This is a funny way to start my reporting from the American Astronomical Society here in St. Louis, but news waits for no one!
1) First, a favor: if you participated in the online workshop on Sunday – even if you just watched the video stream – then we’re asking that you take just a minute or two and fill out a very brief survey. Basically, we’re just looking for feedback on what you liked and didn’t like about it. I know we had about 130 people at one point watching the streaming video, and some of you must have come from here. So please give us your opinions!
2) Tomorrow (Tuesday) night at 7:00 is the blogger meetup. If you’re in the St. Louis area, please drop by!
3) There appears to have been some damage to the launchpad after STS-124 took off on Saturday. The flame trench – the concrete corridor that funnels the flame away from the Shuttle – has chunks of it missing, and debris was seen falling into the water near the pad. It’s unclear if the Shuttle itself got damaged, and we won’t know until it docks later today with the station. Universe Today has more info and some of the dramatic images.
4) Phoenix appears to have landed on some ice! And not only that, it’s started scooping. I am way too busy to keep up with Mars news, so you should really be getting your jones satisfied over at Emily’s place.
5) At these AAS meeting the news flows freely and rapidly. I’ll try to keep up, but it’ll be hard. In the meantime, all of us bigtime bloggers here will be crossposting at AstronomyCast Live, so you can read what everyone’s writing about.
