15 January 2009
Citizen's Briefing Book
Ever wish you could tell the president something? Now you can! change.gov has started a new feature called the citizen’s briefing book where people can submit their own ideas and give other ideas a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. The ideas that are voted up by the most people will be presented to President Obama once he takes office. There are some great ideas and some weird ones on the …
A Commercial Pancam Spinoff?
Ever wish you could make a stunning panorama like the rovers do? Apparently now you can! A friend of mine just sent me a link to GigaPan systems, who are selling a beta version of a robotic tripod and software for making panoramic images. I love NASA spinoffs! From the site: The GigaPan Imager uses the same panoramic photo technology as the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, used to …
14 January 2009
Earth, Observed
A lot of people don’t realize that NASA studies the Earth as well as the rest of the universe. Sure, pictures from Hubble and Cassini and the Mars Rovers are spectacular, but there are some great views of our own planet too, many of which are available at NASA’s Earth Observatory site. Today the Big Picture has a selection of some of the best photos of Earth from NASA’s collections. …
What the Ares V Rocket Could Do for Astronomy
The Ares V rocket is being designed to launch the next crewed mission to the moon. The idea is that the Ares V would do the heavy lifting, bringing the lunar orbiter and lander up to Earth orbit, where they would meet up with the astronauts who would launch on the smaller Ares I. Then the whole package would head to the moon. It’s a cool plan for getting back …
13 January 2009
5 Years on Mars!
The twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars five years ago this month, and they’re still going strong! Not bad for a mission that was supposed to last three months! To celebrate, NASA has released a cool video with rover team members, including principal investigator Steve Squyres reflecting on the mission, and a podcast with rover project manager John Callas. As we “speak”, the rover team is holding a …
ALFALFA Blog!
If you are tired of reading about Mars and planets (I don’t know how you could be, but I suppose it could happen) then you should go check out the new blog about the ALFALFA survey, started by another group of grad students here at Cornell. They use the Arecibo radio telescope (yes, the one in Goldeneye) to look at thousands and thousands of galaxies and do science that blows …
12 January 2009
Colonizing Earth
The other day I helped a race of hideous spiderlike aliens colonize Antarctica. I’ve posted about the game Spore before, but the basic idea is that you begin as a protozoan in the primordial ooze and work your way up through various stages of evolution until you become a space-faring civilization capable of colonizing other worlds, terraforming them, and populating them with plants and animals of your choosing (or even …
Ooops
Update: The panorama is back up! Or, check out the NASA press release. Ooops… Unfortunately, I had to take down the full-res Santorini pan that I had posted here because JPL hadn’t done their press release on it yet, and that made someone upset. I will post it as soon as it is officially ok to do so…
8 January 2009
Early Birthday Present from Opportunity
The Opportunity rover will be celebrating its 5th birthday on Mars later this month, but as an early treat a shiny new panorama was just released. This panorama was taken in late November while the sun was between Mars and the Earth, cutting off communications. It shows the beautiful layered bedrock and undulating ripples that Opportunity is studying on its way to the giant crater Endeavor. Click the images below …
7 January 2009
Rover Driver Blog!
To celebrate the 5 earth-year anniversary of Spirit’s langing on Mars, Scott Maxwell, one of the rover drivers at JPL has begun a blog called “Mars and Me”. In it, he is posting his daily notes from back in the early days of the mission when everyone was living on Mars time. It’s really interesting to hear what it was like early in the from an engineer’s point of view, …
