8 June 2009
Big Picture: Mercury MESSENGER
If you’re not already following the Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog, you should be. They always have spectacular photos, often of current events, but also quite often of space-related stuff! Today’s post is about the MESSENGER mission to Mercury. Go check it out.
Carnival of Space #106
Hello folks, apologies for the lack of posts lately. I have been keeping busy trying to write up a draft of a paper on the Gale crater landing site for MSL, which is taking a very long time and becoming very large. I don’t anticipate having lots of time to post here this month. Even as I work on the draft, I will be traveling out to Los Alamos National …
1 June 2009
How to get Mars funding
On a related note, my fellowship, which involves vaporizing rocks with a high-powered laser, was renewed last month. (Click for the full comic)
27 May 2009
MSL is a Curiosity
Well, it looks like the next-generation rover that will be launching to Mars in 2011 (and happens to be the focal point of my PhD thesis) just got a name! Before today it was referred to as the Mars Science Laboratory or ‘MSL‘. But now it will go by the name Curiosity! The name comes from a short essay written by 12-year-old Clara Ma: Curiosity is an everlasting flame that …
23 May 2009
Olympus Mons is How Tall?!
Olympus Mons is a big volcano. It is almost unimaginably huge. It is 550 kilometers (342 miles) across at its base, and the volcanic crater (the technical term is ‘caldera’) at the peak is 80 kilometers (53 miles) long. If you were standing at the edge of the caldera, the volcano is so broad and the slopes are so gradual that the base of the volcano would be beyond the …
22 May 2009
What Ever Happened to Space Colonies?
There’s a very interesting article up at The Space Review, taking a look at the optimistic view of the future of space exploration that people had in the 70s and discussing why it never caught on. Where are the space colonies depicted in movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey? Go read the article to find out. Here’s a sample: Asimov’s article, “The Next Frontier?” and illustrated by Pierre Mion, was …
21 May 2009
Hubble Servicing Mission Pictures
Last weekend, NASA astronauts rendezvoused with the Hubble space telescope and repaired and upgraded the observatory in a series of five extremely challenging spacewalks. Their mission is now accomplished, Hubble has been set free to continue orbiting and doing cutting edge science, and the shuttle will be landing tomorrow morning. On Monday, the Big Picture had an awesome series of photos of the launch and the mission. And if that’s …
18 May 2009
Weird Rover Prototypes
Last week when the news about Spirit being stuck in the sand came out, my friend Lisa Grossman, a science writing intern at Wired, contacted me to see if I had any ideas for a fresh angle on the story rather than just repeating the press release. I suggested that she check out some of the awesome rover prototypes that JPL is working on and find out how future rovers …
14 May 2009
The Problem with NASA TV
I have a problem with NASA TV: it’s boring! This has been a pet-peeve of mine for quite a while, but with all of the excitement about the current Hubble repair mission, I have been reminded just how bad NASA TV is. Think about it. Right now, as I write this, the astronauts are suiting up and preparing for a spacewalk to begin repairing the Hubble space telescope. They are …
12 May 2009
Ups And Downs for Spirit Rover
Recently, Spirit has had some very good news and some very bad news. The good news is that we just had a huge cleaning event, with high winds blowing the solar panels clean so that we are getting power levels that we haven’t seen in years! The bad news is that this occurred as Spirit got stuck in deep, soft sand. Last week we were commanding drives of tens of …
