You are browsing the archive for Ryan Anderson.
23 November 2009
If Earth had Rings
There’s a great video making the rounds showing what it would look like if Earth had a ring system like Saturn’s, including some gorgeous views from the ground. Of course, rings probably wouldn’t be stable with our moon, or at least would look very different, but that doesn’t take away from the coolness of this video. Enjoy!
22 November 2009
Flying over Enceladus
Check out this awesome animation from the November 21 flyby of Enceladus (via the Planetary Society Blog). Remember, these are actual pictures, taken by an actual spacecraft! I’m constantly amazed at how close the Cassini team can get to Enceladus. This is the sort of cool fly-through I’d expect to see in the opening sequence of a Star Trek episode or something. To see it in real life is just …
21 November 2009
New Enceladus pictures!
The Cassini spacecraft just did a very close flyby of Enceladus, the icy moon of Saturn that has become famous for the plumes of water vapor billowing from its south pole, and the pictures coming back are so spectacular that they are taking seasoned planet-watchers by surprise. Here’s a teaser: a panorama assembled from the raw Cassini images by Stuart Atkinson at Cumbrian Sky. Check out his post for lots …
Black Hole Starships?
Do you ever get tired of science fiction stories using black holes to solve every imaginable problem? (I’m looking at you, new Star Trek.) Well, if so, you should not go take a look at my inaugural article for Universe Today, in which I report on a couple of physicists who calculated that a future civilization might be able to create black holes and then use them as powerplants to …
18 November 2009
Review: Earthlight
What happens when humans expand to the planets, but then the planets try to assert their independence? It’s a common science fiction storyline, and the central focus of Earthlight. Earthlight is one of Arthur C Clarke’s earlier novels, originating as a short story in 1941 and published as a novel in 1955. It is set at an astronomical observatory on the moon. There is war brewing between Earth and the …
17 November 2009
Be a Martian!
Fact #1: As a Mars scientist, I am incredibly spoiled. There are so many missions to Mars right now sending back so much data, that even if they all went silent tomorrow, it would be decades before we managed to look at all the data and figure out what it’s telling us. Fact #2: There are lots of people out there (I’m looking at you, loyal readers!) who would love …
15 November 2009
Crescent Earth, Water on the Moon, and Free Spirit!
Just a quick post to update you on the latest space news and remind you to keep voting for my article about how MSL is like James Bond. First of all, the Rosetta spacecraft, on its way to a rendezvous with a comet in 2014, swung by Earth the other day, and took some beautiful pictures: Second, NASA held a press conference on friday announcing that the LCROSS mission to …
10 November 2009
Sunjammer
In case you were wondering, the title of this post is the name of a short story by Arthur C Clarke in which solar sail-powered spaceships race each other around the moon. Ok, that’s cool, but why do I bring this up? Because the Planetary Society is going to be launching a solar sail spacecraft in about a year! An anonymous donor contributed enough money to jump-start the program. The …
6 November 2009
Big Picture HiRISE Gallery!
Speaking of Mars art, the Big Picture blog (which all of you should be following by now) has a feature on images of Mars taken by HiRISE. Head on over and take a look. Mars is a really pretty and often bizarre-looking place. [PS – Have you voted today?]
Mars Art: Mind-blowing Swiss Cheese
First of all, a reminder to go vote on my article about MSL, which is a finalist in the scientificblogging.com science writing competition. Ok, done? Good. I wanted you to do that before I showed you this image because it may very well break your brain. This is a HiRISE image of the so-called “swiss cheese” terrain at the south pole of mars. The terrain is formed by the sublimation …
