Judging by the headlines, the weather on the moon is as capricious as the weather in Boston. First, it was wet. Then, in August, it was bone dry. This week, it's drenched again.

What's going on here? There's no real weather on the moon, so the true tempest must be in the headlines. Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator on NASA's moon-smashing LCROSS mission, helped me sort through the moon's moist mixed messages.

As Colaprete and his team reported last week in Science, water ice may make up more than 5% of the dust inside a shadowed lunar crater called Cabeus, which they excavated kamikaze-style last year by smacking it with an empty rocket and analyzing the dust and gas that they kicked up. Five percent might not seem like much, but it's twice what you'd find in the Sahara--pretty wet for a place with no atmosphere.

This week's deadly Indonesian tsunami carries echoes of the 2004 wave that killed nearly a quarter of a million people in Sumatra, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. The waves were triggered by earthquakes along different sections of the same fault line, part of a geologically active perimeter called the Pacific Ring of Fire. NOVA covered the 2004 tsunami just months after it happened in Wave That Shook The World.

The birth of a Mars rover isn't so different from the birth of a baby: It's a long, painful process, everybody wears masks and gowns, and someone always wants to get it on tape. Yesterday, the proud engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California started streaming live video of the birth of their own bundle of joy, the next-generation Mars rover Curiosity, which is now under construction in a JPL cleanroom. Check it out here, or join the conversation on Ustream, where you'll also find a calendar of scheduled activity. (Word is that Curiosity's six wheels will be going on today.)

Oliver Wendell Holmes famously once wrote, "A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." My mind, and assuredly those of countless others, never did after pondering some of the key concepts of the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who died last week at the age of 85.

Mandelbrot invented the term fractal to describe the "roughness" he saw all around him in nature -- the jagged shape of a cloud, the rugged indentations of a coastline. Classical Euclidean mathematics, the kind we learn in school, serves well for the human-made world of straight lines, circles, and squares. But nature's non-linear shapes were generally considered unmeasurable -- until Mandelbrot developed fractal geometry.

"In the whole of science, the whole of mathematics, smoothness was everything," Mandelbrot says in "Hunting the Hidden Dimension." "What I did was open up roughness for investigation."

Suddenly, something as ragged as a coastline could come under mathematical scrutiny. While he couldn't actually measure a coastline, Mandelbrot found, he could measure its roughness. It required rethinking one of the basic concepts in math -- dimension.

They are the little big guys who pulled off the unprecedented Chilean mine rescue. We got to know them over the last few weeks as Plan B forged ahead and eventually freed the 33 men trapped underground at San José mine, Chile.

When the miners were discovered alive on August 22, initial estimates of the rescue operation were a minimum of six months. Nobody had been trapped at such a depth before.

But Brandon Fisher, who runs a specialist drilling firm called Center Rock Inc., in Berlin, Pennsylvania, was convinced he could do the job quicker. Fisher had been involved in the rescue at Quecreek, Pennsylvania, in July 2002, in which nine miners had been saved after having been trapped for over 78 hours. But despite his experience, Fisher couldn't get anyone to listen to him.

The NOVA film crew interviews driller Greg Hall during the height of the crisis.


Enter stage left the hulking figure of Greg Hall, who runs his own small firm, Drillers Supply International, in Cypress, Texas. Hall has a long-standing connection with Chile ("it's my second home"), speaks impeccable Spanish, and runs his South American operations out of Antofagasta, about 300 miles north of the San José mine.

Hall's general manager there, Mijali Proestakis, and Proestakis's nephew Igor, had been involved in the early stages of the rescue operation, and Hall quickly persuaded the Chilean government to listen to Fisher's pitch.

It was a bold plan: to sacrifice one of the narrow supply lines being used to keep the miners alive, supplying them with food, water, air, and, later, communications and electricity.

The real struggle for the miners who initially managed to stay alive for 17 days sharing a few tins of tuna and each rationed to a couple of spoonfuls of water per day begins now as they return to normal life.

With the men restored to their families, friends, or lovers, the engineers of the rescue team have now handed primary responsibility for the miners over to the medics, who have been involved from the day the 33 men were found alive on August 22nd.

All the miners have now left hospital. Many were smuggled past the waiting press pack outside Copiapo Hospital yesterday disguised as workmen to avoid the stress of over-exposure.

One of the last men to be discharged was Mario Sepúlveda, or "Super Mario" as he was christened by the press, the joker in the pack, the ever-voluble compere to the underground reality show.

In the end, they made it all look so easy.

After the nervous final moments of preparation, the delay caused by the last-minute trial runs of the rescue capsule Phoenix 2, we at the camp and a billion viewers across the world breathed a sigh of relief with the emergence of the first miner from his subterranean prison.

In different time zones across the world, people were waking up to the news that the rescue had started, or going to bed relieved that it had all begun successfully. Back in London, my cousin John couldn't sleep and came back down to switch on the TV. He stayed up the rest of the night, captivated, like millions of others, by the extraordinary images.

Extraordinary. Remarkable. Unprecedented. All words that are going to get over-used in the next few days.

But how else can you describe the Chilean rescue operation? Nobody has ever been trapped so deep for so long before. And everything was captured on camera.

NOVA's "Emergency Mine Rescue" will air on PBS on October 26, 2010. Here, the NOVA film crew, with Nick Evans at far left, outside their "hotel" at the San Jose mine. Posing with them, in the pink shirt, is Carola, wife of miner Raúl Bustos. 

Final preparations last night for the rescue at the San José mine took a few hours longer than expected, which put everyone on edge.

The rescue team made two trial runs with the rocket-shaped capsule Fenix 2 (Phoenix 2), first to check the communications and then with a rescuer inside the cramped space, winching it down to within about 30 feet of the miners' refuge.


It was 11:19 p.m. local time (10:19 EST) when rescuer Manuel González finally stepped into the capsule to be winched down a narrow tube into the depths of San José mine.

Along with the rest of the world, I watched the remarkable footage when, 17 minutes later, González reached the 33 men below -- the hugs, backslaps, and laughter among men who all along have shown an incredible fortitude.

It looked like nobody wanted to be the first to leave what has become a special community locked away from the world but under its constant gaze.

Editor's Note: A NOVA film crew has been on-site at the San José mine in Chile since September 5, exactly one month after the collapse that trapped 33 miners. (NOVA's film, "Emergency Mine Rescue," will air on PBS within weeks -- watch here for updates on exact airdate.) Producer Nick Evans will blog here from Chile every day until the miners are freed.

The Plan B drill team celebrates after breaking through to the miners' workshop on Saturday, October 9.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

The mood in Campamento Esperanza is feverish, at least among the media who count down the hours to rescue, expected to begin at 8 p.m. local time tonight (7 p.m. EST).

The families, meanwhile, have retreated into their private thoughts. Some pray, others clutch some small object of sentimental value that reminds them of their husband, father, brother, or son.

Or they re-read worn, tear-stained letters from their loved ones below, letters whose words they already know by heart.

Or rehearse speeches that will never get beyond the first few words, as pure emotion inevitably takes over.

The Chilean President will fly in by helicopter this afternoon, and tomorrow we await the arrival of Evo Morales, the left-wing President of Bolivia, who wants to greet Carlos Mamani, the only non-Chilean miner trapped below.

The media village, bristling with satellite dishes and Winnebagos, continues to spread down the hill away from the mine head. Journalists will jostle for position on the platform from which we will be able to record the rescue.

Meanwhile, the families wait, pray, hope, and, if all goes as expected, finally, finally, celebrate.

What kind of place is the fourth planet from the star Gliese 581? It's at least three times as massive as the Earth. It orbits its dim red dwarf once every 36.6 days, at a distance of about 14 million miles. And one more thing: It just might be the first truly habitable planet discovered outside our solar system. (For more on how scientists spot these alien worlds, check out NOVA scienceNOW's Hunt for Alien Earths. )

The fourth planet--also known as Gliese 581g--isn't the first exoplanet to lay a claim on that title. Two of Gliese 581g's neighboring planets have also temporarily held the mantle; one was eventually determined to be too hot, and the other likely too cold, to maintain the liquid water that astrobiologists believe is a critical ingredient for life. Figuring out the temperature of an alien world is tricky business. Without much hard data to go on, scientists must make educated guesses about how much sunlight an exoplanet reflects and how much it absorbs; how much extra warmth it gets from the greenhouse effect; and whether other heat sources, like a roiling interior or tidal friction, nudge up the mercury. (Of course, astronomers would love to be able to get this information--here's how they would use it to probe an exoplanet's atmosphere from afar.)

NOVA congratulates Robert Edwards, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his role in developing human in vitro fertilization therapy. Since the birth of the first "test tube baby" in 1978, an estimated 4 million babies have been born with help from IVF. NOVA documented the development of IVF in the 2001 film 18 Ways To Make A Baby. Check out online resources associated with the film here, or head straight for the transcript.