Mars, then they'll do it. It's a hot topic this year.

Stephenie I was planning to go to the National Principals Conference,
the Elementary School Principals' Association---I can't remember exactly
what it is---this spring. So maybe that is actually a good resource.
Sounds like principals are interested in Mars.

Danielle Are you in Pasadena?

Stephenie Yes. Right at JPL.

Danielle I know a couple of Pasadena principals of the elementary
schools there pretty well. We were on this other tech ed committee
meeting, but we always solved the subject sometimes from tech ed stuff.
The interesting part is that everyone was asking the principals, are you
part of NASA since you're right there in Pasadena at JPL? It's
interesting their responses. It's like sometimes they're new, they don't
know.

So going to those kinds of meetings I think are important to keep them
updated because they always say, hey, anyone can do it. You can call
NASA and ask for materials. It's not like an exclusive club, but there
was an explorer school where an astronaut just came out last week here
in Riverside, and he brought the Mars Rover out and did some fun things
with that, with the elementary school out here.

Stephenie Yes, we heard about that. Sounds like that went really well.

Danielle So I wish we would have known about this elementary component
that you were just talking about because it's the principals. It's
reading, writing, math.

Anita Exactly.

Stephenie Yes, that's what it is.

Danielle We've really got to implement those three things for these
California teachers teaching elementary schools because they're held
accountable.

Anita Are there any other folks online who have some thoughts about
Imagine Mars?

Stephenie Let me know if I can help if you find opportunities to
implement this into stuff that you're already doing. So I think that's
it.

Anita I think a lot of what Danielle was saying, as well as Pat and
Carolyn, leads me to my other topic, which is reporting. If we still
have people on the line, we would really appreciate it if you would
report the audience members that you're getting for Mars events where
Mars Viz has been helpful to you because NASA headquarters is very
interested in the museum field as a venue for providing information and
engaging students to get into the technology and science pipelines. So
the more we can show them the numbers of people you guys can reach and
also the impact with the anecdotes that you've been sending, the impact
where there are students who get into your science fairs and stuff,
that's so valuable.

If you go to the MUSE Web site, which most of you should have access to
if you haven't changed your IP address, its muse.jpl.nasa.gov. If you go
on the top page there up in the blue bar, it says Report Impact, and you
click on that. Then you get a link that says Submit Event Feedback. What
it wants is your e-mail address. We advertised on our pages last spring
when you were doing events, and most of you said you would be doing the
reporting yourself. So this is just a way to make sure that it will pull
up the events that you told us about, and if there are events you didn't
tell us about that you'd love to report, we'd love to get them.

So what you should be able to do there is when you type in your e-mail
address, you should then get a listing of the events that you registered
that we had on the public e-mail pages. I'm using Steve Lee's e-mail
address because it's easy for me to remember. Then you'll get your list.

Steve Now I'm going to get dozens of Spams.

Anita No. Hello, Steve. Then you get the event information that you gave
us, and if you can just fill in for us the numbers of people if you can
remember that actually attended, that would be great. If all you have
was the total number and it's just a guesstimate at this late date,
nine, ten months later, that's okay, too. We were hoping to get this
report form up a lot sooner, so I realize that this stuff is a fog in
our memories. Has anybody tried to report and had any problems doing it?

Ken Anita, this is Ken in North Carolina. I'm trying to get to the page
right now, and I'm getting a network timing out message. So I'm not sure
if it's just my Web server that's going flaky or what, but I seem to be
having some problems getting to the page to look at it again anyway.

Anita Let's see if you have the same IP address.

Ken Yes, everything should be the same. It says network error,
communication operation timed out. So I'm not sure what's going on
there, but I'm pretty certain that I've reported some stuff to you
before.

Anita I'll take e-mails, too if the page is too hard to get to. Rich
Pavolsky, are you online, by the way? No. I will have our tech guys look
into it.

Ken Never mind. I'll let you finish the thread, and then I'll ask the
question.

Anita I was thinking actually it's not Rich I would talk to. It's the
Mars Web masters, and we've got various ones now. I'll talk to them this
afternoon about checking it out, making sure it's working. I know at one
time I said if you're an Ambassador or Solar System Educator, report to
those venues. I changed my mind. Actually, it would be nice for the Mars
people to see what the Ambassadors and the Educators have done on Mars
directly. So if you don't mind double reporting, we will weed out double
reports to headquarters, but at least we'll have it for Mars to see some
Mars numbers. Anybody have any suggestions or problems or comments on
the reporting?

Carol I do, can you hear me?

Anita Yes.

Carol This is Carol. I'm at Calusa Nature Center. I'm still on a
dial-up, and so I have trouble reaching the page. Even though they've
kind of given blocks to me, the blocks of possible IPs, I can only reach
the page one of every ten tries or so, and it just is such a pain to
sign off and sign back on again. Is there going to come a time when
there could be a password system other than an IP address?

Anita I've been trying to tackle Eric de Jong to get that resolved
because I think a lot more people would be interested in this museum
partnership if they didn't have the IP address restriction. That was
basically to protect Eric's servers. So I've asked him the question in
the hallway, but we haven't sat down and got him to decide. So yes, we
will try to do that so it is just password protected.

On that note, too, we've been sharing the training opportunities with
the Solar System Ambassadors and the Solar System Educators and the
museums, science centers, and planetaria, so that any of you can share
the training the others are getting. Right now, we've been posting the
PowerPoint and the transcript information on two different pages that
are on the same server. It just didn't seen very reasonable. So we're
thinking about putting them in one place, but it might mean you have to
go through a double passwording system. We haven't figured out whether
that's the right thing to do or not, but we're trying to make it easier
for you, but still protect the servers and the information.

So Carol, what I can do is I'll send out again the note I've sent about
what we'd like to know, and you can just send me an e-mail on it.

Carol Okay.

Anita That goes for everybody. If it's just easier to send me an e-mail,
that's fine. The Museum Alliance has gotten quite a bit of notice. In
fact, I don't know if any of you have seen the Office of Space Science
annual report for education and outreach, but they devoted a paragraph
or two to the Museum Alliance and put in a quote from Jon Elvert, who's
the president of the International Planetarium Society. So that was kind
of fun. They put the quote in as a headline saying, "The magic for me is
being able to put the live information in my daily programming," which
is very cool. So that is very, very good.

Anybody have anything else they want to discuss? I have a little bit of
Cassini information for you, but shall we finish up on Mars first?

Danielle Does that go for the pictures also, not just the report,
photographs of events?

Anita Yes, I would love to have pictures. One caveat, if you send us
pictures, please make them things that we can use.

Danielle Or newspaper articles and all that.

Anita Yes, but like some things might be a wonderful picture. We'd like
to put it in this annual report or spotlights on the website.

Danielle Should I mail the original pictures to you, or e-mail?

Anita If they're really big, you can maybe mail them or put them on a
CD-ROM for me. Otherwise, I think I can take up to 25 megabytes in an
e-mail. If you have any video, or---

Danielle Yes, we have all that, too.

Anita That would be great. One of these days we'd like to put together a
quick little video that shows what you do with what we have been able to
provide you because that's something I've said a couple of times in
talks with you, and it's that when you say museum to our management, and
this goes for most of NASA I think, they immediately think only museums.
They think a natural history museum or an iMax. They don't all have the
bigger picture about science centers or planetariums or the fact that
you do an immense number of educational activities with schools and with
teachers. So that's part of my internal soapbox is to get them to
understand just the kinds of people you can reach and do reach all the
time.

Jack I have a question, Anita. This is Jack out in Nebraska. On format
for video, do you like DVD, or that'd be the best, rather than VHS tape,
which is going to be lower quality.

Anita Yes, if you're able to do that, that's great.

Jack I've got somebody that shot some DV footage, and I can just put it
on a DVD.

Anita That's perfect. Thank you. I had a question for you, Jack, but I
can't remember it right now. Anybody have any other Mars things you want
to talk about, or are you still doing Mars events? Are people still
interested?

Ken Yes, Anita. This is Ken in North Carolina. Curious again about DVDs,
if there's going to be a six-month summary DVD thing.

Anita I don't know. I'll have to talk to Michelle about that. The
funding has changed. People have moved to other jobs. One of the
struggles through this whole thing has been just the equipment issues.
We have been trying to get more equipment, so that we had more than one
DVD editing station for the whole lab. Is Terry on the line? No. Terry
Formico has been doing this, and I'm not sure what she'll be doing. Of
course, Steve will moan and groan about HD production has slowed down
quite a bit.

Steve Moan. Moan.

Anita You guys are so trainable! So I will take that up. We have been
trying to do a compilation DVD of other mission materials and just keep
running into people's time availability and equipment availability
snags. Mars should be easier because we've had some people dedicated to
it. So I'll see what I can do about that. Ken, what would you like on it
mostly? What are you looking for?

Ken I guess I'm looking for more of just the broad swath of images from
Spirit and Opportunity, and maybe some of the pointed news briefings,
especially the ones that talked about yes, we think we've found evidence
of water on Mars like the one in March at NASA headquarters, those kind
of things.

Anita So you probably wouldn't want the entire news briefing.

Ken No, just the highlights. Kind of like the Sports Center of Mars news
conferences, so to speak.

Anita Is that seconded by others?

Jack I think that would be useful.

Anita Yes, okay.

Danielle The great thing about those... DVDs was that you'd always find
something new and interesting to use that I hadn't looked at before.
Maybe I had missed in updating the server, so anything you could add,
even if you think we should have it already, that doesn't necessarily
mean we don't. Some things get missed.

Anita Yes. I didn't always get those DVDs as they were produced, so I
have to admit I didn't always know what was going out to you guys. I
just trusted what Eric told Terry to do and that she did.

Danielle It's also like a reminder like here's the latest stuff, and
what are you doing with it now, too?

Anita Yes, one thing we'd like to do is keep the momentum up.

I have been told that there will be some NASA TV coverage of the Titan
fly-by on October 26^th^. So let me quickly find that e-mail. I know
it's prettyshort notice for you to do any public events, but they decide
these things not very early. Starting at about 6:30 p.m. Pacific time on
the 26^th^, and that will, I believe, still be daylight time, until
about midnight, they're going to have NASA TV with images as they come
down. We have no idea what we're going to get.

I'm really excited about this because the radar instrument will be
taking its first closeup data, but that's probably going to trickle in a
couple of days later. On October 27^th^---and I will send this out on
e-mail---at 9:00 a.m. PDT there'll be a press conference on the first
pictures and other science results. Then, on the 28^th^ at 9:00 a.m.,
there will be another press conference with other results, including
radar.

They're going to try to do live shots on NASA TV on the 22^nd^ and
27^th^, and that is where you can call in and ask your question of
someone who's on camera. Then you get a tape of them answering your
question, and you can splice it in there to your program like you're
actually talking to the person directly. That's been done for the media,
and a few of you have been using those live shots. Peggy in Indiana has
been getting these for her Spanish classes. So there'll be a note coming
out about signing up for live shots as well hopefully in the next few
days.

Is there anything that you could use besides a more precise schedule? Is
there anything else you could use on the Titan Radar come up? That's
Titan flyby.

Ken Ken in North Carolina again. I guess we have to wait and see like
everybody else. When the images come down and the data comes in, then I
guess we'll know more. I know that sounds kind of vague.

Anita Right. There was an Ambassador training on the flyby last Tuesday,
and I sent out an e-mail about the replay of that so you can listen in
and where to find the training materials. So that's the best I have to
offer you at the moment.

Ken Right, and those are really extensive. The profile of the atmosphere
is really wonderful, but again, what's the surface really going to show?
As I'm talking it up, as I'm showing Ring World. You have the two back
in on the 26^th^ because it's going to happen. What is it, like 400
kilometers away?

Anita Yes, it's very close.

Jack Like 1,200.

Ken Twelve-hundred, thank you. That's awfully close.

Anita I put together for Western Alliance \[of planetariums\]
Conference, a viewgraph presentation of what's coming up. That included
a list that I'll send to you of when the Cassini flybys are over the
next two years. Let me just summarize that really quickly.

Well, let me go back to Mars for a minute. We have the Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter launching next August, August 10^th^, and it's
being built and tested now. Is that of any interest to your audiences if
we had clean room footage, or interviews with people in their bunny
suits or whatever about what this mission's going to do?

Steve I think we'd be interested in that, just partly because it's in
our back yard.

Anita We've had a few people who wanted to be more in the loop on the
development of this spacecraft because that's where most of the work is
done.

Danielle Anita, this is Danielle again. Obviously, headquarters spent a
lot of money on the Mars videos, they had of the scientists talking
about the parts of the mission. That was a real popular subject, but the
video was so good of the interviews. I think it was done at
headquarters, and they broke down the Rover mission. That was the best
feedback we had on the surveys was those videos.

Anita You don't happen to have a copy of that, do you?

Danielle Yes.

Anita Because there are so many videos made, I'm never sure which one it
is, so maybe I'll call you offline and try to identify what that was.

Danielle That was interviews that were with the scientists and where
they're building and what they're working and what they're doing and
mishaps, pros and cons and all that stuff.

Anita I think I know which one that is. On December 13^th^, there's a
flyby of Titan at about 2,350 kilometers. So that's another flyby. The
Huygens probe will be released on December 25^th^ UTC at about 0200.
That's spacecraft event time. You add one hour, eight minutes one-way
light time, and we'll get the signal of the release at 0313 UTC earth
received time. So then convert that to your local time zone, which makes
it for most of us Christmas Eve. That poor flight team, why they do this
to themselves.

Then, on January 1^st^, Cassini has a little campaign they're calling
Ring in the New Year, which is kind of catchy for the ringed planet. On
January 1^st^, there is an Iapetus flyby at 64,000 kilometers. Then, on
the 14^th^, I believe that's UTC, is the Titan descent by the Huygens
probe. It will last about 2 --1/2 hours, and the signal will get here
about two hours later. The orbiter will be about 60,000 kilometers
overhead relaying the data, so our media folks are still negotiating
with ESA \[European Space Agency\] about what the TV coverage of that's
going to be. If you have any contacts at ESA, you might nag at them.

On the 15^th^, there's a flyby of Titan at about 950 kilometers. Very
close. Then, there's one, two, three, four, six more close Titan flybys
from 950 to 11,000 kilometers through the year. There are flybys of
Enceladus, ranging from 750 to 2,900 kilometers, Mimas, Tethys, Dione,
Hyperion, and Rhea. After the Huygens descent, there are about 15 flybys
that year for the rest of 2005. The only months that I don't see a flyby
happening are May and June, so standardized testing can be focused upon
because you won't be looking at Saturn flybys. So I will send that note
out. I don't have the exact time of day and whether it's UTC, but I will
research that a little harder for you.

Then the other big event next year is Deep Impact. The launch is
scheduled for December 30^th^ down at the Cape \[Canaveral\], and then
the impactor release is supposed to happen on July 4, 2005. That's
actually UTC, so it will actually be the evening of July 3^rd^ for most
of us. It's 14 minutes of live observation of the comet impact and the
formation of the crater, near real-time images sent to earth, large and
small telescopes will be observing from Earth, the Hubble, Mauna Kea.
I'm told that even with a small telescope, you might be able to see a
brightening of the comet. So there's a small telescope science program,
and I'm hoping that the TV coverage will link some of those images
together. I'm sure the Web stuff will. So that's a big step for us.

I've also got a list of other events that are happening next year, which
I will pass along to you. I'll either put it on the MUSE Web site or for
people like Carol, I guess I should send it. Carol, how big of a
PowerPoint can you receive---is that a good format, first of all, and
second of all, can you receive it? Carol must have left. Anybody have
any trouble receiving PowerPoint presentations over e-mail?

Ken Yes, anything over about five megabytes I can't handle. This is Ken
in North Carolina again.

Jack We have the same issue.

Anita If they're PDFs, is that okay, or would you rather have
PowerPoint?

Ken Rather have PowerPoint for what you can do with it. Is it possible
to lay it up on the Web site for a while and then take it down after 48
hours or something?

Anita I could put it on the Web site any time.

Ken Because it would be a lot easier to download that way.

Anita I'll be speaking to the Web people this afternoon, so I'll give it
to them then and get it out there. Okay, well I guess I'm about talked
out for today. Is there anything you want to bring up?

Ken Anita, I've got a question that I didn't get to ask last week during
the Titan telecom. So the winds in the upper atmosphere of Titan---and
maybe they covered this and I just wasn't listening---the upper
atmosphere wind is supposed to be really, really high. How are the
parachutes supposed to survive that?

Anita I'm sure they've modeled the upper atmosphere winds and tested
them in a wind tunnel.

Ken We're talking really, really windy. I can't remember how fast the
numbers were, but they were over 1,000 kilometers an hour, I think. Hard
for the atmosphere.

Anita Yes, I will ask someone about that because I don't know at what
altitude the parachutes deploy. Maybe they're below that upper
atmosphere windiness.

Ken I understand.

Anita It's a good question, and I'll get an answer out to you.

Ken Okay, thank you.

Anita I guess that's it for today unless somebody else has something to
bring up.

Ken Anita, I said it to Jim Erickson \[current MER Project Manager\].
This is Ken in NC again. Thank you for everything you're doing for us.
You're making our jobs out here a whole lot easier.

Anita Oh, good. I tried to get Jim on the line today, but he was
involved in the awards ceremony today. I think the next telecom is the
26^th^, and that will be another Cassini telecom. It will be actually
the day of Titan events, so we'll have to play that one a little bit by
ear as far as timing.

Carolyn Is the time going back to this earlier time? Is this going to be
the new standard time?

Anita Good question. We kept it at this time because of Eric de Jong's
schedule, and then he hasn't been available for us. It's a time that
neither Michelle Viotti \[Mars Public Engagement Manager\] nor Alice
Wesson \[Cassini education and outreach manager\] can be on the line. So
we've just tried to be consistent on our time, so that people could have
it on their calendars, and it seems to work for most time zones. If
there's a number of people who would like it at a different time, we
will change it.

Carolyn No, I'm happy. I just have it set up on my calendar, and I
missed one because I didn't notice that it had been jumped up so early.

Anita This is what's happening when we have more than one mission
involved. Trying to work calendars for just one mission is bad enough,
but trying to work calendars for two missions and eventually three or
four is driving me nuts. So at some point, you just have to say, this is
the time.

It's great to talk to all you guys, and we appreciate any reporting you
can help us out with. I'll send out an e-mail again with what we're
looking for, and let me know if I can help with anything.

Ken Thanks.

Anita Bye.