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12 May 2009
Ups And Downs for Spirit Rover
Recently, Spirit has had some very good news and some very bad news. The good news is that we just had a huge cleaning event, with high winds blowing the solar panels clean so that we are getting power levels that we haven’t seen in years! The bad news is that this occurred as Spirit got stuck in deep, soft sand. Last week we were commanding drives of tens of …
11 May 2009
Hubble Repair Launches Today!
In a little over five hours from now, seven astronauts will be blasted into space for the final Hubble repair mission. I could write all about it, but Mike Brown posted a wonderful entry about the mission, so I will just post a teaser and direct you to his blog, Mike Brown’s Planets: This week, for the sake of astronomy, seven people will strap themselves on to the top of …
30 April 2009
Sexy NASA Jets
Remember a couple weeks ago when I posted about how cool it was to ride my bike to work past the two NASA jets in front of Johnson Space Center? Well, NASA just released an awesome photo of two of the same type of jets doing a flyby of the shuttle on the launch pad! A few years ago I got to visit Ellington Field in Texas, where these jets …
22 April 2009
The Ares Launch Vehicles: How We're Going Back to the Moon
I just came across this excellent video describing the Ares rockets that will be replacing the shuttle and taking us back to the moon (and possibly to near-Earth asteroids and Mars). I can’t seem to get it to embed, but here’s the link, and a blurb: “Imagine a rocket the size of a small skyscraper. Now imagine shooting it into the air with so much force that it goes from …
15 April 2009
Watching out for Dust Storms
NASA just sent out this press release discussing the various ways that we watch out for dust storms that might be dangerous to the rovers. I have actually used data from the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) that they mention in the release, but I used it for the exact opposite task! I wrote programs that search through the images taken by that camera (there are a lot of them, it …
2 April 2009
New NASA Hiring Policy
The NASA workforce is, on the whole, old. Yeah yeah, I know I think everyone is old because I’m just a young whippersnapper, but it’s true. The average age of NASA employees is 47. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t young folks (said the young’un who’s currently working at JSC) but we’re a minority. Back in the Apollo days, most of NASA was young. The average age of the people …
30 March 2009
Awesome Moon Photo
Remember how I mentioned the other day that NASA and ASU are in the process of digitizing all the old Apollo photos? Well, apparently there’s an effort to restore the lunar images from other early missions too! Check this bad boy out. This is an oblique view of Copernicus crater, taken in 1966 by Lunar Orbiter 1. This image drives home the point that the moon is really a world, …
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.
24 March 2009
Give MSL a Real Name!
The voting has begun to give the Mars Science Laboratory a genuine, non-acronym name! There are nine potential names, and NASA is asking the general public to submit their votes this week. So go vote and help take part in the next Big Mission to Mars!
14 March 2009
Greetings from Phoenix!
Arizona, not the lander on Mars. After a hectic week of tying up loose ends and running around like a chicken with its head cut off, I now have my proster done for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, and am in Phoenix for the Planetary Surface Processes field trip, led by my adviser Jim Bell. Today was mostly travel, but we did have a chance this afternoon to stop …
