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16 December 2008
AGU Day 1: Phoenix
This AGU is the first major meeting since Phoenix died last month, and so everyone has been eagerly looking forward to hearing about the results now that the team can focus on science instead of operations. Emily has posted a nice summary of her notes from the Phoenix sessions, so go take a look and then come back here for what I thought were the highlights. The results presented today …
AGU Day 1: Enceladus
After lunch, I went to a few talks about the latest results from Enceladus, Saturn’s little moon with geysers at the south pole. The first talk was by Carolyn Porco, giving a great summary of the very close flybys from earlier this year. Most of the (very very awesome) images from her talk were released today on the imaging team’s website. I especially liked this beautiful mosaic from the October …
AGU Day 1: Titan
I spent most of the morning in sessions on Titan, hearing the latest on everyone’s favorite methane shrouded moon. There were several talks looking at the first preliminary topography results and trying to draw some conclusions from them. According to Howard Zebker, Titan is more oblate than you would expect if it was just in its equilibrium shape, meaning its poles are lower in elevation than its equator. Oddly, the …
15 December 2008
Blogging from the Bottom of the World
Did you know that most of the meteorites ever found come from Antarctica? It’s the perfect place to look for them because it’s dry and cold, so they are well preserved. Plus, when you’re out on a kilometers-thick ice sheet, all the rocks are meteorites! Just drive around and pick up anything that isn’t ice! Anyway, I bring this up because there is now a blog chronicling the adventures of …
AGU Impressions
Attending a conference this large (15,000 abstracts) is an interesting experience. Boarding the plane last night, I saw a few dozen poster tubes, a clear sign of a scientist on the way to a meeting. The person in the seat in front of me was working on a table of atmospheric isotope ratios in a tattered notebook, and next to me was a friend from Cornell (now at Brown) who …
14 December 2008
Blogging from the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting
Tomorrow I’m heading to San Francisco along with 15,000 other scientists to participate in the 2008 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Yes, you read that right: fifteen thousand scientists in one place. This will be my first AGU and my first time in San Francisco so I’m excited. There’s tons of planetary science stuff scheduled, and I will be taking notes and blogging as much as possible …
8 December 2008
Mars Art: Rhythmic Layers
This week’s Mars Art image also happens to be the subject of an interesting new finding. A new paper in Science details the discovery of a set of layered deposits in Arabia Terra that appear to match the Martian Climate cycle. Mars’ tilt wobbles around and causes the climate to change with it. It follows the general pattern of ten smaller wobbles in between larger wobbles. The layers shown in …
23 November 2008
More About Mars Glaciers
I posted previously about the announcement that buried glaciers had been discovered on Mars, but now I’ve had time to actually take a look at the article in Science. The important point of the article is not that these formations were discovered (we’ve actually known about them for some time) but that, using radar on the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, scientists were able to penetrate the surface of these mysterious glacier-looking …
11 October 2008
DPS 2008 Day One: Mars, Exoplanets, Defining Planets and Enceladus
Today was the first day of the Division for Planetary Sciences conference here at Cornell. All the talks are being live web-streamed, but since most of you probably don’t have time to sit and watch esoteric scientific talks online all weekend, here are the highlights from the sessions I saw today. In the morning, the first session that I went to was Mars Surface and Surface/Atmosphere Interactions. DPS is an …
10 October 2008
DPS Meeting Live Webstreaming!
Planetary astronomers from around the world have been flocking to Ithaca over the last day or so to participate in the 40th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences meeting here at Cornell. There will be tons of fascinating talks starting tomorrow morning and going until Wednesday. I’ll try to blog about the more interesting ones that I see, but in case you want to listen …
