JWST M51 image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team

This is Issue 681 of the BAN, and 681 is the 17^th centered pentagonal number.

What does that mean? Draw a pentagon using just dots, one for each apex. Put a dot in the center. There are 6 dots, right? That makes 6 the second centered pentagonal number (the first is just the single dot, a degenerate case). Now draw another pentagonal around that first one in the same way, but putting evenly spaced dots in the center of each edge (so each edge has three dots; it’ll take ten more dots to do this). Now there are 16 dots, and 16 is the third centered pentagonal number. The next one takes 15 more dots, so you get 31. And so on and so forth to get to the 17^th in that series, which is a total of 681 dots.

They’re similar to just plain ol’ pentagonal numbers, which I learned about from a Doctor friend of mine. I love stuff like this. I have no idea what use it has in math, and it may not help you live your life better, but just knowing about it, I think, makes life better. A small jot of math is always fun.

As I recently wrote, the Mars helicopter Ingenuity has made its last flight. After 72 hops above the Red Planet’s surface, something went wrong, and one of the blades must have sliced the ground, damaging the rotor enough to ground the mission permanently.

But Perseverance roves on. On Sol 1052 (a “sol” is a day on Mars, and each mission is numbered from its landing, so this translates as February 4, 2024) the rover took one last image of Ingenuity in the distance.

 This color image is straight off the rover’s left Mastcam-Z Camera, though I fiddled with the contrast a bit to make it clearer. It’s dramatic; the rocks in the foreground giving way to the smoother rippling sand dunes is really artistic framing.

Ingenuity — heck, everything we send to Mars — is amazing. Outperforming the warranty by many multiples is a hallmark of JPL engineering…but this also comes on the heels of news that the lab is suffering massive layoffs, losing a staggering 8% of its people due to Congressional gridlock over the 2024 budget.

You know what I’m going to say next: This is 100% the fault of the Republicans in Congress, stalling and huffing and bloviating and making up problems where none exists. They do everything they can to stall the government, with one Rep even admitting that he wants to make sure there’s no good news to come before the election this November, just to poison the well for President Biden.

And because of “party over country”, JPL loses 530 people. It’s galling, and that’s just one thin slice of this. These problems are everywhere, and touch on every aspect of American life.

Just remember that come November. I will.

This is indeed shameless, but here we go: Nominations are open for the 2024 Hugo Awards, what are essentially the Oscars™ for science fiction and fantasy.

There’s a category called “Best Related Work” for things related to scif/fantasy, and in my not-so-humble opinion I think my book Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe qualifies for that!

If any of y’all are members of the World Science Fiction Society, I’d appreciate it if you considered the book for nomination. Each chapter describes a different locale in the cosmos, and what it would be like to actually visit them; what you would see and feel, and each starts with a little scifi vignette of someone experiencing those places.

The nomination process is outlined here, and the deadline is March 9^th. Thanks to anyone considering it.

• Hey, remember the small asteroid 2024 BX1 that was discovered mere hours before burning up over Germany? And how I said it may have dropped meteorites? Well, it did! After an extensive search, meteorites from the impact have been discovered and positively identified as aubrites, an unusual kind of rock that has less iron and more magnesium silicates than other meteorites. While they may come from impacts that freed material from the asteroid Nysa (and its daughter asteroids, meaning ones that may have split off some time ago after bigger impacts), they may also come from Mercury. That’s exciting, though speculative. This all shows that close monitoring of the skies with multiple observatories not only can detect incoming rocks, but can also help nail down where meteorites might fall. This was unachievable just a couple of decades ago, but now it’s happening more and more often. Amazing.

• Scientists studying samples of the small asteroid Ryugu brought to Earth by the Japanese Haybusa2 spacecraft show something remarkable: Evidence of cometary dust impacting the asteroid! [link to research paper] That’s expected; comets shed material when they get close to the sun and heat up; the ice in them sublimates and released rocks, gravel, and dust. The rock samples from Ryugu show small splash marks made by the dust grain impacts (moving at several kilometers per second relative speed they hit like teeny bullets), and these have a chemical composition common in cometary dust. This is yet another way comet material can make its way to Earth then. But I just like the poetic nature of it; one space rock blanketing another kind of space rock. Space is vast, and objects few and far between, yet they still influence each other, sometimes directly. That in and of itself is an astonishing thing to know.

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!