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15 September 2008
MSL One Year from Launch
One year from today, the Mars Science Laboratory will launch. It seems fitting that the workshop during which we choose the final three possible landing sites begins today. The whole process blows my mind. I will be sitting in a conference room this week with dozens of Mars scientists, poring over data of unprecedented detail for seven locations on Mars. We have images of the sites of such high resolution …
3 September 2008
Hawaii Field Work – Ground Truth
I posted a while back, right before I left to participate in the NASA Planetary Volcanology Field Workshop, describing what exactly I was going to be doing there. Our goal was to study a set of images and come up with a geologic map of the area, and then actually go to that location (something we can’t usually do for other planets) and see how good our geologic maps were. …
1 September 2008
The Big Picture: Hubble Rescue
The Big Picture blog has a great collection of photos showing the preparations for the upcoming space shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope (STS-125). The mission launches in October and is one of the 10 remaining shuttle missions. Hubble repair missions are extremely tricky, but they are also, in my opinion, the best thing that the space shuttle has been used for.
29 August 2008
Opportunity Update: Out of Victoria!
It’s offical: Opportunity is out of Victoria crater and back on level ground for the first time in almost a year. Next up, the rover will take a look at some cobbles: rocks strewn about the plains of meridiani by distant impacts. For more detail, check out the JPL press release.
27 August 2008
Crescent Mars
Emily has posted some awesome pictures of a crescent Mars that she put together using old Viking data. For some reason, the previous attempts at doing this are pretty horrible looking, but her images look great! She also provides the relevant touched-up data files for you to try making your own images.
Opportunity Update: Leaving Victoria Crater
JPL just put out a press release confirming the plan that the rover team has been aware of for a while now: Opportunity is on its way out of Victoria crater. After a lot of frustratingly difficult driving toward the crater wall at Cape Verde, we have tons of awesome images of the layers in the rock but were unable to get close enough to reach out and touch it. …
25 August 2008
Hot Lava: Types of Lava
We’ve talked about how lava becomes molten, now let’s discuss how it behaves once it erupts. As liquid rock erupts from a volcanic vent it is glowing hot and can be very fluid. But, it cools rapidly, and as it does so it behaves more like rock and less like a liquid. Depending on the rate of eruption (among other things) there are two main types of lava flow: a’a …
22 August 2008
Hot Lava: Where does it come from?
You’ve seen it in movies, documentaries, and photographs. Mario and other video game heroes have died countless terrible deaths falling into pits of the stuff, but how much do you really know about lava? Where does it come from? Well, volcanoes. And the lava in volcanoes comes from deep in the earth where everything is molten, right? Wrong! It’s true that as you go deeper into the earth, things heat …
"Webcam" at Mars
Check this out. One of the engineering cameras on Mars Express (originally used to make sure that the Beagle lander had detached from the orbiter) has been turned back on! So now you can go check out the view from Mars orbit! More detail over at Bad Astronomy. The picture above shows the four giant volcanoes of the Tharsis bulge: Olympus Mons is half in shadow and the other three, …
20 August 2008
How to Look at Mars
There is so much Mars data out there that it hard to keep track of all of it! Thankfully there are some useful tools that let anyone look easily look at orbital data of anywhere on the planet. The first is a program called “jmars“. This java-based program distributed by Arizona State University lets you overlay all sorts of global datasets, from MOLA topography to THEMIS nighttime infrared maps to …
