21 November 2009
Black Hole Starships?
Do you ever get tired of science fiction stories using black holes to solve every imaginable problem? (I’m looking at you, new Star Trek.) Well, if so, you should not go take a look at my inaugural article for Universe Today, in which I report on a couple of physicists who calculated that a future civilization might be able to create black holes and then use them as powerplants to …
18 November 2009
Review: Earthlight
What happens when humans expand to the planets, but then the planets try to assert their independence? It’s a common science fiction storyline, and the central focus of Earthlight. Earthlight is one of Arthur C Clarke’s earlier novels, originating as a short story in 1941 and published as a novel in 1955. It is set at an astronomical observatory on the moon. There is war brewing between Earth and the …
17 November 2009
Be a Martian!
Fact #1: As a Mars scientist, I am incredibly spoiled. There are so many missions to Mars right now sending back so much data, that even if they all went silent tomorrow, it would be decades before we managed to look at all the data and figure out what it’s telling us. Fact #2: There are lots of people out there (I’m looking at you, loyal readers!) who would love …
15 November 2009
Crescent Earth, Water on the Moon, and Free Spirit!
Just a quick post to update you on the latest space news and remind you to keep voting for my article about how MSL is like James Bond. First of all, the Rosetta spacecraft, on its way to a rendezvous with a comet in 2014, swung by Earth the other day, and took some beautiful pictures: Second, NASA held a press conference on friday announcing that the LCROSS mission to …
10 November 2009
Sunjammer
In case you were wondering, the title of this post is the name of a short story by Arthur C Clarke in which solar sail-powered spaceships race each other around the moon. Ok, that’s cool, but why do I bring this up? Because the Planetary Society is going to be launching a solar sail spacecraft in about a year! An anonymous donor contributed enough money to jump-start the program. The …
6 November 2009
Big Picture HiRISE Gallery!
Speaking of Mars art, the Big Picture blog (which all of you should be following by now) has a feature on images of Mars taken by HiRISE. Head on over and take a look. Mars is a really pretty and often bizarre-looking place. [PS – Have you voted today?]
Mars Art: Mind-blowing Swiss Cheese
First of all, a reminder to go vote on my article about MSL, which is a finalist in the scientificblogging.com science writing competition. Ok, done? Good. I wanted you to do that before I showed you this image because it may very well break your brain. This is a HiRISE image of the so-called “swiss cheese” terrain at the south pole of mars. The terrain is formed by the sublimation …
5 November 2009
LCROSS preliminary results
Hey remember when we bombed the moon? Here’s an interesting article about some preliminary results from LCROSS. I was especially surprised when they said that there may be mercury at the impact site. They say they’re seeing spectral lines that could be produced by iron, magnesium or mercury, but then the article goes on as if mercury is the likeliest candidate! I’m skeptical. Fe and Mg are common in lunar …
4 November 2009
How Habitable is the Earth?
Charlie Stross has an interesting post on his blog that asks the question “How habitable is the Earth?” He goes on to conclude, through a great discussion of the evolution of our planet, that the fraction of time that the earth has been habitable to humans is a tiny sliver of the time the Earth has been around, and that furthermore, much of the earth is not habitable for humans …
2 November 2009
Voting is fixed!
There were some issues with the voting widget on the University Science Writing competition, but they have been resolved, and it turns out it was counting the votes all along! So go vote for my post if you haven’t done so yet today! Don’t worry if you don’t see a number in the grey voting widget box. They decided to hide the number of votes from everyone except the authors. …
