You are browsing the archive for Ryan Anderson.
15 July 2011
Dawn goes into orbit around Vesta today!
Today NASA’s Dawn spacecraft will make history by being the first probe to orbit the protoplanet Vesta! The image below is from July 9, and already Dawn has upgraded Vesta from a fuzzy disk in Hubble images to a world with visible surface features, including some strange striations. Once Dawn is in orbit, we should be getting even better views. Stay tuned!
9 July 2011
The End of an Era
Yesterday morning, the last space shuttle launched for the last time. There will never be another shuttle launch, and personally, I’m glad. But I am worried about the future.
2 July 2011
Spectacular Space Shuttle Photo Retrospective
I’ve been known in the past to be down on the Space Shuttle. After all, it is incredibly expensive, unsafe, and never lived up to the promise inherent in the name “shuttle”. But there’s no denying that it’s still a spectacular machine that, for better or worse, has been the face of human space exploration for 30 years. July 8 is set to be the final launch of the shuttle program, and the Atlantic’s photo-blog “In Focus” has a beautiful pictorial history of the shuttle that is well worth checking out.
26 June 2011
Spectacular New MSL Animation!
You guys. Drop everything and take a look at this spectacular 11 minute animation of Curiosity landing on Mars!
19 June 2011
Seeing Bases and Faces on Mars
Did you hear about Bio Station Alpha? No, it’s not a new video game. It’s a mysterious feature that someone spotted in Google Mars. In the northern hemisphere of Mars, at coordinates 71°49’22.11″N 29°32’35.64″W there is a cluster of white pixels just barely visible if you zoom all the way in. And obviously, the most logical expanation is that these pixels are a secret Mars base. Obviously. It is definitely not a glitch in the image caused by a cosmic ray hitting the detector and then exacerbated by compressing and map-projecting the image.
25 May 2011
R.I.P. Spirit Rover
We all knew this day would come. Yesterday NASA announced that it would be stopping efforts to contact the Spirit rover after a final set of commands early this morning.
20 May 2011
Results of the 5th MSL Landing Site Workshop
Well, after three days of fascinating science and heated discussion, the 5th and final MSL landing site workshop has come to a close, and the consensus is… that all of the sites are pretty darn interesting.
17 May 2011
5th Mars Science Laboratory Landing Site Workshop Info
Hi folks, I don’t have much time to write a full post since I have some last minute changes to make to my talk before tomorrow morning, but I wanted to share some info about the workshop for those who want to play along at home. First, if you’re on the Twitter, there are several people at the meeting or following it online, using the hashtag #MSLsite. Speaking of following …
16 May 2011
Utah Mars Analogs
Greetings from Los Angeles! I’m in California this week for the 5th and final MSL Landing Site Workshop. Since that is sure to provide some tasty blog-fodder, I thought I should sit down and write about my trip to Utah two weeks ago.
Why did I go to Utah? Because the latest MSL camera team meeting was held in Moab, and I was hoping to give a brief presentation about some work I’ve been doing on the side (in all my copious free time) with the calibration data for the Mastcams. Unfortunately, I can’t write about what happened at the business part of the meeting because then I would have to kill you. Or more likely Mike Malin would kill me. It turned out there wasn’t time for me or my adviser to give our presentations, but it was still a great trip because after the “sit in a room all day and watch powerpoint presentations” part of the meeting, came the field trip!
29 April 2011
Gale Crater Videos
Yesterday I participated in a telecon about Gale Crater, one of the potential landing sites for MSL. It’s a fascinating place to talk about and would make for a spectacular mission. Ok, this is true for all four finalist landing sites, but the scenery at Gale, with its 5km tall mountain of layered rocks would be particularly great. One of the presenters at yesterday’s telecon, Dawn Sumner, posted two very nice videos on YouTube covering much of what she talked about. The videos also serve to show off a very-cool new open-source 3D visualization and GIS tool called Crusta being developed by a student at UC Davis.
