A Programming Note

For the last several weeks, my days have been consumed writing a paper describing my current research, and my energy for writing for the blog has been limited.  With the paper done (at least until the reviewers get their say!), I want to return the blog for a couple of lengthy mission descriptions for the Insight Mars Discovery proposal (see the last post before this one) and the Bepi-Colombo mission.  If I can find sufficient material, I'll also describe the Comet Hopper Discovery proposal to round out the current Discovery missions in competition (I've covered the third mission in the Discovery competition, the TiME Titan lake probe, previously).

You’ll also see that the blog has a new look (and my apologies to the three readers who were on the blog when I tried out several different color schemes in rapid succession).  A couple of readers said that the previous colors made the blog difficult to read.  If you have any problems with the new colors, please let me know in the comments.