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4 June 2010
Spirit Rover Discovers Carbonates
Big news from Mars today, Spirit has found evidence for significant amounts of carbonates in the rocks of Gusev crater! Carbonates are really important for two reasons: first of all, Mars has a very thin CO2 atmosphere right now. Too thin for water to remain as a liquid on the surface: it would just boil away and freeze at the same time! But there is lots of evidence that water …
28 May 2010
LittleDog and BigDog walking robots – Could they work on Mars?
If you haven’t seen these videos of experimental new walking robots developed by Boston Dynamics and DARPA, you really need to. They are impressive and quite creepy in how similar the robot movements mimic a living creature. Pretty awesome eh? But would robots like this work on Mars? Well, as you could hear in the BigDog video, it runs on a go-kart engine, so that wouldn’t work on Mars. But, …
26 May 2010
Mars Polar Cap Mystery Solved
If you’ve ever seen a picture of the north polar cap of Mars, you’ve probably wondered why it has those spiral troughs in it. Until recently, you would be in good company: it’s a question that has been plaguing scientists for 40 years. But it has finally been solved! Go check out my new article at Universe Today to find out more!
31 March 2010
More TED skepticism: Is science news the most important news?
Only days after a TED talk about Mars inspired this post correcting some of the misconceptions in the talk, another TED talk has me scratching my head. This one is by Kirk Citron, editor of “The Long News”, a project concerned with winnowing the few news stories from current events that will actually be seen as important 100 years or more from now. In his very brief talk he gives …
25 March 2010
TED Talk: Why we need to go back to Mars
I recently started subscribing to the TED talk RSS feed, and I really love coming home every day after work and listening to smart people talk about cool ideas. If you aren’t familiar with TED, you should be. Most of the talks are fantastic and very thought-provoking. So you can imagine I was excited when I saw that today’s talk was about Mars! The talk was given by Joel Levine, …
6 March 2010
LPSC 2010 – Day 4: Mars Oceans, Titan Lakes, Astrobiology and Asteroids
Thursday started off with a couple of talks about the possibility of oceans on Mars. The first one, given by Gaetano DiAchille looked at possible locations of deltas all over Mars to try to figure out the water level of a past ocean. Deltas form when a river hits a standing body of water and drops its sediment, so they are a reliable marker of the water level. DiAchille found …
5 March 2010
LPSC 2010 – Day 3: Rover Update, Mafic Mars and Atmospheres
Wednesday started off with a summary of results from the Opportunity rover, given by Steve Squyres. He started off talking about the several iron meteorites discovered in the past year. I thought it was particularly interesting that there are hematite blueberries on top of some of the meteorites: the blueberries are way too big to be lifted by the wind, so that means the meteorite must have been buried and …
3 March 2010
LPSC 2010 – Day 2
Well, I made it to Houston about a day later than expected so I missed all of the monday talks and sessions, but I took notes yesterday and I’ll share some highlights here. The day started off with a series of talks about terrestial planet cryospheres. In other words, ice on Mars and the earth. Robert Grimm gave the first talk, describing his latest model results for groundwater and ice …
28 February 2010
Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 2010
Hi there readers! It’s that time of year again: every March, planetary scientists gather at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference to share all their latest results, and every year I frantically try to keep track of all the cool things I see and report some of them on the blog. This year I’ll be doing the same: as usual I’ll try to keep up with daily posts, but if …
15 February 2010
Lasers Shooting Stuff
I posted about lasers last week and mentioned in passing that the US military was working on a giant plane-mounted laser to shoot down missiles. As if on cue, this video was released, showing infrared views of that very laser doing that very thing! And on a related note: good news for mosquito haters out there. The very same technology used to take down missiles is being used on a …
