11 May 2009
Hubble Repair Launches Today!
In a little over five hours from now, seven astronauts will be blasted into space for the final Hubble repair mission. I could write all about it, but Mike Brown posted a wonderful entry about the mission, so I will just post a teaser and direct you to his blog, Mike Brown’s Planets: This week, for the sake of astronomy, seven people will strap themselves on to the top of …
9 May 2009
Review: Star Trek
Last night, I and my thirty closest friends (much of the Cornell astronomy department) visited the movie theater to watch the new Star Trek movie. The overall verdict: it was good! But of course, as huge nerds and astronomers, after the movie we spent a good twenty minutes standing in the halls of the theater blocking traffic and vigorously discussing all aspects of the movie. In general I liked it …
6 May 2009
"Alien Skull" on Mars
Are you kidding?! Guys. That’s a rock. A chunk of vesicular basalt to be specific. As far as pareidolia goes, it’s not even very good! I had to stare for a while before I saw a face. The human brain loves to see familiar shapes in everything, so it’s pretty easy to find examples of rocks on Mars that look like anything you want. Here, take a look at this …
5 May 2009
Comic: Depressing Statistics
Today’s Daisy Owl comic is about the cost of a human mission to Mars. Click for the whole comic:
4 May 2009
We live in the future
I often say (or at least think to myself) that we live in the future. Especially when I’m traveling. It’s constantly amazing to me that I can get anywhere in the world in less than a day. I can make a routine trip out to California for a conference, when 150 years ago that would be the journey of a lifetime, and would involve diseases and caulking wagons to cross …
Fly me to the moon
My adviser Jim Bell has a guest post up over at the Planetary Society blog about the upcoming Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. LRO will be able to take pictures of the lunar surface at 50 centimeters per pixel, and will return 20 Terabytes of data! That’s more than 100 times more data than any other planetary mission! So, go take a look at what Jim thinks that sort of data …
30 April 2009
Sexy NASA Jets
Remember a couple weeks ago when I posted about how cool it was to ride my bike to work past the two NASA jets in front of Johnson Space Center? Well, NASA just released an awesome photo of two of the same type of jets doing a flyby of the shuttle on the launch pad! A few years ago I got to visit Ellington Field in Texas, where these jets …
28 April 2009
Impact Crater
In my posts about our field trip to Arizona, I showed my best pictures of meteor crater, but really none of them come close to expressing the feeling of standing on the brink of such a feature and trying to imagine an explosion big enough to carve it out. I just came across a photo by Stan Gaz that does a much better job than my snapshots (click to follow …
100th Carnival of Space!
Back in the early naive days of space carnivals, we looked to the future and were certain that the 100th carnival of space would actually be a carnival, and that it would actually be held in space. Sadly, protests from the carnival spin-and-barf ride-cleaner’s union quashed that dream before it could become a reality. Luckily, we found a new equally awesome place to have the 100th carnival: One Minute Astronomy! …
27 April 2009
Pretty Dunes in Gale Crater
This is a tiny subframe from the HiRISE image PSP_009294_1750.
