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The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe is closing in on its first target in its flight toward a rendezvous with Comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, but ground controllers are taking the opportunity to use a relatively close encounter with asteroid 2867 Steins for practice en route. Rosetta is optically tracking the asteroid with its cameras, having picked up on it last week from over 20,000,000 kilometers; by this time in September, Rosetta will be under a million kilometers away. The probe’s observations will refine ground controllers’ knowledge of the asteroid’s orbit and, it is hoped, will allow Rosetta to fly within 1,000km of Stein on September 5th. Rosetta still has other maneuvers to make as well, including another gravity-assist swing past Earth in 2009.
Source and image courtesy: ESA

Writer Steven Moffat, who takes over as the showrunner of the BBC’s revival of Doctor Who next year, was awarded his third consecutive Hugo Award for a Doctor Who episode this weekend. Moffat’s acclaimed episode Blink - which barely, in fact, features the Doctor or his companion Martha at all - beat out competition from other episodes of Doctor Who and its spinoffs, including the two-part story Human Nature / The Family Of Blood and the Torchwood episode Captain Jack Harkness. Also in the running was the Battlestar Galactica telemovie Razor and the fan-made Star Trek: New Voyages episode World Enough And Time, which guest starred George Takei. Blink won the Hugo for Best Short Form Dramatic Presentation, while the big-screen adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust won Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation, beating out such competition as Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix and the first season of Heroes, which was submitted as a long-form entry (a first for a TV series). Congratulations to the winners!
Sources: HugoAwards.org

Director Jud Taylor, who will be best known to genre fans for helming several third season episodes of the original Star Trek, died yesterday. In addition to his directing duties, he served as vice president of the Directors’ Guild of America from 1977 to 1981, and then served a term as the body’s president until 1983; the years he spent advocating the cause of film and television directors are considered among the most influential in the DGA’s history, during which he helped open doors for both female and minority directors, and had a tremendous effect on directors’ creative rights, pensions, and pay. Prior to his earliest engagements as a director, he had tried out acting, appearing in several episodes of TV series such as The Fugitive and 12 O’Clock High. He then moved on to directing episodes of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., Love, American Style, and of course Star Trek, where he directed the episodes The Paradise Syndrome, Wink Of An Eye, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, The Mark Of Gideon and The Cloudminders. He was active behind the camera as recently as this decade, during which he directed several episodes of Law & Order: SVU. Mr. Taylor was 76.
Sources: Daily Variety, IMDb

NASA’s Phoenix lander has sampled the soil of Mars, and it has found not only water, but an unusual soil composition which would make living off the land unlikely for human travelers. The soil sample in question contains perchlorate, a chemical used on Earth to make solid rocket fuel. So while a hypothetical Mars colony couldn’t use the planet’s own soil for farming, it could certainly launch a rocket or two. But missions scientists are quick to point out that while the presence of perchlorate in the Martian dirt may be unfriendly to humans, there may still have been life on the planet at some point which adapted to that chemical; it may also be a localized phenomenon unique to Phoenix’s polar landing site. (There are some plants on Earth capable of processing perchlorate-infused soil, but they’re generally not regarded as viable crops.) The Phoenix probe’s mission has been extended to the end of September so it can continue its studies, and could be extended again at the end of that period, though the harsh Martian winter is likely to deny the non-roving Phoenix the kind of longevity enjoyed by its more mobile siblings, Spirit and Opportunity.
Sources: NASA / JPL, Associated Press

We’re back from our temporary news page sabbatical. Needless to say, our migration effort didn’t go off as planned, and we’re back at our previous hosting service (with the same previous problems). Sadly, economic reality being what it is, it’ll probably be September before we can try moving the site again. In the meantime, sincere apologies for the ongoing downtime issues, infernal server errors (wait, I think that’s supposed to be “internal”) and so forth.

Economic reality - to say nothing of the time needed to listen and review material - has also dictated that music reviews will be dropping back to every other week beginning in September. We’ve enjoyed quite a stretch of weekly music reviews, especially thanks to the labels (particularly the indie labels and self-published artists) who send us stuff, but a bit of belt-tightening with the site’s budget is required at this point.

theLogBook.com is currently in “cruise mode” which means that you’re seeing content prepared well in advance; last year the “cruise mode” was our much-loved month of Godzilla, but this year we have the much looser theme of ’70s sci-fi. (Don’t worry, we’ll have some more Godzilla coming up this summer too.) Also on tap later this month is the beginning of our episode guide to Star Wars: The Clone Wars, covering both the theatrical movie that will launch the new animated series this month, and the series episodes themselves.

Work is also continuing on Phosphor Dot Fossils, which now has all 200+ arcade game reviews in its database, and the conversion of the even larger selection of Atari 2600 reviews is more than halfway complete now. Next only to episode guides and music reviews, PDF has been the largest part of the site to move into the new format, but the new search and sorting facilities make it worth that work. While PDF remains part of theLogBook, it also has its own domain name, PhosphorDotFossils.com, for those wishing to jump straight to that part of the site; the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD has entered its third print run and is still available.

That’s the state of the union address for now. I’ll be trying to update the news page more frequently (or at least less infrequently) as time permits.

Earl Green
theLogBook.com webmaster / editor-in-chief

Soundtrack music lovers have a lot to look forward to this summer, to put it mildly. First and foremost is the first new Star Wars soundtrack since 2005, featuring Kevin Kiner’s original music (and adaptations of John Williams’ previous movie scores) from the animated movie Star Wars: The Clone Wars, due out next week. Also out next week is Joel Goldsmith’s full orchestral/choral score from the direct-to-DVD movie Stargate Continuum (currently available from Goldsmith’s own label), while September will see the release of the soundtrack from Doctor Who spinoff series Torchwood, featuring music by Ben Foster and Murray Gold. All three can be pre-ordered now!

The modern-day remake of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, which is debated about as eagerly as it’s awaited, finally has a cast, producers, and a rough premiere date. Rumors about the reimagined version of the classic mind-bending ’60s series have been flying for two years now, especially after Sky One’s hasty departure from the production before a single frame of footage was shot. Now a joint venture between American Movie Classics and British network ITV (which aired the original and still holds the rights), The Prisoner will star Jim Caviezel as Number Six and Ian McKellen as Number Two. Bill Gallagher, announced some time back as the writer of the new version, is still aboard in that capacity; both the American and British networks will have their own producers overseeing the show, which will be in the form of a six-episode series airing in 2009. AMC producer Christina Wayne has said that there will be references to the original series, but promises that they won’t baffle viewers who haven’t seen it.
Source: Daily Variety

Actor Don S. Davis, best known for his long stint in the role of General George Hammond on Stargate SG-1, died June 29th of a heart attack. Though his film and TV career didn’t begin in earnest until the early 1980s, by that time he had earned a doctorate in theater arts and had spent a decade sharing those skills with others as a teacher. One of his early gigs was standing in for Dana Elcar on the set of MacGyver, where he met future SG-1 co-star Richard Dean Anderson. He originated the character of Hammond in the premiere episode of Stargate SG-1, and his final appearance in the role was in the upcoming direct-to-DVD movie Stargate Continuum, due in late July. In addition to reprising his SG-1 role on sister series Stargate Atlantis, he appeared on such series as The Dead Zone, Highlander, The Outer Limits, The X-Files and Twin Peaks. Mr. Davis was 65.
Sources: Gateworld.net, IMDb

If you’re reading this, it’s almost a miracle. In recent weeks, the web hosting company that has been home to theLogBook.com since 2003 has gone rapidly downhill, with “internal server errors” and “server restarts” plaguing the entire site and making it almost unusable. At this point, our success in transitioning the majority of the site to a database-driven format has almost proven to be a liability: with Globat’s database servers having suddenly become so amazingly unreliable and fragile, the vast majority of theLogBook.com is offline for much of any given day, and no help seems to be forthcoming from them. This has resulted in much of the site being down and staying down lately, completely out of our control; this includes the ordering page for the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD, whose sales have dropped off dramatically as a result. Additionally, there are also some extremely troubling billing issues in play, involving very shady practices which don’t paint a picture of a financially stable entity. We’ve done some research and looked at independent hosting review sites, and have found that other Globat customers are suffering from similar problems, including the eyebrow-raising billing issues. After five reasonably good years, the message is clear: our site is being hosted by a company that seems like it may not be on the map for much longer, and the time has come to move.

As such, the site will soon be moving to a new hosting service, though it may take a few weeks as we transition databases and the rest of the site’s content from one place to another. Beginning this week and through the month of July, to ease this transition, this News section will drop back to two weekly updates; since this is the one part of the site that’s updated on a daily basis, it becomes the most problematic unless we voluntarily scale it back in such a way that the database doesn’t have to be backed up daily. As soon as we’ve migrated databases and support files, tested the site thoroughly at its new location, and basically walked all around it and kicked the tires, we’ll switch the site’s DNS pointers over to its new home and daily news updates will continue. It’s taken a while to do the research and settle on a new hosting provider, especially since theLogBook has very specialized requirements, with its wealth of video and a large number of large databases.

Hopefully the changeover will result in little or no disruption of access to the site, and frankly, even if there is a disruption, I can’t imagine it being much worse than what we already suffer on Globat. Anyone out there who’s hosting a site with Globat might wish to formulate a backup-and-exit plan, and anyone considering hosting on Globat may wish to think twice. In 2003 it was the best possible move for us, but now it’s become our greatest liability.

Earl Green
theLogBook.com webmaster / editor-in-chief

The X Prize competition helped rally some of the most inventive minds to put themselves into low Earth orbit, but now Google is putting its money where the moon is. Google has launched the Lunar X Prize competition, which will drop an astronomical $20 million into the pocket of the first group that can design, build and successfully launch its own lunar rover to the surface of the moon - with as little help from the competitors’ respective governments as possible. To qualify, a competitor’s rover has to land on the moon, travel at least 500 meters, and send back photos, HD video and sensor data…all by New Year’s Eve, 2012. On January 1, 2013, the prize incentive money drops to $15 million, and two years later the financial incentive is off the table entirely. But additional bonuses are offered for such achievements as longer roving distances, acquiring on-site video of man-made hardware left behind on previous moon missions. Anyone serious about engineering their own lunar explorer and putting it on the moon’s surface is likely to find out, however, that even winning the $20 million prize would only recoup a fraction of what they’d spend to accomplish the task. Those wanting to be spectators can make smaller donations, including $10 to have your own data time capsule sent as part of one of the missions, by visiting the official web site.

While we normally wait until news of upcoming releases is confirmed and chiseled into stone before discussing it here, these two items are still unconfirmed but of great interest to fans of the music of the Doctor Who universe. It seems fairly likely that there’ll be yet another Doctor Who soundtrack CD this fall, but the first CD of music from Torchwood is expected to be released as well, containing music by Murray Gold and Ben Foster from the first two seasons. Even more unconfirmed, but quite a find if it makes it into stores, is word that the music from both of the Peter Cushing Doctor Who movies, made in the 1960s, may be released later this year; a teaser site promises more news on the Cushing soundtracks “in the coming months”, along with a sample track. We’ll keep an eye out for all of these releases later this year.

Why have one Earth-like planet when you could have three orbiting a single star? That’s what a team of European astronomers claim to have found, using super-sensitive equipment at a Chilean observatory, designed specifically to spot and study planets orbiting other stars. A recent survey of stars with no previous planet detections yielded the surprising find: three planets, between four and nine times the size of Earth, with rocky surfaces. The bad news for any interplanetary real estate agents? The three planets are all too close to their parent star to be favorable havens for life. The star HD40307 is 42 light years from our solar system. But this find, and others (over 40 other newly discovered smaller planets oribitng other stars) which popped up during the same survey, may have a wider implication: if one considers the stars studied to be a representative sampling of all the stars in the known universe, then it means that one in three stars has smaller terrestrial planets and not just gas giants, a figure which drastically increases the odds that life has evolved in some form, somewhere.
Sources: BBC News, Associated Press

Trek alumni work on Raimi’s Wizard for a spell. Two alumni of recent Star Trek series have landed gigs on Sam Raimi’s upcoming TV series Wizard’s First Rule, based on Terry Goodkind’s book of the same name. Kenneth Biller, formerly of Star Trek: Voyager (and an executive producer on that show’s final seasons) and Dark Angel, will be the showrunner, while writer Michael Sussman, formerly of both Voyager and Enterprise, will work on the show as well. Wizard’s First Rule will be syndicated, and has already been sold to stations covering most of the country for a fall premiere.

Nation’s Survivors to be remade. Survivors, a post-apocalyptic early ’70s BBC drama from the pen of the late Terry Nation (best known as the creator of the Daleks and Blake’s 7), is being revived for a BBC Scotland remake. Joining the cast is Freema Agyeman, fresh from her return as Martha Jones in the upcoming season finale of Doctor Who. The original series, which premiered in 1973, dealt with the aftermath of a man-made plague accidentally released, reducing civilization to the pre-industrial age - think of it as the Jeremiah before Jeremiah. Nation left the show after its first season over major creative differences with producer Terence Dudley, went back to writing Dalek scripts for Doctor Who, and eventually created Blake’s 7.

K-9 spinoff to begin filming next month. Outpost Gallifrey reports that the K-9 spinoff, aimed at a younger audience, begins filming next month in Australia on a 26-episode season, with the episodes expected to weigh in around the 25-minute mark (with the extra time reserved for commercials). K-9’s co-creator, Bob Baker, is working out of offices in Queensland, writing scripts; other scripts are being contributed by local writers Shayne Krause and Shane Armstrong. The show will be a combination of live action and CGI, with an upgraded CGI version of K-9 aiding an Earth family from the future. K-9 has appeared in his more familiar, 1970s-style form in the Doctor Who spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures, though both of his appearances were left open-ended to allow for the character to “vanish” into its own spinoff, per a contract with Baker. Baker created K-9 with writing partner Dave Martin in 1977 for the Doctor Who story The Invisible Enemy, which has just been released in a DVD box set with the character’s first attempt at a spinoff, 1981’s K-9 And Company, which also serves as a precursor to The Sarah Jane Adventures. Jetix Europe will distribute the show overseas, though it’s unknown if, when or where the show, simply titled K-9, might reach North America.

Sources for these items: Daily Variety, BBC News, Outpost Gallifrey

If you barely made it through the lengthy Writers’ Guild strike with your brain cells intact due to the major networks’ sudden embrace of “reality” TV, you may want to start making plans to read some books, make the beast with two backs, or wade through this web site for hours on end, because the studios are bracing for another strike - this time with members of the Screen Actors’ Guild potentially hitting the pavement to picket. The deadline for the studios’ negotiations with the actors is June 30th, and with little progress at the bargaining table, major productions such as the second Transformers movie have gone so far as to build breaks into their filming schedules with the assumption that their cast won’t be reporting to work. This may result in another short television season this fall, as many shows such as Heroes just began filming again in May, and another truncated season would likely bring disaster to network advertising sales, which would then trickle down to their shows’ budgets. SAG, which was a strong backer of the Writers’ Guild strike, is trying to win concessions in many of the same areas, including “new media” usage (might as well just read that as “internet video”) and DVD residual payments. Complicating the picture even further is that SAG is not the only union for performers; the American Federation of Radio & Television Artists (AFTRA) has already been through negotiations with the studios and claims to have won its key points; there’s a major SAG push to discourage AFTRA members from voting to ratify that agreement. Hope you like Dancing With The Stars!
Source: Daily Variety

Longtime special effects and makeup wizard Stan Winston, a four-time Oscar winner with a resume loaded with some of the most influential genre films in movie history, died on June 15th after struggling for seven years with multiple myeloma. His four Oscar wins - two for Terminator 2, one for Jurassic Park, and one for Aliens - are just the tip of the iceberg; his makeup and effects skills also earned him Oscar nominations for such films as Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, and AI. Other movie credits included The Wiz, Predator, Friday The 13th Part III, The Thing, Interview With The Vampire and - most recently - Iron Man. His early career was spent in TV, with work on Roots, Amazing Stories and even creating the costumes for Chewbacca’s family in the Star Wars Holiday Special. In 1994, with James Cameron and Scott Ross, he co-founded visual effects house Digital Domain, which grew into a serious competitor in the effects business with its contributions to movies like Titanic, X-Men, Fight Club, The Fifth Element, Speed Racer, Star Trek: Nemesis, and the Lord Of The Rings and Pirates Of The Caribbean series. Mr. Winston was 62.
Sources: Daily Variety, Associated Press, IMDb

Sergey Brin, who co-founded the now-ubiquitous search engine Google.com, has put $5,000,000 on the table for a ride into space aboard a future Russian Soyuz flight to the International Space Station, because when you’ve created a site used so widely that its name has become a verb synonymous with online searching, you can do that sort of thing. There’s no word yet on when Brin will be lifting off, though it probably won’t be until next year; the next “space tourist” to take to low Earth orbit will be computer game pioneer (and Ultima series creator) Richard Garriott, son of former Skylab astronaut Owen Garriott, who is set for an October visit to the station.
Source: CNN.com