Striking their base, yeah, that's it... ;)

At Friday afternoon's meeting, we were briefing the center's new head of small satellites, recently arrived from DoD, on different smallsat mission concepts to Phobos or Deimos. If there is water ice on either, that would be enormously useful in reducing the cost of eventually sending humans there. We discussed tiny landers/hoppers, impactors, and orbiters (probably favored, could possibly "land" one as well with an airbag). We discussed which NASA headquarters office would be most interested in which concept, and why, and how to market it to the right people there.

Anyway, it went well, and as we were leaving I quipped that I was sure we could get the White House to fund a Deimos impactor mission as part of the "war on terror"...

Lucky Saturday?

My son James left his backpack, containing two $60 textbooks and a biology project and a graphing calculator, sitting outside the entrance to a grocery store on Friday afternoon. It disappeared.

Yesterday, James and I got up early and went back to the store. The manager said that no one had put it in lost&found, so we assumed theft and began dumpster-diving in the areas around the store. No luck, mostly... did find a woman's purse, though -- empty, with nothing to identify it, so I left it there. Towards the end, I saw a guy picking out soda cans from a trash can. I approached him and asked if he'd seen any backpacks while out harvesting cans. "Been ripped-off?" he said. I nodded. "Actually, there's a backpack in this one!" he said. And behold, half covered in newspapers and debris was James's backpack, complete except for the calculator! I don't think he quite realizes how lucky he was to recover it... otherwise, he would have had to earn the $200 to replace the contents and backpack.

This morning search, though a success, left me in need of a shower and hence late to dim-sum with inflectionpoint. But that was OK... she and I lingered over coffee made with eggnog (she was out of milk ;) and then meandered around Oakland before finding the restaurant we wanted. And I experienced the dim-sum process, with pushcarts and servers trying to convince us to select one of their dishes. And I shared some bok choy and pea sprouts and shrimp balls with Joanne, as well as some delicious elastic dessert thing filled with dark sesame. Mmmmm.

And on the way home, I saw baiku at last, in a Denny's parking lot in San Leandro with tenacious_snail.

And had a good time out with patgreene, despite us both starting out a bit weary (I'd just braved Costco on the Saturday before Thanksgiving).