g ABODES -The Cassini-Huygens mission has given us our best view yet of Titan, but this moon of Saturn still remains shrouded in mystery. A proposed future mission takes a three-tiered approach - using an orbiting spacecraft, a surface probe, and a hot air balloon -- to further explore the enigmatic moon. See article.
g MESSAGE -What if we examined how to communicate with extraterrestrials from a telecommunication engineer's point of view? That's the approach of Brian McConnell's book, "Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations." Though the book has been out a few years now, it's still worth a read if you haven't already delved into it. For more about the book and an interview with McConnell, click here.
g LEARNING -Here's a neat classroom activity: "Remote Sensing." In this lesson, students discover how remote sensing is used to identify the signatures of life even when the particular life form is not directly observable. See article.
g AFTERMATH - There is a good deal of apprehension among the general public that samples returned from other worlds such as Mars - just might - contain alien germs capable of turning into a worldwide plague, or at least wreaking havoc with the Earth's natural environment. Beside this fear of "back contamination," there is also a fear of "forward contamination" - the possibility that spacecraft might contaminate the worlds they land on with Earth microbes, destroying scientifically priceless alien lifeforms before we even have a chance to study them. See article. Note: This article is from 1999.
