I have to say that watching the launch was an AMAZING experience. Perhaps the whole tour was really a marketing exercise designed to get us all to want to head upwards too. And in fact, Charles watched the launch of Greg Olsen, the third private space traveler (Charles is fifth). I’d bet that among us already there are one or two who are now planning to go – not just dreaming about it.
More at … and here at Flickr, too, where I will have photos from Mission Control of the docking in about 36 hours.

This makes me nostalgic for my days at NASA. Especially seeing the photo of Charles in the spacesuit and the complex procedures they had to learn. (Here is more info about the CLARISSA spoken dialog system we flew onboard ISS).

The MagicBoard project aims at augmenting a perfectly ordinary whiteboard-like surface with electronic capabilities, via a video projector and a pan / tilt / zoom camera.
The user works on the board as in the usual way, drawing or writing with ordinary marker pens. Whenever she chooses, the user can “grab” an electronic copy of the things that have been drawn or written with the marker pen. This copy is projected back onto the board, precisely overlaying the original markings with the appropriate colour. The physical ink may then be erased and the electronic version manipulated on the board’s surface: it can be duplicated, moved, enlarged or reduced, printed, or hidden for a moment before being recalled. Meanwhile, the user may add to her designs with the marker pen as before. At any time, these new markings can be turned into digital form to merge with the electronic version of her work.

This work was originally developed as part of the Facilitator Room project at MIT. My friend Mark Torrance worked on this project during his grad school days at MIT, when it was called the “Intelligent Room”.
My friend Heather Read just wrote to me that her daughter is using the MagicBoard in school, so this technology seems to have made it into operational use. I find this very exciting!
The project also has a connection to the MERBoard, a collaborative whiteboard developed by one of my former groups at NASA and used during the Mars Exploration Rover mission. In addition to letting users manage electronic content using whiteboard metaphors, the MERBoard was used for synchronous and asynchronous distributed collaboration.
As prices come down and technology improves, I think the form factor of networked interactive whiteboards will become increasingly common in work and educational environments. Imagine the possibilities of magic wallpaper covering our homes and offices!

A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.

The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.

What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.

These two scientists are colleagues of mine at NASA Ames. I am sure they are not happy to have this information leaked out of context of their journal article.  And in fact, NASA has issued a correction stating that while their research suggests where to look for life on Mars, there is no data from Mars as yet to support any conclusions. 

Whether or not they have really found evidence of life on mars, the article underscores a bitter irony facing NASA today. In order to support the new Exploration initiative (sending humans to the moon, and eventually to Mars), NASA is redirecting large portions of its funding away from science to pay for the construction of a new Crew Exploration Vehicle.  The NASA research centers (including Ames, where I work) are being hit hardest by these cuts. The same scientists and technologists who have dedicated decades to support understanding and exploration (NASA Ames has been the center of excellence for Astrobiology and Intelligent Systems, among other things) are now faced with deep cuts to their research programs and the possiblity that the entire center will be closed.  When I spoke with one researcher today, he said: “This is what I love, and what I want to do with my life.”  But given the dissolution of his world-class research group, he might just have to go work at google instead (joining several other NASA Ames alumni).

Wouldn’t it be ironic if NASA finally sends humans to Mars, only to find that the experts to tell them where to look for life have all moved on to new jobs?  Maybe this headline will be an alarm call to the new NASA Administrator to save the world-class institution before it is too late.