Hi there! I don’t have a full blog post for you because I am a bad person and a delinquent blogger, but I do have some choice links to share.

First of all, in case you missed it, we live in the future. Proof? […]

This is not so much a review of a recent paper as a review of a significant paper. “An intense terminal epoch of widespread fluvial activity on early Mars:1. Valley network incision and associated deposits” by […]

I woke up this morning to find all of my social media feeds bursting with news of a huge meteor over Chelyabinsk, Russia. Reports are coming in from all over the place that the sonic boom(s) from the meteor […]

How did the boulders in the picture above end up in clumps and arcs instead of randomly distributed across the surface? That’s the focus of the paper “Possible Mechanism of Boulder Clustering on Mars” by […]

The other day I got a message asking about where the earth gets its heat. It brings up a number of misconceptions that I thought would be worth spending a post discussing, so here goes:

Many people assume the […]

To jump on the bandwagon, here is my research, described using only the 1000 most common English words. It would have been nice if “Mars”  and “Laser” and “Robot” were available:

I study the number four rock that […]

Hello loyal readers! After some deliberation, I have decided to try an experiment with this blog. Instead of trying to provide updates on current events in planetary science and space policy as I have done in the […]

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for […]

Greetings! It’s been a busy first two days of AGU, and it’s impossible to convey it all, but here are a few highlights:

Monday morning was my poster presentation, so that prevented me from seeing very many […]

Greetings from San Francisco! I have to say, flying here from Flagstaff is a lot nicer than flying from Ithaca. And the scenery from the first leg of the trip is hard to beat:

The view out my hotel room […]

I post this pretty much every year, but it’s too good not to share. Happy Thanksgiving! May your turkey cooking go more smoothly than the Kranzes’.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOyQ3nTDgCs

If you’re […]

Just in time for the thanksgiving holiday, Space Science Reviews has released its special issue containing all the instrument papers for MSL, along with papers describing the mission’s overall goals, the […]

You guys! Google Mars has been updated!

You did know that Google Earth comes with a Google Mars mode, right? It’s easy: you just click  on the little orange planet icon above the main window when Google Earth […]

I was going to photoshop my own image comparing hurricane Sandy to the great red spot, but this will do nicely:

So. This is happening:

With all the breathless reporting about how hurricane Sandy (a.k.a. Frankenstorm) is such a massive weather event, I was curious what the quantity of rainfall from Sandy looks like in […]

Science fiction fans have been awaiting this news for decades: new results from the European Southern Observatory’s HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) reveal that there is an Earth-sized […]

We’re wrapping up the flight software update on Curiosity and getting ready to continue the commissioning phase, testing out each instrument in turn and gathering new science data. As you have seen, the […]

Feast your eyes on this:

As you can see, there are still a few frames missing, but still. Wow. I love the way the crater rim fades in the distance, and the tantalizing glimpses at the layers of Mt. Sharp. […]

Last night we received the thumbnail version of the 360 degree Mastcam panorama, and it looks great! Unfortunately since it was a canned sequence, they could not tell it to point at the mound, so the upper part of […]