You are browsing the archive for Ryan Anderson.
18 March 2008
Fire and Ice: Tidally Locked Exoplanets
What would the climate be like if the earth was closer to the sun than Mercury, and was tidally locked, so that the same side of the planet always faced the sun? This was the question that Anita Ganesan and colleagues set out to answer with their poster last Thursday night at LPSC. I didn’t get the chance to talk to them directly, but I read their poster and abstract …
16 March 2008
Martian Real Estate
Well, LPSC is over and it is now Cornell’s spring break. Briony and Melissa are running around Joshua Tree National Park this week, so it looks like you’re stuck with me. I was just checking my email when Gmail presented me with a very interesting targeted advertisement: Own Land on the Red Planet ! Apparently there is a company out there convincing gullible people that they can buy plots of …
15 March 2008
What does Mars Taste Like?
Salt and vinegar potato chips. Ok, not really: there are no potatoes on Mars. On the other hand, there is mounting evidence that Mars is and was a salty and acidic place. The salts are not generally table salt, and the acid was likely sulfuric rather than acetic, but you get the idea. There were several talks today about experimenting with brines (salty solutions) to see if they could explain …
13 March 2008
Why is Mars Lopsided?
Take a look at this topographic map of Mars. The first thing that most people notice is that the northern hemisphere is mostly lower elevation (blue), and the southern hemisphere is mostly higher elevation (red). Nobody knows why. This “dichotomy” is one of the biggest questions in Mars science, and there were several talks yesterday afternoon trying to explain it. There are two main types of theory to explain the …
12 March 2008
Martian Greenhouse: Volcanic CO2 Doesn't Cut It
With all the evidence for water on the surface of Mars in the distant past, we always return to the same question: how was it possible for water to be stable back then? These days any liquid water on the surface would boil due to the low pressure or freeze due to the low temperature (or maybe do both at the same time!). To explain liquid water on the past, …
Impacts, Occam's Razor, and Layers
The final Mars talk that I saw yesterday came at the end of a session rich with discussion of geochemistry, aqueous alteration, hydrothermal systems, and reference to the ubiquitous layers seen by both Mars rovers as being emplaced, or at least altered, by water. So I was interested to hear that the final presenter, Don Burt, has an alternative hypothesis. Burt suggested that since layers are so ubiquitious, and that …
Networking the Moon
This afternoon I was listening to Mars talks about geochemistry, but I reached saturation. I had to go hear about somewhere else in the solar system. So, I wandered in a stupor over to the session on lunar exploration. It turns out I had good timing: I got there just in time to hear none other than Alan Stern, associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, give a talk about …
11 March 2008
Layers and Swiss Cheese
No, this isn’t a post about sandwiches. There just happen to be layers and swiss cheese (terrain) in the ice caps on Mars. The morning session that I attended today was all about the north and south polar ice caps, and what people are seeing there, especially with new high-resolution data. The poles of Mars are really interesting because every winter the atmosphere condenses out to form layers of carbon …
9 March 2008
Lunar and Planetary Science Conference XXXIX
We are heading down to Texas today for the 39th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC)! This conference is one of the biggest annual gatherings of planetary scientists, and there are sure to be lots of interesting results. We will do our best to cover the highlights while we’re there and post about them here. If you’re interested, you can browse the abstracts at this link. Stay tuned for loads …
4 March 2008
It's a good camera…
It’s a busy week. All three of us are preparing to go to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference next week and show off our research, which means that we have to make our research look good enough to show off. It’s a good thing the HiRISE team keeps releasing fantastic images so that I have something to post until we get to the conference. (we will be blogging about …
