Career success is created with hard work and superior knowledge. Some basic knowledge about how to get ahead at work is provided in the booklet: Tools for The Workplace. You can get a copy of this from this location on the web, or from any Scientology bookstore (find the nearest location here).

Webcast Thursday, December 6: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). MRO is searching for evidence that water persisted on the surface of Mars for a long period of time.

Webcast title: MRO: Following the Water with New Capabilities

by: Jim Graf, Project Manager & Dr. Richard Zurek, Project Scientist for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission.

Click here on Thursday at 7 p.m. PST for the webcast.

With the Tom Cruise wedding, some people are curious to learn what a Scientology wedding is like. Here is a good description.

Global warming is partly caused by variation in the amount of sun light that Earth gets from the Sun. Acrimsat is the spacecraft that is currently measuring total solar irradiance. It launched in December, 1999, and it is continuing a data collection process that has been going on for 28 years. That is not a lot of time for the purpose of making long term forecasts, but it is now believed by the Project Scientist that as much as 25% of global warming is caused by an increase in total solar irradiance in recent years. Acrimsat is described at this web site.

I am at the Scientology religious retreat in Clearwater, Forida, right now. In case you are interested, the location of the nearest Scientology organization where you live can be found here.

Genesis is the mission that crashed into the Utah dessert, when its parachute failed to open. This meant that several months of painstaking work was needed to recover the particles that Genesis had collected from the Sun

Now we are getting some scientific results. Genesis data are helping scientists understand the lunar samples that were collected during the Apollo program, almost thirty-five years ago. Details are described here.

Your human rights are described in this DVD. This material is based on international agreements, signed by the United States and over 100 other nations around the world in Helsinki, in 1948.
This is an extremely cool DVD, with video representations of each of your human rights that are delightful. Enjoy!

People get distracted by current events, for good reason. The specter of war hangs over the world today. Screaming headlines and blaring television and radio alerts pound into us minute to minute that violence and loss are at hand.
Ask yourself these questions: Are you more and more alarmed at occurrences around you? Do you feel less and less able to do anything about it?
If you feel frightened and alarmed, you are not alone. If you feel that you can do nothing about the situation around you, that is not an uncommon reaction.
L. Ron Hubbard dissected the phenomenon of the dangerous environment, providing methods that will not only help you overcome your fears, but allow you to help others. Here are some things that you can do about a dangerous environment.

The Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer is an infrared sensor designed to measure the state and composition of Earth's troposphere, the layer of the atmosphere that extends from Earth's surface to about 16 kilometers (10 miles) in altitude. While the instrument can detect and measure many components of the troposphere, one of its main purposes is to study ozone. The TES Project has created a movie on how this instrument works.

The Writers of the Future have just released their latest volume of new Science Fiction. This program is the best entry point for new writers into this field. I attended one of their award banquets a year ago, and I saw that it was supported by many of the greatest authors alive today. The new authors are the winners of competitions from around the world, and they are very good. You can get your copy at any on-line vendor of books, or directly from the publisher at Galaxy Press.

The Mars Rovers are alive and well. Spirit is moving away from its winter haven and Opportunity is also on the move. There is a video from JPL on the rovers at this web site.

NASA's Ulysses spacecraft has begun its third voyage around the sun's poles, seeking to learn how the sun affects weather in space, plus cellphones, satellites and electricity on Earth. Hear more from the project scientist at this site.

Your learning rate determines your success rate in high tech jobs. I have someone in my group who knows that their career is limited by their limited willingness to study. Persons who don't want to be limited in their rate of learning would be well advised to get one or more of the books at this website. These books describe standard study technology, which is a breakthrough in this field.

Here is what a Cloudsat 'quick look' image looks like. This is a profile, from the top of clouds down to the ground. This is the first satellite that provides this type of profile. For more quick look images, at full resolution, here is where to look.

Stress can slow you down on the job. Solutions for a Dangerous Environment is a booklet that can reduce stress for many people.

Looking underground from outer space was first demonstrated in 1981.

"It was just a fluke," recalls JPL Director Dr. Charles Elachi, who was the principal investigator of the Shuttle Imaging Radar-A (in 1981).
The radar onboard the shuttle was comprised of a single-frequency, single-polarization antenna capable of acquiring imagery at only one angle. Yet, the results were proof that certain radar frequencies could actually take images from as deep as 3 meters (9 feet) below the sand.

You can find more data on this here.

Mercury transitted the sun yesterday. I looked at it using a special telescope that protected my eyes from the sun's brightness, but showed Mercury as it crossed in front of the sun.

Mariner 10 was launched by JPL in 1973 in order to reach Mercury. This was the final Mariner project, and it pioneered the use of a "gravity assist" by swinging by Venus to bend its flight path to Mercury.

Using a near-ultraviolet filter, it produced the first clear pictures of the Venusian chevron clouds and performed other atmospheric studies before moving to the small, airless, cratered globe of Mercury. Here a fortuitous gravity assist enabled the spacecraft to return at six-month intervals for close mapping passes over the planet, covering half the globe (Mercury’s slow rotation left the other half always in the dark when Mariner 10 returned).

HOW TOXIC ARE YOU? There are metals and other substances that can reduce your mental ability. This would undermine your chances for long term career success.
If you live in an environment that is the least bit polluted, or if you are getting unnatural substances into your body from your food, drugs or other sources, then over time you will collect increasing amounts of toxic material. Here is one answer to this problem that has helped me.

Webcast: Black Holes, Thursday, at 7 pm PST -- by Curt Cutler, a Senior Research Scientist at JPL.

"Most normal galaxies contain, at their cores, black holes that are millions to billions of times more massive than our Sun. Most galaxies probably also contain millions of stellar-mass black holes, which are the remnants of massive stars. In this lecture I will try to explain what black holes are, in theory, and give a brief overview of some of their remarkable properties. I will then review some of what we know observationally about black holes in Nature. " Click here on Thursday at 7 p.m. PST for the webcast.

More on career success: In The Problems of Work, Mr. Hubbard isolates the problems encountered on the job. He offers solutions to frayed tempers and the common feeling that one cannot possibly accomplish all there is to do. This book uncovers the way to handle the confusions that surround a job and opens the doors to efficiency.

We lost communication with the Mars Global Satellite (MGS), sometime yesterday. MGS was launched in 1996, and has been orbiting Mars for nearly 10 years. This is 6 years beyond it's original design goal. MGS has returned data on surface contours, minerals, magnetic fields, gravity fields, and global weather. It provided landing site information for Pathfinder and MER. It has been a communications relay for the Mars Exploration Rovers. Efforts to regain communications are underway at this time.

Currently JPL still has two orbiters ( Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter) and two rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) that are working at Mars. The European Space Agency also has an orbiter at Mars.

You have 30 human rights, according to the Univeral Declaration of Human Rights, which was signed by the United States and over 100 other nations, over 50 years ago. Human right number 19 is freedom of expression. Here is a really cool video that illustrates that right. From this site, you can find out all of the other human rights that you should have. Enjoy!

Bob

Here is an artist's conception of "Dusky Disks" and their influence on star formation.

Developing stars spin so fast that, left unchecked, they would never fully contract and become stars. Astronomers had theorized that dusty disks might be slowing the super speedy stars by yanking on their magnetic fields. When a star's fields pass through a disk, they are thought to get bogged down like a spoon in molasses. This locks a star's rotation to the slower-turning disk, so the shrinking star can't spin faster. Spitzer is an infrared observatory that can find the swirling disks around stars, because dust in the disks is heated by starlight and glows at infrared wavelengths. Spitzer observed nearly 500 young stars in the Orion nebula. Stars divided into slow spinners and fast spinners, and it was determined that the slow spinners are five times more likely to have disks than the fast ones. "We can now say that disks play some kind of role in slowing down stars in at least one region, but there could be a host of other factors operating in tandem. And stars might behave differently in different environments". Other factors that contribute to a star's winding down over longer periods of time include stellar winds and possibly full-grown planets.

I saw a cool video on being competent at this website. The Way to Happiness Association has distributed over 80 million booklets so far. In my opinion, it is one of the best calming influences we have in this troubled world.

One Day Left! NASA's campaign to send the nom de plumes of people from around the world into the heart of the asteroid belt ends Sat., Nov. 4. Submitted names will be carried on board NASA's Dawn spacecraft. Mission scientists are confident Dawn observations of asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres will answer basic questions about the nature and composition of these celestial wanderers. When the craft is launched in June 2007, yours and the names of your loved ones can hitch along for the ride and be part of space exploration history. Dawn will carry a silicon chip containing the names of asteroid, space and other enthusiasts from around the world. People may submit their names for this historic one-way mission by visiting JPL's Dawn Web site now through Nov. 4 at http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/ . More than 170,000 people have already signed up for the asteroid belt tour.

Dianetics: Understanding people in the work place (and other places) is something that a successful manager works on all the time. Dianetics provides knowledge about why people respond to things the way they do. It is based on many millions of hours of recorded work, going back more than 50 years. The complete Dianetics home study course package is recommended as your first step with Dianetics. It includes everything you need to get started in less than an hour and get the most out of the Dianetics procedure. It includes a how-to DVD, the book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the Dianetics Lectures & Demonstrations, the home study course workbook and free phone consultation. Here is where you can get this.