You are browsing the archive for Ryan Anderson.
15 April 2009
Watching out for Dust Storms
NASA just sent out this press release discussing the various ways that we watch out for dust storms that might be dangerous to the rovers. I have actually used data from the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) that they mention in the release, but I used it for the exact opposite task! I wrote programs that search through the images taken by that camera (there are a lot of them, it …
14 April 2009
Where the Moon Rocks Live
This month, I am working at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and I have to say, it’s a pretty cool place to work. Every morning I ride my bike past the pair of NASA T-38 jets that mark the entrance to Space Center Houston (the touristy part of JSC). I ride through the security checkpoint and on my left are a handful of rockets from the early days of …
13 April 2009
Dune Mars, Visiting Mars and Carnival #98!
It seems that the astro-blogs have Mars on the brain today! Bad Astronomy has a post about some mind-bendingly cool HiRISE pictures of dunes on Mars, and The Spacewriter has a post about Mars as a whole and Ganges Chasma in particular. And, if you’d like a little more diversity in your space-blogging, go check out the 98th Carnival of Space at Universe Today!
11 April 2009
Moon Trailer
This looks surprisingly good, although a bit too similar to 2001: A Space Odyssey:
Rover Huggers
Stuart Atkinson just posted a very nice short story over at his blog Cumbrian Sky that you should all go and read. Here’s a teaser: “Hurry up!” Catriona said loudly into her helmet mike. She didn’t bother to turn round towards her brother as she spoke. She didn’t need to; apart from herself and her mother, whose hand she was clutching tightly, he was the only other person for miles …
10 April 2009
The Thermodynamics of Life
Markus Hammonds over at Supernova Condensate has a really interesting post about a recent paper showing that 10 of the 20 amino acids used by life are thermodynamically favored to form in all sorts of environments. That means that it’s very likely that life elsewhere in the universe would have the same most fundamental building blocks! Here’s a quote from the paper: Our results also indicate that a certain degree …
9 April 2009
I have joined the dark side
Guess what? I finally joined twitter! I am marschronicler! Do you want to know about the minutiae of my life? My most (and least) profound thoughts? What I had for breakfast? Well, then you are in luck, my friends!
8 April 2009
How to Talk Like a Physicist
Unfortunately, I missed Talk Like a Physicist Day this year (March 14), but I wanted to share this site anyway. It covers the basics of talking like a physicist, such as: Ground State: You’re not being lazy, you are in your ground state. and: First-order approximation : That is only a first-order approximation to a good cup of coffee… “The living room is clean. Well…at least to a first order …
6 April 2009
Spirit and Opportunity: Good Old Girls
Know what’s awesome? This video, put together by Steven Hammond, is awesome: That’s the song, “Good Old Girl”, by Marian Call. And the pictures, of course, are from Spirit and Opportunity. The song is actually about a somewhat larger, somewhat more fictional spacecraft, but it sure is fitting for the rovers.
Big Pictures of Mount Redoubt Eruption
The Big Picture, an awesome photo-blog that you should be reading, has a very cool set of photos of the Mount Redoubt eruptions in Alaska. I thought it was especially cool to see how the glacier on top of the mountain is collapsing as it melts from beneath. Update: Just like last time the Big Picture posted volcano photos, global warming deniers are posting in the comments and claiming that …
