You are browsing the archive for Ryan Anderson.
27 October 2010
Martian Chronicles 2.0
Hello and welcome to the new incarnation of the Martian Chronicles blog! I’m really excited and honored to be part of the shiny new AGU blogosphere. If you’re a new reader, let me take a moment and let you know what to expect here at Martian Chronicles. I write about a lot of different things because I’m interested in a lot of different things. As you might have guessed, Mars …
24 October 2010
The Tubes of Mars
Last week was my birthday, and I unexpectedly got a gift in the mail from my cousin. We don’t normally exchange birthday gifts, but she came across a t-shirt called “Tubes of Mars” and just had to buy it for me. Apparently, this line of shirts is capitalizing on various wacky conspiracy theories and they decided to use one of my favorites, the “glass tubes on Mars” idea.
17 October 2010
Outpost Tavern and the End of an Era
The Outpost Tavern burned down Friday night. The Outpost was a rickety little tavern in Houston a couple miles from Johnson Space Center, famous as a hang-out for astronauts and other NASA folks. It went out of business earlier this year and it has apparently now met its fiery demise. I first visited the Outpost when I was in the 2006 Goddard NASA Academy. 20 of us showed up without …
13 October 2010
Martian Chronicles is Moving!
Big news folks! Sometime next week, this blog will be moving over to the American Geophysical Union‘s new blog network! AGU is the organization responsible for the Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets, which is one of the most important journals in planetary science, particularly for the terrestrial planets. AGU also hosts the enormous “fall” meeting each December, causing 16,000 scientists to descend on downtown San Francisco like over-educated locusts. …
12 October 2010
John Huchra
Over the weekend I learned that observational cosmologist John Huchra passed away on Friday. I only met him once, when I was a summer intern at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He very graciously gave the group of summer interns an hour and a half of his time and told us about his research, and about the interplay between observation and theory in astronomy. But more than that he also shared …
8 October 2010
Russia's Steampunk Lunar Lander
I always found the contrast between Soviet and US engineering fascinating. The goals were generally similar, but while the US seemed to aim for elegant, lightweight, optimized designs, Soviet spacecraft always look like they’re bolted together out of cast iron or something. That’s why I love this gallery of photos of the Soviet lunar lander that they developed during the space race. This thing looks like it should be used …
2 October 2010
The 4th MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 3 – Final Discussion
We wrapped up the landing site workshop on wednesday afternoon by revisiting each of the four sites and discussing them in turn. Unfortunately, the way that we did this was very disappointing, and made for a frustrating afternoon. The discussion was centered around a word document that was projected up on the screen in the room. Over lunch, the meeting leaders had conferred and listed what they thought were the …
30 September 2010
The 4th MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 3 – Engineering and Safety
With the details of all four landing sites on the table, we started day 3 of the meeting by hearing from the engineers and several scientists about the properties of the ellipses, the risks for landing and the capabilities of the landing system. First on the schedule was Mike Watkins, who explained why MSL is so unique in terms of assessing the risk for the landing site because the landing …
29 September 2010
The 4th MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 2 – Eberswalde Crater
The final site of the four that we discussed yesterday was Eberswalde, which of course is interesting because of the big delta that is preserved in the western part of the crater.The first presentation on Eberswalde was an impassioned and really interesting talk by terrestrial geomorphologist Bill Dietrich. Bill talked about how Eberswalde is an excellent site for going beyond just making qualitative statements about water on Mars and actually …
