You are browsing the archive for Ryan Anderson.
22 June 2009
Carnival of Space #108 : Solstice Edition!
Another week, another carnival of space! This one is special though because yesterday was the northern summer solstice! Go check out the Carnival over at Starts With a Bang, and enjoy the long hours of daylight (if you live in the North) or go have a snowball fight (if you live in the south).
20 June 2009
Fun with Lasers
Ladies and gentlemen: I just spent a week vaporizing rocks with a laser! Now, after your first thought of “Whoa, awesome” wears off, you may be wondering why I would do such a thing. Because it’s fun, obviously. But also because the Mars Science Laboratory rover “Curiosity” will be doing the same thing on Mars. The ChemCam instrument uses an infrared laser to shoot pulses of light at rocks. The …
15 June 2009
Carnival of Space #107
After three flights and a nice nighttime drive during which I got to watch a thunderstorm raging off on the horizon, lighting up the clouds like paper lanterns, I am in Los Alamos! I am here all week doing lab work: I finally get to shoot rocks with lasers! I’ll post some more info about why we are attacking rocks with sci-fi weapons at some point this week, but for …
8 June 2009
Big Picture: Mercury MESSENGER
If you’re not already following the Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog, you should be. They always have spectacular photos, often of current events, but also quite often of space-related stuff! Today’s post is about the MESSENGER mission to Mercury. Go check it out.
Carnival of Space #106
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 …
1 June 2009
How to get Mars funding
On a related note, my fellowship, which involves vaporizing rocks with a high-powered laser, was renewed last month. (Click for the full comic)
27 May 2009
MSL is a Curiosity
Well, it looks like the next-generation rover that will be launching to Mars in 2011 (and happens to be the focal point of my PhD thesis) just got a name! Before today it was referred to as the Mars Science Laboratory or ‘MSL‘. But now it will go by the name Curiosity! The name comes from a short essay written by 12-year-old Clara Ma: Curiosity is an everlasting flame that …
23 May 2009
Olympus Mons is How Tall?!
Olympus Mons is a big volcano. It is almost unimaginably huge. It is 550 kilometers (342 miles) across at its base, and the volcanic crater (the technical term is ‘caldera’) at the peak is 80 kilometers (53 miles) long. If you were standing at the edge of the caldera, the volcano is so broad and the slopes are so gradual that the base of the volcano would be beyond the …
22 May 2009
What Ever Happened to Space Colonies?
There’s a very interesting article up at The Space Review, taking a look at the optimistic view of the future of space exploration that people had in the 70s and discussing why it never caught on. Where are the space colonies depicted in movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey? Go read the article to find out. Here’s a sample: Asimov’s article, “The Next Frontier?” and illustrated by Pierre Mion, was …
21 May 2009
Hubble Servicing Mission Pictures
Last weekend, NASA astronauts rendezvoused with the Hubble space telescope and repaired and upgraded the observatory in a series of five extremely challenging spacewalks. Their mission is now accomplished, Hubble has been set free to continue orbiting and doing cutting edge science, and the shuttle will be landing tomorrow morning. On Monday, the Big Picture had an awesome series of photos of the launch and the mission. And if that’s …
