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28 August 2012
Danny Krysak: An out-of-this-world geologist (Accretionary Wedge #49)
For this month’s Accretionary Wedge, Dana Hunter over at En Tequila Es Veridad suggests that, in honor of the Mars Science Laboratory (and the rover Curiosity) making a successful landing on the Red Planet, we should talk about exogeology! Well, exogeologists, I’ve got a real treat for you. You know those photos that we all tweet and blog and comment on and drool over when they come down from Curiosity’s cameras? Well, I’ve got an interview with one of the camera team who is, quite literally, the first person on Earth to see some of those photos – Danny Krysak!
5 August 2012
Good luck to Curiosity and the MSL teams!
You’ve probably been reading exciting things about tonight’s landing from my fellow AGU Geolblogger, Ryan Anderson of the Martian Chronicles. He’s been doing a fantastic job of covering the upcoming landing (at 1:31 AM EDT tomorrow morning, or 10:31 PM tonight for the folks at JPL), and I’ve been following his posts with fascination. But I’ve also got another reason to be interested: Danny Krysak, a former UB grad student and one of my good friends, is now working at Malin Space Science Systems and is part of the camera team for Curiosity! He’s every bit as excited about tonight, and I wanted to take the chance to wish both Danny and Ryan a fantastic (and successful) landing!
29 February 2012
Survival geology for the space traveler
For your reading pleasure: a totally frivolous post based off musing I’ve been doing when I actually have time to sit down and watch TV.
Recently I’ve been on a scifi kick (and got sucked into watching episodes of Stargate: Universe online, which is a great way to see a whole series but a massive free-time sink). Interpersonal issues aside, the characters on SGU, who are stuck on an alien spaceship on the other side of the universe, spend a lot of time visiting new planets, looking for resources like food and water. Sometimes the main barrier to this is an alien critter that doesn’t like them much, but often they end up on deserted planets with little more than a “well, you can breathe and it’s not too cold” from the probes they send through first.
30 October 2010
Geological Frightfest: The Monolith Monsters
Lee Allison at Arizona Geology deserves credit for inspiring the last movie in the Frightfest series – in his post from June about the Piranha 3D movie, he also mentioned The Monolith Monsters. Again, it’s another 1950s movie I haven’t had the chance to see, but I’ll definitely have to remedy that if I can…guess what’s next on the Netflix queue? With a title like that, though, I couldn’t resist …
20 July 2009
When do I get to go?
A proper geologist’s photo, with foot for scale. (According to NASA’s Apollo 11 Image Library, “Second photo of Buzz’s second soil-mechanics bootprint.”) I like this one almost as much as the iconic solo bootprint. I haven’t spent much time today listening to interviews or news reports about the anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, but I did get a chance to watch For All Mankind (1989), which just showed …
25 September 2008
Rocks in from space: Accretionary Wedge #13
Unfortunately, my experience with extraterrestrial geology is limited – I haven’t taken a planetary geo course yet, although there’s a planetary volcanology expert not twenty yards away, and I intend to take advantage of that next semester. So I’m going to take a little nostalgia trip and talk about one of my favorite places in the world, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. (Don’t worry, this will connect …
Jessica Ball is a volcanologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, researching volcanic hydrothermal systems and stability, and doing science communication for the California Volcano Observatory. She previously worked at the Geological Society of America's Washington DC Policy Office, learning about the intersection of Earth science and legislative affairs. Her Mendenhall postdoc and PhD focused on how water affects the stability of volcanoes, and involved both field investigations and numerical modeling applications. Her blogging covers a range of topics, from her experiences in academic geosciences to science outreach and communication to her field and lab work in volcanology.