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6 November 2009
Mars Art: Mind-blowing Swiss Cheese
First of all, a reminder to go vote on my article about MSL, which is a finalist in the scientificblogging.com science writing competition. Ok, done? Good. I wanted you to do that before I showed you this image because it may very well break your brain. This is a HiRISE image of the so-called “swiss cheese” terrain at the south pole of mars. The terrain is formed by the sublimation …
19 October 2009
Dozens of new Extrasolar Planets
The universe just got a little more crowded! Space.com is reporting that Astronomers using the European Souther Observatory’s 3.6m telescope in Chile have discovered 32 new extrasolar planets. The smallest of these could be ~5 earth masses, while the largest would dwarf Jupiter! Check out the full story here.
27 September 2009
A Detailed Look at Water on the Moon
It looks like Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society blog has beat me to the punch! After the big announcement that three separate groups have found evidence of water on the moon, she dove in, read the papers and has a series of posts with all of the details of their findings. Well worth a read! Part 1: There’s Water on the Moon! Part 2: The Murkier Part of the …
24 September 2009
Water on the Moon
In case you haven’t heard yet, there is quite the buzz building about three separate results that indicate that there is water on the lunar surface. There isn’t much: moon rocks returned by Apollo are pretty darn dry, but it’s still an exciting result, and it means that future missions might be able to extract water for drinking and rocket fuel. I was especially surprised to hear that the water …
8 June 2009
Carnival of Space #106
Hello folks, apologies for the lack of posts lately. I have been keeping busy trying to write up a draft of a paper on the Gale crater landing site for MSL, which is taking a very long time and becoming very large. I don’t anticipate having lots of time to post here this month. Even as I work on the draft, I will be traveling out to Los Alamos National …
27 April 2009
Pretty Dunes in Gale Crater
This is a tiny subframe from the HiRISE image PSP_009294_1750.
26 April 2009
Discoveries in Planetary Science
The Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society just released several short sets of slides summarizing recent important discoveries in planetary science that aren’t yet in textbooks. They are very nice, easy to understand summaries so I encourage you to check them out. The topics so far are: Mars Methane, Extrasolar Planet Imaging, The Chaotic Early Solar System, Mars Sulfur Chemistry, and Mercury Volcanism. Follow those links to …
19 April 2009
Impressive Arecibo
Betsey over at the ALFALFA Survey Blog just posted about visiting Arecibo and how jaw-droppingly impressive the telescope is. Her pictures are spectacular, so you should go check them out! Here’s a teaser:
10 April 2009
The Thermodynamics of Life
Markus Hammonds over at Supernova Condensate has a really interesting post about a recent paper showing that 10 of the 20 amino acids used by life are thermodynamically favored to form in all sorts of environments. That means that it’s very likely that life elsewhere in the universe would have the same most fundamental building blocks! Here’s a quote from the paper: Our results also indicate that a certain degree …
5 April 2009
Creepy Batteries
I saw two rather disturbing articles today about batteries. First: batteries that feed on blood. Apparently they are powered by a colony of specialized yeast that can consume blood for energy. Obviously this would be useful for things like pacemakers, assuming that the cyborg battery doesn’t infiltrate its host’s central nervous system, become sentient and then take over the world… Second: Virus-powered batteries. Apparently some researchers at MIT have used …
