You are browsing the archive for Ryan Anderson.
10 July 2012
MSL Landing Dress Rehearsal
Now that I have moved out to Flagstaff and am starting to get settled in, it’s time to leave! I’m headed to JPL this week for the final Operational Readiness Test (ORT) before MSL lands. This test will be a “dress rehearsal” of events as they are expected to occur when Curiosity lands on August 5, and for the following 2 sols. We will even be working on Mars time …
4 July 2012
Happy Higgs of July!
I don’t normally talk about particle physics here. Planets are really more my thing, but today I need to make an exception for some big news. Scientists at CERN and Fermilab are reporting that they have found the Higgs boson, the missing link in the leading theory of how our universe works at the subatomic scale. The new particle was detected at a mass of 125 to 126 GeV …
12 June 2012
Curiosity gets an improved landing ellipse!
Yesterday NASA hosted a call-in press conference for reporters to announce some good news and some bad news about Curiosity. The good news: the landing system is going to be even more precise than expected. The bad news: the drill sheds teflon that gets into the samples.
10 June 2012
The Scale of Phobos
You’ve probably heard that Mars has two very small moons, but just how small are they? Maybe this brilliant depiction of Phobos hovering over Grenoble like an alien invader will help put things into perspective.
6 June 2012
Ray Bradbury
I just found out that Ray Bradbury has passed away. His writing has had a huge influence on me, as you might suspect based on this blog’s title. If you have not read The Martian Chronicles or Fahrenheit 451, get away from your computer and to a bookstore or library! On my quotes page, I have a whole section dedicated to key excerpts from Bradbury’s writing, and I thought that I would share some of them here to commemorate a great man who will be missed.
5 June 2012
Meeting Under the Transit of Venus
Greetings from Paris! I’ve been here since Saturday afternoon, first taking some time to recover from jet lag and be a tourist, and then yesterday and today I have been at the ChemCam team meeting at the Observatoire de Paris. We’ve had a lot of good discussions: sharing the latest information about how we are getting ready for landing, how to use our various software tools, what sorts of science …
30 May 2012
What’s that rock made of? Good question…
You would think it would be pretty easy to figure out what a rock is made of, but it is actually a very complicated question. For ChemCam, we need a list of geologic samples (“standards”) with a range of known compositions so that we can accurately measure the composition of unknown rocks on Mars. Our measurements are only as good as our standards, so I have been spending an inordinate …
23 May 2012
SpaceX Successfully Launches Dragon Capsule to ISS
In the wee hours of the morning, SpaceX took a major step forward in private space exploration, launching their Dragon capsule on a mission to dock with the International Space Station. If the mission is successful, it will be the first time a privately owned spacecraft has docked with the ISS. This is a major milestone, and it’s great to hear the joy in people’s voices toward the end of this video. Congratulations SpaceX!
20 May 2012
Spectacular view of Mars from Viking 1
We planetary scientists are spoiled. Yeah, so most of my days are spent programming, wrestling with excel spreadsheets, and editing Word documents. But some of our data is beautiful. I’ve raved before about the pretty pictures coming down from new instruments like HiRISE, but even our vintage data is spectacular. For example, feast your eyes on this mosaic of Viking 1 images, put together by Daniel Machacek. I highly recommend clicking the image and downloading the full-resolution (21 MB) version.
11 May 2012
Our Super Moon
You may have heard all the excitement last weekend about the so-called “supermoon”. The gist of it is that the moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular, so its distance from the earth varies slightly. But all the talk of the “SuperMoon” got me thinking and I realized that we were missing a teachable moment. No, the moon being at perihelion is not a big deal, but our Moon is pretty “super”. Let me show you why:
