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18 October 2011
The Rock of Saint Michael
One of my fellow graduate students here at Cornell, Kassandra Martin-Wells, is also writer, but unlike me she actually finishes her stories, and they’re very good. She studies cratering on the moon and wrote the following story after hearing a presentation about the moon’s south pole at a Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) meeting.
4 October 2011
Mars Art: Mars Express View of the South Pole
I came across this image this morning and immediately thought it deserved to be shared. It shows the edge of the south polar ice cap in a location called Ulyxes Rupes. The ice cap is the dark, rounded terrain on the left and there is a small outlier of ice in the crater in the upper right. The great thing about this image is that it was acquired using the High Resolution Stereo Camera, which also returns an elevation map of the same scene. The shaded colorized altitude map looks like some abstract watercolor to my eye…
28 September 2011
How do we know where rovers are on Mars?
The other day, my brother posted a very good question as a comment, and I thought it would be worth dedicating a full post to the answer. So watching this made me wonder how you keep track of the rover(s) once they’re on mars. Is it done with a sort of GPS? Triangulating with things seen in orbital images? Directly taking pictures of the rover with orbital cameras (can they …
20 September 2011
Spectacular Video of Earth from Orbit
If you haven’t seen this yet, you need to watch this spectacular time-lapse video of the earth at night as seen by the ISS.
The “Future” of Human Spaceflight
Well, it looks like Congress has finally decided what NASA’s next foray into human spaceflight will look like. If you’re thinking to yourself that that rocket looks the offspring of a Saturn V rocket and a Space Shuttle, then you’re absolutely right. Those solid rocket boosters on the sides are the same as the ones used for the Space Shuttle, as is the main engine for the first stage. In fact, if you take off Saturn V-like paint on the first stage, you would find a big familiar orange fuel tank. The second stage will use J-2x engines, based on the Saturn V engines.
15 September 2011
Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Red Dust’ Album About Mars
The geniuses at The Onion have come up with a brilliant article about Bruce Springsteen releasing a Mars sci-fi themed album.
14 September 2011
Gale Crater Traverse Video
Check out this video that I made of a possible traverse up the mound at Gale crater!
5 August 2011
Flowing Water Seen on Mars?
What you’re seeing here is a series of HiRISE images of a crater wall on Mars. Starting in the spring, hundreds of dark streaks form and make their way downhill, and then they fade in winter. The leading hypothesis is that they are flowing salty water, but I am still skeptical.
2 August 2011
Our New View of Vesta
Just a quick post to point you to an amazing video of Vesta rotating, made by Tayfun Öner by interpolating between 64 images taken by Dawn from orbit.
