8 June 2009

Carnival of Space #106

Posted by Ryan Anderson

Hello folks, apologies for the lack of posts lately. I have been keeping busy trying to write up a draft of a paper on the Gale crater landing site for MSL, which is taking a very long time and becoming very large. I don’t anticipate having lots of time to post here this month. Even as I work on the draft, I will be traveling out to Los Alamos National Lab next week to begin analyzing some rock samples by vaporizing them with a laser, and then I’ll be rushing back to Ithaca to try to cobble together a coherent outline for my PhD thesis. I then get to defend that outline in front of my committee in early July. Assuming I survive that, they pat me on the back, hand me a master’s degree, and say “now go do all that stuff you listed in your outline”.

And of course, as if that wasn’t enough to keep me busy, I’m involved in a month-long novel outlining project over at the writing forum Liberty Hall. My novel is going to be character-focused realistic science fiction involving space pirates (sorry, no peg legs or eye patches here), colonizing and mining the planets of 55 Cancri, and lots of moral dilemmas. In other words, I’ve got my work cut out for me…

All of which is to say that posts here will be less frequent (unless you want to hear about planning a sci-fi novel or the mundane aspects of making figures for a paper). In the meantime though, other space-bloggers are writing some great stuff, and as always you can get a good sampling at the Carnival of Space. This week it is hosted by Next Big Future. Go take a look!