7 October 2008
More Astro-Art!
Lynn Adrich, Pilgrimage: Through the Wormhole 2008 installation in progress Right on the heels of my post about Planets as Art, a press release from JPL is announcing a new exhibit in Pasadena that is the result of collaboration between the Spitzer space telescope team and the Pasadena Art Center College of Design. From the press release: For thousands of years, people have used art to explore ideas that humble, …
Mercury Flyby #2 Images
The first close-up images from MESSENGER’s second Mercury flyby were posted today and they’re spectacular! Here’s a link to the images, and a nice summary over at Bad Astronomy. The most striking thing about this first image is the totally awesome planet encircling ejecta rays! These are formed in large impacts when the debris gets blasted out of the crater in coherent jets. Rays are common, expecially on airless bodies, …
Red Mars on TV!
If you are reading this blog, which you are, and you have not read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, you should drop everything and go get the book. I read it in high school, before I really knew much about Mars but when I was starting to think about planetary astronomy. It is the story of the first colonists to permanently setlle the red planet, and is more realistic …
6 October 2008
Planets as Art
I’m often struck by how beautiful landscapes are when seen from above, whether they are on Mars, Earth, or anywhere else. With the high-resolution images from HiRISE this is especially true; with such a close view, the scale and context can be lost, and the images become more akin to abstract textures. Here’s a great example: It’s a dune field inside a crater on mars, but it looks like rumpled …
NASA + YouTube = Awesome
NASA has put out some excellent new YouTube videos. Music videos. I’ll let them speak/sing for themselves: And when a music video doesn’t work: cute kids!
Mercury Flyby!
The MESSENGER probe flew by Mercury for the second time last night, coming only 200 km from the planet’s surface. Since MESSENGER is so close to the sun, NASA engineers had to compensate for the fact that the intense sunlight produces a force on the spacecraft. In essence, MESSENGER was acting like a small solar sail! The picture shown above was taken yesterday during the approach, but I’ll post the …
2 October 2008
Carnival of Space #73 – NASA Birthday Edition
NASA is legendary for its numerous and sometimes unnecessary acronyms. (My personal favorite is IDD – instrument deployment device, also known as the arm on the MER rovers.) That’s why it is fitting that this week’s carnival of space is one huge acronym commemorating NASA’s birthday! Go check it out at Alice’s Astro Info!
Happy Birthday NASA!
Today marks the 50th birthday of NASA! Nancy Atkinson over at Universe Today has a very nice post reflecting on the past five decades of space exploration. Rather than repeat what she wrote, I’ll just provide you with these space-exploration-related quotes: “To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.” -Stephen Hawking “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring …
1 October 2008
The footprints of a moonlet's demise…
A cool paper just came out in Icarus this week claiming that a crater in the northern plains of Mars may be the result of the impact of a small moonlet of Mars, possibly just smaller than Deimos. Here’s the crater: (Chappelow and Herrick, 2008) Because the crater is so elliptical, and because of the “blowouts” on the eastern edges of the craters (where ejecta actually blew back through the …
