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10 October 2008
MSL Still Aiming for Oct 2009
NASA is holding a press conference right now regarding MSL and it sounds like they are going to press on and try to achieve the October 2009 launch date. More info as it becomes available! Update: Emily has a much more detailed post about the status of MSL over at the Planetary Society blog.
DPS Meeting Live Webstreaming!
Planetary astronomers from around the world have been flocking to Ithaca over the last day or so to participate in the 40th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences meeting here at Cornell. There will be tons of fascinating talks starting tomorrow morning and going until Wednesday. I’ll try to blog about the more interesting ones that I see, but in case you want to listen …
Carnival of Space #74
Get your weekly space fix over at Kysat with the 74th Carnival of Space! What are you waiting for?
Space-X Launch Video
Check out this video of the succesful Space-X launch, set to music. I especially like the glowing hot rocket nozzle.
8 October 2008
25km Enceladus Flyby!
Tomorrow the Cassini spacecraft will fly within 25 km of the surface of Enceladus. Yes, you read that right. Twenty five kilometers. Not 2500, not 250. Holy crap. I’ll let you read about all the details over at the Planetary Society blog. I just wanted to call attention to how freakin’ amazing it is to be able to command a spacecraft that is currently ~1,525,300,000 km away from Earth and …
Quite the Overhead Projector
Last night McCain called the projector at the Adler Planetarium, the first planetarium in the western hemisphere, an “overhead projector” and criticized Obama for seeking money for it. He is also on record as previously calling planetaria “foolishness”. Read more about it at Cosmic Variance and Universe Today. Update: the Adler planetarium has issued a statement about McCain’s remark, and Bad Astronomy (and many others) weigh in.
7 October 2008
More Astro-Art!
Lynn Adrich, Pilgrimage: Through the Wormhole 2008 installation in progress Right on the heels of my post about Planets as Art, a press release from JPL is announcing a new exhibit in Pasadena that is the result of collaboration between the Spitzer space telescope team and the Pasadena Art Center College of Design. From the press release: For thousands of years, people have used art to explore ideas that humble, …
Mercury Flyby #2 Images
The first close-up images from MESSENGER’s second Mercury flyby were posted today and they’re spectacular! Here’s a link to the images, and a nice summary over at Bad Astronomy. The most striking thing about this first image is the totally awesome planet encircling ejecta rays! These are formed in large impacts when the debris gets blasted out of the crater in coherent jets. Rays are common, expecially on airless bodies, …
Red Mars on TV!
If you are reading this blog, which you are, and you have not read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, you should drop everything and go get the book. I read it in high school, before I really knew much about Mars but when I was starting to think about planetary astronomy. It is the story of the first colonists to permanently setlle the red planet, and is more realistic …
6 October 2008
Planets as Art
I’m often struck by how beautiful landscapes are when seen from above, whether they are on Mars, Earth, or anywhere else. With the high-resolution images from HiRISE this is especially true; with such a close view, the scale and context can be lost, and the images become more akin to abstract textures. Here’s a great example: It’s a dune field inside a crater on mars, but it looks like rumpled …
