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29 September 2008
What can $700 Billion Buy?
With all the talk about the government bailout in the news right now, I got to thinking about just how much money $700 billion dollars is. So here are some depressing numbers. $700,000,000,000 = 1.25 Iraq Wars (based on the ~$558 billion cost shown at this site at 12:30 am EDT on Sept 29, 2008) or 5 Apollo Programs (at ~$135 billion inflation-adjusted dollars for the entire program from conception …
26 September 2008
Plumbing on Mars: HiRISE Reveals Groundwater Cracks
This image from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, shows cracks in the rocks on Mars that once formed the underground plumbing through which groundwater traveled. Groundwater flow on Mars has been speculated for a long time, but it takes powerful cameras like HiRISE to actually find the evidence. These cracks resisted erosion because they were filled with minerals deposited by groundwater, so now we can see them …
24 September 2008
Phoenix Self-Portrait
Check it out! Phoenix recently used its arm camera to take a photo of its mast cameras, just like a tourist taking a self-portrait with their digital camera held at arm’s length.
Low-Gravity Volcanoes
During my series of posts about volcanoes last month, a reader emailed me and asked what the effect of lower gravity would be on martian volcanoes, and I thought it was such a good question that I decided to answer it here! Most of my answer is based on a (rather large) review paper by Wilson and Head that is available here. One of the first effects of low gravity …
23 September 2008
More on Science Policy
Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy has some more detailed thoughts and comments about McCain and Obama’s answers to the ScienceDebate questions. I encourage you to go check them out!
22 September 2008
Opportunity on the Road Again
The Opportunity rover is out of Victoria crater and is on the road again. The destination? A huge 22km (13.7 mile) diameter crater, dubbed “Endeavor”, about 12 km to the southeast. Opportunity was designed to live for at least 90 martian days (sols) and drive about 800 m. Today is sol 1658 and Opportunity has so far driven about 12 km (11,797.91 meters, to be precise). It’s not certain that …
17 September 2008
MSL Landing Site Selection: The Votes are In!
It looks like the top three sites are Eberswalde, Holden and Gale. The “middle” ranked sites are Nili Fossae and Mawrth Vallis, and Miyamoto and South Meridiani are the lowest two. Remember, the results of this meeting are a recommendation, not a binding contract. This will be passed on to the project science group, engineers, and managers and they will make their decisions and recommendations. There will be another worksop …
MSL Workshop: Votes are Cast!
The discussion and arguments are over! We are just waiting for the last few ballots to be submitted, and then the project science group will start counting them. The hope is to have results in an hour or so… stay tuned.
MSL Workshop Presentations!
For those of you playing along at home, I thought I should point out that most of the presentations so far are posted at the “marsoweb” landing site website, so I encourage you to go check them out. Also, in case you were wondering, I have no idea which sites I want to survive this process. I have one or two that I am skeptical of, but I am really …
Potential MSL Site: Gale Crater
I am sort of breaking my own protocol here by posting about Gale crater before I hear the presentations today, but since we will immediately go into discussion and decision making after it is presented this morning, I figured that it would be good to familiarize you with it now. Gale is a ~100 km diameter crater on Mars with a huge 5 km tall mound of sediments in the …
