22 September 2008
Opportunity on the Road Again
The Opportunity rover is out of Victoria crater and is on the road again. The destination? A huge 22km (13.7 mile) diameter crater, dubbed “Endeavor”, about 12 km to the southeast. Opportunity was designed to live for at least 90 martian days (sols) and drive about 800 m. Today is sol 1658 and Opportunity has so far driven about 12 km (11,797.91 meters, to be precise). It’s not certain that …
Vote on ScienceDebate Questions
Both Obama and McCain have answered the 14 questions posed by ScienceDebate 2008, and now the site has opened up the answers to comments from readers. So go and share your thoughts on the candidates’ science policies. They may not be having an actual debate, but we can!
21 September 2008
Carnival of Space #71
Ok, so I’m a little slow on the uptake this week, but the 71st Carnival of Space is online! Go and get your space fix!
19 September 2008
Dancing Dust!
Stuart Atkinson has a cool animation of dust grains moving around in Phoenix’s optical microscope. Unexpected, but way cool! Check it out!
17 September 2008
MSL Landing Site Selection: The Votes are In!
It looks like the top three sites are Eberswalde, Holden and Gale. The “middle” ranked sites are Nili Fossae and Mawrth Vallis, and Miyamoto and South Meridiani are the lowest two. Remember, the results of this meeting are a recommendation, not a binding contract. This will be passed on to the project science group, engineers, and managers and they will make their decisions and recommendations. There will be another worksop …
MSL Workshop: Votes are Cast!
The discussion and arguments are over! We are just waiting for the last few ballots to be submitted, and then the project science group will start counting them. The hope is to have results in an hour or so… stay tuned.
MSL Workshop Presentations!
For those of you playing along at home, I thought I should point out that most of the presentations so far are posted at the “marsoweb” landing site website, so I encourage you to go check them out. Also, in case you were wondering, I have no idea which sites I want to survive this process. I have one or two that I am skeptical of, but I am really …
Potential MSL Site: Gale Crater
I am sort of breaking my own protocol here by posting about Gale crater before I hear the presentations today, but since we will immediately go into discussion and decision making after it is presented this morning, I figured that it would be good to familiarize you with it now. Gale is a ~100 km diameter crater on Mars with a huge 5 km tall mound of sediments in the …
Potential MSL Site: Mawrth Vallis
The Mawrth Vallis landing site is actually a set of four possible landing ellipses in an area with huge clay mineral signatures that is cut by a meandering outflow channel. There was some grumbling in the past about the fact that Mawrth advocates proposed four ellipses when everyone else followed the rules and only submitted one, but in the end I think it hurt them. They ran way over time …
