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28 March 2009
LPSC 2009: Day 2
Day 2 was all about ice in the mars sessions: the morning focused on the polar caps and the afternoon focused on the subsurface. I also managed to catch a few non-mars talks. One of the first talks I saw was by Ken Tanaka, famed for his geologic maps of Mars. He showed the results of his studies of the north polar cap, and identified at least two major hiatuses. …
24 March 2009
LPSC 2009: Day 1
Unfortunately I missed the earliest sessions today because I had to drive down to Johnson Space Center to get a badge. I am going to be working there for four weeks after LPSC and another five weeks later in the summer, characterizing rock samples and shooting them with a laser, so I needed a badge to be able to do that work. I got back to the conference just in …
22 March 2009
Blogging LPSC 2009
Greetings from Texas! With the Arizona field trip over, today I hopped on a plane to Houston for the 40th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. It will be going on all this week, starting on Monday and I will do my best to post my more interesting notes here. LPSC is a great conference, with the latest news from all aspects of planetary science, and a special focus on more …
22 January 2009
Mars Methane: the Paper
After all the to-do about the confirmation of methane on Mars and its possible implications, I decided that I should take a look at the actual Science article and post a distillation of it here. The paper that caused this uproar is called “Strong Release of Methane on Mars in Northern Summer 2003”, by Mumma et al. Before this paper, methane had been detected on Mars, maybe. The evidence was …
21 January 2009
Observing with Arecibo
Betsey over at the ALFALFA blog has a really interesting post giving a play-by-play of what it’s like to observe remotely with Arecibo. Very cool stuff, you should go check it out!
20 January 2009
15 Awesome Space Projects
Here’s a great post from one of my favorite blogs, Web Urbanist: 15 Cool Space Projects for Today and Tomorrow. The post has a bunch of awesome images, and gives a good overview of the current plans of space agencies across the globe. Check it out!
18 January 2009
Methane on Mars
If you follow space news, you’ve probably heard by now the announcement that methane has been detected with confidence in the martian atmosphere. This is a big deal because methane is broken down very quickly on Mars, so the fact that it is detectable means that there must be a source somewhere, indicating either geologic or biological activity. It’s important to point out that this is not evidence of life …
13 January 2009
ALFALFA Blog!
If you are tired of reading about Mars and planets (I don’t know how you could be, but I suppose it could happen) then you should go check out the new blog about the ALFALFA survey, started by another group of grad students here at Cornell. They use the Arecibo radio telescope (yes, the one in Goldeneye) to look at thousands and thousands of galaxies and do science that blows …
24 December 2008
AGU Day 3: Fluvial Systems on Mars
Well, I have survived holiday travel and am now home in Michigan with family. Before I head off to celebrate Christmas eve, here is a quick report from AGU. (I figure I need to get these blog entries posted before I completely forget what my notes mean!) On Wednesday afternoon I spent my time in the Mars sessions on “Ground Truth for Orbital Data” and “Martian Fluvial Systems”. The ground …
18 December 2008
AGU Day 3: MRO
A long walk to Circuit City and a few dollars later, I am now the proud owner of a new AC adaptor! Luckily today is all posters so I have some time to post a summary of yesterday’s events. Yesterday was a day chock full of Martian goodness, and it started off bright and early with a summary of the results from the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter’s primary mission. MRO has …
