NASA’s hardy Mars Exploration Rovers are on the move again, after spending a month and a half in a power-conserving safe mode to ride out a major dust storm that threatened to cut their solar power systems off from sunlight. Both rovers are moving toward their next planned objectives again, despite being covered in dust; controllers woke up Opportunity for a 44-foot drive, while Spirit, which was already near a large rock that it was due to study, only budged 17 inches. Spirit’s optics have also shown a troublesome coating of Martian dust, which ground controllers hope can be “shaken” off with further movement. Originally designed for a three-month mission, the two Mars Exploration Rovers have now been exploring the surface of the red planet for three and a half years.
Sources: NASA / JPL

New Doctor Who figures representing some favorite guest characters from the second season of the new series are now in stock in theLogBook.com Store. Among the new characters are the possessed Toby from The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit, “The Wire” and the “faceless” Grandma Connolly from The Idiot’s Lantern, and the hungry Hoix seen at the beginning of Love & Monsters. You can find them now in the Store.

Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber – as in the original screen-used prop wielded by Mark Hamill in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back – is headed into orbit aboard the next space shuttle mission. Amid a platoon of Stormtroopers, Chewbacca and R2-D2 officially handed over the prop from the Lucasfilm archives to NASA representatives in Houston on Tuesday, where the lightsaber will be stored in the lunar sample vault until October, when it will be among the crew effects stored aboard the shuttle Discovery. Discovery’s crew, however, won’t be devoting much time to learning the ways of the Force; their primary mission is to deliver and attach “Node 2″ of the International Space Station, an all-important connecting piece that will allow further laboratory and living space to be attached during future missions. Discovery is scheduled to launch on October 23rd.
Sources: NASA, Lucasfilm

Universal Home Video has announced a December 4th release date for the feature-length one-off Battlestar Galactica story Razor, and right now they’re asking fans to choose the cover that will help the DVD stand out on the shelf. Go to the show’s official web site and look at the three choices, and then cast your vote; the voting closes on September 7th. Starring Jamie Bamber and Michelle Forbes, Razor premieres on the Sci-Fi Channel on November 24th, and will be available on DVD with the fans’ chosen cover artwork a little over a week later. The DVD will include extras such as a season 4 preview. You can pre-order Razor now in theLogBook.com Store.
Source: Universal

On the planet Sunday, the TARDIS takes a bit of a misstep during landing, burying itself in the planet’s swamp. The Doctor goes for help, but finds that the planet’s human colonists are struggling just to stay alive – and worse yet, Martha, trapped in the TARDIS, finds that the Doctor’s miraculous timeship may not be seaworthy. The latest Doctor Who novel, “Wetworld” by Mark Michalowski, is now available, and you can get your own copy in theLogBook.com’s Store.

You may or may not have noticed that theLogBook.com has gone into monster mode this week, as we kick off an “episode guide” to the live-action exploits of the king of monsters, Godzilla (and his too-numerous-to-count adversaries). If anything, you’ll probably notice by reading these various features that I’ve had very little hand in this monster mash, letting the rest of theLogBook.com’s staff writers stomp through Tokyo (figuratively speaking) while I get ready for my own challenge (the birth of my son, which could happen any day now). By preparing these nifty new features over the summer, the guys have given me some breathing room to make preparations at home without the site having to go “off the air” for an extended period of time. While they were doing that, I’ve been frantically writing material that will begin appearing in late September to tie in with the 20th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Maybe, just maybe, I will have gotten used to the stay-at-home-dad rhythm I’ll be dancing to by November.

My deepest thanks go out to theLogBook.com’s staff writers for their heroic effort to chronicle the city-crushing exploits of Godzilla & company; hopefully you’ll find it as fun as I do. Of course, our updates to other episode guides will continue alongside that content, so it’s not all-Godzilla, all-the-time. Also a big thank you to the publishers, labels and artists who have been sending us review copies of material that we’ve been covering here; with the words “stay-at-home dad” looming in the paragraph above (not to mention work-at-home), now more than ever, it simply wouldn’t be possible without their help and their recognition of theLogBook.com as a legitimate media entity. And of course, thanks to those of you who buy stuff through theLogBook.com Store – your purchases are literally keeping us “on the air” (don’t stop now!). (If anyone’s feeling sentimental enough to send baby gifts, feel absolutely free – we’ve got the baby registries piled high.)

Also, anyone using our P.O. box to send us review copies or other material, please take note – that address will be changing at the end of 2007 to bring things a bit closer to home. As I no longer live in Fort Smith, and only occasionally go there for work purposes, a P.O. box that’s 30 miles away from home is just a little bit out of the way. We’ll let you know the new address in time for the new year.

Stay tuned, there’s more to come, and thanks to you out there reading this, for your ongoing support.

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

Though the premiere of the George Takei-starring episode World Enough And Time was promised for this past week, fan series Star Trek: New Voyages appears to have hit some major distribution snags. The episode has been completed since March of this year, but the New Voyages team opted to hold off on releasing it so they could find an approporiate streaming video solution that would deliver the World in HD resolution as well as allowing them to track exactly how many viewers are “tuning in” online. This new venture was also partly in response to the herds of fans who stormed the New Voyages servers to download To Serve All My Days last fall, crashing the fan-made show’s site for days. But in the end, it seems that there still isn’t a satisfactory solution: a promised live webcast of the premiere gave way to a “technical difficulties” message that promised streaming video by this weekend, and that message has now been replaced by a message promising the same for sometime “next week.” Despite fans clamoring for an alternate distribution method, there’s been no official word.

August 25th marks the fourth anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Unlike Hubble, Spitzer’s views of the night sky reveal the infrared spectrum, which has allowed it to spot distant galactic collisions and signs of water vapor on planets orbiting other stars. Spitzer doesn’t orbit Earth, strictly speaking, but trails in the planet’s shadow; that trajectory, plus a sun shield built onto the observatory, keeps Spitzer cool enough to carry out infrared studies.
Sources: NASA/JPL

Former Star Trek composer Dennis McCarthy is releasing the fruits of one of his visits to another SFTV universe. McCarthy scored the pilot movie and season finale of Fox’s Sliders in the 1990s, and he’s releasing a limited number of CDs of the music from those two episodes, the first time any music from Sliders has been made available to the public. The CDs are available only from his web site, and will be autographed by the composer himself. We’ll be reposting our own 1993 interview with Dennis McCarthy soon, but until then, McCarthy fans and Sliders fans should definitely check this one out.
Source: DennisMcCarthy.com

Teal’c tells a new tale. Stargate alumni Christopher Judge and Michael Shanks, along with director Brad Turner, have gotten a greenlight from Stargate studio MGM for a new project conceived and written by Judge. Called Rage Of Angels, the two-hour movie will serve as a stealth pilot for a potential series about the angel Gabriel battling it out with Lucifer on Earth itself. Turner was a frequent-flyer director on SG-1 until he became a producer on the hit Fox series 24, and is slated to direct Rage Of Angels.

New Voyages’ next voyage is streaming only. In part to make sure they can truly gauge what kind of audience they’re really attracting, the fan series Star Trek: New Voyages is premiering its new episode World Enough And Time, guest starring George Takei and Grace Lee Whitney, this Friday via streaming online video only. Details can be found at the New Voyages web site; there’s no indication that the story will be made available as a download just yet.

Writer, producer and director Barry Letts, who helped to guide some of Doctor Who’s golden years during Jon Pertwee’s early ’70s stint in the TARDIS, has made part one of a two-part autobiography available in ebook form. The sales blurb for volume one of “Who And Me” promises that Letts will reveal “more than has ever been told before” about the personalities behind that era of Doctor Who. You can order “Who And Me” – and get instant download access – at this site.
Source: Outpost Gallifrey

The sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) and Melanie (Bonnie Langford) have to be careful what they wish for in another recently-released Big Finish Doctor Who audio adventure. A summons to an isolated asteroid, where wishes can supposedly be brought to life, is something that the Doctor can’t resist the urge to investigate. Paul Magrs pens both the three-part story The Wishing Beast, guest starring Jean Marsh in yet another role, and the one-parter The Vanity Box, which wraps up the Urgent Calls side-story-arc which began earlier this year. You can order The Wishing Beast / The Vanity Box now from theLogBook.com Store.

Unconditional return. Hurricane Dean’s steady march toward Jamaica and then toward the Gulf of Mexico has prompted NASA to cut short the space shuttle’s mission. Earlier last week, NASA engineers decided that the damaged tile on the shuttle’s heat shield poses no major risks, putting an end to speculation that a spacewalk to conduct repairs might be needed. NASA facilities have suffered significant damage from hurricanes in the past few years, so no chances are being taken with the shuttle’s landing site.

Points of Origins. Shooting has commenced on a new Star Trek fan-made series, Star Trek: Origins, which will chronicle the period between Star Trek: Enterprise and the original series pilot, The Cage, featuring the Starfleet ship U.S.S. Yorktown, commanded by Captain Robert April and his first officer, a young Christopher Pike. No release date has been announced yet.

Astronomers are used to comets having tails, but they’ve never seen one on a star before – until now. Though it’s been studied through telescopes for over four hundred years, the star Mira – 350 light years away from Earth’s solar system – has revealed a new feature: a vivid tail of luminescent gases so long that it would take 13 years to go from the star to the end of that tail while moving at light speed. Mira is a red giant, and it’s zipping through the constellation of Cetus with its orbiting companion, a small white dwarf star, at almost 300,000 miles per hour – not something that red giants are particularly well-known for doing. The tail had never been observed until the Galaxy Evolution Explorer satellite turns its UV sensors toward Mira.
Source: NASA

Years ago during the dot-com boom, video game fans Mark Bussler and David Crosson teamed up to present what may well have been the web’s first streaming video game review show, Classic Game Room. Each installment’s time was divided between the actual game review and humor, and they reviewed games from every machine from the Atari 2600 through the Sega Dreamcast. And then the dot-com bubble burst, and Classic Game Room was no more – until now. Several installments have been gathered on one DVD, showcasing Classic Game Room’s better-than-you-would-have-expected production values, and adding new features such as a documentary and a commentary from Mark Bussler. You can break into the Classic Game Room on DVD in theLogBook.com’s Store.

The seventh Doctor bundles up for his latest adventure from Big Finish Production. Frozen Time sends a companion-less Doctor to the Antarctic to join the search for a lost expedition, but the real reason for the team’s disappearances is truly otherworldly. Sylvester McCoy, Anthony Calf and Maryam D’Abo star in Frozen Time, written by (and featuring the alien voice talents of) Nicholas Briggs and directed by Barnaby Edwards. You can order your own chunk of Frozen Time now from theLogBook.com Store.