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16 September 2008
Potential MSL Site: Miyamoto Crater
Miyamoto crater is an ancient crater about 150 km southwest of where the Opportunity rover is right now. It probably formed in the earliest stage of Mars history, and was then subject to lots of erosion by water, followed by being partially or completely buried by the same material that make up the Meridiani plains. Then, erosion exposed it again. The potential landing site has some interesting mineralogy, particularly evidence …
3rd MSL Landing Site Workshop – Engineering and Geobiology
We covered a LOT today, so I have decided to split things up. This post will cover the talks in the morning and then I will give each site its own post. Today started off with presentations from some of the engineers and managers on the mission. They updated us on the rover’s status (it it making lots of progress, but still has a long way to go!), and informed …
15 September 2008
MSL Workshop Eve
It’s almost time! Tomorrow the third Mars Science Laboratory Landing Site Workshop begins! I’ve tried to get everyone up to date by re-posting my reflections on last year’s workshop, but there is a little more of the story to fill in. At the end of the workshop last year, we had narrowed down the list of possible landing sites to six sites: Nili Fossae, Mawrth Vallis, Holden Crater, Terby Crater, …
9 September 2008
Last Year's MSL Landing Site Workshop: Day 1
Coming up next week is the 3rd Mars Science Laboratory Landing Site Workshop, where the Mars science community will come together to narrow down the possible landing site choices for MSL. There have been two similar meeting before this one, and I was lucky enough to attend the one last year. In fact, some of my first blogging experience was summarizing the three days of that meeting. I will be …
22 August 2008
Carnival of Space #68 and First Frost for Phoenix!
This week’s Carnival of Space is up over at Crowlspace! Be sure to check out this fantastic picture of the first image of water frost on the martian surface from Phoenix over at The Meridiani Journal. Eventually, Phoenix will be covered with about 3 feet of frost and ice. So, while this is a very cool thing to see, some might find the first signs of frost a little depressing.
26 July 2008
Pretty Phoenix Pictures
Stuart Atkinson from Cumbrian Sky has just created a second blog to serve as a gallery of cool images from Phoenix that he has put together. Go check it out, he has some really great pictures!
17 July 2008
New insights into ancient water on Mars
The evidence for a warmer, wetter ancient Mars just keeps piling up! In 2 new papers, the team for the CRISM spectrometer onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has reported new evidence for water on the surface of ancient Mars, based on the ubiquitous presence of water-bearing minerals. Universe Today has a great post up on the findings, so I won’t repeat too much of Nancy’s explanation. In brief, the CRISM …
3 July 2008
Phoenix update: More ice, newer panorama
Emily over at the Planetary Society has a fantastic update on Phoenix. Highlights include: * Phoenix has been scraping away at the icy-soil layer at the Snow White trench, and has begun sampling the soil-ice interface. The team was hoping to deliver a sample of this to TEGA, but concerns about the potential for short-cicuiting in TEGA have slowed down progress on this, and we probably won’t see ice samples …
26 June 2008
Does martian soil contain evidence for rain?
There’s a news story floating around on the net about a new study on soil at the Viking, Pathfinder, and MER landing sites that’s coming out later this month. The study, by UC Berkeley prof Ronald Amundson and his team of terrestrial geologists, suggests that the chemical profiles in the soils at the landing sites may have been the result of precipitation (i.e. water rain). Trench at Meridiani (Unmanned Spaceflight) …
