Hoagland Grunt

        "The symbology is running the show," stated Richard Hoagland during a very brief appearance on Coast to Coast AM on Monday night. Phobos-Grunt, he explained, was not out of control at all.  Moscow Mission Control was merely waiting for the numerology to come right. The spacecraft would depart for Mars on Tuesday, 11/29/11—because 29 is just as good as 11, see?

        As we know, Hoagland's notion that space agencies wait for numerology, or for certain stars to achieve certain elevations, is entirely, tragically, irretrievably, mistaken.  Of course, the dawn of 11/30/11 saw Phobos-Grunt still stuck in orbit.

        On Monday night, Hoagland also stated that the ESA antenna in Perth was no longer involved in the attempt to contact and/or command P-G. According to space.com Perth made another attempt to contact the spacecraft on Tuesday night. Must be the fault of Hoagland's now utterly discredited "sources."

        If Coast-to-Coast had any respect for its audience it would ban Hoagland for ever. However, it doesn't and it won't. Instead, it will give Hoagland and his sources three full hours to tell lies tonight. This blogpost will resume.....

/////////////=======\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

        George Noory is SUCH A WIMP. He let Hoagland so far off the hook that the hook itself straightened out and apologized for ever having been a hook. I didn't expect an actual confrontation, but considering it was just 48 hours since Hoagland had said "The symbology is running the show," surely some powder-puff like "So what happened to that?" would have been appropriate?

        But no. It immediately got worse. Hoagland was allowed to give himself a GLOBAL AND NON-EXPIRING FREE PASS, saying:

"I try not to lead people in the wrong direction by saying 'This will happen.' I almost never say something will happen. ... Just because we say something might be possible, or might have happened, we're not married to this idea. We could get new data tomorrow that would toss that idea out... "

        Noory either said nothing or grunted his approval.  Well, I'm better at prediction than Hoagland and I don't even claim to see the future. On the CoastGab forum last Sunday I offered this spoof preview of last night:

RCH: According to Roscosmos, the Russian/Chinese spacecraft Phobos-Grunt/Yinghuo-1 is now a dead loss, in a slowly decaying Earth orbit. But my sources tell me that we can expect a "convenient resurrection" some time in the next month, after which the spacecraft will be re-targeted to an asteroid -- the asteroid that was the secret destination all along!!! And what asteroid do you think that is, George?

Noory: Umm... I dunno Richard.

RCH: None other than YU55!!!

         ....and that's pretty much how the first dreary hour went. He even used the word 'resurrection.' Hoagland was highly troubled by the discrepancy between the Mars-departure windows of Phobos-Grunt and Mars Science Lab. "They should be the same," he complained, using that as phony evidence that the Russians never intended to go to Phobos. What he doesn't understand is the difference between MSL's one way journey and P-G's round trip. For the Russians, not only does Mars have to be accessible from Earth at departure, Earth has to be accessible for the sample return. In fact, real space scientists (as opposed to wannabees with scary hair) are saying that if P-G magically came to life today, it could still get there but the sample return would have to wait two years.

A Tragedy of Errors

        What followed was a tour of Hoagland's previous mistakes, even reiterating that ridiculous pseudo-statistical "proof that Elenin was artificial" despite the fact that several people have told him his math is a joke (insert swift plug for the Awake & Aware DVD, "because you need to understand the background to this".) Another old favorite was also trotted out of the barn: Those crater chains on small solar-system bodies like Phobos are "weapons fire," from the Great Galactic War 65 million years ago. Oh, how we laughed at that one!!

        Then a brand new fantasy: The USAF's X-37B space plane actually rendezvoused with YU55 and took hi-res images, which are due back on Earth in a couple of days. How did he know that? The Air Force Base in Colorado from whence X-37B is controlled was "lit up" on November 9th. Very persuasive -- not.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

        But a sizable chunk of the second hour was devoted to the landing site of MSL/Curiosity in Gale crater, shown above in false color. Hoagland approves of this, and he correctly described the somewhat hair-raising landing procedure that's been forced on mission planners by Curiosity's 900 kg heft. He likes it because the central peak is, he told us, a tetrahedron (nonsense) and there are plenty of features that are unmistakable signs of civilization (balderdash.) Too bad it's nowhere near 19.5° latitude.

        You could tell he was working toward some Grand Finale, and here it came (after about 5 very uninteresting phone calls): MSL is going to be a huge success. So huge, in fact, that it's going to force disclosure. Yes, folks -- 2012 is THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT!! Now where have I heard that before?.....

Update:

On C2C-AM 13th January 2012, in  the News-snippets segment, Hoagland told us that Nazis in space had probably caused the failure of Phobos-Grunt.