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6 August 2019
Moonquakes tumble boulders, build lunar scarps
The Apollo Moon buggies weren’t the only things rolling over the Moon’s surface in the early 1970s. New research has found that a strong moonquake in 1975 probably sent boulders tumbling down crater walls on our nearest neighbor.
18 April 2019
The Moon’s crust is really cracked
The bombardment of asteroids and meteoroids that pockmarked the Moon’s surface over the eons also created fractures reaching deep into the lunar crust, report researchers in a new study in AGU’s Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
18 September 2018
Mercury and its depressions
One of the most surprising discoveries of the NASA’s Messenger mission was the presence of unusual, bright, irregular and rimless flat-floored depressions on the surface of Mercury. These depressions, called hollows, are usually found on crater walls, rims, floors and central peaks. Since the hollows appear fresh, they may be actively forming today through a mechanism that could involve the loss of volatile compounds, but understanding how the hollows formed is still a major challenge for scientists.
8 January 2017
Sols 1572-1574: New diagnostics
Fortunately, we are able to do everything except drilling while the investigation continues, but the team has decided not to try again to drill at Precipice, and to continue driving up the flank of Aeolis Mons (“Mount Sharp”).
6 November 2012
Updated Google Mars!
You guys! Google Mars has been updated!
You did know that Google Earth comes with a Google Mars mode, right?
18 October 2011
The Rock of Saint Michael
One of my fellow graduate students here at Cornell, Kassandra Martin-Wells, is also writer, but unlike me she actually finishes her stories, and they’re very good. She studies cratering on the moon and wrote the following story after hearing a presentation about the moon’s south pole at a Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting.
30 March 2011
First Image of Mercury from Orbit
MESSENGER just returned the first image of Mercury ever taken from orbit around the planet!