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You are browsing the archive for Earth Archives - Page 2 of 6 - Martian Chronicles.

22 April 2009

The Pale Blue Dot

What better Earth day message is there than this? Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer …

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6 April 2009

Big Pictures of Mount Redoubt Eruption

The Big Picture, an awesome photo-blog that you should be reading, has a very cool set of photos of the Mount Redoubt eruptions in Alaska. I thought it was especially cool to see how the glacier on top of the mountain is collapsing as it melts from beneath. Update: Just like last time the Big Picture posted volcano photos, global warming deniers are posting in the comments and claiming that …

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30 March 2009

ISS, Backlit

I’m starting my first day of work at Johnson Space Center today, and coincidentally, I just came across this awesome photo of the International Space Station. It seemed fitting to post it since I’m going to be about a block from mission control. The ISS may have its critics but you can’t deny that this is an amazing photo of an amazing human achievement.

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22 March 2009

The Painted Desert and Petrified Forest

(This is the final day of a week-long field trip in Arizona. Get caught up with days 1,2,3,4,5, 6) Friday was the last day of the field trip, and we spent it at the Petrified Forest national park. We were there to study the colorful clays and river deposits, but we began the day with an unexpected bonus: our guide, Bill Parker, is a paleontologist at the park, and he …

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16 March 2009

SP Flow and Sunset Crater

(This is day 3 of a week-long field trip to Arizona. Catch up with days 1 and 2!) Today was all about volcanoes. We started early, driving north out of Flagstaff and skirting around the huge San Francisco peaks, which are the remnants of a huge stratovolcano (think Mt. Fuki or Mt. Rainier). The volcano formed between about 1 and 0.4 million years ago. It is currently 12,633 feet high, …

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14 January 2009

Earth, Observed

A lot of people don’t realize that NASA studies the Earth as well as the rest of the universe. Sure, pictures from Hubble and Cassini and the Mars Rovers are spectacular, but there are some great views of our own planet too, many of which are available at NASA’s Earth Observatory site. Today the Big Picture has a selection of some of the best photos of Earth from NASA’s collections. …

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12 January 2009

Colonizing Earth

The other day I helped a race of hideous spiderlike aliens colonize Antarctica. I’ve posted about the game Spore before, but the basic idea is that you begin as a protozoan in the primordial ooze and work your way up through various stages of evolution until you become a space-faring civilization capable of colonizing other worlds, terraforming them, and populating them with plants and animals of your choosing (or even …

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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 …

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13 November 2008

Beyond the Moon

Today the Planetary Society released a “roadmap” for space exploration, detailing what the Society thinks NASA’s priorities and programs should look like in the near future. It is the product of input from the public as well as closed-door meetings of space exploration experts. I encourage you to take a look at the pdf. The plan outlined in the “Beyond the Moon” document is well thought out and feasible, and …

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Tectonics on Mars

Mars is often touted as the “most earth-like” planet, but if you take a look at its surface there are some aspects that are decidedly alien. Sure, there are dry river beds and canyons and volcanoes. But there are also craters. Everywhere. So many that, when Mariner 9 sent back the first spacecraft images of Mars, people were dismayed to see a surface that looked just like the moon! Is …

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