You are browsing the archive for Uncategorized.
25 April 2008
International Year of Astronomy Trailer
Next year is the International Year of Astronomy, and an awesome new trailer just came out to promote it. If only more astronomy-related news came with flashy trailers like this…
21 April 2008
Sand Dunes near the North Pole
Take a look at this new HiRISE image of sand dunes near the north pole on Mars: Click to go to the HiRISE site and learn more (and for much higher resolution)!
9 April 2008
Mars Matters!
The Planetary Society recently submitted an invited statement to the House Science and Technology Committee on the NASA 2009 Budget Request. The statement makes some excellent points about the problems with the budget request, specifically regarding the descoping of “The Vision” (now a dirty word at NASA HQ) and the concurrent decrease in Mars funding. I recommend reading the whole thing, but here is my favorite bit specifically about Mars: …
14 March 2008
Enigmatic features on Enceladus
Just as I thought Saturn’s little ice moon Enceladus couldn’t get any cuter, I found out it has dimples. You won’t spot them easily in the Cassini images, but in topographic maps, which Dr. Paul Schenk presented yesterday at LPSC, they’re striking. Schenk identified 5 large depressions smattered across Enceladus, each roughly 100 km across and 1 km deep. For a moon the size of Great Britain, those dimples are …
13 March 2008
Ask not where Earth got its water…
For decades, planetary scientists have been arguing about how the Earth acquired its oceans. Maybe the water came from volcanic outgassing, or was delivered by icy comets, or came from a bombardment of asteroids over geologic time. Models of the Earth’s formation show that our planet didn’t form with enough water to account for its present oceans – that means the water came from somewhere else. But maybe our …
