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16 October 2008
DPS 2008 Day Five: Icy and Not-so-Icy Moons
Today was the final day of the DPS meeting here at Cornell, but the sessions were still very interesting. They served to remind me just how little we know about the outer solar system. Also, remember you can go and watch all the sessions yourself! I believe the plan is to transfer all the videos to a more permanent location soon, so I will keep you posted. The first few …
7 October 2008
More Astro-Art!
Lynn Adrich, Pilgrimage: Through the Wormhole 2008 installation in progress Right on the heels of my post about Planets as Art, a press release from JPL is announcing a new exhibit in Pasadena that is the result of collaboration between the Spitzer space telescope team and the Pasadena Art Center College of Design. From the press release: For thousands of years, people have used art to explore ideas that humble, …
Mercury Flyby #2 Images
The first close-up images from MESSENGER’s second Mercury flyby were posted today and they’re spectacular! Here’s a link to the images, and a nice summary over at Bad Astronomy. The most striking thing about this first image is the totally awesome planet encircling ejecta rays! These are formed in large impacts when the debris gets blasted out of the crater in coherent jets. Rays are common, expecially on airless bodies, …
6 October 2008
Planets as Art
I’m often struck by how beautiful landscapes are when seen from above, whether they are on Mars, Earth, or anywhere else. With the high-resolution images from HiRISE this is especially true; with such a close view, the scale and context can be lost, and the images become more akin to abstract textures. Here’s a great example: It’s a dune field inside a crater on mars, but it looks like rumpled …
Mercury Flyby!
The MESSENGER probe flew by Mercury for the second time last night, coming only 200 km from the planet’s surface. Since MESSENGER is so close to the sun, NASA engineers had to compensate for the fact that the intense sunlight produces a force on the spacecraft. In essence, MESSENGER was acting like a small solar sail! The picture shown above was taken yesterday during the approach, but I’ll post the …
1 October 2008
The footprints of a moonlet's demise…
A cool paper just came out in Icarus this week claiming that a crater in the northern plains of Mars may be the result of the impact of a small moonlet of Mars, possibly just smaller than Deimos. Here’s the crater: (Chappelow and Herrick, 2008) Because the crater is so elliptical, and because of the “blowouts” on the eastern edges of the craters (where ejecta actually blew back through the …
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.
19 September 2008
Dancing Dust!
Stuart Atkinson has a cool animation of dust grains moving around in Phoenix’s optical microscope. Unexpected, but way cool! Check it out!
15 September 2008
First image of another planet around a sun-like star!
Check it out – this is probably the first image of an extra solar planet around a Sun-like star! More specifically, the image above shows both the primary and companion of the star 1RXSJ160929.1-210524 (romantic, eh?), imaged at the Gemini North Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The companion is about 8 times the mass of Jupiter, and has a radius about 17% of the Sun’s. One of the reasons …
