You may have heard all the excitement last weekend about the so-called “supermoon”. The gist of it is that the moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular, so its distance from the earth varies slightly. When it is at the closest point in its orbit, it looks slightly larger (and therefore slightly brighter) in the sky. [...]

Well, I survived Operational Readiness Test 8 (ORT)! Prior to this week, my only experience with rover operations was as payload downlink lead (PDL) for the color cameras on the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER). I joined MER well into the extended mission, when all of the bugs had been worked out and the planning process [...]

In another development that supports my suspicion that private enterprise is going to shape the future of space exploration, it looks like James Cameron, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and other influential wealthy nerds are unveiling a “new space venture” next week that is going by the name “Planetary Resources”. Of course, the press release doesn’t give [...]

The Mars Science Laboratory Rover Curiosity is a huge and phenomenally complex machine, and operating it is no easy task. And when so much taxpayer money and so many careers are on the line, you want to be ready to roll when you touch down on Mars. That’s why this week I am at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory [...]

Check out what I made today: Actually, I can’t really take much credit. I am starting up a new project using ArcGIS*, and I got this pretty picture by just downloading the global topography and daytime infrared datasets from this USGS page . It’s extremely gratifying to download datasets and have them just automatically be aligned and map [...]

On the second day of this year’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, two of the most interesting talks that I saw were back to back in the morning session about planetary hydrology. The first was by Jeff Andrews-Hanna, about the latest results from his groundwater modeling. You can read the abstract here. For years, Andrews-Hanna has been [...]

Well folks, I’m back from another successful LPSC! I am going to approach my recap differently this time: instead of an attempt to exhaustively list talks that I found interesting, I’m just going to do a few posts about key highlights, starting with the Masursky lecture by Jim Head about the history of the Martian climate. [...]

During my thesis defense, one of the questions that caught me most off guard was: “What would you say to a member of the public who asked you why we’re spending more than $2 billion on the Mars Science Laboratory rover?” I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t answer very well. I was all prepared for [...]

This just in from Mars, a stunning image that appears to be the ghost of a giant sand worm! Of course, those eggheads at NASA would have you believe that this is actually a dust devil . This is by no means the first time that a giant sand worm dust devil has been seen on Mars. Here are [...]