30 January 2009
The MOC "Book": Introduction
When the Mars Global Surveyor arrived at Mars in 1997, it brought with it the most powerful camera ever placed in orbit around another planet, the Mars Orbital Camera (MOC). In 2001, the principal investigators of MOC, Mike Malin and Ken Edgett, published a massive 134 page paper, summarizing the results of the mission and revolutionizing the world’s view of Mars. Here in the MarsLab, the paper is fondly referred …
Rover Cake!
Today the rover team got an email from Michelle Nichols at the Adler Planetarium showing off the awesome cake that they had for their celebration of the rovers’ 5th anniversary on Mars. It’s absolutely amazing. I can’t believe they ate such a masterpiece! Here’s the description of the cake from the email: The body of the rover and the high gain antenna were all made of toffee buttercrunch cake with …
26 January 2009
SETI and Spore
I recently started getting Seed magazine, and am consistently impressed with how good it is. My favorite part is the “Seed salon” where they take two really smart people from fields that might not typically interact, put them in a room together and get them talking. I just discovered that they post videos of the Seed Salon online! Take a look at this one, where Jill Tarter, a pioneer in …
24 January 2009
Pancam spinoff enables 1,474 Megapixel Inauguration Photo
Remember how I posted about the cool commercial PanCam spinoff that can take giant panoramas? Well apparently photographer David Bergman used it to take a monstrous 1,474 megapixel image of the inauguration! The level of detail is amazing. Go take a look and remember that the space program helped make this image possible.
23 January 2009
Carnival of Space #87
Welcome to the Martian Chronicles blog and the 87th Carnival of Space! I’m finishing up this post while sitting in the planning meeting for the Spirit rover (after doing my part, of course!), and would like to point out that this weekend marks Sol 1800 of our 90 sol mission. That’s right, Spirit has lasted 20 times longer than its nominal mission and is still going. Woohoo! Now without further …
22 January 2009
Mars Methane: the Paper
After all the to-do about the confirmation of methane on Mars and its possible implications, I decided that I should take a look at the actual Science article and post a distillation of it here. The paper that caused this uproar is called “Strong Release of Methane on Mars in Northern Summer 2003”, by Mumma et al. Before this paper, methane had been detected on Mars, maybe. The evidence was …
21 January 2009
Observing with Arecibo
Betsey over at the ALFALFA blog has a really interesting post giving a play-by-play of what it’s like to observe remotely with Arecibo. Very cool stuff, you should go check it out!
20 January 2009
15 Awesome Space Projects
Here’s a great post from one of my favorite blogs, Web Urbanist: 15 Cool Space Projects for Today and Tomorrow. The post has a bunch of awesome images, and gives a good overview of the current plans of space agencies across the globe. Check it out!
Mars Methane Movie
NASA has put together a nice movie of Dr. Mike Mumma summarizing his discovery of methane on Mars. He brings up the possibility that the methane detection might influence landing site selection for MSL. I suspect that the Nili Fossae site will get some more attention because it was identified as one of the methane-producing regions, but it was taken off the list of finalist sites mostly due to safety …
18 January 2009
Methane on Mars
If you follow space news, you’ve probably heard by now the announcement that methane has been detected with confidence in the martian atmosphere. This is a big deal because methane is broken down very quickly on Mars, so the fact that it is detectable means that there must be a source somewhere, indicating either geologic or biological activity. It’s important to point out that this is not evidence of life …
