You are browsing the archive for Ryan Anderson.
31 October 2011
Lasers, Lunar Landings, and LRO
The young man was very interested in my work. I described how the tunable laser worked, how we were able to measure carbon dioxide and why it mattered. He was genuinely interested lasers and asked about other uses. I explained that laser can be used for cutting steel, measuring how fast cars are traveling, and as guide stars for observatories. I mentioned that scientists are able to accurately measure the distance to the moon by bouncing the lasers off or reflector arrays placed there by the Apollo astronauts. As I talked about the astronauts on the moon, I watched this guy’s face change. He thought for a minute and asked something like: You think we landed on the moon?
27 October 2011
Occupy Science!
A collection of space and planetary-themed parodies of the 99% movement, including a couple that I made myself!
23 October 2011
Cell Phone Spectrometer
Working with light and spectrometers is a part of my job. I worked with lab-built spectrometers and tunable lasers as a grad student at Montana State. At Los Alamos I worked with a mock-up of the ChemCam spectrometers and laser system. I still work with spectrometers at Apogee Instruments. I am also a smart-phone nerd. Recently, I stumbled onto an article about research using a modified cell-phone to enable doctors to perform in-situ analysis by turning the phone into a microscope or spectrometer.
18 October 2011
The Rock of Saint Michael
One of my fellow graduate students here at Cornell, Kassandra Martin-Wells, is also writer, but unlike me she actually finishes her stories, and they’re very good. She studies cratering on the moon and wrote the following story after hearing a presentation about the moon’s south pole at a Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting.
4 October 2011
Mars Art: Mars Express View of the South Pole
I came across this image this morning and immediately thought it deserved to be shared. It shows the edge of the south polar ice cap in a location called Ulyxes Rupes. The ice cap is the dark, rounded terrain on the left and there is a small outlier of ice in the crater in the upper right. The great thing about this image is that it was acquired using the High Resolution Stereo Camera, which also returns an elevation map of the same scene. The shaded colorized altitude map looks like some abstract watercolor to my eye…
28 September 2011
How do we know where rovers are on Mars?
The other day, my brother posted a very good question as a comment, and I thought it would be worth dedicating a full post to the answer. So watching this made me wonder how you keep track of the rover(s) once they’re on mars. Is it done with a sort of GPS? Triangulating with things seen in orbital images? Directly taking pictures of the rover with orbital cameras (can they …
20 September 2011
Spectacular Video of Earth from Orbit
If you haven’t seen this yet, you need to watch this spectacular time-lapse video of the earth at night as seen by the ISS.
The “Future” of Human Spaceflight
Well, it looks like Congress has finally decided what NASA’s next foray into human spaceflight will look like. If you’re thinking to yourself that that rocket looks the offspring of a Saturn V rocket and a Space Shuttle, then you’re absolutely right. Those solid rocket boosters on the sides are the same as the ones used for the Space Shuttle, as is the main engine for the first stage. In fact, if you take off Saturn V-like paint on the first stage, you would find a big familiar orange fuel tank. The second stage will use J-2x engines, based on the Saturn V engines.
15 September 2011
Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Red Dust’ Album About Mars
The geniuses at The Onion have come up with a brilliant article about Bruce Springsteen releasing a Mars sci-fi themed album.
