You are browsing the archive for Ryan Anderson.
15 February 2010
Shuttle Silhouette
Sorry for the lack of updates in the past week. Things are a bit busy right now as I try to crunch numbers in time to finish a poster for a conference and finish a fellowship renewal (luckily they rely on the same results). Meanwhile, enjoy this excellent photo of the space shuttle taken from the ISS.
8 February 2010
Frickin’ Laser Beams: Fact vs Fiction
Last month I spent a week out at Los Alamos National Laboratory vaporizing things with a high powered laser. Now, as I drown in data that I collected out there, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about lasers. When I tell people that I zap things with lasers, I can almost see the mental images flickering behind their eyes. They tend to look something like this: Man, I …
1 February 2010
NASA's New Budget
The internet has been a whirlwind of wailing and gnashing of teeth, interspersed with the occasional optimistic or guarded response, as space advocates respond to Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget request for NASA. In case you haven’t heard, the main points of the FY2011 budget are nicely summarized in this overview document: Increase of $6.0 billion over 5-years (FY 2011-15) compared to the FY 2010 Budget, for a total of …
29 January 2010
xkcd Spirit
xkcd (a comic which you should all be reading if you aren’t already) has a nice comic up today about Spirit. Click the image to see the whole thing.
27 January 2010
Awesome new Mars flyovers
Check out these awesome flyovers of Mars, generated by Doug Ellison of UnmannedSpaceflight! These are based on digital elevation models from HiRISE, draped with the HiRISE images, so it’s about as close as we can get to actually flying above the surface of Mars. I particularly like the Gale crater one, but I may be slightly biased, having stared at Gale for the past year or so…
So we'll go no more a roving…
With yesterday’s news of Spirit’s defeat at the hands of the sulfury sands of Mars, I was reminded of this poem. It is by Lord Byron, but I first encountered it in one of my favorite short stories in this blog’s namesake, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. The story is entitled “And the Moon be Still as Bright”, and the poem is “So we’ll go no more a-roving”: So, we’ll …
Spirit is no longer a Rover
In a news conference yesterday, NASA announced that Spirit’s driving days are likely over, but by virtue of remaining stationary, new science possibilities are opened up. Here’s the text from the press release: After six years of unprecedented exploration of the Red Planet, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit no longer will be a fully mobile robot. NASA has designated the once-roving scientific explorer a stationary science platform after efforts during …
25 January 2010
Model Mars Landscapes!
Check out these spectacular new photos of Mars! It certainly looks like the rovers have stumbled upon some more interesting terrain! The only catch is, these aren’t pictures of Mars at all, they are photographs of models made of, among other things, paprika, chili powder, and charcoal. They are the work of Matthew Albanese, and you need to go check out some of his other photographs. There are steel-wool tornadoes, …
24 January 2010
Book Review: Revelation Space
I just finished reading Revelation Space, a hard sci-fi space opera written by Alastair Reynolds. The premise of the story is that in the distant future, when humans have spread into deep space, they discover the remains of the Amarantin civilization that was wiped out just as it discovered spaceflight. The main character, Dan Sylveste is a scientist studying that civilization, driven by an unstoppable compulsion to solve the mystery …
