You are browsing the archive for Ryan Anderson.
26 April 2011
Why Read (Speculative) Fiction?
Today I gave a two-part guest lecture to a bunch of Cornell freshmen. The first part of the lecture was The Science of Red Mars, which you can read about over here. But since this writing seminar (taught by my officemate) might be the only course that some of these students take which involves reading fiction and writing about it, my officemate encouraged me to talk a bit in general about reading fiction, and particularly speculative fiction. I figured that since I already put together the guest lecture I might as well post it here!
22 April 2011
New CO2 Reservoir Discovered on Mars
If you’ve followed Mars science for long, you know that the question of where the atmosphere went is a major one. Evidence points to liquid water on the surface of Mars, and that’s only possible if the atmospheric pressure is high enough and the surface temperature is warm enough. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere would increase both temperature and pressure, so a lot of scientists have been looking for carbonate rocks that might be trapping the CO2 that used to be in the atmosphere.
Well, this week a new article in Science reveals that there is a huge amount of CO2 trapped as dry ice near the South Pole!
16 April 2011
Dreaming of Easy-to-Use Data
Some thoughts on how difficult it is to use multiple different types of data in planetary science, how easy it could be, and two free programs that are important first steps in making easy-to-use data a reality.
4 April 2011
The Science of Red Mars
Have you read the book Red Mars yet? If not, you can download a pdf of it here. It’s a classic hard sci-fi epic about the colonization of Mars, and for my latest post over at Science in my Fiction, I took a look at how the highly accurate depiction of Mars in the book has held up with all the new discoveries in the last 20 years. Head on over and check it out!
30 March 2011
First Image of Mercury from Orbit
MESSENGER just returned the first image of Mercury ever taken from orbit around the planet!
22 March 2011
Open Laboratory 2010 Now Available!
Do you like science? Do you like blogs? Do you like blogs about science? I sure hope so, because if not, what are you doing here? Anyway, assuming you answered the above questions in the affirmative, you’re going to want to immediately follow this link to purchase your copy of OpenLab 2010. It’s a collection of “the best science writing on the web” from 2010. Inexplicably, one of my blog …
20 March 2011
Supermoon
Hey folks, did you know that tonight, the Earth doesn’t have just any moon? No, tonight we have a SUPERMOON. What’s that you say? The moon looks just like any other full moon? Well, clearly you haven’t been paying attention. You see, the “supermoon” phenomenon means that it will be ever-so-slightly larger in the sky than normal. This is because the moon will be at perigee: the closest point to …
19 March 2011
LPSC 2011: Day 2 – Cryospheres, Carbon, and Methane Skepticism
More on the cryosphere of Mars, along with some speculation about martian carbonates and skepticism about the presence of methane in the martian atmosphere.
17 March 2011
Orbiting Mercury
In a little over 12 hours, the spacecraft MESSENGER will finally be orbiting the planet Mercury. It’s been a long trip: MESSENGER launched way back in August of 2004 and has spent the intervening time doing flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury. To date it has gone almost 4.9 billion miles.
16 March 2011
LPSC 2011 – Day 1: Cryospheres and Making Moons
Greetings from Texas, loyal readers! As you may have noticed, this year’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference came and went with barely a peep here on the blog. This is because, unlike some members of the planetary science community, I do need to sleep occasionally, and I spent almost all of my time at LPSC either in sessions or working on my never-ending paper. Yeah, remember the one that I …
