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27 January 2023
35-Spaceship Earth: The (visual) beauty of science
As the Scientific Visualization lead for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Mark SubbaRao oversees the translation of NASA science into images and movies. For Mark, science visualization is a key communication tool that allows the public to interact and explore the various scientific discoveries happening at NASA and beyond.
20 January 2023
34-Spaceship Earth: Powering humans in space
As the Deputy Program Manager for NASA’s Radioisotope Power Systems Program at Glenn Research Center, Concha Reid leads a team overseeing and monitoring devices that heat and give power to NASA space projects, such as the recent Orion spacecraft for Artemis 1.
13 January 2023
33-Spaceship Earth: Discovering water on Earth from space
Being a Hydrologist was never on Matthew Rodell’s radar, let alone working for NASA. But he always trusted the path ahead.
6 January 2023
32-Spaceship Earth: A love of space through a son’s telescope
Sparked into Earth Space Science through her son’s curiosity with space, we talk to Dorian on how her journey as an educator and life-long learner led to working on NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement Mission as a Senior Outreach Specialist, and how citizen scientists from around the world are providing important work for researchers through the GLOBE Observer Project.
30 December 2022
31-Spaceship Earth: Using satellites to feed the world
Chris Justice is a geographer and professor at the University of Maryland whose research on land use changes and global agriculture has taken him around the world.
13 June 2017
Sol 1727 Blog: Little bit of everything
After a successful drive, our parking spot included a nice patch of Murray bedrock to allow us to perform contact science (MAHLI and APXS) in today’s plan. Our target for contact science is ‘Jones Marsh,’ a dark patch of the Murray that you can see just above the rightmost corner of Curiosity’s mast shadow in the Navcam image.
12 June 2017
Sol 1726: First Look at Vera Rubin Ridge
After great anticipation over the last few weeks, the drive in the current plan will bring us into position for stop 1 of our close look at the northern face of the hematite-bearing Vera Rubin Ridge. Mastcam will take a wide mosaic to begin documenting the sedimentary structure of the ridge.
11 June 2017
Sol 1725: Curiosity’s four day weekend
On most weekends, Curiosity dedicates part of her efforts to do contact science – deployment of APXS, MAHLI, and sometimes the DRT – because multi-sol weekend plans have more time and power to fit in these more complex activities. Last weekend, however, time and power were dedicated to a more rare, and more complex, activity – analysis of a previously-drilled rock sample by SAM.
8 June 2017
Sols 1722-1724: Leftovers for Dinner
Almost the entirety of the first two sols (1722 and 1723) are dedicated to a SAM analysis of a ‘doggy bagged’ sample from the Quela drill hole collected back in September 2016 (Sol 1464). Several times in the mission we’ve saved samples from our drill locations to analyze later.
7 June 2017
Sol 1720: Rough Road Ahead
I was the Surface Properties Scientist, or SPS on staff today. The SPS has an interesting job, in that the SPS helps Rover Planners (called RPs) assess the terrain around the rover with safety in mind, first and foremost.
Sol 1721: An easier planning day
MSL drove 26 meters on Sol 1720, as planned, to a location with blocks of bedrock in the arm workspace. Because the rover climbed another 3 meters in elevation, contact science has top priority for today’s plan, with driving next in priority.
30 May 2017
Sol 1713: Not enough hours in the sol
Our Tuesday drive placed us perfectly in front of a very interesting outcrop that looked slightly different in color and texture from the typical Murray rocks we’ve been seeing for the last few hundred meters.
21 May 2017
Planning Sol 1705 – 1706: Rocky Road
Curiosity is continuing to make progress towards Vera Rubin Ridge along the Mt Sharp ascent route. We planned two sols today, Sol 1705 and Sol 1706. On our first sol, we will kick off the day with some remote sensing science on the bedrock in front of us, including ChemCam observations of targets ‘Turtle Island’, ‘Stony Brook’, and ‘Dike Peak’. Turtle Island is typical Murray bedrock, Stony Brook has an …
8 August 2016
Sol 1421: Determining drill activities at Marimba
On Sol 1420 we planned a full drill hole on the target “Marimba” to characterize the composition of the Murray mudstone in this location. However, we came in early this morning to find that the drill hole didn’t penetrate very far into this rock target, as seen in the above MAHLI image. We’re trying to evaluate why this drill hole is different, and what prevented the drill from completing as …
1 July 2015
Sol 1031: A Dog’s Eye View at Missoula
By Lauren Edgar Today we planned some MAHLI imaging along the contact near the “Missoula” target (the ledge in the upper left portion of this Navcam image). We refer to it as a dog’s eye mosaic, meaning that we use the MAHLI camera to take a series of images along a vertical face – essentially sticking our nose in there to get a good view. Hopefully it will provide …
11 May 2015
Sols 980-982: Dodging Sand, Updating ChemCam
by Ryan Anderson The Sol 978 drive stopped after going only a couple meters instead of the expected ~19 meters because Curiosity detected that its wheels were slipping in the sand. The rover periodically takes pictures of its surroundings while driving to make sure that it is actually moving forward and its wheels are not just spinning in place. This was a lesson learned years ago when the Opportunity rover …
17 May 2011
5th Mars Science Laboratory Landing Site Workshop Info
Hi folks, I don’t have much time to write a full post since I have some last minute changes to make to my talk before tomorrow morning, but I wanted to share some info about the workshop for those who want to play along at home. First, if you’re on the Twitter, there are several people at the meeting or following it online, using the hashtag #MSLsite. Speaking of following …
30 March 2011
First Image of Mercury from Orbit
MESSENGER just returned the first image of Mercury ever taken from orbit around the planet!
17 March 2011
Orbiting Mercury
In a little over 12 hours, the spacecraft MESSENGER will finally be orbiting the planet Mercury. It’s been a long trip: MESSENGER launched way back in August of 2004 and has spent the intervening time doing flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury. To date it has gone almost 4.9 billion miles.
8 March 2011
Planetary Decadal Survey
Last night Steve Squyres unveiled the results of the Planetary Science Decadal Survey. The decadal is a massive document used to chart the course of planetary science for the next ten years, and it drew a huge crowd here at the conference. This decadal was different from previous ones because it specifically was tasked with coming up with a list of missions that would be achievable with the funding available …
